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• How to setup stunnel so that gmail can use my own smtp server to send messages.

  - by igorhvr

  I am trying to setup gmail to send messages using my own smtp server. I am doing this by using stunnel over a non-ssl enabled server. I am able to use my own smtp client with ssl enabled just fine to my server. Unfortunately, however, gmail seems to be unable to connect to my stunnel port. Gmail seems to be simply closing the connection right after it is established - I get a "SSL socket closed on SSL_read" on my server logs. On gmail, I get a "We are having trouble authenticating with your other mail service. Please try changing your SSL settings. If you continue to experience difficulties, please contact your other email provider for further instructions." message. Any help / tips on figuring this out will be appreciated. My certificate is self-signed - could this perhaps be related to the problem I am experiencing? I pasted the entire SSL session (logs from my server) below. 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082491584]: Service ssmtp accepted FD=0 from 209.85.210.171:46858 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Service ssmtp started 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: FD=0 in non-blocking mode 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Option TCP_NODELAY set on local socket 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Waiting for a libwrap process 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Acquired libwrap process #0 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Releasing libwrap process #0 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Released libwrap process #0 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Service ssmtp permitted by libwrap from 209.85.210.171:46858 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: Service ssmtp accepted connection from 209.85.210.171:46858 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: FD=1 in non-blocking mode 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG6[20897:3082267504]: connect_blocking: connecting 127.0.0.1:25 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: connect_blocking: s_poll_wait 127.0.0.1:25: waiting 10 seconds 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: connect_blocking: connected 127.0.0.1:25 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: Service ssmtp connected remote server from 127.0.0.1:3701 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Remote FD=1 initialized 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Option TCP_NODELAY set on remote socket 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: Negotiations for smtp (server side) started 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: RFC 2487 not detected 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: Protocol negotiations succeeded 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): before/accept initialization 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 read client hello A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 write server hello A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 write certificate A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 write certificate request A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 flush data 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: CRL: verification passed 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: VERIFY OK: depth=2, /C=US/O=Equifax/OU=Equifax Secure Certificate Authority 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: CRL: verification passed 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: VERIFY OK: depth=1, /C=US/O=Google Inc/CN=Google Internet Authority 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: CRL: verification passed 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: VERIFY OK: depth=0, /C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc/CN=smtp.gmail.com 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 read client certificate A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 read client key exchange A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 read certificate verify A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 read finished A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 write change cipher spec A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 write finished A 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL state (accept): SSLv3 flush data 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 1 items in the session cache 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 0 client connects (SSL_connect()) 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 0 client connects that finished 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 0 client renegotiations requested 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 1 server connects (SSL_accept()) 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 1 server connects that finished 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 0 server renegotiations requested 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 0 session cache hits 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 0 external session cache hits 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 0 session cache misses 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: 0 session cache timeouts 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG6[20897:3082267504]: SSL accepted: new session negotiated 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG6[20897:3082267504]: Negotiated ciphers: RC4-MD5 SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=RC4(128) Mac=MD5 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: SSL socket closed on SSL_read 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Socket write shutdown 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG5[20897:3082267504]: Connection closed: 167 bytes sent to SSL, 37 bytes sent to socket 2011.01.02 16:56:20 LOG7[20897:3082267504]: Service ssmtp finished (0 left)

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• Backing up data stored on Amazon S3

  - by Fiver

  I have an EC2 instance running a web server that stores users' uploaded files to S3. The files are written once and never change, but are retrieved occasionally by the users. We will likely accumulate somewhere around 200-500GB of data per year. We would like to ensure this data is safe, particularly from accidental deletions and would like to be able to restore files that were deleted regardless of the reason. I have read about the versioning feature for S3 buckets, but I cannot seem to find if recovery is possible for files with no modification history. See the AWS docs here on versioning: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ObjectVersioning.html In those examples, they don't show the scenario where data is uploaded, but never modified, and then deleted. Are files deleted in this scenario recoverable? Then, we thought we may just backup the S3 files to Glacier using object lifecycle management: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/object-lifecycle-mgmt.html But, it seems this will not work for us, as the file object is not copied to Glacier but moved to Glacier (more accurately it seems it is an object attribute that is changed, but anyway...). So it seems there is no direct way to backup S3 data, and transferring the data from S3 to local servers may be time-consuming and may incur significant transfer costs over time. Finally, we thought we would create a new bucket every month to serve as a monthly full backup, and copy the original bucket's data to the new one on Day 1. Then using something like duplicity (http://duplicity.nongnu.org/) we would synchronize the backup bucket every night. At the end of the month we would put the backup bucket's contents in Glacier storage, and create a new backup bucket using a new, current copy of the original bucket...and repeat this process. This seems like it would work and minimize the storage / transfer costs, but I'm not sure if duplicity allows bucket-to-bucket transfers directly without bringing data down to the controlling client first. So, I guess there are a couple questions here. First, does S3 versioning allow recovery of files that were never modified? Is there some way to "copy" files from S3 to Glacier that I have missed? Can duplicity or any other tool transfer files between S3 buckets directly to avoid transfer costs? Finally, am I way off the mark in my approach to backing up S3 data? Thanks in advance for any insight you could provide!

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• Publishing an Excel spreadsheet using Microsoft SBS 2008 to a web page that is viewable by mobile ph

  - by Dave Heath

  I am getting well out of my “superuser” depth here and would love some support. At work we have an Excel workbook (*.xls format circa Office 2003) which maintains our “engineers” timesheet. This handles what events we are doing across the year and how many “work units” it is. As far as a workbook goes, it is fairly simple with just a few =SUM(range) cells and some linked across sheets (12 sheets, one for each month) It is stored on a server, in a folder that provides “management” with full access and “engineers” with read-only access. The workbook itself is read-only for “engineers” and full access for “management”. I think these permissions are controlled through Active Directory. The workbook is protected with a password, assumingly to allow “management” to edit it even if they are working at a terminal logged in as an “engineer”. This protection prevents “engineers” from going to certain cells to see formulae and therefore editing them. The workbook has a macro which saves and closes it ten minutes after opening. This is to stop other “management” from being locked out by any one person who has logged in with editing privileges. I hope this is making sense to someone... :S Now then, we have Microsoft Small Business Server 2008. We have a shiny new web-based login for when we are offsite so we can get to Exchange webmail and our internal site (which uses Sharepoint 3.0). “Management” would like to be able to publish this timesheet automatically after changes (they don’t want to have to do anything different to what they are currently doing) so that using an iPhone “engineers” can check on it while out of the office. I am currently having a look at “Excel Services” for Office 2007 on TechNet but I am not sure if I am running down the right garden path at the moment. < EDIT This seems to suggest that I have to have Sharepoint Server 2007, with no mention of Sharepoint 3.0... ... "MOSS builds on WSS by adding both core features as well as end user web parts" - Wikipedia entry for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) this is not good news... "...and using the ASP.NET APIs, web parts can be written to extend the functionality of WSS." Wikipedia entry for Windows Sharepoint Services. Could this bring back what I need? Is this good news? Do I need to start learning ASP.NET? This link here implies that we need MOSS to do what I want and the bosses say we aint' getting it. http://serverfault.com/questions/20198/what-is-some-cool-things-you-can-do-with-sharepoint-2007/22128#22128 Back to the drawing board. < /EDIT Please could someone suggest some “further reading” for me to help point me in the right direction or to put me back on the right track. Many thanks. I will try to keep this up to date with how I get on.

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• Dell PowerEdge R720 - Corrupted RAID

  - by BT643

  Apologies in advance for the lengthy question. We have a Dell PowerEdge R720 server with: 2 x 136GB SAS drives in RAID 1 for the OS (Ubuntu Server 12.04) 6 x 3TB SATA drives in RAID 5 for data A few days ago we were getting errors when trying to access files on the large RAID 5 partition. We rebooted the server and got a message about the raid controller has found a foriegn config. We've had this before, and just needed to use Dell's RAID configuration utility to import foreign config on the RAID. Last time this worked, but this time, it started doing a disk check then we got this: FSCK has returned the following: "/dev/sdb1 inode 364738 has a bad extended attribute block 7 /dev/sdb1 unexpected inconsistency run fsck manually (i.e without -a or -p options) MOUNTALL fsck /ourdatapartition [1019] terminated with status 4 MOUNTALL filesystem has errors /ourdatapartition errors where found while checking the disk drive for /ourdatapartition Press F to fix errors, I to Ignore or M for Manual Recovery" We pressed F to try and fix the errors, but it eventually errored with: Inode 275841084, i_blocks is 167080, should be 0. Fix? yes Inode 275841141 has an invalid extend node (blk 2206761006, lblk 0) Clear? yes Inode 275841141, i_blocks is 227872, should be 0. Fix? yes Inode 275842303 has an invalid extend node (blk 2206760975, lblk 0) Clear? yes .... Error storing directory block information (inode=275906766, block=0, num=2699516178): Memory allocation failed /dev/sdb1: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***** e2fsck: aborted /dev/sdb1: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***** mountall: fsck /ourdatapartition [1286] terminated with status 9 mountall: Unrecoverable fsck error: /ourdatapartition We noticed one of the drive lights was not lit at all, and thought this may have failed and be the problem. We replaced the drive with a spare, and tried "F" to repair it again, but we keep just getting the same error as above. In the RAID configuration utility, all drives show as "online" and "optimal". We do have this data on another replicated server, so we're not worried about "recovering" anything, we just want to get the system back online asap. The server has 64 or 32GB memory, can't remember off the top of my head, but either way, with a 14TB RAID, I think it may still not be enough. Thanks EDIT - I checked the memory usage while fsck was running as suggested and after 2 or 3 minutes, it looked like this, using up nearly all of our servers memory: When it failed after 5 minutes or so with the error in my post, the memory immediately freed up again:

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• Apache certificates for some urls not working

  - by Vegaasen

  We are having a rather strange problem with a Apache-installation. Here is a short summary: Currently I'm setting up Apache with https, and server-certificates. This is fairly easy and works straight out of the box - as expected. This is the configuration for this setup: Listen 443 SSLEngine on SSLCertificateFile "/progs/apache/ssl/example-site.no.pem" SSLCertificateKeyFile "/progs/apache/ssl/example-site.no.key" SSLCACertificateFile "/progs/apache/ssl/ca/example_root.pem" SSLCADNRequestFile "/progs/apache/ssl/ca/example_intermediate.pem" SSLVerifyClient none SSLVerifyDepth 3 SSLOptions +StdEnvVars +ExportCertData RequestHeader set ssl-ClientCert-Subject-CN "%{SSL_CLIENT_S_DN}s" RewriteEngine On ProxyPreserveHost On ProxyRequests On SSLProxyEngine On ... <LocationMatch /secureStuff/$> SSLVerifyClient require Order deny,allow Allow from All </LocationMatch> ... <Proxy balancer://exBalancer> Header add Set-Cookie "EX_ROUTE=EB.%{BALANCER_WORKER_ROUTE}e; path=/" env=BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED BalancerMember http://10.0.0.1:7200 route=ee1 retry=300 flushpackets=off keepalive=on BalancerMember http://10.0.0.2:7200 route=ee2 retry=300 flushpackets=off keepalive=on status=+H ProxySet stickysession=EX_ROUTE scolonpathdelim=Off timeout=10 nofailover=off failonstatus=505 maxattempts=1 lbmethod=bybusyness Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.html [NC] RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://exBalancer/$1 [P,NC] ProxyPassReverse / balancer://exBalancer/ Header edit Set-Cookie "(.*)" "$1;HttpsOnly" ... So - everything works fine and as expected for all of the pages that are not a part of the LocationMatch-directive. When requesting something that matches the LocationMatch-directive, I'm asked for a certificate (hence the SSLVerifyClient required attribute) - and getting all the correct certificates in my browser that is based on the root/intermediate chain. After choosing a certificate and clicking "OK", this is what pops up in the apache logs: [ssl:info] [pid 9530:tid 25] [client :43357] AH01998: Connection closed to child 86 with abortive shutdown ( [Thu Oct 11 09:27:36.221876 2012] [ssl:debug] [pid 9530:tid 25] ssl_engine_io.c(1171): (70014)End of file found: [client 10.235.128.55:45846] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!] And this just spams the logs. What is happening here? I can see this configuration working on my local machine, but not on one of our servers. There is no configration differences between the servers, only minor application-wise-changes. I've tried the following: 1) Removing CA-certificate-checking (works) 2) Adding required CA-certificate for the whole site (works) 3) Adding "SSLVerifyClient optional" does not work 4) ++ Server/Application Information Local: -OpenSSL v.1.0.1x -Apache 2.4.3 -Ubuntu -mpm: event -every configuration should be turned on (failing) server: -OpenSSL 0.9.8e -Apache 2.4.2 -SunOS -mpm: worker -every configuration should be turned on Please let me know if more information is needed, I'll provide it instantly. Brief sum-up: -Running apache 2.4 -Server certificates works just fine -Client certificates for some /Locations does not work, fails with errors PS: Could it be related with the OpenSSL version and the "Renegotiation" stuff related to TLS/SSLv3?

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• Multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC – Introduction

  - by zowens

  I’ve read a few different blogs that talk about multi-tenancy and how to resolve some of the issues surrounding multi-tenancy. What I’ve come to realize is that these implementations overcomplicate the issues and give only a muddy implementation! I’ve seen some really illogical code out there. I have recently been building a multi-tenancy framework for internal use at eagleenvision.net. Through this process, I’ve realized a few different techniques to make building multi-tenant applications actually quite easy. I will be posting a few different entries over the issue and my personal implementation. In this first post, I will discuss what multi-tenancy means and how my implementation will be structured.   So what’s the problem? Here’s the deal. Multi-tenancy is basically a technique of code-reuse of web application code. A multi-tenant application is an application that runs a single instance for multiple clients. Here the “client” is different URL bindings on IIS using ASP.NET MVC. The problem with different instances of the, essentially, same application is that you have to spin up different instances of ASP.NET. As the number of running instances of ASP.NET grows, so does the memory footprint of IIS. Stack Exchange shifted its architecture to multi-tenancy March. As the blog post explains, multi-tenancy saves cost in terms of memory utilization and physical disc storage. If you use the same code base for many applications, multi-tenancy just makes sense. You’ll reduce the amount of work it takes to synchronize the site implementations and you’ll thank your lucky stars later for choosing to use one application for multiple sites. Multi-tenancy allows the freedom of extensibility while relying on some pre-built code.   You’d think this would be simple. I have actually seen a real lack of reference material on the subject in terms of ASP.NET MVC. This is somewhat surprising given the number of users of ASP.NET MVC. However, I will certainly fill the void ;). Implementing a multi-tenant application takes a little thinking. It’s not straight-forward because the possibilities of implementation are endless. I have yet to see a great implementation of a multi-tenant MVC application. The only one that comes close to what I have in mind is Rob Ashton’s implementation (all the entries are listed on this page). There’s some really nasty code in there… something I’d really like to avoid. He has also written a library (MvcEx) that attempts to aid multi-tenant development. This code is even worse, in my honest opinion. Once I start seeing Reflection.Emit, I have to assume the worst :) In all seriousness, if his implementation makes sense to you, use it! It’s a fine implementation that should be given a look. At least look at the code. I will reference MvcEx going forward as a comparison to my implementation. I will explain why my approach differs from MvcEx and how it is better or worse (hopefully better).   Core Goals of my Multi-Tenant Implementation The first, and foremost, goal is to use Inversion of Control containers to my advantage. As you will see throughout this series, I pass around containers quite frequently and rely on their use heavily. I will be using StructureMap in my implementation. However, you could probably use your favorite IoC tool instead. <RANT> However, please don’t be stupid and abstract your IoC tool. Each IoC is powerful and by abstracting the capabilities, you’re doing yourself a real disservice. Who in the world swaps out IoC tools…? No one!</RANT> (It had to be said.) I will outline some of the goodness of StructureMap as we go along. This is really an invaluable tool in my tool belt and simple to use in my multi-tenant implementation. The second core goal is to represent a tenant as easily as possible. Just as a dependency container will be a first-class citizen, so will a tenant. This allows us to easily extend and use tenants. This will also allow different ways of “plugging in” tenants into your application. In my implementation, there will be a single dependency container for a single tenant. This will enable isolation of the dependencies of the tenant. The third goal is to use composition as a means to delegate “core” functions out to the tenant. More on this later.   Features In MvcExt, “Modules” are a code element of the infrastructure. I have simplified this concept and have named this “Features”. A feature is a simple element of an application. Controllers can be specified to have a feature and actions can have “sub features”. Each tenant can select features it needs and the other features will be hidden to the tenant’s users. My implementation doesn’t require something to be a feature. A controller can be common to all tenants. For example, (as you will see) I have a “Content” controller that will return the CSS, Javascript and Images for a tenant. This is common logic to all tenants and shouldn’t be hidden or considered a “feature”; Content is a core component.   Up next My next post will be all about the code. I will reveal some of the foundation to the way I do multi-tenancy. I will have posts dedicated to Foundation, Controllers, Views, Caching, Content and how to setup the tenants. Each post will be in-depth about the issues and implementation details, while adhering to my core goals outlined in this post. As always, comment with questions of DM me on twitter or send me an email.

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• Week in Geek: New Security Flaw Confirmed for Internet Explorer Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to use a PC to stay entertained while traveling for the holidays, create quality photo prints with free software, share links between any browser and any smartphone, create perfect Christmas photos using How-To Geek’s 10 best how-to photo guides, and had fun decorating Firefox with a collection of Holiday 2010 Personas themes. Photo by Repoort. Random Geek Links Photo by Asian Angel. Critical 0-Day Flaw Affects All Internet Explorer Versions, Microsoft Warns Microsoft has confirmed a zero-day vulnerability affecting all supported versions of Internet Explorer, including IE8, IE7 and IE6. Note: Article contains link to Microsoft Security Advisory detailing two work-arounds until a security update is released. Hackers targeting human rights, indie media groups Hackers are increasingly hitting the Web sites of human rights and independent media groups in an attempt to silence them, says a new study released this week by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. OpenBSD: audits give no indication of back doors So far, the analyses of OpenBSD’s crypto and IPSec code have not provided any indication that the system contains back doors for listening to encrypted VPN connections. But the developers have already found two bugs during their current audits. Sophos: Beware Facebook’s new facial-recognition feature Facebook’s new facial recognition software might result in undesirable photos of users being circulated online, warned a security expert, who urged users to keep abreast with the social network’s privacy settings to prevent the abovementioned scenario from becoming a reality. Microsoft withdraws flawed Outlook update Microsoft has withdrawn update KB2412171 for Outlook 2007, released last Patch Tuesday, after a number of user complaints. Skype: Millions still without service Skype was still working to right itself going into the holiday weekend from a major outage that began this past Wednesday. Mozilla improves sync setup and WebGL in Firefox 4 beta 8 Firefox 4.0 beta 8 brings better support for WebGL and introduces an improved setup process for Firefox Sync that simplifies the steps for configuring the synchronization service across multiple devices. Chrome OS the litmus test for cloud The success or failure of Google’s browser-oriented Chrome OS will be the litmus test to decide if the cloud is capable of addressing user needs for content and services, according to a new Ovum report released Monday. FCC Net neutrality rules reach mobile apps The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally released its long-expected regulations on Thursday and the related explanations total a whopping 194 pages. One new item that was not previously disclosed: mobile wireless providers can’t block “applications that compete with the provider’s” own voice or video telephony services. KDE and the Document Foundation join Open Invention Network The KDE e.V. and the Document Foundation (TDF) have both joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) as licensees, expanding the organization’s roster of supporters. Report: SEC looks into Hurd’s ousting from HP The scandal surrounding Mark Hurd’s departure from the world’s largest technology company in August has officially drawn attention from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Report: Google requests delay of new Google TVs Google TV is apparently encountering a bit of static that has resulted in a programming change. Geek Video of the Week This week we have a double dose of geeky video goodness for you with the original Mac vs PC video and the trailer for the sequel. Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC Photo courtesy of Peacer. Mac vs PC 2 Trailer Random TinyHacker Links Awesome Tools To Extract Audio From Video Here’s a list of really useful, and free tools to rip audio from videos. Getting Your iPhone Out of Recovery Mode Is your iPhone stuck in recovery mode? This tutorial will help you get it out of that state. Google Shared Spaces Quickly create a shared space and collaborate with friends online. McAfee Internet Security 2011 – Upgrade not worthy of a version change McAfee has released their 2011 version of security products. And as this review details, the upgrades are minimal when compared to their 2010 products. For more information, check out the review. 200 Countries Plotted Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before – using augmented reality animation. Super User Questions Enjoy looking through this week’s batch of popular questions and answers from Super User. How to restore windows 7 to a known working state every time it boots? Is there an easy way to mass-transfer all files between two computers? Coffee spilled inside computer, damaged hard drive Computer does not boot after ram upgrade Keyboard not detected when trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Have you had a super busy week while preparing for the holiday weekend? Then here is your chance to get caught up on your reading with our five hottest articles for the week. Ask How-To Geek: Rescuing an Infected PC, Installing Bloat-free iTunes, and Taming a Crazy Trackpad How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC Eight Geektacular Christmas Projects for Your Day Off VirtualBox 4.0 Rocks Extensions and a Simplified GUI Ask the Readers: How Many Monitors Do You Use with Your Computer? One Year Ago on How-To Geek Here are more great articles from one year ago for you to read and enjoy during the holiday break. Enjoy Distraction-Free Writing with WriteMonkey Shutter is a State of Art Screenshot Tool for Ubuntu Get Hex & RGB Color Codes the Easy Way Find User Scripts for Your Favorite Websites the Easy Way Access Your Unsorted Bookmarks the Easy Way (Firefox) The Geek Note That “wraps” things up for this week and we hope that everyone enjoys the rest of their holiday break! Found a great tip during the break? Then be sure to send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by ArSiSa7. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? Simon’s Cat Explores the Christmas Tree! [Video] The Outdoor Lights Scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [Video] The Famous Home Alone Pizza Delivery Scene [Classic Video] Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Theme for Windows 7 Cardinal and Rabbit Sharing a Tree on a Cold Winter Morning Wallpaper An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video]

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• Week in Geek: 4chan Falls Victim to DDoS Attack Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to tweak the low battery action on a Windows 7 laptop, access an eBook collection anywhere in the world, “extend iPad battery life, batch resize photos, & sync massive music collections”, went on a reign of destruction with Snow Crusher, and had fun decorating our desktops with abstract icon collections. Photo by pasukaru76. Random Geek Links We have included extra news article goodness to help you catch up on any developments that you may have missed during the holiday break this past week. Note: The three 27C3 articles listed here represent three different presentations at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress hacker conference. 4chan victim of DDoS as FBI investigates role in PayPal attack Users of 4chan may have gotten a taste of their own medicine after the site was knocked offline by a DDoS attack from an unknown origin early Thursday morning. Report: FBI seizes server in probe of WikiLeaks attacks The FBI has seized a server in Texas as part of its hunt for the groups behind the pro-WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks launched in December against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others. Mozilla exposes older user-account database Mozilla has disabled 44,000 older user accounts for its Firefox add-ons site after a security researcher found part of a database of the account information on a publicly available server. Data breach affects 4.9 million Honda customers Japanese automaker Honda has put some 2.2 million customers in the United States on a security breach alert after a database containing information on the owners and their cars was hacked. Chinese Trojan discovered in Android games An Android-based Trojan called “Geinimi” has been discovered in the wild and the Trojan is capable of sending personal information to remote servers and exhibits botnet-like behavior. 27C3 presentation claims many mobiles vulnerable to SMS attacks According to security experts, an ‘SMS of death’ threatens to disable many current Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Micromax and LG mobiles. 27C3: GSM cell phones even easier to tap Security researchers have demonstrated how open source software on a number of revamped, entry-level cell phones can decrypt and record mobile phone calls in the GSM network. 27C3: danger lurks in PDF documents Security researcher Julia Wolf has pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe’s PDF standard. Critical update for WordPress A critical update has been made available for WordPress in the form of version 3.0.4. The update fixes a security bug in WordPress’s KSES library. McAfee Labs Predicts Geolocation, Mobile Devices and Apple Will Top the List of Targets for Emerging Threats in 2011 The list comprises 2010’s most buzzed about platforms and services, including Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, which are all expected to become major targets for cybercriminals. McAfee Labs also predicts that politically motivated attacks will be on the rise. Windows Phone 7 piracy materializes with FreeMarketplace A proof-of-concept application, FreeMarketplace, that allows any Windows Phone 7 application to be downloaded and installed free of charge has been developed. Empty email accounts, and some bad buzz for Hotmail In the past few days, a number of Hotmail users have been complaining about a rather disconcerting issue: their Hotmail accounts, some up to 10 years old, appear completely empty.  No emails, no folders, nothing, just what appears to be a new account. Reports: Nintendo warns of 3DS risk for kids Nintendo has reportedly issued a warning that the 3DS, its eagerly awaited glasses-free 3D portable gaming device, should not be used by children under 6 when the gadget is in 3D-viewing mode. Google eyes ‘cloaking’ as next antispam target Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of “cloaking,” or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one’s site while presenting another look to users. Facebook, Twitter stock trading drawing SEC eye? The high degree of investor interest in shares of hot Silicon Valley companies that aren’t yet publicly traded–like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zynga–may be leading to scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Random TinyHacker Links Photo by jcraveiro. Exciting Software Set for Release in 2011 A few bloggers from great websites such as How-To Geek, Guiding Tech and 7 Tutorials took the time to sit down and talk about their software wishes for 2011. Take the time to read it and share… Wikileaks Infopr0n An infographic detailing the quest to plug WikiLeaks. The New York Times Guide to Mobile Apps A growing collection of all mobile app coverage by the New York Times as well as lists of favorite apps from Times writers. 7,000,000,000 (Video) A fascinating look at the world’s population via National Geographic Magazine. Super User Questions Check out the great answers to these hot questions from Super User. How to use a Personal computer as a Linux web server for development purposes? How to link processing power of old computers together? Free virtualization tool for testing suspicious files? Why do some actions not work with Remote Desktop? What is the simplest way to send a large batch of pictures to a distant friend or colleague? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Had a busy week and need to get caught up on your HTG reading? Then sit back and relax while enjoying these hot posts full of how-to roundup goodness. The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 How to Search Just the Site You’re Viewing Using Google Search Ask the Readers: Backing Your Files Up – Local Storage versus the Cloud One Year Ago on How-To Geek Need more how-to geekiness for your weekend? Then look through this great batch of articles from one year ago that focus on dual-booting and O.S. installation goodness. Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Vista Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with XP How To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Ubuntu Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi Installer The Geek Note We hope that you and your families have had a terrific holiday break as everyone prepares to return to work and school this week. Remember to keep those great tips coming in to us at [email protected]! Photo by pjbeardsley. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

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• Dec 5th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Silverlight, Visual Studio

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series for another on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET ASP.NET Code Samples Collection: J.D. Meier has a great post that provides a detailed round-up of ASP.NET code samples and tutorials from a wide variety of sources.  Lots of useful pointers. Slash your ASP.NET compile/load time without any hard work: Nice article that details a bunch of optimizations you can make to speed up ASP.NET project load and compile times. You might also want to read my previous blog post on this topic here. 10 Essential Tools for Building ASP.NET Websites: Great article by Stephen Walther on 10 great (and free) tools that enable you to more easily build great ASP.NET Websites.  Highly recommended reading. Optimize Images using the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework: A nice article by 4GuysFromRolla that discusses how to use the open-source ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework (one of the tools recommended by Stephen in the previous article).  You can use this to significantly improve the load-time of your pages on the client. Formatting Dates, Times and Numbers in ASP.NET: Scott Mitchell has a great article that discusses formatting dates, times and numbers in ASP.NET.  A very useful link to bookmark.  Also check out James Michael’s DateTime is Packed with Goodies blog post for other DateTime tips. Examining ASP.NET’s Membership, Roles and Profile APIs (Part 18): Everything you could possibly want to known about ASP.NET’s built-in Membership, Roles and Profile APIs must surely be in this tutorial series. Part 18 covers how to store additional user info with Membership. ASP.NET with jQuery An Introduction to jQuery Templates: Stephen Walther has written an outstanding introduction and tutorial on the new jQuery Template plugin that the ASP.NET team has contributed to the jQuery project. Composition with jQuery Templates and jQuery Templates, Composite Rendering, and Remote Loading: Dave Ward has written two nice posts that talk about composition scenarios with jQuery Templates and some cool scenarios you can enable with them. Using jQuery and ASP.NET to Build a News Ticker: Scott Mitchell has a nice tutorial that demonstrates how to build a dynamically updated “news ticker” style UI with ASP.NET and jQuery. Checking All Checkboxes in a GridView using jQuery: Scott Mitchell has a nice post that covers how to use jQuery to enable a checkbox within a GridView’s header to automatically check/uncheck all checkboxes contained within rows of it. Using jQuery to POST Form Data to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service: Rick Strahl has a nice post that discusses how to capture form variables and post them to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service (.asmx). ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Diagnostics Using NuGet: Phil Haack has a nice post that demonstrates how to easily install a diagnostics page (using NuGet) that can help identify and diagnose common configuration issues within your apps. ASP.NET MVC 3 JsonValueProviderFactory: James Hughes has a nice post that discusses how to take advantage of the new JsonValueProviderFactory support built into ASP.NET MVC 3.  This makes it easy to post JSON payloads to MVC action methods. Practical jQuery Mobile with ASP.NET MVC: James Hughes has another nice post that discusses how to use the new jQuery Mobile library with ASP.NET MVC to build great mobile web applications. Credit Card Validator for ASP.NET MVC 3: Benjii Me has a nice post that demonstrates how to build a [CreditCard] validator attribute that can be used to easily validate credit card numbers are in the correct format with ASP.NET MVC. Silverlight Silverlight FireStarter Keynote and Sessions: A great blog post from John Papa that contains pointers and descriptions of all the great Silverlight content we published last week at the Silverlight FireStarter.  You can watch all of the talks online.  More details on my keynote and Silverlight 5 announcements can be found here. 31 Days of Windows Phone 7: 31 great tutorials on how to build Windows Phone 7 applications (using Silverlight).  Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit Update: David Anson has a nice post that discusses some of the additional controls provided with the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. Visual Studio JavaScript Editor Extensions: A nice (and free) Visual Studio plugin built by the web tools team that significantly improves the JavaScript intellisense support within Visual Studio. HTML5 Intellisense for Visual Studio: Gil has a blog post that discusses a new extension my team has posted to the Visual Studio Extension Gallery that adds HTML5 schema support to Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Team Build + Web Deployment + Web Deploy + VS 2010 = Goodness: Visual blogs about how to enable a continuous deployment system with VS 2010, TFS 2010 and the Microsoft Web Deploy framework.  Visual Studio 2010 Emacs Emulation Extension and VIM Emulation Extension: Check out these two extensions if you are fond of Emacs and VIM key bindings and want to enable them within Visual Studio 2010. Hope this helps, Scott

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• C#: System.Lazy&lt;T&gt; and the Singleton Design Pattern

  - by James Michael Hare

  So we've all coded a Singleton at one time or another.  It's a really simple pattern and can be a slightly more elegant alternative to global variables.  Make no mistake, Singletons can be abused and are often over-used -- but occasionally you find a Singleton is the most elegant solution. For those of you not familiar with a Singleton, the basic Design Pattern is that a Singleton class is one where there is only ever one instance of the class created.  This means that constructors must be private to avoid users creating their own instances, and a static property (or method in languages without properties) is defined that returns a single static instance. 1: public class Singleton 2: { 3: // the single instance is defined in a static field 4: private static readonly Singleton _instance = new Singleton(); 5:  6: // constructor private so users can't instantiate on their own 7: private Singleton() 8: { 9: } 10:  11: // read-only property that returns the static field 12: public static Singleton Instance 13: { 14: get 15: { 16: return _instance; 17: } 18: } 19: } This is the most basic singleton, notice the key features: Static readonly field that contains the one and only instance. Constructor is private so it can only be called by the class itself. Static property that returns the single instance. Looks like it satisfies, right?  There's just one (potential) problem.  C# gives you no guarantee of when the static field _instance will be created.  This is because the C# standard simply states that classes (which are marked in the IL as BeforeFieldInit) can have their static fields initialized any time before the field is accessed.  This means that they may be initialized on first use, they may be initialized at some other time before, you can't be sure when. So what if you want to guarantee your instance is truly lazy.  That is, that it is only created on first call to Instance?  Well, there's a few ways to do this.  First we'll show the old ways, and then talk about how .Net 4.0's new System.Lazy<T> type can help make the lazy-Singleton cleaner. Obviously, we could take on the lazy construction ourselves, but being that our Singleton may be accessed by many different threads, we'd need to lock it down. 1: public class LazySingleton1 2: { 3: // lock for thread-safety laziness 4: private static readonly object _mutex = new object(); 5:  6: // static field to hold single instance 7: private static LazySingleton1 _instance = null; 8:  9: // property that does some locking and then creates on first call 10: public static LazySingleton1 Instance 11: { 12: get 13: { 14: if (_instance == null) 15: { 16: lock (_mutex) 17: { 18: if (_instance == null) 19: { 20: _instance = new LazySingleton1(); 21: } 22: } 23: } 24:  25: return _instance; 26: } 27: } 28:  29: private LazySingleton1() 30: { 31: } 32: } This is a standard double-check algorithm so that you don't lock if the instance has already been created.  However, because it's possible two threads can go through the first if at the same time the first time back in, you need to check again after the lock is acquired to avoid creating two instances. Pretty straightforward, but ugly as all heck.  Well, you could also take advantage of the C# standard's BeforeFieldInit and define your class with a static constructor.  It need not have a body, just the presence of the static constructor will remove the BeforeFieldInit attribute on the class and guarantee that no fields are initialized until the first static field, property, or method is called.   1: public class LazySingleton2 2: { 3: // because of the static constructor, this won't get created until first use 4: private static readonly LazySingleton2 _instance = new LazySingleton2(); 5:  6: // Returns the singleton instance using lazy-instantiation 7: public static LazySingleton2 Instance 8: { 9: get { return _instance; } 10: } 11:  12: // private to prevent direct instantiation 13: private LazySingleton2() 14: { 15: } 16:  17: // removes BeforeFieldInit on class so static fields not 18: // initialized before they are used 19: static LazySingleton2() 20: { 21: } 22: } Now, while this works perfectly, I hate it.  Why?  Because it's relying on a non-obvious trick of the IL to guarantee laziness.  Just looking at this code, you'd have no idea that it's doing what it's doing.  Worse yet, you may decide that the empty static constructor serves no purpose and delete it (which removes your lazy guarantee).  Worse-worse yet, they may alter the rules around BeforeFieldInit in the future which could change this. So, what do I propose instead?  .Net 4.0 adds the System.Lazy type which guarantees thread-safe lazy-construction.  Using System.Lazy<T>, we get: 1: public class LazySingleton3 2: { 3: // static holder for instance, need to use lambda to construct since constructor private 4: private static readonly Lazy<LazySingleton3> _instance 5: = new Lazy<LazySingleton3>(() => new LazySingleton3()); 6:  7: // private to prevent direct instantiation. 8: private LazySingleton3() 9: { 10: } 11:  12: // accessor for instance 13: public static LazySingleton3 Instance 14: { 15: get 16: { 17: return _instance.Value; 18: } 19: } 20: } Note, you need your lambda to call the private constructor as Lazy's default constructor can only call public constructors of the type passed in (which we can't have by definition of a Singleton).  But, because the lambda is defined inside our type, it has access to the private members so it's perfect. Note how the Lazy<T> makes it obvious what you're doing (lazy construction), instead of relying on an IL generation side-effect.  This way, it's more maintainable.  Lazy<T> has many other uses as well, obviously, but I really love how elegant and readable it makes the lazy Singleton.

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• Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3

  - by rajbk

  We continue building our report in this three part series. Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1 Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2 Adding the ReportViewer control and filter drop downs. Open the source code for index.aspx and add a ScriptManager control. This control is required for the ReportViewer control. Add a DropDownList for the categories and suppliers. Add the ReportViewer control. The markup after these steps is shown below. <div> <asp:ScriptManager ID="smScriptManager" runat="server"> </asp:ScriptManager> <div id="searchFilter"> Filter by: Category : <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlCategories" runat="server" /> and Supplier : <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlSuppliers" runat="server" /> </div> <rsweb:ReportViewer ID="rvProducts" runat="server"> </rsweb:ReportViewer> </div> The design view for index.aspx is shown below. The dropdowns will display the categories and suppliers in the database. Changing the selection in the drop downs will cause the report to be filtered by the selections in the dropdowns. You will see how to do this in the next steps.   Attaching the RDLC to the ReportViewer control by clicking on the top right of the control, going to Report Viewer tasks and selecting Products.rdlc.   Resize the ReportViewer control by dragging at the bottom right corner. I set mine to 800px x 500px. You can also set this value in source view. Defining the data sources. We will now define the Data Source used to populate the report. Go back to the “ReportViewer Tasks” and select “Choose Data Sources” Select a “New data source..” Select “Object” and name your Data Source ID “odsProducts”   In the next screen, choose “ProductRepository” as your business object. Choose “GetProductsProjected” in the next screen.   The method requires a SupplierID and CategoryID. We will set these so that our data source gets the values from the drop down lists we defined earlier. Set the parameter source to be of type “Control” and set the ControlIDs to be ddlSuppliers and ddlCategories respectively. Your screen will look like this: We are now going to define the data source for our drop downs. Select the ddlCategory drop down and pick “Choose Data Source”. Pick “Object” and give it an id “odsCategories”   In the next screen, choose “ProductRepository” Select the GetCategories() method in the next screen.   Select “CategoryName” and “CategoryID” in the next screen. We are done defining the data source for the Category drop down. Perform the same steps for the Suppliers drop down.   Select each dropdown and set the AppendDataBoundItems to true and AutoPostback to true.     The AppendDataBoundItems is needed because we are going to insert an “All“ list item with a value of empty. Go to each drop down and add this list item markup as shown below> Finally, double click on each drop down in the designer and add the following code in the code behind. This along with the “Autopostback= true” attribute refreshes the report anytime a drop down is changed. protected void ddlCategories_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { rvProducts.LocalReport.Refresh(); }   protected void ddlSuppliers_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { rvProducts.LocalReport.Refresh(); } Compile your report and run the page. You should see the report rendered. Note that the tool bar in the ReportViewer control gives you a couple of options including the ability to export the data to Excel, PDF or word.   Conclusion Through this three part series, we did the following: Created a data layer for use by our RDLC. Created an RDLC using the report wizard and define a dataset for the report. Used the report design surface to design our report including adding a chart. Used the ReportViewer control to attach the RDLC. Connected our ReportWiewer to a data source and take parameter values from the drop downlists. Used AutoPostBack to refresh the reports when the dropdown selection was changed. RDLCs allow you to create interactive reports including drill downs and grouping. For even more advanced reports you can use Microsoft® SQL Server™ Reporting Services with RDLs. With RDLs, the report is rendered on the report server instead of the web server. Another nice thing about RDLs is that you can define a parameter list for the report and it gets rendered automatically for you. RDLCs and RDLs both have their advantages and its best to compare them and choose the right one for your requirements. Download VS2010 RTM Sample project NorthwindReports.zip   Alfred Borden: Are you watching closely?

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• Enable Automatic Code First Migrations On SQL Database in Azure Web Sites

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Now that Azure supports .NET Framework 4.5, you can use all the latest and greatest available features. A common scenario is to be able to use Entity Framework Code First Migrations with a SQL Database in Azure. Prior to Code First Migrations, Entity Framework provided database initializers. While convenient for demos and prototypes, database initializers weren’t useful for much beyond that because, if you delete and re-create your entire database when the schema changes, you lose all of your operational data. This is the void that Migrations are meant to fill. For example, if you add a column to your model, Migrations will alter the database to add the column rather than blowing away the entire database and re-creating it from scratch. Azure is becoming increasingly easier to use – especially with features like Azure Web Sites. Being able to use Entity Framework Migrations in Azure makes deployment easier than ever. In this blog post, I’ll walk through enabling Automatic Code First Migrations on Azure. I’ll use the Simple Membership provider for my example. First, we’ll create a new Azure Web site called “migrationstest” including creating a new SQL Database along with it:   Next we’ll go to the web site and download the publish profile:   In the meantime, we’ve created a new MVC 4 website in Visual Studio 2012 using the “Internet Application” template. This template is automatically configured to use the Simple Membership provider. We’ll do our initial Publish to Azure by right-clicking our project and selecting “Publish…”. From the “Publish Web” dialog, we’ll import the publish profile that we downloaded in the previous step:   Once the site is published, we’ll just click the “Register” link from the default site. Since the AccountController is decorated with the [InitializeSimpleMembership] attribute, the initializer will be called and the initial database is created.   We can verify this by connecting to our SQL Database on Azure with SQL Management Studio (after making sure that our local IP address is added to the list of Allowed IP Addresses in Azure): One interesting note is that these tables got created with the default Entity Framework initializer – which is to create the database if it doesn’t already exist. However, our database did already exist! This is because there is a new feature of Entity Framework 5 where Code First will add tables to an existing database as long as the target database doesn’t contain any of the tables from the model. At this point, it’s time to enable Migrations. We’ll open the Package Manger Console and execute the command: PM> Enable-Migrations -EnableAutomaticMigrations This will enable automatic migrations for our project. Because we used the "-EnableAutomaticMigrations” switch, it will create our Configuration class with a constructor that sets the AutomaticMigrationsEnabled property set to true: 1: public Configuration() 2: { 3: AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = true; 4: } We’ll now add our initial migration: PM> Add-Migration Initial This will create a migration class call “Initial” that contains the entire model. But we need to remove all of this code because our database already exists so we are just left with empty Up() and Down() methods. 1: public partial class Initial : DbMigration 2: { 3: public override void Up() 4: { 5: } 6: 7: public override void Down() 8: { 9: } 10: } If we don’t remove this code, we’ll get an exception the first time we attempt to run migrations that tells us: “There is already an object named 'UserProfile' in the database”. This blog post by Julie Lerman fully describes this scenario (i.e., enabling migrations on an existing database). Our next step is to add the Entity Framework initializer that will automatically use Migrations to update the database to the latest version. We will add these 2 lines of code to the Application_Start of the Global.asax: 1: Database.SetInitializer(new MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion<UsersContext, Configuration>()); 2: new UsersContext().Database.Initialize(false); Note the Initialize() call will force the initializer to run if it has not been run before. At this point, we can publish again to make sure everything is still working as we are expecting. This time we’re going to specify in our publish profile that Code First Migrations should be executed:   Once we have re-published we can once again navigate to the Register page. At this point the database has not been changed but Migrations is now enabled on our SQL Database in Azure. We can now customize our model. Let’s add 2 new properties to the UserProfile class – Email and DateOfBirth: 1: [Table("UserProfile")] 2: public class UserProfile 3: { 4: [Key] 5: [DatabaseGeneratedAttribute(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] 6: public int UserId { get; set; } 7: public string UserName { get; set; } 8: public string Email { get; set; } 9: public DateTime DateOfBirth { get; set; } 10: } At this point all we need to do is simply re-publish. We’ll once again navigate to the Registration page and, because we had Automatic Migrations enabled, the database has been altered (*not* recreated) to add our 2 new columns. We can verify this by once again looking at SQL Management Studio:   Automatic Migrations provide a quick and easy way to keep your database in sync with your model without the worry of having to re-create your entire database and lose data. With Azure Web Sites you can set up automatic deployment with Git or TFS and automate the entire process to make it dead simple.

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• How to Modify Data Security in Fusion Applications

  - by Elie Wazen

  The reference implementation in Fusion Applications is designed with built-in data security on business objects that implement the most common business practices.  For example, the “Sales Representative” job has the following two data security rules implemented on an “Opportunity” to restrict the list of Opportunities that are visible to an Sales Representative: Can view all the Opportunities where they are a member of the Opportunity Team Can view all the Opportunities where they are a resource of a territory in the Opportunity territory team While the above conditions may represent the most common access requirements of an Opportunity, some customers may have additional access constraints. This blog post explains: How to discover the data security implemented in Fusion Applications. How to customize data security Illustrative example. a.) How to discover seeded data security definitions The Security Reference Manuals explain the Function and Data Security implemented on each job role.  Security Reference Manuals are available on Oracle Enterprise Repository for Oracle Fusion Applications. The following is a snap shot of the security documented for the “Sales Representative” Job. The two data security policies define the list of Opportunities a Sales Representative can view. Here is a sample of data security policies on an Opportunity. Business Object Policy Description Policy Store Implementation Opportunity A Sales Representative can view opportunity where they are a territory resource in the opportunity territory team Role: Opportunity Territory Resource Duty Privilege: View Opportunity (Data) Resource: Opportunity A Sales Representative can view opportunity where they are an opportunity sales team member with view, edit, or full access Role: Opportunity Sales Representative Duty Privilege: View Opportunity (Data) Resource: Opportunity Description of Columns Column Name Description Policy Description Explains the data filters that are implemented as a SQL Where Clause in a Data Security Grant Policy Store Implementation Provides the implementation details of the Data Security Grant for this policy. In this example the Opportunities listed for a “Sales Representative” job role are derived from a combination of two grants defined on two separate duty roles at are inherited by the Sales Representative job role. b.) How to customize data security Requirement 1: Opportunities should be viewed only by members of the opportunity team and not by all the members of all the territories on the opportunity. Solution: Remove the role “Opportunity Territory Resource Duty” from the hierarchy of the “Sales Representative” job role. Best Practice: Do not modify the seeded role hierarchy. Create a custom “Sales Representative” job role and build the role hierarchy with the seeded duty roles. Requirement 2: Opportunities must be more restrictive based on a custom attribute that identifies if a Opportunity is confidential or not. Confidential Opportunities must be visible only the owner of the Opportunity. Solution: Modify the (2) data security policy in the above example as follows: A Sales Representative can view opportunity where they are a territory resource in the opportunity territory team and the opportunity is not confidential. Implementation of this policy is more invasive. The seeded SQL where clause of the data security grant on “Opportunity Territory Resource Duty” has to be modified and the condition that checks for the confidential flag must be added. Best Practice: Do not modify the seeded grant. Create a new grant with the modified condition. End Date the seeded grant. c.) Illustrative Example (Implementing Requirement 2) A data security policy contains the following components: Role Object Instance Set Action Of the above four components, the Role and Instance Set are the only components that are customizable. Object and Actions for that object are seed data and cannot be modified. To customize a seeded policy, “A Sales Representative can view opportunity where they are a territory resource in the opportunity territory team”, Find the seeded policy Identify the Role, Object, Instance Set and Action components of the policy Create a new custom instance set based on the seeded instance set. End Date the seeded policies Create a new data security policy with custom instance set c-1: Find the seeded policy Step 1: 1. Find the Role 2. Open 3. Find Policies Step 2: Click on the Data Security Tab Sort by “Resource Name” Find all the policies with the “Condition” as “where they are a territory resource in the opportunity territory team” In this example, we can see there are 5 policies for “Opportunity Territory Resource Duty” on Opportunity object. Step 3: Now that we know the policy details, we need to create new instance set with the custom condition. All instance sets are linked to the object. Find the object using global search option. Open it and click on “condition” tab Sort by Display name Find the Instance set Edit the instance set and copy the “SQL Predicate” to a notepad. Create a new instance set with the modified SQL Predicate from above by clicking on the icon as shown below. Step 4: End date the seeded data security policies on the duty role and create new policies with your custom instance set. Repeat the navigation in step Edit each of the 5 policies and end date them 3. Create new custom policies with the same information as the seeded policies in the “General Information”, “Roles” and “Action” tabs. 4. In the “Rules” tab, please pick the new instance set that was created in Step 3.

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• Oracle Open World 2012: SQL Developer Recap

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Last week was the ‘big show’ in San Francisco. I was very happy to meet many of you in person. And many of you had questions – lots of questions! We had full or overflowing rooms for our sessions and hands-on-labs. The SQL Developer ‘booths’ were also slammed several times. So exciting to see so many of YOU excited about SQL Developer. It’s very cool to hear the stories of our tools saving you and your organizations so much time (and money!) Instead of doing a Day 0 – Day 9 recap, I thought I’d share with you the questions that I heard more than once. And just for giggles, I’ll throw in some answers as well So in no particular order… What’s the difference between Oracle SQL Developer & Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler? Mathematically speaking – two words. But as far as the actual modeling features go, there’s no difference between the two applications. The same ‘code’ or features as it pertains to data modeling and design are in both tools. However, in SQL Developer you have all of the OTHER features fighting for real estate in the UI. So I have a general rule of thumb – if you spend MOST of your time in the database, use SQL Developer. And if you spend most of your time in the data model, run the separate and dedicated program, Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Here’s a couple of screenshots to drive home the UI point: Oracle SQL Developer Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler running INSIDE of SQL Developer. Notice how the Modeler menu items fold under the file menu? Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Easier to navigate and manipulate your models with the stand alone modeler. Just no worksheet to run your ad-hoc queries, etc. Don’t forget you can disable the Data Modeler inside of SQL Developer via the Extensions preference page. How can I model my table partitions? Partitioning is defined via the Physical model. So after you have finished your relational model, you need to generate a physical model. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Physical Model and Partitioning Open the properties for your physical model table. Enable the ‘partitioned’ property. Once you do so, the ‘Partitioning’ page will activate. Lots and lots of partitioning support and options here But what about Interval Partitioning? An extension of range partitioning in 11gR2, we don’t currently support this partitioning scheme in SQL Developer. But we’re working on it! Can SQL Developer ignore column order when comparing models? Yes! After you start a model compare, one of your options is to disregard the order of an attribute or column definition. Tell SQL Developer you don’t care when your column shows up, just as long as it DOES show up. Wow, you got a lot of questions around modeling! Is that normal? Yes! While we appreciate that many folks inherit their applications and associated designs, new applications are being ‘born’ every day. Since both of our tools are free for anyone to design their new Oracle applications with, we attract a fair amount of attention I want to do a Hands On Lab. How do I get your software and instructional guides? Go here. Download VirtualBox. Then download the VB image. Import the appliance. Start it. Connect oracle/oracle on the OEL VM. Click on ‘Start Here’ in the desktop. Follow the instructions. If you need help, ask away! You went too fast in your Tips & Tricks session. Do you have cliff notes? Yes! And you’re SO close to finding them! Just go to my SQL Developer resources page. All of my tips are documented on this blog somewhere. I’ve indexed the most popular ones on the resource page. You can use the Search dialog on the right to find the rest. Or just send me a comment or question, and I’ll do my best to answer them as they come in.

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• TFS, G.I. Joe and Under-doing

  If I were to rank the most consistently irritating parts of my work day, using TFS would come in first by a wide margin. Even repeated network outages this week seem like a pleasant reprieve from this monolithic beast. This is not a reflexive anti-Microsoft feeling, that attitude just wouldnt work for a consultant who does .NET development. It is also not an utter dismissal of TFS as worthless; Ive seen people use it effectively on several projects. So why? Ill start with a laundry list of shortcomings. An out of the box UI for work items that is insultingly bad, a source control system that is confoundingly fragile when handling merges, folder renames and long file names, the arcane XML wizardry necessary to customize a template and a build system that adds an extra layer of oddness on top of msbuild. Im sure my legion of readers will soon point out to me how I can work around all these issues, how this is fixed in TFS 2010 or with this add-in, and how once you have everything set up, youre fine. And theyd be right, any one of these problems could be worked around. If not dirty laundry, what else? I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that TFS is so irritating to me because it represents a vision of software development that I find unappealing. To expand upon this, lets start with some wisdom from those great PSAs at the end of the G.I. Joe cartoons of the 80s: Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. In software development, Id go further and say knowing is more than half the battle. Understanding the dimensions of the problem you are trying to solve, the needs of the users, the value that your software can provide are more than half the battle. Implementation of this understanding is not easy, but it is not even possible without this knowledge. Assuming we have a fixed amount of time and mental energy for any project, why does this spell trouble for TFS? If you think about what TFS is doing, its offering you a huge array of options to track the day to day implementation of your project. From tasks, to code churn, to test coverage. All valuable metrics, but only in exchange for valuable time to get it all working. In addition, when you have a shiny toy like TFS, the temptation is to feel obligated to use it. So the push from TFS is to encourage a project manager and team to focus on process and metrics around process. You can get great visibility, and graphs to show your project stakeholders, but none of that is important if you are not implementing the right product. Not just unimportant, these activities can be harmful as they drain your time and sap your creativity away from the rest of the project. To be more concrete, lets suppose your organization has invested the time to create a template for your projects and trained people in how to use it, so there is no longer a big investment of time for each project to get up and running. First, Id challenge if that template could be specific enough to be full featured and still applicable for any project. Second, the very existence of this template would be a indication to a project manager that the success of their project was somehow directly related to fitting management of that project into this format. Again, while the capabilities are wonderful, the mirage is there; just get everything into TFS and your project will run smoothly. Ill close the loop on this first topic by proposing a thought experiment. Think of the projects youve worked on. How many times have you been chagrined to discover youve implemented the wrong feature, misunderstood how a feature should work or just plain spent too much time on a screen that nobody uses? That sounds like a really worthwhile area to invest time in improving. How about going back to these projects and thinking about how many times you wished you had optimized the state change flow of your tasks or been embarrassed to not have a code churn report linked back to the latest changeset? With thanks to the Real American Heroes, Ill move on to a more current influence, that of the developers at 37signals, and their philosophy towards software development. This philosophy, fully detailed in the books Getting Real and Rework, is a vision of software that under does the competition. This is software that is deliberately limited in functionality in order to concentrate fully on making sure ever feature that is there is awesome and needed. Why is this relevant? Well, in one of those fun seeming paradoxes in life, constraints can be a spark for creativity. Think Twitter, the small screen of an iPhone, the limitations of HTML for applications, the low memory limits of older or embedded system. As long as there is some freedom within those constraints, amazing things emerge. For project management, some of the most respected people in the industry recommend using just index cards, pens and tape. They argue that with change the constant in software development, your process should be as limited (yet rigorous) as possible. Looking at TFS, this is not a system designed to under do anybody. It is a big jumble of components and options, with every feature you could think of. Predictably this means many basic functions are hard to use. For task management, many people just use an Excel spreadsheet linked up to TFS. Not a stirring endorsement of the tooling there. TFS as a whole would be far more appealing to me if there was less of it, but better. Id cut 50% of the features to make the other half really amaze and inspire me. And thats really the heart of the matter. TFS has great promise and I want to believe it can work better. But ultimately it focuses your attention on a lot of stuff that doesnt really matter and then clamps down your creativity in a mess of forms and dialogs obscuring what does.   --- Relevant Links --- All those great G.I. Joe PSAs are on YouTube, including lots of mashed up versions. A simple Google search will get you on the right track.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• The Partner Perspective from Oracle OpenWorld 2012 - IDC’s Darren Bibby report

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Below is IDC’s Darren Bibby report on ‘The Partner Perspective from Oracle OpenWorld 2012’. If you missed the 2012 edition, I trust this will give you the willingness to attend next year one! October 26, 2012 I attended my fourth Oracle OpenWorld earlier in October. I always go in with the lens of, "What's in it for partners this year?" Although it's primarily thought of as a customer event - and yes, the bulk of the almost 50,000 attendees are customers - this year's conference was clearly the largest and most important partner event Oracle has ever run. Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Exchange There were more partner attendees than ever, with Oracle citing somewhere around 5000. But the format for partners this year was different. And it was better. Traditionally, Oracle hosts a one-day only Partner Forum on the Sunday before the customer-focused conference begins. This year, the partner content still began on the Sunday, but the worldwide alliances and channels group created an exclusive track throughout the week, just for partners. It featured content specifically targeted towards partners, and was anchored at a nearby hotel. This was a great move for Oracle. The Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) team has been in a tricky position for years in that they have enough partners that they need a landmark event in the year, but perhaps not enough to justify a separate, worldwide, large, partner-only event. Coinciding a four day event with Oracle OpenWorld, where anybody who's anybody in the Oracle world attends anyway, is a good solution. The channels leadership team can build from this success for an even better conference next year. It's expected that they will follow a similar strategy. Cloud Announcements for Partners As for the content, it was primarily about the Cloud. For customers, for VARs, for ISVs, for everyone. There were five key Cloud related announcements for partners at the event: Cloud Builder Specialization. This is one of the first broader Specializations that isn't focused on one unique product. It is a designation for partners that offer design and implementation services for private cloud solutions. As such, it will surely be something that nearly every partner will consider, and many will pursue. New Specializations for Cloud Services. Unlike the broad, almost "strategy-level" Specialization above, there are a group of new product-based "merit badges" for many of the new Cloud offerings. Think about a Specialization for the Cloud version of HCM, for instance. Each of these particular specializations will also have Rapid Start implementation methodologies that allow a partner to offer a fixed scope and fixed price bid to customers. Based on the learnings from Oracle Consulting, this means a partner might be able to deliver Cloud HCM in six weeks for a fixed price. In the end, this means more consistent experiences for Oracle customers. Cloud Resale Program. For those partners who achieve one of these Cloud Specializations, it will mean they can actually resell the subscription-based Cloud product. This is important because it has been somewhat of a rarity in the emerging Cloud channel for partners to be able to "take the paper", take the revenue, do the billing, be first line of support etc. This is an important step for Oracle and one the partners will be happy to see. Cloud Referral Program. For those partners who are not as engaged with these specific Cloud products that the Specializations revolve around, there is a new referral program that provides an incentive to recommend Oracle Cloud products. This one-two punch of referral and resale programs is similar in many ways to other vendors who allow more committed partners to resell, while more casual partners can collect fees. It's the model that seems to work. The key to allow a company to resell a subscription product - something that is inherently delivered directly between the vendor and customer - is trust. Achieving a specialization is a good bar to have to meet. Platform as a Service for ISVs. Leveraging some of the overall announcements made by CEO Larry Ellison around a cloud version of its famous database, Oracle also outlined a new ability for ISVs to build cloud services on its new PaaS offering. Details were less available for this announcement, though it's an expected and fitting play for ISVs comfortable with Oracle technology who can now more easily build out cloud applications. There wasn't much talk of an app store to go along with this, but surely it's in the works. Specializations And "The Gap" Coming back to Specializations, Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) has 4600 partners worldwide that hold 20,000 Specializations. These are impressive numbers just three years into the new OPN framework. The actual number of Specializations has also grown significantly, up to 111 today and soon around 125 or so with the new Cloud designations. Oracle may need to look at grouping some of these and creating higher level, broader designations that partners could achieve by earning several Specializations in that group. At 125 and growing, this is a lot. On the top of the pyramid, Hitachi Ltd. successfully became the eleventh partner to make it to the highly prestigious Diamond level. Partner programs partially exist in order to recognize capable partners. And it's more than abundantly clear that the Diamond level does this. But I think Oracle has a gap. Specializations show capability in a very specific product area, and all sizes of partners can achieve these. The next level at which to show a level of expertise is the Advanced Specialization. However, this is a massive step up from the regular Specialization. The advanced level requires 50 people to have certification in that particular product area. Most other industry programs have similar higher level statuses, but none are even close to that number. Whereas a customer who sees an Oracle partner with an advanced specialization can be very sure of capability, there is a gap in that there are hundreds or even thousands of 20-50 person solution providers who are top notch in their area of expertise. They will never get to Advanced due to numbers alone. These boutique partners don't really have a way of showing off their talents in the current program. Advanced may not need to be so high to really show that a company has deep expertise. Overall it was a very successful Oracle OpenWorld for Oracle partners of all sizes. There was progress made on making it a bigger and more relevant event. And also on catching up and maybe even leading in some cases with cloud opportunities for partners.

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• change height in Android 2.2 LinearLayout in code

  - by Niro

  Im trying to change height of Layouts through the code without success. I've tried all of the examples i saw here and other site and my app just keep shutting down. xml code: <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools" android:id="@+id/main_lay" android:orientation="vertical" tools:context=".MainActivity" > <LinearLayout android:id="@+id/layout_add" > </LinearLayout> <LinearLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="50dp" android:background="@color/green"> <ImageView android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:contentDescription="@string/desc" android:layout_height="45dp" android:layout_gravity="center_vertical|left" android:scaleType="fitStart" android:background="@color/orange" android:src="@drawable/logo" > </ImageView> </LinearLayout> </LinearLayout> Java code: main_layout=(LinearLayout)findViewById(R.id.main_lay); main_layout.setLayoutParams(new FrameLayout.LayoutParams(LayoutParams.MATCH_PARENT,LayoutParams.MATCH_PARENT)); main_layout.setBackgroundResource(R.color.white); layout_add = (LinearLayout) findViewById(R.id.layout_add); layout_add.setLayoutParams(new FrameLayout.LayoutParams(LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT,50 )); layout_add.setBackgroundResource(R.color.dark_grey); I cant understand what im doing wrong. I've tried different ways to fix it. The Backround setting is working fine. Thank you guys Niro This is the Logcat 12-09 16:12:39.007: E/AnalyticsSDKTest.cpp(6338): Time w/ UTC Offset: 2012-12-09 12-09 16:16:14.517: E/ActivityManager(121): fail to set top app changed! 12-09 16:16:14.547: E/InputDispatcher(121): channel '4056b9c8 com.nirosadvice.converter/com.nirosadvice.converter.MainActivity (server)' ~ Consumer closed input channel or an error occurred. events=0x8 12-09 16:16:14.547: E/InputDispatcher(121): channel '4056b9c8 com.nirosadvice.converter/com.nirosadvice.converter.MainActivity (server)' ~ Channel is unrecoverably broken and will be disposed! 12-09 16:16:18.071: E/PVWmdrmProxy(5716): binder died for component: ComponentInfo{com.pv.wmdrmservice/com.pv.wmdrmservice.PVWmdrmService} 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{com.nirosadvice.converter/com.nirosadvice.converter.MainActivity}: java.lang.RuntimeException: Binary XML file line #1: You must supply a layout_width attribute. 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1821) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1842) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$1500(ActivityThread.java:132) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1038) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:150) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4263) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Binary XML file line #1: You must supply a layout_width attribute. 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.content.res.TypedArray.getLayoutDimension(TypedArray.java:491) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.view.ViewGroup$LayoutParams.setBaseAttributes(ViewGroup.java:3684) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.view.ViewGroup$MarginLayoutParams.<init>(ViewGroup.java:3764) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.widget.FrameLayout$LayoutParams.<init>(FrameLayout.java:457) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.widget.FrameLayout.generateLayoutParams(FrameLayout.java:423) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.widget.FrameLayout.generateLayoutParams(FrameLayout.java:47) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.view.LayoutInflater.inflate(LayoutInflater.java:396) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.view.LayoutInflater.inflate(LayoutInflater.java:320) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.view.LayoutInflater.inflate(LayoutInflater.java:276) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at com.android.internal.policy.impl.PhoneWindow.setContentView(PhoneWindow.java:231) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.app.Activity.setContentView(Activity.java:1715) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at com.nirosadvice.converter.MainActivity.onCreate(MainActivity.java:87) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1072) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1785) 12-09 16:16:18.161: E/AndroidRuntime(18911): ... 11 more Thanks After Iv'e added the attributes to the XML - this is what i'm getting : CatLog: 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): java.lang.ClassCastException: android.view.ViewGroup$LayoutParams 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.widget.LinearLayout.measureVertical(LinearLayout.java:360) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onMeasure(LinearLayout.java:309) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:902) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:1957) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:150) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4263) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597) 12-09 16:42:33.168: E/AndroidRuntime(19065): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 12-09 16:42:39.023: E/AnalyticsSDKTest.cpp(6338): Time w/ UTC Offset: 2012-12-09 21:42:39-05:00 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): java.lang.ClassCastException: android.view.ViewGroup$LayoutParams 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.widget.LinearLayout.measureVertical(LinearLayout.java:360) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onMeasure(LinearLayout.java:309) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:902) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:1957) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:150) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4263) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597) 12-09 16:42:49.013: E/AndroidRuntime(19095): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): java.lang.ClassCastException: android.view.ViewGroup$LayoutParams 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.widget.LinearLayout.measureVertical(LinearLayout.java:360) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onMeasure(LinearLayout.java:309) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:902) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:1957) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:150) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4263) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597) 12-09 16:44:00.913: E/AndroidRuntime(19148): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 12-09 16:44:02.935: E/InputDispatcher(121): channel '4056b9c8 com.nirosadvice.converter/com.nirosadvice.converter.MainActivity (server)' ~ Consumer closed input channel or an error occurred. events=0x8 12-09 16:44:02.935: E/InputDispatcher(121): channel '4056b9c8 com.nirosadvice.converter/com.nirosadvice.converter.MainActivity (server)' ~ Channel is unrecoverably broken and will be disposed! 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): java.lang.ClassCastException: android.view.ViewGroup$LayoutParams 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.widget.LinearLayout.measureVertical(LinearLayout.java:360) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onMeasure(LinearLayout.java:309) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:902) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:1957) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:150) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4263) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597) 12-09 16:45:25.075: E/AndroidRuntime(19210): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): java.lang.ClassCastException: android.view.ViewGroup$LayoutParams 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.widget.LinearLayout.measureVertical(LinearLayout.java:360) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onMeasure(LinearLayout.java:309) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:902) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:1957) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:150) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4263) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597) 12-09 16:50:34.507: E/AndroidRuntime(19358): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) Third try - after changing the Frame to Linear : 12-09 17:42:39.076: E/AnalyticsSDKTest.cpp(6338): Time w/ UTC Offset: 2012-12-09 22:42:39-05:00 12-09 17:55:44.141: E/ActivityManager(121): Fix ANR:broadcast when App died 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): java.lang.ClassCastException: android.view.ViewGroup$LayoutParams 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.widget.LinearLayout.measureVertical(LinearLayout.java:360) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.widget.LinearLayout.onMeasure(LinearLayout.java:309) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.view.ViewGroup.measureChildWithMargins(ViewGroup.java:3224) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.widget.FrameLayout.onMeasure(FrameLayout.java:250) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.view.View.measure(View.java:8526) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:902) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:1957) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:150) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4263) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:839) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:597) 12-09 17:55:44.722: E/AndroidRuntime(19469): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)

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• To ORM or Not to ORM. That is the question&hellip;

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  UPDATE:  Thanks for the feedback and comments.  I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations.  I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping.  According to Wikipedia it is defined as the following: Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a "virtual object database" that can be used from within the programming language. Why should you care?  Basically it allows you to map your business objects in code to their persistence layer behind them. And better yet, why would you want to do this?  Let me outline it in the following points: Development speed.  No more need to map repetitive tasks query results to object members.  Once the map is created the code is rendered for you. Persistence portability.  The ORM knows how to map SQL specific syntax for the persistence engine you choose.  It does not matter if it is SQL Server, Oracle and another database of your choosing. Standard/Boilerplate code is simplified.  The basic CRUD operations are consistent and case use database metadata for basic operations. So how does this help?  Well, let’s compare some of the ORM tools that I have used and/or researched.  I have been interested in ORM for some time now.  My ORM of choice for a long time was NHibernate and I still believe it has a strong case in some business situations.  However, you have to take business considerations into account and the law of diminishing returns.  Because of these two factors, my recent activity and experience has been around DevExpress eXpress Persistence Objects (XPO).  The primary reason for this is because they have the DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) that sits on top of XPO.  With this added value, the data model can be created (either database first of code first) and the Web and Windows client can be created from these maps.  While out of the box they provide some simple list and detail screens, you can verify easily extend and modify these to your liking.  DevExpress has done a tremendous job of providing enough framework while also staying out of the way when you need to extend it.  This sounds worse than it really is.  What I mean by this is that if you choose to follow DevExpress coding style and recommendations, the hooks and extension points provided allow you to do some pretty heavy lifting while also not worrying about the basics. I have put together a list of the top features that I have used to compare the limited list of ORM’s that I have exposure with.  Again, the biggest selling point in my opinion is that XPO is just a solid as any of the other ORM’s but with the added layer of XAF they become unstoppable.  And then couple that with the EDMX modeling tools and code generation, it becomes a no brainer. Designer Features Entity Framework NHibernate Fluent w/ Nhibernate Telerik OpenAccess DevExpress XPO DevExpress XPO/XAF plus Liekhus Tools Uses XML to map relationships - Yes - - -   Visual class designer interface Yes - - - - Yes Management integrated w/ Visual Studio Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports schema first approach Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports model first approach Yes - - Yes Yes Yes Supports code first approach Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Attribute driven coding style Yes - Yes - Yes Yes                 I have a very small team and limited resources with a lot of responsibilities.  In order to keep up with our customers, we must rely on tools like these.  We use the EDMX tool so that we can create a visual representation of the applications with our customers.  Second, we rely on the code generation so that we can focus on the business problems at hand and not whether a field is mapped correctly.  This keeps us from requiring as many junior level developers on our team.  I have also worked on multiple teams where they believed in writing their own “framework”.  In my experiences and opinion this is not the route to take unless you have a team dedicated to supporting just the framework.  Each time that I have worked on custom frameworks, the framework eventually becomes old, out dated and full of “performance” enhancements specific to one or two requirements.  With an ORM, there are a lot smarter people than me working on the bigger issue of persistence and performance.  Again, my recommendation would be to use an available framework and get to working on your business domain problems.  If your coding is not making money for you, why are you working on it?  Do you really need to be writing query to object member code again and again? Thanks

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• WWDC and Tech Ed: A Tale of Two DevCons

  - by andrewbrust

  Next week marks the first full week of June.  Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology.  In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday.  Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans.  A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners. In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003.  I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch.  I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference.  My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer.  Just so you know. Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches.  First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle.  WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release.  These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite.  Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all.  The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite.  Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new. I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate.  In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it).  This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem.  And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect. Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us.  Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances.  For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way.  Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers.  This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful. A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways.  WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related.  It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets.  However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development.  Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards.  In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs. What about Tech Ed’s editorial content?  Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut.  The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions.  Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture.  I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7.  Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer. All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products.  Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs.  I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience.  Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and  a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all.  Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy. My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event.  The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat. My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products.  Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.

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• Microsoft, jQuery, and Templating

  - by Stephen Walther

  About two months ago, John Resig and I met at Café Algiers in Harvard square to discuss how Microsoft can contribute to the jQuery project. Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his second-day MIX keynote that Microsoft is throwing its weight behind jQuery and making it the primary way to develop client-side Ajax applications using Microsoft technologies. What does this announcement mean? It means that Microsoft is shifting its resources to invest in jQuery. Developers on the ASP.NET team are now working full-time to contribute features to the core jQuery library. Furthermore, we are working with other teams at Microsoft to ensure that our technologies work great with jQuery. We are contributing to the open-source jQuery project in the exact same way that any other company or individual from the community can contribute to jQuery. We are writing proposals, submitting the proposals to the jQuery forums, and revising the proposals in response to community feedback. The jQuery team can decide to reject or accept any feature that we propose. Any feature that Microsoft contributes to jQuery will be platform neutral. In other words, Microsoft contributions will benefit PHP and RAILS developers just as much as they benefit ASP.NET developers. Microsoft contributions to jQuery will improve the web for everyone. Contributing Support for Templates to jQuery Core Our first proposal concerns templating. We want to contribute support for templates to jQuery so that JavaScript developers can use jQuery to easily display a set of database records. You can read our templating proposal here: http://wiki.github.com/nje/jquery/jquery-templates-proposal You can download and play with our prototype for templating here: http://github.com/nje/jquery-tmpl The following code illustrates how you can use a template to display a set of products in a bulleted list: <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery(function(){ var products = [ { name: "Product 1", price: 12.99}, { name: "Product 2", price: 9.99}, { name: "Product 3", price: 35.59} ]; $("ul").append("#template", products); }); </script> <script id="template" type="text/html"> <li>{%= name %} - {%= price %}</li> </script> <ul></ul> The template is contained in a SCRIPT element that has a TYPE=”text/html” attribute. Browsers ignore the contents of a SCRIPT element when they don’t understand the content type. Notice that the placeholder {%=...%} is used within the template to indicate where the name and price of a product should appear. The delimiters {%=…%} are used for expressions and the delimiters {%...%} are used for code. Finally, the products are rendered using the template with the call to $(“ul”).append(“#template”, products). The standard jQuery DOM manipulation methods have been modified to support templates. When the page above is rendered, you get the bulleted list displayed in the following figure. Our goal is to keep our proposal for templates as simple as possible. After support for templating has been added to jQuery, plug-in authors can take advantage of templating when building complex data-driven plug-ins such as a DataGrid plug-in. The Ajax Control Toolkit Over 100,000 developers download the Ajax Control Toolkit every month. That’s a mind-boggling number of downloads. We realize that the Ajax Control Toolkit is extremely popular among ASP.NET Web Forms developers and we want to continue to invest in the Ajax Control Toolkit. If you are adding JavaScript interactivity to an ASP.NET Web Forms application, and you don’t want to write JavaScript, then we recommend that you use the server controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. Using the Ajax Control Toolkit does not require knowledge of JavaScript and the toolkit enables you to build applications with the concepts familiar to ASP.NET Web Forms applications developers. If, however, you are interested in creating client-side interactivity without server controls then we recommend that you use jQuery. We plan to continue to release new versions of the Ajax Control Toolkit every few months. Our goal is to continue to improve the quality of the Ajax Control Toolkit and to make it easier for the community to contribute code, bug fixes, and documentation. The ASP.NET Ajax Library We are moving the ASP.NET Ajax Library into the Ajax Control Toolkit. If you currently use ASP.NET Ajax Library client templates, client data-binding, or the client script loader then you can continue to use these features by downloading the Ajax Control Toolkit. Be aware that our focus with the Ajax Control Toolkit is server-side Ajax.  For client-side Ajax, we are shifting our focus to jQuery. For example, if you have been using ASP.NET Ajax Library client templates then we recommend that you shift to using jQuery instead. Conclusion Our plan is to focus on jQuery as the primary technology for building client-side Ajax applications moving forward. We want to adapt Microsoft technologies to work great with jQuery and we want to contribute features to jQuery that will make the web better for everyone. We are very excited to be working with the jQuery core team.

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• Making Money from your SQL Server Blog

  - by Bill Graziano

  My SQL Server blog reading list is around one hundred blogs.  Many people are writing great content and generating lots of page views.  I see some of them running Google AdSense and trying to make a little money off their traffic.  If you want to earn some some extra money from what you’ve written there are a couple of options.  And one new option that I’m announcing here. Background Internet advertising is sold based on a few different pricing schemes.  Flat Fee.  You offer either all your impressions (page views) or some percentage of your impressions in exchange for a flat monthly fee.  CPM or cost per thousand impressions.  If the quoted price is $2 CPM you’ll get $2 for every 1,000 times the ad is displayed.  While you might think the “M” means millions, the “M” in CPM is the roman numeral for 1,000. CPC or cost per click.  This is also called PPC or pay per click.  In this method you get paid based on how many clicks there are on the ad.  CPA or cost per action.  In this method you get paid based on an action that occurs on the advertisers site after they click on the ad.  This is typically some type of sign up form.  This is how most affiliate programs work. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has been writing about blogging and making money off blogs for years.  He has a good introduction to making money on your blog in his “Making Money” section.  If you’re interested in learning more he has a post up titled How to Make More Money From Your Blog in the New Year that links to many of his best posts on the subject. Google AdSense This is the most common method for people earning money from their blogging.  It’s easy to setup and administer.  You tell AdSense what size ads you’d like to run and it gives you a little piece of JavaScript to put on your site.  AdSense quickly learns the topics you write about and displays ads that are appropriate for your site.  I typically see ads for hosting, SQL Server tools and developer tools running in AdSense slots.  AdSense pays on a CPC model.  If you translate that back to CPM pricing you’ll see rates from $0.50 to $1.00 CPM. Amazon While you might not make much money writing books it’s now possible to make even less helping Amazon sell them.  You can sign up for an Amazon affiliate program.  Each time you send Amazon a link and someone buys the book you get a cut of that sale.  This is the CPA model from above.  Amazon can help you build some pretty nice “stores”.  Here’s the SQL Server bookstore I built for SQLTeam.com.  If you’re just putting in a page with books like I’ve done on SQLTeam you should keep your expectations low.  If you’re writing book reviews of suggesting books on your blog it really does make sense to setup an Amazon affiliate link.  People are much more likely to buy a book based on a review from a trusted source.  I always try to buy through a referral link if there is one. Amazon pays about 4% of the price as a referral fee.  You also get credit for anything else they buy while on the site.  I recently had someone buy an iPod nano with their SQL Server book making me an extra $5.60 richer!  Estimating how much you can make is difficult though.  How much attention you draw to the links and book reviews can dramatically affect the earnings. Private Ad Sales This is the hardest but potentially most lucrative option.  You sell advertising directly to companies that want to sell things to your readers.  Typically this would be SQL Server tool vendors, hosting companies or anyone else that wants to make money off database administrators.  This is also the most difficult to do.  You’ll need the contacts at the companies and enough page views to make it worth their while.  You’ll also need software to track the page views and clicks, geo-target your ads and smooth out the impressions.  Your earnings are based on whatever you can negotiate with the companies. SQL Server Ad Network For the last couple of years I’ve run any extra ads that I sold on the SQLTeam Weblogs.  You can see an example of that on Mladen’s blog.  The ad in the upper right corner is one that I’m running for him.  (Note: Many of the ads I’m running are geo-targeted to only appear in English speaking countries.  You may see a different set of ads outside the US, Canada and the UK.  You can also see he has a couple of Google ads on his blog.)  When I run ads on his blog I split the advertising revenue with him.  They make a little and I make a little. I recently started to expand this and sell advertising specifically to run on SQL Server-related blogs.  I’m also starting to run ads on non-SQLTeam blogs.  The only way I can sell more advertising is to have more blogs to run it on.  And that’s where you come in. I’ve created a SQL Server advertising network.  I handle all the ad sales and provide the technology to serve the ads.  I handle collections and payments back to you.  You get paid at the end of each month regardless of when (or if) the advertiser actually pays.  All you need to do is add a small piece of JavaScript to your site to display the ads. If you’re writing about SQL Server and interested in earning a little money for your site I’d like to talk to you.  You can use the Contact Us page on SQLTeam.com to reach me.  Running advertising on your blog isn’t for everyone.  If you’re concerned about what advertisers might think about certain posts then you might not be a good fit.  For the most part this isn’t an issue.  You’ll also need to have a PayPal account to receive payments.  You probably won’t get rich doing this.  But you can earn extra cash on the side for doing what you would do anyway.  I do know that people have earned enough to buy themselves a nice laptop doing this. My initial target is blogs with more than 10,000 page views per month.  I expect to pay two to three times what Google pays.  If you have less than 10,000 page views per month but are still interested I’d still like to hear from you.  I may not be able to sign up smaller blogs right away but we’ll get the process started.  If you’re unsure about your traffic Google Analytics is a free tool that provides great reporting on traffic, popular posts and how people find your blog.  If you have any questions or are just curious drop me a line and I’ll try to answer your questions.

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• Invariant code contracts – using class-wide contracts

  - by DigiMortal

  It is possible to define invariant code contracts for classes. Invariant contracts should always hold true whatever member of class is called. In this posting I will show you how to use invariant code contracts so you understand how they work and how they should be tested. This is my randomizer class I am using to demonstrate code contracts. I added one method for invariant code contracts. Currently there is one contract that makes sure that random number generator is not null. public class Randomizer {     private IRandomGenerator _generator;       private Randomizer() { }       public Randomizer(IRandomGenerator generator)     {         _generator = generator;     }       public int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max)     {         Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>(             min < max,             "Min must be less than max"         );           Contract.Ensures(             Contract.Result<int>() >= min &&             Contract.Result<int>() <= max,             "Return value is out of range"         );           return _generator.Next(min, max);     }       [ContractInvariantMethod]     private void ObjectInvariant()     {         Contract.Invariant(_generator != null);     } } Invariant code contracts are define in methods that have ContractInvariantMethod attribute. Some notes: It is good idea to define invariant methods as private. Don’t call invariant methods from your code because code contracts system does not allow it. Invariant methods are defined only as place where you can keep invariant contracts. Invariant methods are called only when call to some class member is made! The last note means that having invariant method and creating Randomizer object with null as argument does not automatically generate exception. We have to call at least one method from Randomizer class. Here is the test for generator. You can find more about contracted code testing from my posting Code Contracts: Unit testing contracted code. There is also explained why the exception handling in test is like it is. [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))] public void Should_fail_if_generator_is_null() {     try     {         var randomizer = new Randomizer(null);         randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(1, 4);     }     catch (Exception ex)     {         throw new Exception(ex.Message, ex);     } } Try out this code – with unit tests or with test application to see that invariant contracts are checked as soon as you call some member of Randomizer class.

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• Browsing Your ADF Application Module Pooling Params with WLST

  - by Duncan Mills

  In ADF 11g you can of course use Enterprise Manager (EM) to browse and configure the settings used by ADF Business Components  Application Modules, as shown here for one of my sample deployed applications. This screen you can access from the EM homepage by pulling down the Application Deployment menu, and then ADF > Configure ADF Business Components. Then select the profile that you are actually using (Hint: look in the DataBindings.cpx file to work this out - probably the "Local" version unless you've explicitly changed it. )So, from this screen you can change the pooling parameters and the world is good. But what if you don't have EM installed? In that case you can use the WebLogic scripting capabilities to view (and Update) the MBean Properties. Explanation The pooling parameters and many others are handled through Message Driven Beans that are created for the deployed application in the server. In the case of the ADF BC pooling parameters, this MBean will combine the configuration deployed as part of the application, along with any overrides defined as -D environement commands on the JVM startup for the application server instance. Using WLST to Browse the Bean ValuesFor our purposes here I'm doing this interactively, although you can also write a script or write Java to achieve the same thing.Step 0: Before You Start You will need the followingAccess to the console on the machine that is running the serverThe WebLogic Admin username and password (I'll use weblogic/password as my example here - yours will be different)The name of the deployed application (in this example FMWdh_application1)The package path to the bc4j.xcfg file (in this example oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfg) This is based on the default path for your model project so it shoudl be fairly easy to work out.The BC configuration your AM is actually running with (look in the DataBindings.cpx for that. In this example DealHelpServiceDeployed is the profile being used..)Step 1: Start the WLST consoleTo start at the beginning, you need to run the WLST command but that needs a little setup:Change to the wlserver_10.3/server/bin directory e.g. under your Fusion Middleware Home[oracle@mymachine] cd /home/oracle/FMW_R1/wlserver_10.3/server/binSet your environment using the setWLSEnv script. e.g. on Oracle Enterprise Linux:[oracle@mymachine bin] source setWLSEnv.shStart the WLST interactive console[oracle@mymachine bin] java weblogic.WLSTInitializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) ...Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting ShellType help() for help on available commandswls:/offline> Step 2:Enter the WLST commandsConnect to the server wls:> connect('weblogic','password')Change to the Custom root, this is where the AMPooling MBeans are registered wls:> custom()Change to the b4j MBean directorywls:> cd ('oracle.bc4j.mbean.config')Work out the correct directory for the AM configuration you need. This is the difficult bit, not because it's hard to do, but because the names are long. The structure here is such that every child MBean is displayed at the same level as the parent, so for each deployed application there will be many directories shown. In fact, do an ls() command here and you'll see what I mean. Each application will have one MBean for the app as a whole, and then for each deployed configuration in the .xcfg file you'll see: One for the config entry itself, and then one each for Security, DB Connection and AM Pooling. So if you deploy an app with just one configuration you'll see 5 directories, if it has two configurations in the .xcfg you'll see 9 and so on.The directory you are looking for will contain those bits of information you gathered in Step 0, specifically the Application Name, the configuration you are using and the xcfg name: First of all narrow your list to just those directories returned from the ls() command that begin oracle.bc4j.mbean.config:name=AMPool. These identify the AM pooling MBeans for all the deployed applications. Now look for the correct application name e.g. Application=FMWdh_application1The config setting in that sub-list should already be correct and match what you expect e.g. oracle.bc4j.mbean.config=oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfgFinally look for the correct value for the AppModuleConfigType e.g. oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType=DealHelpServiceDeployedNow you have identified the correct directory name, change to that (keep the name on one line of course - I've had to split it across lines here for clarity:wls:> cd ('oracle.bc4j.mbean.config:name=AMPool,     type=oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType.AMPoolType,    oracle.bc4j.mbean.config=oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfg,    Application=FMWdh_application1,    oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType=DealHelpServiceDeployed') Now you can actually view the parameter values with a simple ls() commandwls:> ls()And here's the output in which you can view the realtime values of the various pool settings: -rw- AmpoolConnectionstrategyclass oracle.jbo.common.ampool.DefaultConnectionStrategy -rw- AmpoolDoampooling true -rw- AmpoolDynamicjdbccredentials false -rw- AmpoolInitpoolsize 2 -rw- AmpoolIsuseexclusive true -rw- AmpoolMaxavailablesize 40 -rw- AmpoolMaxinactiveage 600000 -rw- AmpoolMaxpoolsize 4096 -rw- AmpoolMinavailablesize 2 -rw- AmpoolMonitorsleepinterval 600000 -rw- AmpoolResetnontransactionalstate true -rw- AmpoolSessioncookiefactoryclass oracle.jbo.common.ampool.DefaultSessionCookieFactory -rw- AmpoolTimetolive 3600000 -rw- AmpoolWritecookietoclient false -r-- ConfigMBean true -rw- ConnectionPoolManager oracle.jbo.server.ConnectionPoolManagerImpl -rw- Doconnectionpooling false -rw- Dofailover false -rw- Initpoolsize 0 -rw- Maxpoolcookieage -1 -rw- Maxpoolsize 4096 -rw- Poolmaxavailablesize 25 -rw- Poolmaxinactiveage 600000 -rw- Poolminavailablesize 5 -rw- Poolmonitorsleepinterval 600000 -rw- Poolrequesttimeout 30000 -rw- Pooltimetolive -1 -r-- ReadOnly false -rw- Recyclethreshold 10 -r-- RestartNeeded false -r-- SystemMBean false -r-- eventProvider true -r-- eventTypes java.lang.String[jmx.attribute.change] -r-- objectName oracle.bc4j.mbean.config:name=AMPool,type=oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType.AMPoolType,oracle.bc4j.mbean.config=oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfg,Application=FMWdh_application1,oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType=DealHelpServiceDeployed -rw- poolClassName oracle.jbo.common.ampool.ApplicationPoolImpl Thanks to Brian Fry on the JDeveloper PM Team who did most of the work to put this sequence of steps together with me badgering him over his shoulder.

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• FAT Volume and CE

  - by Kate Moss' Open Space

  Whenever we format a disk volume, it is a good idea to name the label so it will be easier to categorize. To label a volume, we can use LABEL command or UI depends on your preference. Windows CE does provide FAT driver and support various format (FAT12, FAT16,FAT32, ExFAT and TFAT - transaction-safe FAT) and many feature to let you scan and even defrag the volume but not labeling. At any time you format a volume in CE and then mount it on PC, the label is always empty! Of course, you can always label the volume on PC, even it is formatted in CE. So looks like CE does not care about the volume label at all, neither report the label to OS nor changing the label on FAT.So how can we set the volume label in CE? To Answer this question, we need to know how does FAT stores the volume label. Here are some on-line resources are handy for parsing FAT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/ide/fat32.html http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/fatgen.mspx You can refer to PUBLIC\COMMON\OAK\DRIVERS\FSD\FATUTIL\MAIN\bootsec.h and dosbpb.h or the above links for the fields we discuss here. The first sector of a FAT Volume (it is not necessary to be the first sector of a disk.) is a FAT boot sector and BPB (BIOS Parameter Block). And at offset 43, bgbsVolumeLabel (or bsVolumeLabel on FAT16) is for storing the volume lable, but note in the spec also indicates "FAT file system drivers should make sure that they update this field when the volume label file in the root directory has its name changed or created.". So we can't just simply update the bgbsVolumeLabel but also need to create a volume lable file in root directory. The volume lable file is not a real file but just a file entry in root directory with zero file lenth and a very special file attribute, ATTR_VOLUME_ID. (defined in public\common\oak\drivers\fsd\fatutil\MAIN\fatutilp.h) Locating and accessing bootsector is quite straight forward, as long as we know the starting sector of a FAT volume, that's it. But where is the root directory? The layout of a typical FAT is like this Boot sector (Volume ID in the figure) followed by Reserved Sectors (1 on FAT12/16 and 32 on FAT32), then FAT chain table(s) (can be 1 or 2), after that is the root directory (FAT12/16 and not shows in the figure) then begining of the File and Directories. In FAT12/16, the root directory is placed right after FAT so it is not hard to caculate the offset in the volume. But in FAT32, this rule is no longer true: the first cluster of the root directory is determined by BGBPB_RootDirStrtClus (or offset 44 in boot sector). Although this field is usually 0x00000002 (it is how CE initial the root directory after formating a volume. Note we should never assume it is always true) which means the first cluster contains data but not like the root directory is contiguous in FAT12/16, it is just like a regular file can be fragmented. So we need to access the root directory (of FAT32) hopping one cluster to another by traversing FAT table. Let's trace the code now. Although the source of FAT driver is not available in CE Shared Source program, but the formatter, Fatutil.dll, is available in public\common\oak\drivers\fsd\fatutil\MAIN\formatdisk.cpp. Be aware the public code only provides formatter for FAT12/16/32 for ExFAT it is still not available. FormatVolumeInternal is the main worker function. With the knowledge here, you should be able the trace the code easily. But I would like to discuss the following code pieces     dwReservedSectors = (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) ? 32 : 1;     dwRootEntries = (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) ? 0 : fo.dwRootEntries; Note the dwReservedSectors is 32 in FAT32 and 1 in FAT12/16. Root Entries is another different mentioned in previous paragraph, 0 for FAT32 (dynamic allocated) and fixed size (usually 512, defined in DEFAULT_ROOT_ENTRIES in public\common\sdk\inc\fatutil.h) And then here   memset(pBootSec->bsVolumeLabel, 0x20, sizeof(pBootSec->bsVolumeLabel)); It sets the Volume Label as empty string. Now let's carry on to the next section - write the root directory.     if (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) {         if (!(fo.dwFlags & FATUTIL_FORMAT_TFAT)) {             dwRootSectors = dwSectorsPerCluster;         }         else {             DIRENTRY    dirEntry;             DWORD       offset;             int               iVolumeNo;             memset(pbBlock, 0, pdi->di_bytes_per_sect);             memset(&dirEntry, 0, sizeof(DIRENTRY));                         dirEntry.de_attr = ATTR_VOLUME_ID;             // the first one is volume label             memcpy(dirEntry.de_name, "TFAT       ", sizeof (dirEntry.de_name));             memcpy(pbBlock, &dirEntry, sizeof(dirEntry));              ...             // Skip the next step of zeroing out clusters             dwCurrentSec += dwSectorsPerCluster;             dwRootSectors = 0;         }     }     // Each new root directory sector needs to be zeroed.     memset(pbBlock, 0, cbSizeBlk);     iRootSec=0;     while ( iRootSec < dwRootSectors) { Basically, the code zero out the each entry in root directory depends on dwRootSectors. In FAT12/16, the dwRootSectors is calculated as the sectors we need for the root entries (512 for most of the case) and in FAT32 it just zero out the one cluster. Please note that, if it is a TFAT volume, it initialize the root directory with special volume label entries for some special purpose. Despite to its unusual initialization process for TFAT, it does provide a example for how to create a volume entry. With some minor modification, we can assign the volume label in FAT formatter and also remember to sync the volume label with bsVolumeLabel or bgbsVolumeLabel in boot sector.

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• The Proper Use of the VM Role in Windows Azure

  - by BuckWoody

  At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in 2010 we announced an addition to the Computational Roles in Windows Azure, called the VM Role. This new feature allows a great deal of control over the applications you write, but some have confused it with our full infrastructure offering in Windows Hyper-V. There is a proper architecture pattern for both of them. Virtualization Virtualization is the process of taking all of the hardware of a physical computer and replicating it in software alone. This means that a single computer can “host” or run several “virtual” computers. These virtual computers can run anywhere - including at a vendor’s location. Some companies refer to this as Cloud Computing since the hardware is operated and maintained elsewhere. IaaS The more detailed definition of this type of computing is called Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) since it removes the need for you to maintain hardware at your organization. The operating system, drivers, and all the other software required to run an application are still under your control and your responsibility to license, patch, and scale. Microsoft has an offering in this space called Hyper-V, that runs on the Windows operating system. Combined with a hardware hosting vendor and the System Center software to create and deploy Virtual Machines (a process referred to as provisioning), you can create a Cloud environment with full control over all aspects of the machine, including multiple operating systems if you like. Hosting machines and provisioning them at your own buildings is sometimes called a Private Cloud, and hosting them somewhere else is often called a Public Cloud. State-ful and Stateless Programming This paradigm does not create a new, scalable way of computing. It simply moves the hardware away. The reason is that when you limit the Cloud efforts to a Virtual Machine, you are in effect limiting the computing resources to what that single system can provide. This is because much of the software developed in this environment maintains “state” - and that requires a little explanation. “State-ful programming” means that all parts of the computing environment stay connected to each other throughout a compute cycle. The system expects the memory, CPU, storage and network to remain in the same state from the beginning of the process to the end. You can think of this as a telephone conversation - you expect that the other person picks up the phone, listens to you, and talks back all in a single unit of time. In “Stateless” computing the system is designed to allow the different parts of the code to run independently of each other. You can think of this like an e-mail exchange. You compose an e-mail from your system (it has the state when you’re doing that) and then you walk away for a bit to make some coffee. A few minutes later you click the “send” button (the network has the state) and you go to a meeting. The server receives the message and stores it on a mail program’s database (the mail server has the state now) and continues working on other mail. Finally, the other party logs on to their mail client and reads the mail (the other user has the state) and responds to it and so on. These events might be separated by milliseconds or even days, but the system continues to operate. The entire process doesn’t maintain the state, each component does. This is the exact concept behind coding for Windows Azure. The stateless programming model allows amazing rates of scale, since the message (think of the e-mail) can be broken apart by multiple programs and worked on in parallel (like when the e-mail goes to hundreds of users), and only the order of re-assembling the work is important to consider. For the exact same reason, if the system makes copies of those running programs as Windows Azure does, you have built-in redundancy and recovery. It’s just built into the design. The Difference Between Infrastructure Designs and Platform Designs When you simply take a physical server running software and virtualize it either privately or publicly, you haven’t done anything to allow the code to scale or have recovery. That all has to be handled by adding more code and more Virtual Machines that have a slight lag in maintaining the running state of the system. Add more machines and you get more lag, so the scale is limited. This is the primary limitation with IaaS. It’s also not as easy to deploy these VM’s, and more importantly, you’re often charged on a longer basis to remove them. your agility in IaaS is more limited. Windows Azure is a Platform - meaning that you get objects you can code against. The code you write runs on multiple nodes with multiple copies, and it all works because of the magic of Stateless programming. you don’t worry, or even care, about what is running underneath. It could be Windows (and it is in fact a type of Windows Server), Linux, or anything else - but that' isn’t what you want to manage, monitor, maintain or license. You don’t want to deploy an operating system - you want to deploy an application. You want your code to run, and you don’t care how it does that. Another benefit to PaaS is that you can ask for hundreds or thousands of new nodes of computing power - there’s no provisioning, it just happens. And you can stop using them quicker - and the base code for your application does not have to change to make this happen. Windows Azure Roles and Their Use If you need your code to have a user interface, in Visual Studio you add a Web Role to your project, and if the code needs to do work that doesn’t involve a user interface you can add a Worker Role. They are just containers that act a certain way. I’ll provide more detail on those later. Note: That’s a general description, so it’s not entirely accurate, but it’s accurate enough for this discussion. So now we’re back to that VM Role. Because of the name, some have mistakenly thought that you can take a Virtual Machine running, say Linux, and deploy it to Windows Azure using this Role. But you can’t. That’s not what it is designed for at all. If you do need that kind of deployment, you should look into Hyper-V and System Center to create the Private or Public Infrastructure as a Service. What the VM Role is actually designed to do is to allow you to have a great deal of control over the system where your code will run. Let’s take an example. You’ve heard about Windows Azure, and Platform programming. You’re convinced it’s the right way to code. But you have a lot of things you’ve written in another way at your company. Re-writing all of your code to take advantage of Windows Azure will take a long time. Or perhaps you have a certain version of Apache Web Server that you need for your code to work. In both cases, you think you can (or already have) code the the software to be “Stateless”, you just need more control over the place where the code runs. That’s the place where a VM Role makes sense. Recap Virtualizing servers alone has limitations of scale, availability and recovery. Microsoft’s offering in this area is Hyper-V and System Center, not the VM Role. The VM Role is still used for running Stateless code, just like the Web and Worker Roles, with the exception that it allows you more control over the environment of where that code runs.

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