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• Including objects from external .js files

  - by Molle

  I have been searching for many hours over several days for this answer and though there are many topics on how to include files in a project (also here at Stack Overflow), I have not yet found THE solution to my problem. I'm working on a project where I want to include one single object at a time, from many different files (I do not want to include the files themselves, only their content). All the object in all the files have the same name, only the content is different. It is important that I do not get a SCRIPT tag in the head section of the page as all the content from the files will have the same names. None of the files will have functions anyways, only one single object, that will need to be loaded one at the time and then discarded when the next element is loaded. The objects will hold the data that will be shown on the page and they will be called from the menu by an 'onclick' event. function setMenu() // The menu is being build. { var html = ''; html += '<table border="0">'; for (var i = 0; i<menu.pages.length; i++) { html += '<tr class="menuPunkt"><td width="5"></td><td onclick="pageName(this)">'+ menu.pages[i] +'</td><td width="5"></td></tr>'; } // menu is a global object containing elements such as an array with // all the pages that needs to be shown and styling for the menu. html += '</table>'; document.getElementById("menu").innerHTML = html; style.setMenu(); // The menu is being positioned and styled. } Now, when I click on a menu item the pageName function is triggered and I'm sending the HTML element to the function as well, it is here that I want the content from my external file to be loaded into a local variable and used to display content on the page. ** The answer I want is "How to load the external obj into the function where I need it? (It may be an external file, but only in the term of not being included in the head section. I'm still loading the the file from my own local library.** function pageName(elm) // The element that I clicked is elm. { var page = info.innerHTML; // I need only the innerHTML from the element. var file = 'sites/' + page + '.js'; // The file to be loaded is created. var obj = ?? // Here I somehow want the object from the external file to be loaded. // Before doing stuff the the obj. style.content(); } The content from the external file could look like this: // The src for the external page: 'sites/page.js' var obj = new Object() { obj.innerHTML = 'Text to be shown'; obj.style = 'Not important for problem at hand'; obj.otherStuff = ' --||-- '; } Any help will be appreciated, Molle

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• JAVA: Can't get context parameters in Filter

  - by DaTval

  Hello, I have a filter and parameters in web.xml web.xml is like this: <filter> <description> </description> <display-name>AllClassFilter</display-name> <filter-name>AllClassFilter</filter-name> <filter-class>com.datval.homework.AllClassFilter</filter-class> <init-param> <param-name>DB_URL</param-name> <param-value>jdbc:derby:C:/Users/admin/workspace/homework03/homework/databases/StudentsDB;create=true</param-value> </init-param> <init-param> <param-name>DB_DIALECT</param-name> <param-value>org.hibernate.dialect.DerbyDialect</param-value> </init-param> <init-param> <param-name>DB_DRIVER</param-name> <param-value>org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver</param-value> </init-param> </filter> mapping is working well. But I can't get this parameters in my filter. public void init(FilterConfig config) throws ServletException { // TODO Auto-generated method stub debugMessage = config.getInitParameter("debugMessage"); ctx = config.getServletContext(); } public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException { // TODO Auto-generated method stub // place your code here ctx.log("Start - " + debugMessage); String myDbUrl = ctx.getInitParameter("DB_URL"); String DB_DIALECT = ctx.getInitParameter("DB_DIALECT"); String DB_DRIVER = ctx.getInitParameter("DB_DRIVER"); Map<String,String> pr = new HashMap<String,String>(); pr.put("hibernate.connection.url", myDbUrl); pr.put("hibernate.dialect", DB_DIALECT); pr.put("hibernate.connection.driver_class", DB_DRIVER); EntityManagerFactory emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("students",pr); EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager(); request.setAttribute("em", em); chain.doFilter(request, response); em.close(); ctx.log("end - " + debugMessage); } I have checked and myDbUrl is null. What I'm doing wrong? Any idea? Sorry about code, I will change it later :)

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• Self referencing a table

  - by mue

  Hello, so I'm new to NHibernate and have a problem. Perhaps somebody can help me here. Given a User-class with many, many properties: public class User { public virtual Int64 Id { get; private set; } public virtual string Firstname { get; set; } public virtual string Lastname { get; set; } public virtual string Username { get; set; } public virtual string Email { get; set; } ... public virtual string Comment { get; set; } public virtual UserInfo LastModifiedBy { get; set; } } Here some DDL for the table: CREATE TABLE USERS ( "ID" BIGINT NOT NULL , "FIRSTNAME" VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL , "LASTNAME" VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL , "USERNAME" VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL , "EMAIL" VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL , ... "LASTMODIFIEDBY" BIGINT NOT NULL , ) IN "USERSPACE1" ; Database-table-field 'LASTMODIFIEDBY' holds for auditing purposes the Id from the User who is acting in case of inserts or updates. This would normally be an admin. Because the UI shall display not this Int64 but admins name (pattern like 'Lastname, Firstname') I need to retrieve these values by self referencing table USERS to itself. Next is, that a whole object of type User would be overkill by the amount of unwanted fields. So there is a class UserInfo with much smaller footprint. public class UserInfo { public Int64 Id { get; set; } public string Firstname { get; set; } public string Lastname { get; set; } public string FullnameReverse { get { return string.Format("{0}, {1}", Lastname ?? string.Empty, Firstname ?? string.Empty); } } } So here starts the problem. Actually I have no clue how to accomplish this task. Im not sure if I also must provide a mapping for class UserInfo and not only for class User. I'd like to integrate class UserInfo as Composite-element within the mapping for User-class. But I dont no how to define the mapping between USERS.ID and USERS.LASTMODIFIEDBY table-fields. Hopefully I decribes my problem clear enough to get some hints. Thanks alot!

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• Rails controller not rendering correct view when form is force-submitted by Javascript

  - by whazzmaster

  I'm using Rails with jQuery, and I'm working on a page for a simple site that prints each record to a table. The only editable field for each record is a checkbox. My goal is that every time a checkbox is changed, an ajax request updates that boolean attribute for the record (i.e., no submit button). My view code: <td> <% form_remote_tag :url => admin_update_path, :html => { :id => "form#{lead.id}" } do %> <%= hidden_field :lead, :id, :value => lead.id %> <%= check_box :lead, :contacted, :id => "checkbox"+lead.id.to_s, :checked => lead.contacted, :onchange => "$('#form#{lead.id}').submit();" %> <% end %> </td> In my routes.rb, admin_update_path is defined by map.admin_update 'update', :controller => "admin", :action => "update", :method => :post I also have an RJS template to render back an update. The contents of this file is currently just for testing (I just wanted to see if it worked, this will not be the ultimate functionality on a successful save)... page << "$('#checkbox#{@lead.id}').hide();" When clicked, the ajax request is successfully sent, with the correct params, and the action on the controller can retrieve the record and update it just fine. The problem is that it doesn't send back the JS; it changes the page in the browser and renders the generated Javascript as plain text rather than executing it in-place. Rails does some behind-the-scenes stuff to figure out if the incoming request is an ajax call, and I can't figure out why it's interpreting the incoming request as a regular web request as opposed to an ajax request. I may be missing something extremely simple here, but I've kind-of burned myself out looking so I thought I'd ask for another pair of eyes. Thanks in advance for any info!

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• Lighttpd + fastcgi + python (for django) slow on first request

  - by EagleOne

  I'm having a problem with a django website I host with lighttpd + fastcgi. It works great but it seems that the first request always takes up to 3seconds. Subsequent requests are much faster (<1s). I activated access logs in lighttpd in order to track the issue. But I'm kind of stuck. Here are logs where I 'lose' 4s (from 10:04:17 to 10:04:21): 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (mod_fastcgi.c.3636) handling it in mod_fastcgi 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.470) -- before doc_root 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.471) Doc-Root : /var/www 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.472) Rel-Path : /finderauto.fcgi 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.473) Path : 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.521) -- after doc_root 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.522) Doc-Root : /var/www 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.523) Rel-Path : /finderauto.fcgi 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.524) Path : /var/www/finderauto.fcgi 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.541) -- logical -> physical 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.542) Doc-Root : /var/www 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.543) Rel-Path : /finderauto.fcgi 2012-12-01 10:04:17: (response.c.544) Path : /var/www/finderauto.fcgi 2012-12-01 10:04:21: (response.c.128) Response-Header: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Last-Modified: Sat, 01 Dec 2012 09:04:21 GMT Expires: Sat, 01 Dec 2012 09:14:21 GMT Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Cache-Control: max-age=600 Transfer-Encoding: chunked Date: Sat, 01 Dec 2012 09:04:21 GMT Server: lighttpd/1.4.28 I guess that if there is a problem, it's whith my configuration. So here is the way I launch my django app: python manage.py runfcgi method=threaded host=127.0.0.1 port=3033 And here is my lighttpd conf: server.modules = ( "mod_access", "mod_alias", "mod_compress", "mod_redirect", "mod_rewrite", "mod_fastcgi", "mod_accesslog", ) server.document-root = "/var/www" server.upload-dirs = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" ) server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log" server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid" server.username = "www-data" server.groupname = "www-data" accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/access.log" debug.log-request-header = "enable" debug.log-response-header = "enable" debug.log-file-not-found = "enable" debug.log-request-handling = "enable" debug.log-timeouts = "enable" debug.log-ssl-noise = "enable" debug.log-condition-cache-handling = "enable" debug.log-condition-handling = "enable" fastcgi.server = ( "/finderauto.fcgi" => ( "main" => ( # Use host / port instead of socket for TCP fastcgi "host" => "127.0.0.1", "port" => 3033, #"socket" => "/home/finderadmin/finderauto.sock", "check-local" => "disable", "fix-root-scriptname" => "enable", ) ), ) alias.url = ( "/media" => "/home/user/django/contrib/admin/media/", ) url.rewrite-once = ( "^(/media.*)$" => "$1", "^/favicon\.ico$" => "/media/favicon.ico", "^(/.*)$" => "/finderauto.fcgi$1", ) index-file.names = ( "index.php", "index.html", "index.htm", "default.htm", " index.lighttpd.html" ) url.access-deny = ( "~", ".inc" ) static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" ) ## Use ipv6 if available #include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl" dir-listing.encoding = "utf-8" server.dir-listing = "enable" compress.cache-dir = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/" compress.filetype = ( "application/x-javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" ) include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl" include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl" If any of you could help me finding out where I lose these 3 or 4 s. I would much appreciate. Thanks in advance!

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• A versioning workflow for multiple similar (but not identical) deployments

  - by rs77

  I'm currently employed at a small non-tech organisation and have been given the role of coding the organisations' website. While I have enjoyed the task and have learnt much with web dev I've encountered a few issues that I'm hoping someone will be able to help with me or at least point me in the right direction on. A little background: The site I work on has subdomains that each have their own separate WordPress installation on - as this has been the easiest "backend" admin panel for the type of user who will be responsible for updating content (etc). Within the organisation I work under the Marketing Manager (MM) and I code according to his style guide and wire frames. While we have been working with only one subdomain since the beginning of the year the project has been relatively simple and straightforward. However, lately the workflow is becoming a little more complicated as our original subdomain has been copied over to the other subdomains. Each of the new subdomains receives minor edits to their stylesheets (eg. different pictures for background, slightly different colours here and there, etc). The issue: At the moment managing all the different subdomains has been "bearable", but the straw that's braking the camel's back at the moment has been the slight reversions the MM has required now that the CEO has seen the final product. The problem I'm having with reversions in stylesheets is that the CEO will one week state that he likes change "X" and then as the MM and I continue to modify the site (to now "Z"), will another week state that he wants us to change "X" to "W" but keeping most of the changes made in "Y". What I'm looking for is something that allows for: tracking file changes reverting changes made (or reverting back to 'a' from 'e' but including changes 'b' & 'c') easily upload necessary files to their respective WP-theme installation Does anything out there come close to addressing these issues? If so, what? Thanks for any help! PS - I'm learning Git at the moment and it seems to do the "tracking file changes" quite nicely. Haven't learnt about the reverting changes bit yet, though. Maybe for my final point I'm thinking of creating a shell script to automatically upload the files to their folders. Does Git do this too though? Addendum (alexbbrown) I had a similar problem: I ran a custom version of mediawiki where I installed various extensions in the versioned core (with svn). Each of the extensions required an section in the confit file, but the confit file also needed local configuration for each of several deployments. I could have implemented it using includes, but they would not be versioned; and rebasing branches each time is a chore. +50 experience points for a good answer in git.

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• Drupal's profile_save_profile Doesn't Work in hook_cron, When Run by the Server's cron

  - by anschauung

  I have a problem with the following implementation of hook_cron in Drupal 6.1.3. The script below runs exactly as expected: it sends a welcome letter to new members, and updates a hidden field in their profile to designate that the letter has been sent. There are no errors in the letter, all new members are accounted for, etc. The problem is that the last line -- updating the profile -- doesn't seem to work when Drupal cron is invoked by the 'real' cron on the server. When I run cron manually (such as via /admin/reports/status/run-cron) the profile fields get updated as expected. Any suggestions as to what might be causing this? (Note, since someone will suggest it: members join by means outside of Drupal, and are uploaded to Drupal nightly, so Drupal's built-in welcome letters won't work (I think).) <?php function foo_cron() { // Find users who have not received the new member letter, // and send them a welcome email // Get users who have not recd a message, as per the profile value setting $pending_count_sql = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM {profile_values} v WHERE (v.value = 0) AND (v.fid = 7)"; //fid 7 is the profile field for profile_intro_email_sent if (db_result(db_query($pending_count_sql))) { // Load the message template, since we // know we have users to feed into it. $email_template_file = "/home/foo/public_html/drupal/" . drupal_get_path('module', 'foo') . "/emails/foo-new-member-email-template.txt"; $email_template_data = file_get_contents($email_template_file); fclose($email_template_fh); //We'll just pull the uid, since we have to run user_load anyway $query = "SELECT v.uid FROM {profile_values} v WHERE (v.value = 0) AND (v.fid = 7)"; $result = db_query(($query)); // Loop through the uids, loading profiles so as to access string replacement variables while ($item = db_fetch_object($result)) { $new_member = user_load($item->uid); $translation_key = array( // ... code that generates the string replacement array ... ); // Compose the email component of the message, and send to user $email_text = t($email_template_data, $translation_key); $language = user_preferred_language($new_member); // use member's language preference $params['subject'] = 'New Member Benefits - Welcome to FOO!'; $params['content-type'] = 'text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed;'; $params['content'] = $email_text; drupal_mail('foo', 'welcome_letter', $new_member->mail, $language, $params, '[email protected]'); // Mark the user's profile to indicate that the message was sent $change = array( // Rebuild all of the profile fields in this category, // since they'll be deleted otherwise 'profile_first_name' => $new_member->profile_first_name, 'profile_last_name' => $new_member->profile_last_name, 'profile_intro_email_sent' => 1); profile_save_profile($change, $new_member, "Membership Data"); } } }

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• Identifying if a user is in the local administrators group

  - by Adam Driscoll

  My Problem I'm using PInvoked Windows API functions to verify if a user is part of the local administrators group. I'm utilizing GetCurrentProcess, OpenProcessToken, GetTokenInformationand LookupAccountSid to verify if the user is a local admin. GetTokenInformation returns a TOKEN_GROUPS struct with an array of SID_AND_ATTRIBUTES structs. I iterate over the collection and compare the user names returned by LookupAccountSid. My problem is that, locally (or more generally on our in-house domain), this works as expected. The builtin\Administrators is located within the group membership of the current process token and my method returns true. On another domain of another developer the function returns false. The LookupAccountSid functions properly for the first 2 iterations of the TOKEN_GROUPS struct, returning None and Everyone, and then craps out complaining that "A Parameter is incorrect." What would cause only two groups to work correctly? The TOKEN_GROUPS struct indicates that there are 14 groups. I'm assuming it's the SID that is invalid. Everything that I have PInvoked I have taken from an example on the PInvoke website. The only difference is that with the LookupAccountSid I have changed the Sid parameter from a byte[] to a IntPtr because SID_AND_ATTRIBUTESis also defined with an IntPtr. Is this ok since LookupAccountSid is defined with a PSID? LookupAccountSid PInvoke [DllImport("advapi32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] static extern bool LookupAccountSid( string lpSystemName, IntPtr Sid, StringBuilder lpName, ref uint cchName, StringBuilder ReferencedDomainName, ref uint cchReferencedDomainName, out SID_NAME_USE peUse); Where the code falls over for (int i = 0; i < usize; i++) { accountCount = 0; domainCount = 0; //Get Sizes LookupAccountSid(null, tokenGroups.Groups[i].SID, null, ref accountCount, null, ref domainCount, out snu); accountName2.EnsureCapacity((int) accountCount); domainName.EnsureCapacity((int) domainCount); if (!LookupAccountSid(null, tokenGroups.Groups[i].SID, accountName2, ref accountCount, domainName, ref domainCount, out snu)) { //Finds its way here after 2 iterations //But only in a different developers domain var error = Marshal.GetLastWin32Error(); _log.InfoFormat("Failed to look up SID's account name. {0}", new Win32Exception(error).Message); continue; } If more code is needed let me know. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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• C# A simple Hangman game

  - by Radostin Angelov

  I'm trying to create a simple Hangman game and i have gotten so far, to make it read all words from a text file, but I don't know how to make the code work for every single word. I have another project, working with 3/4 words but with repeating nested if statements. I want to make it as shorter as possible. This is the code i have so far : using System; using System.Linq; class Program { static void Main() { string[] words = System.IO.File.ReadAllLines(@"C:\Users\ADMIN\Desktop\Letters\Letters.txt"); int LengthOfArray = words.Length; Random rnd = new Random(); int random = rnd.Next(1, 3); char[] letters = words[random].ToCharArray(); bool WordIsHidden = true; char hiddenChar = '_'; char GuessedLetter = hiddenChar; var retry = true; while (retry = true) { Console.WriteLine(letters); letters = GuessedLetter.ToString().ToCharArray(); for (int i = 1; i <= LengthOfArray; i++) { Console.Write("{0} ", GuessedLetter); } Console.WriteLine("Enter a letter!"); char letter = char.Parse(Console.ReadLine()); if (words[random].Contains<char>(letter)) { WordIsHidden = false; GuessedLetter = letter; Console.Write(letters); } else { if (WordIsHidden == true) { Console.Write("You guessed wrong!"); } } } } } Also I'm trying to make the game show each letter, the user has guessed on it's corresponding position, but now the letter is one line higher than the rest of the word and it's not in it's right position. Edited: Here is the result : cat ___Enter a letter! a __ aaaEnter a letter! t aa tttEnter a letter! IF anyone have a clue for where does this come from and how can I fix it, any help will be greatly appreciated.

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• How can I remove this query from within a loop?

  - by Chris

  I am currently designing a forum as a personal project. One of the recurring issues I've come across is database queries in loops. I've managed to avoid doing that so far by using table joins or caching of data in arrays for later use. Right now though I've come across a situation where I'm not sure how I can write the code in such a way that I can use either of those methods easily. However I'd still prefer to do at most 2 queries for this operation rather than 1 + 1 per group of forums, which so far has resulted in 5 per page. So while 5 isn't a huge number (though it will increase for each forum group I add) it's the principle that's important to me here, I do NOT want to write queries in loops What I'm doing is displaying forum index groupings (eg admin forums, user forums etc) and then each forum within that group on a single page index, it's the combination of both in one page that's causing me issue. If it had just been a single group per page, I'd use a table join and problem solved. But if I use a table join here, although I can potentially get all the data I need it'll be in one mass of results and it needs displaying properly. Here's the code (I've removed some of the html for clarity) <?php $sql= "select * from forum_groups"; //query 1 $result1 = $database->query($sql); while($group = mysql_fetch_assoc($result1)) //first loop {?> <table class="threads"> <tr> <td class="forumgroupheader"> <?php echo $group['group_name']; ?> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="forumgroupheader2"> <?php echo $group['group_desc']; ?> </td> </tr> </table> <table> <tr> <th class="thforum"> Forum Name</th> <th class="thforum"> Forum Decsription</th> <th class="thforum"> Last Post </th> <tr> <?php $group_id = $group['id']; $sql = "SELECT forums.id, forums.forum_group_id, forums.forum_name, forums.forum_desc, forums.visible_rank, forums.locked, forums.lock_rank, forums.topics, forums.posts, forums.last_post, forums.last_post_id, users.username FROM forums LEFT JOIN users on forums.last_post_id=users.id WHERE forum_group_id='{$group_id}'"; //query 2 $result2 = $database->query($sql); while($forum = mysql_fetch_assoc($result2)) //second loop {?> So how can I either a) write the SQL in such a way as to remove the second query from inside the loop or b) combine the results in an array either way I need to be able to access the data as an when so I can format it properly for the page output, ie within the loops still.

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• Registration form validation not validating

  - by jgray

  I am a noob when it comes to web development. I am trying to validate a registration form and to me it looks right but it will not validate.. This is what i have so far and i am validating through a repository or database. Any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks <?php session_start(); $title = "User Registration"; $keywords = "Name, contact, phone, e-mail, registration"; $description = "user registration becoming a member."; require "partials/_html_header.php"; //require "partials/_header.php"; require "partials/_menu.php"; require "DataRepository.php"; // if all validation passed save user $db = new DataRepository(); // form validation goes here $first_nameErr = $emailErr = $passwordErr = $passwordConfirmErr = ""; $first_name = $last_name = $email = $password = $passwordConfirm = ""; if(isset($_POST['submit'])) { $valid = TRUE; // check if all fields are valid { if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") { if (empty($_POST["first_name"])) {$first_nameErr = "Name is required";} else { // $first_name = test_input($_POST["first_name"]); // check if name only contains letters and whitespace if (!preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z ]*$/",$first_name)) { $first_nameErr = "Only letters and white space allowed"; } } if (empty($_POST["email"])) {$emailErr = "Email is required";} else { // $email = test_input($_POST["email"]); // check if e-mail address syntax is valid if (!preg_match("/([\w\-]+\@[\w\-]+\.[\w\-]+)/",$email)) { $emailErr = "Invalid email format"; } } if (!preg_match("/(......)/",$password)) { $passwordErr = "Subject must contain THREE or more characters!"; } if ($_POST['password']!= $_POST['passwordConfirm']) { echo("Oops! Password did not match! Try again. "); } function test_input($data) { $data = trim($data); $data = stripslashes($data); $data = htmlspecialchars($data); return $data; } } } if(!$db->isEmailUnique($_POST['email'])) { $valid = FALSE; //display errors in the correct places } // if still valid save the user if($valid) { $new_user = array( 'first_name' => $_POST['first_name'], 'last_name' => $_POST['last_name'], 'email' => $_POST['email'], 'password' => $_POST['password'] ); $results = $db->saveUser($new_user); if($results == TRUE) { header("Location: login.php"); } else { echo "WTF!"; exit; } } } ?> <head> <style> .error {color: #FF0000;} </style> </head> <h1 class="center"> World Wide Web Creations' User Registration </h1> <p><span class="error"></span><p> <form method="POST" action="<?php echo htmlspecialchars($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]);?>" onsubmit="return validate_form()" > First Name: <input type="text" name="first_name" id="first_name" value="<?php echo $first_name;?>" /> <span class="error"> <?php echo $first_nameErr;?></span> <br /> <br /> Last Name(Optional): <input type="text" name="last_name" id="last_name" value="<?php echo $last_name;?>" /> <br /> <br /> E-mail: <input type="email" name="email" id="email" value="<?php echo $email;?>" /> <span class="error"> <?php echo $emailErr;?></span> <br /> <br /> Password: <input type="password" name="password" id="password" value="" /> <span class="error"> <?php echo $passwordErr;?></span> <br /> <br /> Confirmation Password: <input type="password" name="passwordConfirm" id="passwordConfirm" value="" /> <span class="error"> <?php echo $passwordConfirmErr;?></span> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Submit Data" /> <input type="reset" name="reset" id="reset" value="Reset Form" /> </form> </body> </html> <?php require "partials/_footer.php"; require "partials/_html_footer.php"; ?> class DataRepository { // version number private $version = "1.0.3"; // turn on and off debugging private static $debug = FALSE; // flag to (re)initialize db on each call private static $initialize_db = FALSE; // insert test data on initialization private static $load_default_data = TRUE; const DATAFILE = "203data.txt"; private $data = NULL; private $errors = array(); private $user_fields = array( 'id' => array('required' => 0), 'created_at' => array('required' => 0), 'updated_at' => array('required' => 0), 'first_name' => array('required' => 1), 'last_name' => array('required' => 0), 'email' => array('required' => 1), 'password' => array('required' => 1), 'level' => array('required' => 0, 'default' => 2), ); private $post_fields = array( 'id' => array('required' => 0), 'created_at' => array('required' => 0), 'updated_at' => array('required' => 0), 'user_id' => array('required' => 1), 'title' => array('required' => 1), 'message' => array('required' => 1), 'private' => array('required' => 0, 'default' => 0), ); private $default_user = array( 'id' => 1, 'created_at' => '2013-01-01 00:00:00', 'updated_at' => '2013-01-01 00:00:00', 'first_name' => 'Admin Joe', 'last_name' => 'Tester', 'email' => '[email protected]', 'password' => 'a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3', 'level' => 1, ); private $default_post = array( 'id' => 1, 'created_at' => '2013-01-01 00:00:00', 'updated_at' => '2013-01-01 00:00:00', 'user_id' => 1, 'title' => 'My First Post', 'message' => 'This is the message of the first post.', 'private' => 0, ); // constructor will load existing data into memory // if it does not exist it will create it and initialize if desired public function __construct() { // check if need to reset if(DataRepository::$initialize_db AND file_exists(DataRepository::DATAFILE)) { unlink(DataRepository::DATAFILE); } // if file doesn't exist, create the initial datafile if(!file_exists(DataRepository::DATAFILE)) { $this->log("Data file does not exist. Attempting to create it... (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); // create initial file $this->data = array( 'users' => array( ), 'posts' => array() ); // load default data if needed if(DataRepository::$load_default_data) { $this->data['users'][1] = $this->default_user; $this->data['posts'][1] = $this->default_post; } $this->writeTheData(); } // load the data into memory for use $this->loadTheData(); } private function showErrors($break = TRUE, $type = NULL) { if(count($this->errors) > 0) { echo "<div style=\"color:red;font-weight: bold;font-size: 1.3em\":<h3>$type Errors</h3><ol>"; foreach($this->errors AS $error) { echo "<li>$error</li>"; } echo "</ol></div>"; if($break) { "</br></br></br>Exiting because of errors!"; exit; } } } private function writeTheData() { $this->log("Attempting to write the datafile: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); file_put_contents(DataRepository::DATAFILE, json_encode($this->data)); $this->log("Datafile written: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (line: ".__LINE__.")"); } private function loadTheData() { $this->log("Attempting to load the datafile: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); $this->data = json_decode(file_get_contents(DataRepository::DATAFILE), true); $this->log("Datafile loaded: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $this->data); } private function validateFields(&$info, $fields, $pre_errors = NULL) { // merge in any pre_errors if($pre_errors != NULL) { $this->errors = array_merge($this->errors, $pre_errors); } // check all required fields foreach($fields AS $field => $reqs) { if(isset($reqs['required']) AND $reqs['required'] == 1) { if(!isset($info[$field]) OR strlen($info[$field]) == 0) { $this->errors[] = "$field is a REQUIRED field"; } } // set any default values if not present if(isset($reqs['default']) AND (!isset($info[$field]) OR $info[$field] == "")) { $info[$field] = $reqs['default']; } } $this->showErrors(); if(count($this->errors) == 0) { return TRUE; } else { return FALSE; } } private function validateUser(&$user_info) { // check if the email is already in use $this->log("About to check pre_errors: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $user_info); $pre_errors = NULL; if(isset($user_info['email'])) { if(!$this->isEmailUnique($user_info['email'])) { $pre_errors = array('The email: '.$user_info['email'].' is already used in our system'); } } $this->log("After pre_error check: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $pre_errors); return $this->validateFields($user_info, $this->user_fields, $pre_errors); } private function validatePost(&$post_info) { // check if the user_id in the post actually exists $this->log("About to check pre_errors: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $post_info); $pre_errors = NULL; if(isset($post_info['user_id'])) { if(!isset($this->data['users'][$post_info['user_id']])) { $pre_errors = array('The posts must belong to a valid user. (User '.$post_info['user_id'].' does not exist in the data'); } } $this->log("After pre_error check: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $pre_errors); return $this->validateFields($post_info, $this->post_fields, $pre_errors); } private function log($message, $data = NULL) { $style = "background-color: #F8F8F8; border: 1px solid #DDDDDD; border-radius: 3px; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; overflow: auto; padding: 6px 10px;"; if(DataRepository::$debug) { if($data != NULL) { $dump = "<div style=\"$style\"><pre>".json_encode($data, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT)."</pre></div>"; } else { $dump = NULL; } echo "<code><b>Debug:</b> $message</code>$dump<br />"; } } public function saveUser($user_info) { $this->log("Entering saveUser: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $user_info); $mydata = array(); $update = FALSE; // check for existing data if(isset($user_info['id']) AND $this->data['users'][$user_info['id']]) { $mydata = $this->data['users'][$user_info['id']]; $this->log("Loaded prior user: ".print_r($mydata, TRUE)." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } // copy over existing values $this->log("Before copying over existing values: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $mydata); foreach($user_info AS $k => $v) { $mydata[$k] = $user_info[$k]; } $this->log("After copying over existing values: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $mydata); // check required fields if($this->validateUser($mydata)) { // hash password if new if(isset($mydata['password'])) { $mydata['password'] = sha1($mydata['password']); } // if no id, add the next available one if(!isset($mydata['id']) OR (int)$mydata['id'] < 1) { $this->log("No id set: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); if(count($this->data['users']) == 0) { $mydata['id'] = 1; $this->log("Setting id to 1: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } else { $mydata['id'] = max(array_keys($this->data['users']))+1; $this->log("Found max id and added 1 [".$mydata['id']."]: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } } // set created date if null if(!isset($mydata['created_at'])) { $mydata['created_at'] = date ("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()); } // update modified time $mydata['modified_at'] = date ("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()); // copy into data and save $this->log("Before data save: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $this->data); $this->data['users'][$mydata['id']] = $mydata; $this->writeTheData(); } return TRUE; } public function getUserById($id) { if(isset($this->data['users'][$id])) { return $this->data['users'][$id]; } else { return array(); } } public function isEmailUnique($email) { // find the user that has the right username/password foreach($this->data['users'] AS $k => $v) { $this->log("Checking unique email: {$v['email']} == $email (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", NULL); if($v['email'] == $email) { $this->log("FOUND NOT unique email: {$v['email']} == $email (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", NULL); return FALSE; break; } } $this->log("Email IS unique: $email (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", NULL); return TRUE; } public function login($username, $password) { // hash password for validation $password = sha1($password); $this->log("Attempting to login with $username / $password: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", NULL); $user = NULL; // find the user that has the right username/password foreach($this->data['users'] AS $k => $v) { if($v['email'] == $username AND $v['password'] == $password) { $user = $v; break; } } $this->log("Exiting login: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $user); return $user; } public function savePost($post_info) { $this->log("Entering savePost: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $post_info); $mydata = array(); // check for existing data if(isset($post_info['id']) AND $this->data['posts'][$post_info['id']]) { $mydata = $this->data['posts'][$post_info['id']]; $this->log("Loaded prior posts: ".print_r($mydata, TRUE)." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } $this->log("Before copying over existing values: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $mydata); foreach($post_info AS $k => $v) { $mydata[$k] = $post_info[$k]; } $this->log("After copying over existing values: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $mydata); // check required fields if($this->validatePost($mydata)) { // if no id, add the next available one if(!isset($mydata['id']) OR (int)$mydata['id'] < 1) { $this->log("No id set: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); if(count($this->data['posts']) == 0) { $mydata['id'] = 1; $this->log("Setting id to 1: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } else { $mydata['id'] = max(array_keys($this->data['posts']))+1; $this->log("Found max id and added 1 [".$mydata['id']."]: ".DataRepository::DATAFILE." (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")"); } } // set created date if null if(!isset($mydata['created_at'])) { $mydata['created_at'] = date ("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()); } // update modified time $mydata['modified_at'] = date ("Y-m-d H:i:s", time()); // copy into data and save $this->data['posts'][$mydata['id']] = $mydata; $this->log("Before data save: (".__FUNCTION__.":".__LINE__.")", $this->data); $this->writeTheData(); } return TRUE; } public function getAllPosts() { return $this->loadPostsUsers($this->data['posts']); } public function loadPostsUsers($posts) { foreach($posts AS $id => $post) { $posts[$id]['user'] = $this->getUserById($post['user_id']); } return $posts; } public function dump($line_number, $temp = 'NO') { // if(DataRepository::$debug) { if($temp == 'NO') { $temp = $this->data; } echo "<pre>Dumping from line: $line_number\n"; echo json_encode($temp, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT); echo "</pre>"; } } } /* * Change Log * * 1.0.0 * - first version * 1.0.1 * - Added isEmailUnique() function for form validation and precheck on user save * 1.0.2 * - Fixed getAllPosts() to include the post's user info * - Added loadPostsUsers() to load one or more posts with their user info * 1.0.3 * - Added autoload to always add admin Joe. */

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• Users and roles in context

  - by Eric W.

  I'm trying to get a sense of how to implement the user/role relationships for an application I'm writing. The persistence layer is Google App Engine's datastore, which places some interesting (but generally beneficial) constraints on what can be done. Any thoughts are appreciated. It might be helpful to keep things very concrete. I would like there to be organizations, users, test content and test administrations (records of tests that have been taken). A user can have the role of participant (test-taker), contributor of test material or both. A user can also be a member of zero or more organizations. In the role of participant, the user can see the previous administrations of tests he or she has taken. The user can also see a test administration of another participant if that participant has given the user authorization. The user can see test material that has been made public, and he or she can see restricted content as a participant during a specific administration of a test for which that user has been authorized by an organization. As a member of an organization, the user can see restricted content in the role of contributor, and he or she might or might not also be able to edit the content. Each organization should have one or more administrators that can determine whether a member can see and edit content and determine who has admin privileges. There should also be one or more application-wide superusers that can troubleshoot and solve problems. Members of organizations can see the administrations of tests that the participants concerned have authorized them to see, and they can see anonymous data if no authorization has been given. A user cannot see the test results of another user in any other circumstances. Since there are no joins in the App Engine datastore, it might be necessary to have things less normalized than usual for the typical SQL database in order to ensure that queries that check permissions are fast (e.g., ones that determine whether a link is to be displayed). My questions are: How do I move forward on this? Should I spend a lot of time up front in order to get the model right, or can I iterate several times and gradually roll in additional complexity? Does anyone have some general ideas about how to break things up in this instance? Are there any GAE libraries that handle roles in a way that is compatible with this arrangement?

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• ActiveX component can't create Object Error? Check 64 bit Status

  - by Rick Strahl

  If you're running on IIS 7 and a 64 bit operating system you might run into the following error using ASP classic or ASP.NET with COM interop. In classic ASP applications the error will show up as: ActiveX component can't create object   (Error 429) (actually without error handling the error just shows up as 500 error page) In my case the code that's been giving me problems has been a FoxPro COM object I'd been using to serve banner ads to some of my pages. The code basically looks up banners from a database table and displays them at random. The ASP classic code that uses it looks like this: <% Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" Response.Write(banner.GetBanner(-1)) %> Originally this code had no specific error checking as above so the ASP pages just failed with 500 error pages from the Web server. To find out what the problem is this code is more useful at least for debugging: <% ON ERROR RESUME NEXT Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") Response.Write(err.Number & " - " & err.Description) banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" Response.Write(banner.GetBanner(-1)) %> which results in: 429 - ActiveX component can't create object which at least gives you a slight clue. In ASP.NET invoking the same COM object with code like this: <% dynamic banner = wwUtils.CreateComInstance("wwBanner.aspBanner") as dynamic; banner.cBANNERFILE = "wwsitebanners"; Response.Write(banner.getBanner(-1)); %> results in: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {B5DCBB81-D5F5-11D2-B85E-00600889F23B} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)). The class is in fact registered though and the COM server loads fine from a command prompt or other COM client. This error can be caused by a COM server that doesn't load. It looks like a COM registration error. There are a number of traditional reasons why this error can crop up of course. The server isn't registered (run regserver32 to register a DLL server or /regserver on an EXE server) Access permissions aren't set on the COM server (Web account has to be able to read the DLL ie. Network service) The COM server fails to load during initialization ie. failing during startup One thing I always do to check for COM errors fire up the server in a COM client outside of IIS and ensure that it works there first - it's almost always easier to debug a server outside of the Web environment. In my case I tried the server in Visual FoxPro on the server with: loBanners = CREATEOBJECT("wwBanner.aspBanner") loBanners.cBannerFile = "wwsitebanners" ? loBanners.GetBanner(-1) and it worked just fine. If you don't have a full dev environment on the server you can also use VBScript do the same thing and run the .vbs file from the command prompt: Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" MsgBox(banner.getBanner(-1)) Since this both works it tells me the server is registered and working properly. This leaves startup failures or permissions as the problem. I double checked permissions for the Application Pool and the permissions of the folder where the DLL lives and both are properly set to allow access by the Application Pool impersonated user. Just to be sure I assigned an Admin user to the Application Pool but still no go. So now what? 64 bit Servers Ahoy A couple of weeks back I had set up a few of my Application pools to 64 bit mode. My server is Server 2008 64 bit and by default Application Pools run 64 bit. Originally when I installed the server I set up most of my Application Pools to 32 bit mainly for backwards compatibility. But as more of my code migrates to 64 bit OS's I figured it'd be a good idea to see how well code runs under 64 bit code. The transition has been mostly painless. Until today when I noticed the problem with the code above when scrolling to my IIS logs and noticing a lot of 500 errors on many of my ASP classic pages. The code in question in most of these pages deals with this single simple COM object. It took a while to figure out that the problem is caused by the Application Pool running in 64 bit mode. The issue is that 32 bit COM objects (ie. my old Visual FoxPro COM component) cannot be loaded in a 64 bit Application Pool. The ASP pages using this COM component broke on the day I switched my main Application Pool into 64 bit mode but I didn't find the problem until I searched my logs for errors by pure chance. To fix this is easy enough once you know what the problem is by switching the Application Pool to Enable 32-bit Applications: Once this is done the COM objects started working correctly again. 64 bit ASP and ASP.NET with DCOM Servers This is kind of off topic, but incidentally it's possible to load 32 bit DCOM (out of process) servers from ASP.NET and ASP classic even if those applications run in 64 bit application pools. In fact, in West Wind Web Connection I use this capability to run a 64 bit ASP.NET handler that talks to a 32 bit FoxPro COM server which allows West Wind Web Connection to run in native 64 bit mode without custom configuration (which is actually quite useful). It's probably not a common usage scenario but it's good to know that you can actually access 32 bit COM objects this way from ASP.NET. For West Wind Web Connection this works out well as the DCOM interface only makes one non-chatty call to the backend server that handles all the rest of the request processing. Application Pool Isolation is your Friend For me the recent incident of failure in the classic ASP pages has just been another reminder to be very careful with moving applications to 64 bit operation. There are many little traps when switching to 64 bit that are very difficult to track and test for. I described one issue I had a couple of months ago where one of the default ASP.NET filters was loading the wrong version (32bit instead of 64bit) which was extremely difficult to track down and was caused by a very sneaky configuration switch error (basically 3 different entries for the same ISAPI filter all with different bitness settings). It took me almost a full day to track this down). Recently I've been taken to isolate individual applications into separate Application Pools rather than my past practice of combining many apps into shared AppPools. This is a good practice assuming you have enough memory to make this work. Application Pool isolate provides more modularity and allows me to selectively move applications to 64 bit. The error above came about precisely because I moved one of my most populous app pools to 64 bit and forgot about the minimal COM object use in some of my old pages. It's easy to forget. To 64bit or Not Is it worth it to move to 64 bit? Currently I'd say -not really. In my - admittedly limited - testing I don't see any significant performance increases. In fact 64 bit apps just seem to consume considerably more memory (30-50% more in my pools on average) and performance is minimally improved (less than 5% at the very best) in the load testing I've performed on a couple of sites in both modes. The only real incentive for 64 bit would be applications that require huge data spaces that exceed the 32 bit 4 gigabyte memory limit. However I have a hard time imagining an application that needs 4 gigs of memory in a single Application Pool :-). Curious to hear other opinions on benefits of 64 bit operation. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in COM   ASP.NET  FoxPro  

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 2, Simple Imperative Data Parallelism

  - by Reed

  In my discussion of Decomposition of the problem space, I mentioned that Data Decomposition is often the simplest abstraction to use when trying to parallelize a routine.  If a problem can be decomposed based off the data, we will often want to use what MSDN refers to as Data Parallelism as our strategy for implementing our routine.  The Task Parallel Library in .NET 4 makes implementing Data Parallelism, for most cases, very simple. Data Parallelism is the main technique we use to parallelize a routine which can be decomposed based off data.  Data Parallelism refers to taking a single collection of data, and having a single operation be performed concurrently on elements in the collection.  One side note here: Data Parallelism is also sometimes referred to as the Loop Parallelism Pattern or Loop-level Parallelism.  In general, for this series, I will try to use the terminology used in the MSDN Documentation for the Task Parallel Library.  This should make it easier to investigate these topics in more detail. Once we’ve determined we have a problem that, potentially, can be decomposed based on data, implementation using Data Parallelism in the TPL is quite simple.  Let’s take our example from the Data Decomposition discussion – a simple contrast stretching filter.  Here, we have a collection of data (pixels), and we need to run a simple operation on each element of the pixel.  Once we know the minimum and maximum values, we most likely would have some simple code like the following: for (int row=0; row < pixelData.GetUpperBound(0); ++row) { for (int col=0; col < pixelData.GetUpperBound(1); ++col) { pixelData[row, col] = AdjustContrast(pixelData[row, col], minPixel, maxPixel); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This simple routine loops through a two dimensional array of pixelData, and calls the AdjustContrast routine on each pixel. As I mentioned, when you’re decomposing a problem space, most iteration statements are potentially candidates for data decomposition.  Here, we’re using two for loops – one looping through rows in the image, and a second nested loop iterating through the columns.  We then perform one, independent operation on each element based on those loop positions. This is a prime candidate – we have no shared data, no dependencies on anything but the pixel which we want to change.  Since we’re using a for loop, we can easily parallelize this using the Parallel.For method in the TPL: Parallel.For(0, pixelData.GetUpperBound(0), row => { for (int col=0; col < pixelData.GetUpperBound(1); ++col) { pixelData[row, col] = AdjustContrast(pixelData[row, col], minPixel, maxPixel); } }); Here, by simply changing our first for loop to a call to Parallel.For, we can parallelize this portion of our routine.  Parallel.For works, as do many methods in the TPL, by creating a delegate and using it as an argument to a method.  In this case, our for loop iteration block becomes a delegate creating via a lambda expression.  This lets you write code that, superficially, looks similar to the familiar for loop, but functions quite differently at runtime. We could easily do this to our second for loop as well, but that may not be a good idea.  There is a balance to be struck when writing parallel code.  We want to have enough work items to keep all of our processors busy, but the more we partition our data, the more overhead we introduce.  In this case, we have an image of data – most likely hundreds of pixels in both dimensions.  By just parallelizing our first loop, each row of pixels can be run as a single task.  With hundreds of rows of data, we are providing fine enough granularity to keep all of our processors busy. If we parallelize both loops, we’re potentially creating millions of independent tasks.  This introduces extra overhead with no extra gain, and will actually reduce our overall performance.  This leads to my first guideline when writing parallel code: Partition your problem into enough tasks to keep each processor busy throughout the operation, but not more than necessary to keep each processor busy. Also note that I parallelized the outer loop.  I could have just as easily partitioned the inner loop.  However, partitioning the inner loop would have led to many more discrete work items, each with a smaller amount of work (operate on one pixel instead of one row of pixels).  My second guideline when writing parallel code reflects this: Partition your problem in a way to place the most work possible into each task. This typically means, in practice, that you will want to parallelize the routine at the “highest” point possible in the routine, typically the outermost loop.  If you’re looking at parallelizing methods which call other methods, you’ll want to try to partition your work high up in the stack – as you get into lower level methods, the performance impact of parallelizing your routines may not overcome the overhead introduced. Parallel.For works great for situations where we know the number of elements we’re going to process in advance.  If we’re iterating through an IList<T> or an array, this is a typical approach.  However, there are other iteration statements common in C#.  In many situations, we’ll use foreach instead of a for loop.  This can be more understandable and easier to read, but also has the advantage of working with collections which only implement IEnumerable<T>, where we do not know the number of elements involved in advance. As an example, lets take the following situation.  Say we have a collection of Customers, and we want to iterate through each customer, check some information about the customer, and if a certain case is met, send an email to the customer and update our instance to reflect this change.  Normally, this might look something like: foreach(var customer in customers) { // Run some process that takes some time... DateTime lastContact = theStore.GetLastContact(customer); TimeSpan timeSinceContact = DateTime.Now - lastContact; // If it's been more than two weeks, send an email, and update... if (timeSinceContact.Days > 14) { theStore.EmailCustomer(customer); customer.LastEmailContact = DateTime.Now; } } Here, we’re doing a fair amount of work for each customer in our collection, but we don’t know how many customers exist.  If we assume that theStore.GetLastContact(customer) and theStore.EmailCustomer(customer) are both side-effect free, thread safe operations, we could parallelize this using Parallel.ForEach: Parallel.ForEach(customers, customer => { // Run some process that takes some time... DateTime lastContact = theStore.GetLastContact(customer); TimeSpan timeSinceContact = DateTime.Now - lastContact; // If it's been more than two weeks, send an email, and update... if (timeSinceContact.Days > 14) { theStore.EmailCustomer(customer); customer.LastEmailContact = DateTime.Now; } }); Just like Parallel.For, we rework our loop into a method call accepting a delegate created via a lambda expression.  This keeps our new code very similar to our original iteration statement, however, this will now execute in parallel.  The same guidelines apply with Parallel.ForEach as with Parallel.For. The other iteration statements, do and while, do not have direct equivalents in the Task Parallel Library.  These, however, are very easy to implement using Parallel.ForEach and the yield keyword. Most applications can benefit from implementing some form of Data Parallelism.  Iterating through collections and performing “work” is a very common pattern in nearly every application.  When the problem can be decomposed by data, we often can parallelize the workload by merely changing foreach statements to Parallel.ForEach method calls, and for loops to Parallel.For method calls.  Any time your program operates on a collection, and does a set of work on each item in the collection where that work is not dependent on other information, you very likely have an opportunity to parallelize your routine.

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• VS 2010 SP1 (Beta) and IIS Express

  - by ScottGu

  Last month we released the VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta.  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.  You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here. IIS Express Earlier this summer I blogged about IIS Express.  IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios.  We think it combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into VS today with the full power of IIS.  Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express – and you can start to take advantage of this starting with last month’s VS 2010 SP1 Beta release. Downloading and Installing IIS Express IIS Express isn’t included as part of the VS 2010 SP1 Beta.  Instead it is a separate ~4MB download which you can download and install using this link (it uses WebPI to install it).  Once IIS Express is installed, VS 2010 SP1 will enable some additional IIS Express commands and dialog options that allow you to easily use it. Enabling IIS Express for Existing Projects Visual Studio today defaults to using the built-in ASP.NET Development Server (aka Cassini) when running ASP.NET Projects: Converting your existing projects to use IIS Express is really easy.  You can do this by opening up the project properties dialog of an existing project, and then by clicking the “web” tab within it and selecting the “Use IIS Express” checkbox. Or even simpler, just right-click on your existing project, and select the “Use IIS Express…” menu command: And now when you run or debug your project you’ll see that IIS Express now starts up and runs automatically as your web-server: You can optionally right-click on the IIS Express icon within your system tray to see/browse all of sites and applications running on it: Note that if you ever want to revert back to using the ASP.NET Development Server you can do this by right-clicking the project again and then select the “Use Visual Studio Development Server” option (or go into the project properties, click the web tab, and uncheck IIS Express).  This will revert back to the ASP.NET Development Server the next time you run the project. IIS Express Properties Visual Studio 2010 SP1 exposes several new IIS Express configuration options that you couldn’t previously set with the ASP.NET Development Server.  Some of these are exposed via the property grid of your project (select the project node in the solution explorer and then change them via the property window): For example, enabling something like SSL support (which is not possible with the ASP.NET Development Server) can now be done simply by changing the “SSL Enabled” property to “True”: Once this is done IIS Express will expose both an HTTP and HTTPS endpoint for the project that we can use: SSL Self Signed Certs IIS Express ships with a self-signed SSL cert that it installs as part of setup – which removes the need for you to install your own certificate to use SSL during development.  Once you change the above drop-down to enable SSL, you’ll be able to browse to your site with the appropriate https:// URL prefix and it will connect via SSL. One caveat with self-signed certificates, though, is that browsers (like IE) will go out of their way to warn you that they aren’t to be trusted: You can mark the certificate as trusted to avoid seeing dialogs like this – or just keep the certificate un-trusted and press the “continue” button when the browser warns you not to trust your local web server. Additional IIS Settings IIS Express uses its own per-user ApplicationHost.config file to configure default server behavior.  Because it is per-user, it can be configured by developers who do not have admin credentials – unlike the full IIS.  You can customize all IIS features and settings via it if you want ultimate server customization (for example: to use your own certificates for SSL instead of self-signed ones). We recommend storing all app specific settings for IIS and ASP.NET within the web.config file which is part of your project – since that makes deploying apps easier (since the settings can be copied with the application content).  IIS (since IIS 7) no longer uses the metabase, and instead uses the same web.config configuration files that ASP.NET has always supported – which makes xcopy/ftp based deployment much easier. Making IIS Express your Default Web Server Above we looked at how we can convert existing sites that use the ASP.NET Developer Web Server to instead use IIS Express.  You can configure Visual Studio to use IIS Express as the default web server for all new projects by clicking the Tools->Options menu  command and opening up the Projects and Solutions->Web Projects node with the Options dialog: Clicking the “Use IIS Express for new file-based web site and projects” checkbox will cause Visual Studio to use it for all new web site and projects. Summary We think IIS Express makes it even easier to build, run and test web applications.  It works with all versions of ASP.NET and supports all ASP.NET application types (including obviously both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications).  Because IIS Express is based on the IIS 7.5 codebase, you have a full web-server feature-set that you can use.  This means you can build and run your applications just like they’ll work on a real production web-server.  In addition to supporting ASP.NET, IIS Express also supports Classic ASP and other file-types and extensions supported by IIS – which also makes it ideal for sites that combine a variety of different technologies. Best of all – you do not need to change any code to take advantage of it.  As you can see above, updating existing Visual Studio web projects to use it is trivial.  You can begin to take advantage of IIS Express today using the VS 2010 SP1 Beta. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Silverlight 4 Training Kit

  - by ScottGu

  We recently released a new free Silverlight 4 Training Kit that walks you through building business applications with Silverlight 4.  You can browse the training kit online or alternatively download an entire offline version of the training kit.  The training material is structured on teaching how to use the new Silverlight 4 features to build an end to end business application. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands on labs. Below is a breakdown and links to all of the content. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Module 1: Introduction Click here to watch this module. In this video John Papa and Ian Griffiths discuss the key areas that the Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4 course focuses on. This module is the overview of the course and covers many key scenarios that are faced when building business applications, and how Silverlight can help address them. Module 2: WCF RIA Services Click here to explore this module. In this lab, you will create a web site for managing conferences that will be the basis for the other labs in this course. Don’t worry if you don’t complete a particular lab in the series – all lab manual instructions are accompanied by completed solutions, so you can either build your own solution from start to finish, or dive straight in at any point using the solutions provided as a starting point. In this lab you will learn how to set up WCF RIA Services, create bindings to the domain context, filter using the domain data source, and create domain service queries. Online Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 2.1 - WCF RIA Services Ian Griffiths sets up the Entity Framework and WCF RIA Services for the sample Event Manager application for the course. He covers how to set up the services, how the Domain Services work and the role that the DomainContext plays in the sample application. He also reviews the metadata classes and integrating the navigation framework. Module 2.2 – Using WCF RIA Services to Edit Entities Ian Griffiths discusses how he adds the ability to edit and create individual entities with the features built into WCF RIA Services into the sample Event Manager application. He covers data binding fundamentals, IQueryable, LINQ, the DomainDataSource, navigation to a single entity using the navigation framework, and how to use the Visual Studio designer to do much of the work . Module 2.3 – Showing Master/Details Records Using WCF RIA Services Ian Griffiths reviews how to display master/detail records for the sample Event Manager application using WCF RIA Services. He covers how to use the Include attribute to indicate which elements to serialize back to the client. Ian also demonstrates how to use the Data Sources window in the designer to add and bind controls to specific data elements. He wraps up by showing how to create custom services to the Domain Services. Module 3 – Authentication, Validation, MVVM, Commands, Implicit Styles and RichTextBox Click here to visit this module. This lab demonstrates how to build a login screen, integrate ASP.NET authentication, and perform validation on data elements. Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) is introduced and used in this lab as a pattern to help separate the UI and business logic. You will also learn how to use implicit styling and the new RichTextBox control. Online Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 3.1 – Authentication Ian Griffiths covers how to integrate a login screen and authentication into the sample Event Manager application. Ian shows how to use the ASP.NET authentication and integrate it into WCF RIA Services and the Silverlight presentation layer. Module 3.2 – MVVM Ian Griffiths covers how to Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) patterns into the sample Event Manager application. He discusses why MVVM exists, what separated presentation means, and why it is important. He shows how to connect the View to the ViewModel, why data binding is important in this symbiosis, and how everything fits together in the overall application. Module 3.3 –Validation Ian Griffiths discusses how validation of user input can be integrated into the sample Event Manager application. He demonstrates how to use the DataAnnotations, the INotifyDataErrorInfo interface, binding markup extensions, and WCF RIA Services in concert to achieve great validation in the sample application. He discusses how this technique allows for property level validation, entity level validation, and asynchronous server side validation. Module 3.4 – Implicit Styles Ian Griffiths discusses how why implicit styles are important and how they can be integrated into the sample Event Manager application. He shows how implicit styles defined in a resource dictionary can be applied to all elements of a particular kind throughout the application. Module 3.5 – RichTextBox Ian Griffiths discusses how the new RichTextBox control and it can be integrated into the sample Event Manager application. He demonstrates how the RichTextBox can provide editing for the event information and how it can display the rich text for selection and copying. Module 4 – User Profiles, Drop Targets, Webcam and Clipboard Click here to visit this module. This lab builds new features into the sample application to take the user's photo. It teaches you how to use the webcam to capture an image, use Silverlight as a drop target, and take advantage of programmatic access to the clipboard. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 4.1 – Webcam Ian Griffiths demonstrates how the webcam adds value to the sample Event Manager application by capturing an image of the attendee. He discusses the VideoCaptureDevice, the CaptureDviceConfiguration, and the CaptureSource classes and how they allow audio and video to be captured so you can grab an image from the capture device and save it. Module 4.2 - Drag and Drop in Silverlight Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to capture and handle the Drop in the sample Event Manager application so the user can drag a photo from a file and drop it into the application. Ian reviews the AllowDrop property, the Drop event, how to access the file that can be dropped, and the other drag related events. He also reviews how to make this work across browsers and the challenges for this. Module 5 – Schedule Planner and Right Mouse Click Click here to visit this module. This lab builds on the application to allow grouping in the DataGrid and implement right mouse click features to add context menu support. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 5.1 – Grouping and Binding Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to use the grouping features for data binding in the DataGrid and how it applies to the sample Event Manager application. He reviews the role of the CollectionViewSource in grouping, customizing the templates for headers, and how to work with grouping with ItemsControls. Module 5.2 – Layout Visual States Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to use the Fluid UI animation support for visual states in the ListBox control DataGrid and how it applies to the sample Event Manager application. He reviews the 3 visual states of BeforeLoaded, AfterLoaded, and BeforeUnloaded. Module 5.3 – Right Mouse Click Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to add support for handling the right mouse button click event to display a context menu for the Event Manager application. He demonstrates how to handle the event, show a custom context menu control, and integrate it into the scheduling portion of the application. Module 6 – Printing the Schedule Click here to visit this module. This lab teaches how to use the new printing features in Silverlight 4. The lab walks through the PrintDocument class and the ViewBox control, while showing how to print multiple pages of content using them. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 6.1 – Printing and the Viewbox Ian Griffiths demonstrates how to add the ability to print the schedule to the sample Event Manager application. He walks through the importance of the PrintDocument class and its members. He also shows how to handle printing the visual tree and how the ViewBox control can help. Module 6.2 – Multi Page Printing Ian Griffiths expands on his printing discussion by showing how to handle printing multiple pages of content for the sample Event Manager application. He shows how to paginate the content and points out various tips to keep in mind when determining the printable area. Module 7 – Running the Event Dashboard Out of Browser Click here to visit this module. This lab builds a dashboard for the sample application while explaining the fundamentals of the out of browser features, how to handle authentication, displaying notifications (toasts), and how to use native integration to use COM Interop with Silverlight. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 7.1 – Out of Browser Ian Griffiths discusses the role of an Out of Browser application for administrators to manage the events and users in the sample Event Manager application. He discusses several reasons why out of browser applications may better suit your needs including custom chrome, toasts, window placement, cross domain access, and file access. He demonstrates the basic technique to take your application and make it work out of browser using the tools. Module 7.2 – NotificationWindow (Toasts) for Elevated Trust Out of Browser Applications Ian Griffiths discusses the how toasts can be used in the sample Event Manager application to show information that may require the user's attention. Ian covers how to create a toast using the NotificationWindow, security implications, and how to make the toast appear as needed. Module 7.3 – Out of Browser Window Placement Ian Griffiths discusses the how to manage the window positioning when building an out of browser application, handling the windows state, and controlling and handling activation of the window. Module 7.4 – Out of Browser Elevated Trust Application Overview Ian Griffiths discusses the implications of creating trusted out of browser application for the Event Manager sample application. He reviews why you might want to use elevated trust, what features is opens to you, and how to take advantage of them. Topics Ian covers include the dynamic keyword in C# 4, the AutomationFactory class, the API to check if you are in a trusted application, and communicating with Excel. Module 8 – Advanced Out of Browser and MEF Click here to visit this module. This hands-on lab walks through the creation of a trusted out of browser application and the new functionality that comes with that. You will learn to use COM Automation, handle the window closing event, set custom window chrome, digitally sign your Silverlight out of browser trusted application, create a silent install option, and take advantage of MEF. Link Download Source Download Lab Document Videos Module 8.1 – Custom Window Chrome for Elevated Trust Out of Browser Applications Ian Griffiths discusses how to replace the standard operating system window chrome with customized chrome for an elevated trusted out of browser application. He covers how it is important to handle close, resize, minimize, and maximize events. Ian mentions that the tooling was not ready when he shot this video, but the good news is that the tooling now supports setting the custom chrome directly from the property page for the Silverlight application. Module 8.2 – Window Closing Event for Out of Browser Applications Ian Griffiths discusses the WindowClosing event and how to handle and optionally cancel the event. Module 8.3 – Silent Install of Out of Browser Applications Ian Griffiths discusses how to use the SLLauncher executable to install an out of browser application. He discusses the optional command line switches that can be set including how the emulate switch can help you emulate the install process. Ian also shows how to setup a shortcut for the application and tell the application where it should look for future updates online. Module 8.4 – Digitally Signing Out of Browser Application Ian Griffiths discusses how and why to digitally sign an out of browser application using the signtool program. He covers what trusted certificates are, the implications of signing (or not signing), and the effect on the user experience. Module 8.5 – The Value of MEF with Silverlight Ian Griffiths discusses what MEF is, how your application can benefit from it, and the fundamental features it puts at your disposal. He covers the 3 step import, export and compose process as well as how to dynamically import XAP files using MEF. Summary As you can probably tell from the long list above – this series contains a ton of great content, and hopefully provides a nice end-to-end walkthrough that helps explain how to take advantage of Silverlight 4 (and all its new features).  Hope this helps, Scott

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• Issue 15: Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ Oracle OpenWorld

  - by rituchhibber

       ORACLE FOCUS Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange@ ORACLE OpenWorld Sylvie MichouSenior DirectorPartner Marketing & Communications and Strategic Programs RESOURCES -- Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Registration Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange SpecializationTest Fest Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder Oracle OpenWorld Promotional Toolkit for Partners Oracle Partner Events Oracle Partner Webcasts Oracle EMEA Partner News SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES If you are attending our forthcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference in San Francisco from 30 September to 4 October, you will discover a new dedicated programme of keynotes and sessions tailored especially for you, our valued partners. Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld has been created to enhance the opportunities for you to learn from and network with Oracle executives and experts. The programme also provides more informal opportunities than ever throughout the week to meet up with the people who are most important to your business: customers, prospects, colleagues and the Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels management team. Oracle remains fully focused on building the industry's most admired partner ecosystem—which today spans over 25,000 partners. This new OPN Exchange programme offers an exciting change of pace for partners throughout the conference. Now it will be possible to enjoy a fully-integrated, partner-dedicated session schedule throughout the week, as well as key social events such as the Sunday night Welcome Reception, networking lunches from Monday to Thursday at the Howard Street Tent, and a fantastic closing event on the last Thursday afternoon. In addition to the regular Oracle OpenWorld conference schedule, if you have registered for the Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld programme, you will be invited to attend a much anticipated global partner keynote presentation, plus more than 40 conference sessions aimed squarely at what's most important to you, as partners. Prominent topics for discussion will include: Oracle technologies and roadmaps and how they fit with partners' business plans; business development; regional distinctions in business practices; and much more. Each session will provide plenty of food for thought ahead of the numerous networking opportunities throughout the week, encouraging the knowledge exchange with Oracle executives, customers, prospects, and colleagues that will make this conference of even greater value for you. At Oracle we always work closely with our partners to deliver solution offerings that improve business value, simplify the IT experience and drive innovation and efficiencies for joint customers. The most important element of our new OPN Exchange is content that helps you get more from technology investments, more from your peer-to-peer connections, and more from your interactions with customers. To this end we've created some partner-specific tools which can be used by OPN members ahead of the conference itself. Crucially, a comprehensive Content Catalog already lists and organises details of every OPN Exchange session, speaker, exhibitor, demonstration and related materials. This Content Catalog can be used by all our partners to identify interesting content that you can add to your own personalised Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder, allowing more effective planning and pre-enrolment for vital sessions. There are numerous highlights that you will definitely want to include in those personal schedules. On Sunday morning, 30 September we will start the week with partner dedicated OPN Exchange sessions, following our Global Partner Keynote at 13:00 with Judson Althoff, SVP, Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales and senior executives, giving insight into Oracle's partner vision, strategy, and resources—all designed to help build and strengthen market opportunities for you. This will be followed by a number of OPN Exchange general sessions, the Oracle OpenWorld Opening Keynote with Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle and concluded with the OPN Exchange AfterDark Welcome Reception, starting at 19:30 at the Metreon. From Monday 1 to Thursday 4 October, you can attend the OPN Exchange sessions that are most relevant to your business today and over the coming year. Oracle's top product and sales leaders will be on hand to discuss Oracle's strategic direction in 40+ targeted and in-depth sessions focussing on critical success factors to develop your business. Oracle's dedication to innovation, specialization, enablement and engineering provides Oracle partners with a huge opportunity to create new services and solutions, differentiate themselves and deliver extreme value to joint customers across the globe. Oracle will even be helping over 1000 partners to earn OPN Specialization certification during the Oracle OpenWorld OPN Exchange Test Fest, which will be providing all the study materials and exams required to drive Specialization for free at the conference. You simply need to check the list of current certification tracks available, and make sure you pre-register to reserve a seat in one of the ten sessions being offered free to OPN Exchange registered attendees. And finally, let's not forget those all-important networking opportunities, which can so often provide partners with valuable long-term alliances as well as exciting new business leads. The Oracle PartnerNetwork Lounge, located at Moscone South, exhibition hall, room 100 is the place where partners can meet formally or informally with colleagues, customers, prospects, and other industry professionals. OPN Specialized partners with OPN Exchange passes can also visit the OPN Video Blogging room to record and share ideas, and at the OPN Information Station you will find consultants available to answer your questions. "For the first time ever we will have a full partner conference within OpenWorld. OPN Exchange @ OpenWorld will kick-off on the first Sunday and run the entire week. We'll have over 40 sessions throughout that time and partners will hear from our top development executives, with special sessions dedicated to partnering throughout. It's going to be a phenomenal event, and we look forward to seeing our partners there." Judson Althoff, SVP, Oracle Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales So if you haven't done so already, please register for Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld today or add OPN Exchange to your existing registration for just $100 through My Account. And if you have any further questions regarding partner activities at Oracle OpenWorld, please don't hesitate to contact the Oracle PartnerNetwork team at [email protected] will be on hand to share the very latest information about: Oracle's SPARC Superclusters: the latest Engineered Systems from Oracle, delivering radically improved performance, faster deployment and greatly reduced operational costs for mixed database and enterprise application consolidation Oracle's SPARC T4 servers: with the newly developed T4 processor and Oracle Solaris providing up to five times the single threaded performance and better overall system throughput for expanded application versatility Oracle Database Appliance: a new way to take advantage of the world's most popular database, Oracle Database 11g, in a single, easy-to-deploy and manage system. It's a complete package engineered to deliver simple, reliable and affordable database services to small and medium size businesses and departmental systems. All hardware and software components are supported together and offer customers unique pay-as-you-grow software licensing to quickly scale from two to 24 processor cores without incurring the costs and downtime usually associated with hardware upgrades Oracle Exalogic: the world's only integrated cloud machine, featuring server hardware and middleware software engineered together for maximum performance with minimum set-up and operational cost Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto grids or private clouds. It is a complete package of servers, storage, networking and software that is massively scalable, secure and redundant Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliances: providing enterprise-class NAS performance, price-performance, manageability and TCO by combining third-generation software with high-performance controllers, flash-based caches and disks Oracle Pillar Axiom Quality-of-Service: confidently consolidate storage for multiple applications into a single datacentre storage solution Oracle Solaris 11: delivering secure enterprise cloud deployments with the ability to run hundreds of virtual application with no overhead and co-engineered with other Oracle software products to provide the highest levels of security, manageability and performance Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Oracle's integrated enterprise IT management product, providing the industry's only complete, integrated and business-driven enterprise cloud management solution Oracle VM 3.0: the latest release of Oracle's server virtualisation and management solution, helping to move datacentres beyond server consolidation to improve application deployment and management. Register today and ensure your place at the Extreme Performance Tour! Extreme Performance Tour events are free to attend, but places are limited. To make sure that you don't miss out, please visit Oracle's Extreme Performance Tour website, select the city that you'd be interest in attending an event in, and then click on the 'Register Now' button for that city to secure your interest. Each individual city page also contains more in-depth information about your local event, including logistics, agenda and maybe even a preview of VIP guest speakers. -- Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Whether you attended Oracle OpenWorld 2009 or not, don't forget to save the date now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010. The event will be held a little earlier next year, from 19th-23rd September, so please don't miss out. With thousands of sessions and hundreds of exhibits and demos already lined up, there's no better place to learn how to optimise your existing systems, get an inside line on upcoming technology breakthroughs, and meet with your partner peers, Oracle strategists and even the developers responsible for the products and services that help you get better results for your end customers. Register Now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010! Perhaps you are interested in learning more about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, but don't wish to register at this time? Great! Please just enter your contact information here and we will contact you at a later date. How to Exhibit at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Sponsorship Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Advertising Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 -- Back to the welcome page

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• Top 10 Reasons SQL Developer is Perfect for Oracle Beginners

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Learning new technologies can be daunting. If you’ve never used a Mac before, you’ll probably be a bit baffled at first. But, you’re probably at least coming from a desktop computing background (Windows), so you common frame of reference. But what if you’re just now learning to use a relational database? Yes, you’ve played with Access a bit, but now your employer or college instructor has charged you with becoming proficient with Oracle database. Here’s 10 reasons why I think Oracle SQL Developer is the perfect vehicle to help get you started. 1. It’s free No need to break into one of these… No start-up costs, no need to wrangle budget dollars from your company. Students don’t have any money after books and lab fees anyway. And most employees don’t like having to ask for ‘special’ software anyway. So avoid all of that and make sure the free stuff doesn’t suit your needs first. Upgrades are available on a regular base, also at no cost, and support is freely available via our public forums. 2. It will run pretty much anywhere Windows – check. OSX (Apple) – check. Unix – check. Linux – check. No need to start up a windows VM to run your Windows-only software in your lab machine. 3. Anyone can install it There’s no installer, no registry to be updated, no admin privs to be obtained. If you can download and extract files to your machine or USB storage device, you can run it. You can be up and running with SQL Developer in under 5 minutes. Here’s a video tutorial to see how to get started. 4. It’s ubiquitous I admit it, I learned a new word yesterday and I wanted an excuse to use it. SQL Developer’s everywhere. It’s had over 2,500,000 downloads in the past year, and is the one of the most downloaded items from OTN. This means if you need help, there’s someone sitting nearby you that can assist, and since they’re in the same tool as you, they’ll be speaking the same language. 5. Simple User Interface Up-up-down-down-Left-right-left-right-A-B-A-B-START will get you 30 lives, but you already knew that, right? You connect, you see your objects, you click on your objects. Or, you can use the worksheet to write your queries and programs in. There’s only one toolbar, and just a few buttons. If you’re like me, video games became less fun when each button had 6 action items mapped to it. I just want the good ole ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘SELECT’, and ‘START’ controls. If you’re new to Oracle, you shouldn’t have the double-workload of learning a new complicated tool as well. 6. It’s not a ‘black box’ Click through your objects, but also get the SQL that drives the GUI As you use the wizards to accomplish tasks for you, you can view the SQL statement being generated on your behalf. Just because you have a GUI, doesn’t mean you’re ceding your responsibility to learn the underlying code that makes the database work. 7. It’s four tools in one It’s not just a query tool. Maybe you need to design a data model first? Or maybe you need to migrate your Sybase ASE database to Oracle for a new project? Or maybe you need to create some reports? SQL Developer does all of that. So once you get comfortable with one part of the tool, the others will be much easier to pick up as your needs change. 8. Great learning resources available Videos, blogs, hands-on learning labs – you name it, we got it. Why wait for someone to train you, when you can train yourself at your own pace? 9. You can use it to teach yourself SQL Instead of being faced with the white-screen-of-panic, you can visually build your queries by dragging and dropping tables and views into the Query Builder. Yes, ‘just like Access’ – only better. And as you build your query, toggle to the Worksheet panel and see the SQL statement. Again, SQL Developer is not a black box. If you prefer to learn by trial and error, the worksheet will attempt to suggest the next bit of your SQL statement with it’s completion insight feature. And if you have syntax errors, those will be highlighted – just like your misspelled words in your favorite word processor. 10. It scales to match your experience level You won’t be a n00b forever. In 6-8 months, when you’re ready to tackle something a bit more complicated, like XML DB or Oracle Spatial, the tool is already there waiting on you. No need to go out and find the ‘advanced’ tool. 11. Wait, you said this was a ‘Top 10′ list? Yes. Yes, I did. I’m using this ‘trick’ to get you to continue reading because I’m going to say something you might not want to hear. Are you ready? Tools won’t replace experience, failure, hard work, and training. Just because you have the keys to the car, doesn’t mean you’re ready to head out on the race track. While SQL Developer reduces the barriers to entry, it does not completely remove them. Many experienced folks simply do not like tools. Rather, they don’t like the people that pick up tools without the know-how to properly use them. If you don’t understand what ‘TRUNCATE’ means, don’t try it out. Try picking up a book first. Of course, it’s very nice to have your own sandbox to play in, so you don’t upset the other children. That’s why I really like our Dev Days Database Virtual Box image. It’s your own database to learn and experiment with.

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• 2 Days of Share &amp; Point

  - by Mark Rackley

  Groovy man… SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is back for 2010, bigger and better than before. Join us for a far out time and learn more about SharePoint in one day than you could in a year from the man… Yes! SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is back! SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is the largest SharePoint conference in Arkansas, Southern Missouri, and the very north east tip of Oklahoma. Last year we had a great turn out with 20 speakers, 5 MVPs, and attendees coming from Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Ohio, Alabama, Michigan, and Washington. Hey Man… what’s SharePoint Saturday anyway? Sounds like a conspiracy man… Not to worry, SharePoint Saturday is not an arm of the government bent on mind control or any attempt what-so-ever to bring you down man. SharePoint Saturday is grass roots effort started by Michael Lotter (http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/pages/about.aspx). It is a FREE one day event where the best SharePoint speakers gather to present their love, hatred, and frustrations of SharePoint to those lucky individuals who attend. Lessons are learned, contacts are made, prizes are won, food is eaten, assorted beverages are consumed until wee hours of the morning. SharePoint Saturday started with just a few sporadic one day events here and there. However, over the past year SharePoint Saturday has exploded and it’s hard to find a weekend where there is NOT a SharePoint Saturday event happing in some corner of the globe. There are even occasions where there are two SharePoint Saturdays on the same day! Many people are pleasantly surprised at the caliber of speakers at these SharePoint Saturday events. For the most part, these speakers are more eloquent, practiced, and practical than those speakers you find at the major multi-day conferences. These guys aren’t even paid to speak.. they do it out of love man… SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2009 Alumni We had a star studded cast last year with many returning this year! Just check out the fun that they had… John Ferringer – Admin rockstar… I can still sense the awesomeness   SharePoint poster children Mike Watson & Laura Rogers     Lori Gowin spreading the SharePoint Love Eric Shupps is a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll       Cathy Dew, Sean McDonough, and JD Wade relaxing between gigs Actually, you can see real photos from last year’s SharePoint Saturday ozarks here:  picasaweb.google.com/mrackley/SharePointSaturdayOzarks#    What’s new for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2010 SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2010 will totally blow your mind man. We’re getting the band back to together with many returning speakers and few new faces. Joel Oleson will be speaking this year, maybe he’ll grace us with his song stylings. Sadly, once again, Andrew Connell will not be able to attend SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, however he did feel the need to show his support in his own way. Prizes this year currently include books, software, a Zune HD, and much more! Wait Man… You said 2 days? I thought it was a one day event? Correct you are my herbal smelling friend… SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2010 will spread the love an additional day this year. The first day will be all about the SharePoint love, on day 2 we will be taking a leisurely float down the Buffalo National River for those interested in a truly unique experience (no banjos allowed please).   Here are the details: WHAT 4 – 5 hour float down the Buffalo National River WHEN & WHERE Sunday June 13th. We will be leaving at 10am from the Parking Lot of: Gordon’s Motel & Canoe Rental Old Highway 7 Jasper, AR 72641 (870) 446-5252 Jasper is about 30 minutes south of Harrison, AR on Highway 7 South. You are responsible for bumming a ride to/from Gordon’s Motel, but they will be shuttling us to/from the river and providing canoes and a boxed lunch. WHAT ELSE? The float trip is dependent on the weather of course, we won’t be floating down the river in a thunderstorm, however I planned SPS Ozarks around a time of year ideal for floating. We aren’t talking class 5 rapids here, you don’t need any real skill, but you need to be okay with possibly tipping your canoe over once or twice. You can bring your own assorted beverages with you, but glass containers are not allowed on the river. I suggest a small cooler with extra snacks and drinks. Also bring clothing you can get wet in (these SharePoint people can get ornery). HOW DO I SIGN UP? When you register for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, you will have the option to also sign up for the float trip. Seats are limited though! If you do not intend to go, please do not take someone else’s place.  The cost for the float trip will be about $35 dollars per person (which you are responsible for unless we find a sponsor). The price includes shuttle to/from river, canoe, life jackets, paddles, and boxed lunch. Far out man… how do I register??? You can register for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks by going to http://spsozarks.eventbrite.com/ We are limited to 200 people for the conference and 50 people for the float trip, so register today before we are sold out. Lodging for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks will once again take place at the Hotel Seville: Annex Suites are available for $103.20 This is So Groovy.. How can I help? I’m glad you asked! We are still looking for a few sponsors and one or two more speakers. If you are interested please let me know!  You can find out more information at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ozarks Hey… wait a minute…. what exactly IS SharePoint man??? Come to SharePoint Saturday Ozarks and find out!!  See you guys there!

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• South Florida Code Camp 2010 &ndash; VI &ndash; 2010-02-27

  - by Dave Noderer

  Catching up after our sixth code camp here in the Ft Lauderdale, FL area. Website at: http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp. For the 5th time, DeVry University hosted the event which makes everything else really easy! Statistics from 2010 South Florida Code Camp: 848 registered (we use Microsoft Group Events) ~ 600 attended (516 took name badges) 64 speakers (including speaker idol) 72 sessions 12 parallel tracks Food 400 waters 600 sodas 900 cups of coffee (it was cold!) 200 pounds of ice 200 pizza's 10 large salad trays 900 mouse pads Photos on facebook Dave Noderer: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=190812&id=693530361 Joe Healy: http://www.facebook.com/devfish?ref=mf#!/album.php?aid=202787&id=720054950 Will Strohl:http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=2045553&id=1046966128&ref=mf Veronica Gonzalez: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=150954&id=672439484 Florida Speaker Idol One of the sessions at code camp was the South Florida Regional speaker idol competition. After user group level competitions there are five competitors. I acted as MC and score keeper while Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell, John Dunagan and Shervin Shakibi were judges. This statewide competition is being run by Roy Lawsen in Lakeland and the winner, Jeff Truman from Naples will move on to the state finals to be held at the Orlando Code Camp on 3/27/2010: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/. Each speaker has 10 minutes. The participants were: Alex Koval Jeff Truman Jared Nielsen Chris Catto Venkat Narayanasamy They all did a great job and I’m working with each to make sure they don’t stop there and start speaking at meetings. Thanks to everyone involved! Volunteers As always events like this don’t happen without a lot of help! The key people were: Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell – DeVry For the months leading up to the event, Ed collects all of the swag, books, etc and stores them. He holds meeting with various DeVry departments to coordinate the day, he works with the students in the days  before code camp to stuff bags, print signs, arrange tables and visit BJ’s for our supplies (I go and pay but have a small car!). And of course the day of the event he is there at 5:30 am!! We took two SUV’s to BJ’s, i was really worried that the 36 cases of water were going to break his rear axle! He also helps with the students and works very hard before and after the event. Rainer Haberman – Speakers and Volunteer of the Year Rainer has helped over the past couple of years but this time he took full control of arranging the tracks. I did some preliminary work solicitation speakers but he took over all communications after that. We have tried various organizations around speakers, chair per track, central team but having someone paying attention to the details is definitely the way to go! This was the first year I did not have to jump in at the last minute and re-arrange everything. There were lots of kudo’s from the speakers too saying they felt it was more organized than they have experienced in the past from any code camp. Thanks Rainer! Ray Alamonte – Book Swap We saw the idea of a book swap from the Alabama Code Camp and thought we would give it a try. Ray jumped in and took control. The idea was to get people to bring their old technical books to swap or for others to buy. You got a ticket for each book you brought that you could then turn in to buy another book. If you did not have a ticket you could buy a book for $1. Net proceeds were $153 which I rounded up and donated to the Red Cross. There is plenty going on in Haiti and Chile! I don’t think we really got a count of how many books came in. I many cases the books barely hit the table before being picked up again. At the end we were left with a dozen books which we donated to the DeVry library. A great success we will definitely do again! Jace Weiss / Ratchelen Hut – Coffee and Snacks Wow, this was an eye opener. In past years a few of us would struggle to give some attention to coffee, snacks, etc. But it was always tenuous and always ended up running out of coffee. In the past we have tried buying Dunkin Donuts coffee, renting urns, borrowing urns, etc. This year I actually purchased 2 – 100 cup Westbend commercial brewers plus a couple of small urns (30 and 60 cup we used for decaf). We got them both started early (although i forgot to push the on button on one!) and primed it with 10 boxes of Joe from Dunkin. then Jace and Rachelen took over.. once a batch was brewed they would refill the boxes, keep the area clean and at one point were filling cups. We never ran out of coffee and served a few hundred more than last  year. We did look but next year I’ll get a large insulated (like gatorade) dispensing container. It all went very smoothly and having help focused on that one area was a big win. Thanks Jace and Rachelen! Ken & Shirley Golding / Roberta Barbosa – Registration Ken & Shirley showed up and took over registration. This year we printed small name tags for everyone registered which was great because it is much easier to remember someone’s name when they are labeled! In any case it went the smoothest it has ever gone. All three were actively pulling people through the registration, answering questions, directing them to bags and information very quickly. I did not see that there was too big a line at any time. Thanks!! Scott Katarincic / Vishal Shukla – Website For the 3rd?? year in a row, Scott was in charge of the website starting in August or September when I start on code camp. He handles all the requests, makes changes to the site and admin. I think two years ago he wrote all the backend administration and tunes it and the website a bit but things are pretty stable. The only thing I do is put up the sponsors. It is a big pressure off of me!! Thanks Scott! Vishal jumped into the web end this year and created a new Silverlight agenda page to replace the old ajax page. We will continue to enhance this but it is definitely a good step forward! Thanks! Alex Funkhouser – T-shirts/Mouse pads/tables/sponsors Alex helps in many areas. He helps me bring in sponsors and handles all the logistics for t-shirts, sponsor tables and this year the mouse pads. He is also a key person to help promote the event as well not to mention the after after party which I did not attend and don’t want to know much about! Students There were a number of student volunteers but don’t have all of their names. But thanks to them, they stuffed bags, patrolled pizza and helped with moving things around. Sponsors We had a bunch of great sponsors which allowed us to feed people and give a way a lot of great swag. Our major sponsors of DeVry, Microsoft (both DPE and UGSS), Infragistics, Telerik, SQL Share (End to End, SQL Saturdays), and Interclick are very much appreciated. The other sponsors Applied Innovations (also supply code camp hosting), Ultimate Software (a great local SW company), Linxter (reliable cloud messaging we are lucky to have here!), Mediascend (a media startup), SoftwareFX (another local SW company we are happy to have back participating in CC), CozyRoc (if you do SSIS, check them out), Arrow Design (local DNN and Silverlight experts),Boxes and Arrows (a local SW consulting company) and Robert Half. One thing we did this year besides a t-shirt was a mouse pad. I like it because it will be around for a long time on many desks. After much investigation and years of using mouse pad’s I’ve determined that the 1/8” fabric top is the best and that is what we got!   So now I get a break for a few months before starting again!

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• Advantages of SQL Backup Pro

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Getting backups of your databases in place is a fundamental issue for protection of the business. Yes, I said business, not data, not databases, but business. Because of a lack of good, tested, backups, companies have gone completely out of business or suffered traumatic financial loss. That’s just a simple fact (outlined with a few examples here). So you want to get backups right. That’s a big part of why we make Red Gate SQL Backup Pro work the way it does. Yes, you could just use native backups, but you’ll be missing a few advantages that we provide over and above what you get out of the box from Microsoft. Let’s talk about them. Guidance If you’re a hard-core DBA with 20+ years of experience on every version of SQL Server and several other data platforms besides, you may already know what you need in order to get a set of tested backups in place. But, if you’re not, maybe a little help would be a good thing. To set up backups for your servers, we supply a wizard that will step you through the entire process. It will also act to guide you down good paths. For example, if your databases are in Full Recovery, you should set up transaction log backups to run on a regular basis. When you choose a transaction log backup from the Backup Type you’ll see that only those databases that are in Full Recovery will be listed: This makes it very easy to be sure you have a log backup set up for all the databases you should and none of the databases where you won’t be able to. There are other examples of guidance throughout the product. If you have the responsibility of managing backups but very little knowledge or time, we can help you out. Throughout the software you’ll notice little green question marks. You can see two in the screen above and more in each of the screens in other topics below this one. Clicking on these will open a window with additional information about the topic in question which should help to guide you through some of the tougher decisions you may have to make while setting up your backup jobs. Here’s an example: Backup Copies As a part of the wizard you can choose to make a copy of your backup on your network. This process runs as part of the Red Gate SQL Backup engine. It will copy your backup, after completing the backup so it doesn’t cause any additional blocking or resource use within the backup process, to the network location you define. Creating a copy acts as a mechanism of protection for your backups. You can then backup that copy or do other things with it, all without affecting the original backup file. This requires either an additional backup or additional scripting to get it done within the native Microsoft backup engine. Offsite Storage Red Gate offers you the ability to immediately copy your backup to the cloud as a further, off-site, protection of your backups. It’s a service we provide and expose through the Backup wizard. Your backup will complete first, just like with the network backup copy, then an asynchronous process will copy that backup to cloud storage. Again, this is built right into the wizard or even the command line calls to SQL Backup, so it’s part a single process within your system. With native backup you would need to write additional scripts, possibly outside of T-SQL, to make this happen. Before you can use this with your backups you’ll need to do a little setup, but it’s built right into the product to get this done. You’ll be directed to the web site for our hosted storage where you can set up an account. Compression If you have SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, or you’re on SQL Server 2008R2 or greater and you have a Standard or Enterprise license, then you have backup compression. It’s built right in and works well. But, if you need even more compression then you might want to consider Red Gate SQL Backup Pro. We offer four levels of compression within the product. This means you can get a little compression faster, or you can just sacrifice some CPU time and get even more compression. You decide. For just a simple example I backed up AdventureWorks2012 using both methods of compression. The resulting file from native was 53mb. Our file was 33mb. That’s a file that is smaller by 38%, not a small number when we start talking gigabytes. We even provide guidance here to help you determine which level of compression would be right for you and your system: So for this test, if you wanted maximum compression with minimum CPU use you’d probably want to go with Level 2 which gets you almost as much compression as Level 3 but will use fewer resources. And that compression is still better than the native one by 10%. Restore Testing Backups are vital. But, a backup is just a file until you restore it. How do you know that you can restore that backup? Of course, you’ll use CHECKSUM to validate that what was read from disk during the backup process is what gets written to the backup file. You’ll also use VERIFYONLY to check that the backup header and the checksums on the backup file are valid. But, this doesn’t do a complete test of the backup. The only complete test is a restore. So, what you really need is a process that tests your backups. This is something you’ll have to schedule separately from your backups, but we provide a couple of mechanisms to help you out here. First, when you create a backup schedule, all done through our wizard which gives you as much guidance as you get when running backups, you get the option of creating a reminder to create a job to test your restores. You can enable this or disable it as you choose when creating your scheduled backups. Once you’re ready to schedule test restores for your databases, we have a wizard for this as well. After you choose the databases and restores you want to test, all configurable for automation, you get to decide if you’re going to restore to a specified copy or to the original database: If you’re doing your tests on a new server (probably the best choice) you can just overwrite the original database if it’s there. If not, you may want to create a new database each time you test your restores. Another part of validating your backups is ensuring that they can pass consistency checks. So we have DBCC built right into the process. You can even decide how you want DBCC run, which error messages to include, limit or add to the checks being run. With this you could offload some DBCC checks from your production system so that you only run the physical checks on your production box, but run the full check on this backup. That makes backup testing not just a general safety process, but a performance enhancer as well: Finally, assuming the tests pass, you can delete the database, leave it in place, or delete it regardless of the tests passing. All this is automated and scheduled through the SQL Agent job on your servers. Running your databases through this process will ensure that you don’t just have backups, but that you have tested backups. Single Point of Management If you have more than one server to maintain, getting backups setup could be a tedious process. But, with Red Gate SQL Backup Pro you can connect to multiple servers and then manage all your databases and all your servers backups from a single location. You’ll be able to see what is scheduled, what has run successfully and what has failed, all from a single interface without having to connect to different servers. Log Shipping Wizard If you want to set up log shipping as part of a disaster recovery process, it can frequently be a pain to get configured correctly. We supply a wizard that will walk you through every step of the process including setting up alerts so you’ll know should your log shipping fail. Summary You want to get your backups right. As outlined above, Red Gate SQL Backup Pro will absolutely help you there. We supply a number of processes and functionalities above and beyond what you get with SQL Server native. Plus, with our guidance, hints and reminders, you will get your backups set up in a way that protects your business.

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• Productivity Tips

  - by Brian T. Jackett

  A few months ago during my first end of year review at Microsoft I was doing an assessment of my year.  One of my personal goals to come out of this reflection was to improve my personal productivity.  While I hear many people say “I wish I had more hours in the day so that I could get more done” I feel like that is the wrong approach.  There is an inherent assumption that you are being productive with your time that you already have and thus more time would allow you to be as productive given more time.    Instead of wishing I could add more hours to the day I’ve begun adopting a number of processes or behavior changes in my personal life to make better use of my time with the goal of improving productivity.  The areas of focus are as follows: Focus Processes Tools Personal health Email Note: A number of these topics have spawned from reading Scott Hanselman’s blog posts on productivity, reading of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, and discussions with friends and coworkers who had great insights into this topic.   Focus Pre-reading / viewing: Overcome your work addiction Millennials paralyzed by choice Its Not What You Read Its What You Ignore (Scott Hanselman video)    I highly recommend Scott Hanselman’s video above and this post before continuing with this article.  It is well worth the 40+ mins price of admission for the video and couple minutes for article.  One key takeaway for me was listing out my activities in an average week and realizing which ones held little or no value to me.  We all have a finite amount of time to work each day.  Do you know how much time and effort you spend on various aspects of your life (family, friends, religion, work, personal happiness, etc.)?  Do your actions and commitments reflect your priorities?    The biggest time consumers with little value for me were time spent on social media services (Twitter and Facebook), playing an MMO video game, and watching TV.  I still check up on Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft internal chat forums, and other services to keep contact with others but I’ve reduced that time significantly.  As for TV I’ve cut the cord and no longer subscribe to cable TV.  Instead I use Netflix, RedBox, and over the air channels but again with reduced time consumption.  With the time I’ve freed up I’m back to working out 2-3 times a week and reading 4 nights a week (both of which I had been neglecting previously).  I’ll mention a few tools for helping measure your time in the Tools section.   Processes    Do not multi-task.  I’ll say it again.  Do not multi-task.  There is no such thing as multi tasking.  The human brain is optimized to work on one thing at a time.  When you are “multi-tasking” you are really doing 2 or more things at less than 100%, usually by a wide margin.  I take pride in my work and when I’m doing something less than 100% the results typically degrade rapidly.    Now there are some ways of bending the rules of physics for this one.  There is the notion of getting a double amount of work done in the same timeframe.  Some examples would be listening to podcasts / watching a movie while working out, using a treadmill as your work desk, or reading while in the bathroom.    Personally I’ve found good results in combining one task that does not require focus (making dinner, playing certain video games, working out) and one task that does (watching a movie, listening to podcasts).  I believe this is related to me being a visual and kinesthetic (using my hands or actually doing it) learner.  I’m terrible with auditory learning.  My fiance and I joke that sometimes we talk and talk to each other but never really hear each other.   Goals / Tasks    Goals can give us direction in life and a sense of accomplishment when we complete them.  Goals can also overwhelm us and give us a sense of failure when we don’t complete them.  I propose that you shift your perspective and not dwell on all of the things that you haven’t gotten done, but focus instead on regularly setting measureable goals that are within reason of accomplishing.    At the end of each time frame have a retrospective to review your progress.  Do not feel guilty about what you did not accomplish.  Feel proud of what you did accomplish and readjust your goals for the next time frame to more attainable goals.  Here is a sample schedule I’ve seen proposed by some.  I have not consistently set goals for each timeframe, but I do typically set 3 small goals a day (this blog post is #2 for today). Each day set 3 small goals Each week set 3 medium goals Each month set 1 large goal Each year set 2 very large goals   Tools    Tools are an extension of our human body.  They help us extend beyond what we can physically and mentally do.  Below are some tools I use almost daily or have found useful as of late. Disclaimer: I am not getting endorsed to promote any of these products.  I just happen to like them and find them useful. Instapaper – Save internet links for reading later.  There are many tools like this but I’ve found this to be a great one.  There is even a “read it later” JavaScript button you can add to your browser so when you navigate to a site it will then add this to your list. Stacks for Instapaper – A Windows Phone 7 app for reading my Instapaper articles on the go.  It does require a subscription to Instapaper (nominal $3 every three months) but is easily worth the cost.  Alternatively you can set up your Kindle to sync with Instapaper easily but I haven’t done so. SlapDash Podcast – Apps for Windows Phone and  Windows 8 (possibly other platforms) to sync podcast viewing / listening across multiple devices.  Now that I have my Surface RT device (which I love) this is making my consumption easier to manage. Feed Reader – Simple Windows 8 app for quickly catching up on my RSS feeds.  I used to have hundreds of unread items all the time.  Now I’m down to 20-50 regularly and it is much easier and faster to consume on my Surface RT.  There is also a free version (which I use) and I can’t see much different between the free and paid versions currently. Rescue Time – Have you ever wondered how much time you’ve spent on websites vs. email vs. “doing work”?  This service tracks your computer actions and then lets you report on them.  This can help you quantitatively identify areas where your actions are not in line with your priorities. PowerShell – Windows automation tool.  It is now built into every client and server OS.  This tool has saved me days (and I mean the full 24 hrs worth) of time and effort in the past year alone.  If you haven’t started learning PowerShell and you administrating any Windows OS or server product you need to start today. Various blogging tools – I wrote a post a couple years ago called How I Blog about my blogging process and tools used.  Almost all of it still applies today.   Personal Health    Some of these may be common sense or debatable, but I’ve found them to help prioritize my daily activities. Get plenty of sleep on a regular basis.  Sacrificing sleep too many nights a week negatively impacts your cognition, attitude, and overall health. Exercise at least three days.  Exercise could be lifting weights, taking the stairs up multiple flights of stairs, walking for 20 mins, or a number of other "non-traditional” activities.  I find that regular exercise helps with sleep and improves my overall attitude. Eat a well balanced diet.  Too much sugar, caffeine, junk food, etc. are not good for your body.  This is not a matter of losing weight but taking care of your body and helping you perform at your peak potential.   Email    Email can be one of the biggest time consumers (i.e. waster) if you aren’t careful. Time box your email usage.  Set a meeting invite for yourself if necessary to limit how much time you spend checking email. Use rules to prioritize your email.  Email from external customers, my manager, or include me directly on the To line go into my inbox.  Everything else goes a level down and I have 30+ rules to further sort it, mostly distribution lists. Use keyboard shortcuts (when available).  I use Outlook for my primary email and am constantly hitting Alt + S to send, Ctrl + 1 for my inbox, Ctrl + 2 for my calendar, Space / Tab / Shift + Tab to mark items as read, and a number of other useful commands.  Learn them and you’ll see your speed getting through emails increase. Keep emails short.  No one Few people like reading through long emails.  The first line should state exactly why you are sending the email followed by a 3-4 lines to support it.  Anything longer might be better suited as a phone call or in person discussion.   Conclusion    In this post I walked through various tips and tricks I’ve found for improving personal productivity.  It is a mix of re-focusing on the things that matter, using tools to assist in your efforts, and cutting out actions that are not aligned with your priorities.  I originally had a whole section on keyboard shortcuts, but with my recent purchase of the Surface RT I’m finding that touch gestures have replaced numerous keyboard commands that I used to need.  I see a big future in touch enabled devices.  Hopefully some of these tips help you out.  If you have any tools, tips, or ideas you would like to share feel free to add in the comments section.         -Frog Out   Links Scott Hanselman Productivity posts http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Productivity Overcome your work addiction http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2012/05/overcome-your-work-addiction.html?awid=5512355740280659420-3271   Millennials paralyzed by choice http://priyaparker.com/blog/millennials-paralyzed-by-choice   Its Not What You Read Its What You Ignore (video) http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsNotWhatYouReadItsWhatYouIgnoreVideoOfScottHanselmansPersonalProductivityTips.aspx   Cutting the cord – Jeff Blankenburg http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2011/04/06/cutting-the-cord/   Building a sitting standing desk – Eric Harlan http://www.ericharlan.com/Everything_Else/building-a-sitting-standing-desk-a229.html   Instapaper http://www.instapaper.com/u   Stacks for Instapaper http://www.stacksforinstapaper.com/   Slapdash Podcast Windows Phone -  http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/slapdash-podcasts/90e8b121-080b-e011-9264-00237de2db9e Windows 8 - http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/slapdash-podcasts/0c62e66a-f2e4-4403-af88-3430a821741e/m/ROW   Feed Reader http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/feed-reader/d03199c9-8e08-469a-bda1-7963099840cc/m/ROW   Rescue Time http://www.rescuetime.com/   PowerShell Script Center http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/bb410849.aspx

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• SharePoint – The Most Important Feature

  - by Bil Simser

  Watching twitter and doing a search for SharePoint and you see a lot (almost one every few minutes) of tweets about the top 10 new features in SharePoint. What answer do you get when you ask the question, “What’s the most important feature in SharePoint?”. Chances are the answer will vary. Some will say it’s the collaboration aspect, others might say it’s the new ribbon interface, multi-item editing, external content types, faceted search, large list support, document versioning, Silverlight, etc. The list goes on. However I think most people might be missing the most important feature that’s sitting right under their noses all this time. The most important feature of SharePoint? It’s called User Empowerment. Huh? What? Is that something I find in the Site Actions menu? Nope. It’s something that’s always been there in SharePoint, you just need to get the word out and support it. How many times have you had a team ask you for a team site (assuming you had SharePoint up and running). Or to create them a contact list. Or how long have you employed that guy in the corner who’s been copying and pasting content from Corporate Communications into the web from a Word document. Let’s stop the insanity. It doesn’t have to be this way. SharePoint’s strongest feature isn’t anything you can find in the Site Settings screen or Central Admin. It’s all about empowering your users and letting them take control of their content. After all, SharePoint really is a bunch of tools to allow users to collaborate on content isn’t it? So why are you stepping in as IT and helping the user every moment along the way. It’s like having to ask users to fill out a help desk ticket or call up the Windows team to create a folder on their desktop or rearrange their Start menu. This isn’t something IT should be spending their time doing nor is it something the users should be burdened with having to wait until their friendly neighborhood tech-guy (or gal) shows up to help them sort the icons on their desktop. SharePoint IS all about empowerment. Site owners can create whatever lists and libraries they need for their team, and if the template isn’t there they can always turn to my friend and yours, the Custom List. From that can spew forth approval tracking systems, new hire checklists, and server inventory. You’re only limited by your imagination and needs. Users should be able to create new sites as they need. Want a blog to let everyone know what your team is up to? Go create one, here’s how. What’s a blog you ask? Here’s what it is and why you would use one. SharePoint is the shift in the balance of power and you need, and an IT group, let go of certain responsibilities and let your users run with the tools. A power user who knows how to create sites and what features are available to them can help a team go from the forming stage to the storming stage overnight. Again, this all hinges on you as an IT organization and what you can and empower your users with as far as features go. Running with tools is great if you know how to use them, running with scissors not recommended unless you enjoy trips to the hospital. With Great Power comes Great Responsibility so don’t go out on Monday and send out a memo to the organization saying “This Bil guy says you peeps can do anything so here it is, knock yourself out” (for one, they’ll have *no* idea who this Bil guy is). This advice comes with the task of getting your users ready for empowerment. Whether it’s through some kind of internal training sessions, in-house documentation; videos; blog posts; on how to accomplish things in SharePoint, or full blown one-on-one sit downs with teams or individuals to help them through their problems. The work is up to you. Helping them along also should be part of your governance (you do have one don’t you?). Just because you have InfoPath client deployed with your Office suite, doesn’t mean users should just start publishing forms all over your SharePoint farm. There should be some governance behind that in what you’ll support and what is possible. The other caveat to all this is that SharePoint is not everything for everyone. It can’t cook you breakfast and impregnate your cat or solve world hunger. It also isn’t suited for every IT solution out there. It’s a horrible source control system (even though some people try to use it as such) and really can’t do financials worth a darn. Again, governance is key here and part of that governance and your responsibility in setting up and unleashing SharePoint into your organization is to provide users guidance on what should be in SharePoint and (more importantly) what should not be in SharePoint. There are boundaries you have to set where you don’t want your end users going as they might be treading into trouble. Again, this is up to you to set these constraints and help users understand why these pylons are there. If someone understands why they can’t do something they might have a better understanding and respect for those that put them there in the first place. Of course you’ll always have the power-users who want to go skiing down dead mans curve so this doesn’t work for everyone, but you can catch the majority of the newbs who don’t wander aimlessly off the beaten path. At the end of the day when all things are going swimmingly your end users should be empowered to solve the needs they have on a day to day basis and not having to keep bugging the IT department to help them create a view to show only approved documents. I wouldn’t go as far as business users building out full blown solutions and handing the keys to SharePoint Designer or (worse) Visual Studio to power-users might not be a path you want to go down but you also don’t have to lock up the SharePoint system in a tight box where users can’t use what’s there. So stop focusing on the shiny things in SharePoint and maybe consider making a shift to what’s really important. Making your day job easier and letting users get the most our of your technology investment.

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• Enhanced REST Support in Oracle Service Bus 11gR1

  - by jeff.x.davies

  In a previous entry on REST and Oracle Service Bus (see http://blogs.oracle.com/jeffdavies/2009/06/restful_services_with_oracle_s_1.html) I encoded the REST query string really as part of the relative URL. For example, consider the following URI: http://localhost:7001/SimpleREST/Products/id=1234 Now, technically there is nothing wrong with this approach. However, it is generally more common to encode the search parameters into the query string. Take a look at the following URI that shows this principle http://localhost:7001/SimpleREST/Products?id=1234 At first blush this appears to be a trivial change. However, this approach is more intuitive, especially if you are passing in multiple parameters. For example: http://localhost:7001/SimpleREST/Products?cat=electronics&subcat=television&mfg=sony The above URI is obviously used to retrieve a list of televisions made by Sony. In prior versions of OSB (before 11gR1PS3), parsing the query string of a URI was more difficult than in the current release. In 11gR1PS3 it is now much easier to parse the query strings, which in turn makes developing REST services in OSB even easier. In this blog entry, we will re-implement the REST-ful Products services using query strings for passing parameter information. Lets begin with the implementation of the Products REST service. This service is implemented in the Products.proxy file of the project. Lets begin with the overall structure of the service, as shown in the following screenshot. This is a common pattern for REST services in the Oracle Service Bus. You implement different flows for each of the HTTP verbs that you want your service to support. Lets take a look at how the GET verb is implemented. This is the path that is taken of you were to point your browser to: http://localhost:7001/SimpleREST/Products/id=1234 There is an Assign action in the request pipeline that shows how to extract a query parameter. Here is the expression that is used to extract the id parameter: $inbound/ctx:transport/ctx:request/http:query-parameters/http:parameter[@name="id"]/@value The Assign action that stores the value into an OSB variable named id. Using this type of XPath statement you can query for any variables by name, without regard to their order in the parameter list. The Log statement is there simply to provided some debugging info in the OSB server console. The response pipeline contains a Replace action that constructs the response document for our rest service. Most of the response data is static, but the ID field that is returned is set based upon the query-parameter that was passed into the REST proxy. Testing the REST service with a browser is very simple. Just point it to the URL I showed you earlier. However, the browser is really only good for testing simple GET services. The OSB Test Console provides a much more robust environment for testing REST services, no matter which HTTP verb is used. Lets see how to use the Test Console to test this GET service. Open the OSB we console (http://localhost:7001/sbconsole) and log in as the administrator. Click on the Test Console icon (the little "bug") next to the Products proxy service in the SimpleREST project. This will bring up the Test Console browser window. Unlike SOAP services, we don't need to do much work in the request document because all of our request information will be encoded into the URI of the service itself. Belore the Request Document section of the Test Console is the Transport section. Expand that section and modify the query-parameters and http-method fields as shown in the next screenshot. By default, the query-parameters field will have the tags already defined. You just need to add a tag for each parameter you want to pass into the service. For out purposes with this particular call, you'd set the quer-parameters field as follows: <tp:parameter name="id" value="1234" /> </tp:query-parameters> Now you are ready to push the Execute button to see the results of the call. That covers the process for parsing query parameters using OSB. However, what if you have an OSB proxy service that needs to consume a REST-ful service? How do you tell OSB to pass the query parameters to the external service? In the sample code you will see a 2nd proxy service called CallREST. It invokes the Products proxy service in exactly the same way it would invoke any REST service. Our CallREST proxy service is defined as a SOAP service. This help to demonstrate OSBs ability to mediate between service consumers and service providers, decreasing the level of coupling between them. If you examine the message flow for the CallREST proxy service, you'll see that it uses an Operational branch to isolate processing logic for each operation that is defined by the SOAP service. We will focus on the getProductDetail branch, that calls the Products REST service using the HTTP GET verb. Expand the getProduct pipeline and the stage node that it contains. There is a single Assign statement that simply extracts the productID from the SOA request and stores it in a local OSB variable. Nothing suprising here. The real work (and the real learning) occurs in the Route node below the pipeline. The first thing to learn is that you need to use a route node when calling REST services, not a Service Callout or a Publish action. That's because only the Routing action has access to the $oubound variable, especially when invoking a business service. The Routing action contains 3 Insert actions. The first Insert action shows how to specify the HTTP verb as a GET. The second insert action simply inserts the XML node into the request. This element does not exist in the request by default, so we need to add it manually. Now that we have the element defined in our outbound request, we can fill it with the parameters that we want to send to the REST service. In the following screenshot you can see how we define the id parameter based on the productID value we extracted earlier from the SOAP request document. That expression will look for the parameter that has the name id and extract its value. That's all there is to it. You now know how to take full advantage of the query parameter parsing capability of the Oracle Service Bus 11gR1PS2. Download the sample source code here: rest2_sbconfig.jar Ubuntu and the OSB Test Console You will get an error when you try to use the Test Console with the Oracle Service Bus, using Ubuntu (or likely a number of other Linux distros also). The error (shown below) will state that the Test Console service is not running. The fix for this problem is quite simple. Open up the WebLogic Server administrator console (usually running at http://localhost:7001/console). In the Domain Structure window on the left side of the console, select the Servers entry under the Environment heading. The select the Admin Server entry in the main window of the console. By default, you should be viewing the Configuration tabe and the General sub tab in the main window. Look for the Listen Address field. By default it is blank, which means it is listening on all interfaces. For some reason Ubuntu doesn't like this. So enter a value like localhost or the specific IP address or DNS name for your server (usually its just localhost in development envirionments). Save your changes and restart the server. Your Test Console will now work correctly.

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• You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development Expert if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  So, all you aspiring SharePoint experts out there (especially those of you who put “expert” in your resumes).  It’s time for a cold cool splash of reality. More than likely you are NOT an expert (I know I’m not). Yes, you may have some expertise in certain aspects in SharePoint (it’s questionable if I have THAT some days), but make sure you’ve got the basics down before you start throwing that word “expert” around. I know that it becomes frustrating to those looking to hire SharePoint people and having to sift through all the resumes of those who think very highly of themselves and their skills only to find those gaping holes in common best practices. I’m much more willing to hire a decent dev who KNOWS they are not an expert than to hire a decent+ dev who THINKS they are an expert.  So… I’ve compiled a small reality check for you SharePoint Devs. and a “red flag” check for those of you wishing to hire a SharePoint developer. If any of these apply to you, you are probably not a SharePoint Development Expert. You are not a SharePoint Development Expert if you manually copy your DLLs Seriously, I don’t care if you write the best code in the world. If you are manually copying files to each web front end you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert. Yes, I realize the admins are generally the ones who do the actual deployments, but if you don’t know how to create solution packages for your admins, you are going to end up doing more damage than good some day. There are TONS of tools out there to help generate deployable solutions for you. You have ZERO excuse. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you can’t tell me the main artifacts of a solution package Directly related to the first one. If you don’t know what the Manifest, DDF, WSP, and Feature files are and how they are used in a solution package, you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. I’m not asking you to be able to write them all from scratch (heck, I can’t even do that), but you MUST know what they are and how to tweak them if necessary. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know what a Content Type or a Site Column is You would be absolutely amazed at how many “Expert” SharePoint Developers have NEVER EVER created a Content Type or Site Column or even know what they are. I mean, why would you ever want to create those when you can just do everything as a custom list or custom field? right???? (that’s sarcasm). You also need to know how to package a Content Type and a Site Column into a deployable package by the way. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you have not created at least one Web Part, Workflow, Timer Job, and Event Handler. If you haven’t written at least one of each, you don’t fully understand what they do or their limitations. Again, I expect NO ONE to be able to write these things blind. I think the last time I wrote an application from scratch without copying and pasting from another project I had done before was back in 1994? Seriously, coding is like a Sour Dough starter, you get it from someone else and keep adding to it. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know how to properly dispose of objects Another biggie with zero excuse for getting it wrong. It is so well known that you must dispose of your SPWeb and SPSite objects that if you aren’t doing it then you are not an expert. Heck, if you utilize “using” when handling SPWeb and SPSite objects and don’t realize that it disposes of those objects for you, then you are not a SharePoint Development expert. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you do not know how to properly elevate privileges Just one of those development basics that any decent SharePoint Developer has got to have down and understand how and why it’s used You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know all of the development options available to SharePoint and when they should be used Okay… so all you hard core .NET SharePoint dev geeks take a moment to listen. You may be the most top not SharePoint .NET developer in the world, but if you are opening Visual Studio to solve every problem in SharePoint, then you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. The SharePoint developer’s tool kit is growing every day with tools like Visual Studio, Data View Web Parts, XSL, jQuery, SPServices, etc. etc… If you don’t have the ability to at least recognize that “hey, you can basically do the same thing here but just dropping in Easy Tabs instead of writing some weird web part” then you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert AND you are doing a huge disservice to your clients and customers. You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development expert if you call yourself an Expert So, truth telling time. I’m not an expert. There, I said it. I feel so much better. Now, I realize the word “expert” has been used with my name before, but I am quick to point out that I KNOW the experts and know that they will help me if I need it, but I’m not an expert in all things SharePoint. The minute you take on that moniker you are setting yourself up for a fall. It’s too big, there’s too much to know, and there’s WAY too much you can do wrong. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you are not involved in the community I expect to get the most flack for this one, but it’s always a huge red flag for me when someone says they are an expert and has ZERO knowledge of the SharePoint community. The SharePoint community is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to be an effective SharePoint developer, admin, architect, power user or whatever the heck you are!! The community keeps you sane, tells you when you are NOT using a best practice, recommends the best practice, and even knows when Microsoft is giving you the wrong information (*gasp* it does happen). If you can’t tell me who you are following on twitter, who's blog you read, what conferences you attend, or name the experts who you monitor to make sure you are not doing something stupid, then you are probably doing something stupid. Again, not asking you to be a speaker, blogger, or the least bit extroverted but you should be at LEAST stalking the experts. So… what’s the point? So… yeah… what’s my point in all this. Well, first of all let me point out that this is by far not a finished list and I could come up with a LOT more specific “deep dive” questions, but these should be high enough level that even non experts can recognize and ask them. If you have some common ones you run into let me know and add them in the comments below. Also, keep in mind I’m not saying you as a developer HAVE to know EVERYTHING, but you DO need to know what you don’t know and proudly and honestly state “I don’t know, but I’ll learn and find out”.  Those of us hiring SharePoint developers and know and have a passion for SharePoint are not looking for that elusive “expert” who knows everything. We are looking for someone who “gets it”, has a similar passion, great attitude, an understanding that they DON’T know everything, and a desire to do it right.  I would bet money that most SharePoint development disasters happen because of “experts” who think they know everything rather than the developer who is cautious and knows he doesn’t. Lastly, I know there’s a raging debate over what a “SharePoint Developer” is (I should know, as I keep bringing it up). So, obviously this blog post is more closely tied to the .NET side of SharePoint development and less towards the client side, middle tier, or whatever you want to call it. So, let’s please not get that argument going here as well…  Thanks

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