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• Autounattend.xml not being recognized in VirtualBox

  - by beagle

  I am working my way through the steps on this page to prepare an unattended installation of Windows 7 Enterprise x64 for purposes of a college assignment which simply requires the process to be carried out and documented. Both the "technician" and "reference" computers are virtual machines created in VirtualBox 4.3.12, as will be the destination computer. I seem to have successfully completed Step 1, building an Autounattend.xml answer file using Windows System Image Manager, in as far as the answer file validates successfully. The problem arises when I try to install Windows on the reference machine from the DVD image in conjunction with the Autounattend file on a USB drive. I have tried a couple of different USB devices, and the devices themselves seem to be recognized, but the answer file does not, as instead of taking the configuration settings from the file the user interface appears as in a manual installation. Has anyone come across this problem or a solution? The xml created by Windows SIM is below for reference in case the problem is with the file itself. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend"> <settings pass="oobeSystem"> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Deployment" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <Reseal> <Mode>Audit</Mode> </Reseal> </component> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <OOBE> <HideEULAPage>true</HideEULAPage> <ProtectYourPC>3</ProtectYourPC> </OOBE> </component> </settings> <settings pass="windowsPE"> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-International-Core-WinPE" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <SetupUILanguage> <UILanguage>en-IE</UILanguage> </SetupUILanguage> <InputLocale>en-IE</InputLocale> <SystemLocale>en-IE</SystemLocale> <UILanguage>en-IE</UILanguage> <UserLocale>en-IE</UserLocale> </component> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <DiskConfiguration> <Disk wcm:action="add"> <CreatePartitions> <CreatePartition wcm:action="add"> <Order>1</Order> <Size>300</Size> <Type>Primary</Type> </CreatePartition> <CreatePartition wcm:action="add"> <Order>2</Order> <Extend>true</Extend> <Type>Primary</Type> </CreatePartition> </CreatePartitions> <ModifyPartitions> <ModifyPartition wcm:action="add"> <Active>true</Active> <Format>NTFS</Format> <Label>System</Label> <Order>1</Order> <PartitionID>1</PartitionID> </ModifyPartition> <ModifyPartition wcm:action="add"> <Format>NTFS</Format> <Label>Windows</Label> <Order>2</Order> <PartitionID>2</PartitionID> </ModifyPartition> </ModifyPartitions> <DiskID>0</DiskID> <WillWipeDisk>true</WillWipeDisk> </Disk> <WillShowUI>OnError</WillShowUI> </DiskConfiguration> <ImageInstall> <OSImage> <InstallTo> <DiskID>0</DiskID> <PartitionID>2</PartitionID> </InstallTo> <InstallToAvailablePartition>false</InstallToAvailablePartition> <WillShowUI>OnError</WillShowUI> </OSImage> </ImageInstall> <UserData> <ProductKey> <WillShowUI>OnError</WillShowUI> </ProductKey> <AcceptEula>true</AcceptEula> </UserData> </component> </settings> <settings pass="specialize"> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-IE-InternetExplorer" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <Home_Page>http://www.example.com</Home_Page> </component> </settings> <cpi:offlineImage cpi:source="wim://technician/users/user/desktop/install.wim#Windows 7 ENTERPRISE" xmlns:cpi="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:cpi" />

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• An Introduction to jQuery Templates

  - by Stephen Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to provide you with enough information to start working with jQuery Templates. jQuery Templates enable you to display and manipulate data in the browser. For example, you can use jQuery Templates to format and display a set of database records that you have retrieved with an Ajax call. jQuery Templates supports a number of powerful features such as template tags, template composition, and wrapped templates. I’ll concentrate on the features that I think that you will find most useful. In order to focus on the jQuery Templates feature itself, this blog entry is server technology agnostic. All the samples use HTML pages instead of ASP.NET pages. In a future blog entry, I’ll focus on using jQuery Templates with ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC (You can do some pretty powerful things when jQuery Templates are used on the client and ASP.NET is used on the server). Introduction to jQuery Templates The jQuery Templates plugin was developed by the Microsoft ASP.NET team in collaboration with the open-source jQuery team. While working at Microsoft, I wrote the original proposal for jQuery Templates, Dave Reed wrote the original code, and Boris Moore wrote the final code. The jQuery team – especially John Resig – was very involved in each step of the process. Both the jQuery community and ASP.NET communities were very active in providing feedback. jQuery Templates will be included in the jQuery core library (the jQuery.js library) when jQuery 1.5 is released. Until jQuery 1.5 is released, you can download the jQuery Templates plugin from the jQuery Source Code Repository or you can use jQuery Templates directly from the ASP.NET CDN. The documentation for jQuery Templates is already included with the official jQuery documentation at http://api.jQuery.com. The main entry for jQuery templates is located under the topic plugins/templates. A Basic Sample of jQuery Templates Let’s start with a really simple sample of using jQuery Templates. We’ll use the plugin to display a list of books stored in a JavaScript array. Here’s the complete code: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html > <head> <title>Intro</title> <link href="0_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="pageContent"> <h1>ASP.NET Bookstore</h1> <div id="bookContainer"></div> </div> <script id="bookTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Create an array of books var books = [ { title: "ASP.NET 4 Unleashed", price: 37.79, picture: "AspNet4Unleashed.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashed.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET Kick Start", price: 4.00, picture: "AspNetKickStart.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed iPhone", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashedIPhone.jpg" }, ]; // Render the books using the template $("#bookTemplate").tmpl(books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); function formatPrice(price) { return "$" + price.toFixed(2); } </script> </body> </html> When you open this page in a browser, a list of books is displayed: There are several things going on in this page which require explanation. First, notice that the page uses both the jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery Templates libraries. Both libraries are retrieved from the ASP.NET CDN: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> You can use the ASP.NET CDN for free (even for production websites). You can learn more about the files included on the ASP.NET CDN by visiting the ASP.NET CDN documentation page. Second, you should notice that the actual template is included in a script tag with a special MIME type: <script id="bookTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> </script> This template is displayed for each of the books rendered by the template. The template displays a book picture, title, and price. Notice that the SCRIPT tag which wraps the template has a MIME type of text/x-jQuery-tmpl. Why is the template wrapped in a SCRIPT tag and why the strange MIME type? When a browser encounters a SCRIPT tag with an unknown MIME type, it ignores the content of the tag. This is the behavior that you want with a template. You don’t want a browser to attempt to parse the contents of a template because this might cause side effects. For example, the template above includes an <img> tag with a src attribute that points at “BookPictures/${picture}”. You don’t want the browser to attempt to load an image at the URL “BookPictures/${picture}”. Instead, you want to prevent the browser from processing the IMG tag until the ${picture} expression is replaced by with the actual name of an image by the jQuery Templates plugin. If you are not worried about browser side-effects then you can wrap a template inside any HTML tag that you please. For example, the following DIV tag would also work with the jQuery Templates plugin: <div id="bookTemplate" style="display:none"> <div> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> </div> Notice that the DIV tag includes a style=”display:none” attribute to prevent the template from being displayed until the template is parsed by the jQuery Templates plugin. Third, notice that the expression ${…} is used to display the value of a JavaScript expression within a template. For example, the expression ${title} is used to display the value of the book title property. You can use any JavaScript function that you please within the ${…} expression. For example, in the template above, the book price is formatted with the help of the custom JavaScript formatPrice() function which is defined lower in the page. Fourth, and finally, the template is rendered with the help of the tmpl() method. The following statement selects the bookTemplate and renders an array of books using the bookTemplate. The results are appended to a DIV element named bookContainer by using the standard jQuery appendTo() method. $("#bookTemplate").tmpl(books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); Using Template Tags Within a template, you can use any of the following template tags. {{tmpl}} – Used for template composition. See the section below. {{wrap}} – Used for wrapped templates. See the section below. {{each}} – Used to iterate through a collection. {{if}} – Used to conditionally display template content. {{else}} – Used with {{if}} to conditionally display template content. {{html}} – Used to display the value of an HTML expression without encoding the value. Using ${…} or {{= }} performs HTML encoding automatically. {{= }}-- Used in exactly the same way as ${…}. {{! }} – Used for displaying comments. The contents of a {{!...}} tag are ignored. For example, imagine that you want to display a list of blog entries. Each blog entry could, possibly, have an associated list of categories. The following page illustrates how you can use the { if}} and {{each}} template tags to conditionally display categories for each blog entry:   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>each</title> <link href="1_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="blogPostContainer"></div> <script id="blogPostTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <h1>${postTitle}</h1> <p> ${postEntry} </p> {{if categories}} Categories: {{each categories}} <i>${$value}</i> {{/each}} {{else}} Uncategorized {{/if}} </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var blogPosts = [ { postTitle: "How to fix a sink plunger in 5 minutes", postEntry: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna.", categories: ["HowTo", "Sinks", "Plumbing"] }, { postTitle: "How to remove a broken lightbulb", postEntry: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna.", categories: ["HowTo", "Lightbulbs", "Electricity"] }, { postTitle: "New associate website", postEntry: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna." } ]; // Render the blog posts $("#blogPostTemplate").tmpl(blogPosts).appendTo("#blogPostContainer"); </script> </body> </html> When this page is opened in a web browser, the following list of blog posts and categories is displayed: Notice that the first and second blog entries have associated categories but the third blog entry does not. The third blog entry is “Uncategorized”. The template used to render the blog entries and categories looks like this: <script id="blogPostTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <h1>${postTitle}</h1> <p> ${postEntry} </p> {{if categories}} Categories: {{each categories}} <i>${$value}</i> {{/each}} {{else}} Uncategorized {{/if}} </script> Notice the special expression $value used within the {{each}} template tag. You can use $value to display the value of the current template item. In this case, $value is used to display the value of each category in the collection of categories. Template Composition When building a fancy page, you might want to build a template out of multiple templates. In other words, you might want to take advantage of template composition. For example, imagine that you want to display a list of products. Some of the products are being sold at their normal price and some of the products are on sale. In that case, you might want to use two different templates for displaying a product: a productTemplate and a productOnSaleTemplate. The following page illustrates how you can use the {{tmpl}} tag to build a template from multiple templates:   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Composition</title> <link href="2_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="pageContainer"> <h1>Products</h1> <div id="productListContainer"></div> <!-- Show list of products using composition --> <script id="productListTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div> {{if onSale}} {{tmpl "#productOnSaleTemplate"}} {{else}} {{tmpl "#productTemplate"}} {{/if}} </div> </script> <!-- Show product --> <script id="productTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> ${name} </script> <!-- Show product on sale --> <script id="productOnSaleTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <b>${name}</b> <img src="images/on_sale.png" alt="On Sale" /> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var products = [ { name: "Laptop", onSale: false }, { name: "Apples", onSale: true }, { name: "Comb", onSale: false } ]; $("#productListTemplate").tmpl(products).appendTo("#productListContainer"); </script> </div> </body> </html>   In the page above, the main template used to display the list of products looks like this: <script id="productListTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div> {{if onSale}} {{tmpl "#productOnSaleTemplate"}} {{else}} {{tmpl "#productTemplate"}} {{/if}} </div> </script>   If a product is on sale then the product is displayed with the productOnSaleTemplate (which includes an on sale image): <script id="productOnSaleTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <b>${name}</b> <img src="images/on_sale.png" alt="On Sale" /> </script>   Otherwise, the product is displayed with the normal productTemplate (which does not include the on sale image): <script id="productTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> ${name} </script>   You can pass a parameter to the {{tmpl}} tag. The parameter becomes the data passed to the template rendered by the {{tmpl}} tag. For example, in the previous section, we used the {{each}} template tag to display a list of categories for each blog entry like this: <script id="blogPostTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <h1>${postTitle}</h1> <p> ${postEntry} </p> {{if categories}} Categories: {{each categories}} <i>${$value}</i> {{/each}} {{else}} Uncategorized {{/if}} </script>   Another way to create this template is to use template composition like this: <script id="blogPostTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <h1>${postTitle}</h1> <p> ${postEntry} </p> {{if categories}} Categories: {{tmpl(categories) "#categoryTemplate"}} {{else}} Uncategorized {{/if}} </script> <script id="categoryTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <i>${$data}</i> &nbsp; </script>   Using the {{each}} tag or {{tmpl}} tag is largely a matter of personal preference. Wrapped Templates The {{wrap}} template tag enables you to take a chunk of HTML and transform the HTML into another chunk of HTML (think easy XSLT). When you use the {{wrap}} tag, you work with two templates. The first template contains the HTML being transformed and the second template includes the filter expressions for transforming the HTML. For example, you can use the {{wrap}} template tag to transform a chunk of HTML into an interactive tab strip: When you click any of the tabs, you see the corresponding content. This tab strip was created with the following page: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Wrapped Templates</title> <style type="text/css"> body { font-family: Arial; background-color:black; } .tabs div { display:inline-block; border-bottom: 1px solid black; padding:4px; background-color:gray; cursor:pointer; } .tabs div.tabState_true { background-color:white; border-bottom:1px solid white; } .tabBody { border-top:1px solid white; padding:10px; background-color:white; min-height:400px; width:400px; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="tabsView"></div> <script id="tabsContent" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> {{wrap "#tabsWrap"}} <h3>Tab 1</h3> <div> Content of tab 1. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> <h3>Tab 2</h3> <div> Content of tab 2. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> <h3>Tab 3</h3> <div> Content of tab 3. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> {{/wrap}} </script> <script id="tabsWrap" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div class="tabs"> {{each $item.html("h3", true)}} <div class="tabState_${$index === selectedTabIndex}"> ${$value} </div> {{/each}} </div> <div class="tabBody"> {{html $item.html("div")[selectedTabIndex]}} </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Global for tracking selected tab var selectedTabIndex = 0; // Render the tab strip $("#tabsContent").tmpl().appendTo("#tabsView"); // When a tab is clicked, update the tab strip $("#tabsView") .delegate(".tabState_false", "click", function () { var templateItem = $.tmplItem(this); selectedTabIndex = $(this).index(); templateItem.update(); }); </script> </body> </html>   The “source” for the tab strip is contained in the following template: <script id="tabsContent" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> {{wrap "#tabsWrap"}} <h3>Tab 1</h3> <div> Content of tab 1. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> <h3>Tab 2</h3> <div> Content of tab 2. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> <h3>Tab 3</h3> <div> Content of tab 3. Lorem ipsum dolor <b>sit</b> amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </div> {{/wrap}} </script>   The tab strip is created with a list of H3 elements (which represent each tab) and DIV elements (which represent the body of each tab). Notice that the HTML content is wrapped in the {{wrap}} template tag. This template tag points at the following tabsWrap template: <script id="tabsWrap" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div class="tabs"> {{each $item.html("h3", true)}} <div class="tabState_${$index === selectedTabIndex}"> ${$value} </div> {{/each}} </div> <div class="tabBody"> {{html $item.html("div")[selectedTabIndex]}} </div> </script> The tabs DIV contains all of the tabs. The {{each}} template tag is used to loop through each of the H3 elements from the source template and render a DIV tag that represents a particular tab. The template item html() method is used to filter content from the “source” HTML template. The html() method accepts a jQuery selector for its first parameter. The tabs are retrieved from the source template by using an h3 filter. The second parameter passed to the html() method – the textOnly parameter -- causes the filter to return the inner text of each h3 element. You can learn more about the html() method at the jQuery website (see the section on $item.html()). The tabBody DIV renders the body of the selected tab. Notice that the {{html}} template tag is used to display the tab body so that HTML content in the body won’t be HTML encoded. The html() method is used, once again, to grab all of the DIV elements from the source HTML template. The selectedTabIndex global variable is used to display the contents of the selected tab. Remote Templates A common feature request for jQuery templates is support for remote templates. Developers want to be able to separate templates into different files. Adding support for remote templates requires only a few lines of extra code (Dave Ward has a nice blog entry on this). For example, the following page uses a remote template from a file named BookTemplate.htm: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Remote Templates</title> <link href="0_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="pageContent"> <h1>ASP.NET Bookstore</h1> <div id="bookContainer"></div> </div> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Create an array of books var books = [ { title: "ASP.NET 4 Unleashed", price: 37.79, picture: "AspNet4Unleashed.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashed.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET Kick Start", price: 4.00, picture: "AspNetKickStart.jpg" }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed iPhone", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashedIPhone.jpg" }, ]; // Get the remote template $.get("BookTemplate.htm", null, function (bookTemplate) { // Render the books using the remote template $.tmpl(bookTemplate, books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); }); function formatPrice(price) { return "$" + price.toFixed(2); } </script> </body> </html>   The remote template is retrieved (and rendered) with the following code: // Get the remote template $.get("BookTemplate.htm", null, function (bookTemplate) { // Render the books using the remote template $.tmpl(bookTemplate, books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); });   This code uses the standard jQuery $.get() method to get the BookTemplate.htm file from the server with an Ajax request. After the BookTemplate.htm file is successfully retrieved, the $.tmpl() method is used to render an array of books with the template. Here’s what the BookTemplate.htm file looks like: <div> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> Notice that the template in the BooksTemplate.htm file is not wrapped by a SCRIPT element. There is no need to wrap the template in this case because there is no possibility that the template will get interpreted before you want it to be interpreted. If you plan to use the bookTemplate multiple times – for example, you are paging or sorting the books -- then you should compile the template into a function and cache the compiled template function. For example, the following page can be used to page through a list of 100 products (using iPhone style More paging). <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Template Caching</title> <link href="6_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <h1>Products</h1> <div id="productContainer"></div> <button id="more">More</button> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Globals var pageIndex = 0; // Create an array of products var products = []; for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) { products.push({ name: "Product " + (i + 1) }); } // Get the remote template $.get("ProductTemplate.htm", null, function (productTemplate) { // Compile and cache the template $.template("productTemplate", productTemplate); // Render the products renderProducts(0); }); $("#more").click(function () { pageIndex++; renderProducts(); }); function renderProducts() { // Get page of products var pageOfProducts = products.slice(pageIndex * 5, pageIndex * 5 + 5); // Used cached productTemplate to render products $.tmpl("productTemplate", pageOfProducts).appendTo("#productContainer"); } function formatPrice(price) { return "$" + price.toFixed(2); } </script> </body> </html>   The ProductTemplate is retrieved from an external file named ProductTemplate.htm. This template is retrieved only once. Furthermore, it is compiled and cached with the help of the $.template() method: // Get the remote template $.get("ProductTemplate.htm", null, function (productTemplate) { // Compile and cache the template $.template("productTemplate", productTemplate); // Render the products renderProducts(0); });   The $.template() method compiles the HTML representation of the template into a JavaScript function and caches the template function with the name productTemplate. The cached template can be used by calling the $.tmp() method. The productTemplate is used in the renderProducts() method: function renderProducts() { // Get page of products var pageOfProducts = products.slice(pageIndex * 5, pageIndex * 5 + 5); // Used cached productTemplate to render products $.tmpl("productTemplate", pageOfProducts).appendTo("#productContainer"); } In the code above, the first parameter passed to the $.tmpl() method is the name of a cached template. Working with Template Items In this final section, I want to devote some space to discussing Template Items. A new Template Item is created for each rendered instance of a template. For example, if you are displaying a list of 100 products with a template, then 100 Template Items are created. A Template Item has the following properties and methods: data – The data associated with the Template Instance. For example, a product. tmpl – The template associated with the Template Instance. parent – The parent template item if the template is nested. nodes – The HTML content of the template. calls – Used by {{wrap}} template tag. nest – Used by {{tmpl}} template tag. wrap – Used to imperatively enable wrapped templates. html – Used to filter content from a wrapped template. See the above section on wrapped templates. update – Used to re-render a template item. The last method – the update() method -- is especially interesting because it enables you to re-render a template item with new data or even a new template. For example, the following page displays a list of books. When you hover your mouse over any of the books, additional book details are displayed. In the following screenshot, details for ASP.NET Kick Start are displayed. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Template Item</title> <link href="0_Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="pageContent"> <h1>ASP.NET Bookstore</h1> <div id="bookContainer"></div> </div> <script id="bookTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div class="bookItem"> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} </div> </script> <script id="bookDetailsTemplate" type="text/x-jQuery-tmpl"> <div class="bookItem"> <img src="BookPictures/${picture}" alt="" /> <h2>${title}</h2> price: ${formatPrice(price)} <p> ${description} </p> </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // Create an array of books var books = [ { title: "ASP.NET 4 Unleashed", price: 37.79, picture: "AspNet4Unleashed.jpg", description: "The most comprehensive book on Microsoft’s new ASP.NET 4.. " }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashed.jpg", description: "Writing for professional programmers, Walther explains the crucial concepts that make the Model-View-Controller (MVC) development paradigm work…" }, { title: "ASP.NET Kick Start", price: 4.00, picture: "AspNetKickStart.jpg", description: "Visual Studio .NET is the premier development environment for creating .NET applications…." }, { title: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed iPhone", price: 44.99, picture: "AspNetMvcUnleashedIPhone.jpg", description: "ASP.NET MVC Unleashed for the iPhone…" }, ]; // Render the books using the template $("#bookTemplate").tmpl(books).appendTo("#bookContainer"); // Get compiled details template var bookDetailsTemplate = $("#bookDetailsTemplate").template(); // Add hover handler $(".bookItem").mouseenter(function () { // Get template item associated with DIV var templateItem = $(this).tmplItem(); // Change template to compiled template templateItem.tmpl = bookDetailsTemplate; // Re-render template templateItem.update(); }); function formatPrice(price) { return "$" + price.toFixed(2); } </script> </body> </html>   There are two templates used to display a book: bookTemplate and bookDetailsTemplate. When you hover your mouse over a template item, the standard bookTemplate is swapped out for the bookDetailsTemplate. The bookDetailsTemplate displays a book description. The books are rendered with the bookTemplate with the following line of code: // Render the books using the template $("#bookTemplate").tmpl(books).appendTo("#bookContainer");   The following code is used to swap the bookTemplate and the bookDetailsTemplate to show details for a book: // Get compiled details template var bookDetailsTemplate = $("#bookDetailsTemplate").template(); // Add hover handler $(".bookItem").mouseenter(function () { // Get template item associated with DIV var templateItem = $(this).tmplItem(); // Change template to compiled template templateItem.tmpl = bookDetailsTemplate; // Re-render template templateItem.update(); });   When you hover your mouse over a DIV element rendered by the bookTemplate, the mouseenter handler executes. First, this handler retrieves the Template Item associated with the DIV element by calling the tmplItem() method. The tmplItem() method returns a Template Item. Next, a new template is assigned to the Template Item. Notice that a compiled version of the bookDetailsTemplate is assigned to the Template Item’s tmpl property. The template is compiled earlier in the code by calling the template() method. Finally, the Template Item update() method is called to re-render the Template Item with the bookDetailsTemplate instead of the original bookTemplate. Summary This is a long blog entry and I still have not managed to cover all of the features of jQuery Templates J However, I’ve tried to cover the most important features of jQuery Templates such as template composition, template wrapping, and template items. To learn more about jQuery Templates, I recommend that you look at the documentation for jQuery Templates at the official jQuery website. Another great way to learn more about jQuery Templates is to look at the (unminified) source code.

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• Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release

  - by Jon Galloway

  ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesSummary for lazy readers: Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download on the Visual Studio site and on MSDN subscriber downloads) Visual Studio 2013 installs side by side with Visual Studio 2012 and supports round-tripping between Visual Studio versions, so you can try it out without committing to a switch Visual Studio 2013 ships with the new version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0 The new releases ASP.NET focuses on One ASP.NET, so core features and web tools work the same across the platform (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application) New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system, and a new identity system Visual Studio 2013 is an incredible editor for web files, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, LESS, Coffeescript, Handlebars, Angular, Ember, Knockdown, etc. Top links: Visual Studio 2013 content on the ASP.NET site are in the standard new releases area: http://www.asp.net/vnext ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release Notes Short intro videos on the new Visual Studio web editor features from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 post on the official .NET Web Development and Tools Blog Scott Guthrie's post: Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework Okay, for those of you who are still with me, let's dig in a bit. Quick web dev notes on downloading and installing Visual Studio 2013 I found Visual Studio 2013 to be a pretty fast install. According to Brian Harry's release post, installing over pre-release versions of Visual Studio is supported.  I've installed the release version over pre-release versions, and it worked fine. If you're only going to be doing web development, you can speed up the install if you just select Web Developer tools. Of course, as a good Microsoft employee, I'll mention that you might also want to install some of those other features, like the Store apps for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but they do download and install a lot of other stuff (e.g. the Windows Phone SDK sets up Hyper-V and downloads several GB's of VM's). So if you're planning just to do web development for now, you can pick just the Web Developer Tools and install the other stuff later. If you've got a fast internet connection, I recommend using the web installer instead of downloading the ISO. The ISO includes all the features, whereas the web installer just downloads what you're installing. Visual Studio 2013 development settings and color theme When you start up Visual Studio, it'll prompt you to pick some defaults. These are totally up to you -whatever suits your development style - and you can change them later. As I said, these are completely up to you. I recommend either the Web Development or Web Development (Code Only) settings. The only real difference is that Code Only hides the toolbars, and you can switch between them using Tools / Import and Export Settings / Reset. Web Development settings Web Development (code only) settings Usually I've just gone with Web Development (code only) in the past because I just want to focus on the code, although the Standard toolbar does make it easier to switch default web browsers. More on that later. Color theme Sigh. Okay, everyone's got their favorite colors. I alternate between Light and Dark depending on my mood, and I personally like how the low contrast on the window chrome in those themes puts the emphasis on my code rather than the tabs and toolbars. I know some people got pretty worked up over that, though, and wanted the blue theme back. I personally don't like it - it reminds me of ancient versions of Visual Studio that I don't want to think about anymore. So here's the thing: if you install Visual Studio Ultimate, it defaults to Blue. The other versions default to Light. If you use Blue, I won't criticize you - out loud, that is. You can change themes really easily - either Tools / Options / Environment / General, or the smart way: ctrl+q for quick launch, then type Theme and hit enter. Signing in During the first run, you'll be prompted to sign in. You don't have to - you can click the "Not now, maybe later" link at the bottom of that dialog. I recommend signing in, though. It's not hooked in with licensing or tracking the kind of code you write to sell you components. It is doing good things, like  syncing your Visual Studio settings between computers. More about that here. So, you don't have to, but I sure do. Overview of shiny new things in ASP.NET land There are a lot of good new things in ASP.NET. I'll list some of my favorite here, but you can read more on the ASP.NET site. One ASP.NET You've heard us talk about this for a while. The idea is that options are good, but choice can be a burden. When you start a new ASP.NET project, why should you have to make a tough decision - with long-term consequences - about how your application will work? If you want to use ASP.NET Web Forms, but have the option of adding in ASP.NET MVC later, why should that be hard? It's all ASP.NET, right? Ideally, you'd just decide that you want to use ASP.NET to build sites and services, and you could use the appropriate tools (the green blocks below) as you needed them. So, here it is. When you create a new ASP.NET application, you just create an ASP.NET application. Next, you can pick from some templates to get you started... but these are different. They're not "painful decision" templates, they're just some starting pieces. And, most importantly, you can mix and match. I can pick a "mostly" Web Forms template, but include MVC and Web API folders and core references. If you've tried to mix and match in the past, you're probably aware that it was possible, but not pleasant. ASP.NET MVC project files contained special project type GUIDs, so you'd only get controller scaffolding support in a Web Forms project if you manually edited the csproj file. Features in one stack didn't work in others. Project templates were painful choices. That's no longer the case. Hooray! I just did a demo in a presentation last week where I created a new Web Forms + MVC + Web API site, built a model, scaffolded MVC and Web API controllers with EF Code First, add data in the MVC view, viewed it in Web API, then added a GridView to the Web Forms Default.aspx page and bound it to the Model. In about 5 minutes. Sure, it's a simple example, but it's great to be able to share code and features across the whole ASP.NET family. Authentication In the past, authentication was built into the templates. So, for instance, there was an ASP.NET MVC 4 Intranet Project template which created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application that was preconfigured for Windows Authentication. All of that authentication stuff was built into each template, so they varied between the stacks, and you couldn't reuse them. You didn't see a lot of changes to the authentication options, since they required big changes to a bunch of project templates. Now, the new project dialog includes a common authentication experience. When you hit the Change Authentication button, you get some common options that work the same way regardless of the template or reference settings you've made. These options work on all ASP.NET frameworks, and all hosting environments (IIS, IIS Express, or OWIN for self-host) The default is Individual User Accounts: This is the standard "create a local account, using username / password or OAuth" thing; however, it's all built on the new Identity system. More on that in a second. The one setting that has some configuration to it is Organizational Accounts, which lets you configure authentication using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, or Office 365. Identity There's a new identity system. We've taken the best parts of the previous ASP.NET Membership and Simple Identity systems, rolled in a lot of feedback and made big enhancements to support important developer concerns like unit testing and extensiblity. I've written long posts about ASP.NET identity, and I'll do it again. Soon. This is not that post. The short version is that I think we've finally got just the right Identity system. Some of my favorite features: There are simple, sensible defaults that work well - you can File / New / Run / Register / Login, and everything works. It supports standard username / password as well as external authentication (OAuth, etc.). It's easy to customize without having to re-implement an entire provider. It's built using pluggable pieces, rather than one large monolithic system. It's built using interfaces like IUser and IRole that allow for unit testing, dependency injection, etc. You can easily add user profile data (e.g. URL, twitter handle, birthday). You just add properties to your ApplicationUser model and they'll automatically be persisted. Complete control over how the identity data is persisted. By default, everything works with Entity Framework Code First, but it's built to support changes from small (modify the schema) to big (use another ORM, store your data in a document database or in the cloud or in XML or in the EXIF data of your desktop background or whatever). It's configured via OWIN. More on OWIN and Katana later, but the fact that it's built using OWIN means it's portable. You can find out more in the Authentication and Identity section of the ASP.NET site (and lots more content will be going up there soon). New Bootstrap based project templates The new project templates are built using Bootstrap 3. Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a front-end framework that brings a lot of nice benefits: It's responsive, so your projects will automatically scale to device width using CSS media queries. For example, menus are full size on a desktop browser, but on narrower screens you automatically get a mobile-friendly menu. The built-in Bootstrap styles make your standard page elements (headers, footers, buttons, form inputs, tables etc.) look nice and modern. Bootstrap is themeable, so you can reskin your whole site by dropping in a new Bootstrap theme. Since Bootstrap is pretty popular across the web development community, this gives you a large and rapidly growing variety of templates (free and paid) to choose from. Bootstrap also includes a lot of very useful things: components (like progress bars and badges), useful glyphicons, and some jQuery plugins for tooltips, dropdowns, carousels, etc.). Here's a look at how the responsive part works. When the page is full screen, the menu and header are optimized for a wide screen display: When I shrink the page down (this is all based on page width, not useragent sniffing) the menu turns into a nice mobile-friendly dropdown: For a quick example, I grabbed a new free theme off bootswatch.com. For simple themes, you just need to download the boostrap.css file and replace the /content/bootstrap.css file in your project. Now when I refresh the page, I've got a new theme: Scaffolding The big change in scaffolding is that it's one system that works across ASP.NET. You can create a new Empty Web project or Web Forms project and you'll get the Scaffold context menus. For release, we've got MVC 5 and Web API 2 controllers. We had a preview of Web Forms scaffolding in the preview releases, but they weren't fully baked for RTM. Look for them in a future update, expected pretty soon. This scaffolding system wasn't just changed to work across the ASP.NET frameworks, it's also built to enable future extensibility. That's not in this release, but should also hopefully be out soon. Project Readme page This is a small thing, but I really like it. When you create a new project, you get a Project_Readme.html page that's added to the root of your project and opens in the Visual Studio built-in browser. I love it. A long time ago, when you created a new project we just dumped it on you and left you scratching your head about what to do next. Not ideal. Then we started adding a bunch of Getting Started information to the new project templates. That told you what to do next, but you had to delete all of that stuff out of your website. It doesn't belong there. Not ideal. This is a simple HTML file that's not integrated into your project code at all. You can delete it if you want. But, it shows a lot of helpful links that are current for the project you just created. In the future, if we add new wacky project types, they can create readme docs with specific information on how to do appropriately wacky things. Side note: I really like that they used the internal browser in Visual Studio to show this content rather than popping open an HTML page in the default browser. I hate that. It's annoying. If you're doing that, I hope you'll stop. What if some unnamed person has 40 or 90 tabs saved in their browser session? When you pop open your "Thanks for installing my Visual Studio extension!" page, all eleventy billion tabs start up and I wish I'd never installed your thing. Be like these guys and pop stuff Visual Studio specific HTML docs in the Visual Studio browser. ASP.NET MVC 5 The biggest change with ASP.NET MVC 5 is that it's no longer a separate project type. It integrates well with the rest of ASP.NET. In addition to that and the other common features we've already looked at (Bootstrap templates, Identity, authentication), here's what's new for ASP.NET MVC. Attribute routing ASP.NET MVC now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers. This supports some pretty complex, customized routing scenarios, and it allows you to keep your route information right with your controller actions if you'd like. Here's a controller that includes an action whose method name is Hiding, but I've used AttributeRouting to configure it to /spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo public class SampleController : Controller { [Route("spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo")] public string Hiding() { return "You found me!"; } } I enable that in my RouteConfig.cs, and I can use that in conjunction with my other MVC routes like this: public class RouteConfig { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes(); routes.MapRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); } } You can read more about Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 here. Filter enhancements There are two new additions to filters: Authentication Filters and Filter Overrides. Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorized requests. Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features. Attribute Routing ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article. OAuth 2.0 ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN (discussed below). This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson. Lots more There's a huge list of other features, including CORS (cross-origin request sharing), IHttpActionResult, IHttpRequestContext, and more. I think the best overview is in the release notes. OWIN and Katana I've written about OWIN and Katana recently. I'm a big fan. OWIN is the Open Web Interfaces for .NET. It's a spec, like HTML or HTTP, so you can't install OWIN. The benefit of OWIN is that it's a community specification, so anyone who implements it can plug into the ASP.NET stack, either as middleware or as a host. Katana is the Microsoft implementation of OWIN. It leverages OWIN to wire up things like authentication, handlers, modules, IIS hosting, etc., so ASP.NET can host OWIN components and Katana components can run in someone else's OWIN implementation. Howard Dierking just wrote a cool article in MSDN magazine describing Katana in depth: Getting Started with the Katana Project. He had an interesting example showing an OWIN based pipeline which leveraged SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and NancyFx components in the same stack. If this kind of thing makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, don't worry, but keep an eye on it. You're going to see some cool things happen as a result of ASP.NET becoming more and more pluggable. Visual Studio Web Tools Okay, this stuff's just crazy. Visual Studio has been adding some nice web dev features over the past few years, but they've really cranked it up for this release. Visual Studio is by far my favorite code editor for all web files: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and lots of popular libraries. Stop thinking of Visual Studio as a big editor that you only use to write back-end code. Stop editing HTML and CSS in Notepad (or Sublime, Notepad++, etc.). Visual Studio starts up in under 2 seconds on a modern computer with an SSD. Misspelling HTML attributes or your CSS classes or jQuery or Angular syntax is stupid. It doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a silly person who wastes time. Browser Link Browser Link is a real-time, two-way connection between Visual Studio and all connected browsers. It's only attached when you're running locally, in debug, but it applies to any and all connected browser, including emulators. You may have seen demos that showed the browsers refreshing based on changes in the editor, and I'll agree that's pretty cool. But it's really just the start. It's a two-way connection, and it's built for extensiblity. That means you can write extensions that push information from your running application (in IE, Chrome, a mobile emulator, etc.) back to Visual Studio. Mads and team have showed off some demonstrations where they enabled edit mode in the browser which updated the source HTML back on the browser. It's also possible to look at how the rendered HTML performs, check for compatibility issues, watch for unused CSS classes, the sky's the limit. New HTML editor The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Here's a 3 minute tour from Mads Kristensen. The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Lots more Visual Studio web dev features That's just a sampling - there's a ton of great features for JavaScript editing, CSS editing, publishing, and Page Inspector (which shows real-time rendering of your page inside Visual Studio). Here are some more short videos showing those features. Lots, lots more Okay, that's just a summary, and it's still quite a bit. Head on over to http://asp.net/vnext for more information, and download Visual Studio 2013 now to get started!

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• Toorcon 15 (2013)

  - by danx

  The Toorcon gang (senior staff): h1kari (founder), nfiltr8, and Geo Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Making Attacks Go Backwards Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) Toorcon 15 is the 15th annual security conference held in San Diego. I've attended about a third of them and blogged about previous conferences I attended here starting in 2003. As always, I've only summarized the talks I attended and interested me enough to write about them. Be aware that I may have misrepresented the speaker's remarks and that they are not my remarks or opinion, or those of my employer, so don't quote me or them. Those seeking further details may contact the speakers directly or use The Google. For some talks, I have a URL for further information. A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Andrew Furtak and Oleksandr Bazhaniuk Yuri Bulygin, Oleksandr ("Alex") Bazhaniuk, and (not present) Andrew Furtak Yuri and Alex talked about UEFI and Bootkits and bypassing MS Windows 8 Secure Boot, with vendor recommendations. They previously gave this talk at the BlackHat 2013 conference. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Overview UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is interface between hardware and OS. UEFI is processor and architecture independent. Malware can replace bootloader (bootx64.efi, bootmgfw.efi). Once replaced can modify kernel. Trivial to replace bootloader. Today many legacy bootkits—UEFI replaces them most of them. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot verifies everything you load, either through signatures or hashes. UEFI firmware relies on secure update (with signed update). You would think Secure Boot would rely on ROM (such as used for phones0, but you can't do that for PCs—PCs use writable memory with signatures DXE core verifies the UEFI boat loader(s) OS Loader (winload.efi, winresume.efi) verifies the OS kernel A chain of trust is established with a root key (Platform Key, PK), which is a cert belonging to the platform vendor. Key Exchange Keys (KEKs) verify an "authorized" database (db), and "forbidden" database (dbx). X.509 certs with SHA-1/SHA-256 hashes. Keys are stored in non-volatile (NV) flash-based NVRAM. Boot Services (BS) allow adding/deleting keys (can't be accessed once OS starts—which uses Run-Time (RT)). Root cert uses RSA-2048 public keys and PKCS#7 format signatures. SecureBoot — enable disable image signature checks SetupMode — update keys, self-signed keys, and secure boot variables CustomMode — allows updating keys Secure Boot policy settings are: always execute, never execute, allow execute on security violation, defer execute on security violation, deny execute on security violation, query user on security violation Attacking MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Secure Boot does NOT protect from physical access. Can disable from console. Each BIOS vendor implements Secure Boot differently. There are several platform and BIOS vendors. It becomes a "zoo" of implementations—which can be taken advantage of. Secure Boot is secure only when all vendors implement it correctly. Allow only UEFI firmware signed updates protect UEFI firmware from direct modification in flash memory protect FW update components program SPI controller securely protect secure boot policy settings in nvram protect runtime api disable compatibility support module which allows unsigned legacy Can corrupt the Platform Key (PK) EFI root certificate variable in SPI flash. If PK is not found, FW enters setup mode wich secure boot turned off. Can also exploit TPM in a similar manner. One is not supposed to be able to directly modify the PK in SPI flash from the OS though. But they found a bug that they can exploit from User Mode (undisclosed) and demoed the exploit. It loaded and ran their own bootkit. The exploit requires a reboot. Multiple vendors are vulnerable. They will disclose this exploit to vendors in the future. Recommendations: allow only signed updates protect UEFI fw in ROM protect EFI variable store in ROM Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Yoel Gluck and Angelo Prado Angelo Prado and Yoel Gluck, Salesforce.com CRIME is software that performs a "compression oracle attack." This is possible because the SSL protocol doesn't hide length, and because SSL compresses the header. CRIME requests with every possible character and measures the ciphertext length. Look for the plaintext which compresses the most and looks for the cookie one byte-at-a-time. SSL Compression uses LZ77 to reduce redundancy. Huffman coding replaces common byte sequences with shorter codes. US CERT thinks the SSL compression problem is fixed, but it isn't. They convinced CERT that it wasn't fixed and they issued a CVE. BREACH, breachattrack.com BREACH exploits the SSL response body (Accept-Encoding response, Content-Encoding). It takes advantage of the fact that the response is not compressed. BREACH uses gzip and needs fairly "stable" pages that are static for ~30 seconds. It needs attacker-supplied content (say from a web form or added to a URL parameter). BREACH listens to a session's requests and responses, then inserts extra requests and responses. Eventually, BREACH guesses a session's secret key. Can use compression to guess contents one byte at-a-time. For example, "Supersecret SupersecreX" (a wrong guess) compresses 10 bytes, and "Supersecret Supersecret" (a correct guess) compresses 11 bytes, so it can find each character by guessing every character. To start the guess, BREACH needs at least three known initial characters in the response sequence. Compression length then "leaks" information. Some roadblocks include no winners (all guesses wrong) or too many winners (multiple possibilities that compress the same). The solutions include: lookahead (guess 2 or 3 characters at-a-time instead of 1 character). Expensive rollback to last known conflict check compression ratio can brute-force first 3 "bootstrap" characters, if needed (expensive) block ciphers hide exact plain text length. Solution is to align response in advance to block size Mitigations length: use variable padding secrets: dynamic CSRF tokens per request secret: change over time separate secret to input-less servlets Future work eiter understand DEFLATE/GZIP HTTPS extensions Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Ryan Huber Ryan Huber, Risk I/O Ryan first discussed various ways to do a denial of service (DoS) attack against web services. One usual method is to find a slow web page and do several wgets. Or download large files. Apache is not well suited at handling a large number of connections, but one can put something in front of it Can use Apache alternatives, such as nginx How to identify malicious hosts short, sudden web requests user-agent is obvious (curl, python) same url requested repeatedly no web page referer (not normal) hidden links. hide a link and see if a bot gets it restricted access if not your geo IP (unless the website is global) missing common headers in request regular timing first seen IP at beginning of attack count requests per hosts (usually a very large number) Use of captcha can mitigate attacks, but you'll lose a lot of genuine users. Bouncer, goo.gl/c2vyEc and www.github.com/rawdigits/Bouncer Bouncer is software written by Ryan in netflow. Bouncer has a small, unobtrusive footprint and detects DoS attempts. It closes blacklisted sockets immediately (not nice about it, no proper close connection). Aggregator collects requests and controls your web proxies. Need NTP on the front end web servers for clean data for use by bouncer. Bouncer is also useful for a popularity storm ("Slashdotting") and scraper storms. Future features: gzip collection data, documentation, consumer library, multitask, logging destroyed connections. Takeaways: DoS mitigation is easier with a complete picture Bouncer designed to make it easier to detect and defend DoS—not a complete cure Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman, Adobe ASSET, blogs.adobe.com/asset/ Peleus and Karthik talked about response to mass-customized exploits. Attackers behave much like a business. "Mass customization" refers to concept discussed in the book Future Perfect by Stan Davis of Harvard Business School. Mass customization is differentiating a product for an individual customer, but at a mass production price. For example, the same individual with a debit card receives basically the same customized ATM experience around the world. Or designing your own PC from commodity parts. Exploit kits are another example of mass customization. The kits support multiple browsers and plugins, allows new modules. Exploit kits are cheap and customizable. Organized gangs use exploit kits. A group at Berkeley looked at 77,000 malicious websites (Grier et al., "Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service", 2012). They found 10,000 distinct binaries among them, but derived from only a dozen or so exploit kits. Characteristics of Mass Malware: potent, resilient, relatively low cost Technical characteristics: multiple OS, multipe payloads, multiple scenarios, multiple languages, obfuscation Response time for 0-day exploits has gone down from ~40 days 5 years ago to about ~10 days now. So the drive with malware is towards mass customized exploits, to avoid detection There's plenty of evicence that exploit development has Project Manager bureaucracy. They infer from the malware edicts to: support all versions of reader support all versions of windows support all versions of flash support all browsers write large complex, difficult to main code (8750 lines of JavaScript for example Exploits have "loose coupling" of multipe versions of software (adobe), OS, and browser. This allows specific attacks against specific versions of multiple pieces of software. Also allows exploits of more obscure software/OS/browsers and obscure versions. Gave examples of exploits that exploited 2, 3, 6, or 14 separate bugs. However, these complete exploits are more likely to be buggy or fragile in themselves and easier to defeat. Future research includes normalizing malware and Javascript. Conclusion: The coming trend is that mass-malware with mass zero-day attacks will result in mass customization of attacks. x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Richard Wartell Richard Wartell The attack vector we are addressing here is: First some malware causes a buffer overflow. The malware has no program access, but input access and buffer overflow code onto stack Later the stack became non-executable. The workaround malware used was to write a bogus return address to the stack jumping to malware Later came ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to randomize memory layout and make addresses non-deterministic. The workaround malware used was to jump t existing code segments in the program that can be used in bad ways "RoP" is Return-oriented Programming attacks. RoP attacks use your own code and write return address on stack to (existing) expoitable code found in program ("gadgets"). Pinkie Pie was paid $60K last year for a RoP attack. One solution is using anti-RoP compilers that compile source code with NO return instructions. ASLR does not randomize address space, just "gadgets". IPR/ILR ("Instruction Location Randomization") randomizes each instruction with a virtual machine. Richard's goal was to randomize a binary with no source code access. He created "STIR" (Self-Transofrming Instruction Relocation). STIR disassembles binary and operates on "basic blocks" of code. The STIR disassembler is conservative in what to disassemble. Each basic block is moved to a random location in memory. Next, STIR writes new code sections with copies of "basic blocks" of code in randomized locations. The old code is copied and rewritten with jumps to new code. the original code sections in the file is marked non-executible. STIR has better entropy than ASLR in location of code. Makes brute force attacks much harder. STIR runs on MS Windows (PEM) and Linux (ELF). It eliminated 99.96% or more "gadgets" (i.e., moved the address). Overhead usually 5-10% on MS Windows, about 1.5-4% on Linux (but some code actually runs faster!). The unique thing about STIR is it requires no source access and the modified binary fully works! Current work is to rewrite code to enforce security policies. For example, don't create a *.{exe,msi,bat} file. Or don't connect to the network after reading from the disk. Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Collin Greene Collin Greene, Facebook Collin talked about Facebook's bug bounty program. Background at FB: FB has good security frameworks, such as security teams, external audits, and cc'ing on diffs. But there's lots of "deep, dark, forgotten" parts of legacy FB code. Collin gave several examples of bountied bugs. Some bounty submissions were on software purchased from a third-party (but bounty claimers don't know and don't care). We use security questions, as does everyone else, but they are basically insecure (often easily discoverable). Collin didn't expect many bugs from the bounty program, but they ended getting 20+ good bugs in first 24 hours and good submissions continue to come in. Bug bounties bring people in with different perspectives, and are paid only for success. Bug bounty is a better use of a fixed amount of time and money versus just code review or static code analysis. The Bounty program started July 2011 and paid out $1.5 million to date. 14% of the submissions have been high priority problems that needed to be fixed immediately. The best bugs come from a small % of submitters (as with everything else)—the top paid submitters are paid 6 figures a year. Spammers like to backstab competitors. The youngest sumitter was 13. Some submitters have been hired. Bug bounties also allows to see bugs that were missed by tools or reviews, allowing improvement in the process. Bug bounties might not work for traditional software companies where the product has release cycle or is not on Internet. Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Anna Shubina Anna Shubina, Dartmouth Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (I missed the start of her talk because another track went overtime. But I have the DVD of the talk, so I'll expand later) IPsec leaves fingerprints. Using netcat, one can easily visually distinguish various crypto chaining modes just from packet timing on a chart (example, DES-CBC versus AES-CBC) One can tell a lot about VPNs just from ping roundtrips (such as what router is used) Delayed packets are not informative about a network, especially if far away from the network More needed to explore about how TCP works in real life with respect to timing Making Attacks Go Backwards Fuzzynop FuzzyNop, Mandiant This talk is not about threat attribution (finding who), product solutions, politics, or sales pitches. But who are making these malware threats? It's not a single person or group—they have diverse skill levels. There's a lot of fat-fingered fumblers out there. Always look for low-hanging fruit first: "hiding" malware in the temp, recycle, or root directories creation of unnamed scheduled tasks obvious names of files and syscalls ("ClearEventLog") uncleared event logs. Clearing event log in itself, and time of clearing, is a red flag and good first clue to look for on a suspect system Reverse engineering is hard. Disassembler use takes practice and skill. A popular tool is IDA Pro, but it takes multiple interactive iterations to get a clean disassembly. Key loggers are used a lot in targeted attacks. They are typically custom code or built in a backdoor. A big tip-off is that non-printable characters need to be printed out (such as "[Ctrl]" "[RightShift]") or time stamp printf strings. Look for these in files. Presence is not proof they are used. Absence is not proof they are not used. Java exploits. Can parse jar file with idxparser.py and decomile Java file. Java typially used to target tech companies. Backdoors are the main persistence mechanism (provided externally) for malware. Also malware typically needs command and control. Application of Artificial Intelligence in Ad-Hoc Static Code Analysis John Ashaman John Ashaman, Security Innovation Initially John tried to analyze open source files with open source static analysis tools, but these showed thousands of false positives. Also tried using grep, but tis fails to find anything even mildly complex. So next John decided to write his own tool. His approach was to first generate a call graph then analyze the graph. However, the problem is that making a call graph is really hard. For example, one problem is "evil" coding techniques, such as passing function pointer. First the tool generated an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with the nodes created from method declarations and edges created from method use. Then the tool generated a control flow graph with the goal to find a path through the AST (a maze) from source to sink. The algorithm is to look at adjacent nodes to see if any are "scary" (a vulnerability), using heuristics for search order. The tool, called "Scat" (Static Code Analysis Tool), currently looks for C# vulnerabilities and some simple PHP. Later, he plans to add more PHP, then JSP and Java. For more information see his posts in Security Innovation blog and NRefactory on GitHub. Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Sometimes in emailing or posting TCP/IP packets to analyze problems, you may want to mask the IP address. But to do this correctly, you need to mask the checksum too, or you'll leak information about the IP. Problem reports found in stackoverflow.com, sans.org, and pastebin.org are usually not masked, but a few companies do care. If only the IP is masked, the IP may be guessed from checksum (that is, it leaks data). Other parts of packet may leak more data about the IP. TCP and IP checksums both refer to the same data, so can get more bits of information out of using both checksums than just using one checksum. Also, one can usually determine the OS from the TTL field and ports in a packet header. If we get hundreds of possible results (16x each masked nibble that is unknown), one can do other things to narrow the results, such as look at packet contents for domain or geo information. With hundreds of results, can import as CSV format into a spreadsheet. Can corelate with geo data and see where each possibility is located. Eric then demoed a real email report with a masked IP packet attached. Was able to find the exact IP address, given the geo and university of the sender. Point is if you're going to mask a packet, do it right. Eric wouldn't usually bother, but do it correctly if at all, to not create a false impression of security. Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Sergey Bratus Sergey Bratus, Dartmouth College (and Julian Bangert and Rebecca Shapiro, not present) "Reflections on Trusting Trust" refers to Ken Thompson's classic 1984 paper. "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself." There's invisible links in the chain-of-trust, such as "well-installed microcode bugs" or in the compiler, and other planted bugs. Thompson showed how a compiler can introduce and propagate bugs in unmodified source. But suppose if there's no bugs and you trust the author, can you trust the code? Hell No! There's too many factors—it's Babylonian in nature. Why not? Well, Input is not well-defined/recognized (code's assumptions about "checked" input will be violated (bug/vunerabiliy). For example, HTML is recursive, but Regex checking is not recursive. Input well-formed but so complex there's no telling what it does For example, ELF file parsing is complex and has multiple ways of parsing. Input is seen differently by different pieces of program or toolchain Any Input is a program input executes on input handlers (drives state changes & transitions) only a well-defined execution model can be trusted (regex/DFA, PDA, CFG) Input handler either is a "recognizer" for the inputs as a well-defined language (see langsec.org) or it's a "virtual machine" for inputs to drive into pwn-age ELF ABI (UNIX/Linux executible file format) case study. Problems can arise from these steps (without planting bugs): compiler linker loader ld.so/rtld relocator DWARF (debugger info) exceptions The problem is you can't really automatically analyze code (it's the "halting problem" and undecidable). Only solution is to freeze code and sign it. But you can't freeze everything! Can't freeze ASLR or loading—must have tables and metadata. Any sufficiently complex input data is the same as VM byte code Example, ELF relocation entries + dynamic symbols == a Turing Complete Machine (TM). @bxsays created a Turing machine in Linux from relocation data (not code) in an ELF file. For more information, see Rebecca "bx" Shapiro's presentation from last year's Toorcon, "Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata" @bxsays did same thing with Mach-O bytecode Or a DWARF exception handling data .eh_frame + glibc == Turning Machine X86 MMU (IDT, GDT, TSS): used address translation to create a Turning Machine. Page handler reads and writes (on page fault) memory. Uses a page table, which can be used as Turning Machine byte code. Example on Github using this TM that will fly a glider across the screen Next Sergey talked about "Parser Differentials". That having one input format, but two parsers, will create confusion and opportunity for exploitation. For example, CSRs are parsed during creation by cert requestor and again by another parser at the CA. Another example is ELF—several parsers in OS tool chain, which are all different. Can have two different Program Headers (PHDRs) because ld.so parses multiple PHDRs. The second PHDR can completely transform the executable. This is described in paper in the first issue of International Journal of PoC. Conclusions trusting computers not only about bugs! Bugs are part of a problem, but no by far all of it complex data formats means bugs no "chain of trust" in Babylon! (that is, with parser differentials) we need to squeeze complexity out of data until data stops being "code equivalent" Further information See and langsec.org. USENIX WOOT 2013 (Workshop on Offensive Technologies) for "weird machines" papers and videos.

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Concurrent Collections (1 of 3)

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again we consider some of the lesser known classes and keywords of C#.  In the next few weeks, we will discuss the concurrent collections and how they have changed the face of concurrent programming. This week’s post will begin with a general introduction and discuss the ConcurrentStack<T> and ConcurrentQueue<T>.  Then in the following post we’ll discuss the ConcurrentDictionary<T> and ConcurrentBag<T>.  Finally, we shall close on the third post with a discussion of the BlockingCollection<T>. For more of the "Little Wonders" posts, see the index here. A brief history of collections In the beginning was the .NET 1.0 Framework.  And out of this framework emerged the System.Collections namespace, and it was good.  It contained all the basic things a growing programming language needs like the ArrayList and Hashtable collections.  The main problem, of course, with these original collections is that they held items of type object which means you had to be disciplined enough to use them correctly or you could end up with runtime errors if you got an object of a type you weren't expecting. Then came .NET 2.0 and generics and our world changed forever!  With generics the C# language finally got an equivalent of the very powerful C++ templates.  As such, the System.Collections.Generic was born and we got type-safe versions of all are favorite collections.  The List<T> succeeded the ArrayList and the Dictionary<TKey,TValue> succeeded the Hashtable and so on.  The new versions of the library were not only safer because they checked types at compile-time, in many cases they were more performant as well.  So much so that it's Microsoft's recommendation that the System.Collections original collections only be used for backwards compatibility. So we as developers came to know and love the generic collections and took them into our hearts and embraced them.  The problem is, thread safety in both the original collections and the generic collections can be problematic, for very different reasons. Now, if you are only doing single-threaded development you may not care – after all, no locking is required.  Even if you do have multiple threads, if a collection is “load-once, read-many” you don’t need to do anything to protect that container from multi-threaded access, as illustrated below: 1: public static class OrderTypeTranslator 2: { 3: // because this dictionary is loaded once before it is ever accessed, we don't need to synchronize 4: // multi-threaded read access 5: private static readonly Dictionary<string, char> _translator = new Dictionary<string, char> 6: { 7: {"New", 'N'}, 8: {"Update", 'U'}, 9: {"Cancel", 'X'} 10: }; 11:  12: // the only public interface into the dictionary is for reading, so inherently thread-safe 13: public static char? Translate(string orderType) 14: { 15: char charValue; 16: if (_translator.TryGetValue(orderType, out charValue)) 17: { 18: return charValue; 19: } 20:  21: return null; 22: } 23: } Unfortunately, most of our computer science problems cannot get by with just single-threaded applications or with multi-threading in a load-once manner.  Looking at  today's trends, it's clear to see that computers are not so much getting faster because of faster processor speeds -- we've nearly reached the limits we can push through with today's technologies -- but more because we're adding more cores to the boxes.  With this new hardware paradigm, it is even more important to use multi-threaded applications to take full advantage of parallel processing to achieve higher application speeds. So let's look at how to use collections in a thread-safe manner. Using historical collections in a concurrent fashion The early .NET collections (System.Collections) had a Synchronized() static method that could be used to wrap the early collections to make them completely thread-safe.  This paradigm was dropped in the generic collections (System.Collections.Generic) because having a synchronized wrapper resulted in atomic locks for all operations, which could prove overkill in many multithreading situations.  Thus the paradigm shifted to having the user of the collection specify their own locking, usually with an external object: 1: public class OrderAggregator 2: { 3: private static readonly Dictionary<string, List<Order>> _orders = new Dictionary<string, List<Order>>(); 4: private static readonly _orderLock = new object(); 5:  6: public void Add(string accountNumber, Order newOrder) 7: { 8: List<Order> ordersForAccount; 9:  10: // a complex operation like this should all be protected 11: lock (_orderLock) 12: { 13: if (!_orders.TryGetValue(accountNumber, out ordersForAccount)) 14: { 15: _orders.Add(accountNumber, ordersForAccount = new List<Order>()); 16: } 17:  18: ordersForAccount.Add(newOrder); 19: } 20: } 21: } Notice how we’re performing several operations on the dictionary under one lock.  With the Synchronized() static methods of the early collections, you wouldn’t be able to specify this level of locking (a more macro-level).  So in the generic collections, it was decided that if a user needed synchronization, they could implement their own locking scheme instead so that they could provide synchronization as needed. The need for better concurrent access to collections Here’s the problem: it’s relatively easy to write a collection that locks itself down completely for access, but anything more complex than that can be difficult and error-prone to write, and much less to make it perform efficiently!  For example, what if you have a Dictionary that has frequent reads but in-frequent updates?  Do you want to lock down the entire Dictionary for every access?  This would be overkill and would prevent concurrent reads.  In such cases you could use something like a ReaderWriterLockSlim which allows for multiple readers in a lock, and then once a writer grabs the lock it blocks all further readers until the writer is done (in a nutshell).  This is all very complex stuff to consider. Fortunately, this is where the Concurrent Collections come in.  The Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft went through great pains to determine how to make a set of concurrent collections that would have the best performance characteristics for general case multi-threaded use. Now, as in all things involving threading, you should always make sure you evaluate all your container options based on the particular usage scenario and the degree of parallelism you wish to acheive. This article should not be taken to understand that these collections are always supperior to the generic collections. Each fills a particular need for a particular situation. Understanding what each container is optimized for is key to the success of your application whether it be single-threaded or multi-threaded. General points to consider with the concurrent collections The MSDN points out that the concurrent collections all support the ICollection interface. However, since the collections are already synchronized, the IsSynchronized property always returns false, and SyncRoot always returns null.  Thus you should not attempt to use these properties for synchronization purposes. Note that since the concurrent collections also may have different operations than the traditional data structures you may be used to.  Now you may ask why they did this, but it was done out of necessity to keep operations safe and atomic.  For example, in order to do a Pop() on a stack you have to know the stack is non-empty, but between the time you check the stack’s IsEmpty property and then do the Pop() another thread may have come in and made the stack empty!  This is why some of the traditional operations have been changed to make them safe for concurrent use. In addition, some properties and methods in the concurrent collections achieve concurrency by creating a snapshot of the collection, which means that some operations that were traditionally O(1) may now be O(n) in the concurrent models.  I’ll try to point these out as we talk about each collection so you can be aware of any potential performance impacts.  Finally, all the concurrent containers are safe for enumeration even while being modified, but some of the containers support this in different ways (snapshot vs. dirty iteration).  Once again I’ll highlight how thread-safe enumeration works for each collection. ConcurrentStack<T>: The thread-safe LIFO container The ConcurrentStack<T> is the thread-safe counterpart to the System.Collections.Generic.Stack<T>, which as you may remember is your standard last-in-first-out container.  If you think of algorithms that favor stack usage (for example, depth-first searches of graphs and trees) then you can see how using a thread-safe stack would be of benefit. The ConcurrentStack<T> achieves thread-safe access by using System.Threading.Interlocked operations.  This means that the multi-threaded access to the stack requires no traditional locking and is very, very fast! For the most part, the ConcurrentStack<T> behaves like it’s Stack<T> counterpart with a few differences: Pop() was removed in favor of TryPop() Returns true if an item existed and was popped and false if empty. PushRange() and TryPopRange() were added Allows you to push multiple items and pop multiple items atomically. Count takes a snapshot of the stack and then counts the items. This means it is a O(n) operation, if you just want to check for an empty stack, call IsEmpty instead which is O(1). ToArray() and GetEnumerator() both also take snapshots. This means that iteration over a stack will give you a static view at the time of the call and will not reflect updates. Pushing on a ConcurrentStack<T> works just like you’d expect except for the aforementioned PushRange() method that was added to allow you to push a range of items concurrently. 1: var stack = new ConcurrentStack<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to stack is much the same as before 4: stack.Push("First"); 5:  6: // but you can also push multiple items in one atomic operation (no interleaves) 7: stack.PushRange(new [] { "Second", "Third", "Fourth" }); For looking at the top item of the stack (without removing it) the Peek() method has been removed in favor of a TryPeek().  This is because in order to do a peek the stack must be non-empty, but between the time you check for empty and the time you execute the peek the stack contents may have changed.  Thus the TryPeek() was created to be an atomic check for empty, and then peek if not empty: 1: // to look at top item of stack without removing it, can use TryPeek. 2: // Note that there is no Peek(), this is because you need to check for empty first. TryPeek does. 3: string item; 4: if (stack.TryPeek(out item)) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("Top item was " + item); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("Stack was empty."); 11: } Finally, to remove items from the stack, we have the TryPop() for single, and TryPopRange() for multiple items.  Just like the TryPeek(), these operations replace Pop() since we need to ensure atomically that the stack is non-empty before we pop from it: 1: // to remove items, use TryPop or TryPopRange to get multiple items atomically (no interleaves) 2: if (stack.TryPop(out item)) 3: { 4: Console.WriteLine("Popped " + item); 5: } 6:  7: // TryPopRange will only pop up to the number of spaces in the array, the actual number popped is returned. 8: var poppedItems = new string[2]; 9: int numPopped = stack.TryPopRange(poppedItems); 10:  11: foreach (var theItem in poppedItems.Take(numPopped)) 12: { 13: Console.WriteLine("Popped " + theItem); 14: } Finally, note that as stated before, GetEnumerator() and ToArray() gets a snapshot of the data at the time of the call.  That means if you are enumerating the stack you will get a snapshot of the stack at the time of the call.  This is illustrated below: 1: var stack = new ConcurrentStack<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to stack is much the same as before 4: stack.Push("First"); 5:  6: var results = stack.GetEnumerator(); 7:  8: // but you can also push multiple items in one atomic operation (no interleaves) 9: stack.PushRange(new [] { "Second", "Third", "Fourth" }); 10:  11: while(results.MoveNext()) 12: { 13: Console.WriteLine("Stack only has: " + results.Current); 14: } The only item that will be printed out in the above code is "First" because the snapshot was taken before the other items were added. This may sound like an issue, but it’s really for safety and is more correct.  You don’t want to enumerate a stack and have half a view of the stack before an update and half a view of the stack after an update, after all.  In addition, note that this is still thread-safe, whereas iterating through a non-concurrent collection while updating it in the old collections would cause an exception. ConcurrentQueue<T>: The thread-safe FIFO container The ConcurrentQueue<T> is the thread-safe counterpart of the System.Collections.Generic.Queue<T> class.  The concurrent queue uses an underlying list of small arrays and lock-free System.Threading.Interlocked operations on the head and tail arrays.  Once again, this allows us to do thread-safe operations without the need for heavy locks! The ConcurrentQueue<T> (like the ConcurrentStack<T>) has some departures from the non-concurrent counterpart.  Most notably: Dequeue() was removed in favor of TryDequeue(). Returns true if an item existed and was dequeued and false if empty. Count does not take a snapshot It subtracts the head and tail index to get the count.  This results overall in a O(1) complexity which is quite good.  It’s still recommended, however, that for empty checks you call IsEmpty instead of comparing Count to zero. ToArray() and GetEnumerator() both take snapshots. This means that iteration over a queue will give you a static view at the time of the call and will not reflect updates. The Enqueue() method on the ConcurrentQueue<T> works much the same as the generic Queue<T>: 1: var queue = new ConcurrentQueue<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to queue is much the same as before 4: queue.Enqueue("First"); 5: queue.Enqueue("Second"); 6: queue.Enqueue("Third"); For front item access, the TryPeek() method must be used to attempt to see the first item if the queue.  There is no Peek() method since, as you’ll remember, we can only peek on a non-empty queue, so we must have an atomic TryPeek() that checks for empty and then returns the first item if the queue is non-empty. 1: // to look at first item in queue without removing it, can use TryPeek. 2: // Note that there is no Peek(), this is because you need to check for empty first. TryPeek does. 3: string item; 4: if (queue.TryPeek(out item)) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("First item was " + item); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("Queue was empty."); 11: } Then, to remove items you use TryDequeue().  Once again this is for the same reason we have TryPeek() and not Peek(): 1: // to remove items, use TryDequeue. If queue is empty returns false. 2: if (queue.TryDequeue(out item)) 3: { 4: Console.WriteLine("Dequeued first item " + item); 5: } Just like the concurrent stack, the ConcurrentQueue<T> takes a snapshot when you call ToArray() or GetEnumerator() which means that subsequent updates to the queue will not be seen when you iterate over the results.  Thus once again the code below will only show the first item, since the other items were added after the snapshot. 1: var queue = new ConcurrentQueue<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to queue is much the same as before 4: queue.Enqueue("First"); 5:  6: var iterator = queue.GetEnumerator(); 7:  8: queue.Enqueue("Second"); 9: queue.Enqueue("Third"); 10:  11: // only shows First 12: while (iterator.MoveNext()) 13: { 14: Console.WriteLine("Dequeued item " + iterator.Current); 15: } Using collections concurrently You’ll notice in the examples above I stuck to using single-threaded examples so as to make them deterministic and the results obvious.  Of course, if we used these collections in a truly multi-threaded way the results would be less deterministic, but would still be thread-safe and with no locking on your part required! For example, say you have an order processor that takes an IEnumerable<Order> and handles each other in a multi-threaded fashion, then groups the responses together in a concurrent collection for aggregation.  This can be done easily with the TPL’s Parallel.ForEach(): 1: public static IEnumerable<OrderResult> ProcessOrders(IEnumerable<Order> orderList) 2: { 3: var proxy = new OrderProxy(); 4: var results = new ConcurrentQueue<OrderResult>(); 5:  6: // notice that we can process all these in parallel and put the results 7: // into our concurrent collection without needing any external locking! 8: Parallel.ForEach(orderList, 9: order => 10: { 11: var result = proxy.PlaceOrder(order); 12:  13: results.Enqueue(result); 14: }); 15:  16: return results; 17: } Summary Obviously, if you do not need multi-threaded safety, you don’t need to use these collections, but when you do need multi-threaded collections these are just the ticket! The plethora of features (I always think of the movie The Three Amigos when I say plethora) built into these containers and the amazing way they acheive thread-safe access in an efficient manner is wonderful to behold. Stay tuned next week where we’ll continue our discussion with the ConcurrentBag<T> and the ConcurrentDictionary<TKey,TValue>. For some excellent information on the performance of the concurrent collections and how they perform compared to a traditional brute-force locking strategy, see this wonderful whitepaper by the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform team here.   Tweet Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Concurrent Collections,Collections,Multi-Threading,Little Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,James Michael Hare

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• Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks.  2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"?  5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools.  - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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• How to find and fix performance problems in ORM powered applications

  - by FransBouma

  Once in a while we get requests about how to fix performance problems with our framework. As it comes down to following the same steps and looking into the same things every single time, I decided to write a blogpost about it instead, so more people can learn from this and solve performance problems in their O/R mapper powered applications. In some parts it's focused on LLBLGen Pro but it's also usable for other O/R mapping frameworks, as the vast majority of performance problems in O/R mapper powered applications are not specific for a certain O/R mapper framework. Too often, the developer looks at the wrong part of the application, trying to fix what isn't a problem in that part, and getting frustrated that 'things are so slow with <insert your favorite framework X here>'. I'm in the O/R mapper business for a long time now (almost 10 years, full time) and as it's a small world, we O/R mapper developers know almost all tricks to pull off by now: we all know what to do to make task ABC faster and what compromises (because there are almost always compromises) to deal with if we decide to make ABC faster that way. Some O/R mapper frameworks are faster in X, others in Y, but you can be sure the difference is mainly a result of a compromise some developers are willing to deal with and others aren't. That's why the O/R mapper frameworks on the market today are different in many ways, even though they all fetch and save entities from and to a database. I'm not suggesting there's no room for improvement in today's O/R mapper frameworks, there always is, but it's not a matter of 'the slowness of the application is caused by the O/R mapper' anymore. Perhaps query generation can be optimized a bit here, row materialization can be optimized a bit there, but it's mainly coming down to milliseconds. Still worth it if you're a framework developer, but it's not much compared to the time spend inside databases and in user code: if a complete fetch takes 40ms or 50ms (from call to entity object collection), it won't make a difference for your application as that 10ms difference won't be noticed. That's why it's very important to find the real locations of the problems so developers can fix them properly and don't get frustrated because their quest to get a fast, performing application failed. Performance tuning basics and rules Finding and fixing performance problems in any application is a strict procedure with four prescribed steps: isolate, analyze, interpret and fix, in that order. It's key that you don't skip a step nor make assumptions: these steps help you find the reason of a problem which seems to be there, and how to fix it or leave it as-is. Skipping a step, or when you assume things will be bad/slow without doing analysis will lead to the path of premature optimization and won't actually solve your problems, only create new ones. The most important rule of finding and fixing performance problems in software is that you have to understand what 'performance problem' actually means. Most developers will say "when a piece of software / code is slow, you have a performance problem". But is that actually the case? If I write a Linq query which will aggregate, group and sort 5 million rows from several tables to produce a resultset of 10 rows, it might take more than a couple of milliseconds before that resultset is ready to be consumed by other logic. If I solely look at the Linq query, the code consuming the resultset of the 10 rows and then look at the time it takes to complete the whole procedure, it will appear to me to be slow: all that time taken to produce and consume 10 rows? But if you look closer, if you analyze and interpret the situation, you'll see it does a tremendous amount of work, and in that light it might even be extremely fast. With every performance problem you encounter, always do realize that what you're trying to solve is perhaps not a technical problem at all, but a perception problem. The second most important rule you have to understand is based on the old saying "Penny wise, Pound Foolish": the part which takes e.g. 5% of the total time T for a given task isn't worth optimizing if you have another part which takes a much larger part of the total time T for that same given task. Optimizing parts which are relatively insignificant for the total time taken is not going to bring you better results overall, even if you totally optimize that part away. This is the core reason why analysis of the complete set of application parts which participate in a given task is key to being successful in solving performance problems: No analysis -> no problem -> no solution. One warning up front: hunting for performance will always include making compromises. Fast software can be made maintainable, but if you want to squeeze as much performance out of your software, you will inevitably be faced with the dilemma of compromising one or more from the group {readability, maintainability, features} for the extra performance you think you'll gain. It's then up to you to decide whether it's worth it. In almost all cases it's not. The reason for this is simple: the vast majority of performance problems can be solved by implementing the proper algorithms, the ones with proven Big O-characteristics so you know the performance you'll get plus you know the algorithm will work. The time taken by the algorithm implementing code is inevitable: you already implemented the best algorithm. You might find some optimizations on the technical level but in general these are minor. Let's look at the four steps to see how they guide us through the quest to find and fix performance problems. Isolate The first thing you need to do is to isolate the areas in your application which are assumed to be slow. For example, if your application is a web application and a given page is taking several seconds or even minutes to load, it's a good candidate to check out. It's important to start with the isolate step because it allows you to focus on a single code path per area with a clear begin and end and ignore the rest. The rest of the steps are taken per identified problematic area. Keep in mind that isolation focuses on tasks in an application, not code snippets. A task is something that's started in your application by either another task or the user, or another program, and has a beginning and an end. You can see a task as a piece of functionality offered by your application.  Analyze Once you've determined the problem areas, you have to perform analysis on the code paths of each area, to see where the performance problems occur and which areas are not the problem. This is a multi-layered effort: an application which uses an O/R mapper typically consists of multiple parts: there's likely some kind of interface (web, webservice, windows etc.), a part which controls the interface and business logic, the O/R mapper part and the RDBMS, all connected with either a network or inter-process connections provided by the OS or other means. Each of these parts, including the connectivity plumbing, eat up a part of the total time it takes to complete a task, e.g. load a webpage with all orders of a given customer X. To understand which parts participate in the task / area we're investigating and how much they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task, analysis of each participating task is essential. Start with the code you wrote which starts the task, analyze the code and track the path it follows through your application. What does the code do along the way, verify whether it's correct or not. Analyze whether you have implemented the right algorithms in your code for this particular area. Remember we're looking at one area at a time, which means we're ignoring all other code paths, just the code path of the current problematic area, from begin to end and back. Don't dig in and start optimizing at the code level just yet. We're just analyzing. If your analysis reveals big architectural stupidity, it's perhaps a good idea to rethink the architecture at this point. For the rest, we're analyzing which means we collect data about what could be wrong, for each participating part of the complete application. Reviewing the code you wrote is a good tool to get deeper understanding of what is going on for a given task but ultimately it lacks precision and overview what really happens: humans aren't good code interpreters, computers are. We therefore need to utilize tools to get deeper understanding about which parts contribute how much time to the total task, triggered by which other parts and for example how many times are they called. There are two different kind of tools which are necessary: .NET profilers and O/R mapper / RDBMS profilers. .NET profiling .NET profilers (e.g. dotTrace by JetBrains or Ants by Red Gate software) show exactly which pieces of code are called, how many times they're called, and the time it took to run that piece of code, at the method level and sometimes even at the line level. The .NET profilers are essential tools for understanding whether the time taken to complete a given task / area in your application is consumed by .NET code, where exactly in your code, the path to that code, how many times that code was called by other code and thus reveals where hotspots are located: the areas where a solution can be found. Importantly, they also reveal which areas can be left alone: remember our penny wise pound foolish saying: if a profiler reveals that a group of methods are fast, or don't contribute much to the total time taken for a given task, ignore them. Even if the code in them is perhaps complex and looks like a candidate for optimization: you can work all day on that, it won't matter.  As we're focusing on a single area of the application, it's best to start profiling right before you actually activate the task/area. Most .NET profilers support this by starting the application without starting the profiling procedure just yet. You navigate to the particular part which is slow, start profiling in the profiler, in your application you perform the actions which are considered slow, and afterwards you get a snapshot in the profiler. The snapshot contains the data collected by the profiler during the slow action, so most data is produced by code in the area to investigate. This is important, because it allows you to stay focused on a single area. O/R mapper and RDBMS profiling .NET profilers give you a good insight in the .NET side of things, but not in the RDBMS side of the application. As this article is about O/R mapper powered applications, we're also looking at databases, and the software making it possible to consume the database in your application: the O/R mapper. To understand which parts of the O/R mapper and database participate how much to the total time taken for task T, we need different tools. There are two kind of tools focusing on O/R mappers and database performance profiling: O/R mapper profilers and RDBMS profilers. For O/R mapper profilers, you can look at LLBLGen Prof by hibernating rhinos or the Linq to Sql/LLBLGen Pro profiler by Huagati. Hibernating rhinos also have profilers for other O/R mappers like NHibernate (NHProf) and Entity Framework (EFProf) and work the same as LLBLGen Prof. For RDBMS profilers, you have to look whether the RDBMS vendor has a profiler. For example for SQL Server, the profiler is shipped with SQL Server, for Oracle it's build into the RDBMS, however there are also 3rd party tools. Which tool you're using isn't really important, what's important is that you get insight in which queries are executed during the task / area we're currently focused on and how long they took. Here, the O/R mapper profilers have an advantage as they collect the time it took to execute the query from the application's perspective so they also collect the time it took to transport data across the network. This is important because a query which returns a massive resultset or a resultset with large blob/clob/ntext/image fields takes more time to get transported across the network than a small resultset and a database profiler doesn't take this into account most of the time. Another tool to use in this case, which is more low level and not all O/R mappers support it (though LLBLGen Pro and NHibernate as well do) is tracing: most O/R mappers offer some form of tracing or logging system which you can use to collect the SQL generated and executed and often also other activity behind the scenes. While tracing can produce a tremendous amount of data in some cases, it also gives insight in what's going on. Interpret After we've completed the analysis step it's time to look at the data we've collected. We've done code reviews to see whether we've done anything stupid and which parts actually take place and if the proper algorithms have been implemented. We've done .NET profiling to see which parts are choke points and how much time they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task we're investigating. We've performed O/R mapper profiling and RDBMS profiling to see which queries were executed during the task, how many queries were generated and executed and how long they took to complete, including network transportation. All this data reveals two things: which parts are big contributors to the total time taken and which parts are irrelevant. Both aspects are very important. The parts which are irrelevant (i.e. don't contribute significantly to the total time taken) can be ignored from now on, we won't look at them. The parts which contribute a lot to the total time taken are important to look at. We now have to first look at the .NET profiler results, to see whether the time taken is consumed in our own code, in .NET framework code, in the O/R mapper itself or somewhere else. For example if most of the time is consumed by DbCommand.ExecuteReader, the time it took to complete the task is depending on the time the data is fetched from the database. If there was just 1 query executed, according to tracing or O/R mapper profilers / RDBMS profilers, check whether that query is optimal, uses indexes or has to deal with a lot of data. Interpret means that you follow the path from begin to end through the data collected and determine where, along the path, the most time is contributed. It also means that you have to check whether this was expected or is totally unexpected. My previous example of the 10 row resultset of a query which groups millions of rows will likely reveal that a long time is spend inside the database and almost no time is spend in the .NET code, meaning the RDBMS part contributes the most to the total time taken, the rest is compared to that time, irrelevant. Considering the vastness of the source data set, it's expected this will take some time. However, does it need tweaking? Perhaps all possible tweaks are already in place. In the interpret step you then have to decide that further action in this area is necessary or not, based on what the analysis results show: if the analysis results were unexpected and in the area where the most time is contributed to the total time taken is room for improvement, action should be taken. If not, you can only accept the situation and move on. In all cases, document your decision together with the analysis you've done. If you decide that the perceived performance problem is actually expected due to the nature of the task performed, it's essential that in the future when someone else looks at the application and starts asking questions you can answer them properly and new analysis is only necessary if situations changed. Fix After interpreting the analysis results you've concluded that some areas need adjustment. This is the fix step: you're actively correcting the performance problem with proper action targeted at the real cause. In many cases related to O/R mapper powered applications it means you'll use different features of the O/R mapper to achieve the same goal, or apply optimizations at the RDBMS level. It could also mean you apply caching inside your application (compromise memory consumption over performance) to avoid unnecessary re-querying data and re-consuming the results. After applying a change, it's key you re-do the analysis and interpretation steps: compare the results and expectations with what you had before, to see whether your actions had any effect or whether it moved the problem to a different part of the application. Don't fall into the trap to do partly analysis: do the full analysis again: .NET profiling and O/R mapper / RDBMS profiling. It might very well be that the changes you've made make one part faster but another part significantly slower, in such a way that the overall problem hasn't changed at all. Performance tuning is dealing with compromises and making choices: to use one feature over the other, to accept a higher memory footprint, to go away from the strict-OO path and execute queries directly onto the RDBMS, these are choices and compromises which will cross your path if you want to fix performance problems with respect to O/R mappers or data-access and databases in general. In most cases it's not a big issue: alternatives are often good choices too and the compromises aren't that hard to deal with. What is important is that you document why you made a choice, a compromise: which analysis data, which interpretation led you to the choice made. This is key for good maintainability in the years to come. Most common performance problems with O/R mappers Below is an incomplete list of common performance problems related to data-access / O/R mappers / RDBMS code. It will help you with fixing the hotspots you found in the interpretation step. SELECT N+1: (Lazy-loading specific). Lazy loading triggered performance bottlenecks. Consider a list of Orders bound to a grid. You have a Field mapped onto a related field in Order, Customer.CompanyName. Showing this column in the grid will make the grid fetch (indirectly) for each row the Customer row. This means you'll get for the single list not 1 query (for the orders) but 1+(the number of orders shown) queries. To solve this: use eager loading using a prefetch path to fetch the customers with the orders. SELECT N+1 is easy to spot with an O/R mapper profiler or RDBMS profiler: if you see a lot of identical queries executed at once, you have this problem. Prefetch paths using many path nodes or sorting, or limiting. Eager loading problem. Prefetch paths can help with performance, but as 1 query is fetched per node, it can be the number of data fetched in a child node is bigger than you think. Also consider that data in every node is merged on the client within the parent. This is fast, but it also can take some time if you fetch massive amounts of entities. If you keep fetches small, you can use tuning parameters like the ParameterizedPrefetchPathThreshold setting to get more optimal queries. Deep inheritance hierarchies of type Target Per Entity/Type. If you use inheritance of type Target per Entity / Type (each type in the inheritance hierarchy is mapped onto its own table/view), fetches will join subtype- and supertype tables in many cases, which can lead to a lot of performance problems if the hierarchy has many types. With this problem, keep inheritance to a minimum if possible, or switch to a hierarchy of type Target Per Hierarchy, which means all entities in the inheritance hierarchy are mapped onto the same table/view. Of course this has its own set of drawbacks, but it's a compromise you might want to take. Fetching massive amounts of data by fetching large lists of entities. LLBLGen Pro supports paging (and limiting the # of rows returned), which is often key to process through large sets of data. Use paging on the RDBMS if possible (so a query is executed which returns only the rows in the page requested). When using paging in a web application, be sure that you switch server-side paging on on the datasourcecontrol used. In this case, paging on the grid alone is not enough: this can lead to fetching a lot of data which is then loaded into the grid and paged there. Keep note that analyzing queries for paging could lead to the false assumption that paging doesn't occur, e.g. when the query contains a field of type ntext/image/clob/blob and DISTINCT can't be applied while it should have (e.g. due to a join): the datareader will do DISTINCT filtering on the client. this is a little slower but it does perform paging functionality on the data-reader so it won't fetch all rows even if the query suggests it does. Fetch massive amounts of data because blob/clob/ntext/image fields aren't excluded. LLBLGen Pro supports field exclusion for queries. You can exclude fields (also in prefetch paths) per query to avoid fetching all fields of an entity, e.g. when you don't need them for the logic consuming the resultset. Excluding fields can greatly reduce the amount of time spend on data-transport across the network. Use this optimization if you see that there's a big difference between query execution time on the RDBMS and the time reported by the .NET profiler for the ExecuteReader method call. Doing client-side aggregates/scalar calculations by consuming a lot of data. If possible, try to formulate a scalar query or group by query using the projection system or GetScalar functionality of LLBLGen Pro to do data consumption on the RDBMS server. It's far more efficient to process data on the RDBMS server than to first load it all in memory, then traverse the data in-memory to calculate a value. Using .ToList() constructs inside linq queries. It might be you use .ToList() somewhere in a Linq query which makes the query be run partially in-memory. Example: var q = from c in metaData.Customers.ToList() where c.Country=="Norway" select c; This will actually fetch all customers in-memory and do an in-memory filtering, as the linq query is defined on an IEnumerable<T>, and not on the IQueryable<T>. Linq is nice, but it can often be a bit unclear where some parts of a Linq query might run. Fetching all entities to delete into memory first. To delete a set of entities it's rather inefficient to first fetch them all into memory and then delete them one by one. It's more efficient to execute a DELETE FROM ... WHERE query on the database directly to delete the entities in one go. LLBLGen Pro supports this feature, and so do some other O/R mappers. It's not always possible to do this operation in the context of an O/R mapper however: if an O/R mapper relies on a cache, these kind of operations are likely not supported because they make it impossible to track whether an entity is actually removed from the DB and thus can be removed from the cache. Fetching all entities to update with an expression into memory first. Similar to the previous point: it is more efficient to update a set of entities directly with a single UPDATE query using an expression instead of fetching the entities into memory first and then updating the entities in a loop, and afterwards saving them. It might however be a compromise you don't want to take as it is working around the idea of having an object graph in memory which is manipulated and instead makes the code fully aware there's a RDBMS somewhere. Conclusion Performance tuning is almost always about compromises and making choices. It's also about knowing where to look and how the systems in play behave and should behave. The four steps I provided should help you stay focused on the real problem and lead you towards the solution. Knowing how to optimally use the systems participating in your own code (.NET framework, O/R mapper, RDBMS, network/services) is key for success as well as knowing what's going on inside the application you built. I hope you'll find this guide useful in tracking down performance problems and dealing with them in a useful way.  

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• Silverlight Recruiting Application Part 5 - Jobs Module / View

  Now we starting getting into a more code-heavy portion of this series, thankfully though this means the groundwork is all set for the most part and after adding the modules we will have a complete application that can be provided with full source. The Jobs module will have two concerns- adding and maintaining jobs that can then be broadcast out to the website. How they are displayed on the site will be handled by our admin system (which will just poll from this common database), so we aren't too concerned with that, but rather with getting the information into the system and allowing the backend administration/HR users to keep things up to date. Since there is a fair bit of information that we want to display, we're going to move editing to a separate view so we can get all that information in an easy-to-use spot. With all the files created for this module, the project looks something like this: And now... on to the code. XAML for the Job Posting View All we really need for the Job Posting View is a RadGridView and a few buttons. This will let us both show off records and perform operations on the records without much hassle. That XAML is going to look something like this: 01.<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" 02.Background="White"> 03.<Grid.RowDefinitions> 04.<RowDefinition Height="30" /> 05.<RowDefinition /> 06.</Grid.RowDefinitions> 07.<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> 08.<Button x:Name="xAddRecordButton" 09.Content="Add Job" 10.Width="120" 11.cal:Click.Command="{Binding AddRecord}" 12.telerik:StyleManager.Theme="Windows7" /> 13.<Button x:Name="xEditRecordButton" 14.Content="Edit Job" 15.Width="120" 16.cal:Click.Command="{Binding EditRecord}" 17.telerik:StyleManager.Theme="Windows7" /> 18.</StackPanel> 19.<telerikGrid:RadGridView x:Name="xJobsGrid" 20.Grid.Row="1" 21.IsReadOnly="True" 22.AutoGenerateColumns="False" 23.ColumnWidth="*" 24.RowDetailsVisibilityMode="VisibleWhenSelected" 25.ItemsSource="{Binding MyJobs}" 26.SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedJob, Mode=TwoWay}" 27.command:SelectedItemChangedEventClass.Command="{Binding SelectedItemChanged}"> 28.<telerikGrid:RadGridView.Columns> 29.<telerikGrid:GridViewDataColumn Header="Job Title" 30.DataMemberBinding="{Binding JobTitle}" 31.UniqueName="JobTitle" /> 32.<telerikGrid:GridViewDataColumn Header="Location" 33.DataMemberBinding="{Binding Location}" 34.UniqueName="Location" /> 35.<telerikGrid:GridViewDataColumn Header="Resume Required" 36.DataMemberBinding="{Binding NeedsResume}" 37.UniqueName="NeedsResume" /> 38.<telerikGrid:GridViewDataColumn Header="CV Required" 39.DataMemberBinding="{Binding NeedsCV}" 40.UniqueName="NeedsCV" /> 41.<telerikGrid:GridViewDataColumn Header="Overview Required" 42.DataMemberBinding="{Binding NeedsOverview}" 43.UniqueName="NeedsOverview" /> 44.<telerikGrid:GridViewDataColumn Header="Active" 45.DataMemberBinding="{Binding IsActive}" 46.UniqueName="IsActive" /> 47.</telerikGrid:RadGridView.Columns> 48.</telerikGrid:RadGridView> 49.</Grid> I'll explain what's happening here by line numbers: Lines 11 and 16: Using the same type of click commands as we saw in the Menu module, we tie the button clicks to delegate commands in the viewmodel. Line 25: The source for the jobs will be a collection in the viewmodel. Line 26: We also bind the selected item to a public property from the viewmodel for use in code. Line 27: We've turned the event into a command so we can handle it via code in the viewmodel. So those first three probably make sense to you as far as Silverlight/WPF binding magic is concerned, but for line 27... This actually comes from something I read onDamien Schenkelman's blog back in the day for creating an attached behavior from any event. So, any time you see me using command:Whatever.Command, the backing for it is actually something like this: SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior.cs: 01.public class SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior : CommandBehaviorBase<Telerik.Windows.Controls.DataControl> 02.{ 03.public SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior(DataControl element) 04.: base(element) 05.{ 06.element.SelectionChanged += new EventHandler<SelectionChangeEventArgs>(element_SelectionChanged); 07.} 08.void element_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangeEventArgs e) 09.{ 10.// We'll only ever allow single selection, so will only need item index 0 11.base.CommandParameter = e.AddedItems[0]; 12.base.ExecuteCommand(); 13.} 14.} SelectedItemChangedEventClass.cs: 01.public class SelectedItemChangedEventClass 02.{ 03.#region The Command Stuff 04.public static ICommand GetCommand(DependencyObject obj) 05.{ 06.return (ICommand)obj.GetValue(CommandProperty); 07.} 08.public static void SetCommand(DependencyObject obj, ICommand value) 09.{ 10.obj.SetValue(CommandProperty, value); 11.} 12.public static readonly DependencyProperty CommandProperty = 13.DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("Command", typeof(ICommand), 14.typeof(SelectedItemChangedEventClass), new PropertyMetadata(OnSetCommandCallback)); 15.public static void OnSetCommandCallback(DependencyObject dependencyObject, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) 16.{ 17.DataControl element = dependencyObject as DataControl; 18.if (element != null) 19.{ 20.SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior behavior = GetOrCreateBehavior(element); 21.behavior.Command = e.NewValue as ICommand; 22.} 23.} 24.#endregion 25.public static SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior GetOrCreateBehavior(DataControl element) 26.{ 27.SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior behavior = element.GetValue(SelectedItemChangedEventBehaviorProperty) as SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior; 28.if (behavior == null) 29.{ 30.behavior = new SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior(element); 31.element.SetValue(SelectedItemChangedEventBehaviorProperty, behavior); 32.} 33.return behavior; 34.} 35.public static SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior GetSelectedItemChangedEventBehavior(DependencyObject obj) 36.{ 37.return (SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior)obj.GetValue(SelectedItemChangedEventBehaviorProperty); 38.} 39.public static void SetSelectedItemChangedEventBehavior(DependencyObject obj, SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior value) 40.{ 41.obj.SetValue(SelectedItemChangedEventBehaviorProperty, value); 42.} 43.public static readonly DependencyProperty SelectedItemChangedEventBehaviorProperty = 44.DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior", 45.typeof(SelectedItemChangedEventBehavior), typeof(SelectedItemChangedEventClass), null); 46.} These end up looking very similar from command to command, but in a nutshell you create a command based on any event, determine what the parameter for it will be, then execute. It attaches via XAML and ties to a DelegateCommand in the viewmodel, so you get the full event experience (since some controls get a bit event-rich for added functionality). Simple enough, right? Viewmodel for the Job Posting View The Viewmodel is going to need to handle all events going back and forth, maintaining interactions with the data we are using, and both publishing and subscribing to events. Rather than breaking this into tons of little pieces, I'll give you a nice view of the entire viewmodel and then hit up the important points line-by-line: 001.public class JobPostingViewModel : ViewModelBase 002.{ 003.private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator; 004.private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; 005.public DelegateCommand<object> AddRecord { get; set; } 006.public DelegateCommand<object> EditRecord { get; set; } 007.public DelegateCommand<object> SelectedItemChanged { get; set; } 008.public RecruitingContext context; 009.private QueryableCollectionView _myJobs; 010.public QueryableCollectionView MyJobs 011.{ 012.get { return _myJobs; } 013.} 014.private QueryableCollectionView _selectionJobActionHistory; 015.public QueryableCollectionView SelectedJobActionHistory 016.{ 017.get { return _selectionJobActionHistory; } 018.} 019.private JobPosting _selectedJob; 020.public JobPosting SelectedJob 021.{ 022.get { return _selectedJob; } 023.set 024.{ 025.if (value != _selectedJob) 026.{ 027._selectedJob = value; 028.NotifyChanged("SelectedJob"); 029.} 030.} 031.} 032.public SubscriptionToken editToken = new SubscriptionToken(); 033.public SubscriptionToken addToken = new SubscriptionToken(); 034.public JobPostingViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAgg, IRegionManager regionmanager) 035.{ 036.// set Unity items 037.this.eventAggregator = eventAgg; 038.this.regionManager = regionmanager; 039.// load our context 040.context = new RecruitingContext(); 041.this._myJobs = new QueryableCollectionView(context.JobPostings); 042.context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 043.// set command events 044.this.AddRecord = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.AddNewRecord); 045.this.EditRecord = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.EditExistingRecord); 046.this.SelectedItemChanged = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.SelectedRecordChanged); 047.SetSubscriptions(); 048.} 049.#region DelegateCommands from View 050.public void AddNewRecord(object obj) 051.{ 052.this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddJobEvent>().Publish(true); 053.} 054.public void EditExistingRecord(object obj) 055.{ 056.if (_selectedJob == null) 057.{ 058.this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<NotifyUserEvent>().Publish("No job selected."); 059.} 060.else 061.{ 062.this._myJobs.EditItem(this._selectedJob); 063.this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<EditJobEvent>().Publish(this._selectedJob); 064.} 065.} 066.public void SelectedRecordChanged(object obj) 067.{ 068.if (obj.GetType() == typeof(ActionHistory)) 069.{ 070.// event bubbles up so we don't catch items from the ActionHistory grid 071.} 072.else 073.{ 074.JobPosting job = obj as JobPosting; 075.GrabHistory(job.PostingID); 076.} 077.} 078.#endregion 079.#region Subscription Declaration and Events 080.public void SetSubscriptions() 081.{ 082.EditJobCompleteEvent editComplete = eventAggregator.GetEvent<EditJobCompleteEvent>(); 083.if (editToken != null) 084.editComplete.Unsubscribe(editToken); 085.editToken = editComplete.Subscribe(this.EditCompleteEventHandler); 086.AddJobCompleteEvent addComplete = eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddJobCompleteEvent>(); 087.if (addToken != null) 088.addComplete.Unsubscribe(addToken); 089.addToken = addComplete.Subscribe(this.AddCompleteEventHandler); 090.} 091.public void EditCompleteEventHandler(bool complete) 092.{ 093.if (complete) 094.{ 095.JobPosting thisJob = _myJobs.CurrentEditItem as JobPosting; 096.this._myJobs.CommitEdit(); 097.this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 098.{ 099.ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 100.myAction.PostingID = thisJob.PostingID; 101.myAction.Description = String.Format("Job '{0}' has been edited by {1}", thisJob.JobTitle, "default user"); 102.myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 103.eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 104.} 105., null); 106.} 107.else 108.{ 109.this._myJobs.CancelEdit(); 110.} 111.this.MakeMeActive(this.regionManager, "MainRegion", "JobPostingsView"); 112.} 113.public void AddCompleteEventHandler(JobPosting job) 114.{ 115.if (job == null) 116.{ 117.// do nothing, new job add cancelled 118.} 119.else 120.{ 121.this.context.JobPostings.Add(job); 122.this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 123.{ 124.ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 125.myAction.PostingID = job.PostingID; 126.myAction.Description = String.Format("Job '{0}' has been added by {1}", job.JobTitle, "default user"); 127.myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 128.eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 129.} 130., null); 131.} 132.this.MakeMeActive(this.regionManager, "MainRegion", "JobPostingsView"); 133.} 134.#endregion 135.public void GrabHistory(int postID) 136.{ 137.context.ActionHistories.Clear(); 138._selectionJobActionHistory = new QueryableCollectionView(context.ActionHistories); 139.context.Load(context.GetHistoryForJobQuery(postID)); 140.} Taking it from the top, we're injecting an Event Aggregator and Region Manager for use down the road and also have the public DelegateCommands (just like in the Menu module). We also grab a reference to our context, which we'll obviously need for data, then set up a few fields with public properties tied to them. We're also setting subscription tokens, which we have not yet seen but I will get into below. The AddNewRecord (50) and EditExistingRecord (54) methods should speak for themselves for functionality, the one thing of note is we're sending events off to the Event Aggregator which some module, somewhere will take care of. Since these aren't entirely relying on one another, the Jobs View doesn't care if anyone is listening, but it will publish AddJobEvent (52), NotifyUserEvent (58) and EditJobEvent (63)regardless. Don't mind the GrabHistory() method so much, that is just grabbing history items (visibly being created in the SubmitChanges callbacks), and adding them to the database. Every action will trigger a history event, so we'll know who modified what and when, just in case. ;) So where are we at? Well, if we click to Add a job, we publish an event, if we edit a job, we publish an event with the selected record (attained through the magic of binding). Where is this all going though? To the Viewmodel, of course! XAML for the AddEditJobView This is pretty straightforward except for one thing, noted below: 001.<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" 002.Background="White"> 003.<Grid x:Name="xEditGrid" 004.Margin="10" 005.validationHelper:ValidationScope.Errors="{Binding Errors}"> 006.<Grid.Background> 007.<LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="0.5,1" 008.StartPoint="0.5,0"> 009.<GradientStop Color="#FFC7C7C7" 010.Offset="0" /> 011.<GradientStop Color="#FFF6F3F3" 012.Offset="1" /> 013.</LinearGradientBrush> 014.</Grid.Background> 015.<Grid.RowDefinitions> 016.<RowDefinition Height="40" /> 017.<RowDefinition Height="40" /> 018.<RowDefinition Height="40" /> 019.<RowDefinition Height="100" /> 020.<RowDefinition Height="100" /> 021.<RowDefinition Height="100" /> 022.<RowDefinition Height="40" /> 023.<RowDefinition Height="40" /> 024.<RowDefinition Height="40" /> 025.</Grid.RowDefinitions> 026.<Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 027.<ColumnDefinition Width="150" /> 028.<ColumnDefinition Width="150" /> 029.<ColumnDefinition Width="300" /> 030.<ColumnDefinition Width="100" /> 031.</Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 032.<!-- Title --> 033.<TextBlock Margin="8" 034.Text="{Binding AddEditString}" 035.TextWrapping="Wrap" 036.Grid.Column="1" 037.Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 038.FontSize="16" /> 039.<!-- Data entry area--> 040. 041.<TextBlock Margin="8,0,0,0" 042.Style="{StaticResource LabelTxb}" 043.Grid.Row="1" 044.Text="Job Title" 045.VerticalAlignment="Center" /> 046.<TextBox x:Name="xJobTitleTB" 047.Margin="0,8" 048.Grid.Column="1" 049.Grid.Row="1" 050.Text="{Binding activeJob.JobTitle, Mode=TwoWay, NotifyOnValidationError=True, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}" 051.Grid.ColumnSpan="2" /> 052.<TextBlock Margin="8,0,0,0" 053.Grid.Row="2" 054.Text="Location" 055.d:LayoutOverrides="Height" 056.VerticalAlignment="Center" /> 057.<TextBox x:Name="xLocationTB" 058.Margin="0,8" 059.Grid.Column="1" 060.Grid.Row="2" 061.Text="{Binding activeJob.Location, Mode=TwoWay, NotifyOnValidationError=True, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}" 062.Grid.ColumnSpan="2" /> 063. 064.<TextBlock Margin="8,11,8,0" 065.Grid.Row="3" 066.Text="Description" 067.TextWrapping="Wrap" 068.VerticalAlignment="Top" /> 069. 070.<TextBox x:Name="xDescriptionTB" 071.Height="84" 072.TextWrapping="Wrap" 073.ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" 074.Grid.Column="1" 075.Grid.Row="3" 076.Text="{Binding activeJob.Description, Mode=TwoWay, NotifyOnValidationError=True, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}" 077.Grid.ColumnSpan="2" /> 078.<TextBlock Margin="8,11,8,0" 079.Grid.Row="4" 080.Text="Requirements" 081.TextWrapping="Wrap" 082.VerticalAlignment="Top" /> 083. 084.<TextBox x:Name="xRequirementsTB" 085.Height="84" 086.TextWrapping="Wrap" 087.ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" 088.Grid.Column="1" 089.Grid.Row="4" 090.Text="{Binding activeJob.Requirements, Mode=TwoWay, NotifyOnValidationError=True, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}" 091.Grid.ColumnSpan="2" /> 092.<TextBlock Margin="8,11,8,0" 093.Grid.Row="5" 094.Text="Qualifications" 095.TextWrapping="Wrap" 096.VerticalAlignment="Top" /> 097. 098.<TextBox x:Name="xQualificationsTB" 099.Height="84" 100.TextWrapping="Wrap" 101.ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" 102.Grid.Column="1" 103.Grid.Row="5" 104.Text="{Binding activeJob.Qualifications, Mode=TwoWay, NotifyOnValidationError=True, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}" 105.Grid.ColumnSpan="2" /> 106.<!-- Requirements Checkboxes--> 107. 108.<CheckBox x:Name="xResumeRequiredCB" Margin="8,8,8,15" 109.Content="Resume Required" 110.Grid.Row="6" 111.Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 112.IsChecked="{Binding activeJob.NeedsResume, Mode=TwoWay, NotifyOnValidationError=True, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}"/> 113. 114.<CheckBox x:Name="xCoverletterRequiredCB" Margin="8,8,8,15" 115.Content="Cover Letter Required" 116.Grid.Column="2" 117.Grid.Row="6" 118.IsChecked="{Binding activeJob.NeedsCV, Mode=TwoWay, NotifyOnValidationError=True, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}"/> 119. 120.<CheckBox x:Name="xOverviewRequiredCB" Margin="8,8,8,15" 121.Content="Overview Required" 122.Grid.Row="7" 123.Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 124.IsChecked="{Binding activeJob.NeedsOverview, Mode=TwoWay, NotifyOnValidationError=True, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}"/> 125. 126.<CheckBox x:Name="xJobActiveCB" Margin="8,8,8,15" 127.Content="Job is Active" 128.Grid.Column="2" 129.Grid.Row="7" 130.IsChecked="{Binding activeJob.IsActive, Mode=TwoWay, NotifyOnValidationError=True, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}"/> 131. 132.<!-- Buttons --> 133. 134.<Button x:Name="xAddEditButton" Margin="8,8,0,10" 135.Content="{Binding AddEditButtonString}" 136.cal:Click.Command="{Binding AddEditCommand}" 137.Grid.Column="2" 138.Grid.Row="8" 139.HorizontalAlignment="Left" 140.Width="125" 141.telerik:StyleManager.Theme="Windows7" /> 142. 143.<Button x:Name="xCancelButton" HorizontalAlignment="Right" 144.Content="Cancel" 145.cal:Click.Command="{Binding CancelCommand}" 146.Margin="0,8,8,10" 147.Width="125" 148.Grid.Column="2" 149.Grid.Row="8" 150.telerik:StyleManager.Theme="Windows7" /> 151.</Grid> 152.</Grid> The 'validationHelper:ValidationScope' line may seem odd. This is a handy little trick for catching current and would-be validation errors when working in this whole setup. This all comes from an approach found on theJoy Of Code blog, although it looks like the story for this will be changing slightly with new advances in SL4/WCF RIA Services, so this section can definitely get an overhaul a little down the road. The code is the fun part of all this, so let us see what's happening under the hood. Viewmodel for the AddEditJobView We are going to see some of the same things happening here, so I'll skip over the repeat info and get right to the good stuff: 001.public class AddEditJobViewModel : ViewModelBase 002.{ 003.private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator; 004.private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; 005. 006.public RecruitingContext context; 007. 008.private JobPosting _activeJob; 009.public JobPosting activeJob 010.{ 011.get { return _activeJob; } 012.set 013.{ 014.if (_activeJob != value) 015.{ 016._activeJob = value; 017.NotifyChanged("activeJob"); 018.} 019.} 020.} 021. 022.public bool isNewJob; 023. 024.private string _addEditString; 025.public string AddEditString 026.{ 027.get { return _addEditString; } 028.set 029.{ 030.if (_addEditString != value) 031.{ 032._addEditString = value; 033.NotifyChanged("AddEditString"); 034.} 035.} 036.} 037. 038.private string _addEditButtonString; 039.public string AddEditButtonString 040.{ 041.get { return _addEditButtonString; } 042.set 043.{ 044.if (_addEditButtonString != value) 045.{ 046._addEditButtonString = value; 047.NotifyChanged("AddEditButtonString"); 048.} 049.} 050.} 051. 052.public SubscriptionToken addJobToken = new SubscriptionToken(); 053.public SubscriptionToken editJobToken = new SubscriptionToken(); 054. 055.public DelegateCommand<object> AddEditCommand { get; set; } 056.public DelegateCommand<object> CancelCommand { get; set; } 057. 058.private ObservableCollection<ValidationError> _errors = new ObservableCollection<ValidationError>(); 059.public ObservableCollection<ValidationError> Errors 060.{ 061.get { return _errors; } 062.} 063. 064.private ObservableCollection<ValidationResult> _valResults = new ObservableCollection<ValidationResult>(); 065.public ObservableCollection<ValidationResult> ValResults 066.{ 067.get { return this._valResults; } 068.} 069. 070.public AddEditJobViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAgg, IRegionManager regionmanager) 071.{ 072.// set Unity items 073.this.eventAggregator = eventAgg; 074.this.regionManager = regionmanager; 075. 076.context = new RecruitingContext(); 077. 078.AddEditCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.AddEditJobCommand); 079.CancelCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.CancelAddEditCommand); 080. 081.SetSubscriptions(); 082.} 083. 084.#region Subscription Declaration and Events 085. 086.public void SetSubscriptions() 087.{ 088.AddJobEvent addJob = this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddJobEvent>(); 089. 090.if (addJobToken != null) 091.addJob.Unsubscribe(addJobToken); 092. 093.addJobToken = addJob.Subscribe(this.AddJobEventHandler); 094. 095.EditJobEvent editJob = this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<EditJobEvent>(); 096. 097.if (editJobToken != null) 098.editJob.Unsubscribe(editJobToken); 099. 100.editJobToken = editJob.Subscribe(this.EditJobEventHandler); 101.} 102. 103.public void AddJobEventHandler(bool isNew) 104.{ 105.this.activeJob = null; 106.this.activeJob = new JobPosting(); 107.this.activeJob.IsActive = true; // We assume that we want a new job to go up immediately 108.this.isNewJob = true; 109.this.AddEditString = "Add New Job Posting"; 110.this.AddEditButtonString = "Add Job"; 111. 112.MakeMeActive(this.regionManager, "MainRegion", "AddEditJobView"); 113.} 114. 115.public void EditJobEventHandler(JobPosting editJob) 116.{ 117.this.activeJob = null; 118.this.activeJob = editJob; 119.this.isNewJob = false; 120.this.AddEditString = "Edit Job Posting"; 121.this.AddEditButtonString = "Edit Job"; 122. 123.MakeMeActive(this.regionManager, "MainRegion", "AddEditJobView"); 124.} 125. 126.#endregion 127. 128.#region DelegateCommands from View 129. 130.public void AddEditJobCommand(object obj) 131.{ 132.if (this.Errors.Count > 0) 133.{ 134.List<string> errorMessages = new List<string>(); 135. 136.foreach (var valR in this.Errors) 137.{ 138.errorMessages.Add(valR.Exception.Message); 139.} 140. 141.this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<DisplayValidationErrorsEvent>().Publish(errorMessages); 142. 143.} 144.else if (!Validator.TryValidateObject(this.activeJob, new ValidationContext(this.activeJob, null, null), _valResults, true)) 145.{ 146.List<string> errorMessages = new List<string>(); 147. 148.foreach (var valR in this._valResults) 149.{ 150.errorMessages.Add(valR.ErrorMessage); 151.} 152. 153.this._valResults.Clear(); 154. 155.this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<DisplayValidationErrorsEvent>().Publish(errorMessages); 156.} 157.else 158.{ 159.if (this.isNewJob) 160.{ 161.this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddJobCompleteEvent>().Publish(this.activeJob); 162.} 163.else 164.{ 165.this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<EditJobCompleteEvent>().Publish(true); 166.} 167.} 168.} 169. 170.public void CancelAddEditCommand(object obj) 171.{ 172.if (this.isNewJob) 173.{ 174.this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddJobCompleteEvent>().Publish(null); 175.} 176.else 177.{ 178.this.eventAggregator.GetEvent<EditJobCompleteEvent>().Publish(false); 179.} 180.} 181. 182.#endregion 183.} 184.} We start seeing something new on line 103- the AddJobEventHandler will create a new job and set that to the activeJob item on the ViewModel. When this is all set, the view calls that familiar MakeMeActive method to activate itself. I made a bit of a management call on making views self-activate like this, but I figured it works for one reason. As I create this application, views may not exist that I have in mind, so after a view receives its 'ping' from being subscribed to an event, it prepares whatever it needs to do and then goes active. This way if I don't have 'edit' hooked up, I can click as the day is long on the main view and won't get lost in an empty region. Total personal preference here. :) Everything else should again be pretty straightforward, although I do a bit of validation checking in the AddEditJobCommand, which can either fire off an event back to the main view/viewmodel if everything is a success or sent a list of errors to our notification module, which pops open a RadWindow with the alerts if any exist. As a bonus side note, here's what my WCF RIA Services metadata looks like for handling all of the validation: private JobPostingMetadata() { } [StringLength(2500, ErrorMessage = "Description should be more than one and less than 2500 characters.", MinimumLength = 1)] [Required(ErrorMessage = "Description is required.")] public string Description; [Required(ErrorMessage="Active Status is Required")] public bool IsActive; [StringLength(100, ErrorMessage = "Posting title must be more than 3 but less than 100 characters.", MinimumLength = 3)] [Required(ErrorMessage = "Job Title is required.")] public bool JobTitle; [Required] public string Location; public bool NeedsCV; public bool NeedsOverview; public bool NeedsResume; public int PostingID; [Required(ErrorMessage="Qualifications are required.")] [StringLength(2500, ErrorMessage="Qualifications should be more than one and less than 2500 characters.", MinimumLength=1)] public string Qualifications; [StringLength(2500, ErrorMessage = "Requirements should be more than one and less than 2500 characters.", MinimumLength = 1)] [Required(ErrorMessage="Requirements are required.")] public string Requirements;   The RecruitCB Alternative See all that Xaml I pasted above? Those are now two pieces sitting in the JobsView.xaml file now. The only real difference is that the xEditGrid now sits in the same place as xJobsGrid, with visibility swapping out between the two for a quick switch. I also took out all the cal: and command: command references and replaced Button events with clicks and the Grid selection command replaced with a SelectedItemChanged event. Also, at the bottom of the xEditGrid after the last button, I add a ValidationSummary (with Visibility=Collapsed) to catch any errors that are popping up. Simple as can be, and leads to this being the single code-behind file: 001.public partial class JobsView : UserControl 002.{ 003.public RecruitingContext context; 004.public JobPosting activeJob; 005.public bool isNew; 006.private ObservableCollection<ValidationResult> _valResults = new ObservableCollection<ValidationResult>(); 007.public ObservableCollection<ValidationResult> ValResults 008.{ 009.get { return this._valResults; } 010.} 011.public JobsView() 012.{ 013.InitializeComponent(); 014.this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(JobsView_Loaded); 015.} 016.void JobsView_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 017.{ 018.context = new RecruitingContext(); 019.xJobsGrid.ItemsSource = context.JobPostings; 020.context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 021.} 022.private void xAddRecordButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 023.{ 024.activeJob = new JobPosting(); 025.isNew = true; 026.xAddEditTitle.Text = "Add a Job Posting"; 027.xAddEditButton.Content = "Add"; 028.xEditGrid.DataContext = activeJob; 029.HideJobsGrid(); 030.} 031.private void xEditRecordButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 032.{ 033.activeJob = xJobsGrid.SelectedItem as JobPosting; 034.isNew = false; 035.xAddEditTitle.Text = "Edit a Job Posting"; 036.xAddEditButton.Content = "Edit"; 037.xEditGrid.DataContext = activeJob; 038.HideJobsGrid(); 039.} 040.private void xAddEditButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 041.{ 042.if (!Validator.TryValidateObject(this.activeJob, new ValidationContext(this.activeJob, null, null), _valResults, true)) 043.{ 044.List<string> errorMessages = new List<string>(); 045.foreach (var valR in this._valResults) 046.{ 047.errorMessages.Add(valR.ErrorMessage); 048.} 049.this._valResults.Clear(); 050.ShowErrors(errorMessages); 051.} 052.else if (xSummary.Errors.Count > 0) 053.{ 054.List<string> errorMessages = new List<string>(); 055.foreach (var err in xSummary.Errors) 056.{ 057.errorMessages.Add(err.Message); 058.} 059.ShowErrors(errorMessages); 060.} 061.else 062.{ 063.if (this.isNew) 064.{ 065.context.JobPostings.Add(activeJob); 066.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 067.{ 068.ActionHistory thisAction = new ActionHistory(); 069.thisAction.PostingID = activeJob.PostingID; 070.thisAction.Description = String.Format("Job '{0}' has been edited by {1}", activeJob.JobTitle, "default user"); 071.thisAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 072.context.ActionHistories.Add(thisAction); 073.context.SubmitChanges(); 074.}, null); 075.} 076.else 077.{ 078.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 079.{ 080.ActionHistory thisAction = new ActionHistory(); 081.thisAction.PostingID = activeJob.PostingID; 082.thisAction.Description = String.Format("Job '{0}' has been added by {1}", activeJob.JobTitle, "default user"); 083.thisAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 084.context.ActionHistories.Add(thisAction); 085.context.SubmitChanges(); 086.}, null); 087.} 088.ShowJobsGrid(); 089.} 090.} 091.private void xCancelButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 092.{ 093.ShowJobsGrid(); 094.} 095.private void ShowJobsGrid() 096.{ 097.xAddEditRecordButtonPanel.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; 098.xEditGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed; 099.xJobsGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; 100.} 101.private void HideJobsGrid() 102.{ 103.xAddEditRecordButtonPanel.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed; 104.xJobsGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed; 105.xEditGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; 106.} 107.private void ShowErrors(List<string> errorList) 108.{ 109.string nm = "Errors received: \n"; 110.foreach (string anerror in errorList) 111.nm += anerror + "\n"; 112.RadWindow.Alert(nm); 113.} 114.} The first 39 lines should be pretty familiar, not doing anything too unorthodox to get this up and running. Once we hit the xAddEditButton_Click on line 40, we're still doing pretty much the same things except instead of checking the ValidationHelper errors, we both run a check on the current activeJob object as well as check the ValidationSummary errors list. Once that is set, we again use the callback of context.SubmitChanges (lines 68 and 78) to create an ActionHistory which we will use to track these items down the line. That's all? Essentially... yes. If you look back through this post, most of the code and adventures we have taken were just to get things working in the MVVM/Prism setup. Since I have the whole 'module' self-contained in a single JobView+code-behind setup, I don't have to worry about things like sending events off into space for someone to pick up, communicating through an Infrastructure project, or even re-inventing events to be used with attached behaviors. Everything just kinda works, and again with much less code. Here's a picture of the MVVM and Code-behind versions on the Jobs and AddEdit views, but since the functionality is the same in both apps you still cannot tell them apart (for two-strike): Looking ahead, the Applicants module is effectively the same thing as the Jobs module, so most of the code is being cut-and-pasted back and forth with minor tweaks here and there. So that one is being taken care of by me behind the scenes. Next time, we get into a new world of fun- the interview scheduling module, which will pull from available jobs and applicants for each interview being scheduled, tying everything together with RadScheduler to the rescue. 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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• Use Extension method to write cleaner code

  - by Fredrik N

  This blog post will show you step by step to refactoring some code to be more readable (at least what I think). Patrik Löwnedahl gave me some of the ideas when we where talking about making code much cleaner. The following is an simple application that will have a list of movies (Normal and Transfer). The task of the application is to calculate the total sum of each movie and also display the price of each movie. class Program { enum MovieType { Normal, Transfer } static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Normal) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } else if (movie == MovieType.Transfer) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } } } private static IEnumerable<MovieType> GetMovies() { return new List<MovieType>() { MovieType.Normal, MovieType.Transfer, MovieType.Normal }; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } In the code above I’m using an enum, a good way to add types (isn’t it ;)). I also use one foreach loop to calculate the price, the loop has a condition statement to check what kind of movie is added to the list of movies. I want to reuse the foreach only to increase performance and let it do two things (isn’t that smart of me?! ;)). First of all I can admit, I’m not a big fan of enum. Enum often results in ugly condition statements and can be hard to maintain (if a new type is added we need to check all the code in our app to see if we use the enum somewhere else). I don’t often care about pre-optimizations when it comes to write code (of course I have performance in mind). I rather prefer to use two foreach to let them do one things instead of two. So based on what I don’t like and Martin Fowler’s Refactoring catalog, I’m going to refactoring this code to what I will call a more elegant and cleaner code. First of all I’m going to use Split Loop to make sure the foreach will do one thing not two, it will results in two foreach (Don’t care about performance here, if the results will results in bad performance, you can refactoring later, but computers are so fast to day, so iterating through a list is not often so time consuming.) Note: The foreach actually do four things, will come to is later. var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Normal) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } } foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Transfer) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } To remove the condition statement we can use the Where extension method added to the IEnumerable<T> and is located in the System.Linq namespace: foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m == MovieType.Normal)) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m == MovieType.Transfer)) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The above code will still do two things, calculate the total price, and display the price of the movie. I will not take care of it at the moment, instead I will focus on the enum and try to remove them. One way to remove enum is by using the Replace Conditional with Polymorphism. So I will create two classes, one base class called Movie, and one called MovieTransfer. The Movie class will have a property called Price, the Movie will now hold the price:   public class Movie { public virtual int Price { get { return 2; } } } public class MovieTransfer : Movie { public override int Price { get { return 3; } } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The following code has no enum and will use the new Movie classes instead: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is Movie)) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += movie.Price; Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is MovieTransfer)) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += movie.Price; Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } } private static IEnumerable<Movie> GetMovies() { return new List<Movie>() { new Movie(), new MovieTransfer(), new Movie() }; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   If you take a look at the foreach now, you can see it still actually do two things, calculate the price and display the price. We can do some more refactoring here by using the Sum extension method to calculate the total price of the movies:   static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is Movie)) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is MovieTransfer)) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now when the Movie object will hold the price, there is no need to use two separate foreach to display the price of the movies in the list, so we can use only one instead: foreach (var movie in movies) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If we want to increase the Maintainability index we can use the Extract Method to move the Sum of the prices into two separate methods. The name of the method will explain what we are doing: static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); foreach (var movie in movies) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovie(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now to the last thing, I love the ForEach method of the List<T>, but the IEnumerable<T> doesn’t have it, so I created my own ForEach extension, here is the code of the ForEach extension method: public static class LoopExtensions { public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) { Contract.Requires(values != null); Contract.Requires(action != null); foreach (var v in values) action(v); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I will now replace the foreach by using this ForEach method: static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); movies.ForEach(m => Console.WriteLine(m.Price)); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The ForEach on the movies will now display the price of the movie, but maybe we want to display the name of the movie etc, so we can use Extract Method by moving the lamdba expression into a method instead, and let the method explains what we are displaying: movies.ForEach(DisplayMovieInfo); private static void DisplayMovieInfo(Movie movie) { Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now the refactoring is done! Here is the complete code:   class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); movies.ForEach(DisplayMovieInfo); } private static void DisplayMovieInfo(Movie movie) { Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovie(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static IEnumerable<Movie> GetMovies() { return new List<Movie>() { new Movie(), new MovieTransfer(), new Movie() }; } } public class Movie { public virtual int Price { get { return 2; } } } public class MovieTransfer : Movie { public override int Price { get { return 3; } } } pulbic static class LoopExtensions { public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) { Contract.Requires(values != null); Contract.Requires(action != null); foreach (var v in values) action(v); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I think the new code is much cleaner than the first one, and I love the ForEach extension on the IEnumerable<T>, I can use it for different kind of things, for example: movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .ForEach(DoSomething); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } By using the Where and ForEach extension method, some if statements can be removed and will make the code much cleaner. But the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What would you have done different, what do you think will make the first example in the blog post look much cleaner than my results, comments are welcome! If you want to know when I will publish a new blog post, you can follow me on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fredrikn

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 22, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 22, 2011Popular ReleasesDeveloper Team Article System Management: DTASM v1.3: ?? ??? ???? 3 ????? ???? ???? ????? ??? : - ????? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?? ??? ? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ?? ???? ????? ?? . - ??? ?? ???? ????? ???? ????? ???? ???? ?? ????? , ?????? ????? ????? ?? ??? . - ??? ??????? ??? ??? ???? ?? ????? ????? ????? .VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF & Silverlight 5: VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF, SL5 - 2011.11.22: The new version contains Silverlight 5 library: Vlc.DotNet.Silverlight. A sample could be tested here The new version add and correct many features : Correction : Reinitialize some variables Deprecate : Logging API, since VLC 1.2 (08/20/2011) Add subitem in LocationMedia (for Youtube videos, ...) Update Wpf sample to use Youtube videos Many others correctionsSharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.2.0: Web parts are now fully customizable via html templates (Issue #323) FBA Pack is now completely localizable using resource files. Thank you David Chen for submitting the code as well as Chinese translations of the FBA Pack! The membership request web part now gives the option of having the user enter the password and removing the captcha (Issue # 447) The FBA Pack will now work in a zone that does not have FBA enabled (Another zone must have FBA enabled, and the zone must contain the me...SharePoint 2010 Education Demo Project: Release SharePoint SP1 for Education Solutions: This release includes updates to the Content Packs for SharePoint SP1. All Content Packs have been updated to install successfully under SharePoint SP1SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 6: 1. improved support for schema 2. added find reference when right click on object list 3. added object rename supportBugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.126: First stable release of version 0.9. Upgrades from 0.8 are fully supported and upgrades to future releases will also be supported. This release is now compiled against the .NET 4.0 framework and is a requirement. Because of this the web.config has significantly changed. After upgrading, you will need to configure the authentication settings for user registration and anonymous access again. Please see our installation / upgrade instructions for more details: http://wiki.bugnetproject.c...Anno 2070 Assistant: v0.1.0 (STABLE): Version 0.1.0 Features Production Chains Eco Production Chains (Complete) Tycoon Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Production Chains (Disabled - Incomplete) Supply (Disabled - Incomplete) Calculator (Disabled - Incomplete) Building Layouts Eco Building Layouts (Complete) Tycoon Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Tech Building Layouts (Disabled - Incomplete) Credits (Complete)Free SharePoint 2010 Sites Templates: SharePoint Server 2010 Sites Templates: here is the list of sites templates to be downloadedVsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 30 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 30 (beta)New: Support for TortoiseSVN 1.7 added. (the download contains both setups, for TortoiseSVN 1.6 and 1.7) New: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog displays conflicted files now. New: OpenModifiedDocument allows to group items by changelist now. Fix: OpenModifiedDocumentDialog caused Visual Studio 2010 to freeze sometimes. Fix: The installer didn...nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.30: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Back in stock notifications. • Product special price support. • Catalog mode (based on customer role) To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).WPF Converters: WPF Converters V1.2.0.0: support for enumerations, value types, and reference types in the expression converter's equality operators the expression converter now handles DependencyProperty.UnsetValue as argument values correctly (#4062) StyleCop conformance (more or less)Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 4: Change - JsonTextReader.Culture is now CultureInfo.InvariantCulture by default Change - KeyValurPairConverter no longer cares about the order of the key and value properties Change - Time zone conversions now use new TimeZoneInfo instead of TimeZone Fix - Fixed boolean values sometimes being capitalized when converting to XML Fix - Fixed error when deserializing ConcurrentDictionary Fix - Fixed serializing some Uris returning the incorrect value Fix - Fixed occasional error when...Media Companion: MC 3.423b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Replaced 'Rebuild' with 'Refresh' throughout entire code. Rebuild will now be known as Refresh. mc_com.exe has been fully updated TV Show Resolutions... Resolved issue #206 - having to hit save twice when updating runtime manually Shrunk cache size and lowered loading times f...Delta Engine: Delta Engine Beta Preview v0.9.1: v0.9.1 beta release with lots of refactoring, fixes, new samples and support for iOS, Android and WP7 (you need a Marketplace account however). If you want a binary release for the games (like v0.9.0), just say so in the Forum or here and we will quickly prepare one. It is just not much different from v0.9.0, so I left it out this time. See http://DeltaEngine.net/Wiki.Roadmap for details.SharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLR: SharpMap-0.9-AnyCPU-Trunk-2011.11.17: This is a build of SharpMap from the 0.9 development trunk as per 2011-11-17 For most applications the AnyCPU release is the recommended, but in case you need an x86 build that is included to. For some dataproviders (GDAL/OGR, SqLite, PostGis) you need to also referense the SharpMap.Extensions assembly For SqlServer Spatial you need to reference the SharpMap.SqlServerSpatial assemblyAJAX Control Toolkit: November 2011 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - November 2011 Release Version 51116November 2011 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ASP.NET 2.0. The latest version that is compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 can be found h...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.36: Fix for issue #16908: string literals containing ASP.NET replacement syntax fail if the ASP.NET code contains the same character as the string literal delimiter. Also, we shouldn't be changing the delimiter for those literals or combining them with other literals; the developer may have specifically chosen the delimiter used because of possible content inserted by ASP.NET code. This logic is normally off; turn it on via the -aspnet command-line flag (or the Code.Settings.AllowEmbeddedAspNetBl...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.5: Added: Now the DateRanteAttribute accepts complex expressions containing "Now" and "Today" as static minimum and maximum. Menu, MenuFor helpers capable of handling a "currently selected element". The developer can choose between using a standard nested menu based on a standard SimpleMenuItem class or specifying an item template based on a custom class. Added also helpers to build the tree structure containing all data items the menu takes infos from. Improved the pager. Now the developer ...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.7: Reworked API to be more consistent. See Supported formats table. Added some more helper methods - e.g. OpenEntryStream (RarArchive/RarReader does not support this) Fixed up testsSilverlight Toolkit: Windows Phone Toolkit - Nov 2011 (7.1 SDK): This release is coming soon! What's new ListPicker once again works in a ScrollViewer LongListSelector bug fixes around OutOfRange exceptions, wrong ordering of items, grouping issues, and scrolling events. ItemTuple is now refactored to be the public type LongListSelectorItem to provide users better access to the values in selection changed handlers. PerformanceProgressBar binding fix for IsIndeterminate (item 9767 and others) There is no longer a GestureListener dependency with the C...New ProjectsAndrecorder: Andrecorder???Android???????,???????????????????,????????????????,????????!Android Tree Bulletin: Android bulletin reader in tree format.Bài t?p l?p môn HCI: Name: Ph?n m?m qu?n lý thu h?c phí tru?ng d?i h?c Công Nghi?p Hà N?i Basic Grid Collision sample in XNA: This project shows how to implement a basic grid collision in XNA. The project uses the XNA 4.0 framework and C#Club Manager: Club Manager is a web site for managing sport clubs / teams.Create email with encrypt text implement TEA encryption and Web Service: RahaTEA Mail is an application to send messages in secret. These applications implement TEA encryption and web serviceCRM 2011 Layers: Several .net layers to customize CRM 2011CTEF: China Tomorrow Education Foundation websitedns?????: ??c#???dns?????。????????，???????，??????。EAF: Extensibility Application FrameworkEnergy SBA: In order to compete with large companies for Federal contracts, small business need information. This application seeks to show standard methods of using remote APIs to integrate information into a Metro interface using services provided by the Small Business Administration (SBA)EPiOptimiser - Scan your EPiServer configuration to optimise start up times: EPiScanner scans your EPiServer configuration to optimise start ups by generating a recommended exclude list of assemblies to include in EPiServer framework config. It can be used on command line, as a custom build task or integrated into Visual Studio as an external tool.FreeIDS - Free Intrusion Detection System: Don't want someone to use your computer? Don't want to use a system password? Want to see when someone accessed your computer? Time/Date? FreeIDS is it!FtpServerAdministrator: FtpServerAdministrator makes it easier to administer some ftp server by code, although it can only be used for FileZilla server now. It's developed in C#.GreenPoint Online: Tools and components that help you customize an Office 365 / SharePoint Online Environment.HCC C# Workshop: This project contains the code for the exercises of the HCC C# WorkshopKsigDo - Real time view model syncing across user screens: KsigDo show real time view model syncing across user screens - using ASP.NET, Knockout and SignalR. Real time data syncing across user views *was* hard, especially in web applications. Most of the time, the second user needs to refresh the screen, to see the changes made by first user, or we need to implement some long polling that fetches the data and does the update manually. Now, with SignalR and Knockout, ASP.NET developers can take advantage of view model syncing across users, that...lineseven: ???????????????。Mail Size Labeler for GMail: A small utility that labels large e-mails on your gmail account. This utility scan you gmail account, and adds labels to large e-mail so you can clean your mailbox and free space. The labels this utility adds are: Size 1M-2M Size 2M-5M Size 5M-10M Size 10M-15M Size 15M plus Note: a single e-mail thread may get multiple labels if different e-mails of the thread fit different filters.MathService: Complex digits, standart class extentions etc.MyGameProject: gamesMySQL Connect 2 ASP.NET: Example project to show how to connect MySQL database to ASP.NET web project. IDE: Visual Studio 2010 Pro Programming language: C# Detailed information in the article here: http://epavlov.net/blog/2011/11/13/connect-to-mysql-in-visual-studio/ nl: Nutri Leaf Devomr.event.js: Simple js event injecterPastebin4DotNet: This project is an example of how to consume an API, in this case I consummed the Pastebin API.Pomelo: Pomelo is a website example.QuickDevFrameWork: ????????,??,??,????,ioc ?????postsharp?aopReadable Passphrase Generator: Generates passphrases which are (mostly) grammatically correct but nonsensical. These are easy to remember but difficult to guess (for humans or computers). Developed in C# with a KeePass plugin, console app and public API.Rosyama.ru for Windows Phone 7: ?????????? Windows Phone 7 ??? ???????? ???????? ?? ???? rosyama.ru. ?????????? ??????? ?????????? ? ???????? ????????? ???????. SimpleBatch: As the name suggests, this is a simple batch framework allowing you to define batch jobs in XML format. Thus far, contains a basic selection of processors such as the following; File Email SQL (SQL Server Client) SharePoint Document Library Custom ProcessorSite de Notícias: Projeto de faculdade que consiste na criação de um site de notícias.SPWikiProvisioning: Create update and delete SharePoint wiki pages using feature activation and deactivation handlers.SVN Automated Control With C#: I Created this libaray because I need to control Tortoise SVN automactically with out an interface for my own build server and could not find any resuilts on google to achive this task so I went about creating this libaray which dos most of the task's that I needed. I round that you could control SVN by command line so using that as my basic idear I went about coding the most common commands for SVN most of the commads are done but not all. if you like this libaray then please use it we...TremplinCMS: TremplinCMS is a CMS framework for ASP .NET 4.vlu0206sms: SMSMaker by team0206 developingWCF DataService RequestStream Access on webInvoke HTTP POST: This library provides access to the message body request stream of a WCF Data Service (formerly ADO.NET Data Service), which is not possible with the original WCF Data Service class. You are enabled passing data (e.g. Json, files) via HTTP POST to the request body. It uses the operation context (DbContext) provided by the DataService<T> class to get access to the resquest stream.WebOS: Welcome to join us to build our os projectWp7StarterDantas: Iniciando com Wp7WpfCollaborative3D: WpfCollaborative3DXNA Content Preprocessor: The XNA Content Preprocessor allows you to compile all of your XNA assets outside of your normal XNA project. This means more time building your game or app instead of your content.

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• Server compromised. Bounce message contains many email addresses message was not sent to

  - by Tim Duncklee

  This is not a dupe. Please read and understand the issue before marking this as a duplicate question that has been answered already. Several customers are reporting bounce messages like the one below. At first I thought their computers had a virus but then I received one that was server generated so the problem is with the server. I've inspected the logs and these email addresses do not appear in the logs. The only thing I see that I do not remember seeing in the past are entries like this: Apr 30 13:34:49 psa86 qmail-queue-handlers[20994]: hook_dir = '/var/qmail//handlers/before-queue' Apr 30 13:34:49 psa86 qmail-queue-handlers[20994]: recipient[3] = '[email protected]' Apr 30 13:34:49 psa86 qmail-queue-handlers[20994]: handlers dir = '/var/qmail//handlers/before-queue/recipient/[email protected]' I've searched here and the web and maybe I'm just not entering the right search terms but I find nothing on this issue. Does anyone know how a hacker would attach additional email addresses to a message at the server and have them not appear in the logs? CentOS release 5.4, Plesk 8.6, QMail 1.03 Hi. This is the qmail-send program at psa.aaaaaa.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. <[email protected]>: 82.201.133.227 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected. Giving up on 82.201.133.227. <[email protected]>: 64.18.7.10 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 No such user - psmtp Giving up on 64.18.7.10. <[email protected]>: 173.194.68.27 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try 550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or 550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at 550 5.1.1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=6596 w8si1903qag.18 - gsmtp Giving up on 173.194.68.27. <[email protected]>: 207.115.36.23 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.2.1 <[email protected]>... Addressee unknown, relay=[174.142.62.210] Giving up on 207.115.36.23. <[email protected]>: 207.115.37.22 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.2.1 <[email protected]>... Addressee unknown, relay=[174.142.62.210] Giving up on 207.115.37.22. <[email protected]>: 207.115.37.20 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.2.1 <[email protected]>... Addressee unknown, relay=[174.142.62.210] Giving up on 207.115.37.20. <[email protected]>: 207.115.37.23 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.2.1 <[email protected]>... Addressee unknown, relay=[174.142.62.210] Giving up on 207.115.37.23. <[email protected]>: 207.115.36.22 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.2.1 <[email protected]>... Addressee unknown, relay=[174.142.62.210] Giving up on 207.115.36.22. <[email protected]>: 74.205.16.140 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts; no valid cert for gatewaying (#5.7.1) Giving up on 74.205.16.140. <[email protected]>: 207.115.36.20 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.2.1 <[email protected]>... Addressee unknown, relay=[174.142.62.210] Giving up on 207.115.36.20. <[email protected]>: 207.115.37.21 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.2.1 <[email protected]>... Addressee unknown, relay=[174.142.62.210] Giving up on 207.115.37.21. <[email protected]>: 192.169.41.23 failed after I sent the message. Remote host said: 554 qq Sorry, no valid recipients (#5.1.3) --- Below this line is a copy of the message. Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: (qmail 15962 invoked from network); 1 May 2013 06:49:34 -0400 Received: from exprod6mo107.postini.com (64.18.1.18) by psa.aaaaaa.com with (DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA encrypted) SMTP; 1 May 2013 06:49:34 -0400 Received: from aaaaaa.com (exprod6lut001.postini.com [64.18.1.199]) by exprod6mo107.postini.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 47F80B8CA4 for <[email protected]>; Wed, 1 May 2013 03:49:33 -0700 (PDT) From: "Support" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Detected Potential Junk Mail Date: Wed, 1 May 2013 03:49:33 -0700 Dear [email protected], junk mail protection service has detected suspicious email message(s) since your last visit and directed them to your Message Center. You can inspect your suspicious email at: ... UPDATE: After not seeing this problem for a while, I personally sent a message and immediately got a bounce with several bad addresses that I know I did not send to. These are addresses that are not on my system or on the server. This problem happens with both Mac and Windows clients and with messages generated from Postini and sent to users on my system. This is NOT backscatter. If it was backscatter it would not have the contents of my message in it. UPDATE #2 Here is another bounce. This one was sent by me and the bounce came back immediately. Hi. This is the qmail-send program at psa.aaaaaa.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. <[email protected]>: 71.74.56.227 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 <[email protected]>... User unknown Giving up on 71.74.56.227. <[email protected]>: Connected to 208.34.236.3 but sender was rejected. Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 This system is configured to reject mail from 174.142.62.210 [174.142.62.210] (Host blacklisted - Found on Realtime Black List server 'bl.mailspike.net') <[email protected]>: 66.96.80.22 failed after I sent the message. Remote host said: 552 sorry, mailbox [email protected] is over quota temporarily (#5.1.1) <[email protected]>: 83.145.109.52 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 <[email protected]>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table Giving up on 83.145.109.52. <[email protected]>: 69.49.101.234 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 <[email protected]>... H:M12 [174.142.62.210] Connection refused due to abuse. Please see http://mailspike.org/anubis/lookup.html or contact your E-mail provider. Giving up on 69.49.101.234. <[email protected]>: 212.55.154.36 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550-The account has been suspended for inactivity 550 A conta do destinatario encontra-se suspensa por inactividade (#5.2.1) Giving up on 212.55.154.36. <[email protected]>: 199.168.90.102 failed after I sent the message. Remote host said: 552 Transaction [email protected] failed, remote said "550 No such user" (#5.1.1) <[email protected]>: 98.136.217.192 failed after I sent the message. Remote host said: 554 delivery error: dd Sorry your message to [email protected] cannot be delivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued [#102]. - mta1210.sbc.mail.gq1.yahoo.com --- Below this line is a copy of the message. Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: (qmail 2618 invoked from network); 2 Jun 2013 22:32:51 -0400 Received: from 75-138-254-239.dhcp.jcsn.tn.charter.com (HELO ?192.168.0.66?) (75.138.254.239) by psa.aaaaaa.com with SMTP; 2 Jun 2013 22:32:48 -0400 User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/12.34.0.120813 Date: Sun, 02 Jun 2013 21:32:39 -0500 Subject: Refinance From: Tim Duncklee <[email protected]> To: Scott jones <[email protected]> Message-ID: <CDD16A79.67344%[email protected]> Thread-Topic: Reference Thread-Index: Ac5gAp2QmTs+LRv0SEOy7AJTX2DWzQ== Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="B_3453053568_12034440" > This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. --B_3453053568_12034440 Content-type: multipart/related; boundary="B_3453053568_11982218" --B_3453053568_11982218 Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary="B_3453053568_12000660" --B_3453053568_12000660 Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Scott, ... email body here ... Here are the relevant log entries: Jun 2 22:32:50 psa qmail-queue[2616]: mail: all addreses are uncheckable - need to skip scanning (by deny mode) Jun 2 22:32:50 psa qmail-queue[2616]: scan: the message(drweb.tmp.i2SY0n) sent by [email protected] to [email protected] should be passed without checks, because contains uncheckable addresses Jun 2 22:32:50 psa qmail-queue-handlers[2617]: Handlers Filter before-queue for qmail started ... Jun 2 22:32:50 psa qmail-queue-handlers[2617]: [email protected] Jun 2 22:32:50 psa qmail-queue-handlers[2617]: [email protected] Jun 2 22:32:50 psa qmail-queue-handlers[2617]: hook_dir = '/var/qmail//handlers/before-queue' Jun 2 22:32:50 psa qmail-queue-handlers[2617]: recipient[3] = '[email protected]' Jun 2 22:32:50 psa qmail-queue-handlers[2617]: handlers dir = '/var/qmail//handlers/before-queue/recipient/[email protected]' Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail: 1370226771.060211 starting delivery 57: msg 1540285 to remote [email protected] Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail: 1370226771.060402 status: local 0/10 remote 1/20 Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail: 1370226771.060556 new msg 4915232 Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail: 1370226771.060671 info msg 4915232: bytes 687899 from <[email protected]> qp 2618 uid 2020 Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail-remote-handlers[2619]: Handlers Filter before-remote for qmail started ... Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail-queue-handlers[2617]: starter: submitter[2618] exited normally Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail-remote-handlers[2619]: from= Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail-remote-handlers[2619]: [email protected] Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail: 1370226771.078732 starting delivery 58: msg 4915232 to remote [email protected] Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail: 1370226771.078825 status: local 0/10 remote 2/20 Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail-remote-handlers[2621]: Handlers Filter before-remote for qmail started ... Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail-remote-handlers[2621]: [email protected] Jun 2 22:32:51 psa qmail-remote-handlers[2621]: [email protected]

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• Linux (NAS) Permissions problem (Permission Denied)

  - by calumbrodie

  This is probably easier to show than to explain... -bash-3.2$ id uid=501(admin) gid=503(admin) groups=100(users),501(admins),503(admin) -bash-3.2$ groups admin users admins -bash-3.2$ ls -l total 8 drwxrwxrwx 78 admin www 4096 Dec 9 09:02 Inbox drwxrwxrwx 21 admin www 4096 Dec 8 21:45 Movies drwxrwx--- 3 admin www 52 Dec 9 07:57 TV -bash-3.2$ cd Movies -bash-3.2$ ls -l total 20 drwxrwx--- 7 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:04 Action drwxrwx--- 6 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:05 Animation drwxrwx--- 4 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:17 Comedy drwxrwx--- 4 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:14 Drama drwxrwx--- 4 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:14 Family drwxrwx--- 6 admin www 58 Dec 6 19:10 Foreign Language drwxrwx--- 2 admin www 31 Dec 7 23:58 Horror drwxrwx--- 3 admin www 50 Dec 8 00:15 Science Fiction drwxrwx--- 2 admin www 6 Dec 8 00:16 Thriller -bash-3.2$ cd ../Inbox -bash: cd: ../Inbox: Permission denied Filesystem is XFS. Are there permissions on the directories that ls -l wouldn't show? I'm the owner of all directories and files inside them. I can sudo to modify the file permissions or view the contents of the folders but I need them to be accessible by 'admin'. Any ideas? I'll be checking the question regularly so let me know if I need to update this with more information. Thanks Edit : Added strace execve("/bin/ls", ["ls", "Inbox"], [/* 21 vars */]) = 0 brk(0) = 0x26000 uname({sys="Linux", node="axentraserver.the-brodie-stora.mystora.com", ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001c000 access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=17972, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 17972, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x4001d000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/librt.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0P\25\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=39776, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 57816, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40025000 mprotect(0x4002b000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40032000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x5) = 0x40032000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libacl.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\0\24\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=134375, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 54368, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40034000 mprotect(0x4003a000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40041000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x5) = 0x40041000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libselinux.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\2147\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=297439, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 117504, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40042000 mprotect(0x40056000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x4005d000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x13) = 0x4005d000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libgcc_s.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\10\"\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=43164, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40022000 mmap2(NULL, 74572, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x4005f000 mprotect(0x4006a000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40071000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0xa) = 0x40071000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0XI\1\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1517948, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 1245628, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40072000 mprotect(0x40195000, 32768, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x4019d000, 12288, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x123) = 0x4019d000 mmap2(0x401a0000, 8636, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x401a0000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libpthread.so.0", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\230A\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=121044, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 115184, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401a3000 mprotect(0x401b5000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x401bc000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x11) = 0x401bc000 mmap2(0x401be000, 4592, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x401be000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libattr.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\364\f\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=40571, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 45512, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401c0000 mprotect(0x401c3000, 32768, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x401cb000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x3) = 0x401cb000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libdl.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\254\10\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=15344, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 41116, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401cc000 mprotect(0x401ce000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x401d5000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x1) = 0x401d5000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libsepol.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\330/\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=228044, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 301748, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401d7000 mprotect(0x4020f000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40216000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x37) = 0x40216000 mmap2(0x40217000, 39604, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40217000 close(3) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40221000 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40222000 set_tls(0x40221d00, 0x40221d00, 0x40024000, 0x402223e8, 0x41) = 0 mprotect(0x401d5000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x401bc000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x4019d000, 8192, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x4005d000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x40032000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x40023000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 17972) = 0 set_tid_address(0x402218a8) = 9539 set_robust_list(0x402218b0, 0xc) = 0 rt_sigaction(SIGRTMIN, {0x401a6d90, [], SA_SIGINFO|0x4000000}, NULL, 8) = 0 rt_sigaction(SIGRT_1, {0x401a6c64, [], SA_RESTART|SA_SIGINFO|0x4000000}, NULL, 8) = 0 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [RTMIN RT_1], NULL, 8) = 0 getrlimit(RLIMIT_STACK, {rlim_cur=8192*1024, rlim_max=RLIM_INFINITY}) = 0 brk(0) = 0x26000 brk(0x47000) = 0x47000 open("/proc/mounts", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0444, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0\nubi0:root"..., 1024) = 1024 read(3, "fs.xino,noplink,create=mfs,sum,b"..., 1024) = 428 read(3, "", 1024) = 0 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 access("/etc/selinux/", F_OK) = 0 open("/etc/selinux/config", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) ioctl(1, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B38400 opost isig icanon echo ...}) = 0 ioctl(1, TIOCGWINSZ, {ws_row=52, ws_col=153, ws_xpixel=918, ws_ypixel=728}) = 0 stat64("Inbox", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0777, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 open("/etc/nsswitch.conf", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1696, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "#\n# /etc/nsswitch.conf\n#\n# An ex"..., 4096) = 1696 read(3, "", 4096) = 0 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=17972, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 17972, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x4001d000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libnss_files.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\304\27\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=49256, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 70316, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40223000 mprotect(0x4022c000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40233000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x8) = 0x40233000 close(3) = 0 mprotect(0x40233000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 17972) = 0 open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1661, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash\n"..., 4096) = 1661 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 open("/etc/group", O_RDONLY) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=700, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "root:x:0:root\nbin:x:1:root,bin,d"..., 4096) = 700 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 open("Inbox", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied) write(2, "ls: ", 4ls: ) = 4 write(2, "Inbox", 5Inbox) = 5 write(2, ": Permission denied", 19: Permission denied) = 19 write(2, "\n", 1 ) = 1 close(1) = 0 exit_group(2) = ? 2nd edit: Elaboration for Mike. The Inbox sits at the following location /home/admin/MyLibrary/MyVideos/Inbox /home/admin/MyLibrary/MyVideos/Movies The system is a Netgear Stora NAS box that I have root access to. The /home/ folder is mounted as an smb share on various computers around the house. The folder /Inbox cannot be opened on any of those machines (they all connect as 'admin'). When I ssh into the box using the 'admin' credentials I am also unable to access the folder. The folder was created via a Web Admin page hosted on the NAS. The user/group for the Inbox folder was previously apache:www (expected as this folder was created by the web application), but I chmod/chowned the folder as the root user in an attempt to grant the admin user (therefore the rest of the connected machines) access to the files. Sorry for not including this earlier, I wasn't sure if it was relevant and didn't want to confuse the situation. -Thanks 3rd Edit Sorry again - It looks like this NAS is running some custom version of Red Hat, not Debian as previously stated - I'm not sure if this makes a difference

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• OpenVPN Client timing out

  - by Austin

  I recently installed OpenVPN on my Ubuntu VPS. Whenenver I try to connect to it, I can establish a connection just fine. However, everything I try to connect to times out. If I try to ping something, it will resolve the IP, but will time out after resolving the IP. (So DNS Server seems to be working correctly) My server.conf has this relevant information (At least I think it's relevant. I'm not sure if you need more or not) # Which local IP address should OpenVPN # listen on? (optional) ;local a.b.c.d # Which TCP/UDP port should OpenVPN listen on? # If you want to run multiple OpenVPN instances # on the same machine, use a different port # number for each one. You will need to # open up this port on your firewall. port 1194 # TCP or UDP server? ;proto tcp proto udp # "dev tun" will create a routed IP tunnel, # "dev tap" will create an ethernet tunnel. # Use "dev tap0" if you are ethernet bridging # and have precreated a tap0 virtual interface # and bridged it with your ethernet interface. # If you want to control access policies # over the VPN, you must create firewall # rules for the the TUN/TAP interface. # On non-Windows systems, you can give # an explicit unit number, such as tun0. # On Windows, use "dev-node" for this. # On most systems, the VPN will not function # unless you partially or fully disable # the firewall for the TUN/TAP interface. ;dev tap dev tun # Windows needs the TAP-Win32 adapter name # from the Network Connections panel if you # have more than one. On XP SP2 or higher, # you may need to selectively disable the # Windows firewall for the TAP adapter. # Non-Windows systems usually don't need this. ;dev-node MyTap # SSL/TLS root certificate (ca), certificate # (cert), and private key (key). Each client # and the server must have their own cert and # key file. The server and all clients will # use the same ca file. # # See the "easy-rsa" directory for a series # of scripts for generating RSA certificates # and private keys. Remember to use # a unique Common Name for the server # and each of the client certificates. # # Any X509 key management system can be used. # OpenVPN can also use a PKCS #12 formatted key file # (see "pkcs12" directive in man page). ca ca.crt cert server.crt key server.key # This file should be kept secret # Diffie hellman parameters. # Generate your own with: # openssl dhparam -out dh1024.pem 1024 # Substitute 2048 for 1024 if you are using # 2048 bit keys. dh dh1024.pem # Configure server mode and supply a VPN subnet # for OpenVPN to draw client addresses from. # The server will take 10.8.0.1 for itself, # the rest will be made available to clients. # Each client will be able to reach the server # on 10.8.0.1. Comment this line out if you are # ethernet bridging. See the man page for more info. server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 # Maintain a record of client <-> virtual IP address # associations in this file. If OpenVPN goes down or # is restarted, reconnecting clients can be assigned # the same virtual IP address from the pool that was # previously assigned. ifconfig-pool-persist ipp.txt # Configure server mode for ethernet bridging. # You must first use your OS's bridging capability # to bridge the TAP interface with the ethernet # NIC interface. Then you must manually set the # IP/netmask on the bridge interface, here we # assume 10.8.0.4/255.255.255.0. Finally we # must set aside an IP range in this subnet # (start=10.8.0.50 end=10.8.0.100) to allocate # to connecting clients. Leave this line commented # out unless you are ethernet bridging. ;server-bridge 10.8.0.4 255.255.255.0 10.8.0.50 10.8.0.100 # Configure server mode for ethernet bridging # using a DHCP-proxy, where clients talk # to the OpenVPN server-side DHCP server # to receive their IP address allocation # and DNS server addresses. You must first use # your OS's bridging capability to bridge the TAP # interface with the ethernet NIC interface. # Note: this mode only works on clients (such as # Windows), where the client-side TAP adapter is # bound to a DHCP client. ;server-bridge # Push routes to the client to allow it # to reach other private subnets behind # the server. Remember that these # private subnets will also need # to know to route the OpenVPN client # address pool (10.8.0.0/255.255.255.0) # back to the OpenVPN server. ;push "route 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0" ;push "route 192.168.20.0 255.255.255.0" # To assign specific IP addresses to specific # clients or if a connecting client has a private # subnet behind it that should also have VPN access, # use the subdirectory "ccd" for client-specific # configuration files (see man page for more info). # EXAMPLE: Suppose the client # having the certificate common name "Thelonious" # also has a small subnet behind his connecting # machine, such as 192.168.40.128/255.255.255.248. # First, uncomment out these lines: ;client-config-dir ccd ;route 192.168.40.128 255.255.255.248 # Then create a file ccd/Thelonious with this line: # iroute 192.168.40.128 255.255.255.248 # This will allow Thelonious' private subnet to # access the VPN. This example will only work # if you are routing, not bridging, i.e. you are # using "dev tun" and "server" directives. # EXAMPLE: Suppose you want to give # Thelonious a fixed VPN IP address of 10.9.0.1. # First uncomment out these lines: ;client-config-dir ccd ;route 10.9.0.0 255.255.255.252 # Then add this line to ccd/Thelonious: # ifconfig-push 10.9.0.1 10.9.0.2 # Suppose that you want to enable different # firewall access policies for different groups # of clients. There are two methods: # (1) Run multiple OpenVPN daemons, one for each # group, and firewall the TUN/TAP interface # for each group/daemon appropriately. # (2) (Advanced) Create a script to dynamically # modify the firewall in response to access # from different clients. See man # page for more info on learn-address script. ;learn-address ./script # If enabled, this directive will configure # all clients to redirect their default # network gateway through the VPN, causing # all IP traffic such as web browsing and # and DNS lookups to go through the VPN # (The OpenVPN server machine may need to NAT # or bridge the TUN/TAP interface to the internet # in order for this to work properly). push "redirect-gateway def1 bypass-dhcp" push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.8.8" # Certain Windows-specific network settings # can be pushed to clients, such as DNS # or WINS server addresses. CAVEAT: # http://openvpn.net/faq.html#dhcpcaveats # The addresses below refer to the public # DNS servers provided by opendns.com. ;push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.8.8" push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.4.4" # Uncomment this directive to allow different # clients to be able to "see" each other. # By default, clients will only see the server. # To force clients to only see the server, you # will also need to appropriately firewall the # server's TUN/TAP interface. ;client-to-client # Uncomment this directive if multiple clients # might connect with the same certificate/key # files or common names. This is recommended # only for testing purposes. For production use, # each client should have its own certificate/key # pair. # # IF YOU HAVE NOT GENERATED INDIVIDUAL # CERTIFICATE/KEY PAIRS FOR EACH CLIENT, # EACH HAVING ITS OWN UNIQUE "COMMON NAME", # UNCOMMENT THIS LINE OUT. ;duplicate-cn # The keepalive directive causes ping-like # messages to be sent back and forth over # the link so that each side knows when # the other side has gone down. # Ping every 10 seconds, assume that remote # peer is down if no ping received during # a 120 second time period. keepalive 10 120 # For extra security beyond that provided # by SSL/TLS, create an "HMAC firewall" # to help block DoS attacks and UDP port flooding. # # Generate with: # openvpn --genkey --secret ta.key # # The server and each client must have # a copy of this key. # The second parameter should be '0' # on the server and '1' on the clients. ;tls-auth ta.key 0 # This file is secret # Select a cryptographic cipher. # This config item must be copied to # the client config file as well. ;cipher BF-CBC # Blowfish (default) ;cipher AES-128-CBC # AES ;cipher DES-EDE3-CBC # Triple-DES # Enable compression on the VPN link. # If you enable it here, you must also # enable it in the client config file. comp-lzo # The maximum number of concurrently connected # clients we want to allow. ;max-clients 100 # It's a good idea to reduce the OpenVPN # daemon's privileges after initialization. # # You can uncomment this out on # non-Windows systems. ;user nobody ;group nogroup # The persist options will try to avoid # accessing certain resources on restart # that may no longer be accessible because # of the privilege downgrade. persist-key persist-tun # Output a short status file showing # current connections, truncated # and rewritten every minute. status openvpn-status.log # By default, log messages will go to the syslog (or # on Windows, if running as a service, they will go to # the "\Program Files\OpenVPN\log" directory). # Use log or log-append to override this default. # "log" will truncate the log file on OpenVPN startup, # while "log-append" will append to it. Use one # or the other (but not both). ;log openvpn.log ;log-append openvpn.log # Set the appropriate level of log # file verbosity. # # 0 is silent, except for fatal errors # 4 is reasonable for general usage # 5 and 6 can help to debug connection problems # 9 is extremely verbose verb 3 # Silence repeating messages. At most 20 # sequential messages of the same message # category will be output to the log. ;mute 20 I've tried on multiple computers by the way. The same result on all of them. What could be wrong? Thanks in advance, and if you need other information I'll gladly post it. Information for new comments root@vps:~# iptables -L -n -v Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 862K packets, 51M bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 3 packets, 382 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 0 0 ACCEPT all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED 4641 298K ACCEPT all -- * * 10.8.0.0/24 0.0.0.0/0 0 0 REJECT all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 reject-with icmp-port-unreachable Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 1671K packets, 2378M bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination And root@vps:~# iptables -t nat -L -n -v Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT 17937 packets, 2013K bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain POSTROUTING (policy ACCEPT 8975 packets, 562K bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 1579 103K SNAT all -- * * 10.8.0.0/24 0.0.0.0/0 to:SERVERIP Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 8972 packets, 562K bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination

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• How to associate jquery validation with only one button if there are many?

  - by Eyla

  Greetings, In my current project, I have gridview, search button, text box for search, text box, and submit button. -I should input string in the search box then click search button. -when click search button, it will retrieve all matches records then bind them to the view grid. -then when I click a record in the gridview, it should bound a field to the second text box. finally I should submit the page by clicking in submit button. where is the problem: -the problme that I'm using jquery validation plugin that will make second text box is required. -when I click search button will not allow postback until I write some thing in second text box. How can I make scond text box only do validation for required field only when click asp.net submit button. here is my code: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Master.Master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="WebForm1.aspx.cs" Inherits="IMAM_APPLICATION.WebForm1" %> <%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="cc1" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1" runat="server"> <script src="js/jquery-1.4.1-vsdoc.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="js/jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="js/js.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $("#aspnetForm").validate({ // debug: true, rules: { "<%=txtFirstName.UniqueID %>": { required: true } }, errorElement: "mydiv", wrapper: "mydiv", // a wrapper around the error message errorPlacement: function(error, element) { offset = element.offset(); error.insertBefore(element) error.addClass('message'); // add a class to the wrapper error.css('position', 'absolute'); error.css('left', offset.left + element.outerWidth()); error.css('top', offset.top - (element.height() / 2)); } }); }) </script> <div id="mydiv"> <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" style="position:absolute; top: 280px; left: 30px; height: 240px; width: 915px;" PageSize="5" onselectedindexchanged="GridView1_SelectedIndexChanged" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataKeyNames="idcontact_info"> <Columns> <asp:CommandField ShowSelectButton="True" InsertVisible="False" ShowCancelButton="False" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="First_Name" HeaderText="First Name" /> <asp:BoundField AccessibleHeaderText="Midle Name" DataField="Midle_Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Last_Name" HeaderText="Last Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Phone_home" HeaderText="Phone Home" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="cell_home" HeaderText="Mobile Home" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="phone_work" HeaderText="Phone Work" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="cell_Work" HeaderText="Mobile Work" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Email_Home" HeaderText="Personal Home" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Email_work" HeaderText="Work Email" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> <asp:ObjectDataSource ID="ObjectDataSource1" runat="server" DeleteMethod="Delete" InsertMethod="Insert" OldValuesParameterFormatString="original_{0}" SelectMethod="GetData" TypeName="IMAM_APPLICATION.DSContactTableAdapters.contact_infoTableAdapter" UpdateMethod="Update"> <DeleteParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="Original_idcontact_info" Type="Int32" /> </DeleteParameters> <UpdateParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="Title" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="First_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Midle_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Last_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address1_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address2_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="State_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Prov_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ZipCode_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Home_Ext" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Cell_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Email_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="material_status" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="DateOfBrith" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="company" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Work_Field" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Occupation" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="sub_Occupation" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Other" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address1_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address2_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="State_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Prov_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ZipCode_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Work_Ext" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Cell_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Email_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="WebSite" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Note" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Groups" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterPhoneHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterMobileHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterFaxHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterPhoneWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterMobileWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterFaxWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoPhoneHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoMobileHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoEmailHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoPhoneWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoMobileWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoEmailWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="locationHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="locationWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Original_idcontact_info" Type="Int32" /> </UpdateParameters> <InsertParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="Title" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="First_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Midle_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Last_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address1_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address2_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="State_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Prov_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ZipCode_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Home_Ext" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Cell_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Email_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="material_status" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="DateOfBrith" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="company" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Work_Field" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Occupation" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="sub_Occupation" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Other" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address1_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address2_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="State_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Prov_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ZipCode_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Work_Ext" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Cell_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Email_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="WebSite" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Note" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Groups" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterPhoneHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterMobileHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterFaxHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterPhoneWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterMobileWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterFaxWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoPhoneHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoMobileHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoEmailHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoPhoneWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoMobileWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoEmailWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="locationHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="locationWork" Type="Int32" /> </InsertParameters> </asp:ObjectDataSource> <asp:TextBox ID="txtSearch" runat="server" style="position:absolute; top: 560px; left: 170px;" ></asp:TextBox> <asp:Button ID="btnSearch" runat="server" Text="Search" style="position:absolute; top: 555px; left: 375px;" CausesValidation="False" onclick="btnSearch_Click"/> <asp:Label ID="Label7" runat="server" Style="position: absolute; top: 630px; left: 85px;" Text="First Name"></asp:Label> <asp:TextBox ID="txtFirstName" runat="server" Style="top: 630px; left: 185px; position: absolute; height: 22px; width: 128px"></asp:TextBox> <asp:Button ID="submit" runat="server" Text="submit" /> </div> </asp:Content>

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• How to associate jquery validation when only one button if there are many??

  - by Eyla

  Greetings, In my current project, I have gridview, search button, text box for search, text box, and submit button. -I should input string in the search box then click search button. -when click search button, it will retrieve all matches records then bind them to the view grid. -then when I click a record in the gridview, it should bound a field to the second text box. finally I should submit the page by clicking in submit button. where is the problem: -the problme that I'm using jquery validation plugin that will make second text box is required. -when I click search button will not allow postback until I write some thing in second text box. How can I make scond text box only do validation for required field only when click asp.net submit button. here is my code: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Master.Master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="WebForm1.aspx.cs" Inherits="IMAM_APPLICATION.WebForm1" %> <%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="cc1" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1" runat="server"> <script src="js/jquery-1.4.1-vsdoc.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="js/jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="js/js.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $("#aspnetForm").validate({ // debug: true, rules: { "<%=txtFirstName.UniqueID %>": { required: true } }, errorElement: "mydiv", wrapper: "mydiv", // a wrapper around the error message errorPlacement: function(error, element) { offset = element.offset(); error.insertBefore(element) error.addClass('message'); // add a class to the wrapper error.css('position', 'absolute'); error.css('left', offset.left + element.outerWidth()); error.css('top', offset.top - (element.height() / 2)); } }); }) </script> <div id="mydiv"> <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" style="position:absolute; top: 280px; left: 30px; height: 240px; width: 915px;" PageSize="5" onselectedindexchanged="GridView1_SelectedIndexChanged" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataKeyNames="idcontact_info"> <Columns> <asp:CommandField ShowSelectButton="True" InsertVisible="False" ShowCancelButton="False" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="First_Name" HeaderText="First Name" /> <asp:BoundField AccessibleHeaderText="Midle Name" DataField="Midle_Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Last_Name" HeaderText="Last Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Phone_home" HeaderText="Phone Home" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="cell_home" HeaderText="Mobile Home" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="phone_work" HeaderText="Phone Work" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="cell_Work" HeaderText="Mobile Work" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Email_Home" HeaderText="Personal Home" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Email_work" HeaderText="Work Email" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> <asp:ObjectDataSource ID="ObjectDataSource1" runat="server" DeleteMethod="Delete" InsertMethod="Insert" OldValuesParameterFormatString="original_{0}" SelectMethod="GetData" TypeName="IMAM_APPLICATION.DSContactTableAdapters.contact_infoTableAdapter" UpdateMethod="Update"> <DeleteParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="Original_idcontact_info" Type="Int32" /> </DeleteParameters> <UpdateParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="Title" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="First_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Midle_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Last_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address1_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address2_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="State_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Prov_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ZipCode_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Home_Ext" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Cell_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Email_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="material_status" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="DateOfBrith" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="company" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Work_Field" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Occupation" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="sub_Occupation" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Other" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address1_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address2_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="State_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Prov_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ZipCode_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Work_Ext" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Cell_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Email_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="WebSite" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Note" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Groups" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterPhoneHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterMobileHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterFaxHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterPhoneWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterMobileWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterFaxWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoPhoneHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoMobileHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoEmailHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoPhoneWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoMobileWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoEmailWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="locationHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="locationWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Original_idcontact_info" Type="Int32" /> </UpdateParameters> <InsertParameters> <asp:Parameter Name="Title" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="First_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Midle_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Last_Name" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address1_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address2_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="State_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Prov_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ZipCode_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Home_Ext" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Cell_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax_home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Email_Home" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="material_status" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="DateOfBrith" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="company" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Work_Field" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Occupation" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="sub_Occupation" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Other" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address1_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Address2_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="City_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="State_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Prov_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="ZipCode_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Country_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Phone_Work_Ext" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Cell_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Fax_Work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Email_work" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="WebSite" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Note" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="Groups" Type="String" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterPhoneHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterMobileHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterFaxHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterPhoneWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterMobileWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="InterFaxWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoPhoneHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoMobileHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoEmailHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoPhoneWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoMobileWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="rdoEmailWork" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="locationHome" Type="Int32" /> <asp:Parameter Name="locationWork" Type="Int32" /> </InsertParameters> </asp:ObjectDataSource> <asp:TextBox ID="txtSearch" runat="server" style="position:absolute; top: 560px; left: 170px;" ></asp:TextBox> <asp:Button ID="btnSearch" runat="server" Text="Search" style="position:absolute; top: 555px; left: 375px;" CausesValidation="False" onclick="btnSearch_Click"/> <asp:Label ID="Label7" runat="server" Style="position: absolute; top: 630px; left: 85px;" Text="First Name"></asp:Label> <asp:TextBox ID="txtFirstName" runat="server" Style="top: 630px; left: 185px; position: absolute; height: 22px; width: 128px"></asp:TextBox> <asp:Button ID="submit" runat="server" Text="submit" /> </div> </asp:Content>

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• Generating moderately interesting images

  - by Williham Totland

  Abstract: Can you propose a mathematical-ish algorithm over a plane of pixels that will generate a moderately interesting image, preferably one that on the whole resembles something? The story thus far: Once upon a time I decided in an effort to reduce cycle waste on my (admittedly too) numerous computers, and set out to generate images in a moderately interesting fashion; using a PRNG and some clever math to create images that would, on the whole, resemble something. Or at least, that was the plan. As it turns out, clever math requires being a clever mathematician; this I am not. At some length I arrived at a method that preferred straight lines (as these are generally the components of which our world is made), perhaps too strongly. The result is mildly interesting; resembling, perhaps, city grids as such: Now for the question proper: Given the source code of this little program; can you improve upon it and propose a method that gives somewhat more interesting results? (e.g. not city grids, but perhaps faces, animals, geography, what have you) This is also meant as a sort of challenge; I suppose and as such I've set down some completely arbitrary and equally optional rules: The comments in the code says it all really. Suggestions and "solutions" should edit the algorithm itself, not the surrounding framework, except as for to fix errors that prevents the sample from compiling. The code should compile cleanly with a standard issue C compiler. (If the example provided doesn't, oops! Tell me, and I'll fix. :) The method should, though again, this is optional, not need to elicit help from your friendly neighborhood math library. Solutions should probably be deliverable by simply yanking out whatever is between the snip lines (the ones that say you should not edit above and below, respectively), with a statement to the effect of what you need to add to the preamble in particular. The code requires a C compiler and libpng to build; I'm not entirely confident that the MinGW compiler provides the necessities, but I would be surprised if it didn't. For Debian you'll want the libpng-dev package, and for Mac OS X you'll want the XCode tools.. The source code can be downloaded here. Warning: Massive code splurge incoming! // compile with gcc -o imggen -lpng imggen.c // optionally with -DITERATIONS=x, where x is an appropriate integer // If you're on a Mac or using MinGW, you may have to fiddle with the linker flags to find the library and includes. #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <png.h> #ifdef ITERATIONS #define REPEAT #endif // ITERATIONS // YOU MAY CHANGE THE FOLLOWING DEFINES #define WIDTH 320 #define HEIGHT 240 // YOU MAY REPLACE THE FOLLOWING DEFINES AS APPROPRIATE #define INK 16384 void writePNG (png_bytepp imageBuffer, png_uint_32 width, png_uint_32 height, int iteration) { char *fname; asprintf(&fname, "out.%d.png", iteration); FILE *fp = fopen(fname, "wb"); if (!fp) return; png_structp png_ptr = png_create_write_struct(PNG_LIBPNG_VER_STRING, NULL, NULL, NULL); png_infop info_ptr = png_create_info_struct(png_ptr); png_init_io(png_ptr, fp); png_set_filter(png_ptr, PNG_FILTER_TYPE_DEFAULT, PNG_FILTER_NONE); png_set_compression_level(png_ptr, Z_BEST_COMPRESSION); png_set_IHDR(png_ptr, info_ptr, width, height, 8, PNG_COLOR_TYPE_GRAY, PNG_INTERLACE_NONE, PNG_COMPRESSION_TYPE_DEFAULT, PNG_FILTER_TYPE_DEFAULT); png_set_rows(png_ptr, info_ptr, imageBuffer); png_set_invert_mono(png_ptr); /// YOU MAY COMMENT OUT THIS LINE png_write_png(png_ptr, info_ptr, PNG_TRANSFORM_IDENTITY, NULL); png_destroy_write_struct(&png_ptr, &info_ptr); fclose(fp); free(fname); } int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) { png_uint_32 height = HEIGHT, width = WIDTH; int iteration = 1; #ifdef REPEAT for (iteration = 1; iteration <= ITERATIONS; iteration++) { #endif // REPEAT png_bytepp imageBuffer = malloc(sizeof(png_bytep) * height); for (png_uint_32 i = 0; i < height; i++) { imageBuffer[i] = malloc(sizeof(png_byte) * width); for (png_uint_32 j = 0; j < width; j++) { imageBuffer[i][j] = 0; } } /// CUT ACROSS THE DASHED LINES /// ------------------------------------------- /// NO EDITING ABOVE THIS LINE; EXCEPT AS NOTED int ink = INK; int x = rand() % width, y = rand() % height; int xdir = (rand() % 2)?1:-1; int ydir = (rand() % 2)?1:-1; while (ink) { imageBuffer[y][x] = 255; --ink; xdir += (rand() % 2)?(1):(-1); ydir += (rand() % 2)?(1):(-1); if (ydir > 0) { ++y; } else if (ydir < 0) { --y; } if (xdir > 0) { ++x; } else if (xdir < 0) { --x; } if (x == -1 || y == -1 || x == width || y == height || x == y && x == 0) { x = rand() % width; y = rand() % height; xdir = (rand() % 2)?1:-1; ydir = (rand() % 2)?1:-1; } } /// NO EDITING BELOW THIS LINE /// ------------------------------------------- writePNG(imageBuffer, width, height, iteration); for (png_uint_32 i = 0; i < height; i++) { free(imageBuffer[i]); } free(imageBuffer); #ifdef REPEAT } #endif // REPEAT return 0; } Note: While this question doesn't strictly speaking seem "answerable" as such; I still believe that it can give rise to some manner of "right" answer. Maybe. Happy hunting.

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• php edit database entery script not working.

  - by Jacksta

  I have two files which show all contats in a database, then edits them. The second script keeps directing the browser back due to this part. I cant work out how to make it work! :) <?php if (!$_POST[id]) { header( "Location: pick_modcontact.php"); exit; } else { session_start(); } if ($_SESSION[valid] != "yes") { header( "Location: pick_modcontact.php"); exit; } This script shows all contacts in a database which is an "address book" this part works fine. please see below. Name:pick_modcontact.php if ($_SESSION[valid] != "yes") { header( "Location: contact_menu.php"); exit; } $db_name = "testDB"; $table_name = "my_contacts"; $connection = @mysql_connect("localhost", "admin", "user") or die(mysql_error()); $db = @mysql_select_db($db_name, $connection) or die(mysql_error()); $sql = "SELECT id, f_name, l_name FROM $table_name ORDER BY f_name"; $result = @mysql_query($sql, $connection) or die(mysql_error()); $num = @mysql_num_rows($result); if ($num < 1) { $display_block = "<p><em>Sorry No Results!</em></p>"; } else { while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { $id = $row['id']; $f_name = $row['f_name']; $l_name = $row['l_name']; $option_block .= "<option value\"$id\">$f_name, $l_name</option>"; } $display_block = "<form method=\"POST\" action=\"show_modcontact.php\"> <p><strong>Contact:</strong> <select name=\"id\">$option_block</select> <input type=\"submit\" name=\"submit\" value=\"Select This Contact\"></p> </form>"; } ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Modify A Contact</title> </head> <body> <h1>My Contact Management System</h1> <h2><em>Modify a Contact</em></h2> <p>Select a contact from the list below, to modify the contact's record.</p> <? echo "$display_block"; ?> <br> <p><a href="contact_menu.php">Return to Main Menu</a></p> </body> </html> This script is for modifying the contact: named show_modcontact.php <?php if (!$_POST[id]) { header( "Location: pick_modcontact.php"); exit; } else { session_start(); } if ($_SESSION[valid] != "yes") { header( "Location: pick_modcontact.php"); exit; } $db_name = "testDB"; $table_name = "my_contacts"; $connection = @mysql_connect("localhost", "admin_cantsayno", "cantsayno") or die(mysql_error()); $db = @mysql_select_db($db_name, $connection) or die(mysql_error()); $sql = "SELECT f_name, l_name, address1, address2, address3, postcode, prim_tel, sec_tel, email, birthday FROM $table_name WHERE id = '$_POST[id]'"; $result = @mysql_query($sql, $connection) or die(mysql_error()); while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { $f_name = $row['f_name']; $l_name = $row['l_name']; $address1 = $row['address1']; $address2 = $row['address2']; $address3 = $row['address3']; $country = $row['country']; $prim_tel = $row['prim_tel']; $sec_tel = $row['sec_tel']; $email = $row['email']; $birthday = $row['birthday']; } ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Modify A Contact</title> </head> <body> <form action="do_modcontact.php" method="post"> <input type="id" value="<? echo "$_POST[id]"; ?>" /> <table cellpadding="5" cellspacing="3"> <tr> <th>Name & Address Information</th> <th> Other Contact / Personal Information</th> </tr> <tr> <td align="top"> <p><strong>First Name:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$f_name" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Last Name:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="l_name" value="<? echo "$l_name" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Address1:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$address1" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Address2:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$address2" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Address3:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$address3" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /> </p> <p><strong>Postcode:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$postcode" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Country:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$country" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /> </p> <p><strong>First Name:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$f_name" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> </td> <td align="top"> <p><strong>Prim Tel:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$prim_tel" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Sec Tel:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$sec_tel" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Email:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$email" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /> </p> <p><strong>Birthday:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$birthday" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> <p><input type="submit" name="submit" value="Update Contact" /></p> <br /> <p><a href="contact_menu.php">Retuen To Menu</a></p> </td> </tr> </table> </form> </body> </html>

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• php remove duplicates from array..

  - by SoulieBaby

  Hi all, I was wondering if anyone could help me out, I'm trying to find a script that will check my entire array and remove any duplicates if required, then spit out the array in the same format. Here's an example of my array (as you will see there are some duplicates): Array ( [0] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 34 [name] => Adrianos Pizza & Pasta [imageurl] => sp_adrian.gif [clickurl] => # ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 42 [name] => Ray White Mordialloc [imageurl] => sp_raywhite.gif [clickurl] => http://www.raywhite.com/ ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 48 [name] => Beachside Osteo [imageurl] => sp_beachside.gif [clickurl] => http://www.beachsideosteo.com.au/ ) [3] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 57 [name] => Southern Suburbs Physiotherapy Centre [imageurl] => sp_sspc.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.sspc.com.au ) [4] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 52 [name] => Mordialloc Travel and Cruise [imageurl] => sp_morditravel.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.yellowpages.com.au/vic/mordialloc/mordialloc-travel-cruise-13492525-listing.html ) [5] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 37 [name] => Mordialloc Cellar Door [imageurl] => sp_cellardoor.gif [clickurl] => ) [6] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [1] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 55 [name] => 360South [imageurl] => sp_360.jpg [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 40 [name] => Ripponlea Mitsubishi [imageurl] => sp_mitsubishi.gif [clickurl] => ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 57 [name] => Southern Suburbs Physiotherapy Centre [imageurl] => sp_sspc.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.sspc.com.au ) [3] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 52 [name] => Mordialloc Travel and Cruise [imageurl] => sp_morditravel.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.yellowpages.com.au/vic/mordialloc/mordialloc-travel-cruise-13492525-listing.html ) [4] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 37 [name] => Mordialloc Cellar Door [imageurl] => sp_cellardoor.gif [clickurl] => ) [5] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [2] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 44 [name] => Mordialloc Personal Trainers [imageurl] => sp_mordipt.gif [clickurl] => # ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 36 [name] => Big River [imageurl] => sp_bigriver.gif [clickurl] => ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 52 [name] => Mordialloc Travel and Cruise [imageurl] => sp_morditravel.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.yellowpages.com.au/vic/mordialloc/mordialloc-travel-cruise-13492525-listing.html ) [3] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 37 [name] => Mordialloc Cellar Door [imageurl] => sp_cellardoor.gif [clickurl] => ) [4] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [3] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 41 [name] => Print House Graphics [imageurl] => sp_printhouse.gif [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 49 [name] => Kim Reed Conveyancing [imageurl] => sp_kimreed.jpg [clickurl] => ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 37 [name] => Mordialloc Cellar Door [imageurl] => sp_cellardoor.gif [clickurl] => ) [3] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [4] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 38 [name] => Lowe Financial Group [imageurl] => sp_lowe.gif [clickurl] => http://lowefinancial.com/ ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 58 [name] => Dicount Lollie Shop [imageurl] => new dls logo.jpg [clickurl] => ) [2] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 53 [name] => Carmotive [imageurl] => sp_carmotive.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.carmotive.com.au/ ) ) [5] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 45 [name] => Mordialloc Sporting Club [imageurl] => msc logo.jpg [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 33 [name] => Two Brothers [imageurl] => sp_2brothers.gif [clickurl] => http://www.2brothers.com.au/ ) ) [6] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 46 [name] => Patterson Securities [imageurl] => cmyk patersons_withtag.jpg [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 56 [name] => Logical Services [imageurl] => sp_logical.jpg [clickurl] => ) ) [7] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 59 [name] => Pure Sport [imageurl] => sp_psport.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.puresport.com.au/ ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 51 [name] => Richmond and Bennison [imageurl] => sp_richmond.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.richbenn.com.au/ ) ) [8] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 39 [name] => Main Street Mordialloc [imageurl] => main street cafe.jpg [clickurl] => ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 50 [name] => Letec [imageurl] => sp_letec.jpg [clickurl] => www.letec.biz ) ) [9] => Array ( [0] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 54 [name] => PPM Builders [imageurl] => sp_ppm.jpg [clickurl] => http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/P-P-M-Builders ) [1] => stdClass Object ( [bid] => 43 [name] => Systema [imageurl] => sp_systema.gif [clickurl] => ) ) )

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• WordPress contact form email as PDF

  - by lock

  I am using the below code for my WordPress site which is emailing all the form details as an HTML text but I need the details to be written into a PDF first and then have to email the PDF as an attachment. How can I achieve this? This is not a PHP code to use PHP's writePDF modules. So, any idea or any code to implement this? <div style="padding-left: 100px;"> [raw] [contact-form subject="Best Aussie Broker" to="[email protected]"] <div id="main34" style="border: 1px solid black; border-radius: 15px; width: 720px; padding: 15px;"> &nbsp; <h2><span style="color: #ff6600;">Express Application</span></h2> &nbsp; [contact-field label="First Name" type="name" required="true" /] [contact-field label="Last Name" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Email" type="email" required="true" /] [contact-field label="Purpose of Finance?" type="select" options="Home Loan,Refinance,Investment Loan,Debt Consolidation,Other" /] [contact-field label="Your deposit amount" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Amount you need to borrow?" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Brief description of the purpose for finance" type="textarea" required="true" /] <div><label></label> <input class="radio" type="radio" name="19" value="Single Application" onchange="showsingle();" /> <label class="radio">Single Application</label> <div class="clear-form"></div> <input class="radio" type="radio" name="19" value="Joint Application" onchange="showjoint();" /> <label class="radio">Joint Application</label> <div class="clear-form"></div> [contact-field label="Privacy Act" type="checkbox" required="true" /] I have read the Privacy Act 1988 (as Amended) and understand that by selecting the submit button I/we Authorize Best Aussie Broker to act on my/our behalf and manage personal information in relation to this application.<br> <a href="http://googleplex.com.au/pdf.pdf"><img src="http://googleplex.com.au/pdf.png" alt="" /> </a> </div> </div> <div id="single" style="display: none; width: 720px; border: 1px solid black; border-radius: 15px; padding: 15px; margin-top: 10px;"> <div style="padding-top: 10px; width: 720px; text-align: left;"> <h4><span style="color: #ff6600;">Last step then we will get all listed Australian vendors to fight it out for your best deal</span></h4> </div> <div> <label class="select" for="19-date-of-birth">Date of Birth</label> [contact-field label="Day" type="select" options="1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="January,February,March,April,May,June,July,August,September,October,November,December" /] [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="2000,1999,1998,1997,1996,1995,1994,1993,1992,1991,1990,1989,1988,1987,1986,1985,1984,1983,1982,1981,1980,1979,1978,197,1976,1975,1974,1973,1972,1971,1970,1969,1968,1967,1966,1965,1964,1963,1962,1961,1960,1959,1958,1957,1956,1955,1954,1953,1952,1951,1950,1949,1948,1947,1946,1945,1944,1943,1942,1941,1940,1939,1938,1937,1936,1935,1934,1933,1932,1931,1930,1929,1928,1927,1926,1925,1924,1923,1922,1921,1920, 1919,1918,1917,1916,1915,1914,1913,1912,1911,1910,1909" /] </div> [contact-field label="Address" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Suburb" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Postcode" type="text" /] <div> [contact-field label="State" type="select" options="VIC,NSW,QLD,SA,WA,TAS,NZ,Other" /] </div> [contact-field label="Best Contact" type="radio" options="Landline,Mobile" /] [contact-field label="Phone Number" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Marital Status" type="select" options="Married,Single,Other" /] [contact-field label="Residential Status" type="select" options="Renting, Home Owned, Home Mortgage, Board, Other" /] [contact-field label="Children/Dependents" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6" /] <div></div> [contact-field label="Gross Yearly Income" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Current Employer" type="text" /] <div> <label class="select" for="19-year-of-empl">Time at this employer</label> [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,More" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12" /] </div> <div style="padding-right: 15px;"></div> </div> <div id="joint" style="display: none; width: 720px; border: 1px solid black; border-radius: 15px; padding: 15px; margin-top: 10px;"> <div style="padding-top: 10px; width: 720px; text-align: left;"> <h4><span style="color: #ff6600;">Last step then we will get all listed Australian vendors to fight it out for your best deal</span></h4> </div> <div style="float: left; width: 320px;"> <div> <label class="select" for="19-date-of-birth1">Date of Birth</label> [contact-field label="Day" type="select" options="1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="January,February,March,April,May,June,July,August,September,October,November,December" /] [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="2000,1999,1998,1997,1996,1995,1994,1993,1992,1991,1990,1989,1988,1987,1986,1985,1984,1983,1982,1981,1980,1979,1978,197,1976,1975,1974,1973,1972,1971,1970,1969,1968,1967,1966,1965,1964,1963,1962,1961,1960,1959,1958,1957,1956,1955,1954,1953,1952,1951,1950,1949,1948,1947,1946,1945,1944,1943,1942,1941,1940,1939,1938,1937,1936,1935,1934,1933,1932,1931,1930,1929,1928,1927,1926,1925,1924,1923,1922,1921,1920, 1919,1918,1917,1916,1915,1914,1913,1912,1911,1910,1909" /] </div> [contact-field label="Address" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Suburb" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Postcode" type="text" /] <div> [contact-field label="State" type="select" options="VIC,NSW,QLD,SA,WA,TAS,NZ,Other" /] </div> [contact-field label="Best Contact" type="radio" options="Landline,Mobile" /] [contact-field label="Phone Number" type="text" /] <div></div> <div></div> [contact-field label="Marital Status" type="select" options="Married,Single,Other" /] [contact-field label="Residential Status" type="select" options="Renting, Home Owned, Home Mortgage, Board, Other" /] [contact-field label="Children/Dependents" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6" /] <div></div> <div><label class="text" for="netincome">Net Income</label> <input id="netincome" type="text" name="netincome" /> <select id="netincome-dropdown" name="netincome-dropdown"> <option>Monthly</option> <option>Yearly</option> </select></div> [contact-field label="Current Employer" type="text" /] <div> <label class="select" for="19-year-of-empl2">Time at this employer</label> [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,More" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12" /] </div> </div> <div style="float: right; width: 320px; padding-right: 50px;"> <div> <label class="select" for="19-date-of-birth3">Date of Birth</label> [contact-field label="Day" type="select" options="1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="January,February,March,April,May,June,July,August,September,October,November,December" /] [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="2000,1999,1998,1997,1996,1995,1994,1993,1992,1991,1990,1989,1988,1987,1986,1985,1984,1983,1982,1981,1980,1979,1978,197,1976,1975,1974,1973,1972,1971,1970,1969,1968,1967,1966,1965,1964,1963,1962,1961,1960,1959,1958,1957,1956,1955,1954,1953,1952,1951,1950,1949,1948,1947,1946,1945,1944,1943,1942,1941,1940,1939,1938,1937,1936,1935,1934,1933,1932,1931,1930,1929,1928,1927,1926,1925,1924,1923,1922,1921,1920, 1919,1918,1917,1916,1915,1914,1913,1912,1911,1910,1909" /] </div> [contact-field label="Address" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Suburb" type="text" /] [contact-field label="Postcode" type="text" /] <div> [contact-field label="State" type="select" options="VIC,NSW,QLD,SA,WA,TAS,NZ,Other" /] </div> [contact-field label="Best Contact" type="radio" options="Landline,Mobile" /] [contact-field label="Phone Number" type="text" /] <div></div> <div></div> [contact-field label="Marital Status" type="select" options="Married,Single,Other" /] [contact-field label="Residential Status" type="select" options="Renting, Home Owned, Home Mortgage, Board, Other" /] [contact-field label="Children/Dependents" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6" /] <div></div> <div><label class="text" for="netincome">Net Income</label> <input id="netincome" type="text" name="netincome" /> <select id="netincome-dropdown" name="netincome-dropdown"> <option>Monthly</option> <option>Yearly</option> </select></div> [contact-field label="Current Employer" type="text" /] <div> <label class="select" for="19-year-of-empl">Time at this employer</label> [contact-field label="Year" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,More" /] [contact-field label="Month" type="select" options="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12" /] </div> </div> <div style="clear: both;"></div> <div></div> </div> &nbsp; [/contact-form][/raw] </div>

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• php + MySQL editing table data.

  - by Jacksta

  This question is relating to 2 php scripts. The first script is called pick_modcontact.php where I choose a contact (from a contact book like phone book), then posts to the script show_modcontact.php When I click the submit button on the form on pick.modcontact.php. As a result of submitting the form I am then taken to show_modcontact.php. As the variables are not present the user is directed back to pick_modcontact.php I can not work out how to correct the code so that it will show the results of the script show_modcontact.php This script shows all contacts in a database which is an "address book" this part works fine. please see below. Name:pick_modcontact.php if ($_SESSION['valid'] != "yes") { header( "Location: contact_menu.php"); exit; } $db_name = "testDB"; $table_name = "my_contacts"; $connection = @mysql_connect("localhost", "admin", "user") or die(mysql_error()); $db = @mysql_select_db($db_name, $connection) or die(mysql_error()); $sql = "SELECT id, f_name, l_name FROM $table_name ORDER BY f_name"; $result = @mysql_query($sql, $connection) or die(mysql_error()); $num = @mysql_num_rows($result); if ($num < 1) { $display_block = "<p><em>Sorry No Results!</em></p>"; } else { while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { $id = $row['id']; $f_name = $row['f_name']; $l_name = $row['l_name']; $option_block .= "<option value\"$id\">$f_name, $l_name</option>"; } $display_block = "<form method=\"POST\" action=\"show_modcontact.php\"> <p><strong>Contact:</strong> <select name=\"id\">$option_block</select> <input type=\"submit\" name=\"submit\" value=\"Select This Contact\"></p> </form>"; } ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Modify A Contact</title> </head> <body> <h1>My Contact Management System</h1> <h2><em>Modify a Contact</em></h2> <p>Select a contact from the list below, to modify the contact's record.</p> <? echo "$display_block"; ?> <br> <p><a href="contact_menu.php">Return to Main Menu</a></p> </body> </html> This script is for modifying the contact: named show_modcontact.php <?php if (!$_POST['id']) { header( "Location: pick_modcontact.php"); exit; } else { session_start(); } if ($_SESSION['valid'] != "yes") { header( "Location: pick_modcontact.php"); exit; } $db_name = "testDB"; $table_name = "my_contacts"; $connection = @mysql_connect("localhost", "admin", "pass") or die(mysql_error()); $db = @mysql_select_db($db_name, $connection) or die(mysql_error()); $sql = "SELECT f_name, l_name, address1, address2, address3, postcode, prim_tel, sec_tel, email, birthday FROM $table_name WHERE id = '" . $_POST['id'] . "'"; $result = @mysql_query($sql, $connection) or die(mysql_error()); while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { $f_name = $row['f_name']; $l_name = $row['l_name']; $address1 = $row['address1']; $address2 = $row['address2']; $address3 = $row['address3']; $country = $row['country']; $prim_tel = $row['prim_tel']; $sec_tel = $row['sec_tel']; $email = $row['email']; $birthday = $row['birthday']; } ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Modify A Contact</title> </head> <body> <form action="do_modcontact.php" method="post"> <input type="text" name="id" value="<? echo $_POST['id']; ?>" /> <table cellpadding="5" cellspacing="3"> <tr> <th>Name & Address Information</th> <th> Other Contact / Personal Information</th> </tr> <tr> <td align="top"> <p><strong>First Name:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$f_name"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Last Name:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="l_name" value="<? echo "$l_name"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Address1:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$address1"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Address2:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$address2"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Address3:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$address3"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /> </p> <p><strong>Postcode:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$postcode"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Country:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$country"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /> </p> <p><strong>First Name:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$f_name"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> </td> <td align="top"> <p><strong>Prim Tel:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$prim_tel"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Sec Tel:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$sec_tel"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /></p> <p><strong>Email:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$email;" ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /> </p> <p><strong>Birthday:</strong><br /> <input type="text" name="f_name" value="<? echo "$birthday"; ?>" size="35" maxlength="75" /> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> <p><input type="submit" name="submit" value="Update Contact" /></p> <br /> <p><a href="contact_menu.php">Retuen To Menu</a></p> </td> </tr> </table> </form> </body> </html> note for site admin, I am re posting this question with the hope of someone else reading over it. older questions seem to go dead after a while.

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• drop down menu will not display outside containing div in IE7..

  - by playahabana

  I am tearing my hair out over this, I have a dropdown menu using CSS and jQuery (thanks to Soh Tanaka) and it works perfectly in Firefox, Safari, Google chrome and I.E. 8, but in IE 7 it will not drop down outside the 'Banner div'. It drops below the nav div however. I have moved the nav div higher in the banner the result is the same, menu drops until it reaches the border of the banner div and then vanishes.... Below is the css. This is my first website and I have some limited understanding of what I am doing. The drop down menu includes transparent png's as links (I know, I know...but it's what the Boss wants...) please could someone take a quick scan at the below CSS and let me know what is wroong? Is this some form of the IE z-index bug? i have tried all different combinations of z-index and still I can't get a different result. . The html is below as well. Thankyou in advance #banner { position: relative; width: 62.5em; height: 12em; background-color: #46280A; background-image: url('images/includes/banner2.jpg'); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center; -moz-box-shadow: -4px 6px 8px #000; -webkit-box-shadow: -4px 6px 8px #000; box-shadow: -4px 6px 8px #000; /* For IE 8 */ -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=8, Direction=225, Color='#000000')"; /* For IE 5.5 - 7 */ filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=8, Direction=225, Color='#000000'); z-index: 1; } /*------------------------------------SCROLLER---------------------------------------------*/ #headlines{ position: absolute; top: 1.3em; right: 2.75em; overflow: hidden; height: 2.5em; width: 24em; background-color: #000000; display: block; z-index: 3; } #news{ position: relative; height: 3.1em; line-height: 2.5em; font-size: 0.8em color: #FFFF99; white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; font-family: Georgia,Arial; } #scrollerglass{ position: absolute; top: 0.95em; right: 2em; height: 52px; width: 410px; border: none; padding: 0.2em 0em 0em 0em; line-height: 0.7em; text-align: center; background-image: url('images/includes/scrollerglass.png'); background-color: transparent; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center; opacity: 20; z-index: 10; } #scrollerglass a i { visibility: hiddn ; } /-------------------------------------NAVIGATION-----------------------------------------/ #nav { position: absolute; top: 5.8em; left: 0.2em; font-family: trebuchet, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; line-height: 3.75em; text-align: center; color: #FFFF00; z-index: 3; } ul.navlist { list-style: none; padding: 0em; margin: 1em; float: left; width: 62.5em; background: transparent; font-size: 1em; } ul.navlist li { position: relative; /*--Declare X and Y axis base for sub navigation--*/ float: left; margin: 0em 1.4em; padding: 0em 0.7em 0em 0em; z-index: 1; } ul.navlist li a{ display: block; text-decoration: none; float: left; border: 0px solid; } ul.navlist li img{ border: 0px solid; } ul.navlist li span { trigger styles--*/ width: 1.2em; height: 5.25em; float: left; background: url(images/links/downlogo.png) no-repeat center top; } ul.navlist li span.subhover { background-position: center bottom; cursor: pointer; } ul.navlist li ul.navdrop { list-style: none; position: absolute; float: left; top: 5.3em; left: -2.4em; height: 15.0em; width: 11.25em; margin: 0; padding: 0.5em 0em 0em 0em; display: none; background-position: center; background-image: url('images/includes/slider.jpg'); background-color: transparent; background-repeat: no-repeat; -moz-box-shadow: -4px 6px 8px #000; -webkit-box-shadow: -4px 6px 8px #000; box-shadow: -4px 6px 8px #000; /* For IE 8 */ -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=8, Direction=225, Color='#000000')"; /* For IE 5.5 - 7 */ filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=8, Direction=225, Color='#000000'); z-index:1; } ul.navlist li ul.navdrop li{ margin: 0em 2.3em 0em 0em; padding: 1em 0em 0em 0em; width: 8em; clear: both; } html ul.navlist li ul.navdrop li a { border: 0px solid; width: 11.25em; } html ul.navlist li ul.navdrop li a:hover { background: transparent; } <div id="banner"> <div id="headlines"> <div id="news"> Whatever we want to promote </div> </div> <div id="scrollerglass"> <a href="vintagecigars.php"> <i>------s-c-r-o-l-l-e-r - - - -l-i-n-k-s--------<br /> <br>------s-c-r-o-l-l-e-r - - - -l-i-n-k-s------</i></a> </div> <div id="nav"> <ul class="navmenu"> <li><a href="index.php"><img src="images/links/home.png" alt="Home" ></a></li> <li><a href="ourbar.php"><img src="images/links/ourbar.png" alt="Our Bar" ></a> <ul class="navdrop"> <li ><a href="ourcocktails.php"><img src="images/links/cockteles.png" alt="Our Cocktails" ></a></li> <li ><a href="celebrate.php"><img src="images/links/celebrate.png" alt="Celebrate in Style" ></a></li> </ul> </li> <li><a href="ourcigars.php"><img src="images/links/ourcigars.png" alt="Our Cigars" ></a> <ul class="navdrop"> <li ><a href="edicioneslimitadas.php"><img src="images/links/edicioneslimitadas.png" alt="Edition Limitadas" ></a></li> <li ><a href="cigartasting.php"><img src="images/links/cigartasting.png" alt="Cigar Tastings" ></a></li> </ul> </li> <li><a href="personalroller.php"><img src="images/links/personalcigar.png" alt="Personal Cigar Roller" ></a></li> <li><a href="galleryentrance.php"><img src="images/links/photogallery.png" alt="Photo Gallery" ></a></li> <li><a href="contactus.php"><img src="images/links/contactus.png" alt="Contact Us" ></a></li> </ul></div></div><!--end banner-->

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract   Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA.   Introduction   A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders.   Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc.   Purpose of Reference Architecture   In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness.   Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices.   Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level:   ·       Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise ·       Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. ·       Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles ·       Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc ·       A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information ·       Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security ·       Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. ·       Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets ·       Has a shorter implementation time and cost   Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO).     Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers   Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider:   ·       In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. ·       Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. ·       Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. ·       Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. ·       Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. ·       Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. ·       Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems   However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape.   Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture   Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges.   “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum.   The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture:   ·       Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements ·       Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. ·       Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) ·       Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services ·       Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem ·       (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks ·       Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products ·       Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products   Drivers of Reference Architecture   The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure.   Telecom reference architectures are today expected to:   ·       Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems ·       Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services ·       Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure ·       Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. ·       Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g.  Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. ·       Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations ·       Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) ·       Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management ·       Lower operating costs to drive profitability   Enterprise Reference Architecture   The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA.   • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture   Telecom Reference Architecture   Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements:   ·       The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. ·       The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. ·       The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. ·       The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes.   NGOSS Architecture Standards are:   ·       Centralized data ·       Loosely coupled distributed systems ·       Application components/re-use  ·       A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations ·       Interoperability to service provider data/processes ·       Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios ·       Workflow automation   The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers,   ·       Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. ·       Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. ·       Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. ·       Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility.   Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture   The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows:   1. Customer Relationship Management   CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.   CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.   The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are   ·       Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. ·       Create and manage customer profiles. ·       Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. ·       Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. ·       Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. ·       Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). ·       Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.   CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing.   2. Billing and Revenue Management   Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. ·       To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. ·       To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. ·       Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. ·       Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. ·       Support prepaid and post-paid rating. ·       Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. ·       Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. ·       Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. ·       Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. ·       Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc.   Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.   3. Mediation   Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.   ·       Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. ·       Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. ·       Validate Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. ·       Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. ·       Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. ·       Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. ·       Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window.   4. Fulfillment   This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; ·       Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; ·       Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; ·       Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; ·       Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; ·       Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; ·       Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and ·       Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer.   These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.   5. Enterprise Management   This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that   ·       Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.;   ·       Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business;   ·       Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc.     (i) Enterprise Risk Management:   Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are:   ·       Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o   Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o   Interconnect bill verification. o   Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o   Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o   Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o   Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized.   ·       Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.   The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows:   o   Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o   Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o   The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o   The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems   (ii) Knowledge Management   This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.   Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to   ·       Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. ·       Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse ·       Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. ·       Run report generator. ·       Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc.   (iii) Document Management   It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system.   (iv) Data Management   It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management.   Key responsibilities of Data Management are   ·       Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. ·       Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) ·       Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. ·       Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.   (v) Business Intelligence   It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:   ·       It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. ·       It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. ·       It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. ·       It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. ·       It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. ·       It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions.   It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer   ·       It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.   (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management   It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations.   (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning   It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.   The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:   ·        It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. ·       It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. ·       It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. ·       It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. ·       It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.   6. External Interfaces/Touch Points   The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including:   ·       Exchange of emails or faxes ·       Call Centers ·       Web Portals ·       Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions   These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.   Typical characteristics of these touch points are   ·       Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine ·       Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment ·       Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application   These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses.   7. Middleware   The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.   ·       As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces ·       Provide a web service framework with service registry. ·       Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. ·       Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. ·       Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. ·       Use standard XML for data exchange. ·       Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. ·       Provide a tracking until the response completion. ·       Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. ·       Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. ·       Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. ·       Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component.   8. Network Elements   The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.   Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.   Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.   9. 3rd Party Applications   3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government.   Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done.   10. Service Delivery Platform   A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction.   SOA Reference Architecture   SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques.   In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:   ·       The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services ·       Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface ·       A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs ·       Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services ·       Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change ·       Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services   ·       A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis   The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits.   Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers.   COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives.   The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers.   The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1.          Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation.   ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc.   CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc.   Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components:   ·       Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges ·       Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured.   MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data.     2.          Enterprise Component Layer:   This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing.   Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are:   ·       Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc.   ·       Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query.   ·       Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design.   Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc.   3.          Integration Layer:   This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime.   • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework.   4.          Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains.   5.          Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services.   6.          Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications.   7.          Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications.   8.          Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance.     9.          EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices:   EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology).   Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey.   Conclusions   Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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• Cisco Unifed Communication integration for Microsoft Lync crashes on Remote Desktop services 2008 R2!

  - by user66267

  Hi everybody i have deployed office communication server 2007 R2 and communicator 2007 R2 and i made integration with Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7.1 in my network, i also uses Remote Desktop Servers 2008 R2 for Thin Client Computers, now that i installed Cisco UC integration client for communicator 2007 R2 (Ver. 8.0.3) or Cisco UC integration client for Microsoft Lync that works fine on PCs but Not on Remote Desktop Servers. i have Three Remote Desktop Servers in a Farm with loadbalancing enabled. all other applications on these RDP servers works fine for 120 active users. some times when i start Cisco UC client on Remote Desktop servers i get the following error "The Port Reguired for callbacks from Cisco unified client framework could not be read, please retry" i also found the folowing log so i think that may be the cause: 2011-01-05 08:24:21,489 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.SingleInstanceManager] [SingleInstanceManager.acquireMutex(0)] - Acquiring Mutex... 2011-01-05 08:24:21,512 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.IPC.PipeServer] [PipeServer.start(0)] - Starting Pipe Server 2011-01-05 08:24:21,516 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.SingleInstanceManager] [SingleInstanceManager.acquireMutex(0)] - Mutex Acquired... 2011-01-05 08:24:25,437 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.process.ProcessUtil] [ProcessUtil.isOtherPRTProcessRunning(0)] - No other instance(s) of ProblemReportingTool.exe found 2011-01-05 08:24:25,438 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - ******************************* 2011-01-05 08:24:25,439 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - **Launching CUCSF Problem Reporting Tool v0.8.3.2** 2011-01-05 08:24:25,440 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - ******************************* 2011-01-05 08:24:25,441 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - Raw input: -reason=Launched by the user from CUCIMOC ver 8.5.105.17095 -file=C:\Users\MA899~1.SAD\AppData\Local\Temp\36\CUCIMOCInstaller.txt 2011-01-05 08:24:25,445 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - Current culture: English (United States) 2011-01-05 08:24:25,448 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.init(0)] - Loading string resources from file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,455 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.context.CLIUtil] [CLIUtil.parse(0)] - Argument -reason Launched by the user from CUCIMOC ver 8.5.105.17095 received 2011-01-05 08:24:25,456 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.context.CLIUtil] [CLIUtil.parse(0)] - Argument -file C:\Users\MA899~1.SAD\AppData\Local\Temp\36\CUCIMOCInstaller.txt received 2011-01-05 08:24:25,457 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.startup(0)] - Launching GUI... 2011-01-05 08:24:25,536 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PROG.PleaseWaitText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,545 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.OKButtonText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,548 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.CancelButtonText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,549 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.ErrorMsgText1 from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,549 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.Title from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,552 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.WindowTitle from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,553 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.AgreeText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,553 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.PrivacyText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,554 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.PrivacyTitle from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,555 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.PrivacyLinkText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,555 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.DescriptionTitle from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,629 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager..ctor(0)] - Starting SysInfoManager... 2011-01-05 08:24:25,634 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: systeminfo.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,669 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: tasklist.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,672 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: ipconfig.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,676 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: netstat.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,684 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: net.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,926 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.launchHardwareInfoThread(0)] - Launching worker thread: HardwareInfo 2011-01-05 08:24:25,928 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getHardWareInfo(0)] - Gathering CPU data 2011-01-05 08:24:26,149 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.launchCSFDirectoryInfoThread(0)] - Gathering CSF Directory Listing 2011-01-05 08:24:26,153 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [CSFDirectoryInfo.getCSFInstallPath(0)] - Retrieving CSF Install Directory 2011-01-05 08:24:26,159 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [CSFDirectoryInfo.getCSFInstallPath(0)] - CSF Install Path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Cisco Systems\Client Services Framework 2011-01-05 08:24:26,162 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.launchWMIInfoThread(0)] - Launching worker thread: WMIInfo 2011-01-05 08:24:26,164 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getWMIInfo(0)] - Gathering Audio info... 2011-01-05 08:24:26,168 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.launchRegistryAndEnvironmentalVarInfoThread(0)] - Launching worker thread: Registry & Environment Variables 2011-01-05 08:24:26,173 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\Cisco Systems, Inc.\Client Services Framework\AdminData\ 2011-01-05 08:24:26,180 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\Policies\Cisco Systems, Inc.\Client Services Framework\AdminData\ 2011-01-05 08:24:26,182 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\Cisco Systems, Inc.\Unified Communications\CUCSF 2011-01-05 08:24:26,183 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment 2011-01-05 08:24:26,184 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment\1.6 2011-01-05 08:24:26,186 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment\1.6.0_17 2011-01-05 08:24:26,188 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment\1.6.0_17\MSI 2011-01-05 08:24:26,190 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.gatherRegistryAndEnvInfo(0)] - Gathering Environment Variables data 2011-01-05 08:24:26,283 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getWMIInfo(0)] - Gathering Video driver info... 2011-01-05 08:24:26,750 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.writeFile(0)] - Creating file: DirectoryInfo.txt 2011-01-05 08:24:26,759 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getWMIInfo(0)] - Gathering Monitor info... 2011-01-05 08:24:34,483 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.gatherFiles(0)] - Config Dir C:\Users\m.sadeghi\AppData\Roaming\Cisco\Unified Communications\ 2011-01-05 08:24:34,530 [WARN ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.addFile(0)] - C:\Users\MA899~1.SAD\AppData\Local\Temp\36\CUCIMOCInstaller.txt not found 2011-01-05 08:24:34,561 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.addSystemInfo(0)] - Waiting for worker threads... 2011-01-05 08:24:38,180 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getHardWareInfo(0)] - Gathering Resolution data 2011-01-05 08:24:55,565 [ERROR] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.addSystemInfo(0)] - One or more worker threads have not returned in a timely manner. Forcing quit. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,568 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.writeFile(0)] - Creating file: SystemInfo.txt 2011-01-05 08:24:55,577 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Checking for files to be excluded 2011-01-05 08:24:55,578 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: d11bfd8f-9745-41db-a35b-200389e65583.dat 2011-01-05 08:24:55,579 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: cacerts 2011-01-05 08:24:55,580 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: Voicemail.2639.20110103081119+0330.wav 2011-01-05 08:24:55,581 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: Voicemail.farhad.20101224165510+0330.wav 2011-01-05 08:24:55,581 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: Voicemail.postmaster.20101224165906+0330.wav 2011-01-05 08:24:55,582 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: VoicemailBeep.wav 2011-01-05 08:24:55,583 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: secModeNone 2011-01-05 08:24:55,586 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Preparing to create zip file... 2011-01-05 08:24:55,588 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - 60 files found 2011-01-05 08:24:55,589 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying .CSFExit.loc to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,595 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CSF.loc to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,597 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CsfAddress.dat to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,600 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CSFLogSetting.dat to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,634 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CSFSecurityKey.dat to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,637 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CommunicationHistory.xml to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,641 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying MehdiSadeghi.cnf.xml to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,751 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying jtapi.jar to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,812 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi.index to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,820 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi01.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,887 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi02.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,968 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi03.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,972 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi04.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,008 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi05.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,038 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi06.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,079 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi07.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,100 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi08.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,140 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi09.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,215 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi10.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,296 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,319 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log.1 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,498 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log.2 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,708 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log.3 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,912 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log.4 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,105 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log.5 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,292 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log.6 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,505 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying tracker.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,523 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying VideoEngineEncryptedTrace.txt to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,542 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying VoiceEngineDebugTrace.txt to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,545 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying VoiceEngineTrace.txt to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,548 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying operationreport.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,551 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying voicemailbox.dat to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,554 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying voicemailfolder.dat to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,558 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying UIPrefs.xml to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,562 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,569 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.1 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:57,752 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.10 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:58,099 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.2 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:58,302 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.3 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:58,517 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.4 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:58,697 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.5 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:58,899 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.6 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,100 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.7 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,303 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.8 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,500 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying uc-client.log.9 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,895 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Cisco.ClickToCall.Common.Core.dll.config to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,915 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying ClickToCall.pref to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,918 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoClickToCall.dll.config to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,928 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoClickToCallContacts.dll.config to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,948 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoPersonName.dll.config to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,980 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying userData.properties to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,988 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying userData.properties.backup to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,990 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying cisco-uc-client.log4net.config to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:59,994 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying cisco-uc-tab.log4net.config to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:25:00,011 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying LocalSettings.xml to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:25:00,025 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Description.txt to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:25:00,028 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying LaunchInfo.txt to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:25:00,031 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying DirectoryInfo.txt to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:25:00,034 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying SystemInfo.txt to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:25:00,036 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying csf-prt.log to temp folder.

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• Cisco Unified Communication integration for Microsoft Lync crashes on Remote Desktop services 2008 R2!

  - by user66267

  Hi everybody i have deployed office communication server 2007 R2 and communicator 2007 R2 and i made integration with Cisco Unified Communication Manager 7.1 in my network, i also use Remote Desktop Servers 2008 R2 for Thin Client Computers, now that i installed Cisco UC integration client for communicator 2007 R2 (Ver. 8.0.3) or Cisco UC integration client for Microsoft Lync that works fine on PCs but Not on Remote Desktop Servers. i have Three Remote Desktop Servers in a Farm with loadbalancing enabled. all other applications on these RDP servers works fine for 120 active users. some times when i start Cisco UC client on Remote Desktop servers i get the following error: "The Port Reguired for callbacks from Cisco unified client framework could not be read, please retry" i also found the folowing log so i think that may be the cause: 2011-01-05 08:24:21,489 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.SingleInstanceManager] [SingleInstanceManager.acquireMutex(0)] - Acquiring Mutex... 2011-01-05 08:24:21,512 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.IPC.PipeServer] [PipeServer.start(0)] - Starting Pipe Server 2011-01-05 08:24:21,516 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.SingleInstanceManager] [SingleInstanceManager.acquireMutex(0)] - Mutex Acquired... 2011-01-05 08:24:25,437 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.process.ProcessUtil] [ProcessUtil.isOtherPRTProcessRunning(0)] - No other instance(s) of ProblemReportingTool.exe found 2011-01-05 08:24:25,438 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - ******************************* 2011-01-05 08:24:25,439 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - **Launching CUCSF Problem Reporting Tool v0.8.3.2** 2011-01-05 08:24:25,440 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - ******************************* 2011-01-05 08:24:25,441 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - Raw input: -reason=Launched by the user from CUCIMOC ver 8.5.105.17095 -file=C:\Users\MA899~1.SAD\AppData\Local\Temp\36\CUCIMOCInstaller.txt 2011-01-05 08:24:25,445 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.Main(0)] - Current culture: English (United States) 2011-01-05 08:24:25,448 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.init(0)] - Loading string resources from file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,455 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.context.CLIUtil] [CLIUtil.parse(0)] - Argument -reason Launched by the user from CUCIMOC ver 8.5.105.17095 received 2011-01-05 08:24:25,456 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.context.CLIUtil] [CLIUtil.parse(0)] - Argument -file C:\Users\MA899~1.SAD\AppData\Local\Temp\36\CUCIMOCInstaller.txt received 2011-01-05 08:24:25,457 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.Controller] [Controller.startup(0)] - Launching GUI... 2011-01-05 08:24:25,536 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PROG.PleaseWaitText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,545 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.OKButtonText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,548 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.CancelButtonText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,549 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.ErrorMsgText1 from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,549 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.Title from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,552 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.WindowTitle from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,553 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.AgreeText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,553 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.PrivacyText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,554 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.PrivacyTitle from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,555 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.PrivacyLinkText from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,555 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.controller.ResourceUtil] [ResourceUtil.getResourceFileString(0)] - Retrieving Key: com.cisco.uc.csf.prt.PF.DescriptionTitle from resource file 2011-01-05 08:24:25,629 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager..ctor(0)] - Starting SysInfoManager... 2011-01-05 08:24:25,634 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: systeminfo.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,669 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: tasklist.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,672 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: ipconfig.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,676 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: netstat.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,684 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.WindowsUtilsInfo] [WindowsUtilsInfo.startWindowsUtilsThreads(0)] - Launching worker thread: net.exe 2011-01-05 08:24:25,926 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.launchHardwareInfoThread(0)] - Launching worker thread: HardwareInfo 2011-01-05 08:24:25,928 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getHardWareInfo(0)] - Gathering CPU data 2011-01-05 08:24:26,149 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.launchCSFDirectoryInfoThread(0)] - Gathering CSF Directory Listing 2011-01-05 08:24:26,153 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [CSFDirectoryInfo.getCSFInstallPath(0)] - Retrieving CSF Install Directory 2011-01-05 08:24:26,159 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [CSFDirectoryInfo.getCSFInstallPath(0)] - CSF Install Path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Cisco Systems\Client Services Framework 2011-01-05 08:24:26,162 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.launchWMIInfoThread(0)] - Launching worker thread: WMIInfo 2011-01-05 08:24:26,164 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getWMIInfo(0)] - Gathering Audio info... 2011-01-05 08:24:26,168 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.launchRegistryAndEnvironmentalVarInfoThread(0)] - Launching worker thread: Registry & Environment Variables 2011-01-05 08:24:26,173 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\Cisco Systems, Inc.\Client Services Framework\AdminData\ 2011-01-05 08:24:26,180 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\Policies\Cisco Systems, Inc.\Client Services Framework\AdminData\ 2011-01-05 08:24:26,182 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\Cisco Systems, Inc.\Unified Communications\CUCSF 2011-01-05 08:24:26,183 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment 2011-01-05 08:24:26,184 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment\1.6 2011-01-05 08:24:26,186 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment\1.6.0_17 2011-01-05 08:24:26,188 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.generateRegString(0)] - Gathering Registry data under: Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment\1.6.0_17\MSI 2011-01-05 08:24:26,190 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.RegistryEnvironmentInfo] [RegistryEnvironmentInfo.gatherRegistryAndEnvInfo(0)] - Gathering Environment Variables data 2011-01-05 08:24:26,283 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getWMIInfo(0)] - Gathering Video driver info... 2011-01-05 08:24:26,750 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.writeFile(0)] - Creating file: DirectoryInfo.txt 2011-01-05 08:24:26,759 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getWMIInfo(0)] - Gathering Monitor info... 2011-01-05 08:24:34,483 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.gatherFiles(0)] - Config Dir C:\Users\m.sadeghi\AppData\Roaming\Cisco\Unified Communications\ 2011-01-05 08:24:34,530 [WARN ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.addFile(0)] - C:\Users\MA899~1.SAD\AppData\Local\Temp\36\CUCIMOCInstaller.txt not found 2011-01-05 08:24:34,561 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.addSystemInfo(0)] - Waiting for worker threads... 2011-01-05 08:24:38,180 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.CSFDirectoryInfo] [HardwareInfo.getHardWareInfo(0)] - Gathering Resolution data 2011-01-05 08:24:55,565 [ERROR] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.addSystemInfo(0)] - One or more worker threads have not returned in a timely manner. Forcing quit. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,568 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.sysinfo.SysInfoManager] [SysInfoManager.writeFile(0)] - Creating file: SystemInfo.txt 2011-01-05 08:24:55,577 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Checking for files to be excluded 2011-01-05 08:24:55,578 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: d11bfd8f-9745-41db-a35b-200389e65583.dat 2011-01-05 08:24:55,579 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: cacerts 2011-01-05 08:24:55,580 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: Voicemail.2639.20110103081119+0330.wav 2011-01-05 08:24:55,581 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: Voicemail.farhad.20101224165510+0330.wav 2011-01-05 08:24:55,581 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: Voicemail.postmaster.20101224165906+0330.wav 2011-01-05 08:24:55,582 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: VoicemailBeep.wav 2011-01-05 08:24:55,583 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.FileUtil] [FileUtil.removePrivateFiles(0)] - Excluding: secModeNone 2011-01-05 08:24:55,586 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Preparing to create zip file... 2011-01-05 08:24:55,588 [INFO ] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - 60 files found 2011-01-05 08:24:55,589 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying .CSFExit.loc to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,595 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CSF.loc to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,597 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CsfAddress.dat to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,600 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CSFLogSetting.dat to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,634 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CSFSecurityKey.dat to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,637 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CommunicationHistory.xml to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,641 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying MehdiSadeghi.cnf.xml to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,751 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying jtapi.jar to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,812 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi.index to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,820 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi01.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,887 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi02.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,968 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi03.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:55,972 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi04.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,008 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi05.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,038 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi06.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,079 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi07.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,100 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi08.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,140 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi09.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,215 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying CiscoJtapi10.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,296 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,319 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log.1 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,498 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log.2 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,708 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - Copying Core.log.3 to temp folder. 2011-01-05 08:24:56,912 [DEBUG] [com.cisco.uc.ucsf.ProblemReportingTool.file.Zip] [Zip.zipMultipleFiles(0)] - 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• Red Gate Coder interviews: Alex Davies

  - by Michael Williamson

  Alex Davies has been a software engineer at Red Gate since graduating from university, and is currently busy working on .NET Demon. We talked about tackling parallel programming with his actors framework, a scientific approach to debugging, and how JavaScript is going to affect the programming languages we use in years to come. So, if we start at the start, how did you get started in programming? When I was seven or eight, I was given a BBC Micro for Christmas. I had asked for a Game Boy, but my dad thought it would be better to give me a proper computer. For a year or so, I only played games on it, but then I found the user guide for writing programs in it. I gradually started doing more stuff on it and found it fun. I liked creating. As I went into senior school I continued to write stuff on there, trying to write games that weren’t very good. I got a real computer when I was fourteen and found ways to write BASIC on it. Visual Basic to start with, and then something more interesting than that. How did you learn to program? Was there someone helping you out? Absolutely not! I learnt out of a book, or by experimenting. I remember the first time I found a loop, I was like “Oh my God! I don’t have to write out the same line over and over and over again any more. It’s amazing!” When did you think this might be something that you actually wanted to do as a career? For a long time, I thought it wasn’t something that you would do as a career, because it was too much fun to be a career. I thought I’d do chemistry at university and some kind of career based on chemical engineering. And then I went to a careers fair at school when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it just didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought “I could be a programmer, and there’s loads of money there, and I’m good at it, and it’s fun”, but also that I shouldn’t spoil my hobby. Now I don’t really program in my spare time any more, which is a bit of a shame, but I program all the rest of the time, so I can live with it. Do you think you learnt much about programming at university? Yes, definitely! I went into university knowing how to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. However, I didn’t have the language to talk about algorithms, so the algorithms course in my first year was massively important. Learning other language paradigms like functional programming was really good for breadth of understanding. Functional programming influences normal programming through design rather than actually using it all the time. I draw inspiration from it to write imperative programs which I think is actually becoming really fashionable now, but I’ve been doing it for ages. I did it first! There were also some courses on really odd programming languages, a bit of Prolog, a little bit of C. Having a little bit of each of those is something that I would have never done on my own, so it was important. And then there are knowledge-based courses which are about not programming itself but things that have been programmed like TCP. Those are really important for examples for how to approach things. Did you do any internships while you were at university? Yeah, I spent both of my summers at the same company. I thought I could code well before I went there. Looking back at the crap that I produced, it was only surpassed in its crappiness by all of the other code already in that company. I’m so much better at writing nice code now than I used to be back then. Was there just not a culture of looking after your code? There was, they just didn’t hire people for their abilities in that area. They hired people for raw IQ. The first indicator of it going wrong was that they didn’t have any computer scientists, which is a bit odd in a programming company. But even beyond that they didn’t have people who learnt architecture from anyone else. Most of them had started straight out of university, so never really had experience or mentors to learn from. There wasn’t the experience to draw from to teach each other. In the second half of my second internship, I was being given tasks like looking at new technologies and teaching people stuff. Interns shouldn’t be teaching people how to do their jobs! All interns are going to have little nuggets of things that you don’t know about, but they shouldn’t consistently be the ones who know the most. It’s not a good environment to learn. I was going to ask how you found working with people who were more experienced than you… When I reached Red Gate, I found some people who were more experienced programmers than me, and that was difficult. I’ve been coding since I was tiny. At university there were people who were cleverer than me, but there weren’t very many who were more experienced programmers than me. During my internship, I didn’t find anyone who I classed as being a noticeably more experienced programmer than me. So, it was a shock to the system to have valid criticisms rather than just formatting criticisms. However, Red Gate’s not so big on the actual code review, at least it wasn’t when I started. We did an entire product release and then somebody looked over all of the UI of that product which I’d written and say what they didn’t like. By that point, it was way too late and I’d disagree with them. Do you think the lack of code reviews was a bad thing? I think if there’s going to be any oversight of new people, then it should be continuous rather than chunky. For me I don’t mind too much, I could go out and get oversight if I wanted it, and in those situations I felt comfortable without it. If I was managing the new person, then maybe I’d be keener on oversight and then the right way to do it is continuously and in very, very small chunks. Have you had any significant projects you’ve worked on outside of a job? When I was a teenager I wrote all sorts of stuff. I used to write games, I derived how to do isomorphic projections myself once. I didn’t know what the word was so I couldn’t Google for it, so I worked it out myself. It was horrifically complicated. But it sort of tailed off when I started at university, and is now basically zero. If I do side-projects now, they tend to be work-related side projects like my actors framework, NAct, which I started in a down tools week. Could you explain a little more about NAct? It is a little C# framework for writing parallel code more easily. Parallel programming is difficult when you need to write to shared data. Sometimes parallel programming is easy because you don’t need to write to shared data. When you do need to access shared data, you could just have your threads pile in and do their work, but then you would screw up the data because the threads would trample on each other’s toes. You could lock, but locks are really dangerous if you’re using more than one of them. You get interactions like deadlocks, and that’s just nasty. Actors instead allows you to say this piece of data belongs to this thread of execution, and nobody else can read it. If you want to read it, then ask that thread of execution for a piece of it by sending a message, and it will send the data back by a message. And that avoids deadlocks as long as you follow some obvious rules about not making your actors sit around waiting for other actors to do something. There are lots of ways to write actors, NAct allows you to do it as if it was method calls on other objects, which means you get all the strong type-safety that C# programmers like. Do you think that this is suitable for the majority of parallel programming, or do you think it’s only suitable for specific cases? It’s suitable for most difficult parallel programming. If you’ve just got a hundred web requests which are all independent of each other, then I wouldn’t bother because it’s easier to just spin them up in separate threads and they can proceed independently of each other. But where you’ve got difficult parallel programming, where you’ve got multiple threads accessing multiple bits of data in multiple ways at different times, then actors is at least as good as all other ways, and is, I reckon, easier to think about. When you’re using actors, you presumably still have to write your code in a different way from you would otherwise using single-threaded code. You can’t use actors with any methods that have return types, because you’re not allowed to call into another actor and wait for it. If you want to get a piece of data out of another actor, then you’ve got to use tasks so that you can use “async” and “await” to await asynchronously for it. But other than that, you can still stick things in classes so it’s not too different really. Rather than having thousands of objects with mutable state, you can use component-orientated design, where there are only a few mutable classes which each have a small number of instances. Then there can be thousands of immutable objects. If you tend to do that anyway, then actors isn’t much of a jump. If I’ve already built my system without any parallelism, how hard is it to add actors to exploit all eight cores on my desktop? Usually pretty easy. If you can identify even one boundary where things look like messages and you have components where some objects live on one side and these other objects live on the other side, then you can have a granddaddy object on one side be an actor and it will parallelise as it goes across that boundary. Not too difficult. If we do get 1000-core desktop PCs, do you think actors will scale up? It’s hard. There are always in the order of twenty to fifty actors in my whole program because I tend to write each component as actors, and I tend to have one instance of each component. So this won’t scale to a thousand cores. What you can do is write data structures out of actors. I use dictionaries all over the place, and if you need a dictionary that is going to be accessed concurrently, then you could build one of those out of actors in no time. You can use queuing to marshal requests between different slices of the dictionary which are living on different threads. So it’s like a distributed hash table but all of the chunks of it are on the same machine. That means that each of these thousand processors has cached one small piece of the dictionary. I reckon it wouldn’t be too big a leap to start doing proper parallelism. Do you think it helps if actors get baked into the language, similarly to Erlang? Erlang is excellent in that it has thread-local garbage collection. C# doesn’t, so there’s a limit to how well C# actors can possibly scale because there’s a single garbage collected heap shared between all of them. When you do a global garbage collection, you’ve got to stop all of the actors, which is seriously expensive, whereas in Erlang garbage collections happen per-actor, so they’re insanely cheap. However, Erlang deviated from all the sensible language design that people have used recently and has just come up with crazy stuff. You can definitely retrofit thread-local garbage collection to .NET, and then it’s quite well-suited to support actors, even if it’s not baked into the language. Speaking of language design, do you have a favourite programming language? I’ll choose a language which I’ve never written before. I like the idea of Scala. It sounds like C#, only with some of the niggles gone. I enjoy writing static types. It means you don’t have to writing tests so much. When you say it doesn’t have some of the niggles? C# doesn’t allow the use of a property as a method group. It doesn’t have Scala case classes, or sum types, where you can do a switch statement and the compiler checks that you’ve checked all the cases, which is really useful in functional-style programming. Pattern-matching, in other words. That’s actually the major niggle. C# is pretty good, and I’m quite happy with C#. And what about going even further with the type system to remove the need for tests to something like Haskell? Or is that a step too far? I’m quite a pragmatist, I don’t think I could deal with trying to write big systems in languages with too few other users, especially when learning how to structure things. I just don’t know anyone who can teach me, and the Internet won’t teach me. That’s the main reason I wouldn’t use it. If I turned up at a company that writes big systems in Haskell, I would have no objection to that, but I wouldn’t instigate it. What about things in C#? For instance, there’s contracts in C#, so you can try to statically verify a bit more about your code. Do you think that’s useful, or just not worthwhile? I’ve not really tried it. My hunch is that it needs to be built into the language and be quite mathematical for it to work in real life, and that doesn’t seem to have ended up true for C# contracts. I don’t think anyone who’s tried them thinks they’re any good. I might be wrong. On a slightly different note, how do you like to debug code? I think I’m quite an odd debugger. I use guesswork extremely rarely, especially if something seems quite difficult to debug. I’ve been bitten spending hours and hours on guesswork and not being scientific about debugging in the past, so now I’m scientific to a fault. What I want is to see the bug happening in the debugger, to step through the bug happening. To watch the program going from a valid state to an invalid state. When there’s a bug and I can’t work out why it’s happening, I try to find some piece of evidence which places the bug in one section of the code. From that experiment, I binary chop on the possible causes of the bug. I suppose that means binary chopping on places in the code, or binary chopping on a stage through a processing cycle. Basically, I’m very stupid about how I debug. I won’t make any guesses, I won’t use any intuition, I will only identify the experiment that’s going to binary chop most effectively and repeat rather than trying to guess anything. I suppose it’s quite top-down. Is most of the time then spent in the debugger? Absolutely, if at all possible I will never debug using print statements or logs. I don’t really hold much stock in outputting logs. If there’s any bug which can be reproduced locally, I’d rather do it in the debugger than outputting logs. And with SmartAssembly error reporting, there’s not a lot that can’t be either observed in an error report and just fixed, or reproduced locally. And in those other situations, maybe I’ll use logs. But I hate using logs. You stare at the log, trying to guess what’s going on, and that’s exactly what I don’t like doing. You have to just look at it and see does this look right or wrong. We’ve covered how you get to grip with bugs. How do you get to grips with an entire codebase? I watch it in the debugger. I find little bugs and then try to fix them, and mostly do it by watching them in the debugger and gradually getting an understanding of how the code works using my process of binary chopping. I have to do a lot of reading and watching code to choose where my slicing-in-half experiment is going to be. The last time I did it was SmartAssembly. The old code was a complete mess, but at least it did things top to bottom. There wasn’t too much of some of the big abstractions where flow of control goes all over the place, into a base class and back again. Code’s really hard to understand when that happens. So I like to choose a little bug and try to fix it, and choose a bigger bug and try to fix it. Definitely learn by doing. I want to always have an aim so that I get a little achievement after every few hours of debugging. Once I’ve learnt the codebase I might be able to fix all the bugs in an hour, but I’d rather be using them as an aim while I’m learning the codebase. If I was a maintainer of a codebase, what should I do to make it as easy as possible for you to understand? Keep distinct concepts in different places. And name your stuff so that it’s obvious which concepts live there. You shouldn’t have some variable that gets set miles up the top of somewhere, and then is read miles down to choose some later behaviour. I’m talking from a very much SmartAssembly point of view because the old SmartAssembly codebase had tons and tons of these things, where it would read some property of the code and then deal with it later. Just thousands of variables in scope. Loads of things to think about. If you can keep concepts separate, then it aids me in my process of fixing bugs one at a time, because each bug is going to more or less be understandable in the one place where it is. And what about tests? Do you think they help at all? I’ve never had the opportunity to learn a codebase which has had tests, I don’t know what it’s like! What about when you’re actually developing? How useful do you find tests in finding bugs or regressions? Finding regressions, absolutely. Running bits of code that would be quite hard to run otherwise, definitely. It doesn’t happen very often that a test finds a bug in the first place. I don’t really buy nebulous promises like tests being a good way to think about the spec of the code. My thinking goes something like “This code works at the moment, great, ship it! Ah, there’s a way that this code doesn’t work. Okay, write a test, demonstrate that it doesn’t work, fix it, use the test to demonstrate that it’s now fixed, and keep the test for future regressions.” The most valuable tests are for bugs that have actually happened at some point, because bugs that have actually happened at some point, despite the fact that you think you’ve fixed them, are way more likely to appear again than new bugs are. Does that mean that when you write your code the first time, there are no tests? Often. The chance of there being a bug in a new feature is relatively unaffected by whether I’ve written a test for that new feature because I’m not good enough at writing tests to think of bugs that I would have written into the code. So not writing regression tests for all of your code hasn’t affected you too badly? There are different kinds of features. Some of them just always work, and are just not flaky, they just continue working whatever you throw at them. Maybe because the type-checker is particularly effective around them. Writing tests for those features which just tend to always work is a waste of time. And because it’s a waste of time I’ll tend to wait until a feature has demonstrated its flakiness by having bugs in it before I start trying to test it. You can get a feel for whether it’s going to be flaky code as you’re writing it. I try to write it to make it not flaky, but there are some things that are just inherently flaky. And very occasionally, I’ll think “this is going to be flaky” as I’m writing, and then maybe do a test, but not most of the time. How do you think your programming style has changed over time? I’ve got clearer about what the right way of doing things is. I used to flip-flop a lot between different ideas. Five years ago I came up with some really good ideas and some really terrible ideas. All of them seemed great when I thought of them, but they were quite diverse ideas, whereas now I have a smaller set of reliable ideas that are actually good for structuring code. So my code is probably more similar to itself than it used to be back in the day, when I was trying stuff out. I’ve got more disciplined about encapsulation, I think. There are operational things like I use actors more now than I used to, and that forces me to use immutability more than I used to. The first code that I wrote in Red Gate was the memory profiler UI, and that was an actor, I just didn’t know the name of it at the time. I don’t really use object-orientation. By object-orientation, I mean having n objects of the same type which are mutable. I want a constant number of objects that are mutable, and they should be different types. I stick stuff in dictionaries and then have one thing that owns the dictionary and puts stuff in and out of it. That’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen recently. I think maybe I’m doing functional programming. Possibly. It’s plausible. If you had to summarise the essence of programming in a pithy sentence, how would you do it? Programming is the form of art that, without losing any of the beauty of architecture or fine art, allows you to produce things that people love and you make money from. So you think it’s an art rather than a science? It’s a little bit of engineering, a smidgeon of maths, but it’s not science. Like architecture, programming is on that boundary between art and engineering. If you want to do it really nicely, it’s mostly art. You can get away with doing architecture and programming entirely by having a good engineering mind, but you’re not going to produce anything nice. You’re not going to have joy doing it if you’re an engineering mind. Architects who are just engineering minds are not going to enjoy their job. I suppose engineering is the foundation on which you build the art. Exactly. How do you think programming is going to change over the next ten years? There will be an unfortunate shift towards dynamically-typed languages, because of JavaScript. JavaScript has an unfair advantage. JavaScript’s unfair advantage will cause more people to be exposed to dynamically-typed languages, which means other dynamically-typed languages crop up and the best features go into dynamically-typed languages. Then people conflate the good features with the fact that it’s dynamically-typed, and more investment goes into dynamically-typed languages. They end up better, so people use them. What about the idea of compiling other languages, possibly statically-typed, to JavaScript? It’s a reasonable idea. I would like to do it, but I don’t think enough people in the world are going to do it to make it pick up. The hordes of beginners are the lifeblood of a language community. They are what makes there be good tools and what makes there be vibrant community websites. And any particular thing which is the same as JavaScript only with extra stuff added to it, although it might be technically great, is not going to have the hordes of beginners. JavaScript is always to be quickest and easiest way for a beginner to start programming in the browser. And dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners. Compilers are pretty scary and beginners don’t write big code. And having your errors come up in the same place, whether they’re statically checkable errors or not, is quite nice for a beginner. If someone asked me to teach them some programming, I’d teach them JavaScript. If dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners, when do you think the benefits of static typing start to kick in? The value of having a statically typed program is in the tools that rely on the static types to produce a smooth IDE experience rather than actually telling me my compile errors. And only once you’re experienced enough a programmer that having a really smooth IDE experience makes a blind bit of difference, does static typing make a blind bit of difference. So it’s not really about size of codebase. If I go and write up a tiny program, I’m still going to get value out of writing it in C# using ReSharper because I’m experienced with C# and ReSharper enough to be able to write code five times faster if I have that help. Any other visions of the future? Nobody’s going to use actors. Because everyone’s going to be running on single-core VMs connected over network-ready protocols like JSON over HTTP. So, parallelism within one operating system is going to die. But until then, you should use actors. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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