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• .NET Security Part 3

  - by Simon Cooper

  You write a security-related application that allows addins to be used. These addins (as dlls) can be downloaded from anywhere, and, if allowed to run full-trust, could open a security hole in your application. So you want to restrict what the addin dlls can do, using a sandboxed appdomain, as explained in my previous posts. But there needs to be an interaction between the code running in the sandbox and the code that created the sandbox, so the sandboxed code can control or react to things that happen in the controlling application. Sandboxed code needs to be able to call code outside the sandbox. Now, there are various methods of allowing cross-appdomain calls, the two main ones being .NET Remoting with MarshalByRefObject, and WCF named pipes. I’m not going to cover the details of setting up such mechanisms here, or which you should choose for your specific situation; there are plenty of blogs and tutorials covering such issues elsewhere. What I’m going to concentrate on here is the more general problem of running fully-trusted code within a sandbox, which is required in most methods of app-domain communication and control. Defining assemblies as fully-trusted In my last post, I mentioned that when you create a sandboxed appdomain, you can pass in a list of assembly strongnames that run as full-trust within the appdomain: // get the Assembly object for the assembly Assembly assemblyWithApi = ... // get the StrongName from the assembly's collection of evidence StrongName apiStrongName = assemblyWithApi.Evidence.GetHostEvidence<StrongName>(); // create the sandbox AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain( "Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms, apiStrongName); Any assembly that is loaded into the sandbox with a strong name the same as one in the list of full-trust strong names is unconditionally given full-trust permissions within the sandbox, irregardless of permissions and sandbox setup. This is very powerful! You should only use this for assemblies that you trust as much as the code creating the sandbox. So now you have a class that you want the sandboxed code to call: // within assemblyWithApi public class MyApi { public static void MethodToDoThings() { ... } } // within the sandboxed dll public class UntrustedSandboxedClass { public void DodgyMethod() { ... MyApi.MethodToDoThings(); ... } } However, if you try to do this, you get quite an ugly exception: MethodAccessException: Attempt by security transparent method ‘UntrustedSandboxedClass.DodgyMethod()’ to access security critical method ‘MyApi.MethodToDoThings()’ failed. Security transparency, which I covered in my first post in the series, has entered the picture. Partially-trusted code runs at the Transparent security level, fully-trusted code runs at the Critical security level, and Transparent code cannot under any circumstances call Critical code. Security transparency and AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute So the solution is easy, right? Make MethodToDoThings SafeCritical, then the transparent code running in the sandbox can call the api: [SecuritySafeCritical] public static void MethodToDoThings() { ... } However, this doesn’t solve the problem. When you try again, exactly the same exception is thrown; MethodToDoThings is still running as Critical code. What’s going on? By default, a fully-trusted assembly always runs Critical code, irregardless of any security attributes on its types and methods. This is because it may not have been designed in a secure way when called from transparent code – as we’ll see in the next post, it is easy to open a security hole despite all the security protections .NET 4 offers. When exposing an assembly to be called from partially-trusted code, the entire assembly needs a security audit to decide what should be transparent, safe critical, or critical, and close any potential security holes. This is where AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute (APTCA) comes in. Without this attribute, fully-trusted assemblies run Critical code, and partially-trusted assemblies run Transparent code. When this attribute is applied to an assembly, it confirms that the assembly has had a full security audit, and it is safe to be called from untrusted code. All code in that assembly runs as Transparent, but SecurityCriticalAttribute and SecuritySafeCriticalAttribute can be applied to individual types and methods to make those run at the Critical or SafeCritical levels, with all the restrictions that entails. So, to allow the sandboxed assembly to call the full-trust API assembly, simply add APCTA to the API assembly: [assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers] and everything works as you expect. The sandboxed dll can call your API dll, and from there communicate with the rest of the application. Conclusion That’s the basics of running a full-trust assembly in a sandboxed appdomain, and allowing a sandboxed assembly to access it. The key is AllowPartiallyTrustedCallersAttribute, which is what lets partially-trusted code call a fully-trusted assembly. However, an assembly with APTCA applied to it means that you have run a full security audit of every type and member in the assembly. If you don’t, then you could inadvertently open a security hole. I’ll be looking at ways this can happen in my next post.

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• SQLAuthority News – 7th Anniversary of Blog – A Personal Note

  - by Pinal Dave

  Special Day Today is a very special day – seven years ago I blogged for the very first time.  Seven years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know how to blog, or even what a blog was or what to write.  I was working as a DBA, and I was trying to solve a problem – at my job, there were a few issues I had to fix again and again and again.  There were days when I was rewriting the same solution over and over, and there were times when I would get very frustrated because I could not write the same elegant solution that I had written before.  I came up with a solution to this problem – posting these solutions online, where I could access them whenever I needed them.  At that point, I had no idea what a blog was, or even how the internet worked, I had no idea that a blog would be visible to others.  Can you believe it? Google it on Yahoo! After a few posts on this “blog,” there was a surprise for me – an e-mail saying that someone had left me a comment.  I was surprised, because I didn’t even know you could comment on a blog!  I logged on and read my comment.  It said: “I like your script,but there is a small bug.  If you could fix it, it will run on multiple other versions of SQL Server.”  I was like, “wow, someone figured out how to find my blog, and they figured out how to fix my script!”  I found the bug, I fixed the script, and a wrote a thank you note to the guy.  My first question for him was: how did you figure it out – not the script, but how to find my blog?  He said he found it from Yahoo Search (this was in the time before Google, believe it or not). From that day, my life changed.  I wrote a few more posts, I got a few more comments, and I started to watch my traffic.  People were reading, commenting, and giving feedback.  At the end of the day, people enjoyed what I was writing.  This was a fantastic feeling!  I never thought I would be writing for others.  Even today, I don’t feel like I am writing for others, but that I am simply posting what I am learning every day.  From that very first day, I decided that I would not change my intent or my blog’s purpose. 72 Million Views – 2600 Posts – 57000 comments – 10 books – 9 courses Today, this blog is my habit, my addiction, my baby.  Every day I try to learn something new, and that lesson gets posted on the blog.  Lately there have been days where I am traveling for a full 24 hours, but even on those days I try to learn something new, and later when I have free time, I will still post it to the blog.  Because of this habit, this blog has over 72 millions views, I have written more than 2600 posts, and there are 57,000 comments and counting.  I have also written 10 books, 9 courses, and learned so many things.  This blog has given me back so much more than I ever put it into it.  It gave me an education, a reason to learn something new every day, and a way to connect to people.  I like to think of it as a learning chain, a relay where we all pass knowledge from one to another. Never Ending Journey When I started the blog, I thought I would write for a few days and stop, but now after seven years I haven’t stopped and I have no intention of stopping!  However, change happens, and for this blog it will start today.  This blog started as a single resource for SQL Server, but now it has grown beyond, to Sharepoint, Personal Development, Developer Training, MySQL, Big Data, and lots of other things.  Truly speaking, this blog is more than just SQL Server, and that was always my intention.  I named it “SQL Authority,” not “SQL Server Authority”!  Loudly and clearly, I would like to announce that I am going to go back to my roots and start writing more about SQL, more about big data, and more about the other technology like relational databases, MySQL, Oracle, and others.  My goal is not to become a comprehensive resource for every technology, my goal is to learn something new every day – and now it can be so much more than just SQL Server.  I will learn it, and post it here for you. I have written a very long post on this anniversary, but here is the summary: Thank You.  You all have been wonderful.  Seven years is a long journey, and it makes me emotional.  I have been “with” this blog before I met my wife, before we had our daughter.  This blog is like a fourth member of the family.  Keep reading, keep commenting, keep supporting.  Thank you all. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: About Me, MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• Monitoring your WCF Web Apis with AppFabric

  - by cibrax

  The other day, Ron Jacobs made public a template in the Visual Studio Gallery for enabling monitoring capabilities to any existing WCF Http service hosted in Windows AppFabric. I thought it would be a cool idea to reuse some of that for doing the same thing on the new WCF Web Http stack. Windows AppFabric provides a dashboard that you can use to dig into some metrics about the services usage, such as number of calls, errors or information about different events during a service call. Those events not only include information about the WCF pipeline, but also custom events that any developer can inject and make sense for troubleshooting issues.      This monitoring capabilities can be enabled on any specific IIS virtual directory by using the AppFabric configuration tool or adding the following configuration sections to your existing web app, <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> <diagnostics etwProviderId="3e99c707-3503-4f33-a62d-2289dfa40d41"> <endToEndTracing propagateActivity="true" messageFlowTracing="true" /> </diagnostics> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name=""> <etwTracking profileName="EndToEndMonitoring Tracking Profile" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel>   <microsoft.applicationServer> <monitoring> <default enabled="true" connectionStringName="ApplicationServerMonitoringConnectionString" monitoringLevel="EndToEndMonitoring" /> </monitoring> </microsoft.applicationServer> Bad news is that none of the configuration above can be easily set on code by using the new configuration model for WCF Web stack.  A good thing is that you easily disable it in the configuration when you no longer need it, and also uses ETW, a general-purpose and high-speed tracing facility provided by the operating system (it’s part of the windows kernel). By adding that configuration section, AppFabric will start monitoring your service automatically and providing some basic event information about the service calls. You need some custom code for injecting custom events in the monitoring data. What I did here is to copy and refactor the “WCFUserEventProvider” class provided as sample in the Ron’s template to make it more TDD friendly when using IoC. I created a simple interface “ILogger” that any service (or resource) can use to inject custom events or monitoring information in the AppFabric database. public interface ILogger { bool WriteError(string name, string format, params object[] args); bool WriteWarning(string name, string format, params object[] args); bool WriteInformation(string name, string format, params object[] args); } The “WCFUserEventProvider” class implements this interface by making possible to send the events to the AppFabric monitoring database. The service or resource implementation can receive an “ILogger” as part of the constructor. [ServiceContract] [Export] public class OrderResource { IOrderRepository repository; ILogger logger;   [ImportingConstructor] public OrderResource(IOrderRepository repository, ILogger logger) { this.repository = repository; this.logger = logger; }   [WebGet(UriTemplate = "{id}")] public Order Get(string id, HttpResponseMessage response) { var order = this.repository.All.FirstOrDefault(o => o.OrderId == int.Parse(id, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)); if (order == null) { response.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.NotFound; response.Content = new StringContent("Order not found"); }   this.logger.WriteInformation("Order Requested", "Order Id {0}", id);   return order; } } The example above uses “MEF” as IoC for injecting a repository and the logger implementation into the service. You can also see how the logger is used to write an information event in the monitoring database. The following image illustrates how the custom event is injected and the information becomes available for any user in the dashboard. An issue that you might run into and I hope the WCF and AppFabric teams fixed soon is that any WCF service that uses friendly URLs with ASP.NET routing does not get listed as a available service in the WCF services tab in the AppFabric console. The complete example is available to download from here.

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• Subscribable World Cup 2010 Calendar

  - by jamiet

  I bang on quite a lot on this blog about ways in which data can get published over the web and one of the most interesting ways, in my opinion, of publishing data in a structured manner that is well understood is to use the iCalendar specification. There isn’t much information in the world that doesn’t have some concept of “when” so iCalendar is a great way of distributing that information. You have probably used iCalendar at some point without even knowing about it. All files with a .ics suffix are iCalendar format files and that is why you can happily import them into Outlook, Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar etc… where they can be parsed and have the semantic data (when, where and who) extracted from them. Importing of iCalendar format data is really only half the trick though; in my opinion the real value of iCalendar-formatted calendar is the ability to subscribe to them. Subscribing has a simple benefit over importing but that single benefit is of massive importance: a subscriber to an iCalendar calendar can periodically check to see if any updates have been made and, if they have, automatically update the local copy. The real benefit to the user is the productivity gain – a single update to an iCalendar means that all subscribers are automatically made aware of the change and there is zero effort on the part of the subscriber; as my former colleague Howard van Rooijen is fond of saying, “work smarter not harder” – nowhere is this edict more ably demonstrated than subscribing versus importing of calendars. If you want to read some more thoughts about iCalendar then go and read my past blog post Calendar syndication - My big hope for 2009's breakthrough technology or better still go and seek out Jon Udell who speaks very authoritatively on the issue of iCalendar. With this subject of iCalendar on my mind I was interested to discover (via Steve Clayton’s blog post Download the world cup fixtures) that the BBC had made a .ics file available containing all of the matches in the upcoming World Cup. As you can probably guess this was a file that was made available so that it could be imported into your calendar of choice. It had one obvious downside though, right now nobody knows who is going to be playing in the knock-out stages so the calendar looks like this: with no teams being named after 25th June. How much more useful would this calendar have been if the BBC had made it possible to subscribe to the calendar instead, thus the calendar could be updated with the teams for the knock out stages when they are known and every subscriber would have a permanently up-to-date record of all the fixtures in their calendar. Better still, the calendar could be updated with match results as well or perhaps even post a match report from the BBC sport pages; when calendars are made subscribable a sea of opportunity opens up for distribution of information. So with that in mind I have decided to go one better than the BBC. I have imported their .ics into a brand new Hotmail calendar and made it publicly available at the following URLs: HTML http://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/index.html iCalendar webcal://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/calendar.ics The link you’re really interested in is the second one - click on that and it should open up in your calendar software of choice. Or, if you want to view it in an online calendar such as Hotmail Calendar or Google Calendar, copy and paste that URL into the appropriate place. Some people have told me they’re having trouble with the iCalendar link in which case hit the HTML link and then click “View ICS” at the resultant web page: I shall endeavour to keep the calendar updated throughout the World Cup and even if I don’t you’re no worse off than if you had imported the BBC’s .ics file so why not give it a try? If I do keep it up to date then you will have a permanent record of the 2010 World Cup available in your calendar. Forever. If you have your calendar synced to your smartphone then you’ll be carrying match reports around with you without you having to do a single thing. Surely that’s worth a quick click isn’t it?   If you have any thoughts let me have them in the comments below. Thanks for reading. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Monitoring Events in your BPEL Runtime - RSS Feeds?

  - by Ramkumar Menon

  @10g - It had been a while since I'd tried something different. so here's what I did this week!Whenever our Developers deployed processes to the BPEL runtime, or perhaps when a process gets turned off due to connectivity issues, or maybe someone retired a process, I needed to know. So here's what I did. Step 1: Downloaded Quartz libraries and went through the documentation to understand what it takes to schedule a recurring job. Step 2: Cranked out two components using Oracle JDeveloper. [Within a new Web Project] a) A simple Java Class named FeedUpdater that extends org.quartz.Job. All this class does is to connect to your BPEL Runtime [via opmn:ormi] and fetch all events that occured in the last "n" minutes. events? - If it doesn't ring a bell - its right there on the BPEL Console. If you click on "Administration > Process Log" - what you see are events.The API to retrieve the events is //get the locator reference for the domain you are interested in.Locator l = .... //Predicate to retrieve events for last "n" minutesWhereCondition wc = new WhereCondition(...) //get all those events you needed.BPELProcessEvent[] events = l.listProcessEvents(wc); After you get all these events, write out these into an RSS Feed XML structure and stream it into a file that resides either in your Apache htdocs, or wherever it can be accessed via HTTP.You can read all about RSS 2.0 here. At a high level, here is how it looks like. <?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'UTF-8'?><rss version="2.0">  <channel>    <title>Live Updates from the Development Environment</title>    <link>http://soadev.myserver.com/feeds/</link>    <description>Live Updates from the Development Environment</description>    <lastBuildDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2010 01:03:00 PST</lastBuildDate>    <language>en-us</language>    <ttl>1</ttl>    <item>      <guid>1290213724692</guid>      <title>Process compiled</title>      <link>http://soadev.myserver.com/BPELConsole/mdm_product/administration.jsp?mode=processLog&amp;processName=&amp;dn=all&amp;eventType=all&amp;eventDate=600&amp;Filter=++Filter++</link>      <pubDate>Fri Nov 19 00:00:37 PST 2010</pubDate>      <description>SendPurchaseOrderRequestService: 3.0 Time : Fri Nov 19 00:00:37                   PST 2010</description>    </item>   ...... </channel> </rss> For writing ut XML content, read through Oracle XML Parser APIs - [search around for oracle.xml.parser.v2] b) Now that my "Job" was done, my job was half done. Next, I wrote up a simple Scheduler Servlet that schedules the above "Job" class to be executed ever "n" minutes. It is very straight forward. Here is the primary section of the code.           try {        Scheduler sched = StdSchedulerFactory.getDefaultScheduler();         //get n and make a trigger that executes every "n" seconds        Trigger trigger = TriggerUtils.makeSecondlyTrigger(n);        trigger.setName("feedTrigger" + System.currentTimeMillis());        trigger.setGroup("feedGroup");                JobDetail job = new JobDetail("SOA_Feed" + System.currentTimeMillis(), "feedGroup", FeedUpdater.class);        sched.scheduleJob(job,trigger);         }catch(Exception ex) {            ex.printStackTrace();            throw new ServletException(ex.getMessage());        } Look up the Quartz API and documentation. It will make this look much simpler.   Now that both components were ready, I packaged the Application into a war file and deployed it onto my Application Server. When the servlet initialized, the "n" second schedule was set/initialized. From then on, the servlet kept populating the RSS Feed file. I just ensured that my "Job" code keeps only 30 latest events within it, so that the feed file is small and under control. [a few kbs]   Next I opened up the feed xml on my browser - It requested a subscription - and Here I was - watching new deployments/life cycle events all popping up on my browser toolbar every 5 (actually n)  minutes!   Well, you could do it on a browser/reader of your choice - or perhaps read them like you read an email on your thunderbird!.      

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• Rip and Convert DVD’s to an ISO Image

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you own a lot of DVD’s, you might want to convert them to an ISO image for backup and easily playing them on your media center. Today we take a look at ripping your discs using DVDFab, then using ImgBurn to create an ISO image of the ripped DVD files. Rip DVD with DVDFab6 DVDFab will remove copy protection and rip the DVD files for free. Other components in the suite require you to purchase a license after the 30 day trial, but you’ll still be able to rip DVD’s after the trial. Install DVDFab by accepting the defaults (link below)…a system restart is required to complete the install process. The first time you run it, a welcome screen is displayed. If you don’t want to see it again check the box Do not show again, then Start DVDFab.  Pop the DVD in your drive and click Next. Now select your region and check Do not show again, then OK. It will then open the DVD and begin to scan it. Under DVD to DVD you can select either Full Disc or Main Movie depending on what you want to rip. If you want to burn the DVD to a disc after it’s created select the Full Disc option. Now click the Start button to begin the ripping process. After the ripping process has completed, you’ll get a message telling you it’s waiting for you to put in a blank DVD. Since we aren’t burning the disc, just cancel the message. Click Finish and close out of DVDFab or just minimize it if you’re going to keep using it to rip another DVD. By default the temporary directory is in My Documents \ DVDFab \ Temp…however you can change it in settings. If you go to the Temp directory you’ll see the DVD files listed there… Convert Files to ISO with ImgBurn Now that we have the files ripped from the DVD, we need to convert them to an ISO image using ImgBurn (link below). Open it up and from the main menu click on Create image file from files/folders. Click on the folder icon to browse to the location of the ripped DVD files. Browse to the DVDFab temp directory and the VIDEO_TS folder for the source and click Ok. Then choose a destination directory, give the ISO a name, and click Save. In this case we ripped the Unbreakable DVD, so named it that.   So now in ImgBurn you have the source being the ripped DVD files, and the destination for the ISO…then click the Build button. If you don’t create a volume label, ImgBurn is kind enough to create on for you. If everything looks correct, click Ok. Now wait while ImgBurn goes through the process of converting the ripped DVD files to an ISO image. The process has successfully completed. The ISO image of the DVD will be in the output directory you selected earlier. Now you can burn the ISO image to a blank DVD or store it on an external hard drive for safe keeping. When you’re done, you’ll probably want to go into the temp DVDFab folder and delete the VOB and other files in the Video_TS folder as they will take up a lot of space on your hard drive.   Conclusion Although this method requires two programs to make an ISO out of a DVD, it’s extremely quick. When burning DVD’s of various lengths, it took less than 30 minutes to get the final ISO. Now, you’ll have your DVD movies backed up in case something were to happen to the discs and are no longer playable. If you use Windows Media Center to watch your movies, check out our article on how to automatically mount and view ISO files in Windows 7 Media Center. With DVDFab, you get a 30 day fully functional trial for all of its features. You’ll still be able rip DVD’s even after the 30 day trial has ended. The more we’ve been using DVDFab, the more impressed we are with its capabilities, so after the 30 day trial you should consider purchasing a license. We will have a full review of the of it to share with you soon.  Download DVDFab Download ImgBurn Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Rip DVDs with VLCCalculate with Qalculate on LinuxConvert a Row to a Column in Excel the Easy WayEnjoy Quick & Easy Unit Conversion with Convert for WindowsConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser

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• WPF: Timers

  - by Ilya Verbitskiy

  I believe, once your WPF application will need to execute something periodically, and today I would like to discuss how to do that. There are two possible solutions. You can use classical System.Threading.Timer class or System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer class, which is the part of WPF. I have created an application to show you how to use the API.     Let’s take a look how you can implement timer using System.Threading.Timer class. First of all, it has to be initialized.   1: private Timer timer; 2:   3: public MainWindow() 4: { 5: // Form initialization code 6: 7: timer = new Timer(OnTimer, null, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan); 8: }   Timer’s constructor accepts four parameters. The first one is the callback method which is executed when timer ticks. I will show it to you soon. The second parameter is a state which is passed to the callback. It is null because there is nothing to pass this time. The third parameter is the amount of time to delay before the callback parameter invokes its methods. I use System.Threading.Timeout helper class to represent infinite timeout which simply means the timer is not going to start at the moment. And the final fourth parameter represents the time interval between invocations of the methods referenced by callback. Infinite timeout timespan means the callback method will be executed just once. Well, the timer has been created. Let’s take a look how you can start the timer.   1: private void StartTimer(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: timer.Change(TimeSpan.Zero, new TimeSpan(0, 0, 1)); 4:   5: // Disable the start buttons and enable the reset button. 6: }   The timer is started by calling its Change method. It accepts two arguments: the amount of time to delay before the invoking the callback method and the time interval between invocations of the callback. TimeSpan.Zero means we start the timer immediately and TimeSpan(0, 0, 1) tells the timer to tick every second. There is one method hasn’t been shown yet. This is the callback method OnTimer which does a simple task: it shows current time in the center of the screen. Unfortunately you cannot simple write something like this:   1: clock.Content = DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss");   The reason is Timer runs callback method on a separate thread, and it is not possible to access GUI controls from a non-GUI thread. You can avoid the problem using System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher class.   1: private void OnTimer(object state) 2: { 3: Dispatcher.Invoke(() => ShowTime()); 4: } 5:   6: private void ShowTime() 7: { 8: clock.Content = DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss"); 9: }   You can build similar application using System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer class. The class represents a timer which is integrated into the Dispatcher queue. It means that your callback method is executed on GUI thread and you can write a code which updates your GUI components directly.   1: private DispatcherTimer dispatcherTimer; 2:   3: public MainWindow() 4: { 5: // Form initialization code 6:   7: dispatcherTimer = new DispatcherTimer { Interval = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 1) }; 8: dispatcherTimer.Tick += OnDispatcherTimer; 9: } Dispatcher timer has nicer and cleaner API. All you need is to specify tick interval and Tick event handler. The you just call Start method to start the timer.   private void StartDispatcher(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { dispatcherTimer.Start(); // Disable the start buttons and enable the reset button. } And, since the Tick event handler is executed on GUI thread, the code which sets the actual time is straightforward.   1: private void OnDispatcherTimer(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: ShowTime(); 4: } We’re almost done. Let’s take a look how to stop the timers. It is easy with the Dispatcher Timer.   1: dispatcherTimer.Stop(); And slightly more complicated with the Timer. You should use Change method again.   1: timer.Change(Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan); What is the best way to add timer into an application? The Dispatcher Timer has simple interface, but its advantages are disadvantages at the same time. You should not use it if your Tick event handler executes time-consuming operations. It freezes your window which it is executing the event handler method. You should think about using System.Threading.Timer in this case. The code is available on GitHub.

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• Android app crashes on emulator - logCat shows no errors

  - by David Miler

  I have just added the SherlockActionBar library to my android project. After some small changes (FragmentActivity - SherlockFragmentActivity, getActionBar() - getSupportActionBar(), imports) it all compiled nicely. After I run the app, however, the debugger stops, as though it had encountered an exception. However, there are no errors shown in the LogCat output. I just can't wrap my head around what's going on. Here is the logCat output after I terminate the app. 10-02 14:11:19.227: I/SystemUpdateService(174): UpdateTask at time 1349187079227 10-02 14:11:19.237: I/ActivityThread(328): Pub com.android.email.attachmentprovider: com.android.email.provider.AttachmentProvider 10-02 14:11:19.687: I/dalvikvm(81): Jit: resizing JitTable from 512 to 1024 10-02 14:11:19.809: D/MediaScannerService(150): start scanning volume internal: [/system/media] 10-02 14:11:20.047: V/AlarmClock(239): AlarmInitReceiver finished 10-02 14:11:20.087: I/ActivityManager(81): Start proc com.android.quicksearchbox for broadcast com.android.quicksearchbox/.SearchWidgetProvider: pid=346 uid=10012 gids={3003} 10-02 14:11:20.127: D/ExchangeService(320): !!! EAS ExchangeService, onStartCommand, startingUp = false, running = false 10-02 14:11:20.427: I/ActivityThread(346): Pub com.android.quicksearchbox.google: com.android.quicksearchbox.google.GoogleSuggestionProvider 10-02 14:11:20.497: I/ActivityThread(346): Pub com.android.quicksearchbox.shortcuts: com.android.quicksearchbox.ShortcutsProvider 10-02 14:11:20.657: I/ActivityManager(81): Start proc com.android.music for broadcast com.android.music/.MediaAppWidgetProvider: pid=358 uid=10028 gids={3003, 1015} 10-02 14:11:20.927: D/ExchangeService(320): !!! EAS ExchangeService, onCreate 10-02 14:11:20.967: D/dalvikvm(260): GC_CONCURRENT freed 213K, 6% free 6409K/6791K, paused 5ms+101ms 10-02 14:11:21.077: D/ExchangeService(320): !!! EAS ExchangeService, onStartCommand, startingUp = true, running = false 10-02 14:11:21.567: D/GTalkService(174): [ReonnectMgr] ### report Inet condition: status=false, networkType=0 10-02 14:11:21.587: D/ConnectivityService(81): reportNetworkCondition(0, 0) 10-02 14:11:21.597: D/ConnectivityService(81): Inet connectivity change, net=0, condition=0,mActiveDefaultNetwork=0 10-02 14:11:21.597: D/ConnectivityService(81): starting a change hold 10-02 14:11:21.697: D/GTalkService(174): [RawStanzaProvidersMgr] ##### searchProvidersFromIntent 10-02 14:11:21.697: D/GTalkService(174): [RawStanzaProvidersMgr] no intent receivers found 10-02 14:11:21.847: I/SystemUpdateService(174): cancelUpdate (empty URL) 10-02 14:11:21.847: E/TelephonyManager(174): Hidden constructor called more than once per process! 10-02 14:11:21.867: D/dalvikvm(174): GC_CONCURRENT freed 337K, 7% free 6561K/7047K, paused 5ms+4ms 10-02 14:11:21.917: D/GTalkService(174): [ReonnectMgr] ### report Inet condition: status=false, networkType=0 10-02 14:11:21.917: D/ConnectivityService(81): reportNetworkCondition(0, 0) 10-02 14:11:21.917: D/ConnectivityService(81): Inet connectivity change, net=0, condition=0,mActiveDefaultNetwork=0 10-02 14:11:21.917: D/ConnectivityService(81): currently in hold - not setting new end evt 10-02 14:11:21.990: E/TelephonyManager(174): Original: com.google.android.location, new: com.google.android.gsf 10-02 14:11:22.027: I/SystemUpdateService(174): removeAllDownloads (cancelUpdate) 10-02 14:11:22.127: D/dalvikvm(328): GC_CONCURRENT freed 205K, 6% free 6506K/6855K, paused 660ms+3ms 10-02 14:11:22.197: D/Eas Debug(320): Logging: 10-02 14:11:22.319: D/dalvikvm(81): GREF has increased to 401 10-02 14:11:22.947: D/ExchangeService(320): !!! EAS ExchangeService, onStartCommand, startingUp = true, running = false 10-02 14:11:23.130: D/Eas Debug(320): Logging: 10-02 14:11:23.307: I//system/bin/fsck_msdos(29): Attempting to allocate 2044 KB for FAT 10-02 14:11:23.560: I/ActivityManager(81): Starting: Intent { flg=0x10000000 cmp=com.google.android.gsf/.update.SystemUpdateInstallDialog } from pid 174 10-02 14:11:23.587: I/ActivityManager(81): Starting: Intent { flg=0x10000000 cmp=com.google.android.gsf/.update.SystemUpdateDownloadDialog } from pid 174 10-02 14:11:24.087: W/ActivityManager(81): Activity pause timeout for ActivityRecord{407c7320 com.android.launcher/com.android.launcher2.Launcher} 10-02 14:11:24.237: E/TelephonyManager(174): Hidden constructor called more than once per process! 10-02 14:11:24.237: E/TelephonyManager(174): Original: com.google.android.location, new: com.google.android.gsf 10-02 14:11:24.507: D/dalvikvm(174): GC_EXPLICIT freed 231K, 7% free 6596K/7047K, paused 4ms+6ms 10-02 14:11:24.607: D/ConnectivityService(81): Inet hold end, net=0, condition =0, published condition =0 10-02 14:11:24.607: D/ConnectivityService(81): no change in condition - aborting 10-02 14:11:24.707: D/dalvikvm(174): GC_EXPLICIT freed 17K, 7% free 6579K/7047K, paused 4ms+4ms 10-02 14:11:24.947: I//system/bin/fsck_msdos(29): ** Phase 2 - Check Cluster Chains 10-02 14:11:25.117: I//system/bin/fsck_msdos(29): ** Phase 3 - Checking Directories 10-02 14:11:25.128: I//system/bin/fsck_msdos(29): ** Phase 4 - Checking for Lost Files 10-02 14:11:25.167: I//system/bin/fsck_msdos(29): 12 files, 1044448 free (522224 clusters) 10-02 14:11:25.227: I/Vold(29): Filesystem check completed OK 10-02 14:11:25.227: I/Vold(29): Device /dev/block/vold/179:0, target /mnt/sdcard mounted @ /mnt/secure/staging 10-02 14:11:25.237: D/Vold(29): Volume sdcard state changing 3 (Checking) -> 4 (Mounted) 10-02 14:11:25.257: I/PackageManager(81): Updating external media status from unmounted to mounted 10-02 14:11:25.457: D/dalvikvm(303): GC_EXPLICIT freed 35K, 6% free 6242K/6595K, paused 3ms+312ms 10-02 14:11:25.987: D/ExchangeService(320): !!! EAS ExchangeService, onStartCommand, startingUp = true, running = false 10-02 14:11:26.157: D/MediaScanner(150): prescan time: 2905ms 10-02 14:11:26.167: D/MediaScanner(150): scan time: 148ms 10-02 14:11:26.167: D/MediaScanner(150): postscan time: 2ms 10-02 14:11:26.167: D/MediaScanner(150): total time: 3055ms 10-02 14:11:26.197: D/MediaScannerService(150): done scanning volume internal 10-02 14:11:26.237: D/MediaScannerService(150): start scanning volume external: [/mnt/sdcard] 10-02 14:11:26.497: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_EXPLICIT freed 234K, 8% free 7735K/8327K, paused 3ms+5ms 10-02 14:11:27.180: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_CONCURRENT freed 150K, 4% free 8004K/8327K, paused 7ms+3ms 10-02 14:11:27.397: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 96K, 6% free 8310K/8775K, paused 76ms 10-02 14:11:27.580: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 515K, 11% free 8135K/9095K, paused 79ms 10-02 14:11:27.829: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_CONCURRENT freed 3K, 5% free 8694K/9095K, paused 7ms+6ms 10-02 14:11:28.137: V/TLINE(143): new: android.text.TextLine@4065b280 10-02 14:11:28.527: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_CONCURRENT freed 729K, 10% free 8764K/9671K, paused 5ms+13ms 10-02 14:11:28.677: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 152K, 11% free 8683K/9671K, paused 99ms 10-02 14:11:28.717: I/dalvikvm-heap(143): Grow heap (frag case) to 11.434MB for 2975968-byte allocation 10-02 14:11:28.807: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 0K, 9% free 11589K/12615K, paused 84ms 10-02 14:11:29.159: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_CONCURRENT freed 197K, 7% free 12195K/12999K, paused 8ms+6ms 10-02 14:11:29.647: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_EXPLICIT freed 351K, 6% free 12790K/13511K, paused 8ms+17ms 10-02 14:11:29.717: I/SurfaceFlinger(32): Boot is finished (70768 ms) 10-02 14:11:29.877: I/ARMAssembler(32): generated scanline__00000177:03010104_00000002_00000000 [ 44 ipp] (66 ins) at [0x407c7290:0x407c7398] in 990662 ns 10-02 14:11:29.907: I/ARMAssembler(32): generated scanline__00000177:03515104_00000001_00000000 [ 73 ipp] (95 ins) at [0x407c73a0:0x407c751c] in 989381 ns 10-02 14:11:30.287: D/dalvikvm(174): GC_EXPLICIT freed 25K, 8% free 6554K/7047K, paused 4ms+32ms 10-02 14:11:30.380: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_EXPLICIT freed 349K, 6% free 13124K/13895K, paused 5ms+25ms 10-02 14:11:30.957: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 1069K, 10% free 13860K/15239K, paused 81ms 10-02 14:11:32.177: D/dalvikvm(150): GC_CONCURRENT freed 183K, 6% free 6438K/6791K, paused 5ms+4ms 10-02 14:11:32.187: W/ActivityManager(81): No content provider found for: 10-02 14:11:32.607: V/MediaScanner(150): pruneDeadThumbnailFiles... android.database.sqlite.SQLiteCursor@406724a8 10-02 14:11:32.617: V/MediaScanner(150): /pruneDeadThumbnailFiles... android.database.sqlite.SQLiteCursor@406724a8 10-02 14:11:32.640: W/ActivityManager(81): No content provider found for: 10-02 14:11:32.640: D/VoldCmdListener(29): asec list 10-02 14:11:32.647: I/PackageManager(81): No secure containers on sdcard 10-02 14:11:32.667: D/MediaScanner(150): prescan time: 107ms 10-02 14:11:32.667: D/MediaScanner(150): scan time: 89ms 10-02 14:11:32.667: D/MediaScanner(150): postscan time: 61ms 10-02 14:11:32.667: D/MediaScanner(150): total time: 257ms 10-02 14:11:32.697: W/PackageManager(81): Unknown permission android.permission.ADD_SYSTEM_SERVICE in package com.android.phone 10-02 14:11:32.707: W/PackageManager(81): Unknown permission com.android.smspush.WAPPUSH_MANAGER_BIND in package com.android.phone 10-02 14:11:32.737: W/PackageManager(81): Not granting permission android.permission.SEND_DOWNLOAD_COMPLETED_INTENTS to package com.android.browser (protectionLevel=2 flags=0x9be45) 10-02 14:11:32.737: W/PackageManager(81): Not granting permission android.permission.BIND_APPWIDGET to package com.android.widgetpreview (protectionLevel=3 flags=0x28be44) 10-02 14:11:32.767: W/PackageManager(81): Unknown permission android.permission.READ_OWNER_DATA in package com.android.exchange 10-02 14:11:32.778: W/PackageManager(81): Unknown permission android.permission.READ_OWNER_DATA in package com.android.email 10-02 14:11:32.788: W/PackageManager(81): Unknown permission com.android.providers.im.permission.READ_ONLY in package com.google.android.apps.maps 10-02 14:11:32.797: W/PackageManager(81): Not granting permission android.permission.DEVICE_POWER to package com.android.deskclock (protectionLevel=2 flags=0x8be45) 10-02 14:11:33.137: D/MediaScannerService(150): done scanning volume external 10-02 14:11:33.197: D/PackageParser(81): Scanning package: /data/app/vmdl257911298.tmp 10-02 14:11:33.837: I/InputReader(81): Device reconfigured: id=0, name='qwerty2', surface size is now 1024x800 10-02 14:11:34.097: D/dalvikvm(81): GC_CONCURRENT freed 12185K, 47% free 13966K/26311K, paused 8ms+23ms 10-02 14:11:36.798: I/TabletStatusBar(124): DISABLE_CLOCK: no 10-02 14:11:36.798: I/TabletStatusBar(124): DISABLE_NAVIGATION: no 10-02 14:11:37.348: I/ARMAssembler(32): generated scanline__00000177:03515104_00001001_00000000 [ 91 ipp] (114 ins) at [0x407c7520:0x407c76e8] in 919320 ns 10-02 14:11:37.598: I/TabletStatusBar(124): DISABLE_BACK: no 10-02 14:11:37.710: I/ActivityManager(81): Displayed com.android.launcher/com.android.launcher2.Launcher: +46s212ms 10-02 14:11:38.817: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_CONCURRENT freed 969K, 8% free 14867K/16007K, paused 4ms+10ms 10-02 14:11:39.437: I/dalvikvm(81): Jit: resizing JitTable from 1024 to 2048 10-02 14:11:40.267: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 2357K, 16% free 14395K/17031K, paused 80ms 10-02 14:11:40.717: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_EXPLICIT freed 742K, 16% free 14358K/17031K, paused 8ms+4ms 10-02 14:11:41.617: D/dalvikvm(81): GC_CONCURRENT freed 1955K, 48% free 13869K/26311K, paused 9ms+10ms 10-02 14:11:42.559: D/dalvikvm(81): GC_CONCURRENT freed 1830K, 48% free 13881K/26311K, paused 9ms+9ms 10-02 14:11:42.758: I/PackageManager(81): Removing non-system package:cz.trilimi.sfaui 10-02 14:11:42.758: I/ActivityManager(81): Force stopping package cz.trilimi.sfaui uid=10036 10-02 14:11:42.967: D/PackageManager(81): Scanning package cz.trilimi.sfaui 10-02 14:11:42.967: I/PackageManager(81): Package cz.trilimi.sfaui codePath changed from /data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-1.apk to /data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-2.apk; Retaining data and using new 10-02 14:11:42.967: I/PackageManager(81): Unpacking native libraries for /data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-2.apk 10-02 14:11:43.097: D/installd(35): DexInv: --- BEGIN '/data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-2.apk' --- 10-02 14:11:45.317: D/dalvikvm(391): DexOpt: load 434ms, verify+opt 1260ms 10-02 14:11:45.407: D/installd(35): DexInv: --- END '/data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-2.apk' (success) --- 10-02 14:11:45.407: W/PackageManager(81): Code path for pkg : cz.trilimi.sfaui changing from /data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-1.apk to /data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-2.apk 10-02 14:11:45.407: W/PackageManager(81): Resource path for pkg : cz.trilimi.sfaui changing from /data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-1.apk to /data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-2.apk 10-02 14:11:45.407: D/PackageManager(81): Activities: cz.trilimi.sfaui.ItemListActivity cz.trilimi.sfaui.ItemDetailActivity 10-02 14:11:45.427: I/ActivityManager(81): Force stopping package cz.trilimi.sfaui uid=10036 10-02 14:11:45.657: I/installd(35): move /data/dalvik-cache/data@[email protected]@classes.dex -> /data/dalvik-cache/data@[email protected]@classes.dex 10-02 14:11:45.657: D/PackageManager(81): New package installed in /data/app/cz.trilimi.sfaui-2.apk 10-02 14:11:45.997: I/ActivityManager(81): Force stopping package cz.trilimi.sfaui uid=10036 10-02 14:11:46.147: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_EXPLICIT freed 3K, 16% free 14356K/17031K, paused 10ms+9ms 10-02 14:11:46.237: D/PackageManager(81): generateServicesMap(android.accounts.AccountAuthenticator): 3 services unchanged 10-02 14:11:46.277: D/PackageManager(81): generateServicesMap(android.content.SyncAdapter): 5 services unchanged 10-02 14:11:46.337: D/PackageManager(81): generateServicesMap(android.accounts.AccountAuthenticator): 3 services unchanged 10-02 14:11:46.347: D/PackageManager(81): generateServicesMap(android.content.SyncAdapter): 5 services unchanged 10-02 14:11:46.437: D/dalvikvm(208): GC_EXPLICIT freed 258K, 7% free 6488K/6919K, paused 3ms+5ms 10-02 14:11:46.477: W/RecognitionManagerService(81): no available voice recognition services found 10-02 14:11:46.897: I/ActivityManager(81): Start proc com.svox.pico for broadcast com.svox.pico/.VoiceDataInstallerReceiver: pid=398 uid=10006 gids={} 10-02 14:11:47.087: I/ActivityThread(398): Pub com.svox.pico.providers.SettingsProvider: com.svox.pico.providers.SettingsProvider 10-02 14:11:47.138: D/GTalkService(174): [GTalkService.1] handlePackageInstalled: re-initialize providers 10-02 14:11:47.147: D/GTalkService(174): [RawStanzaProvidersMgr] ##### searchProvidersFromIntent 10-02 14:11:47.147: D/GTalkService(174): [RawStanzaProvidersMgr] no intent receivers found 10-02 14:11:47.718: I/AccountTypeManager(208): Loaded meta-data for 1 account types, 0 accounts in 186ms 10-02 14:11:48.377: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_CONCURRENT freed 1865K, 15% free 14513K/17031K, paused 7ms+4ms 10-02 14:11:48.917: D/dalvikvm(208): GC_CONCURRENT freed 219K, 6% free 6788K/7175K, paused 7ms+73ms 10-02 14:11:49.207: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_FOR_ALLOC freed 4558K, 31% free 11866K/17031K, paused 89ms 10-02 14:11:49.587: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_CONCURRENT freed 713K, 24% free 13010K/17031K, paused 5ms+4ms 10-02 14:11:49.967: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_CONCURRENT freed 1046K, 19% free 13922K/17031K, paused 5ms+4ms 10-02 14:11:50.437: D/dalvikvm(81): GC_EXPLICIT freed 898K, 47% free 13955K/26311K, paused 6ms+39ms 10-02 14:11:50.467: I/installd(35): unlink /data/dalvik-cache/data@[email protected]@classes.dex 10-02 14:11:50.477: D/AndroidRuntime(227): Shutting down VM 10-02 14:11:50.507: D/dalvikvm(227): GC_CONCURRENT freed 97K, 84% free 331K/2048K, paused 1ms+2ms 10-02 14:11:50.507: I/AndroidRuntime(227): NOTE: attach of thread 'Binder Thread #3' failed 10-02 14:11:50.517: D/jdwp(227): adbd disconnected 10-02 14:11:51.177: D/AndroidRuntime(410): >>>>>> AndroidRuntime START com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit <<<<<< 10-02 14:11:51.177: D/AndroidRuntime(410): CheckJNI is ON 10-02 14:11:51.897: D/AndroidRuntime(410): Calling main entry com.android.commands.am.Am 10-02 14:11:51.937: I/ActivityManager(81): Force stopping package cz.trilimi.sfaui uid=10036 10-02 14:11:51.937: I/ActivityManager(81): Starting: Intent { act=android.intent.action.MAIN cat=[android.intent.category.LAUNCHER] flg=0x10000000 cmp=cz.trilimi.sfaui/.ItemListActivity } from pid 410 10-02 14:11:51.968: W/WindowManager(81): Failure taking screenshot for (230x179) to layer 21005 10-02 14:11:51.997: I/ActivityManager(81): Start proc cz.trilimi.sfaui for activity cz.trilimi.sfaui/.ItemListActivity: pid=418 uid=10036 gids={} 10-02 14:11:52.007: D/AndroidRuntime(410): Shutting down VM 10-02 14:11:52.057: I/AndroidRuntime(410): NOTE: attach of thread 'Binder Thread #3' failed 10-02 14:11:52.097: D/dalvikvm(410): GC_CONCURRENT freed 98K, 83% free 360K/2048K, paused 1ms+0ms 10-02 14:11:52.097: D/jdwp(410): adbd disconnected 10-02 14:11:53.147: W/ActivityThread(418): Application cz.trilimi.sfaui is waiting for the debugger on port 8100... 10-02 14:11:53.207: I/System.out(418): Sending WAIT chunk 10-02 14:11:53.217: I/dalvikvm(418): Debugger is active 10-02 14:11:53.447: I/System.out(418): Debugger has connected 10-02 14:11:53.457: I/System.out(418): waiting for debugger to settle... 10-02 14:11:53.637: I/ARMAssembler(32): generated scanline__00000177:03515104_00001002_00000000 [ 87 ipp] (110 ins) at [0x407c76f0:0x407c78a8] in 598498 ns 10-02 14:11:53.660: I/System.out(418): waiting for debugger to settle... 10-02 14:11:53.857: I/System.out(418): waiting for debugger to settle... 10-02 14:11:54.057: I/System.out(418): waiting for debugger to settle... 10-02 14:11:54.257: I/System.out(418): waiting for debugger to settle... 10-02 14:11:54.317: V/TLINE(81): new: android.text.TextLine@4155dde8 10-02 14:11:54.467: I/System.out(418): waiting for debugger to settle... 10-02 14:11:54.667: I/System.out(418): waiting for debugger to settle... 10-02 14:11:54.870: I/System.out(418): waiting for debugger to settle... 10-02 14:11:55.027: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_EXPLICIT freed 900K, 16% free 14420K/17031K, paused 7ms+4ms 10-02 14:11:55.067: I/System.out(418): waiting for debugger to settle... 10-02 14:11:55.292: I/System.out(418): debugger has settled (1315) 10-02 14:12:02.008: W/ActivityManager(81): Launch timeout has expired, giving up wake lock! 10-02 14:12:02.971: W/ActivityManager(81): Activity idle timeout for ActivityRecord{4078c6b0 cz.trilimi.sfaui/.ItemListActivity} 10-02 14:12:08.359: D/ExchangeService(320): Received deviceId from Email app: androidc259148960 10-02 14:12:08.507: D/ExchangeService(320): Reconciling accounts... 10-02 14:16:11.437: D/SntpClient(81): request time failed: java.net.SocketException: Address family not supported by protocol 10-02 14:17:21.573: W/jdwp(418): Debugger is telling the VM to exit with code=1 10-02 14:17:21.573: I/dalvikvm(418): GC lifetime allocation: 8642 bytes 10-02 14:17:21.637: D/Zygote(33): Process 418 exited cleanly (1) 10-02 14:17:21.651: I/ActivityManager(81): Process cz.trilimi.sfaui (pid 418) has died. 10-02 14:17:21.847: D/dalvikvm(143): GC_EXPLICIT freed <1K, 16% free 14420K/17031K, paused 7ms+7ms 10-02 14:17:21.917: W/InputManagerService(81): Window already focused, ignoring focus gain of: com.android.internal.view.IInputMethodClient$Stub$Proxy@40bfbf28

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• 5 minutes WIF: Make your ASP.NET application use test-STS

  - by DigiMortal

  Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) provides us with simple and dummy STS application we can use to develop our system with no actual STS in place. In this posting I will show you how to add STS support to your existing application and how to generate dummy application that plays you real STS. Word of caution! Although it is relatively easy to build your own STS using WIF tools I don’t recommend you to build it. Identity providers must be highly secure and stable in every means and this makes development of your own STS very complex task. If it is possible then use some known STS solution. I suppose you have WIF and WIF SDK installed on your development machine. If you don’t then here are the links to download pages: Windows Identity Foundation Windows Identity Foundation SDK Adding STS support to your web application Suppose you have web application and you want to externalize authentication so your application is able to detect users, send unauthenticated users to login and work in other terms exactly like it worked before. WIF tools provide you with all you need. 1. Click on your web application project and select “Add STS reference…” from context menu to start adding or updating STS settings for web application. 2. Insert your application URI in application settings window. Note that web.config file is already selected for you. I inserted URI that corresponds to my web application address under IIS Express. This URI must exist (later) because otherwise you cannot use dummy STS service. 3. Select “Create a new STS project in the current solution” and click Next button. 4. Summary screen gives you information about how your site will use STS. You can run this wizard always when you have to modify STS parameters. Click Finish. If everything goes like expected then new web site will be added to your solution and it is named as YourWebAppName_STS. Dummy STS application Image on right shows you dummy STS web site. Yes, it is created as web site project not as web application. But it still works nice and you don’t have to make there any modifications. It just works but it is dummy one. Why dummy STS? Some points about dummy STS web site: Dummy STS is not template for your own custom STS identity provider. Dummy STS is very good and simple replacement of real STS so you have more flexible development environment and you don’t have to authenticate yourself in real service. Of course, you can modify dummy STS web site to mimic some behavior of your real STS. Pages in dummy STS Dummy STS has two pages – Login.aspx and  Default.aspx. Default.aspx is the page that handles requests to STS service. Login.aspx is the page where authentication takes place. Dummy STS authenticates users using FBA. You can insert whatever username you like and dummy STS still works. You can take a look at the code behind these pages to get some idea about how this dummy service is built up. But again – this service is there to simplify your life as developer. Authenticating users using dummy STS If you are using development web server that ships with Visual Studio 2010 I suggest you to switch over to IIS or IIS Express and make some more configuration changes as described in my previous posting Making WIF local STS to work with your ASP.NET application. When you are done with these little modifications you are ready to run your application and see how authentication works. If everything is okay then you are redirected to dummy STS login page when running your web application. Adam Carter is provided as username by default. If you click on submit button you are authenticated and redirected to application page. In my case it looks like this. Conclusion As you saw it is very easy to set up your own dummy STS web site for testing purposes. You coded nothing. You just ran wizard, inserted some data, modified configuration a little bit and you were done. Later, when your application goes to production you can run again this STS configuration utility and it generates correct settings for your real STS service automatically.

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• Off center projection

  - by N0xus

  I'm trying to implement the code that was freely given by a very kind developer at the following link: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/142383-Code-sample-Off-Center-Projection-Code-for-VR-CAVE-or-just-for-fun Right now, all I'm trying to do is bring it in on one camera, but I have a few issues. My class, looks as follows: using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class PerspectiveOffCenter : MonoBehaviour { // Use this for initialization void Start () { } // Update is called once per frame void Update () { } public static Matrix4x4 GeneralizedPerspectiveProjection(Vector3 pa, Vector3 pb, Vector3 pc, Vector3 pe, float near, float far) { Vector3 va, vb, vc; Vector3 vr, vu, vn; float left, right, bottom, top, eyedistance; Matrix4x4 transformMatrix; Matrix4x4 projectionM; Matrix4x4 eyeTranslateM; Matrix4x4 finalProjection; ///Calculate the orthonormal for the screen (the screen coordinate system vr = pb - pa; vr.Normalize(); vu = pc - pa; vu.Normalize(); vn = Vector3.Cross(vr, vu); vn.Normalize(); //Calculate the vector from eye (pe) to screen corners (pa, pb, pc) va = pa-pe; vb = pb-pe; vc = pc-pe; //Get the distance;; from the eye to the screen plane eyedistance = -(Vector3.Dot(va, vn)); //Get the varaibles for the off center projection left = (Vector3.Dot(vr, va)*near)/eyedistance; right = (Vector3.Dot(vr, vb)*near)/eyedistance; bottom = (Vector3.Dot(vu, va)*near)/eyedistance; top = (Vector3.Dot(vu, vc)*near)/eyedistance; //Get this projection projectionM = PerspectiveOffCenter(left, right, bottom, top, near, far); //Fill in the transform matrix transformMatrix = new Matrix4x4(); transformMatrix[0, 0] = vr.x; transformMatrix[0, 1] = vr.y; transformMatrix[0, 2] = vr.z; transformMatrix[0, 3] = 0; transformMatrix[1, 0] = vu.x; transformMatrix[1, 1] = vu.y; transformMatrix[1, 2] = vu.z; transformMatrix[1, 3] = 0; transformMatrix[2, 0] = vn.x; transformMatrix[2, 1] = vn.y; transformMatrix[2, 2] = vn.z; transformMatrix[2, 3] = 0; transformMatrix[3, 0] = 0; transformMatrix[3, 1] = 0; transformMatrix[3, 2] = 0; transformMatrix[3, 3] = 1; //Now for the eye transform eyeTranslateM = new Matrix4x4(); eyeTranslateM[0, 0] = 1; eyeTranslateM[0, 1] = 0; eyeTranslateM[0, 2] = 0; eyeTranslateM[0, 3] = -pe.x; eyeTranslateM[1, 0] = 0; eyeTranslateM[1, 1] = 1; eyeTranslateM[1, 2] = 0; eyeTranslateM[1, 3] = -pe.y; eyeTranslateM[2, 0] = 0; eyeTranslateM[2, 1] = 0; eyeTranslateM[2, 2] = 1; eyeTranslateM[2, 3] = -pe.z; eyeTranslateM[3, 0] = 0; eyeTranslateM[3, 1] = 0; eyeTranslateM[3, 2] = 0; eyeTranslateM[3, 3] = 1f; //Multiply all together finalProjection = new Matrix4x4(); finalProjection = Matrix4x4.identity * projectionM*transformMatrix*eyeTranslateM; //finally return return finalProjection; } // Update is called once per frame public void FixedUpdate () { Camera cam = camera; //calculate projection Matrix4x4 genProjection = GeneralizedPerspectiveProjection( new Vector3(0,1,0), new Vector3(1,1,0), new Vector3(0,0,0), new Vector3(0,0,0), cam.nearClipPlane, cam.farClipPlane); //(BottomLeftCorner, BottomRightCorner, TopLeftCorner, trackerPosition, cam.nearClipPlane, cam.farClipPlane); cam.projectionMatrix = genProjection; } } My error lies in projectionM = PerspectiveOffCenter(left, right, bottom, top, near, far); The debugger states: Expression denotes a `type', where a 'variable', 'value' or 'method group' was expected. Thus, I changed the line to read: projectionM = new PerspectiveOffCenter(left, right, bottom, top, near, far); But then the error is changed to: The type 'PerspectiveOffCenter' does not contain a constructor that takes '6' arguments. For reasons that are obvious. So, finally, I changed the line to read: projectionM = new GeneralizedPerspectiveProjection(left, right, bottom, top, near, far); And the error I get is: is a 'method' but a 'type' was expected. With this last error, I'm not sure what it is I should do / missing. Can anyone see what it is that I'm missing to fix this error?

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• Adventures in Windows 8: Understanding and debugging design time data in Expression Blend

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  One of my favorite features in Expression Blend is the ability to attach a Visual Studio debugger to Blend. First let’s start by answering the question: why exactly do you want to do that? Note: If you are familiar with the creation and usage of design time data, feel free to scroll down to the paragraph titled “When design time data fails”. Creating design time data for your app When a designer works on an app, he needs to see something to design. For “static” UI such as buttons, backgrounds, etc, the user interface elements are going to show up in Blend just fine. If however the data is fetched dynamically from a service (web, database, etc) or created dynamically, most probably Blend is going to show just an empty element. The classical way to design at that stage is to run the application, navigate to the screen that is under construction (which can involve delays, need to log in, etc…), to measure what is on the screen (colors, margins, width and height, etc) using various tools, going back to Blend, editing the properties of the elements, running again, etc. Obviously this is not ideal. The solution is to create design time data. For more information about the creation of design time data by mocking services, you can refer to two talks of mine “Deep dive MVVM” and “MVVM Applied From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8”. The source code for these talks is here and here. Design time data in MVVM Light One of the main reasons why I developed MVVM Light is to facilitate the creation of design time data. To illustrate this, let’s create a new MVVM Light application in Visual Studio. Install MVVM Light from here: http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com (use the MSI in the Download section). After installing, make sure to read the Readme that opens up in your favorite browser, you will need one more step to install the Project Templates. Start Visual Studio 2012. Create a new MvvmLight (Win8) app. Run the application. You will see a string showing “Welcome to MVVM Light”. In the Solution explorer, right click on MainPage.xaml and select Open in Blend. Now you should see “Welcome to MVVM Light [Design]” What happens here is that Expression Blend runs different code at design time than the application runs at runtime. To do this, we use design-time detection (as explained in a previous article) and use that information to initialize a different data service at design time. To understand this better, open the ViewModelLocator.cs file in the ViewModel folder and see how the DesignDataService is used at design time, while the DataService is used at runtime. In a real-life applicationm, DataService would be used to connect to a web service, for instance. When design time data fails Sometimes however, the creation of design time data fails. It can be very difficult to understand exactly what is happening. Expression Blend is not giving a lot of information about what happened. Thankfully, we can use a trick: Attaching a debugger to Expression Blend and debug the design time code. In WPF and Silverlight (including Windows Phone 7), you could simply attach the debugger to Blend.exe (using the “Managed (v4.5, v4.0) code” option even for Silverlight!!) In Windows 8 however, things are just a bit different. This is because the designer that renders the actual representation of the Windows 8 app runs in its own process. Let’s illustrate that: Open the file DesignDataService in the Design folder. Modify the GetData method to look like this: public void GetData(Action<DataItem, Exception> callback) { throw new Exception(); // Use this to create design time data var item = new DataItem("Welcome to MVVM Light [design]"); callback(item, null); } Go to Blend and build the application. The build succeeds, but now the page is empty. The creation of the design time data failed, but we don’t get a warning message. We need to investigate what’s wrong. Close MainPage.xaml Go to Visual Studio and select the menu Debug, Attach to Process. Update: Make sure that you select “Managed (v4.5, v4.0) code” in the “Attach to” field. Find the process named XDesProc.exe. You should have at least two, one for the Visual Studio 2012 designer surface, and one for Expression Blend. Unfortunately in this screen it is not obvious which is which. Let’s find out in the Task Manager. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del and select Task Manager Go to the Details tab and sort the processes by name. Find the one that says “Blend for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 XAML UI Designer” and write down the process ID. Go back to the Attach to Process dialog in Visual Studio. sort the processes by ID and attach the debugger to the correct instance of XDesProc.exe. Open the MainViewModel (in the ViewModel folder) Place a breakpoint on the first line of the MainViewModel constructor. Go to Blend and open the MainPage.xaml again. At this point, the debugger breaks in Visual Studio and you can execute your code step by step. Simply step inside the dataservice call, and find the exception that you had placed there. Visual Studio gives you additional information which helps you to solve the issue. More info and Conclusion I want to thank the amazing people on the Expression Blend team for being very fast in guiding me in that matter and encouraging me to blog about it. More information about the XDesProc.exe process can be found here. I had to work on a Windows 8 app for a few days without design time data because of an Exception thrown somewhere in the code, and it was really painful. With the debugger, finding the issue was a simple matter of stepping into the code until it threw the exception.   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Alternative Grid Layout for Silverlight suggestion

  - by brainbox

  I've proposed a suggestion to create alternative grid layout for Silverlight. Please vote for it if also faced the same problems. As i write before current Silverlight Grid Layout breakes best practices of HTML and Adobe Flex Grid layouts. Current defention based approach have following disadvantages that makes xaml coding very hard: 1. It is very hard to create new row. In that case you should rewriteall Grid.Row and Grid.Columns for all rows inserted below.2. Defenitions are static by their nature and because of it, it isimpossible to use grid for dynamic forms. Currently even in toolkit DataFormMicrosoft is using StackPanel. But StackPanel is not designed for multicolumn layout that have dataform. Here is a sample code of AdobeFlex datagrid, which incorporates bestpractices of HTML. <mx:Grid id="myGrid">        <!-- Define Row 1. -->       <mx:GridRow id="row1">           <!-- Define the first cell of Row 1. -->           <mx:GridItem>               <mx:Button label="Button 1"/>           </mx:GridItem>           <!-- Define the second cell of Row 1. -->           <mx:GridItem>               <mx:Button label="2"/>           </mx:GridItem>           <!-- Define the third cell of Row 1. -->           <mx:GridItem>               <mx:Button label="Button 3"/>           </mx:GridItem>       </mx:GridRow>        <!-- Define Row 2. -->       <mx:GridRow id="row2">           <!-- Define a single cell to span three columns of Row 2. -->           <mx:GridItem colSpan="3" horizontalAlign="center">               <mx:Button label="Long-Named Button 4"/>           </mx:GridItem>       </mx:GridRow>        <!-- Define Row 3. -->       <mx:GridRow id="row3">           <!-- Define an empty first cell of Row 3. -->           <mx:GridItem/>           <!-- Define a cell to span columns 2 and 3 of Row 3. -->           <mx:GridItem colSpan="2" horizontalAlign="center">               <mx:Button label="Button 5"/>           </mx:GridItem>       </mx:GridRow>    </mx:Grid>

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer

  - by Elton Stoneman

  This is the second in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Part 2 is nice and easy. From Part 1 we exposed our service over the Azure Service Bus Relay using the netTcpRelayBinding and verified we could set up our network to listen for relayed messages. Assuming we want to consume that service in .NET from an environment which is fairly unrestricted for us, but quite restricted for attackers, we can use netTcpRelay and shared secret authentication. Pattern applicability This is a good fit for scenarios where: the consumer can run .NET in full trust the environment does not restrict use of external DLLs the runtime environment is secure enough to keep shared secrets the service does not need to know who is consuming it the service does not need to know who the end-user is So for example, the consumer is an ASP.NET website sitting in a cloud VM or Azure worker role, where we can keep the shared secret in web.config and we don't need to flow any identity through to the on-premise service. The service doesn't care who the consumer or end-user is - say it's a reference data service that provides a list of vehicle manufacturers. Provided you can authenticate with ACS and have access to Service Bus endpoint, you can use the service and it doesn't care who you are. In this post, we’ll consume the service from Part 1 in ASP.NET using netTcpRelay. The code for Part 2 (+ Part 1) is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 2 Authenticating and authorizing with ACS In this scenario the consumer is a server in a controlled environment, so we can use a shared secret to authenticate with ACS, assuming that there is governance around the environment and the codebase which will prevent the identity being compromised. From the provider's side, we will create a dedicated service identity for this consumer, so we can lock down their permissions. The provider controls the identity, so the consumer's rights can be revoked. We'll add a new service identity for the namespace in ACS , just as we did for the serviceProvider identity in Part 1. I've named the identity fullTrustConsumer. We then need to add a rule to map the incoming identity claim to an outgoing authorization claim that allows the identity to send messages to Service Bus (see Part 1 for a walkthrough creating Service Idenitities): Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: fullTrustConsumer Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Send This sets up a service identity which can send messages into Service Bus, but cannot register itself as a listener, or manage the namespace. Adding a Service Reference The Part 2 sample client code is ready to go, but if you want to replicate the steps, you’re going to add a WSDL reference, add a reference to Microsoft.ServiceBus and sort out the ServiceModel config. In Part 1 we exposed metadata for our service, so we can browse to the WSDL locally at: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc?wsdl If you add a Service Reference to that in a new project you'll get a confused config section with a customBinding, and a set of unrecognized policy assertions in the namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2009/05/servicebus/connect. If you NuGet the ASB package (“windowsazure.servicebus”) first and add the service reference - you'll get the same messy config. Either way, the WSDL should have downloaded and you should have the proxy code generated. You can delete the customBinding entries and copy your config from the service's web.config (this is already done in the sample project in Sixeyed.Ipasbr.NetTcpClient), specifying details for the client:     <client>       <endpoint address="sb://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/net"                 behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret"                 binding="netTcpRelayBinding"                 contract="FormatService.IFormatService" />     </client>     <behaviors>       <endpointBehaviors>         <behavior name="SharedSecret">           <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">             <clientCredentials>               <sharedSecret issuerName="fullTrustConsumer"                             issuerSecret="E3feJSMuyGGXksJi2g2bRY5/Bpd2ll5Eb+1FgQrXIqo="/>             </clientCredentials>           </transportClientEndpointBehavior>         </behavior>       </endpointBehaviors>     </behaviors>   The proxy is straight WCF territory, and the same client can run against Azure Service Bus through any relay binding, or directly to the local network service using any WCF binding - the contract is exactly the same. The code is simple, standard WCF stuff: using (var client = new FormatService.FormatServiceClient()) { outputString = client.ReverseString(inputString); } Running the sample First, update Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml with your service bus namespace, and your service identity credentials for the netTcpClient and the provider:   <!-- ACS credentials for the full trust consumer (Part2): -->   <netTcpClient identityName="fullTrustConsumer"                 symmetricKey="E3feJSMuyGGXksJi2g2bRY5/Bpd2ll5Eb+1FgQrXIqo="/> Then rebuild the solution and verify the unit tests work. If they’re green, your service is listening through Azure. Check out the client by navigating to http://localhost:53835/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.NetTcpClient. Enter a string and hit Go! - your string will be reversed by your on-premise service, routed through Azure: Using shared secret client credentials in this way means ACS is the identity provider for your service, and the claim which allows Send access to Service Bus is consumed by Service Bus. None of the authentication details make it through to your service, so your service is not aware who the consumer is (MSDN calls this "anonymous authentication").

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• Guidance: How to layout you files for an Ideal Solution

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Creating a solution and having it maintainable over time is an art and not a science. I like being pedantic and having a place for everything, no matter how small. For setting up the Areas to run Multiple projects under one solution see my post on  When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects and for an explanation of branching see Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams. Update 17th May 2010 – We are currently trialling running a single Sprint branch to improve our history. Whenever I setup a new Team Project I implement the basic version control structure. I put “readme.txt” files in the folder structure explaining the different levels, and a solution file called “[Client].[Product].sln” located at “$/[Client]/[Product]/DEV/Main” within version control. Developers should add any projects you need to create to that solution in the format “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly]” and they will automatically be picked up and built automatically when you setup Automated Builds using Team Foundation Build. All test projects need to be done using MSTest to get proper IDE and Team Foundation Build integration out-of-the-box and be named for the assembly that it is testing with a naming convention of “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly].Tests” Here is a description of the folder layout; this content should be replicated in readme files under version control in the relevant locations so that even developers new to the project can see how to do it. Figure: The Team Project level - at this level there should be a folder for each the products that you are building if you are using Areas correctly in TFS 2010. You should try very hard to avoided spaces as these things always end up in a URL eventually e.g. "Code Auditor" should be "CodeAuditor". Figure: Product Level - At this level there should be only 3 folders (DEV, RELESE and SAFE) all of which should be in capitals. These folders represent the three stages of your application production line. Each of them may contain multiple branches but this format leaves all of your branches at the same level. Figure: The DEV folder is where all of the Development branches reside. The DEV folder will contain the "Main" branch and all feature branches is they are being used. The DEV designation specifies that all code in every branch under this folder has not been released or made ready for release. And feature branches MUST merge (Forward Integrate) from Main and stabilise prior to merging (Reverse Integration) back down into Main and being decommissioned. Figure: In the Feature branching scenario only merges are allowed onto Main, no development can be done there. Once we have a mature product it is important that new features being developed in parallel are kept separate. This would most likely be used if we had more than one Scrum team working on a single product. Figure: when we are ready to do a release of our software we will create a release branch that is then stabilised prior to deployment. This protects the serviceability of of our released code allowing developers to fix bugs and re-release an existing version. Figure: All bugs found on a release are fixed on the release.  All bugs found in a release are fixed on the release and a new deployment is created. After the deployment is created the bug fixes are then merged (Reverse Integration) into the Main branch. We do this so that we separate out our development from our production ready code.  Figure: SAFE or RTM is a read only record of what you actually released. Labels are not immutable so are useless in this circumstance.  When we have completed stabilisation of the release branch and we are ready to deploy to production we create a read-only copy of the code for reference. In some cases this could be a regulatory concern, but in most cases it protects the company building the product from legal entanglements based on what you did or did not release. Figure: This allows us to reference any particular version of our application that was ever shipped.   In addition I am an advocate of having a single solution with all the Project folders directly under the “Trunk”/”Main” folder and using the full name for the project folders.. Figure: The ideal solution If you must have multiple solutions, because you need to use more than one version of Visual Studio, name the solutions “[Client].[Product][VSVersion].sln” and have it reside in the same folder as the other solution. This makes it easier for Automated build and improves the discoverability of your code and its dependencies. Send me your feedback!   Technorati Tags: VS ALM,VSTS Developing,VS 2010,VS 2008,TFS 2010,TFS 2008,TFBS

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• How To Get Web Site Thumbnail Image In ASP.NET

  - by SAMIR BHOGAYTA

  Overview One very common requirement of many web applications is to display a thumbnail image of a web site. A typical example is to provide a link to a dynamic website displaying its current thumbnail image, or displaying images of websites with their links as a result of search (I love to see it on Google). Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 makes it quite easier to do it in a ASP.NET application. Background In order to generate image of a web page, first we need to load the web page to get their html code, and then this html needs to be rendered in a web browser. After that, a screen shot can be taken easily. I think there is no easier way to do this. Before .NET framework 2.0 it was quite difficult to use a web browser in C# or VB.NET because we either have to use COM+ interoperability or third party controls which becomes headache later. WebBrowser control in .NET framework 2.0 In .NET framework 2.0 we have a new Windows Forms WebBrowser control which is a wrapper around old shwdoc.dll. All you really need to do is to drop a WebBrowser control from your Toolbox on your form in .NET framework 2.0. If you have not used WebBrowser control yet, it's quite easy to use and very consistent with other Windows Forms controls. Some important methods of WebBrowser control are. public bool GoBack(); public bool GoForward(); public void GoHome(); public void GoSearch(); public void Navigate(Uri url); public void DrawToBitmap(Bitmap bitmap, Rectangle targetBounds); These methods are self explanatory with their names like Navigate function which redirects browser to provided URL. It also has a number of useful overloads. The DrawToBitmap (inherited from Control) draws the current image of WebBrowser to the provided bitmap. Using WebBrowser control in ASP.NET 2.0 The Solution Let's start to implement the solution which we discussed above. First we will define a static method to get the web site thumbnail image. public static Bitmap GetWebSiteThumbnail(string Url, int BrowserWidth, int BrowserHeight, int ThumbnailWidth, int ThumbnailHeight) { WebsiteThumbnailImage thumbnailGenerator = new WebsiteThumbnailImage(Url, BrowserWidth, BrowserHeight, ThumbnailWidth, ThumbnailHeight); return thumbnailGenerator.GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage(); } The WebsiteThumbnailImage class will have a public method named GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage which will generate the website thumbnail image in a separate STA thread and wait for the thread to exit. In this case, I decided to Join method of Thread class to block the initial calling thread until the bitmap is actually available, and then return the generated web site thumbnail. public Bitmap GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage() { Thread m_thread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(_GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage)); m_thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); m_thread.Start(); m_thread.Join(); return m_Bitmap; } The _GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage will create a WebBrowser control object and navigate to the provided Url. We also register for the DocumentCompleted event of the web browser control to take screen shot of the web page. To pass the flow to the other controls we need to perform a method call to Application.DoEvents(); and wait for the completion of the navigation until the browser state changes to Complete in a loop. private void _GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage() { WebBrowser m_WebBrowser = new WebBrowser(); m_WebBrowser.ScrollBarsEnabled = false; m_WebBrowser.Navigate(m_Url); m_WebBrowser.DocumentCompleted += new WebBrowserDocument CompletedEventHandler(WebBrowser_DocumentCompleted); while (m_WebBrowser.ReadyState != WebBrowserReadyState.Complete) Application.DoEvents(); m_WebBrowser.Dispose(); } The DocumentCompleted event will be fired when the navigation is completed and the browser is ready for screen shot. We will get screen shot using DrawToBitmap method as described previously which will return the bitmap of the web browser. Then the thumbnail image is generated using GetThumbnailImage method of Bitmap class passing it the required thumbnail image width and height. private void WebBrowser_DocumentCompleted(object sender, WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs e) { WebBrowser m_WebBrowser = (WebBrowser)sender; m_WebBrowser.ClientSize = new Size(this.m_BrowserWidth, this.m_BrowserHeight); m_WebBrowser.ScrollBarsEnabled = false; m_Bitmap = new Bitmap(m_WebBrowser.Bounds.Width, m_WebBrowser.Bounds.Height); m_WebBrowser.BringToFront(); m_WebBrowser.DrawToBitmap(m_Bitmap, m_WebBrowser.Bounds); m_Bitmap = (Bitmap)m_Bitmap.GetThumbnailImage(m_ThumbnailWidth, m_ThumbnailHeight, null, IntPtr.Zero); } One more example here : http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/Website_URL_Screenshot.aspx

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• Azure Mobile Services: available modules

  - by svdoever

  Azure Mobile Services has documented a set of objects available in your Azure Mobile Services server side scripts at their documentation page Mobile Services server script reference. Although the documented list is a nice list of objects for the common things you want to do, it will be sooner than later that you will look for more functionality to be included in your script, especially with the new provided feature that you can now create your custom API’s. If you use GIT it is now possible to add any NPM module (node package manager module, say the NuGet of the node world), but why include a module if it is already available out of the box. And you can only use GIT with Azure Mobile Services if you are an administrator on your Azure Mobile Service, not if you are a co-administrator (will be solved in the future). Until now I did some trial and error experimentation to test if a certain module was available. This is easiest to do as follows:   Create a custom API, for example named experiment. In this API use the following code: exports.get = function (request, response) { var module = "nonexistingmodule"; var m = require(module); response.send(200, "Module '%s' found.", module); }; You can now test your service with the following request in your browser: https://yourservice.azure-mobile.net/api/experiment If you get the result: {"code":500,"error":"Error: Internal Server Error"} you know that the module does not exist. In your logs you will find the following error: Error in script '/api/experiment.json'. Error: Cannot find module 'nonexistingmodule' [external code] atC:\DWASFiles\Sites\yourservice\VirtualDirectory0\site\wwwroot\App_Data\config\scripts\api\experiment.js:3:13[external code] If you require an existing (undocumented) module like the OAuth module in the following code, you will get success as a result: exports.get = function (request, response) { var module = "oauth"; var m = require(module); response.send(200, "Module '" + module + "' found."); }; If we look at the standard node.js documentation we see an extensive list of modules that can be used from your code. If we look at the list of files available in the Azure Mobile Services platform as documented in the blog post Azure Mobile Services: what files does it consist of? we see a folder node_modules with many more modules are used to build the Azure Mobile Services functionality on, but that can also be utilized from your server side node script code: apn - An interface to the Apple Push Notification service for Node.js. dpush - Send push notifications to Android devices using GCM. mpns - A Node.js interface to the Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS) for Windows Phone. wns - Send push notifications to Windows 8 devices using WNS. pusher - Node library for the Pusher server API (see also: http://pusher.com/) azure - Windows Azure Client Library for node. express - Sinatra inspired web development framework. oauth - Library for interacting with OAuth 1.0, 1.0A, 2 and Echo. Provides simplified client access and allows for construction of more complex apis and OAuth providers. request - Simplified HTTP request client. sax - An evented streaming XML parser in JavaScript sendgrid - A NodeJS implementation of the SendGrid Api. sqlserver – In node repository known as msnodesql - Microsoft Driver for Node.js for SQL Server. tripwire - Break out from scripts blocking node.js event loop. underscore - JavaScript's functional programming helper library. underscore.string - String manipulation extensions for Underscore.js javascript library. xml2js - Simple XML to JavaScript object converter. xmlbuilder - An XML builder for node.js. As stated before, many of these modules are used to provide the functionality of Azure Mobile Services platform, and in general should not be used directly. On the other hand, I needed OAuth badly to authenticate to the new v1.1 services of Twitter, and was very happy that a require('oauth') and a few lines of code did the job. Based on the above modules and a lot of code in the other javascript files in the Azure Mobile Services platform a set of global objects is provided that can be used from your server side node.js script code. In future blog posts I will go into more details with respect to how this code is built-up, all starting at the node.js express entry point app.js.

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• Why enumerator structs are a really bad idea

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've ever poked around the .NET class libraries in Reflector, I'm sure you would have noticed that the generic collection classes all have implementations of their IEnumerator as a struct rather than a class. As you will see, this design decision has some rather unfortunate side effects... As is generally known in the .NET world, mutable structs are a Very Bad Idea; and there are several other blogs around explaining this (Eric Lippert's blog post explains the problem quite well). In the BCL, the generic collection enumerators are all mutable structs, as they need to keep track of where they are in the collection. This bit me quite hard when I was coding a wrapper around a LinkedList<int>.Enumerator. It boils down to this code: sealed class EnumeratorWrapper : IEnumerator<int> { private readonly LinkedList<int>.Enumerator m_Enumerator; public EnumeratorWrapper(LinkedList<int> linkedList) { m_Enumerator = linkedList.GetEnumerator(); } public int Current { get { return m_Enumerator.Current; } } object System.Collections.IEnumerator.Current { get { return Current; } } public bool MoveNext() { return m_Enumerator.MoveNext(); } public void Reset() { ((System.Collections.IEnumerator)m_Enumerator).Reset(); } public void Dispose() { m_Enumerator.Dispose(); } } The key line here is the MoveNext method. When I initially coded this, I thought that the call to m_Enumerator.MoveNext() would alter the enumerator state in the m_Enumerator class variable and so the enumeration would proceed in an orderly fashion through the collection. However, when I ran this code it went into an infinite loop - the m_Enumerator.MoveNext() call wasn't actually changing the state in the m_Enumerator variable at all, and my code was looping forever on the first collection element. It was only after disassembling that method that I found out what was going on The MoveNext method above results in the following IL: .method public hidebysig newslot virtual final instance bool MoveNext() cil managed { .maxstack 1 .locals init ( [0] bool CS$1$0000, [1] valuetype [System]System.Collections.Generic.LinkedList`1/Enumerator CS$0$0001) L_0000: nop L_0001: ldarg.0 L_0002: ldfld valuetype [System]System.Collections.Generic.LinkedList`1/Enumerator EnumeratorWrapper::m_Enumerator L_0007: stloc.1 L_0008: ldloca.s CS$0$0001 L_000a: call instance bool [System]System.Collections.Generic.LinkedList`1/Enumerator::MoveNext() L_000f: stloc.0 L_0010: br.s L_0012 L_0012: ldloc.0 L_0013: ret } Here, the important line is 0002 - m_Enumerator is accessed using the ldfld operator, which does the following: Finds the value of a field in the object whose reference is currently on the evaluation stack. So, what the MoveNext method is doing is the following: public bool MoveNext() { LinkedList<int>.Enumerator CS$0$0001 = this.m_Enumerator; bool CS$1$0000 = CS$0$0001.MoveNext(); return CS$1$0000; } The enumerator instance being modified by the call to MoveNext is the one stored in the CS$0$0001 variable on the stack, and not the one in the EnumeratorWrapper class instance. Hence why the state of m_Enumerator wasn't getting updated. Hmm, ok. Well, why is it doing this? If you have a read of Eric Lippert's blog post about this issue, you'll notice he quotes a few sections of the C# spec. In particular, 7.5.4: ...if the field is readonly and the reference occurs outside an instance constructor of the class in which the field is declared, then the result is a value, namely the value of the field I in the object referenced by E. And my m_Enumerator field is readonly! Indeed, if I remove the readonly from the class variable then the problem goes away, and the code works as expected. The IL confirms this: .method public hidebysig newslot virtual final instance bool MoveNext() cil managed { .maxstack 1 .locals init ( [0] bool CS$1$0000) L_0000: nop L_0001: ldarg.0 L_0002: ldflda valuetype [System]System.Collections.Generic.LinkedList`1/Enumerator EnumeratorWrapper::m_Enumerator L_0007: call instance bool [System]System.Collections.Generic.LinkedList`1/Enumerator::MoveNext() L_000c: stloc.0 L_000d: br.s L_000f L_000f: ldloc.0 L_0010: ret } Notice on line 0002, instead of the ldfld we had before, we've got a ldflda, which does this: Finds the address of a field in the object whose reference is currently on the evaluation stack. Instead of loading the value, we're loading the address of the m_Enumerator field. So now the call to MoveNext modifies the enumerator stored in the class rather than on the stack, and everything works as expected. Previously, I had thought enumerator structs were an odd but interesting feature of the BCL that I had used in the past to do linked list slices. However, effects like this only underline how dangerous mutable structs are, and I'm at a loss to explain why the enumerators were implemented as structs in the first place. (interestingly, the SortedList<TKey, TValue> enumerator is a struct but is private, which makes it even more odd - the only way it can be accessed is as a boxed IEnumerator!). I would love to hear people's theories as to why the enumerators are implemented in such a fashion. And bonus points if you can explain why LinkedList<int>.Enumerator.Reset is an explicit implementation but Dispose is implicit... Note to self: never ever ever code a mutable struct.

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• Sort Data in Windows Phone using Collection View Source

  - by psheriff

  When you write a Windows Phone application you will most likely consume data from a web service somewhere. If that service returns data to you in a sort order that you do not want, you have an easy alternative to sort the data without writing any C# or VB code. You use the built-in CollectionViewSource object in XAML to perform the sorting for you. This assumes that you can get the data into a collection that implements the IEnumerable or IList interfaces.For this example, I will be using a simple Product class with two properties, and a list of Product objects using the Generic List class. Try this out by creating a Product class as shown in the following code:public class Product {  public Product(int id, string name)   {    ProductId = id;    ProductName = name;  }  public int ProductId { get; set; }  public string ProductName { get; set; }}Create a collection class that initializes a property called DataCollection with some sample data as shown in the code below:public class Products : List<Product>{  public Products()  {    InitCollection();  }  public List<Product> DataCollection { get; set; }  List<Product> InitCollection()  {    DataCollection = new List<Product>();    DataCollection.Add(new Product(3,        "PDSA .NET Productivity Framework"));    DataCollection.Add(new Product(1,        "Haystack Code Generator for .NET"));    DataCollection.Add(new Product(2,        "Fundamentals of .NET eBook"));    return DataCollection;  }}Notice that the data added to the collection is not in any particular order. Create a Windows Phone page and add two XML namespaces to the Page.xmlns:scm="clr-namespace:System.ComponentModel;assembly=System.Windows"xmlns:local="clr-namespace:WPSortData"The 'local' namespace is an alias to the name of the project that you created (in this case WPSortData). The 'scm' namespace references the System.Windows.dll and is needed for the SortDescription class that you will use for sorting the data. Create a phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources section in your Windows Phone page that looks like the following:<phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources>  <local:Products x:Key="products" />  <CollectionViewSource x:Key="prodCollection"      Source="{Binding Source={StaticResource products},                       Path=DataCollection}">    <CollectionViewSource.SortDescriptions>      <scm:SortDescription PropertyName="ProductName"                           Direction="Ascending" />    </CollectionViewSource.SortDescriptions>  </CollectionViewSource></phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources>The first line of code in the resources section creates an instance of your Products class. The constructor of the Products class calls the InitCollection method which creates three Product objects and adds them to the DataCollection property of the Products class. Once the Products object is instantiated you now add a CollectionViewSource object in XAML using the Products object as the source of the data to this collection. A CollectionViewSource has a SortDescriptions collection that allows you to specify a set of SortDescription objects. Each object can set a PropertyName and a Direction property. As you see in the above code you set the PropertyName equal to the ProductName property of the Product object and tell it to sort in an Ascending direction.All you have to do now is to create a ListBox control and set its ItemsSource property to the CollectionViewSource object. The ListBox displays the data in sorted order by ProductName and you did not have to write any LINQ queries or write other code to sort the data!<ListBox    ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource prodCollection}}"   DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" />SummaryIn this blog post you learned that you can sort any data without having to change the source code of where the data comes from. Simply feed the data into a CollectionViewSource in XAML and set some sort descriptions in XAML and the rest is done for you! This comes in very handy when you are consuming data from a source where the data is given to you and you do not have control over the sorting.NOTE: You can download this article and many samples like the one shown in this blog entry at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips and Tricks”, then “Sort Data in Windows Phone using Collection View Source” from the drop down list.Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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• Customizing UPK outputs (Part 2 - Player)

  - by [email protected]

  There are a few things that can be done to give the Player output a personalized look to match your corporate branding. In my previous post, I talked about changing the logo. In addition to the logo, you can change the graphic in the heading, button colors, border colors and many other items. Prior to making any customizations, I strongly recommend making a copy of the existing Player style. This will give you a backup in case things go wrong. I'd also recommend that you create your own brand. This way, when you install the newest updates from us, your brand will remain intact. Creating your own brand is pretty easy. Make sure you have modify permissions on the publishing styles directory, if you are using a multi-user installation. Under the Publishing/Styles folder, create a new folder with your company name. Copy all the publishing styles from the UPK folder to your newly created folder. Now, when you go through the Publishing wizard, you will have two categories to choose from: the UPK category or your custom category. Now, for updating the Player output. First, the graphic that appears on the right hand side of the Player. If you're using a multi-user installation, check out the player style from your custom brand. Open the player style. Open the img folder. The file named "banner_image.png" represents the graphic that appears on the right hand side of the player. It is currently sized at 425 x 54. Try to keep your graphic about the same size. Rename your graphic file to be "banner_image.png", and drag it into the img folder. Save the package. Check in the package if you are in a multi-user installation. You've just updated the banner heading! Next, let's work on updating some of the other colors in the player. All the customizable areas are located in the skin.css file which is in the root of the Player style. Many of our customers update the colors to match their own theme. You don't have to be a programmer to make these changes, honest. :) To change the colors in the player: Make a copy of the original skin.css file. (This is to make sure you have a working version to revert to, in case something goes wrong.) Open the skin.css file from the Player package. You can edit it using Notepad. Make the desired changes. Save the file. Save the package. Publish to view your new changes. When you open the skin.css, you will see groupings like this: .headerDivbar { height: 21px; background-color: #CDE2FD; } Change the value of the background-color to the color of your choice. Note that you cannot use "red" as a color, but rather you should enter the hexadecimal color code. If you don't know the color code, search the web for "hexadecimal colors" and you'll find many sites to provide the information. Here are a few of the variables that you can update. Heading: .headerDivbar -this changes the color of the banner that appears under the graphic Button colors: .navCellOn - changes the color of the mode buttons when your mouse is hovering on them. .navCellOff - changes the color of the mode buttons when the mouse is not over them Lines: .thorizontal - this is the color of the horizontal lines surrounding the outline .tvertical - this is the color of the vertical lines on the left and right margin in the outline. .tsep - this is the color of the line that separates the outline from the content area Search frame: .tocSearchColor - this is the color of the search area .tocFrameText - this is the background color of the TOC tree. Hint: If you want to try out the changes prior to updating the style, you can update the skin.css in some content you've already published for the player (it's located in the css folder of the player package). This way, you can immediately see the changes without going through publishing. Once you're happy with the changes, update the skin.css in player style. Want to customize more? Refer to the "Customizing the Player" section of the Content Development manual for more details on all the options in the skin.css that can be changed, and pictures of what each variable controls. I'd love to see how you've customized the player for your corporate needs. Also, if there are other areas of the player you'd like to modify but have not been able to, let us know. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. --Maria Cozzolino, Manager of Requirements & UI Design for UPK

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• Some non-generic collections

  - by Simon Cooper

  Although the collections classes introduced in .NET 2, 3.5 and 4 cover most scenarios, there are still some .NET 1 collections that don't have generic counterparts. In this post, I'll be examining what they do, why you might use them, and some things you'll need to bear in mind when doing so. BitArray System.Collections.BitArray is conceptually the same as a List<bool>, but whereas List<bool> stores each boolean in a single byte (as that's what the backing bool[] does), BitArray uses a single bit to store each value, and uses various bitmasks to access each bit individually. This means that BitArray is eight times smaller than a List<bool>. Furthermore, BitArray has some useful functions for bitmasks, like And, Xor and Not, and it's not limited to 32 or 64 bits; a BitArray can hold as many bits as you need. However, it's not all roses and kittens. There are some fundamental limitations you have to bear in mind when using BitArray: It's a non-generic collection. The enumerator returns object (a boxed boolean), rather than an unboxed bool. This means that if you do this: foreach (bool b in bitArray) { ... } Every single boolean value will be boxed, then unboxed. And if you do this: foreach (var b in bitArray) { ... } you'll have to manually unbox b on every iteration, as it'll come out of the enumerator an object. Instead, you should manually iterate over the collection using a for loop: for (int i=0; i<bitArray.Length; i++) { bool b = bitArray[i]; ... } Following on from that, if you want to use BitArray in the context of an IEnumerable<bool>, ICollection<bool> or IList<bool>, you'll need to write a wrapper class, or use the Enumerable.Cast<bool> extension method (although Cast would box and unbox every value you get out of it). There is no Add or Remove method. You specify the number of bits you need in the constructor, and that's what you get. You can change the length yourself using the Length property setter though. It doesn't implement IList. Although not really important if you're writing a generic wrapper around it, it is something to bear in mind if you're using it with pre-generic code. However, if you use BitArray carefully, it can provide significant gains over a List<bool> for functionality and efficiency of space. OrderedDictionary System.Collections.Specialized.OrderedDictionary does exactly what you would expect - it's an IDictionary that maintains items in the order they are added. It does this by storing key/value pairs in a Hashtable (to get O(1) key lookup) and an ArrayList (to maintain the order). You can access values by key or index, and insert or remove items at a particular index. The enumerator returns items in index order. However, the Keys and Values properties return ICollection, not IList, as you might expect; CopyTo doesn't maintain the same ordering, as it copies from the backing Hashtable, not ArrayList; and any operations that insert or remove items from the middle of the collection are O(n), just like a normal list. In short; don't use this class. If you need some sort of ordered dictionary, it would be better to write your own generic dictionary combining a Dictionary<TKey, TValue> and List<KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>> or List<TKey> for your specific situation. ListDictionary and HybridDictionary To look at why you might want to use ListDictionary or HybridDictionary, we need to examine the performance of these dictionaries compared to Hashtable and Dictionary<object, object>. For this test, I added n items to each collection, then randomly accessed n/2 items: So, what's going on here? Well, ListDictionary is implemented as a linked list of key/value pairs; all operations on the dictionary require an O(n) search through the list. However, for small n, the constant factor that big-o notation doesn't measure is much lower than the hashing overhead of Hashtable or Dictionary. HybridDictionary combines a Hashtable and ListDictionary; for small n, it uses a backing ListDictionary, but switches to a Hashtable when it gets to 9 items (you can see the point it switches from a ListDictionary to Hashtable in the graph). Apart from that, it's got very similar performance to Hashtable. So why would you want to use either of these? In short, you wouldn't. Any gain in performance by using ListDictionary over Dictionary<TKey, TValue> would be offset by the generic dictionary not having to cast or box the items you store, something the graphs above don't measure. Only if the performance of the dictionary is vital, the dictionary will hold less than 30 items, and you don't need type safety, would you use ListDictionary over the generic Dictionary. And even then, there's probably more useful performance gains you can make elsewhere.

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• How to make creating viewmodels at runtime less painful

  - by Mr Happy

  I apologize for the long question, it reads a bit as a rant, but I promise it's not! I've summarized my question(s) below In the MVC world, things are straightforward. The Model has state, the View shows the Model, and the Controller does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a controller has no state. To do stuff the Controller has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a controller you care about supplying those dependencies, nothing else. When you execute an action (method on Controller), you use those dependencies to retrieve or update the Model or calling some other domain service. If there's any context, say like some user wants to see the details of a particular item, you pass the Id of that item as parameter to the Action. Nowhere in the Controller is there any reference to any state. So far so good. Enter MVVM. I love WPF, I love data binding. I love frameworks that make data binding to ViewModels even easier (using Caliburn Micro a.t.m.). I feel things are less straightforward in this world though. Let's do the exercise again: the Model has state, the View shows the ViewModel, and the ViewModel does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a ViewModel does have state! (to clarify; maybe it delegates all the properties to one or more Models, but that means it must have a reference to the model one way or another, which is state in itself) To do stuff the ViewModel has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a ViewModel you care about supplying those dependencies, but also the state. And this, ladies and gentlemen, annoys me to no end. Whenever you need to instantiate a ProductDetailsViewModel from the ProductSearchViewModel (from which you called the ProductSearchWebService which in turn returned IEnumerable<ProductDTO>, everybody still with me?), you can do one of these things: call new ProductDetailsViewModel(productDTO, _shoppingCartWebService /* dependcy */);, this is bad, imagine 3 more dependencies, this means the ProductSearchViewModel needs to take on those dependencies as well. Also changing the constructor is painful. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelFactory.Create().Initialize(productDTO);, the factory is just a Func, they are easily generated by most IoC frameworks. I think this is bad because Init methods are a leaky abstraction. You also can't use the readonly keyword for fields that are set in the Init method. I'm sure there are a few more reasons. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelAbstractFactory.Create(productDTO); So... this is the pattern (abstract factory) that is usually recommended for this type of problem. I though it was genius since it satisfies my craving for static typing, until I actually started using it. The amount of boilerplate code is I think too much (you know, apart from the ridiculous variable names I get use). For each ViewModel that needs runtime parameters you'll get two extra files (factory interface and implementation), and you need to type the non-runtime dependencies like 4 extra times. And each time the dependencies change, you get to change it in the factory as well. It feels like I don't even use a DI container anymore. (I think Castle Windsor has some kind of solution for this [with it's own drawbacks, correct me if I'm wrong]). do something with anonymous types or dictionary. I like my static typing. So, yeah. Mixing state and behavior in this way creates a problem which don't exist at all in MVC. And I feel like there currently isn't a really adequate solution for this problem. Now I'd like to observe some things: People actually use MVVM. So they either don't care about all of the above, or they have some brilliant other solution. I haven't found an in-depth example of MVVM with WPF. For example, the NDDD-sample project immensely helped me understand some DDD concepts. I'd really like it if someone could point me in the direction of something similar for MVVM/WPF. Maybe I'm doing MVVM all wrong and I should turn my design upside down. Maybe I shouldn't have this problem at all. Well I know other people have asked the same question so I think I'm not the only one. To summarize Am I correct to conclude that having the ViewModel being an integration point for both state and behavior is the reason for some difficulties with the MVVM pattern as a whole? Is using the abstract factory pattern the only/best way to instantiate a ViewModel in a statically typed way? Is there something like an in depth reference implementation available? Is having a lot of ViewModels with both state/behavior a design smell?

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• Reference Data Management and Master Data: Are Relation ?

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  Submitted By:  Rahul Kamath  Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM) has always been extremely powerful as an Enterprise Master Data Management (MDM) solution that can help manage changes to master data in a way that influences enterprise structure, whether it be mastering chart of accounts to enable financial transformation, or revamping organization structures to drive business transformation and operational efficiencies, or restructuring sales territories to enable equitable distribution of leads to sales teams following the acquisition of new products, or adding additional cost centers to enable fine grain control over expenses. Increasingly, DRM is also being utilized by Oracle customers for reference data management, an emerging solution space that deserves some explanation. What is reference data? How does it relate to Master Data? Reference data is a close cousin of master data. While master data is challenged with problems of unique identification, may be more rapidly changing, requires consensus building across stakeholders and lends structure to business transactions, reference data is simpler, more slowly changing, but has semantic content that is used to categorize or group other information assets – including master data – and gives them contextual value. In fact, the creation of a new master data element may require new reference data to be created. For example, when a European company acquires a US business, chances are that they will now need to adapt their product line taxonomy to include a new category to describe the newly acquired US product line. Further, the cross-border transaction will also result in a revised geo hierarchy. The addition of new products represents changes to master data while changes to product categories and geo hierarchy are examples of reference data changes.1 The following table contains an illustrative list of examples of reference data by type. Reference data types may include types and codes, business taxonomies, complex relationships & cross-domain mappings or standards. Types & Codes Taxonomies Relationships / Mappings Standards Transaction Codes Industry Classification Categories and Codes, e.g., North America Industry Classification System (NAICS) Product / Segment; Product / Geo Calendars (e.g., Gregorian, Fiscal, Manufacturing, Retail, ISO8601) Lookup Tables (e.g., Gender, Marital Status, etc.) Product Categories City à State à Postal Codes Currency Codes (e.g., ISO) Status Codes Sales Territories (e.g., Geo, Industry Verticals, Named Accounts, Federal/State/Local/Defense) Customer / Market Segment; Business Unit / Channel Country Codes (e.g., ISO 3166, UN) Role Codes Market Segments Country Codes / Currency Codes / Financial Accounts Date/Time, Time Zones (e.g., ISO 8601) Domain Values Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC), eCl@ss International Classification of Diseases (ICD) e.g., ICD9 à IC10 mappings Tax Rates Why manage reference data? Reference data carries contextual value and meaning and therefore its use can drive business logic that helps execute a business process, create a desired application behavior or provide meaningful segmentation to analyze transaction data. Further, mapping reference data often requires human judgment. Sample Use Cases of Reference Data Management Healthcare: Diagnostic Codes The reference data challenges in the healthcare industry offer a case in point. Part of being HIPAA compliant requires medical practitioners to transition diagnosis codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10, a medical coding scheme used to classify diseases, signs and symptoms, causes, etc. The transition to ICD-10 has a significant impact on business processes, procedures, contracts, and IT systems. Since both code sets ICD-9 and ICD-10 offer diagnosis codes of very different levels of granularity, human judgment is required to map ICD-9 codes to ICD-10. The process requires collaboration and consensus building among stakeholders much in the same way as does master data management. Moreover, to build reports to understand utilization, frequency and quality of diagnoses, medical practitioners may need to “cross-walk” mappings -- either forward to ICD-10 or backwards to ICD-9 depending upon the reporting time horizon. Spend Management: Product, Service & Supplier Codes Similarly, as an enterprise looks to rationalize suppliers and leverage their spend, conforming supplier codes, as well as product and service codes requires supporting multiple classification schemes that may include industry standards (e.g., UNSPSC, eCl@ss) or enterprise taxonomies. Aberdeen Group estimates that 90% of companies rely on spreadsheets and manual reviews to aggregate, classify and analyze spend data, and that data management activities account for 12-15% of the sourcing cycle and consume 30-50% of a commodity manager’s time. Creating a common map across the extended enterprise to rationalize codes across procurement, accounts payable, general ledger, credit card, procurement card (P-card) as well as ACH and bank systems can cut sourcing costs, improve compliance, lower inventory stock, and free up talent to focus on value added tasks. Change Management: Point of Sales Transaction Codes and Product Codes In the specialty finance industry, enterprises are confronted with usury laws – governed at the state and local level – that regulate financial product innovation as it relates to consumer loans, check cashing and pawn lending. To comply, it is important to demonstrate that transactions booked at the point of sale are posted against valid product codes that were on offer at the time of booking the sale. Since new products are being released at a steady stream, it is important to ensure timely and accurate mapping of point-of-sale transaction codes with the appropriate product and GL codes to comply with the changing regulations. Multi-National Companies: Industry Classification Schemes As companies grow and expand across geographies, a typical challenge they encounter with reference data represents reconciling various versions of industry classification schemes in use across nations. While the United States, Mexico and Canada conform to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) standard, European Union countries choose different variants of the NACE industry classification scheme. Multi-national companies must manage the individual national NACE schemes and reconcile the differences across countries. Enterprises must invest in a reference data change management application to address the challenge of distributing reference data changes to downstream applications and assess which applications were impacted by a given change. References 1 Master Data versus Reference Data, Malcolm Chisholm, April 1, 2006.

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• Simple Project Templates

  - by Geertjan

  The NetBeans sources include a module named "simple.project.templates": In the module sources, Tim Boudreau turns out to be the author of the code, so I asked him what it was all about, and if he could provide some usage code. His response, from approximately this time last year because it's been sitting in my inbox for a while, is below. Sure - though I think the javadoc in it is fairly complete.  I wrote it because I needed to create a bunch of project templates for Javacard, and all of the ways that is usually done were grotesque and complicated.  I figured we already have the ability to create files from templates, and we already have the ability to do substitutions in templates, so why not have a single file that defines the project as a list of file templates to create (with substitutions in the names) and some definitions of what should be in project properties. You can also add files to the project programmatically if you want.Basically, a template for an entire project is a .properties file.  Any line which doesn't have the prefix 'pp.' or 'pvp.' is treated as the definition of one file which should be created in the new project.  Any such line where the key ends in * means that file should be opened once the new project is created.  So, for example, in the nodejs module, the definition looks like: {{projectName}}.js*=Templates/javascript/HelloWorld.js .npmignore=node_hidden_templates/npmignore So, the first line means:  - Create a file with the same name as the project, using the HelloWorld template    - I.e. the left side of the line is the relative path of the file to create, and the right side is the path in the system filesystem for the template to use       - If the template is not one you normally want users to see, just register it in the system filesystem somewhere other than Templates/ (but remember to set the attribute that marks it as a template)  - Include that file in the set of files which should be opened in the editor once the new project is created. To actually create a project, first you just create a new ProjectCreator: ProjectCreator gen = new ProjectCreator( parentFolderOfNewProject ); Now, if you want to programmatically generate any files, in addition to those defined in the template, you can: gen.add (new FileCreator("nbproject", "project.xml", false) {     public DataObject create (FileObject project, Map<String,String> substitutions) throws IOException {          ...     } }); Then pass the FileObject for the project template (the properties file) to the ProjectCreator's createProject method (hmm, maybe it should be the string path to the project template instead, to save the caller trouble looking up the FileObject for the template).  That method looks like this: public final GeneratedProject createProject(final ProgressHandle handle, final String name, final FileObject template, final Map<String, String> substitutions) throws IOException { The name parameter should be the directory name for the new project;  the map is the strings you gathered in the wizard which should be used for substitutions.  createProject should be called on a background thread (i.e. use a ProgressInstantiatingIterator for the wizard iterator and just pass in the ProgressHandle you are given). The return value is a GeneratedProject object, which is just a holder for the created project directory and the set of DataObjects which should be opened when the wizard finishes. I'd love to see simple.project.templates moved out of the javacard cluster, as it is really useful and much simpler than any of the stuff currently done for generating projects.  It would also be possible to do much richer tools for creating projects in apisupport - i.e. choose (or create in the wizard) the templates you want to use, generate a skeleton wizard with a UI for all the properties you'd like to substitute, etc. Here is a partial project template from Javacard - for example usage, see org.netbeans.modules.javacard.wizard.ProjectWizardIterator in javacard.project (or the much simpler one in contrib/nodejs). #This properties file describes what to create when a project template is#instantiated.  The keys are paths on disk relative to the project root. #The values are paths to the templates to use for those files in the system#filesystem.  Any string inside {{ and }}'s will be substituted using properties#gathered in the template wizard.#Special key prefixes are #  pp. - indicates an entry for nbproject/project.properties#  pvp. - indicates an entry for nbproject/private/private.properties #File templates, in format [path-in-project=path-to-template]META-INF/javacard.xml=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/javacard.xmlMETA-INF/MANIFEST.MF=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/EAP_MANIFEST.MF APPLET-INF/applet.xml=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/applet.xmlscripts/{{classnamelowercase}}.scr=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/test.scrsrc/{{packagepath}}/{{classname}}.java*=Templates/javacard/ExtendedApplet.java nbproject/deployment.xml=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/deployment.xml#project.properties contentspp.display.name={{projectname}}pp.platform.active={{activeplatform}} pp.active.device={{activedevice}}pp.includes=**pp.excludes= I will be using the above info in an upcoming blog entry and provide step by step instructions showing how to use them. However, anyone else out there should have enough info from the above to get started yourself!

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• Writing an ASP.Net Web based TFS Client

  - by Glav

  So one of the things I needed to do was write an ASP.Net MVC based application for our senior execs to manage a set of arbitrary attributes against stories, bugs etc to be able to attribute whether the item was related to Research and Development, and if so, what kind. We are using TFS Azure and don’t have the option of custom templates. I have decided on using a string based field within the template that is not very visible and which we don’t use to write a small set of custom which will determine the research and development association. However, this string munging on the field is not very user friendly so we need a simple tool that can display attributes against items in a simple dropdown list or something similar. Enter a custom web app that accesses our TFS items in Azure (Note: We are also using Visual Studio 2012) Now TFS Azure uses your Live ID and it is not really possible to easily do this in a server based app where no interaction is available. Even if you capture the Live ID credentials yourself and try to submit them to TFS Azure, it wont work. Bottom line is that it is not straightforward nor obvious what you have to do. In fact, it is a real pain to find and there are some answers out there which don’t appear to be answers at all given they didn’t work in my scenario. So for anyone else who wants to do this, here is a simple breakdown on what you have to do: Go here and get the “TFS Service Credential Viewer”. Install it, run it and connect to your TFS instance in azure and create a service account. Note the username and password exactly as it presents it to you. This is the magic identity that will allow unattended, programmatic access. Without this step, don’t bother trying to do anything else. In your MVC app, reference the following assemblies from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0”: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.DataStoreLoader.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Common.dll If hosting this in Internet Information Server, for the application pool this app runs under, you will need to enable 32 Bit support. You also have to allow the TFS client assemblies to store a cache of files on your system. If you don’t do this, you will authenticate fine, but then get an exception saying that it is unable to access the cache at some directory path when you query work items. You can set this up by adding the following to your web.config, in the <appSettings> element as shown below: <appSettings> <!-- Add reference to TFS Client Cache --> <add key="WorkItemTrackingCacheRoot" value="C:\windows\temp" /> </appSettings> With all that in place, you can write the following code: var token = new Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.SimpleWebTokenCredential("{you-service-account-name", "{your-service-acct-password}"); var clientCreds = new Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TfsClientCredentials(token); var currentCollection = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri(“https://{yourdomain}.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection”), clientCreds); TfsConfigurationServercurrentCollection.EnsureAuthenticated(); In the above code, not the URL contains the “defaultcollection” at the end of the URL. Obviously replace {yourdomain} with whatever is defined for your TFS in Azure instance. In addition, make sure the service user account and password that was generated in the first step is substituted in here. Note: If something is not right, the “EnsureAuthenticated()” call will throw an exception with the message being you are not authorised. If you forget the “defaultcollection” on the URL, it will still fail but with a message saying you are not authorised. That is, a similar but different exception message. And that is it. You can then query the collection using something like: var service = currentCollection.GetService<WorkItemStore>(); var proj = service.Projects[0]; var allQueries = proj.StoredQueries; for (int qcnt = 0; qcnt < allQueries.Count; qcnt++) {     var query = allQueries[qcnt];     var queryDesc = string.format(“Query found named: {0}”,query.Name); } You get the idea. If you search around, you will find references to the ServiceIdentityCredentialProvider which is referenced in this article. I had no luck with this method and it all looked too hard since it required an extra KB article and other magic sauce. So I hope that helps. This article certainly would have helped me save a boat load of time and frustration.

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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 1

  - by Dave Campbell

  I'm going to try something here... if it seems useful, I'll continue, if it doesn't, I'll stop... so give me feedback! There are *lots* of Apps in the WP7 Marketplace, and heaven help me, but the Marketplace sucks for finding stuff. I won't rehash what's already been said in the blogs, but I agree with one and all. I went out last Saturday to find 2 apps that I knew were released, and couldn't do so on my device. Even in the Zune app, it took quite a while to find them... ok, I'll back off a bit, because I just found out I can do 'Search' now if I know the name... I didn't think that was working before. So my thought is on Monday (like today), I will post a review of 5 apps/games I either use or have played with on my device. These are strictly my opinions, you understand, but hey... it's better than a poke in the eye with an iPhone! A few disclaimers:     Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week, and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. In this Issue:   Jingo! is the first app I bought, just to see what the experience was like. It's very much like a game we used to play in school in the Army in 1971 on paper we passed around. Sort of a cross between hangman and Mastermind, you try to figure out the hidden word in 5 tries. You get really good at 5-letter words after a while. I like this because you have to think, and you're not pressured by a clock Jingo! is by James Furdell and is $1.99 I reviewed René Schulte's Pictures Lab a while back, and have not changed my mind. This is an excellent app for playing with any photo on your device... one you've just taken, one you've synced from your PC, or one you've saved from email. I like this because you can get some cool effects for your photos, and it just works. Pictures Lab is by Schulte Software Development and is $1.99 Since I work as a consultant, and from home, I wanted something I could track my time with. I've test-driven all the contenders I could find so far on the phone, and so far I like ONTRACK! the best. If asked, I have some suggestions, but it's probably just the way I work or think. What I do like is I can tap a project to start/stop/restart a counter, and at the end of the day it shows me how much time I've been working. If there's a way to make an adjustment in case you forget to tap the counter, I don't know how to do it, and that's my biggest complaint. I like this because you can get a daily readout which you can also email as a spreadsheet. The daily results display is very good. ONTRACK! is by Qmino and is $2.99 Remember Item 4 above... I've been playing guitar for 48 years... obviously since before the invention of 'tuners', so I'm not as dependent upon these as some folks are. I've tried some in the past and have always felt I can do just as good by ear (I have perfect relative pitch). So, I gave this app by András Velvárt a dance just to see how it works, and it is surprisingly good. If you're used to one of the stage tuners this may take a little getting used to, but it does the job. The difference with this one is there is no real 'null' point inside which you can think your guitar is in tune. The soundwave stays visible on the device, and if it's moving to the right, your string is flat, if it's moving to the left, your string is sharp. Getting it exact might be tricky, but it is exact! If you need to rely on a tuner, this is a good choice in my opinion, exactly because of the sensitivity.. tune up with this and you're dead-on. Guitar Tuner is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $0.99 Popper 2 is the WP7 version of a wildly popular game by Bill Reiss named Dr. Popper. You can get a trial, or you can now get a free lite version of the game. Popper 2 is a fast-paced bubble breaker game. I find it something fun to play when I just want to buzz out, but maybe the best review is that my daughter didn't want to give my phone back when I showed it to her, and always wants to grab my phone to play 'that game'. A fun distraction with great graphics and a great price Popper 2 is by Blue Rose Systems, LLC and is $1.29 Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light!   Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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