Search Results

Search found 13653 results on 547 pages for 'integration testing'.

Page 317/547 | < Previous Page | 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 | Next Page >

Michael Crump’s notes for 70-563 PRO – Designing and Developing Windows Applications usi

- by mbcrump

TIME TO GO PRO! This is my notes for 70-563 PRO – Designing and Developing Windows Applications using .NET Framework 3.5 I created it using several resources (various certification web sites, msdn, official ms 70-548 book). The reason that I created this review is because a) I am taking the exam. b) MS did not create a book for this exam. Use the(MS 70-548)book. c) To make sure I am familiar with each before the exam. I hope that it provides a good start for your own notes. I hope that someone finds this useful. At least, it will give you a starting point of what to expect to know on the PRO exam. Also, for those wondering, the PRO exam does contains very little code. It is basically all theory. 1. Validation Controls – How to prevent users from entering invalid data on forms. (MaskedTextBox control and RegEx) 2. ServiceController – used to start and control the behavior of existing services. 3. User Feedback (know winforms Status Bar, Tool Tips, Color, Error Provider, Context-Sensitive and Accessibility) 4. Specific (derived) exceptions must be handled before general (base class) exceptions. By moving the exception handling for the base type Exception to after exception handling of ArgumentNullException, all ArgumentNullException thrown by the Helper method will be caught and logged correctly. 5. A heartbeat method is a method exposed by a Web service that allows external applications to check on the status of the service. 6. New users must master key tasks quickly. Giving these tasks context and appropriate detail will help. However, advanced users will demand quicker paths. Shortcuts, accelerators, or toolbar buttons will speed things along for the advanced user. 7. MSBuild uses project files to instruct the build engine what to build and how to build it. MSBuild project files are XML files that adhere to the MSBuild XML schema. The MSBuild project files contain complete file, build action, and dependency information for each individual projects. 8. Evaluating whether or not to fix a bug involves a triage process. You must identify the bug's impact, set the priority, categorize it, and assign a developer. Many times the person doing the triage work will assign the bug to a developer for further investigation. In fact, the workflow for the bug work item inside of Team System supports this step. Developers are often asked to assess the impact of a given bug. This assessment helps the person doing the triage make a decision on how to proceed. When assessing the impact of a bug, you should consider time and resources to fix it, bug risk, and impacts of the bug. 9. In large projects it is generally impossible and unfeasible to fix all bugs because of the impact on schedule and budget. 10. Code reviews should be conducted by a technical lead or a technical peer. 11. Testing Applications 12. WCF Services – application state 13. SQL Server 2005 / 2008 Express Edition – reliable storage of data / Microsoft SQL Server 3.5 Compact Database– used for client computers to retrieve and save data from a shared location. 14. SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition – used for minimum possible memory and can synchronize data with a corporate SQL Server 2008 Database. Supports offline user and minimum dependency on external components. 15. MDI and SDI Forms (specifically IsMDIContainer) 16. GUID – in the case of data warehousing, it is important to define unique keys. 17. Encrypting / Security Data 18. Understanding of Isolated Storage/Proper location to store items 19. LINQ to SQL 20. Multithreaded access 21. ADO.NET Entity Framework model 22. Marshal.ReleaseComObject 23. Common User Interface Layout (ComboBox, ListBox, Listview, MaskedTextBox, TextBox, RichTextBox, SplitContainer, TableLayoutPanel, TabControl) 24. DataSets Class - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.dataset%28VS.71%29.aspx 25. SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) 26. SystemIcons.Shield (Vista UAC) 27. Leverging stored procedures to perform data manipulation for a database schema that can change. 28. DataContext 29. Microsoft Windows Installer Packages, ClickOnce(bootstrapping features), XCopy. 30. Client Application Services – will authenticate users by using the same data source as a ASP.NET web application. 31. SQL Server 2008 Caching 32. StringBuilder 33. Accessibility Guidelines for Windows Applications http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228004.aspx 34. Logging erros 35. Testing performance related issues. 36. Role Based Security, GenericIdentity and GenericPrincipal 37. System.Net.CookieContainer will store session data for webapps (see isolated storage for winforms) 38. .NET CLR Profiler tool will identify objects that cause performance issues. 39. ADO.NET Synchronization (SyncGroup) 40. Globalization - CultureInfo 41. IDisposable Interface- reports on several questions relating to this. 42. Adding timestamps to determine whether data has changed or not. 43. Converting applications to .NET Framework 3.5 44. MicrosoftReportViewer 45. Composite Controls 46. Windows Vista KNOWN folders. 47. Microsoft Sync Framework 48. TypeConverter -Provides a unified way of converting types of values to other types, as well as for accessing standard values and sub properties. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.typeconverter.aspx 49. Concurrency control mechanisms The main categories of concurrency control mechanisms are: Optimistic - Delay the checking of whether a transaction meets the isolation rules (e.g., serializability and recoverability) until its end, without blocking any of its (read, write) operations, and then abort a transaction, if the desired rules are violated. Pessimistic - Block operations of a transaction, if they may cause violation of the rules. Semi-optimistic - Block operations in some situations, and do not block in other situations, while delaying rules checking to transaction's end, as done with optimistic. 50. AutoResetEvent 51. Microsoft Messaging Queue (MSMQ) 4.0 52. Bulk imports 53. KeyDown event of controls 54. WPF UI components 55. UI process layer 56. GAC (installing, removing and queuing) 57. Use a local database cache to reduce the network bandwidth used by applications. 58. Sound can easily be annoying and distracting to users, so use it judiciously. Always give users the option to turn sound off. Because a user might have sound off, never convey important information through sound alone.

Read the article
CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010New ProjectsAlter gear SQL index Management: SQL Index management displays a list of indexes available for the chosen database and allows you to select an individual / group of indexes to be r...ASP League Ladder System: An ASP ladder / league system for online gaming league or real life leagues also.Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator is a software suite to promote computer aided strategy planning. Sports team can visualize their strategy usin...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Simple syntax hightlighting VSX add-in for Boo language in Visual Studio 2010.easySan: easySan zur einfachen Mitgliedsverwaltung im BRKFsUnit: FsUnit makes unit-testing with F# more enjoyable. It adds a special syntax to your favorite .NET testing framework.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog is a simple to use, component based 2D framework for XNA game development. At present it is very early in development and as such is f...miniTodo: WPFでMVVMの練習にてきとうに作ったTODOアプリ実用は無理です。My Common Library on .NET with CSharp: My Common Library on .NET with CSharp, it conclude database assecc, encrypt string, data caching, StringUtility, thank you for your view.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Ever thought about creating HUGE FILES for future use but felt bad for the wasted memory? Well, SPARSE FILES are the ANSWER! This FSUTIL SPARSE CO...Open SOA Platform: A centralized system for administering applications throught a SOA Enterprise Service Bus: Runtime environment (PROD, DEV, ...) , application and s...P-DBMS: Network and Database ProjectPraiseSight: PraiseSight is supposed to become a practical tool for churches to catalog an present their songs, lyrics and presentations on a beamer. The soluti...Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend is a sample frontend for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 and MDT 2010 Zero Touch. S3Appender (Appender for Log4Net that Uses Amazon S3 For Storing Log Files): The S3Appender is a log4net appender that stores log events in either a MemoryStream or FileStream and sends them to S3 based on time intervals and...sEmit: sEmit (sms emitter) is an application written in C# which was built to send text messages. The project was founded in May 2009 by cansik. It works ...Silverlight RIA Tools: A tool set that generates a full RIA Solutions in Silverlightthommo cannon: Cannon for shooting down ThommosTianjin Polytechnic University Online Judge: Online Judge System Built on Microsoft technologies. Vision & Scope: A distributed OJ Solution on Windows and Cloud. Technologies used or planed...Tinare: Tinare is an byte encryption and decryption alogrithm. The input key is a string password.TinyPlug: Small Plugin Manager, written in C# Allows a project to define supported interfaces, and at runtime add plugins which support (inherit) these in...Utility niconv helps to convert text from one encoding to another: .NET implementation of GUN iconv console converter utility. The niconv program converts text from one encoding to another encoding. In the future r...WareFeed - Software Business Analytics: WareFeed is a simple but effective Software Business Analytics tool written in PHP and compatible others languages such as .NET, Java or Python. It...Y36API1: Semestralni projekt na Y36APINew ReleasesAlter gear SQL index Management: Setup 1.0.0: setup for first alpha releaseASP League Ladder System: ASPLeagueRelease_0_4_1: Release v 0.41Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Version 1.0 InstallerAutoAudit: AutoAudit 1.10e: Version 1.10e will be the final iteration of version 1 development. Version 2 will begin adding switches and options. Pleae email your suggestio...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Boo syntax VS 2010 - alpha: First release TODO: Multiline comments!Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET 0.6: Updated library, using Metered Components and updated Product information.Composer: V1.0.326.1000 Alpha: Initial Alpha release. Should be stable, with minor issues.CoNatural Components: CoNatural Components 1.6: Code fixes: Created helper classes to generate source code for type mapper/materializer. Fixed issue in optimized type materializer when loading ...CRM External View: 1.2: New Features in v1.2 release Password protected views. No more using Web Data Access role from v1. Filtering capabilities Caching for performan...Designit Video Embed Package: Release 1.1.0 beta1: You can now either have the video embeded directly in the template or have a preview in template that opens the video in a lightbox window.FsUnit: FsUnit 0.9.0 for NUnit: This release is for F# 2.0 and NUnit 2.5+.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog 0.0.1: Laughing Dog - Alpla - v 0.0.1 First released version of the Laughing Dog framework.LiveUpload to Facebook: LiveUpload to Facebook 3.2: Version 3.2Become a fan on Facebook! Features Quickly and easily upload your photos and videos to Facebook, including any people tags added in Win...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi March 26: This version adds the Join feature for creating a new "featureset" with attributes that are joined with attributes from a Excel data label named 'D...Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor: Mobile Broadband Logging Monitor 1.2.2: This edition supports: Newer and older editions of Birdstep Technology's EasyConnect HUAWEI Mobile Partner MWConn User defined location for s...Multiplayer Quiz: Release 1_6_351_0: A beta release of the next version. Please leave any errors in discussions or comments.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Fsutil sparse file native code - c sharp wrapper: Project Description A C# code wrapping a native code-Sparse files1 The code is about SPARSE files- the abillity to create huge files (for future us...Nice Libraries: 1.30 build 50325.01: Release 1.30 build 50325.01Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend binaries v1.0: This is the first public release of the Pretty Good Frontend binariesPylor: Pylor 0.1 alpha: This is the very first published version. I hope I can put a sample project soon.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.1 refresh: There was a typo or two in the sample batch file. Corrected now.Rapidshare Episode Downloader: RED v0.8.3: 0.8.1 introduced the ability to advance to the next episode. In 0.8.2 a bug was found that if episode number is less then 10, then the preceding 0...RapidWebDev - .NET Enterprise Software Development Infrastructure: RapidWebDev 1.52: RapidWebDev is an infrastructure helps to develop enterprise software solutions in Microsoft .NET easily and productively. This is the release vers...thommo cannon: game: gamethommo cannon: setup: setupthommo cannon: test: testTinare: Tinare DLL: Tinare DLL is a dynamic-link library written in C# which provides the functions to encrypt and decrypt a byte stream with tinare.WeatherBar: WeatherBar 2.1 [No Installation]: Minor changes to release 2.0 (http://weatherbar.codeplex.com/releases/view/42490). Fixed the bug that caused an exception to be thrown if the user...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightLINQ to TwitterTable2ClassFluent Ribbon Control SuiteNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

Read the article
MySQL Cluster 7.2: Over 8x Higher Performance than Cluster 7.1

- by Mat Keep

0 0 1 893 5092 Homework 42 11 5974 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Summary The scalability enhancements delivered by extensions to multi-threaded data nodes enables MySQL Cluster 7.2 to deliver over 8x higher performance than the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release on a recent benchmark What’s New in MySQL Cluster 7.2 MySQL Cluster 7.2 was released as GA (Generally Available) in February 2012, delivering many enhancements to performance on complex queries, new NoSQL Key / Value API, cross-data center replication and ease-of-use. These enhancements are summarized in the Figure below, and detailed in the MySQL Cluster New Features whitepaper Figure 1: Next Generation Web Services, Cross Data Center Replication and Ease-of-Use Once of the key enhancements delivered in MySQL Cluster 7.2 is extensions made to the multi-threading processes of the data nodes. Multi-Threaded Data Node Extensions The MySQL Cluster 7.2 data node is now functionally divided into seven thread types: 1) Local Data Manager threads (ldm). Note – these are sometimes also called LQH threads. 2) Transaction Coordinator threads (tc) 3) Asynchronous Replication threads (rep) 4) Schema Management threads (main) 5) Network receiver threads (recv) 6) Network send threads (send) 7) IO threads Each of these thread types are discussed in more detail below. MySQL Cluster 7.2 increases the maximum number of LDM threads from 4 to 16. The LDM contains the actual data, which means that when using 16 threads the data is more heavily partitioned (this is automatic in MySQL Cluster). Each LDM thread maintains its own set of data partitions, index partitions and REDO log. The number of LDM partitions per data node is not dynamically configurable, but it is possible, however, to map more than one partition onto each LDM thread, providing flexibility in modifying the number of LDM threads. The TC domain stores the state of in-flight transactions. This means that every new transaction can easily be assigned to a new TC thread. Testing has shown that in most cases 1 TC thread per 2 LDM threads is sufficient, and in many cases even 1 TC thread per 4 LDM threads is also acceptable. Testing also demonstrated that in some instances where the workload needed to sustain very high update loads it is necessary to configure 3 to 4 TC threads per 4 LDM threads. In the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release, only one TC thread was available. This limit has been increased to 16 TC threads in MySQL Cluster 7.2. The TC domain also manages the Adaptive Query Localization functionality introduced in MySQL Cluster 7.2 that significantly enhanced complex query performance by pushing JOIN operations down to the data nodes. Asynchronous Replication was separated into its own thread with the release of MySQL Cluster 7.1, and has not been modified in the latest 7.2 release. To scale the number of TC threads, it was necessary to separate the Schema Management domain from the TC domain. The schema management thread has little load, so is implemented with a single thread. The Network receiver domain was bound to 1 thread in MySQL Cluster 7.1. With the increase of threads in MySQL Cluster 7.2 it is also necessary to increase the number of recv threads to 8. This enables each receive thread to service one or more sockets used to communicate with other nodes the Cluster. The Network send thread is a new thread type introduced in MySQL Cluster 7.2. Previously other threads handled the sending operations themselves, which can provide for lower latency. To achieve highest throughput however, it has been necessary to create dedicated send threads, of which 8 can be configured. It is still possible to configure MySQL Cluster 7.2 to a legacy mode that does not use any of the send threads – useful for those workloads that are most sensitive to latency. The IO Thread is the final thread type and there have been no changes to this domain in MySQL Cluster 7.2. Multiple IO threads were already available, which could be configured to either one thread per open file, or to a fixed number of IO threads that handle the IO traffic. Except when using compression on disk, the IO threads typically have a very light load. Benchmarking the Scalability Enhancements The scalability enhancements discussed above have made it possible to scale CPU usage of each data node to more than 5x of that possible in MySQL Cluster 7.1. In addition, a number of bottlenecks have been removed, making it possible to scale data node performance by even more than 5x. Figure 2: MySQL Cluster 7.2 Delivers 8.4x Higher Performance than 7.1 The flexAsynch benchmark was used to compare MySQL Cluster 7.2 performance to 7.1 across an 8-node Intel Xeon x5670-based cluster of dual socket commodity servers (6 cores each). As the results demonstrate, MySQL Cluster 7.2 delivers over 8x higher performance per data nodes than MySQL Cluster 7.1. More details of this and other benchmarks will be published in a new whitepaper – coming soon, so stay tuned! In a following blog post, I’ll provide recommendations on optimum thread configurations for different types of server processor. You can also learn more from the Best Practices Guide to Optimizing Performance of MySQL Cluster Conclusion MySQL Cluster has achieved a range of impressive benchmark results, and set in context with the previous 7.1 release, is able to deliver over 8x higher performance per node. As a result, the multi-threaded data node extensions not only serve to increase performance of MySQL Cluster, they also enable users to achieve significantly improved levels of utilization from current and future generations of massively multi-core, multi-thread processor designs.

Read the article
C#: Does an IDisposable in a Halted Iterator Dispose?

- by James Michael Hare

If that sounds confusing, let me give you an example. Let's say you expose a method to read a database of products, and instead of returning a List<Product> you return an IEnumerable<Product> in iterator form (yield return). This accomplishes several good things: The IDataReader is not passed out of the Data Access Layer which prevents abstraction leak and resource leak potentials. You don't need to construct a full List<Product> in memory (which could be very big) if you just want to forward iterate once. If you only want to consume up to a certain point in the list, you won't incur the database cost of looking up the other items. This could give us an example like: 1: // a sample data access object class to do standard CRUD operations. 2: public class ProductDao 3: { 4: private DbProviderFactory _factory = SqlClientFactory.Instance 5: 6: // a method that would retrieve all available products 7: public IEnumerable<Product> GetAvailableProducts() 8: { 9: // must create the connection 10: using (var con = _factory.CreateConnection()) 11: { 12: con.ConnectionString = _productsConnectionString; 13: con.Open(); 14: 15: // create the command 16: using (var cmd = _factory.CreateCommand()) 17: { 18: cmd.Connection = con; 19: cmd.CommandText = _getAllProductsStoredProc; 20: cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; 21: 22: // get a reader and pass back all results 23: using (var reader = cmd.ExecuteReader()) 24: { 25: while(reader.Read()) 26: { 27: yield return new Product 28: { 29: Name = reader["product_name"].ToString(), 30: ... 31: }; 32: } 33: } 34: } 35: } 36: } 37: } The database details themselves are irrelevant. I will say, though, that I'm a big fan of using the System.Data.Common classes instead of your provider specific counterparts directly (SqlCommand, OracleCommand, etc). This lets you mock your data sources easily in unit testing and also allows you to swap out your provider in one line of code. In fact, one of the shared components I'm most proud of implementing was our group's DatabaseUtility library that simplifies all the database access above into one line of code in a thread-safe and provider-neutral way. I went with my own flavor instead of the EL due to the fact I didn't want to force internal company consumers to use the EL if they didn't want to, and it made it easy to allow them to mock their database for unit testing by providing a MockCommand, MockConnection, etc that followed the System.Data.Common model. One of these days I'll blog on that if anyone's interested. Regardless, you often have situations like the above where you are consuming and iterating through a resource that must be closed once you are finished iterating. For the reasons stated above, I didn't want to return IDataReader (that would force them to remember to Dispose it), and I didn't want to return List<Product> (that would force them to hold all products in memory) -- but the first time I wrote this, I was worried. What if you never consume the last item and exit the loop? Are the reader, command, and connection all disposed correctly? Of course, I was 99.999999% sure the creators of C# had already thought of this and taken care of it, but inspection in Reflector was difficult due to the nature of the state machines yield return generates, so I decided to try a quick example program to verify whether or not Dispose() will be called when an iterator is broken from outside the iterator itself -- i.e. before the iterator reports there are no more items. So I wrote a quick Sequencer class with a Dispose() method and an iterator for it. Yes, it is COMPLETELY contrived: 1: // A disposable sequence of int -- yes this is completely contrived... 2: internal class Sequencer : IDisposable 3: { 4: private int _i = 0; 5: private readonly object _mutex = new object(); 6: 7: // Constructs an int sequence. 8: public Sequencer(int start) 9: { 10: _i = start; 11: } 12: 13: // Gets the next integer 14: public int GetNext() 15: { 16: lock (_mutex) 17: { 18: return _i++; 19: } 20: } 21: 22: // Dispose the sequence of integers. 23: public void Dispose() 24: { 25: // force output immediately (flush the buffer) 26: Console.WriteLine("Disposed with last sequence number of {0}!", _i); 27: Console.Out.Flush(); 28: } 29: } And then I created a generator (infinite-loop iterator) that did the using block for auto-Disposal: 1: // simply defines an extension method off of an int to start a sequence 2: public static class SequencerExtensions 3: { 4: // generates an infinite sequence starting at the specified number 5: public static IEnumerable<int> GetSequence(this int starter) 6: { 7: // note the using here, will call Dispose() when block terminated. 8: using (var seq = new Sequencer(starter)) 9: { 10: // infinite loop on this generator, means must be bounded by caller! 11: while(true) 12: { 13: yield return seq.GetNext(); 14: } 15: } 16: } 17: } This is really the same conundrum as the database problem originally posed. Here we are using iteration (yield return) over a large collection (infinite sequence of integers). If we cut the sequence short by breaking iteration, will that using block exit and hence, Dispose be called? Well, let's see: 1: // The test program class 2: public class IteratorTest 3: { 4: // The main test method. 5: public static void Main() 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("Going to consume 10 of infinite items"); 8: Console.Out.Flush(); 9: 10: foreach(var i in 0.GetSequence()) 11: { 12: // could use TakeWhile, but wanted to output right at break... 13: if(i >= 10) 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("Breaking now!"); 16: Console.Out.Flush(); 17: break; 18: } 19: 20: Console.WriteLine(i); 21: Console.Out.Flush(); 22: } 23: 24: Console.WriteLine("Done with loop."); 25: Console.Out.Flush(); 26: } 27: } So, what do we see? Do we see the "Disposed" message from our dispose, or did the Dispose get skipped because from an "eyeball" perspective we should be locked in that infinite generator loop? Here's the results: 1: Going to consume 10 of infinite items 2: 0 3: 1 4: 2 5: 3 6: 4 7: 5 8: 6 9: 7 10: 8 11: 9 12: Breaking now! 13: Disposed with last sequence number of 11! 14: Done with loop. Yes indeed, when we break the loop, the state machine that C# generates for yield iterate exits the iteration through the using blocks and auto-disposes the IDisposable correctly. I must admit, though, the first time I wrote one, I began to wonder and that led to this test. If you've never seen iterators before (I wrote a previous entry here) the infinite loop may throw you, but you have to keep in mind it is not a linear piece of code, that every time you hit a "yield return" it cedes control back to the state machine generated for the iterator. And this state machine, I'm happy to say, is smart enough to clean up the using blocks correctly. I suspected those wily guys and gals at Microsoft engineered it well, and I wasn't disappointed. But, I've been bitten by assumptions before, so it's good to test and see. Yes, maybe you knew it would or figured it would, but isn't it nice to know? And as those campy 80s G.I. Joe cartoon public service reminders always taught us, "Knowing is half the battle...". Technorati Tags: C#,.NET

Read the article
.NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

- by RobertChipperfield

One of the great things about working at Red Gate is getting to play with new technology - and right now, that means mobile. A few weeks ago, we decided that a little research into the tablet computing arena was due, and purely from a numbers point of view, that suggested the iPad as a good target device. A quick trip to iPhoneDevCon in San Diego later, and Marine and I came back full of ideas, and with some concept of how iOS development was meant to work. Here's how we went from there to the release of Stacks & Heaps, our geeky take on the classic "Snakes & Ladders" game. Step 1: Buy a Mac I've played with many operating systems in my time: from the original BBC Model B, through DOS, Windows, Linux, and others, but I'd so far managed to avoid buying fruit-flavoured computer hardware! If you want to develop for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, that's the first thing that needs to change. If you've not used OS X before, the first thing you'll realise is that everything is different! In the interests of avoiding a flame war in the comments section, I'll only go so far as to say that a lot of my Windows-flavoured muscle memory no longer worked. If you're in the UK, you'll also realise your keyboard is lacking a # key, and that " and @ are the other way around from normal. The wonderful Ukelele keyboard layout editor restores some sanity here, as long as you don't look at the keyboard when you're typing. I couldn't give up the PC entirely, but a handy application called Synergy comes to the rescue - it lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. There's a few limitations: Alt-Tab always seems to go to the Mac, and Windows 7's UAC dialogs require the local mouse for security reasons, but it gets you a long way at least. Step 2: Register as an Apple Developer You can register as an Apple Developer free of charge, and that lets you download XCode and the iOS SDK. You also get the iPhone / iPad emulator, which is handy, since you'll need to be a paid member before you can deploy your apps to a real device. You can either enroll as an individual, or as a company. They both cost the same ($99/year), but there's a few differences between them. If you register as a company, you can add multiple developers to your team (all for the same $99 - not $99 per developer), and you get to use your company name in the App Store. However, you'll need to send off significantly more documentation to Apple, and I suspect the process takes rather longer than for an individual, where they just need to verify some credit card details. Here's a tip: if you're registering as a company, do so as early as possible. The approval process can take a while to complete, so get the application in in plenty of time. Step 3: Learn to love the square brackets! Objective-C is the language of the iPad. C and C++ are also supported, and if you're doing some serious game development, you'll probably spend most of your time in C++ talking OpenGL, but for forms-based apps, you'll be interacting with a lot of the Objective-C SDK. Like shifting from Ctrl-C to Cmd-C, it feels a little odd at first, with the familiar string.format(.) turning into: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hello world, it's %@", [NSDate date]]; Thankfully XCode's auto-complete is normally passable, if not up to Visual Studio's standards, which coupled with a huge amount of content on Stack Overflow means you'll soon get to grips with the API. You'll need to get used to some terminology changes, though; here's an incomplete approximation: Coming from a .NET background, there's some luxuries you no longer have developing Objective C in XCode: Generics! Remember back in .NET 1.1, when all collections were just objects? Yup, we're back there now. ReSharper. Or, more generally, very much refactoring support. The not-many-keystrokes to rename a class, its file, and al references to it in Visual Studio turns into a much more painful experience in XCode. Garbage collection. This is actually rather less of an issue than you might expect: if you follow the rules, the reference counting provided by Objective C gets you a long way without too much pain. Circular references are their usual problematic self, though. Decent exception handling. You do have exceptions, but they're nowhere near as widely used. Generally, if something goes wrong, you get nil (see translation table above) back. Which brings me on to. Calling a method on a nil object isn't a failure - it just returns nil itself! There's many arguments for and against this, but personally I fall into the "stuff should fail as quickly and explicitly as possible" camp. Less specifically, I found that there's more chance of code failing at runtime rather than getting caught at compile-time: using the @selector(.) syntax to pass a method signature isn't (can't be) checked at compile-time, so the first you know about a typo is a crash when you try and call it. The solution to this is of course lots of great testing, both automated and manual, but I still find comfort in provably correct type safety being enforced in addition to testing. Step 4: Submit to the App Store Assuming you want to distribute to more than a handful of devices, you're going to need to submit your app to the Apple App Store. There's a few gotchas in terms of getting builds signed with the right certificates, and you'll be bouncing around between XCode and iTunes Connect a fair bit, but eventually you get everything checked off the to-do list, and are ready to upload your first binary! With some amount of anticipation, I pressed the Upload button in XCode, ready to release our creation into the world, but was instead greeted by an error informing me my XML file was malformed. Uh. A little Googling later, and it turned out that a simple rename from "Stacks&Heaps.app" to "StacksAndHeaps.app" worked around an XML escaping bug, and we were good to go. The next step is to wait for approval (or otherwise). After a couple of weeks of intensive development, this part is agonising. Did we make it? The Apple jury is still out at the moment, but our fingers are firmly crossed! In the meantime, you can see some screenshots and leave us your email address if you'd like us to get in touch when it does go live at the MobileFoo website. Step 5: Profit! Actually, that wasn't the idea here: Stacks & Heaps is free; there's no adverts, and we're not going to sell all your data either. So why did we do it? We wanted to get an idea of what it's like to move from coding for a desktop environment, to something completely different. We don't know whether in a year's time, the iPad will still be the dominant force, or whether Android will have smoothed out some bugs, tweaked the performance, and polished the UI, but I think it's a fairly sure bet that the tablet form factor is here to stay. We want to meet people who are using it, start chatting to them, and find out about some of the pain they're feeling. What better way to do that than do it ourselves, and get to write a cool game in the process?

Read the article
Establishing WebLogic Server HTTPS Trust of IIS Using a Microsoft Local Certificate Authority

- by user647124

Everyone agrees that self-signed and demo certificates for SSL and HTTPS should never be used in production and preferred not to be used elsewhere. Most self-signed and demo certificates are provided by vendors with the intention that they are used only to integrate within the same environment. In a vendor’s perfect world all application servers in a given enterprise are from the same vendor, which makes this lack of interoperability in a non-production environment an advantage. For us working in the real world, where not only do we not use a single vendor everywhere but have to make do with self-signed certificates for all but production, testing HTTPS between an IIS ASP.NET service provider and a WebLogic J2EE consumer application can be very frustrating to set up. It was for me, especially having found many blogs and discussion threads where various solutions were described but did not quite work and were all mostly similar but just a little bit different. To save both you and my future (who always seems to forget the hardest-won lessons) all of the pain and suffering, I am recording the steps that finally worked here for reference and sanity. How You Know You Need This The first cold clutches of dread that tells you it is going to be a long day is when you attempt to a WSDL published by IIS in WebLogic over HTTPS and you see the following: <Jul 30, 2012 2:51:31 PM EDT> <Warning> <Security> <BEA-090477> <Certificate chain received from myserver.mydomain.com - 10.555.55.123 was not trusted causing SSL handshake failure.> weblogic.wsee.wsdl.WsdlException: Failed to read wsdl file from url due to -- javax.net.ssl.SSLKeyException: [Security:090477]Certificate chain received from myserver02.mydomain.com - 10.555.55.123 was not trusted causing SSL handshake failure. The above is what started a three day sojourn into searching for a solution. Even people who had solved it before would tell me how they did, and then shrug when I demonstrated that the steps did not end in the success they claimed I would experience. Rather than torture you with the details of everything I did that did not work, here is what finally did work. Export the Certificates from IE First, take the offending WSDL URL and paste it into IE (if you have an internal Microsoft CA, you have IE, even if you don’t use it in favor of some other browser). To state the semi-obvious, if you received the error above there is a certificate configured for the IIS host of the service and the SSL port has been configured properly. Otherwise there would be a different error, usually about the site not found or connection failed. Once the WSDL loads, to the right of the address bar there will be a lock icon. Click the lock and then click View Certificates in the resulting dialog (if you do not have a lock icon but do have a Certificate Error message, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931850 for steps to install the certificate then you can continue from the point of finding the lock icon). Figure 1: View Certificates in IE Next, select the Details tab in the resulting dialog Figure 2: Use Certificate Details to Export Certificate Click Copy to File, then Next, then select the Base-64 encoded option for the format Figure 3: Select the Base-64 encoded option for the format For the sake of simplicity, I choose to save this to the root of the WebLogic domain. It will work from anywhere, but later you will need to type in the full path rather than just the certificate name if you save it elsewhere. Figure 4: Browse to Save Location Figure 5: Save the Certificate to the Domain Root for Convenience This is the point where I ran into some confusion. Some articles mentioned exporting the entire chain of certificates. This supposedly works for some types of certificates, or if you have a few other tools and the time to learn them. For the SSL experts out there, they already have these tools, know how to use them well, and should not be wasting their time reading this article meant for folks who just want to get things wired up and back to unit testing and development. For the rest of us, the easiest way to make sure things will work is to just export all the links in the chain individually and let WebLogic Server worry about re-assembling them into a chain (which it does quite nicely). While perhaps not the most elegant solution, the multi-step process is easy to repeat and uses only tools that are immediately available and require no learning curve. So… Next, go to Tools then Internet Options then the Content tab and click Certificates. Go to the Trust Root Certificate Authorities tab and find the certificate root for your Microsoft CA cert (look for the Issuer of the certificate you exported earlier). Figure 6: Trusted Root Certification Authorities Tab Export this one the same way as before, with a different name Figure 7: Use a Unique Name for Each Certificate Repeat this once more for the Intermediate Certificate tab. Import the Certificates to the WebLogic Domain Now, open an command prompt, navigate to [WEBLOGIC_DOMAIN_ROOT]\bin and execute setDomainEnv. You should then be in the root of the domain. If not, CD to the domain root. Assuming you saved the certificate in the domain root, execute the following: keytool -importcert -alias [ALIAS-1] -trustcacerts -file [FULL PATH TO .CER 1] -keystore truststore.jks -storepass [PASSWORD] An example with the variables filled in is: keytool -importcert -alias IIS-1 -trustcacerts -file microsftcert.cer -keystore truststore.jks -storepass password After several lines out output you will be prompted with: Trust this certificate? [no]: The correct answer is ‘yes’ (minus the quotes, of course). You’ll you know you were successful if the response is: Certificate was added to keystore If not, check your typing, as that is generally the source of an error at this point. Repeat this for all three of the certificates you exported, changing the [ALIAS-1] and [FULL PATH TO .CER 1] value each time. For example: keytool -importcert -alias IIS-1 -trustcacerts -file microsftcert.cer -keystore truststore.jks -storepass password keytool -importcert -alias IIS-2 -trustcacerts -file microsftcertRoot.cer -keystore truststore.jks -storepass password keytool -importcert -alias IIS-3 -trustcacerts -file microsftcertIntermediate.cer -keystore truststore.jks -storepass password In the above we created a new JKS key store. You can re-use an existing one by changing the name of the JKS file to one you already have and change the password to the one that matches that JKS file. For the DemoTrust.jks that is included with WebLogic the password is DemoTrustKeyStorePassPhrase. An example here would be: keytool -importcert -alias IIS-1 -trustcacerts -file microsoft.cer -keystore DemoTrust.jks -storepass DemoTrustKeyStorePassPhrase keytool -importcert -alias IIS-2 -trustcacerts -file microsoftRoot.cer -keystore DemoTrust.jks -storepass DemoTrustKeyStorePassPhrase keytool -importcert -alias IIS-2 -trustcacerts -file microsoftInter.cer -keystore DemoTrust.jks -storepass DemoTrustKeyStorePassPhrase Whichever keystore you use, you can check your work with: keytool -list -keystore truststore.jks -storepass password Where “truststore.jks” and “password” can be replaced appropriately if necessary. The output will look something like this: Figure 8: Output from keytool -list -keystore Update the WebLogic Keystore Configuration If you used an existing keystore rather than creating a new one, you can restart your WebLogic Server and skip the rest of this section. For those of us who created a new one because that is the instructions we found online… Next, we need to tell WebLogic to use the JKS file (truststore.jks) we just created. Log in to the WebLogic Server Administration Console and navigate to Servers > AdminServer > Configuration > Keystores. Scroll down to “Custom Trust Keystore:” and change the value to “truststore.jks” and the value of “Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase:” and “Confirm Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase:” to the password you used when earlier, then save your changes. You will get a nice message similar to the following: Figure 9: To Be Safe, Restart Anyways The “No restarts are necessary” is somewhat of an exaggeration. If you want to be able to use the keystore you may need restart the server(s). To save myself aggravation, I always do. Your mileage may vary. Conclusion That should get you there. If there are some erroneous steps included for your situation in particular, I will offer up a semi-apology as the process described above does not take long at all and if there is one step that could be dropped from it, is still much faster than trying to figure this out from other sources.

Read the article
The Birth of a Method - Where did OUM come from?

- by user702549

It seemed fitting to start this blog entry with the OUM vision statement. The vision for the Oracle® Unified Method (OUM) is to support the entire Enterprise IT lifecycle, including support for the successful implementation of every Oracle product. Well, it’s that time of year again; we just finished testing and packaging OUM 5.6. It will be released for general availability to qualifying customers and partners this month. Because of this, I’ve been reflecting back on how the birth of Oracle’s Unified method - OUM came about. As the Release Director of OUM, I’ve been honored to package every method release. No, maybe you’d say it’s not so special. Of course, anyone can use packaging software to create an .exe file. But to me, it is pretty special, because so many people work together to make each release come about. The rich content that results is what makes OUM’s history worth talking about. To me, professionally speaking, working on OUM, well it’s been “a labor of love”. My youngest child was just 8 years old when OUM was born, and she’s now in High School! Watching her grow and change has been fascinating, if you ask her, she’s grown up hearing about OUM. My son would often walk into my home office and ask “How is OUM today, Mom?” I am one of many people that take care of OUM, and have watched the method “mature” over these last 6 years. Maybe that makes me a "Method Mom" (someone in one of my classes last year actually said this outloud) but there are so many others who collaborate and care about OUM Development. I’ve thought about writing this blog entry for a long time just to reflect on how far the Method has come. Each release, as I prepare the OUM Contributors list, I see how many people’s experience and ideas it has taken to create this wealth of knowledge, process and task guidance as well as templates and examples. If you’re wondering how many people, just go into OUM select the resources button on the top of most pages of the method, and on that resources page click the ABOUT link. So now back to my nostalgic moment as I finished release 5.6 packaging. I reflected back, on all the things that happened that cause OUM to become not just a dream but to actually come to fruition. Here are some key conditions that make it possible for each release of the method: A vision to have one method instead of many methods, thereby focusing on deeper, richer content People within Oracle’s consulting Organization willing to contribute to OUM providing Subject Matter Experts who are willing to write down and share what they know. Oracle’s continued acquisition of software companies, the need to assimilate high quality existing materials from these companies The need to bring together people from very different backgrounds and provide a common language to support Oracle Product implementations that often involve multiple product families What came first, and then what was the strategy? Initially OUM 4.0 was based on Oracle’s J2EE Custom Development Method (JCDM), it was a good “backbone” (work breakdown structure) it was Unified Process based, and had good content around UML as well as custom software development. But it needed to be extended in order to achieve the OUM Vision. What happened after that was to take in the “best of the best”, the legacy and acquired methods were scheduled for assimilation into OUM, one release after another. We incrementally built OUM. We didn’t want to lose any of the expertise that was reflected in AIM (Oracle’s legacy Application Implementation Method), Compass (People Soft’s Application implementation method) and so many more. When was OUM born? OUM 4.1 published April 30, 2006. This release allowed Oracles Advanced Technology groups to begin the very first implementations of Fusion Middleware. In the early days of the Method we would prepare several releases a year. Our iterative release development cycle began and continues to be refined with each Method release. Now we typically see one major release each year. The OUM release development cycle is not unlike many Oracle Implementation projects in that we need to gather requirements, prioritize, prepare the content, test package and then go production. Typically we develop an OUM release MoSCoW (must have, should have, could have, and won’t have) right after the prior release goes out. These are the high level requirements. We break the timeframe into increments, frequent checkpoints that help us assess the content and progress is measured through frequent checkpoints. We work as a team to prioritize what should be done in each increment. Yes, the team provides the estimates for what can be done within a particular increment. We sometimes have Method Development workshops (physically or virtually) to accelerate content development on a particular subject area, that is where the best content results. As the written content nears the final stages, it goes through edit and evaluation through peer reviews, and then moves into the release staging environment. Then content freeze and testing of the method pack take place. This iterative cycle is run using the OUM artifacts that make sense “fit for purpose”, project plans, MoSCoW lists, Test plans are just a few of the OUM work products we use on a Method Release project. In 2007 OUM 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 were published. With the release of 4.5 our Custom BI Method (Data Warehouse Method FastTrack) was assimilated into OUM. These early releases helped us align Oracle’s Unified method with other industry standards Then in 2008 we made significant changes to the OUM “Backbone” to support Applications Implementation projects with that went to the OUM 5.0 release. Now things started to get really interesting. Next we had some major developments in the Envision focus area in the area of Enterprise Architecture. We acquired some really great content from the former BEA, Liquid Enterprise Method (LEM) along with some SMEs who were willing to work at bringing this content into OUM. The Service Oriented Architecture content in OUM is extensive and can help support the successful implementation of Fusion Middleware, as well as Fusion Applications. Of course we’ve developed a wealth of OUM training materials that work also helps to improve the method content. It is one thing to write “how to”, and quite another to be able to teach people how to use the materials to improve the success of their projects. I’ve learned so much by teaching people how to use OUM. What's next? So here toward the end of 2012, what’s in store in OUM 5.6, well, I’m sure you won’t be surprised the answer is Cloud Computing. More details to come in the next couple of weeks! The best part of being involved in the development of OUM is to see how many people have “adopted” OUM over these six years, Clients, Partners, and Oracle Consultants. The content just gets better with each release. I’d love to hear your comments on how OUM has evolved, and ideas for new content you’d like to see in the upcoming releases.

Read the article
CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013Popular ReleasesMastersign.Expressions: Mastersign.Expressions v0.4.2: added support for if(<cond>, <true-part>, <false-part>) fixed multithreading issue with rand() improved demo applicationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module: NB_Store v2.3.6 Rel0: v2.3.6 Is now DNN6 and DNN7 compatible Important : During update this install with overwrite the menu.xml setting, if you have changed this then make a backup before you upgrade and reapply your changes after the upgrade. Please view the following documentation if you are installing and configuring this module for the first time System Requirements Skill requirements Downloads and documents Step by step guide to a working store Please ask all questions in the Discussions tab. Document.Editor: 2013.26: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.26: New Insert Chart Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWsus Package Publisher: Release V1.2.1307.01: Fix an issue in the UI, approvals are not shown correctly in the 'Report' tabDirectX Tool Kit: July 2013: July 1, 2013 VS 2013 Preview projects added and updates for DirectXMath 3.05 vectorcall Added use of sRGB WIC metadata for JPEG, PNG, and TIFF SaveToWIC functions updated with new optional setCustomProps parameter and error check with optional targetFormatCore Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: new_root.zip: Verison 1.0JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 4.1.736: Improved strinfigy performance New serializing feature New anonymous type support in constructorsDotNetNuke® IFrame: IFrame 04.05.00: New DNN6/7 Manifest file and Azure Compatibility.VidCoder: 1.5.2 Beta: Fixed crash on presets with an invalid bitrate.Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.1: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.1 has new facilities for defining and manipulating character classes. These changes make the construction of large Unicode character classes more convenient. The runtime code for performing automaton backup has been re-implemented, and is now faster for scanners that need backup. Source CodeThe distribution contains a complete VS2010 project for the appli...ZXMAK2: Version 2.7.5.7: - fix TZX emulation (Bruce Lee, Zynaps) - fix ATM 16 colors for border - add memory module PROFI 512K; add PROFI V03 rom image; fix PROFI 3.XX configTwitter image Downloader: Twitter Image Downloader 2 with Installer: Application file with Install shield and Dot Net 4.0 redistributableUltimate Music Tagger: Ultimate Music Tagger 1.0.0.0: First release of Ultimate Music TaggerBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.2: 2013.06.28 Ver5.9.2 (1) ??????????(????SMTP?????)?????????? (2) HTTPS???????????Outlook 2013 Add-In: Configuration Form: This new version includes the following changes: - Refactored code a bit. - Removing configuration from main form to gain more space to display items. - Moved configuration to separate form. You can click the little "gear" icon to access the configuration form (still very simple). - Added option to show past day appointments from the selected day (previous in time, that is). - Added some tooltips. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it ...Terminals: Version 3.0 - Release: Changes since version 2.0:Choose 100% portable or installed version Removed connection warning when running RDP 8 (Windows 8) client Fixed Active directory search Extended Active directory search by LDAP filters Fixed single instance mode when running on Windows Terminal server Merged usage of Tags and Groups Added columns sorting option in tables No UAC prompts on Windows 7 Completely new file persistence data layer New MS SQL persistence layer (Store data in SQL database)...NuGet: NuGet 2.6: Released June 26, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.6Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0 Beta: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, and cross platform debugging support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuewiStN...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for Windows Azure Media Services Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expectin...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...New ProjectsALM Rangers DevOps Tooling and Guidance: Practical tooling and guidance that will enable teams to realize a faster deployment based on continuous feedback.Core Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: Free core Server 2012 powershell scripts and batch files that replace the non-existent hyper-v manager, vmconnect and mstsc.Enhanced Deployment Service (EDS): EDS is a web service based utility designed to extend the deployment capabilities of administrators with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.ExtendedDialogBox: Libreria DialogBoxJazdy: This project is here only because we wanted to take advantage of a public git server.Mon Examen: This web interface is meant to make examinationsneet: summaryOrchard Multi-Choice Voting: A multiple choice voting Orchard module.Particle Swarm Optimization Solving Quadratic Assignment Problem: This project is submitted for the solving of QAP using PSO algorithms with addition of some modification Porjects: 23123123PPL Power Pack: PPL Power PackProperty Builder: Visual Studio tool for speeding up process of coding class properties getters and setters.RedRuler for Redline: I tried some on-screen rulers, none of them help me measure the UI element quickly based on the Redline. So I decided to created this handy RedRuler tool. Royale Living: Mahindra Royale Community PortalSearch and booking Hotel or Tours: Ð? án nghiên c?u c?a sinh viên tdt theo mô hình mvc 4SystemBuilder.Show: This tool is a helper after you create your project in visual studio to create the respective objects and interface. TalentDesk: new ptojectTcmplex: The Training Center teaches many different kind of course such as English, French, Computer hardware and computer softwareTFS Reporting Guide: Provides guidance and samples to enable TFS users to generate reports based on WIT data.Umbraco AdaptiveImages: Adaptive Images Package for UmbracoVirtualNet - A ILcode interpreter/emulator written in C++/Assembly: VirtualNet is a interpreter/emulator for running .net code in native without having to install the .Net FrameWorkVisual Blocks: Visual Blocks ????IDE ????? ??????? ????? ????/?? Visual Studio and Cloud Based Mobile Device Testing: Practical guidance enabling field to remove blockers to adoption and to use and extend the Perfecto Mobile Cloud Device testing within the context of VS.Windows 8 Time Picker for Windows Phone: A Windows Phone implementation of the Time Picker control found in the Windows 8.1 Alarms app.???? - SmallBasic?: ?????????

Read the article
Design for complex ATG applications

- by Glen Borkowski

Overview Needless to say, some ATG applications are more complex than others. Some ATG applications support a single site, single language, single catalog, single currency, have a single development staff, single business team, and a relatively simple business model. The real complex applications have to support multiple sites, multiple languages, multiple catalogs, multiple currencies, a couple different development teams, multiple business teams, and a highly complex business model (and processes to go along with it). While it's still important to implement a proper design for simple applications, it's absolutely critical to do this for the complex applications. Why? It's all about time and money. If you are unable to manage your complex applications in an efficient manner, the cost of managing it will increase dramatically as will the time to get things done (time to market). On the positive side, your competition is most likely in the same situation, so you just need to be more efficient than they are. This article is intended to discuss a number of key areas to think about when designing complex applications on ATG. Some of this can get fairly technical, so it may help to get some background first. You can get enough of the required background information from this post. After reading that, come back here and follow along. Application Design Of all the various types of ATG applications out there, the most complex tend to be the ones in the telecommunications industry - especially the ones which operate in multiple countries. To get started, let's assume that we are talking about an application like that. One that has these properties: Operates in multiple countries - must support multiple sites, catalogs, languages, and currencies The organization is fairly loosely-coupled - single brand, but different businesses across different countries There is some common functionality across all sites in all countries There is some common functionality across different sites within the same country Sites within a single country may have some unique functionality - relative to other sites in the same country Complex product catalog (mostly in terms of bundles, eligibility, and compatibility) At this point, I'll assume you have read through the required reading and have a decent understanding of how ATG modules work... Code / configuration - assemble into modules When it comes to defining your modules for a complex application, there are a number of goals: Divide functionality between the modules in a way that maps to your business Group common functionality 'further down in the stack of modules' Provide a good balance between shared resources and autonomy for countries / sites Now I'll describe a high level approach to how you could accomplish those goals... Let's start from the bottom and work our way up. At the very bottom, you have the modules that ship with ATG - the 'out of the box' stuff. You want to make sure that you are leveraging all the modules that make sense in order to get the most value from ATG as possible - and less stuff you'll have to write yourself. On top of the ATG modules, you should create what we'll refer to as the Corporate Foundation Module described as follows: Sits directly on top of ATG modules Used by all applications across all countries and sites - this is the foundation for everyone Contains everything that is common across all countries / all sites Once established and settled, will change less frequently than other 'higher' modules Encapsulates as many enterprise-wide integrations as possible Will provide means of code sharing therefore less development / testing - faster time to market Contains a 'reference' web application (described below) The next layer up could be multiple modules for each country (you could replace this with region if that makes more sense). We'll define those modules as follows: Sits on top of the corporate foundation module Contains what is unique to all sites in a given country Responsible for managing any resource bundles for this country (to handle multiple languages) Overrides / replaces corporate integration points with any country-specific ones Finally, we will define what should be a fairly 'thin' (in terms of functionality) set of modules for each site as follows: Sits on top of the country it resides in module Contains what is unique for a given site within a given country Will mostly contain configuration, but could also define some unique functionality as well Contains one or more web applications The graphic below should help to indicate how these modules fit together: Web applications As described in the previous section, there are many opportunities for sharing (minimizing costs) as it relates to the code and configuration aspects of ATG modules. Web applications are also contained within ATG modules, however, sharing web applications can be a bit more difficult because this is what the end customer actually sees, and since each site may have some degree of unique look & feel, sharing becomes more challenging. One approach that can help is to define a 'reference' web application at the corporate foundation layer to act as a solid starting point for each site. Here's a description of the 'reference' web application: Contains minimal / sample reference styling as this will mostly be addressed at the site level web app Focus on functionality - ensure that core functionality is revealed via this web application Each individual site can use this as a starting point There may be multiple types of web apps (i.e. B2C, B2B, etc) There are some techniques to share web application assets - i.e. multiple web applications, defined in the web.xml, and it's worth investigating, but is out of scope here. Reference infrastructure In this complex environment, it is assumed that there is not a single infrastructure for all countries and all sites. It's more likely that different countries (or regions) could have their own solution for infrastructure. In this case, it will be advantageous to define a reference infrastructure which contains all the hardware and software that make up the core environment. Specifications and diagrams should be created to outline what this reference infrastructure looks like, as well as it's baseline cost and the incremental cost to scale up with volume. Having some consistency in terms of infrastructure will save time and money as new countries / sites come online. Here are some properties of the reference infrastructure: Standardized approach to setup of hardware Type and number of servers Defines application server, operating system, database, etc... - including vendor and specific versions Consistent naming conventions Provides a consistent base of terminology and understanding across environments Defines which ATG services run on which servers Production Staging BCC / Preview Each site can change as required to meet scale requirements Governance / organization It should be no surprise that the complex application we're talking about is backed by an equally complex organization. One of the more challenging aspects of efficiently managing a series of complex applications is to ensure the proper level of governance and organization. Here are some ideas and goals to work towards: Establish a committee to make enterprise-wide decisions that affect all sites Representation should be evenly distributed Should have a clear communication procedure Focus on high level business goals Evaluation of feature / function gaps and how that relates to ATG release schedule / roadmap Determine when to upgrade & ensure value will be realized Determine how to manage various levels of modules Who is responsible for maintaining corporate / country / site layers Determine a procedure for controlling what goes in the corporate foundation module Standardize on source code control, database, hardware, OS versions, J2EE app servers, development procedures, etc only use tested / proven versions - this is something that should be centralized so that every country / site does not have to worry about compatibility between versions Create a innovation team Quickly develop new features, perform proof of concepts All teams can benefit from their findings Summary At this point, it should be clear why the topics above (design, governance, organization, etc) are critical to being able to efficiently manage a complex application. To summarize, it's all about competitive advantage... You will need to reduce costs and improve time to market with the goal of providing a better experience for your end customers. You can reduce cost by reducing development time, time allocated to testing (don't have to test the corporate foundation module over and over again - do it once), and optimizing operations. With an efficient design, you can improve your time to market and your business will be more flexible and agile. Over time, you'll find that you're becoming more focused on offering functionality that is new to the market (creativity) and this will be rewarded - you're now a leader. In addition to the above, you'll realize soft benefits as well. Your staff will be operating in a culture based on sharing. You'll want to reward efforts to improve and enhance the foundation as this will benefit everyone. This culture will inspire innovation, which can only lend itself to your competitive advantage.

Read the article
Instructions on how to configure a WebLogic Cluster and use it with Oracle Http Server

- by Laurent Goldsztejn

On October 17th I delivered a webcast on WebLogic Clustering that included a demo with Apache as the proxy server. I realized that many steps are needed to set up the configuration I used during the demo. The purpose of this article is to go through these steps to show how quickly and easily one can define a new cluster and then proxy requests via an Oracle Http Server (OHS). The domain configuration wizard offers the option to create a cluster. The administration console or WLST, the Weblogic scripting tool can also be used to define a new cluster. It can be created at any time but the servers that will participate in it cannot be in a running state. Cluster Creation using the configuration wizard Network and architecture requirements need to be considered while choosing between unicast and multicast. Multicast Vs. Unicast with WebLogic Clustering is of great help to make the best decision between the two messaging modes. In addition, Configure Cluster offers details on each single field displayed above. After this initial configuration page, individual servers could be assigned to this newly created cluster although servers can be added later to the cluster. What is not recommended is for the Admin server to participate in a cluster as the main purpose of the Admin server is to perform the bulk of the processing for the domain. Servers need to stop before being assigned to a cluster. There is also no minimum number of servers that have to participate in the cluster. At this point the configuration should be done and the cluster created successfully. This can easily be verified from the console. Each clustered managed server can be launched to join the cluster. At startup the following messages should be logged for each clustered managed server: <Notice> <WeblogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to STARTING> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000197> <Listening for announcements from cluster using messaging_mode cluster messaging> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000133> <Waiting to synchronize with other running members of cluster_name> It's time to try sending requests to the cluster and we will do this with the help of Oracle Http Server to play the role of a proxy server to demonstrate load balancing. Proxy Server configuration The first step is to download Weblogic Server Web Server Plugin that will enhance the web server by handling requests aimed at being sent to the Weblogic cluster. For our test Oracle Http Server (OHS) will be used. However plug-ins are also available for Apache Http server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Oracle iPlanet Webserver or even WebLogic Server with the HttpClusterServlet. Once OHS is installed on the system, the configuration file, mod_wl_ohs.conf, will need to be altered to include Weblogic proxy specifics. First of all, add the following directive to instruct Apache to load the Weblogic shared object module extracted from the plugins file just downloaded. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl_ohs.so and then create an IfModule directive to encapsulate the following location block so that proxy will be enabled by path (each request including /wls will be directed directly to the WebLogic Cluster). You could also proxy requests by MIME type using MatchExpression in the Location block. <IfModule weblogic_module> <Location /wls> SetHandler weblogic-handler PathTrim /wls WebLogicCluster MS1_URL:port,MS2_URL:port Debug ON WLLogFile c:/tmp/global_proxy.log WLTempDir "c:/myTemp" DebugConfigInfo On </Location> </IfModule> SetHandler specifies the handler for the plug-in module PathTrim will instruct the plug-in to trim /w ls from the URL before forwarding the request to the cluster. The list of WebLogic Servers defined in WeblogicCluster could contain a mixed set of clustered and single servers. However, the dynamic list returned for this parameter will only contain valid clustered servers and may contain more servers if not all clustered servers are listed in WeblogicCluster. Testing proxy and load balancing It's time to start OHS web server which should at this point be configured correctly to proxy requests to the clustered servers. By default round-robin is the load balancing strategy set by WebLogic. Testing the load balancing can be easily done by disabling cookies on your browser given that a request containing a cookie attempts to connect to the primary server. If that attempt fails, the plug-in attempts to make a connection to the next available server in the list in a round-robin fashion. With cookies enabled, you could use two different browsers to test the load balancing with a JSP page that contains the following: <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" language="java" %> <% String path = request.getContextPath(); String getProtocol=request.getScheme(); String getDomain=request.getServerName(); String getPort=Integer.toString(request.getLocalPort()); String getPath = getProtocol+"://"+getDomain+":"+getPort+path+"/"; %> <html> <body> Receiving Server <%=getPath%> </body> </html> Assuming that you name the JSP page Test.jsp and the webapp that contains it TestApp, your browsers should open the following URL: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp Each browser should connect to a different clustered server and this simple JSP should confirm that. The webapp that contains the JSP needs to be deployed to the cluster. You can also verify that the load is correctly balanced by looking at the proxy log file. Each request generates a set of log entries that starts with : timestamp ================New Request: Each request is associated with a primary server and a secondary server if one is available. For our test request, the following entries should appear in the log as well:Using Uri /wls/TestApp/Test.jsp After trimming path: '/TestApp/Test.jsp' The final request string is '/TestApp/Test.jsp' If an exception occurs, it should also be logged in the proxy log file with the prefix:timestamp *******Exception type WeblogicBridgeConfig DebugConfigInfo enables runtime statistics and the production of configuration information. For security purposes, this parameter should be turned off in production. http://webserver_host:port/path/xyz.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig will display a proxy bridge page detailing the plugin configuration followed by runtime statistics which could help in diagnosing issues along with the analyzing of the proxy log file. In our example the url would be: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig Here is how the top section of the screen can look like: The bottom part of the page contains runtime statistics, here is a snippet of it (unrelated with the previous JSP example). This entire plugin configuration should be very similar with other web servers, what varies is the name of the proxy server configuration file. So, as you can see, it only takes a few minutes to configure a Weblogic cluster and get servers to join it.

Read the article
3D Ball Physics Theory: collision response on ground and against walls?

- by David

I'm really struggling to get a strong grasp on how I should be handling collision response in a game engine I'm building around a 3D ball physics concept. Think Monkey Ball as an example of the type of gameplay. I am currently using sphere-to-sphere broad phase, then AABB to OBB testing (the final test I am using right now is one that checks if one of the 8 OBB points crosses the planes of the object it is testing against). This seems to work pretty well, and I am getting back: Plane that object is colliding against (with a point on the plane, the plane's normal, and the exact point of intersection. I've tried what feels like dozens of different high-level strategies for handling these collisions, without any real success. I think my biggest problem is understanding how to handle collisions against walls in the x-y axes (left/right, front/back), which I want to have elasticity, and the ground (z-axis) where I want an elastic reaction if the ball drops down, but then for it to eventually normalize and be kept "on the ground" (not go into the ground, but also not continue bouncing). Without kluging something together, I'm positive there is a good way to handle this, my theories just aren't getting me all the way there. For physics modeling and movement, I am trying to use a Euler based setup with each object maintaining a position (and destination position prior to collision detection), a velocity (which is added onto the position to determine the destination position), and an acceleration (which I use to store any player input being put on the ball, as well as gravity in the z coord). Starting from when I detect a collision, what is a good way to approach the response to get the expected behavior in all cases? Thanks in advance to anyone taking the time to assist... I am grateful for any pointers, and happy to post any additional info or code if it is useful. UPDATE Based on Steve H's and eBusiness' responses below, I have adapted my collision response to what makes a lot more sense now. It was close to right before, but I didn't have all the right pieces together at the right time! I have one problem left to solve, and that is what is causing the floor collision to hit every frame. Here's the collision response code I have now for the ball, then I'll describe the last bit I'm still struggling to understand. // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... if (m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal) <= 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold // -- NOTE: this was an experimental idea I had to solve the "jitter" bug I'll describe below float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position + intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); The above snippet is run after a collision is detected on the ball (collider) with a collidee (floor in this case). With a dampening force of 1.8f, the ball's reflected "upward" velocity will eventually be overcome by gravity, so the ball will essentially be stuck on the floor. THIS is the problem I have now... the collision code is running every frame (since the ball's z-velocity is constantly pushing it a collision with the floor below it). The ball is not technically stuck, I can move it around still, but the movement is really goofy because the velocity and position keep getting affected adversely by the above snippet. I was experimenting with an idea to clamp the z-velocity to zero if it was "close to zero", but this didn't do what I think... probably because the very next frame the ball gets a new gravity acceleration applied to its velocity regardless (which I think is good, right?). Collisions with walls are as they used to be and work very well. It's just this last bit of "stickiness" to deal with. The camera is constantly jittering up and down by extremely small fractions too when the ball is "at rest". I'll keep playing with it... I like puzzles like this, especially when I think I'm close. Any final ideas on what I could be doing wrong here? UPDATE 2 Good news - I discovered I should be subtracting the intersection.diff from the m_position (position prior to collision). The intersection.diff is my calculation of the difference in the vector of position to destPosition from the intersection point to the position. In this case, adding it was causing my ball to always go "up" just a little bit, causing the jitter. By subtracting it, and moving that clamper for the velocity.z when close to zero to being above the dot product (and changing the test from <= 0 to < 0), I now have the following: // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... float dotprod = m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal); if (dotprod < 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration? // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position - intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); UpdateWorldMatrix(m_destWorldMatrix, m_destOBB, m_destPosition, false); This is MUCH better. No jitter, and the ball now "rests" at the floor, while still bouncing off the floor and walls. The ONLY thing left is that the ball is now virtually "stuck". He can move but at a much slower rate, likely because the else of my dot product test is only letting the ball move at a rate multiplied against the tRemaining... I think this is a better solution than I had previously, but still somehow not the right idea. BTW, I'm trying to journal my progress through this problem for anyone else with a similar situation - hopefully it will serve as some help, as many similar posts have for me over the years.

Read the article
JSP Precompilation for ADF Applications

- by Duncan Mills

A question that comes up from time to time, particularly in relation to build automation, is how to best pre-compile the .jspx and .jsff files in an ADF application. Thus ensuring that the app is ready to run as soon as it's installed into WebLogic. In the normal run of things, the first poor soul to hit a page pays the price and has to wait a little whilst the JSP is compiled into a servlet. Everyone else subsequently gets a free lunch. So it's a reasonable thing to want to do... Let Me List the Ways So forth to Google (other search engines are available)... which lead me to a fairly old article on WLDJ - Removing Performance Bottlenecks Through JSP Precompilation. Technololgy wise, it's somewhat out of date, but the one good point that it made is that it's really not very useful to try and use the precompile option in the weblogic.xml file. That's a really good observation - particularly if you're trying to integrate a pre-compile step into a Hudson Continuous Integration process. That same article mentioned an alternative approach for programmatic pre-compilation using weblogic.jspc. This seemed like a much more useful approach for a CI environment. However, weblogic.jspc is now obsoleted by weblogic.appc so we'll use that instead. Thanks to Steve for the pointer there. And So To APPC APPC has documentation - always a great place to start, and supports usage both from Ant via the wlappc task and from the command line using the weblogic.appc command. In my testing I took the latter approach. Usage, as the documentation will show you, is superficially pretty simple. The nice thing here, is that you can pass an existing EAR file (generated of course using OJDeploy) and that EAR will be updated in place with the freshly compiled servlet classes created from the JSPs. Appc takes care of all the unpacking, compiling and re-packing of the EAR for you. Neat. So we're done right...? Not quite. The Devil is in the Detail OK so I'm being overly dramatic but it's not all plain sailing, so here's a short guide to using weblogic.appc to compile a simple ADF application without pain. Information You'll Need The following is based on the assumption that you have a stand-alone WLS install with the Application Development Runtime installed and a suitable ADF enabled domain created. This could of course all be run off of a JDeveloper install as well 1. Your Weblogic home directory. Everything you need is relative to this so make a note. In my case it's c:\builds\wls_ps4. 2. Next deploy your EAR as normal and have a peek inside it using your favourite zip management tool. First of all look at the weblogic-application.xml inside the EAR /META-INF directory. Have a look for any library references. Something like this: <library-ref> <library-name>adf.oracle.domain</library-name> </library-ref> Make a note of the library ref (adf.oracle.domain in this case) , you'll need that in a second. 3. Next open the nested WAR file within the EAR and then have a peek inside the weblogic.xml file in the /WEB-INF directory. Again make a note of the library references. 4. Now start the WebLogic as per normal and run the WebLogic console app (e.g. http://localhost:7001/console). In the Domain Structure navigator, select Deployments. 5. For each of the libraries you noted down drill into the library definition and make a note of the .war, .ear or .jar that defines the library. For example, in my case adf.oracle.domain maps to "C:\ builds\ WLS_PS4\ oracle_common\ modules\ oracle. adf. model_11. 1. 1\ adf. oracle. domain. ear". Note the extra spaces that are salted throughout this string as it is displayed in the console - just to make it annoying, you'll have to strip these out. 6. Finally you'll need the location of the adfsharebean.jar. We need to pass this on the classpath for APPC so that the ADFConfigLifeCycleCallBack listener can be found. In a more complex app of your own you may need additional classpath entries as well. Now we're ready to go, and it's a simple matter of applying the information we have gathered into the relevant command line arguments for the utility A Simple CMD File to Run APPC Here's the stub .cmd file I'm using on Windows to run this. @echo offREM Stub weblogic.appc Runner setlocal set WLS_HOME=C:\builds\WLS_PS4 set ADF_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\oracle_common\modulesset COMMON_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\common\deployable-libraries set ADF_WEBAPP=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.view_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.webapp.war set ADF_DOMAIN=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.model_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.ear set JSTL=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jstl-1.2.war set JSF=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jsf-1.2.war set ADF_SHARE=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.share_11.1.1\adfsharembean.jar REM Set up the WebLogic Environment so appc can be found call %WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\server\bin\setWLSEnv.cmd CLS REM Now compile away!java weblogic.appc -verbose -library %ADF_WEBAPP%,%ADF_DOMAIN%,%JSTL%,%JSF% -classpath %ADF_SHARE% %1 endlocal Running the above on a target ADF .ear file will zip through and create all of the relevant compiled classes inside your nested .war file in the \WEB-INF\classes\jsp_servlet\ directory (but don't take my word for it, run it and take a look!) And So... In the immortal words of the Pet Shop Boys, Was It Worth It? Well, here's where you'll have to do your own testing. In my case here, with a simple ADF application, pre-compilation shaved an non-scientific "3 Elephants" off of the initial page load time for the first access of each page. That's a pretty significant payback for such a simple step to add into your CI process, so why not give it a go.

Read the article
7 Good Reasons to Upgrade E-Business Suite to the cloud

- by Lisa Schwartz

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} As promised here is blog Part 2: Why Upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite 12 in the cloud? 7 Good Reasons to Upgrade to E-Business Suite 12 in the Cloud: 1) Take advantage of new and improved features: from global sub-ledger accounting to mobile access for supply chain management to built-in extensions for information search and discovery. If you haven’t checked out the latest features yet, there are over 1000 EBS 12 enhancements. 2) Plan now to address any ongoing Oracle Support considerations and regulatory compliance requirements. EBS Release 11 support is ending soon. Based upon that information alone, you should have an EBS upgrade strategy and planning well underway. 3) Customizations got you worried? Expedite your next Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade – have Oracle identify all customizations, reduce un-needed customizations (EBS 12 has built-in many of your customizations) and during the upgrade keep all necessary customizations to run your business. 4) Migrating EBS to the cloud allows parallel migration and testing. Therefore no extra hardware purchases for the testing and upgrade. Business disruption is minimized. And, by moving to the cloud, this provides for smoother future upgrades that are based on your own timeline. 5) Oracle Experts will upgrade and run your EBS applications for you in the cloud. Free your IT resources to develop new services and work on projects that are critical to business innovation and competitiveness. Your IT resources will not be inundated with upgrade tasks! 6) Reallocate precious IT dollars to other projects, eliminate CapEx costs. 7) Oracle minimizes business risk by having enterprise class cloud services under stringent SLAs designed to run your business applications for you such as: a. Enterprise grade infrastructure b. World-class security and identity management c. Best practices in regulatory compliance: from classified federal gov’t standards, to healthcare HIPPA standards to meeting Financial Services requirements (PCI DSS) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 7 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Next Step: To help you upgrade and get to the cloud in the shortest period of time, Oracle has a program called Oracle Upgrade Factory for Oracle E-Business Suite 12. It offers a unique approach, seamlessly bundling Managed Cloud Services and Oracle Consulting Services together for an entire Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade and migration to a managed private cloud. Read the Oracle Upgrade Factory Solution Brief here. Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

Read the article
BizTalk: Internals: the Partner Direct Ports and the Orchestration Chains

- by Leonid Ganeline

Partner Direct Port is one of the BizTalk hidden gems. It opens simple ways to the several messaging patterns. This article based on the Kevin Lam’s blog article. The article is pretty detailed but it still leaves several unclear pieces. So I have created a sample and will show how it works from different perspectives. Requirements We should create an orchestration chain where the messages should be routed from the first stage to the second stage. The messages should not be modified. All messages has the same message type. Common artifacts Source code can be downloaded here. It is interesting but all orchestrations use only one port type. It is possible because all ports are one-way ports and use only one operation. I have added a B orchestration. It helps to test the sample, showing all test messages in channel. The Receive shape Filter is empty. A Receive Port (R_Shema1Direct) is a plain Direct Port. As you can see, a subscription expression of this direct port has only one part, the MessageType for our test schema: A Filer is empty but, as you know, a link from the Receive shape to the Port creates this MessageType expression. I use only one Physical Receive File port to send a message to all processes. Each orchestration outputs a Trace.WriteLine(“<Orchestration Name>”). Forward Binding This sample has three orchestrations: A_1, A_21 and A_22. A_1 is a sender, A_21 and A_22 are receivers. Here is a subscription of the A_1 orchestration: It has two parts A MessageType. The same was for the B orchestration. A ReceivePortID. There was no such parameter for the B orchestration. It was created because I have bound the orchestration port with Physical Receive File port. This binding means the PortID parameter is added to the subscription. How to set up the ports? All ports involved in the message exchange should be the same port type. It forces us to use the same operation and the same message type for the bound ports. This step as absolutely contra-intuitive. We have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for the sending orchestration, A_1. The first strange thing is it is not a partner orchestration we have to choose but an orchestration port. But the most strange thing is we have to choose exactly this orchestration and exactly this port.It is not a port from the partner, receive orchestrations, A_21 or A_22, but it is A_1 orchestration and S_SentFromA_1 port. Now we have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for the received orchestrations, A_21 and A_22. Nothing strange is here except a parameter name. We choose the port of the sender, A_1 orchestration and S_SentFromA_1 port. As you can see the Partner Orchestration parameter for the sender and receiver orchestrations is the same. Testing I dropped a test file in a file folder. There we go: A dropped file was received by B and by A_1 A_1 sent a message forward. A message was received by B, A_21, A_22 Let’s look at a context of a message sent by A_1 on the second step: A MessageType part. It is quite expected. A PartnerService, a ParnerPort, an Operation. All those parameters were set up in the Partner Orchestration parameter on both bound ports. Now let’s see a subscription of the A_21 and A_22 orchestrations. Now it makes sense. That’s why we have chosen such a strange value for the Partner Orchestration parameter of the sending orchestration. Inverse Binding This sample has three orchestrations: A_11, A_12 and A_2. A_11 and A_12 are senders, A_2 is receiver. How to set up the ports? All ports involved in the message exchange should be the same port type. It forces us to use the same operation and the same message type for the bound ports. This step as absolutely contra-intuitive. We have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for a receiving orchestration, A_2. The first strange thing is it is not a partner orchestration we have to choose but an orchestration port. But the most strange thing is we have to choose exactly this orchestration and exactly this port.It is not a port from the partner, sent orchestrations, A_11 or A_12, but it is A_2 orchestration and R_SentToA_2 port. Now we have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for the sending orchestrations, A_11 and A_12. Nothing strange is here except a parameter name. We choose the port of the sender, A_2 orchestration and R_SentToA_2 port. Testing I dropped a test file in a file folder. There we go: A dropped file was received by B, A_11 and by A_12 A_11 and A_12 sent two messages forward. The messages were received by B, A_2 Let’s see what was a context of a message sent by A_1 on the second step: A MessageType part. It is quite expected. A PartnerService, a ParnerPort, an Operation. All those parameters were set up in the Partner Orchestration parameter on both bound ports. Here is a subscription of the A_2 orchestration. Models I had a hard time trying to explain the Partner Direct Ports in simple terms. I have finished with this model: Forward Binding Receivers know a Sender. Sender doesn’t know Receivers. Publishers know a Subscriber. Subscriber doesn’t know Publishers. 1 –> 1 1 –> M Inverse Binding Senders know a Receiver. Receiver doesn’t know Senders. Subscribers know a Publisher. Publisher doesn’t know Subscribers. 1 –> 1 M –> 1 Notes Orchestration chain It’s worth to note, the Partner Direct Port Binding creates a chain opened from one side and closed from another. The Forward Binding: A new Receiver can be added at run-time. The Sender can not be changed without design-time changes in Receivers. The Inverse Binding: A new Sender can be added at run-time. The Receiver can not be changed without design-time changes in Senders.

Read the article
Creating a Document Library with Content Type in code

- by David Jacobus

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/djacobus/archive/2013/10/15/154360.aspxIn the past, I have shown how to create a list content type and add the content type to a list in code. As a Developer, many of the artifacts which we create are widgets which have a List or Document Library as the back end. We need to be able to create our applications (Web Part, etc.) without having the user involved except to enter the list item data. Today, I will show you how to do the same with a document library. A summary of what we will do is as follows: 1. Create an Empty SharePoint Project in Visual Studio 2. Add a Code Folder in the solution and Drag and Drop Utilities and Extensions Libraries to the solution 3. Create a new Feature and add and event receiver all the code will be in the event receiver 4. Add the fields which will extend the built-in Document content type 5. If the Content Type does not exist, Create it 6. If the Document Library does not exist, Create it with the new Content Type inherited from the Document Content Type 7. Delete the Document Content Type from the Library (as we have a new one which inherited from it) 8. Add the fields which we want to be visible from the fields added to the new Content Type Here we go: Create an Empty SharePoint Project in Visual Studio Add a Code Folder in the solution and Drag and Drop Utilities and Extensions Libraries to the solution The Utilities and Extensions Library will be part of this project which I will provide a download link at the end of this post. Drag and drop them into your project. If Dragged and Dropped from windows explorer you will need to show all files and then include them in your project. Change the Namespace to agree with your project. Create a new Feature and add and event receiver all the code will be in the event receiver. Here We added a new Feature called “CreateDocLib” and then right click to add an Event Receiver All of our code will be in this Event Receiver. For this Demo I will only be using the Feature Activated Event. From this point on we will be looking at code! We are adding two constants for use columGroup (How we want SharePoint to Group them, usually Company Name) and ctName(ContentType Name) using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Security.Permissions; using Microsoft.SharePoint; namespace CreateDocLib.Features.CreateDocLib { /// <summary> /// This class handles events raised during feature activation, deactivation, installation, uninstallation, and upgrade. /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// The GUID attached to this class may be used during packaging and should not be modified. /// </remarks> [Guid("56e6897c-97c4-41ac-bc5b-5cd2c04f2dd1")] public class CreateDocLibEventReceiver : SPFeatureReceiver { const string columnGroup = "DJ"; const string ctName = "DJDocLib"; } } Here we are creating the Feature Activated event. Adding the new fields (Site Columns) , Testing if the Content Type Exists, if not adding it. Testing if the document Library exists, if not adding it. #region DocLib public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { using (SPWeb spWeb = properties.GetWeb() as SPWeb) { //add the fields addFields(spWeb); //add content type SPContentType testCT = spWeb.ContentTypes[ctName]; // we will not create the content type if it exists if (testCT == null) { //the content type does not exist add it addContentType(spWeb, ctName); } if ((spWeb.Lists.TryGetList("MyDocuments") == null)) { //create the list if it dosen't to exist CreateDocLib(spWeb); } } } #endregion The addFields method uses the utilities library to add site columns to the site. We can add as many fields within this method as we like. Here we are adding one for demonstration purposes. Icon as a Url type. public void addFields(SPWeb spWeb) { Utilities.addField(spWeb, "Icon", SPFieldType.URL, false, columnGroup); }The addContentType method add the new Content Type to the site Content Types. We have already checked to see that it does not exist. In addition, here is where we add the linkages from our site columns previously created to our new Content Type private static void addContentType(SPWeb spWeb, string name) { SPContentType myContentType = new SPContentType(spWeb.ContentTypes["Document"], spWeb.ContentTypes, name) { Group = columnGroup }; spWeb.ContentTypes.Add(myContentType); addContentTypeLinkages(spWeb, myContentType); myContentType.Update(); } Here we are adding just one linkage as we only have one additional field in our Content Type public static void addContentTypeLinkages(SPWeb spWeb, SPContentType ct) { Utilities.addContentTypeLink(spWeb, "Icon", ct); } Next we add the logic to create our new Document Library, which we have already checked to see if it exists. We create the document library and turn on content types. Add the new content type and then delete the old “Document” content types. private void CreateDocLib(SPWeb web) { using (var site = new SPSite(web.Url)) { var web1 = site.RootWeb; var listId = web1.Lists.Add("MyDocuments", string.Empty, SPListTemplateType.DocumentLibrary); var lib = web1.Lists[listId] as SPDocumentLibrary; lib.ContentTypesEnabled = true; var docType = web.ContentTypes[ctName]; lib.ContentTypes.Add(docType); lib.ContentTypes.Delete(lib.ContentTypes["Document"].Id); lib.Update(); AddLibrarySettings(web1, lib); } } Finally, we set some document library settings on our new document library with the AddLibrarySettings method. We then ensure that the new site column is visible when viewed in the browser. private void AddLibrarySettings(SPWeb web, SPDocumentLibrary lib) { lib.OnQuickLaunch = true; lib.ForceCheckout = true; lib.EnableVersioning = true; lib.MajorVersionLimit = 5; lib.EnableMinorVersions = true; lib.MajorWithMinorVersionsLimit = 5; lib.Update(); var view = lib.DefaultView; view.ViewFields.Add("Icon"); view.Update(); } Okay, what's cool here: In a few lines of code, we have created site columns, A content Type, a document library. As a developer, I use this functionality all the time. For instance, I could now just add a web part to this same solutionwhich uses this document Library. I love SharePoint! Here is the complete solution: Create Document Library Code

Read the article
Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

- by Kyle Burns

One of the earliest lessons I was taught in Enterprise development was "always program against an interface". This was back in the VB6 days and I quickly learned that no code would be allowed to move to the QA server unless my business objects and data access objects each are defined as an interface and have a matching implementation class. Why? "It's more reusable" was one answer. "It doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" a slightly more knowing answer. And let's not forget the discussion ending "it's a standard". The problem with these responses was that senior people didn't really understand the reason we were doing the things we were doing and because of that, we were entirely unable to realize the intent behind the practice - we simply used interfaces and had a bunch of extra code to maintain to show for it. It wasn't until a few years later that I finally heard the term "Inversion of Control". Simply put, "Inversion of Control" takes the creation of objects that used to be within the control (and therefore a responsibility of) of your component and moves it to some outside force. For example, consider the following code which follows the old "always program against an interface" rule in the manner of many corporate development shops: 1: ICatalog catalog = new Catalog(); 2: Category[] categories = catalog.GetCategories(); In this example, I met the requirement of the rule by declaring the variable as ICatalog, but I didn't hit "it doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" because I explicitly created an instance of the concrete Catalog object. If I want to test the functionality of the code I just wrote I have to have an environment in which Catalog can be created along with any of the resources upon which it depends (e.g. configuration files, database connections, etc) in order to test my functionality. That's a lot of setup work and one of the things that I think ultimately discourages real buy-in of unit testing in many development shops. So how do I test my code without needing Catalog to work? A very primitive approach I've seen is to change the line the instantiates catalog to read: 1: ICatalog catalog = new FakeCatalog(); once the test is run and passes, the code is switched back to the real thing. This obviously poses a huge risk for introducing test code into production and in my opinion is worse than just keeping the dependency and its associated setup work. Another popular approach is to make use of Factory methods which use an object whose "job" is to know how to obtain a valid instance of the object. Using this approach, the code may look something like this: 1: ICatalog catalog = CatalogFactory.GetCatalog(); The code inside the factory is responsible for deciding "what kind" of catalog is needed. This is a far better approach than the previous one, but it does make projects grow considerably because now in addition to the interface, the real implementation, and the fake implementation(s) for testing you have added a minimum of one factory (or at least a factory method) for each of your interfaces. Once again, developers say "that's too complicated and has me writing a bunch of useless code" and quietly slip back into just creating a new Catalog and chalking any test failures up to "it will probably work on the server". This is where software intended specifically to facilitate Inversion of Control comes into play. There are many libraries that take on the Inversion of Control responsibilities in .Net and most of them have many pros and cons. From this point forward I'll discuss concepts from the standpoint of the Unity framework produced by Microsoft's Patterns and Practices team. I'm primarily focusing on this library because it questions about it inspired this posting. At Unity's core and that of most any IoC framework is a catalog or registry of components. This registry can be configured either through code or using the application's configuration file and in the most simple terms says "interface X maps to concrete implementation Y". It can get much more complicated, but I want to keep things at the "what does it do" level instead of "how does it do it". The object that exposes most of the Unity functionality is the UnityContainer. This object exposes methods to configure the catalog as well as the Resolve<T> method which is used to obtain an instance of the type represented by T. When using the Resolve<T> method, Unity does not necessarily have to just "new up" the requested object, but also can track dependencies of that object and ensure that the entire dependency chain is satisfied. There are three basic ways that I have seen Unity used within projects. Those are through classes directly using the Unity container, classes requiring injection of dependencies, and classes making use of the Service Locator pattern. The first usage of Unity is when classes are aware of the Unity container and directly call its Resolve method whenever they need the services advertised by an interface. The up side of this approach is that IoC is utilized, but the down side is that every class has to be aware that Unity is being used and tied directly to that implementation. Many developers don't like the idea of as close a tie to specific IoC implementation as is represented by using Unity within all of your classes and for the most part I agree that this isn't a good idea. As an alternative, classes can be designed for Dependency Injection. Dependency Injection is where a force outside the class itself manipulates the object to provide implementations of the interfaces that the class needs to interact with the outside world. This is typically done either through constructor injection where the object has a constructor that accepts an instance of each interface it requires or through property setters accepting the service providers. When using dependency, I lean toward the use of constructor injection because I view the constructor as being a much better way to "discover" what is required for the instance to be ready for use. During resolution, Unity looks for an injection constructor and will attempt to resolve instances of each interface required by the constructor, throwing an exception of unable to meet the advertised needs of the class. The up side of this approach is that the needs of the class are very clearly advertised and the class is unaware of which IoC container (if any) is being used. The down side of this approach is that you're required to maintain the objects passed to the constructor as instance variables throughout the life of your object and that objects which coordinate with many external services require a lot of additional constructor arguments (this gets ugly and may indicate a need for refactoring). The final way that I've seen and used Unity is to make use of the ServiceLocator pattern, of which the Patterns and Practices team has also provided a Unity-compatible implementation. When using the ServiceLocator, your class calls ServiceLocator.Retrieve in places where it would have called Resolve on the Unity container. Like using Unity directly, it does tie you directly to the ServiceLocator implementation and makes your code aware that dependency injection is taking place, but it does have the up side of giving you the freedom to swap out the underlying IoC container if necessary. I'm not hugely concerned with hiding IoC entirely from the class (I view this as a "nice to have"), so the single biggest problem that I see with the ServiceLocator approach is that it provides no way to proactively advertise needs in the way that constructor injection does, allowing more opportunity for difficult to track runtime errors. This blog entry has not been intended in any way to be a definitive work on IoC, but rather as something to spur thought about why we program to interfaces and some ways to reach the intended value of the practice instead of having it just complicate your code. I hope that it helps somebody begin or continue a journey away from being a "Cargo Cult Programmer".

Read the article
Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

- by kellsey.ruppel

Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A. Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student. Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies". There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience. There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used. With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler. But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team. In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes. Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A: The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues; and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business. It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action! Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

Read the article
Building an OpenStack Cloud for Solaris Engineering, Part 1

- by Dave Miner

One of the signature features of the recently-released Solaris 11.2 is the OpenStack cloud computing platform. Over on the Solaris OpenStack blog the development team is publishing lots of details about our version of OpenStack Havana as well as some tips on specific features, and I highly recommend reading those to get a feel for how we've leveraged Solaris's features to build a top-notch cloud platform. In this and some subsequent posts I'm going to look at it from a different perspective, which is that of the enterprise administrator deploying an OpenStack cloud. But this won't be just a theoretical perspective: I've spent the past several months putting together a deployment of OpenStack for use by the Solaris engineering organization, and now that it's in production we'll share how we built it and what we've learned so far.In the Solaris engineering organization we've long had dedicated lab systems dispersed among our various sites and a home-grown reservation tool for developers to reserve those systems; various teams also have private systems for specific testing purposes. But as a developer, it can still be difficult to find systems you need, especially since most Solaris changes require testing on both SPARC and x86 systems before they can be integrated. We've added virtual resources over the years as well in the form of LDOMs and zones (both traditional non-global zones and the new kernel zones). Fundamentally, though, these were all still deployed in the same model: our overworked lab administrators set up pre-configured resources and we then reserve them. Sounds like pretty much every traditional IT shop, right? Which means that there's a lot of opportunity for efficiencies from greater use of virtualization and the self-service style of cloud computing. As we were well into development of OpenStack on Solaris, I was recruited to figure out how we could deploy it to both provide more (and more efficient) development and test resources for the organization as well as a test environment for Solaris OpenStack.At this point, let's acknowledge one fact: deploying OpenStack is hard. It's a very complex piece of software that makes use of sophisticated networking features and runs as a ton of service daemons with myriad configuration files. The web UI, Horizon, doesn't often do a good job of providing detailed errors. Even the command-line clients are not as transparent as you'd like, though at least you can turn on verbose and debug messaging and often get some clues as to what to look for, though it helps if you're good at reading JSON structure dumps. I'd already learned all of this in doing a single-system Grizzly-on-Linux deployment for the development team to reference when they were getting started so I at least came to this job with some appreciation for what I was taking on. The good news is that both we and the community have done a lot to make deployment much easier in the last year; probably the easiest approach is to download the OpenStack Unified Archive from OTN to get your hands on a single-system demonstration environment. I highly recommend getting started with something like it to get some understanding of OpenStack before you embark on a more complex deployment. For some situations, it may in fact be all you ever need. If so, you don't need to read the rest of this series of posts!In the Solaris engineering case, we need a lot more horsepower than a single-system cloud can provide. We need to support both SPARC and x86 VM's, and we have hundreds of developers so we want to be able to scale to support thousands of VM's, though we're going to build to that scale over time, not immediately. We also want to be able to test both Solaris 11 updates and a release such as Solaris 12 that's under development so that we can work out any upgrade issues before release. One thing we don't have is a requirement for extremely high availability, at least at this point. We surely don't want a lot of down time, but we can tolerate scheduled outages and brief (as in an hour or so) unscheduled ones. Thus I didn't need to spend effort on trying to get high availability everywhere.The diagram below shows our initial deployment design. We're using six systems, most of which are x86 because we had more of those immediately available. All of those systems reside on a management VLAN and are connected with a two-way link aggregation of 1 Gb links (we don't yet have 10 Gb switching infrastructure in place, but we'll get there). A separate VLAN provides "public" (as in connected to the rest of Oracle's internal network) addresses, while we use VxLANs for the tenant networks. One system is more or less the control node, providing the MySQL database, RabbitMQ, Keystone, and the Nova API and scheduler as well as the Horizon console. We're curious how this will perform and I anticipate eventually splitting at least the database off to another node to help simplify upgrades, but at our present scale this works.I had a couple of systems with lots of disk space, one of which was already configured as the Automated Installation server for the lab, so it's just providing the Glance image repository for OpenStack. The other node with lots of disks provides Cinder block storage service; we also have a ZFS Storage Appliance that will help back-end Cinder in the near future, I just haven't had time to get it configured in yet.There's a separate system for Neutron, which is our Elastic Virtual Switch controller and handles the routing and NAT for the guests. We don't have any need for firewalling in this deployment so we're not doing so. We presently have only two tenants defined, one for the Solaris organization that's funding this cloud, and a separate tenant for other Oracle organizations that would like to try out OpenStack on Solaris. Each tenant has one VxLAN defined initially, but we can of course add more. Right now we have just a single /24 network for the floating IP's, once we get demand up to where we need more then we'll add them.Finally, we have started with just two compute nodes; one is an x86 system, the other is an LDOM on a SPARC T5-2. We'll be adding more when demand reaches the level where we need them, but as we're still ramping up the user base it's less work to manage fewer nodes until then.My next post will delve into the details of building this OpenStack cloud's infrastructure, including how we're using various Solaris features such as Automated Installation, IPS packaging, SMF, and Puppet to deploy and manage the nodes. After that we'll get into the specifics of configuring and running OpenStack itself.

Read the article
Hosting and consuming WCF services without configuration files

- by martinsj

In this post, I'll demonstrate how to configure both the host and the client in code without the need for configuring services i the <system.serviceModel> section of the config-file. In fact, you don't need a <system.serviceModel> section at all. What you'll do need (and want) sometimes, is the Uri of the service in the configuration file. Configuring the Uri of the the service is actually only needed for the client or when self-hosting, not when hosting in IIS. So, exactly What do we need to configure? The binding type and the binding constraints The metadata behavior Debug behavior You can of course configure even more, and even more if you want to, WCF is after all the king of configuration… As an example I'll be hosting and consuming a service that removes most of the default constraints for WCF-services, using a BasicHttpBinding. Of course, in regards to security, it is probably better to have some constraints on the server, but this is only a demonstration. The ServerConfig class in the code beneath is a static helper class that will be used in the examples. In this post, I’ll be using this helper-class for all configuration, for both the server and the client. In WCF, the client and the server have both their own WCF-configuration. With this piece of code, they will be sharing the same configuration. 1: public static class ServiceConfig 2: { 3: public static Binding DefaultBinding 4: { 5: get 6: { 7: var binding = new BasicHttpBinding(); 8: Configure(binding); 9: return binding; 10: } 11: } 12: 13: public static void Configure(HttpBindingBase binding) 14: { 15: if (binding == null) 16: { 17: throw new ArgumentException("Argument 'binding' cannot be null. Cannot configure binding."); 18: } 19: 20: binding.SendTimeout = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 30, 0); // 30 minute timeout 21: binding.MaxBufferSize = Int32.MaxValue; 22: binding.MaxBufferPoolSize = 2147483647; 23: binding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = Int32.MaxValue; 24: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxArrayLength = Int32.MaxValue; 25: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxBytesPerRead = Int32.MaxValue; 26: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxDepth = Int32.MaxValue; 27: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxNameTableCharCount = Int32.MaxValue; 28: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxStringContentLength = Int32.MaxValue; 29: } 30: 31: public static ServiceMetadataBehavior ServiceMetadataBehavior 32: { 33: get 34: { 35: return new ServiceMetadataBehavior 36: { 37: HttpGetEnabled = true, 38: MetadataExporter = {PolicyVersion = PolicyVersion.Policy15} 39: }; 40: } 41: } 42: 43: public static ServiceDebugBehavior ServiceDebugBehavior 44: { 45: get 46: { 47: var smb = new ServiceDebugBehavior(); 48: Configure(smb); 49: return smb; 50: } 51: } 52: 53: 54: public static void Configure(ServiceDebugBehavior behavior) 55: { 56: if (behavior == null) 57: { 58: throw new ArgumentException("Argument 'behavior' cannot be null. Cannot configure debug behavior."); 59: } 60: 61: behavior.IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true; 62: } 63: } Configuring the server There are basically two ways to host a WCF service, in IIS and self-hosting. When hosting a WCF service in a production environment using SOA architecture, you'll be most likely hosting it in IIS. When testing the service in integration tests, it's very handy to be able to self-host services in the unit-tests. In fact, you can share the the WCF configuration for self-hosted services and services hosted in IIS. And that is exactly what you want to do, testing the same configurations for test and production environments. Configuring when Self-hosting When self-hosting, in order to start the service, you'll have to instantiate the ServiceHost class, configure the service and open it. 1: // Create the service-host. 2: var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(MyService), endpoint); 3: 4: // Configure the binding 5: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IMyService), ServiceConfig.DefaultBinding, endpoint); 6: 7: // Configure metadata behavior 8: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(ServiceConfig.ServiceMetadataBehavior); 9: 10: // Configure debgug behavior 11: ServiceConfig.Configure((ServiceDebugBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors[typeof(ServiceDebugBehavior)]); 12: 13: // Start listening to the service 14: host.Open(); 15: Configuring when hosting in IIS When you create a WCF service application with the wizard in Visual Studio, you'll end up with bits and pieces of code in order to get the service running: Svc-file with codebehind. A interface to the service Web.config In order to get rid of the configuration in the <system.serviceModel> section, which the wizard has generated for us, we must tell the service that we have a factory that will create the service for us. We do this by changing the markup for the svc-file: 1: <%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="Namespace.MyService" Factory="Namespace.ServiceHostFactory" %> The markup tells IIS that we have a factory called ServiceHostFactory for this service. The service factory has a method we can override which will be called when someone asks IIS for the service. There are overloads we can override: 1: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase CreateServiceHost(string constructorString, Uri[] baseAddresses) 2: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) 3: In this example, we'll be using the last one, so our implementation looks like this: 1: public class ServiceHostFactory : System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceHostFactory 2: { 3: 4: protected override System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) 5: { 6: var host = base.CreateServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddresses); 7: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(ServiceConfig.ServiceMetadataBehavior); 8: ServiceConfig.Configure((ServiceDebugBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors[typeof(ServiceDebugBehavior)]); 9: return host; 10: } 11: } 12: 1: public class ServiceHostFactory : System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceHostFactory 2: { 3: 4: protected override System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) 5: { 6: var host = base.CreateServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddresses); 7: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(ServiceConfig.ServiceMetadataBehavior); 8: ServiceConfig.Configure((ServiceDebugBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors[typeof(ServiceDebugBehavior)]); 9: return host; 10: } 11: } 12: As you can see, we are using the same configuration helper we used when self-hosting. Now, when you have a factory, the <system.serviceModel> section of the configuration can be removed, because the section will be ignored when the service has a custom factory. If you want to configure something else in the config-file, one could configure in some other section. Configuring the client Microsoft has helpfully created a ChannelFactory class in order to create a proxy client. When using this approach, you don't have generate those awfull proxy classes for the client. If you share the contracts with the server in it's own assembly like in the layer diagram under, you can share the same piece of code. The contracts in WCF are the interface to the service and if any, the datacontracts (custom types) the service depends on. Using the ChannelFactory with our configuration helper-class is very simple: 1: var identity = EndpointIdentity.CreateDnsIdentity("localhost"); 2: var endpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(endPoint, identity); 3: var factory = new ChannelFactory<IMyService>(DeployServiceConfig.DefaultBinding, endpointAddress); 4: using (var myService = new factory.CreateChannel()) 5: { 6: myService.Hello(); 7: } 8: factory.Close(); Happy configuration!

Read the article
Data Guard - Snapshot Standby Database??

- by Jian Zhang-Oracle

?? -------- ?????,??standby?????mount??????????REDO??,??standby????????????????????,???????read-only???open????,????ACTIVE DATA GUARD,????standby?????????(read-only)??(????????),????standby???????????(read-write)? ?????,?????????????Real Application Testing(RAT)??????????,?????????standby??????snapshot standby?????????,??snapshot standby??????????,???????????(read-write)??????snapshot standby??????????????,?????????,??????????,????????,?????????snapshot standby?????standby???,????????? ?? --------- 1.??standby?????? SQL> Alter system set db_recovery_file_dest_size=500M; System altered. SQL> Alter system set db_recovery_file_dest='/u01/app/oracle/snapshot_standby'; System altered. 2.??standby?????? SQL> alter database recover managed standby database cancel; Database altered. 3.??standby???snapshot standby,??open snapshot standby SQL> alter database convert to snapshot standby; Database altered. SQL> alter database open; Database altered. ??snapshot standby??????SNAPSHOT STANDBY,open???READ WRITE: SQL> select DATABASE_ROLE,name,OPEN_MODE from v$database; DATABASE_ROLE NAME OPEN_MODE ---------------- --------- -------------------- SNAPSHOT STANDBY FSDB READ WRITE 4.?snapshot standby???????????Real Application Testing(RAT)????????? 5.?????,??snapshot standby???physical standby,?????????? SQL> shutdown immediate; Database closed. Database dismounted. ORACLE instance shut down. SQL> startup mount; ORACLE instance started. Database mounted. SQL> ALTER DATABASE CONVERT TO PHYSICAL STANDBY; Database altered. SQL> shutdown immediate; ORA-01507: database not mounted ORACLE instance shut down. SQL> startup mount; ORACLE instance started. Database mounted. SQL>ALTER DATABASE RECOVER MANAGED STANDBY DATABASE DISCONNECT FROM SESSION; Database altered. 5.?????standby?,???????PHYSICAL STANDBY,open???MOUNTED SQL> select DATABASE_ROLE,name,OPEN_MODE from v$database; DATABASE_ROLE NAME OPEN_MODE ---------------- --------- -------------------- PHYSICAL STANDBY FSDB MOUNTED 6.??????????????? ????: SQL> select ads.dest_id,max(sequence#) "Current Sequence", max(log_sequence) "Last Archived" from v$archived_log al, v$archive_dest ad, v$archive_dest_status ads where ad.dest_id=al.dest_id and al.dest_id=ads.dest_id and al.resetlogs_change#=(select max(resetlogs_change#) from v$archived_log ) group by ads.dest_id; DEST_ID Current Sequence Last Archived ---------- ---------------- ------------- 1 361 361 2 361 362 --???? SQL> select al.thrd "Thread", almax "Last Seq Received", lhmax "Last Seq Applied" from (select thread# thrd, max(sequence#) almax from v$archived_log where resetlogs_change#=(select resetlogs_change# from v$database) group by thread#) al, (select thread# thrd, max(sequence#) lhmax from v$log_history where resetlogs_change#=(select resetlogs_change# from v$database) group by thread#) lh where al.thrd = lh.thrd; Thread Last Seq Received Last Seq Applied ---------- ----------------- ---------------- 1 361 361 ??????????,???blog,???????????,??"??:Data Guard - Snapshot Standby Database??"

Read the article
Query optimization using composite indexes

- by xmarch

Many times, during the process of creating a new Coherence application, developers do not pay attention to the way cache queries are constructed; they only check that these queries comply with functional specs. Later, performance testing shows that these perform poorly and it is then when developers start working on improvements until the non-functional performance requirements are met. This post describes the optimization process of a real-life scenario, where using a composite attribute index has brought a radical improvement in query execution times. The execution times went down from 4 seconds to 2 milliseconds! E-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca In the context of a new e-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca, Oracle Coherence has been used to calculate and store SKU prices. In this architecture, a Coherence cache stores the final SKU prices used for Endeca baseline indexing. Each SKU price is calculated from a base SKU price and a series of calculations based on information from corporate global discounts. Corporate global discounts information is stored in an auxiliary Coherence cache with over 800.000 entries. In particular, to obtain each price the process needs to execute six queries over the global discount cache. After the implementation was finished, we discovered that the most expensive steps in the price calculation discount process were the global discounts cache query. This query has 10 parameters and is executed 6 times for each SKU price calculation. The steps taken to optimise this query are described below; Starting point Initial query was: String filter = "levelId = :iLevelId AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId "+ "AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND brand = :iBrand AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Map<String, Object> params = new HashMap<String, Object>(10); // Fill all parameters. params.put("iLevelId", xxxx); // Executing filter. Filter globalDiscountsFilter = QueryHelper.createFilter(filter, params); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(globalDiscountsFilter); With the small dataset used for development the cache queries performed very well. However, when carrying out performance testing with a real-world sample size of 800,000 entries, each query execution was taking more than 4 seconds. First round of optimizations The first optimisation step was the creation of separate Coherence index for each of the 10 attributes used by the filter. This avoided object deserialization while executing the query. Each index was created as follows: globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(new ReflectionExtractor("getXXX" ) , false, null); After adding these indexes the query execution time was reduced to between 450 ms and 1s. However, these execution times were still not good enough. Second round of optimizations In this optimisation phase a Coherence query explain plan was used to identify how many entires each index reduced the results set by, along with the cost in ms of executing that part of the query. Though the explain plan showed that all the indexes for the query were being used, it also showed that the ordering of the query parameters was "sub-optimal". Parameters associated to object attributes with high-cardinality should appear at the beginning of the filter, or more specifically, the attributes that filters out the highest of number records should be placed at the beginning. But examining corporate global discount data we realized that depending on the values of the parameters used in the query the “good” order for the attributes was different. In particular, if the attributes brand and family had specific values it was more optimal to have a different query changing the order of the attributes. Ultimately, we ended up with three different optimal variants of the query that were used in its relevant cases: String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId AND brand = :iBrand "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Using the appropriate query depending on the value of brand and family parameters the query execution time dropped to between 100 ms and 150 ms. But these these execution times were still not good enough and the solution was cumbersome. Third and last round of optimizations The third and final optimization was to introduce a composite index. However, this did mean that it was not possible to use the Coherence Query Language (CohQL), as composite indexes are not currently supporte in CohQL. As the original query had 8 parameters using EqualsFilter, 1 using GreaterEqualsFilter and 1 using LessEqualsFilter, the composite index was built for the 8 attributes using EqualsFilter. The final query had an EqualsFilter for the multiple extractor, a GreaterEqualsFilter and a LessEqualsFilter for the 2 remaining attributes. All individual indexes were dropped except the ones being used for LessEqualsFilter and GreaterEqualsFilter. We were now running in an scenario with an 8-attributes composite filter and 2 single attribute filters. The composite index created was as follows: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(me, false, null); And the final query was: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); // Fill composite parameters.String SalesCompanyId = xxxx;...AndFilter composite = new AndFilter(new EqualsFilter(me, Arrays.asList(iSalesChannelId, iLevelId, iAreaId, iDepartmentId, iFamilyId, iManufacturer, iBrand, SalesCompanyId)), new GreaterEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getEndDate" ), iEndDate)); AndFilter finalFilter = new AndFilter(composite, new LessEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getStartDate" ), iStartDate)); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(finalFilter); Using this composite index the query improved dramatically and the execution time dropped to between 2 ms and 4 ms. These execution times completely met the non-functional performance requirements . It should be noticed than when using the composite index the order of the attributes inside the ValueExtractor was not relevant.

Read the article
CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 12, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 12, 2010New Projects.NET DEPENDENCY INJECTION: Abel Perez Enterprise FrameworkAutodocs - WCF REST Automatic API Documentation Generator: Autodocs is an automatic API documentation generator for .NET applications that use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to establish REST API's.BlockBlock: Block Block is a free game. You know Lumines and you will like BlockBlock.C4F XNA ASCII Post-Processing: This is the source code for the Coding4Fun article "XNA Effects – ASCII Art in 3D"ChequePrinter: this is ChequePrinterCompiladores MSIL usando Phoenix (PLP 2008.1 - CIn/UFPE): Este projeto foi feito com o intuito de explorar a plataforma Microsoft Phoenix para a construção de compiladores para MSIL de duas linguagens de E...CRM External View: CRM External View enables more robust control over exposing Microsoft CRM data (in a form of views) for external parties. The solution uses web ser...CS Project2: This is for the projectDotNetNuke IM Module of Facebook Like Messenger: Help you integrate 123 Web Messenger into DotNetNuke, and add a powerful 1-to-1 IM Software named "Facebook Messenger Style Web Chat Bar" at the bo...DotNetNuke® RadPanelBar: DNNRadPanelBar makes it easy to add telerik RadPanelBar functionality to your module or skin. Licensing permits anyone to use the components (incl...DotNetNuke® Skin Blocks: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Armand Datema of Schwingsoft. This skin uses a bit of jQu...Drilltrough and filtering on SSAS-cubes in SSRS: We will describe a technique to create Reporting services (SSRS) reports that use Analysis services (SSAS) cubes as data sources, have a very intu...Ecosystem Diagnosis & Treatment: The Ecosystem DIagnosis & Treatment community provides tools, analyses and applications of the medical model to natural resource problems. EDT sof...ExIf 35: A utility for use by film photographers for keeping track of critical facts about images taken on a roll of film, just as digital cameras do automa...FabricadeTI: Desenvolvimento do framework FabricadeTI.Find and Replace word in the sentences: This program used Java Development Kid 6.0 and i were using HighLighter class. It was completed code with source code and then everybody can use in...Flash Nut: Flash Nut is a flash card program. You can build and review decks of flash cards. The project is a vs2008 wpf application.Free DotNetNuke Chat Module (Popup Mode): With this free DotNetNuke Chat Module (Popup Mode), master will assist to integrate DotNetNuke with 123 Flash Chat seamlessly, and add a popup mode...Free DotNetNuke IM of 123 Web Messenger -- Web-based Friend List: With this FREE application, you could integrate DNN website Database with 123 Web Messenger seamlessly and embed a web-based Friends List into anyw...Free DotNetNuke Live Help Module: With DotNetNuke Live Help Module, integrate 123 Live Help into DotNetNuke website and add Live Chat Button anywhere you like. Let visitors to chat ...G52GRP Videowall: NottinghamHappy Turtle Plugins for BVI :: Repository Based Versioning for Visual Studio: The Happy Turtle project creates plugins for the Build Version Increment Add-In for Visual Studio (BVI). The focus is to automatically version asse...Hasher: Hasher es capaz de generar el hash MD5 y SHA de textos de hasta 100.000 caracteres y ficheros. También te permitirá comprobar dos hash para verifi...Infragistics Silverlight Extended Controls: This project is a group of controls that extend or add functionality to the Infragistics Silverlight control suite. This control requires Infragis...Insert Video Jnr: This is a baby version of my Video plugin, it is intended for Hosted Wordpress blogs only and shouldn't be used with other blog providers.jccc .NET smart framework: jccc .NET smart framework allows the creation of fast connections to MSSQL or MYSQL databases, and the data manipulation by using of c# class's tha...LytScript: 函数式脚本语言Microsoft - DDD NLayerApp .NET 4.0 Example (Microsoft Spain): DDD NLayered App .NET 4.0 Example By Microsoft - Spain Domain Driven Design NLayered App .NET 4.0 Example Implementation Example of our local Arc...mimiKit: Lightweight ASP.NET MVC / Javascript Framework for creating mobile applications PHPWord: With PHPWord you can easily create a Word document with PHP. PHPWord creates docx Files that can include all major word functions like TextElements...Protocol Transition with BizTalk: An example solution the shows how todo Protocol Transition with BizTalk. This also shows you how to create a WCF extension to allow this to happen.Raid Runner: Raid Runner makes it easier to run and manage raid in World of Warcraft. It is a Silverlight application developed in c#SQL Server Authentication Troubleshooter: SQL Server Authentication Troubleshooter is a tool to help investigate a root cause of ‘Login Failed’ error in SQL Server. There could be number of...SuperviseObjects: SuperviseObjects consists of a collection which is derived from ObservableCollection<T>. This collection fires ItemPropertyChanging and ItemPropert...Viuto: Viuto.NET project aims to create a fully track and trace application. It is developed in: - Java & C: Firmware - C#: Parser - Asp.net: Tracki...Zealand IT MSBuild Tasks: Zealand IT MSBuild Tasks is a collection that you cannot do without if you are serious about continous integration. Ever wish you could specify an...New ReleasesASP.NET: ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM: This release contains the source code for ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM as well as the ASP.NET MVC Futures project. The futures project contains features that ...C#Mail: Higuchi.Mail.dll (2010.3.11 ver): Higuchi.Mail.dll at 2010-3-11 version.C#Mail: Higuchi.MailServer.dll (2010.3.11 ver): Higuchi.MailServer.dll at 2010.3.11 version.C4F XNA ASCII Post-Processing: XNA ASCII FPS v1 - Full Version: This is the full, complete example of the XNA ASCII FPS.C4F XNA ASCII Post-Processing: XNA ASCII FPS v1.0 - Base Project: This is the base project to be used by those who plan to follow along the Coding4Fun article.CRM External View: 1.0: Release 1.0DevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: Social Budgeting Web Software, DevTreks alpha 3c: Alpha 3c upgrades custom/virtual uris (devpacks), temp uris, and zip packages. This is believed to be the first fully functional/performant release.DotNetNuke® RadPanelBar: DNNRadPanelBar 1.0.0: DNNRadPanelBar makes it easy to add telerik RadPanelBar functionality to your module or skin. Licensing permits anyone to use the components (inclu...Drilltrough and filtering on SSAS-cubes in SSRS: Release 1: Release 1ExIf 35: ExIf 35: Daily build of ExIf 35Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.0.3.0: Version 1.0.3.0 Added options to check for updates on load and on help menu Disable use of US census for now until dealt with years being differen...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.0.4.0: Version 1.0.4.0 Added support for display of Ahnenfatel numbers Added filter to hide individuals from Lost Cousins report that have been flagged a...Flash Nut: Flash Nut 1.0 Setup: Flash Nut SetupFluent Validation for .NET: 1.2 RC: This is the release candidate for FluentValidation 1.2. If no bugs are found within the next couple of weeks, then this will become the 1.2 Final b...Free DotNetNuke Chat Module (Popup Mode): Download DNN Chat Module (Popup Mode)+Source Code: Feel free to download DotNetNuke Chat Module (Popup Mode), integrating DotNetNuke with 123 Flash Chat Software, and add a free popup mode flash cha...Free DotNetNuke Live Help Module: Download DNN Live Support Module and Source Code: In Readme file, there are detailed Installation and Integration Manual for you. This module is compatible with DotNetNuke v5.x.Happy Turtle Plugins for BVI :: Repository Based Versioning for Visual Studio: Happy Turtle 1.0.44927: This is the first release of the SVN based version incrementor. How To InstallMake sure that Build Version Increment v2.2.10065.1524 or newer is i...Hasher: 1.0: Versión inicial de la aplicación: Obtención de hash MD5 y SHA. Codificación en tiempo real de textos de hasta 100.000 caracteres. Codificación ...Jamolina: PhotosynthDemo: PhotosynthDemoMapWindow GIS: MapWindow 6.0 msi (March 11): This fixes an PixelToProj problem for the Extended Buffer case, as well as adding fixes to the WKBFeatureReader to fix an X,Y reversal and some ext...Math.NET Numerics: 2010.3.11.291 Build: Latest alpha buildMicrosoft - DDD NLayerApp .NET 4.0 Example (Microsoft Spain): V0.5 - N-Layer DDD Sample App: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Unity Application Block 1.2 - October 2008 http://www.microsoft.com/...MiniTwitter: 1.09.2: MiniTwitter 1.09.2 更新内容修正タイムラインを削除すると落ちるバグを修正稀にタイムラインのスクロールが出来ないバグを修正Nestoria.NET: Nestoria.NET 0.8: Provides access to the Nestoria API. Documentation contains a basic getting started guide. Please visit Darren Edge's blog for ongoing developmen...Pod Thrower: Version 1.0: Here is version 1.0. It has all the features I was looking to do in it. Please let me know if you use this and if you would like any changes.SharePoint Ad Rotator: SPAdRotator 2.0 Beta: This new release of the Ad Rotator contains many new features. One major new feature is that jQuery has been added to do image rotation without hav...SharePoint Objects: Democode Ton Stegeman: These download contains sample code for some SharePoint 2007 blog posts: TST.Themes_Build20100311.zip contains a feature receiver that registers Sh...SharePoint Taxonomy Extensions: SharePoint Taxonomy Extensions 1.2: Make Taxonomy Extensions useable in every list type. Not only in document libraries.SharePoint Video Player Web Part & SharePoint Video Library: Version 3.0.0: Absolutely killer feature - installing multiple players on a page without any loss of performance.SilverLight Interface for Mapserver: SLMapViewer v. 1.0: SLMapviewer sample application version 1.0. This new release includes the following enhancements: Silverlight 3.0 native Added a new init parame...Spark View Engine: Spark v1.1: Changes since RC1Built against ASP.NET MVC 2 RTMSPSS .NET interop library: 2.0: This new version supports SPSS 15, and includes spssio32.dll and other native .dll dependencies so that it works out of the box without SPSS being ...stefvanhooijdonk.com: SharePoint2010.ProfilePicturesLoader: So, with the help of Reflector, I wrote a small tool that would import all our profile pictures and update the user profiles. http://wp.me/pMnlQ-6G SuperviseObjects: SuperviseObjects 1.0: First releaseTortoiseSVN Addin for Visual Studio: TortoiseSVN Addin 1.0.5: Feature: Visual Studio/svn action synchronization on Item in Solution explorer like add, move, delete and rename. Note: Move action does not rememb...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30311.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.0.4: Business Management ■This release fixes a Could not load type error on the main view of the module. Groups ■Group requests were failing in some i...WikiPlex – a Regex Wiki Engine: WikiPlex 1.3: Info: Official Version: 1.3.0.215 | Full Release Notes Documentation - This new documentation includes Full Markup Guide with Examples Articles ...Zealand IT MSBuild Tasks: Zealand IT MSBuild Tasks: Initial beta release of Zealand IT MSBuild Tasks. Contains the following tasks: RunAs - Same as Exec task, but provides parameters for impersonat...ZoomBarPlus: V1 (Beta): This is the initial release. It should be considered a beta test version as it has not been tested for very long on my device.Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NET Ajax LibraryASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsUmbraco CMSRawrN2 CMSBlogEngine.NETFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Servicespatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryFarseer Physics EngineCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightSharePoint Team-Mailer

Read the article
Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework

- by ScottGu

Today we released VS 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. These releases include a ton of great improvements, and include some fantastic enhancements to ASP.NET and the Entity Framework. You can download and start using them now. Below are details on a few of the great ASP.NET, Web Development, and Entity Framework improvements you can take advantage of with this release. Please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext for additional release notes, documentation, and tutorials. One ASP.NET With the release of Visual Studio 2013, we have taken a step towards unifying the experience of using the different ASP.NET sub-frameworks (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR, etc), and you can now easily mix and match the different ASP.NET technologies you want to use within a single application. When you do a File-New Project with VS 2013 you’ll now see a single ASP.NET Project option: Selecting this project will bring up an additional dialog that allows you to start with a base project template, and then optionally add/remove the technologies you want to use in it. For example, you could start with a Web Forms template and add Web API or Web Forms support for it, or create a MVC project and also enable Web Forms pages within it: This makes it easy for you to use any ASP.NET technology you want within your apps, and take advantage of any feature across the entire ASP.NET technology span. Richer Authentication Support The new “One ASP.NET” project dialog also includes a new Change Authentication button that, when pushed, enables you to easily change the authentication approach used by your applications – and makes it much easier to build secure applications that enable SSO from a variety of identity providers. For example, when you start with the ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC templates you can easily add any of the following authentication options to the application: No Authentication Individual User Accounts (Single Sign-On support with FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft ID – or Forms Auth with ASP.NET Membership) Organizational Accounts (Single Sign-On support with Windows Azure Active Directory ) Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application) The Windows Azure Active Directory support is particularly cool. Last month we updated Windows Azure Active Directory so that developers can now easily create any number of Directories using it (for free and deployed within seconds). It now takes only a few moments to enable single-sign-on support within your ASP.NET applications against these Windows Azure Active Directories. Simply choose the “Organizational Accounts” radio button within the Change Authentication dialog and enter the name of your Windows Azure Active Directory to do this: This will automatically configure your ASP.NET application to use Windows Azure Active Directory and register the application with it. Now when you run the app your users can easily and securely sign-in using their Active Directory credentials within it – regardless of where the application is hosted on the Internet. For more information about the new process for creating web projects, see Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013. Responsive Project Templates with Bootstrap The new default project templates for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SPA are built using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework that helps you build responsive websites which look great on different form factors such as mobile phones, tables and desktops. For example in a browser window the home page created by the MVC template looks like the following: When you resize the browser to a narrow window to see how it would like on a phone, you can notice how the contents gracefully wrap around and the horizontal top menu turns into an icon: When you click the menu-icon above it expands into a vertical menu – which enables a good navigation experience for small screen real-estate devices: We think Bootstrap will enable developers to build web applications that work even better on phones, tablets and other mobile devices – and enable you to easily build applications that can leverage the rich ecosystem of Bootstrap CSS templates already out there. You can learn more about Bootstrap here. Visual Studio Web Tooling Improvements Visual Studio 2013 includes a new, much richer, HTML editor for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The new HTML editor provides a single unified schema based on HTML5. It has automatic brace completion, jQuery UI and AngularJS attribute IntelliSense, attribute IntelliSense Grouping, and other great improvements. For example, typing “ng-“ on an HTML element will show the intellisense for AngularJS: This support for AngularJS, Knockout.js, Handlebars and other SPA technologies in this release of ASP.NET and VS 2013 makes it even easier to build rich client web applications: The screen shot below demonstrates how the HTML editor can also now inspect your page at design-time to determine all of the CSS classes that are available. In this case, the auto-completion list contains classes from Bootstrap’s CSS file. No more guessing at which Bootstrap element names you need to use: Visual Studio 2013 also comes with built-in support for both CoffeeScript and LESS editing support. The LESS editor comes with all the cool features from the CSS editor and has specific Intellisense for variables and mixins across all the LESS documents in the @import chain. Browser Link – SignalR channel between browser and Visual Studio The new Browser Link feature in VS 2013 lets you run your app within multiple browsers on your dev machine, connect them to Visual Studio, and simultaneously refresh all of them just by clicking a button in the toolbar. You can connect multiple browsers (including IE, FireFox, Chrome) to your development site, including mobile emulators, and click refresh to refresh all the browsers all at the same time. This makes it much easier to easily develop/test against multiple browsers in parallel. Browser Link also exposes an API to enable developers to write Browser Link extensions. By enabling developers to take advantage of the Browser Link API, it becomes possible to create very advanced scenarios that crosses boundaries between Visual Studio and any browser that’s connected to it. Web Essentials takes advantage of the API to create an integrated experience between Visual Studio and the browser’s developer tools, remote controlling mobile emulators and a lot more. You will see us take advantage of this support even more to enable really cool scenarios going forward. ASP.NET Scaffolding ASP.NET Scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.NET Web applications. It makes it easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. When using scaffolding, we ensure that all required dependencies are automatically installed for you in the project. For example, if you start with an ASP.NET Web Forms project and then use scaffolding to add a Web API Controller, the required NuGet packages and references to enable Web API are added to your project automatically. To do this, just choose the Add->New Scaffold Item context menu: Support for scaffolding async controllers uses the new async features from Entity Framework 6. ASP.NET Identity ASP.NET Identity is a new membership system for ASP.NET applications that we are introducing with this release. ASP.NET Identity makes it easy to integrate user-specific profile data with application data. ASP.NET Identity also allows you to choose the persistence model for user profiles in your application. You can store the data in a SQL Server database or another data store, including NoSQL data stores such as Windows Azure Storage Tables. ASP.NET Identity also supports Claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. Users can login by creating an account on the website using username and password, or they can login using social identity providers (such as Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or using organizational accounts through Windows Azure Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). To learn more about how to use ASP.NET Identity visit http://www.asp.net/identity. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 has a bunch of great improvements including: Attribute routing ASP.NET Web API now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your Web API routes by annotating your actions and controllers like this: OAuth 2.0 support The Web API and Single Page Application project templates now support authorization using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a framework for authorizing client access to protected resources. It works for a variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API also now provides support for OData endpoints and enables support for both ATOM and JSON-light formats. With OData you get support for rich query semantics, paging, $metadata, CRUD operations, and custom actions over any data source. Below are some of the specific enhancements in ASP.NET Web API 2 OData. Support for $select, $expand, $batch, and $value Improved extensibility Type-less support Reuse an existing model OWIN Integration ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API. More Web API Improvements In addition to the features above there have been a host of other features in ASP.NET Web API, including CORS support Authentication Filters Filter Overrides Improved Unit Testability Portable ASP.NET Web API Client To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/web-api/ ASP.NET SignalR 2 ASP.NET SignalR is library for ASP.NET developers that dramatically simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to your applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server-side code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR 2.0 introduces a ton of great improvements. We’ve added support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to SignalR 2.0. iOS and Android support for SignalR have also been added using the MonoTouch and MonoDroid components from the Xamarin library (for more information on how to use these additions, see the article Using Xamarin Components from the SignalR wiki). We’ve also added support for the Portable .NET Client in SignalR 2.0 and created a new self-hosting package. This change makes the setup process for SignalR much more consistent between web-hosted and self-hosted SignalR applications. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/signalr. ASP.NET MVC 5 The ASP.NET MVC project templates integrate seamlessly with the new One ASP.NET experience and enable you to integrate all of the above ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Identity improvements. You can also customize your MVC project and configure authentication using the One ASP.NET project creation wizard. The MVC templates have also been updated to use ASP.NET Identity and Bootstrap as well. An introductory tutorial to ASP.NET MVC 5 can be found at Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 5. This release of ASP.NET MVC also supports several nice new MVC-specific features including: Authentication filters: These filters allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller or globally for all controllers. Attribute Routing: Attribute Routing allows you to define your routes on actions or controllers. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/mvc Entity Framework 6 Improvements Visual Studio 2013 ships with Entity Framework 6, which bring a lot of great new features to the data access space: Async and Task<T> Support EF6’s new Async Query and Save support enables you to perform asynchronous data access and take advantage of the Task<T> support introduced in .NET 4.5 within data access scenarios. This allows you to free up threads that might otherwise by blocked on data access requests, and enable them to be used to process other requests whilst you wait for the database engine to process operations. When the database server responds the thread will be re-queued within your ASP.NET application and execution will continue. This enables you to easily write significantly more scalable server code. Here is an example ASP.NET WebAPI action that makes use of the new EF6 async query methods: Interception and Logging Interception and SQL logging allows you to view – or even change – every command that is sent to the database by Entity Framework. This includes a simple, human readable log – which is great for debugging – as well as some lower level building blocks that give you access to the command and results. Here is an example of wiring up the simple log to Debug in the constructor of an MVC controller: Custom Code-First Conventions The new Custom Code-First Conventions enable bulk configuration of a Code First model – reducing the amount of code you need to write and maintain. Conventions are great when your domain classes don’t match the Code First conventions. For example, the following convention configures all properties that are called ‘Key’ to be the primary key of the entity they belong to. This is different than the default Code First convention that expects Id or <type name>Id. Connection Resiliency The new Connection Resiliency feature in EF6 enables you to register an execution strategy to handle – and potentially retry – failed database operations. This is especially useful when deploying to cloud environments where dropped connections become more common as you traverse load balancers and distributed networks. EF6 includes a built-in execution strategy for SQL Azure that knows about retryable exception types and has some sensible – but overridable – defaults for the number of retries and time between retries when errors occur. Registering it is simple using the new Code-Based Configuration support: These are just some of the new features in EF6. You can visit the release notes section of the Entity Framework site for a complete list of new features. Microsoft OWIN Components Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) defines an open abstraction between .NET web servers and web applications, and the ASP.NET “Katana” project brings this abstraction to ASP.NET. OWIN decouples the web application from the server, making web applications host-agnostic. For example, you can host an OWIN-based web application in IIS or self-host it in a custom process. For more information about OWIN and Katana, see What's new in OWIN and Katana. Summary Today’s Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET and Entity Framework release delivers some fantastic new features that streamline your web development lifecycle. These feature span from server framework to data access to tooling to client-side HTML development. They also integrate some great open-source technology and contributions from our developer community. Download and start using them today! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

Read the article
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released

- by ScottGu

The final release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 is now available. Download and Install Today MSDN subscribers, as well as WebsiteSpark/BizSpark/DreamSpark members, can now download the final releases of Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 through the MSDN subscribers download center. If you are not an MSDN Subscriber, you can download free 90-day trial editions of Visual Studio 2010. Or you can can download the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++. These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). If you are looking for an easy way to setup a new machine for web-development you can automate installing ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, IIS, SQL Server Express and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express really quickly with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (just click the install button on the page). What is new with VS 2010 and .NET 4 Today’s release is a big one – and brings with it a ton of new feature and capabilities. One of the things we tried hard to focus on with this release was to invest heavily in making existing applications, projects and developer experiences better. What this means is that you don’t need to read 1000+ page books or spend time learning major new concepts in order to take advantage of the release. There are literally thousands of improvements (both big and small) that make you more productive and successful without having to learn big new concepts in order to start using them. Below is just a small sampling of some of the improvements with this release: Visual Studio 2010 IDE Visual Studio 2010 now supports multiple-monitors (enabling much better use of screen real-estate). It has new code Intellisense support that makes it easier to find and use classes and methods. It has improved code navigation support for searching code-bases and seeing how code is called and used. It has new code visualization support that allows you to see the relationships across projects and classes within projects, as well as to automatically generate sequence diagrams to chart execution flow. The editor now supports HTML and JavaScript snippet support as well as improved JavaScript intellisense. The VS 2010 Debugger and Profiling support is now much, much richer and enables new features like Intellitrace (aka Historical Debugging), debugging of Crash/Dump files, and better parallel debugging. VS 2010’s multi-targeting support is now much richer, and enables you to use VS 2010 to target .NET 2, .NET 3, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 applications. And the infamous Add Reference dialog now loads much faster. TFS 2010 is now easy to setup (you can now install the server in under 10 minutes) and enables great source-control, bug/work-item tracking, and continuous integration support. Testing (both automated and manual) is now much, much richer. And VS 2010 Premium and Ultimate provide much richer architecture and design tooling support. VB and C# Language Features VB and C# in VS 2010 both contain a bunch of new features and capabilities. VB adds new support for automatic properties, collection initializers, and implicit line continuation support among many other features. C# adds support for optional parameters and named arguments, a new dynamic keyword, co-variance and contra-variance, and among many other features. ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 With ASP.NET 4, Web Forms controls now render clean, semantically correct, and CSS friendly HTML markup. Built-in URL routing functionality allows you to expose clean, search engine friendly, URLs and increase the traffic to your Website. ViewState within applications can now be more easily controlled and made smaller. ASP.NET Dynamic Data support has been expanded. More controls, including rich charting and data controls, are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and enable you to build applications even faster. New starter project templates now make it easier to get going with new projects. SEO enhancements make it easier to drive traffic to your public facing sites. And web.config files are now clean and simple. ASP.NET MVC 2 is now built-into VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4, and provides a great way to build web sites and applications using a model-view-controller based pattern. ASP.NET MVC 2 adds features to easily enable client and server validation logic, provides new strongly-typed HTML and UI-scaffolding helper methods. It also enables more modular/reusable applications. The new <%: %> syntax in ASP.NET makes it easier to HTML encode output. Visual Studio 2010 also now includes better tooling support for unit testing and TDD. In particular, “Consume first intellisense” and “generate from usage" support within VS 2010 make it easier to write your unit tests first, and then drive your implementation from them. Deploying ASP.NET applications gets a lot easier with this release. You can now publish your Websites and applications to a staging or production server from within Visual Studio itself. Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to transfer all your files, code, configuration, database schema and data in one complete package. VS 2010 also makes it easy to manage separate web.config configuration files settings depending upon whether you are in debug, release, staging or production modes. WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 WPF 4 includes a ton of new improvements and capabilities including more built-in controls, richer graphics features (cached composition, pixel shader 3 support, layoutrounding, and animation easing functions), a much improved text stack (with crisper text rendering, custom dictionary support, and selection and caret brush options). WPF 4 also includes a bunch of support to enable you to take advantage of new Windows 7 features – including multi-touch and Windows 7 shell integration. Silverlight 4 will launch this week as well. You can watch my Silverlight 4 launch keynote streamed live Tuesday (April 13th) at 8am Pacific Time. Silverlight 4 includes a ton of new capabilities – including a bunch for making it possible to build great business applications and out of the browser applications. I’ll be doing a separate blog post later this week (once it is live on the web) that talks more about its capabilities. Visual Studio 2010 now includes great tooling support for both WPF and Silverlight. The new VS 2010 WPF and Silverlight designer makes it much easier to build client applications as well as build great line of business solutions, as well as integrate and bind with data. Tooling support for Silverlight 4 with the final release of Visual Studio 2010 will be available when Silverlight 4 releases to the web this week. SharePoint and Azure Visual Studio 2010 now includes built-in support for building SharePoint applications. You can now create, edit, build, and debug SharePoint applications directly within Visual Studio 2010. You can also now use SharePoint with TFS 2010. Support for creating Azure-hosted applications is also now included with VS 2010 – allowing you to build ASP.NET and WCF based applications and host them within the cloud. Data Access Data access has a lot of improvements coming to it with .NET 4. Entity Framework 4 includes a ton of new features and capabilities – including support for model first and POCO development, default support for lazy loading, built-in support for pluralization/singularization of table/property names within the VS 2010 designer, full support for all the LINQ operators, the ability to optionally expose foreign keys on model objects (useful for some stateless web scenarios), disconnected API support to better handle N-Tier and stateless web scenarios, and T4 template customization support within VS 2010 to allow you to customize and automate how code is generated for you by the data designer. In addition to improvements with the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL with .NET 4 also includes a bunch of nice improvements. WCF and Workflow WCF includes a bunch of great new capabilities – including better REST, activation and configuration support. WCF Data Services (formerly known as Astoria) and WCF RIA Services also now enable you to easily expose and work with data from remote clients. Windows Workflow is now much faster, includes flowchart services, and now makes it easier to make custom services than before. More details can be found here. CLR and Core .NET Library Improvements .NET 4 includes the new CLR 4 engine – which includes a lot of nice performance and feature improvements. CLR 4 engine now runs side-by-side in-process with older versions of the CLR – allowing you to use two different versions of .NET within the same process. It also includes improved COM interop support. The .NET 4 base class libraries (BCL) include a bunch of nice additions and refinements. In particular, the .NET 4 BCL now includes new parallel programming support that makes it much easier to build applications that take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores on a computer. This work dove-tails nicely with the new VS 2010 parallel debugger (making it much easier to debug parallel applications), as well as the new F# functional language support now included in the VS 2010 IDE. .NET 4 also now also has the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) library built-in – which makes it easier to use dynamic language functionality with .NET. MEF – a really cool library that enables rich extensibility – is also now built-into .NET 4 and included as part of the base class libraries. .NET 4 Client Profile The download size of the .NET 4 redist is now much smaller than it was before (the x86 full .NET 4 package is about 36MB). We also now have a .NET 4 Client Profile package which is a pure sub-set of the full .NET that can be used to streamline client application installs. C++ VS 2010 includes a bunch of great improvements for C++ development. This includes better C++ Intellisense support, MSBuild support for projects, improved parallel debugging and profiler support, MFC improvements, and a number of language features and compiler optimizations. My VS 2010 and .NET 4 Blog Series I’ve been cranking away on a blog series the last few months that highlights many of the new VS 2010 and .NET 4 improvements. The good news is that I have about 20 in-depth posts already written. The bad news (for me) is that I have about 200 more to go until I’m done! I’m going to try and keep adding a few more each week over the next few months to discuss the new improvements and how best to take advantage of them. Below is a list of the already written ones that you can check out today: Clean Web.Config Files Starter Project Templates Multi-targeting Multiple Monitor Support New Code Focused Web Profile Option HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements WPF 4 Add Reference Dialog Improvements SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4 Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4 Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 - Client IDs Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 - and a cool scenarios with ASP.NET MVC 2 Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and Implicit Line Continuation Support with VB 2010 New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output using ASP.NET 4 JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 Stay tuned to my blog as I post more. Also check out this page which links to a bunch of great articles and videos done by others. VS 2010 Installation Notes If you have installed a previous version of VS 2010 on your machine (either the beta or the RC) you must first uninstall it before installing the final VS 2010 release. I also recommend uninstalling .NET 4 betas (including both the client and full .NET 4 installs) as well as the other installs that come with VS 2010 (e.g. ASP.NET MVC 2 preview builds, etc). The uninstalls of the betas/RCs will clean up all the old state on your machine – after which you can install the final VS 2010 version and should have everything just work (this is what I’ve done on all of my machines and I haven’t had any problems). The VS 2010 and .NET 4 installs add a bunch of new managed assemblies to your machine. Some of these will be “NGEN’d” to native code during the actual install process (making them run fast). To avoid adding too much time to VS setup, though, we don’t NGEN all assemblies immediately – and instead will NGEN the rest in the background when your machine is idle. Until it finishes NGENing the assemblies they will be JIT’d to native code the first time they are used in a process – which for large assemblies can sometimes cause a slight performance hit. If you run into this you can manually force all assemblies to be NGEN’d to native code immediately (and not just wait till the machine is idle) by launching the Visual Studio command line prompt from the Windows Start Menu (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio Command Prompt). Within the command prompt type “Ngen executequeueditems” – this will cause everything to be NGEN’d immediately. How to Buy Visual Studio 2010 You can can download and use the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++. These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). You can buy a new copy of VS 2010 Professional that includes a 1 year subscription to MSDN Essentials for $799. MSDN Essentials includes a developer license of Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 DataCenter R2, and 20 hours of Azure hosting time. Subscribers also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, and Priority Support in MSDN Forums. Upgrade prices from previous releases of Visual Studio are also available. Existing Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard customers can upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Professional for a special $299 retail price until October. You can take advantage of this VS Standard->Professional upgrade promotion here. Web developers who build applications for others, and who are either independent developers or who work for companies with less than 10 employees, can also optionally take advantage of the Microsoft WebSiteSpark program. This program gives you three copies of Visual Studio 2010 Professional, 1 copy of Expression Studio, and 4 CPU licenses of both Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and SQL 2008 Web Edition that you can use to both develop and deploy applications with at no cost for 3 years. At the end of the 3 years there is no obligation to buy anything. You can sign-up for WebSiteSpark today in under 5 minutes – and immediately have access to the products to download. Summary Today’s release is a big one – and has a bunch of improvements for pretty much every developer. Thank you everyone who provided feedback, suggestions and reported bugs throughout the development process – we couldn’t have delivered it without you. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

Read the article
CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 19, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 19, 2011Popular ReleasesAdvanced Explorer for Wp7: Advanced Explorer for Wp7 Version 1.4 Test8: Added option to run under Lockscreen. Fixed a bug when you open a pdf/mobi file without starting adobe reader/amazon kindle first boost loading time for folders added \Windows directory (all devices) you can now interact with the filesystem while it is loading!Game Files Open - Map Editor: Game Files Open - Map Editor Beta 2 v1.0.0.0: The 2° beta release of the Map Editor, we have fixed a big bug of the files regen.Document.Editor: 2011.6: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.6: New Left to Right and Left to Right support New Indent more/less support Improved Home tab Improved Tooltips/shortcut keys Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsCatel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.2: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com =========== Version 1.2 =========== Release date: ============= 2011/02/17 Added/fixed: ============ (+) DataObjectBase now supports Isolated Storage out of the box: Person.Save(myStream) stores a whole object graph in Silverlight (+) DataObjectBase can now be converted to Json via Person.ToJson(); (+)...??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-02-18: ?????All-In-One Code Framework?2011??????????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????，?????AzureBingMaps??????，??Azure，WCF, Silverlight, Window Phone????????，????????????????????????。 ???： Windows Azure SQL Azure Windows Azure AppFabric Windows Live Messenger Connect Bing Maps ?????： ??????HTML??? ??Windows PC?Mac?Silverlight??? ??Windows Phone?Silverlight??? ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011...Image.Viewer: 2011: First version of 2011Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Feb 2011: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit OverviewSilverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in the Create.msdn.com forum. Add bugs or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Help us shape the Silverlight Toolkit with your feedback! Please clearly indicate that the work items and issues are for the phone t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 29 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 29 (beta)New: Added VsTortoise Solution Explorer integration for Web Project Folder, Web Folder and Web Item. Fix: TortoiseProc was called with invalid parameters, when using TSVN 1.4.x or older #7338 (thanks psifive) Fix: Add-in does not work, when "TortoiseSVN/bin" is not added to PATH environment variable #7357 Fix: Missing error message when ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.3 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.3 Community Edition We are happy to introduce you the latest version of Sense/Net with integrated ECM Workflow capabilities! In the past weeks we have been working hard to migrate the product to .Net 4 and include a workflow framework in Sense/Net built upon Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This brand new feature enables developers to define and develop workflows, and supports users when building and setting up complicated business processes involving content creation and response...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.11): Features Added a new option that allows properties on data contract types to be marked as virtual. Bug Fixes Fixed a bug caused by certain project properties not being available on Web Service Software Factory projects. Fixed a bug that could result in the WrapperName value of the MessageContractAttribute being incorrect when the Adjust Casing option is used. The menu item code now caters for CommandBar instances that are not available. For example the Web Item CommandBar does not exist ...Terminals: Version 2 - RC1: The "Clean Install" will overwrite your log4net configuration (if you have one). If you run in a Portable Environment, you can use the "Clean Install" and target your portable folder. Tested and it works fine. Changes for this release: Re-worked on the Toolstip settings are done, just to avoid the vs.net clash with auto-generating files for .settings files. renamed it to .settings.config Packged both log4net and ToolStripSettings files into the installer Upgraded the version inform...AllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.Jint - Javascript Interpreter for .NET: Jint - 0.9.0: New CLR interoperability features Many bugfixesBuild Version Increment Add-In Visual Studio: Build Version Increment v2.4.11046.2045: v2.4.11046.2045 Fixes and/or Improvements:Major: Added complete support for VC projects including .vcxproj & .vcproj. All padding issues fixed. A project's assembly versions are only changed if the project has been modified. Minor Order of versioning style values is now according to their respective positions in the attributes i.e. Major, Minor, Build, Revision. Fixed issue with global variable storage with some projects. Fixed issue where if a project item's file does not exist, a ...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1 release. Bug fixes and minor feature requests addedTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksNuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues list A...New ProjectsComplexityEvolution: Research projectCRM 2011 Metadata Browser: The CRM 2011 Metadata Browser is a Silverlight 4 application that is packaged as a Managed CRM Solution. This tool allows you to view metadata including Entities, Attributes and Relationships. The 2011 SOAP endpoint is used to connect to CRM using the Organization.svc/web serviceEFCFvsNH3: A sample project that shows the main differences between Entity Framework Code First and Nhibernate 3: -Mapping -Configuration -DB Initialization -Query API -Session & Transaction -ValidationE-Teacher for IELTS preparation: E-teacher helps IELTS students prepare for the IELTS Academic and General Training test. Qualified English Teachers can register to the e-community and helps candidates to understand what they really need to improve for the IELTS exam and how to reach for the maximum band score.FIM CM Extensions: Extensions for Forefront Identity Manager 2010 to enable integration between the FIM Service workflow and the FIM Certificate Management workflow. Game Files Open - Map Editor: This is a map editor for the metin2 clients, it's very simple edit or create a map with this tool.Garbage Collection Sample Code: Garbage collection sample code demonstrates the differences between the large and small object heaps. This code supports the blog post at http://www.deepcode.co.ukGardenersWorld: The aim of gardenersWorld community website is to provide a platform for budding gardenening enthusiasts, hobbyists and professionals to share information. Harvester - Debug Monitor for Log4Net and NLog: Harvester enables you to monitor all Win32 debug output from all applications running on your machine. Watch real time Log4Net and NLog output across multiple applications at the same time. Trace a call from client to server and back without having to look at multiple log files.Hjelp! Jeg skal ha farmakokinetikk-eksamen!: Sliter du med å pugge formler til farmakokinetikk-eksamenen? Da er redningen din her! :DMercury Business Framework: Mercury Business Framework is a project set up to define basic objects used by the vast majority of business and non business software. The idea is to define the low level objects required by most applications on the web and desktop.MyDistrictBuilder: MyDistrictBuilder allows anybody to build legislative districts and submit to the Florida House of Rep. It is built on Bing Maps, Silverlight and AZURE. Written in C#. It is written to allow anyone to adapt for any states census geography. www.floridaredistricting.cloudapp.netMySchoolApp: MySchoolApp is a customizable application written in Visual Basic and C# for the Windows Mobile Phone 7 platform using Visual Studio Professional 2010. The application combines links to RSS and Web sites about a school, and displays a map and local weather. Osm Parser Community Edition: Osm Parser parse highways in open street maps to generate routable roads network in spatialite.PRBox Cloud Website: This is the website base for PRBox.com SEO Reporter : open source search engine optimization software: SEO Reporter is an open source search engine optimization application for detecting HTML related SEO violations, gathering data about a Web page and analyzing its keywords strategy. It's a Windows navigation application developed in F#. Setting timeout for SharePoint 2010 Silverlight web part: This web part overwrites 5sec hard-coded timeout for SharePoint 2010 Silverlight web part.SharePoint 2010 Central Administration Automatic Resources Link Generator: This feature will automatically generate the resources links list (Quick Links) in your SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site making it easier for SharePoint Admins to navigate through the common Central Administration activities without populating it themselves - VS2010/c#SharePoint Holiday Loader: SharePoint Holiday Loader allows you to quickly import public holidays into a SharePoint calendar from the standard .HOL format.Sohu?????: ?????????WPF?????????????，????????????（??、??、???），??、??、???????，????????????，??????????????。 ??V1????????，V2?????????????????。SP2010 Form Manipulator: This project will hopefully make it easier to manipulate the list form in SharePoint 2010.SPRotator: A jQuery powered web part for SharePoint that cycles through any type of list.SQL Script to Create a Website Directory: Here you can download sql script to create a website directory using SQL Server. * This is only the easy directory sql script to develop your website. Directory software may publish in future.Sri Hits Zone: This is an online repository which used to share Sri Lankan music. This is to provide Sri Lankans who living abroad to being touches with Sri Lankan artist and their music. testz: testzTime domain dissipative acoustic problem: tddapWindows Azure Hosted Services VM Manager: Windows Azure Hosted Services VM Manager is a Windows Service that can manage the number of hosted services running in Azure by either a time based schedule or by CPU load. This allows your service to scale for either dynamic load or a known schedule. Z80TR: Z80TR

Read the article

Search Results

Search found 13653 results on 547 pages for 'integration testing'.

Page 317/547 | < Previous Page | 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 | Next Page >

- by mbcrump

- by Mat Keep

- by James Michael Hare

- by RobertChipperfield

- by user647124

- by user702549

- by Glen Borkowski

- by Laurent Goldsztejn

- by David

- by Duncan Mills

- by Lisa Schwartz

- by Leonid Ganeline

- by David Jacobus

- by Kyle Burns

- by kellsey.ruppel

- by Dave Miner

- by martinsj

- by Jian Zhang-Oracle

- by xmarch

- by ScottGu

- by ScottGu

< Previous Page | 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 | Next Page >