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• This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited. Limitation to both Nintex and SPD workflow

  - by ybbest

  Note, this post is from Nintex Forum here. These limitations apply to both SharePoint designer Workflow and Nintex Workflow as Nintex using the SharePoint workflow engine. The common cause that I experience is that ‘parent’ workflow is generating more than one task at once. This is common as you can have multiple approvers for certain approval process. You could also have workflow running when the task is created, one of the common scenario is you would like to set a custom column value in your approval task. For me this is huge limitation, as Nintex lover I really hope Nintex could solve this problem with Microsoft going forward. Introduction “This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited” is a common message that is seen when an error occurs while the SharePoint workflow engine is processing a task item associated with a workflow. When a workflow processes a task normally, the following sequence of events is expected to occur: 1.       The process begins. 2.       The workflow places a ‘lock’ on the task so nothing else can change the values while the workflow is processing. 3.       The workflow processes the task. 4.       The lock is released when the task processing is finished. When the message is encountered, it usually indicates that an error occurred between step 2 and 4. As a result, the lock is never released. Therefore, the ‘task locked’ message is not an error itself, rather a symptom of another error – the ‘task locked’ message does not indicate what went wrong. In most cases, once this message is encountered, the workflow cannot be made to continue and must be terminated and started again. The following is a guide that can help troubleshoot the cause of these messages.  Some initial observations to narrow down the potential causes are: Is the error consistent or intermittent? When the error is consistent, it will happen every time the workflow is run. When it is intermittent, it may happen regularly, but not every time. Does the error occur the first time the user tries to respond to a task, or do they respond and notice the workflow does not continue, and when they respond again the error occurs? If the message is present when the user first responds to the task, the issue would have occurred when the task was created. Otherwise, it would have occurred when the user attempted to respond to the task. Causes Modifying the task list A cause of this error appearing consistently the first time a user tries to respond to a task is a modification to the default task list schema. For example, changing the ‘Assigned to’ field in a task list to be a multiple selection will cause the behaviour. Deleting the workflow task then restoring it from the Recycle bin If you start a workflow, delete the workflow task then restore it from the Recycle Bin in SharePoint, the workflow will fail with the ‘task locked’ error.  This is confirmed behaviour whether using a SharePoint Designer or a Nintex workflow.  You will need to terminate the workflow and start it again. Parallel simultaneous responses A cause of this error appearing inconsistently is multiple users responding to tasks in parallel at the same time. In this scenario, one task will complete correctly and the other will not process. When the user tries again, the ‘task locked’ message will display. Nintex included a workaround for this issue in build 11000. In build 11000 and later, one of the users will receive a message on the task form when they attempt to respond, stating that they need to try again in a few moments. Additional processing on the task A cause of this error appearing consistently and inconsistently is having an additional system running on the items in the task list. Some examples include: a workflow running on the task list, an event receiver running on the task list or another automated process querying and updating workflow tasks. Note: This Microsoft help article (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA102376561033.aspx#5) explains creating a workflow that runs on the task list to update a field on the task. Our experience shows that this causes the ‘Task Locked’ issues when the ‘parent’ workflow is generating more than one task at once. Isolated system error If the error is a rare event, or a ‘one off’ event, then an isolated system error may have occurred. For example, if there is a database connectivity issue while the workflow is processing the task response, the task will lock. In this case, the user will respond to a task but the workflow will not continue. When they respond again, the ‘task locked’ message will display. In this case, there will be an error in the SharePoint ULS Logs at the time that the user originally responded. Temporary delay while workflow processes If the workflow is taking a long time to process after a user submits a task, they may notice and try to respond to the task again. They will see the task locked error, but after a number of attempts (or after waiting some time) the task response page eventually indicates the task has been responded to. In this case, nothing actually went wrong, and the error message gives an accurate indication of what is happening – the workflow temporarily locked the task while it was processing. This scenario may occur in a very large workflow, or after the SharePoint application pool has just started. Modifying the task via a web service with an invalid url If the Nintex Workflow web service is used to respond to or delegate a task, the site context part of the url must be a valid alternative access mapping url. For example, if you access the web service via the IP address of the SharePoint server, and the IP address is not a valid AAM, the task can become locked. The workflow has become stuck without any apparent errors This behaviour can occur as a result of a bug in the SharePoint 2010 workflow engine.  If you do not have the August 2010 Cumulative Update (or later) for SharePoint, and your workflow uses delays, “Flexi-task”, State machine”, “Task Reminder” actions or variables, you could be affected. Check the SharePoint 2010 Updates site here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff800847.  The October CU is recommended http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553031.   The fix is described as “Consider the following scenario. You add a Delay activity to a workflow. Then, you set the duration for the Delay activity. You deploy the workflow in SharePoint Foundation 2010. In this scenario, the workflow is not resumed after the duration of the Delay activity”. If you find this is occurring in your environment, install the October CU, terminate all the running workflows affected and run them afresh. Investigative steps The first step to isolate the issue is to create a new task list on the site and configure the workflow to use it.  Any customizations that were made to the original task list should not be made to the new task list. If the new task list eliminates the issue, then the cause can be attributed to the original task list or a change that was made to it. To change the task list that the workflow uses: In Workflow Designer select Settings -> Startup Options Then configure the task list as required If any of the scenarios above do not help, check the SharePoint logs for any messages with a category of ‘Workflow Infrastructure’. Conclusion The information in this article has been gathered from observations and investigations by Nintex. The sources of these issues are the underlying SharePoint workflow engine. This article will be updated if further causes are discovered. From <http://connect.nintex.com/forums/thread/6503.aspx>

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• WCF WS-Security and WSE Nonce Authentication

  - by Rick Strahl

  WCF makes it fairly easy to access WS-* Web Services, except when you run into a service format that it doesn't support. Even then WCF provides a huge amount of flexibility to make the service clients work, however finding the proper interfaces to make that happen is not easy to discover and for the most part undocumented unless you're lucky enough to run into a blog, forum or StackOverflow post on the matter. This is definitely true for the Password Nonce as part of the WS-Security/WSE protocol, which is not natively supported in WCF. Specifically I had a need to create a WCF message on the client that includes a WS-Security header that looks like this from their spec document:<soapenv:Header> <wsse:Security soapenv:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:UsernameToken wsu:Id="UsernameToken-8" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:Username>TeStUsErNaMe1</wsse:Username> <wsse:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >TeStPaSsWoRd1</wsse:Password> <wsse:Nonce EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" >f8nUe3YupTU5ISdCy3X9Gg==</wsse:Nonce> <wsu:Created>2011-05-04T19:01:40.981Z</wsu:Created> </wsse:UsernameToken> </wsse:Security> </soapenv:Header> Specifically, the Nonce and Created keys are what WCF doesn't create or have a built in formatting for. Why is there a nonce? My first thought here was WTF? The username and password are there in clear text, what does the Nonce accomplish? The Nonce and created keys are are part of WSE Security specification and are meant to allow the server to detect and prevent replay attacks. The hashed nonce should be unique per request which the server can store and check for before running another request thus ensuring that a request is not replayed with exactly the same values. Basic ServiceUtl Import - not much Luck The first thing I did when I imported this service with a service reference was to simply import it as a Service Reference. The Add Service Reference import automatically detects that WS-Security is required and appropariately adds the WS-Security to the basicHttpBinding in the config file:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding"> <security mode="Transport" /> </binding> <binding name="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding1" /> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://notarealurl.com:443/services/RealTimeOnline" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding" contract="RealTimeOnline.RealTimeOnline" name="RealTimeOnline" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> If if I run this as is using code like this:var client = new RealTimeOnlineClient(); client.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = "TheUsername"; client.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = "ThePassword"; … I get nothing in terms of WS-Security headers. The request is sent, but the the binding expects transport level security to be applied, rather than message level security. To fix this so that a WS-Security message header is sent the security mode can be changed to: <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential" /> Now if I re-run I at least get a WS-Security header which looks like this:<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:u="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <u:Timestamp u:Id="_0"> <u:Created>2012-11-24T02:55:18.011Z</u:Created> <u:Expires>2012-11-24T03:00:18.011Z</u:Expires> </u:Timestamp> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-18c215d4-1106-40a5-8dd1-c81fdddf19d3-1"> <o:Username>TheUserName</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >ThePassword</o:Password> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> Closer! Now the WS-Security header is there along with a timestamp field (which might not be accepted by some WS-Security expecting services), but there's no Nonce or created timestamp as required by my original service. Using a CustomBinding instead My next try was to go with a CustomBinding instead of basicHttpBinding as it allows a bit more control over the protocol and transport configurations for the binding. Specifically I can explicitly specify the message protocol(s) used. Using configuration file settings here's what the config file looks like:<?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="CustomSoapBinding"> <security includeTimestamp="false" authenticationMode="UserNameOverTransport" defaultAlgorithmSuite="Basic256" requireDerivedKeys="false" messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10"> </security> <textMessageEncoding messageVersion="Soap11"></textMessageEncoding> <httpsTransport maxReceivedMessageSize="2000000000"/> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://notrealurl.com:443/services/RealTimeOnline" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomSoapBinding" contract="RealTimeOnline.RealTimeOnline" name="RealTimeOnline" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> <startup> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> </startup> </configuration> This ends up creating a cleaner header that's missing the timestamp field which can cause some services problems. The WS-Security header output generated with the above looks like this:<s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-291622ca-4c11-460f-9886-ac1c78813b24-1"> <o:Username>TheUsername</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >ThePassword</o:Password> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> This is closer as it includes only the username and password. The key here is the protocol for WS-Security:messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10" which explicitly specifies the protocol version. There are several variants of this specification but none of them seem to support the nonce unfortunately. This protocol does allow for optional omission of the Nonce and created timestamp provided (which effectively makes those keys optional). With some services I tried that requested a Nonce just using this protocol actually worked where the default basicHttpBinding failed to connect, so this is a possible solution for access to some services. Unfortunately for my target service that was not an option. The nonce has to be there. Creating Custom ClientCredentials As it turns out WCF doesn't have support for the Digest Nonce as part of WS-Security, and so as far as I can tell there's no way to do it just with configuration settings. I did a bunch of research on this trying to find workarounds for this, and I did find a couple of entries on StackOverflow as well as on the MSDN forums. However, none of these are particularily clear and I ended up using bits and pieces of several of them to arrive at a working solution in the end. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/896901/wcf-adding-nonce-to-usernametoken http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/4df3354f-0627-42d9-b5fb-6e880b60f8ee The latter forum message is the more useful of the two (the last message on the thread in particular) and it has most of the information required to make this work. But it took some experimentation for me to get this right so I'll recount the process here maybe a bit more comprehensively. In order for this to work a number of classes have to be overridden: ClientCredentials ClientCredentialsSecurityTokenManager WSSecurityTokenizer The idea is that we need to create a custom ClientCredential class to hold the custom properties so they can be set from the UI or via configuration settings. The TokenManager and Tokenizer are mainly required to allow the custom credentials class to flow through the WCF pipeline and eventually provide custom serialization. Here are the three classes required and their full implementations:public class CustomCredentials : ClientCredentials { public CustomCredentials() { } protected CustomCredentials(CustomCredentials cc) : base(cc) { } public override System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenManager CreateSecurityTokenManager() { return new CustomSecurityTokenManager(this); } protected override ClientCredentials CloneCore() { return new CustomCredentials(this); } } public class CustomSecurityTokenManager : ClientCredentialsSecurityTokenManager { public CustomSecurityTokenManager(CustomCredentials cred) : base(cred) { } public override System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenSerializer CreateSecurityTokenSerializer(System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenVersion version) { return new CustomTokenSerializer(System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityVersion.WSSecurity11); } } public class CustomTokenSerializer : WSSecurityTokenSerializer { public CustomTokenSerializer(SecurityVersion sv) : base(sv) { } protected override void WriteTokenCore(System.Xml.XmlWriter writer, System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityToken token) { UserNameSecurityToken userToken = token as UserNameSecurityToken; string tokennamespace = "o"; DateTime created = DateTime.Now; string createdStr = created.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss.fffZ"); // unique Nonce value - encode with SHA-1 for 'randomness' // in theory the nonce could just be the GUID by itself string phrase = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); var nonce = GetSHA1String(phrase); // in this case password is plain text // for digest mode password needs to be encoded as: // PasswordAsDigest = Base64(SHA-1(Nonce + Created + Password)) // and profile needs to change to //string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); string password = userToken.Password; writer.WriteRaw(string.Format( "<{0}:UsernameToken u:Id=\"" + token.Id + "\" xmlns:u=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd\">" + "<{0}:Username>" + userToken.UserName + "</{0}:Username>" + "<{0}:Password Type=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText\">" + password + "</{0}:Password>" + "<{0}:Nonce EncodingType=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary\">" + nonce + "</{0}:Nonce>" + "<u:Created>" + createdStr + "</u:Created></{0}:UsernameToken>", tokennamespace)); } protected string GetSHA1String(string phrase) { SHA1CryptoServiceProvider sha1Hasher = new SHA1CryptoServiceProvider(); byte[] hashedDataBytes = sha1Hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(phrase)); return Convert.ToBase64String(hashedDataBytes); } } Realistically only the CustomTokenSerializer has any significant code in. The code there deals with actually serializing the custom credentials using low level XML semantics by writing output into an XML writer. I can't take credit for this code - most of the code comes from the MSDN forum post mentioned earlier - I made a few adjustments to simplify the nonce generation and also added some notes to allow for PasswordDigest generation. Per spec the nonce is nothing more than a unique value that's supposed to be 'random'. I'm thinking that this value can be any string that's unique and a GUID on its own probably would have sufficed. Comments on other posts that GUIDs can be potentially guessed are highly exaggerated to say the least IMHO. To satisfy even that aspect though I added the SHA1 encryption and binary decoding to give a more random value that would be impossible to 'guess'. The original example from the forum post used another level of encoding and decoding to string in between - but that really didn't accomplish anything but extra overhead. The header output generated from this looks like this:<s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-f43d8b0d-0ebb-482e-998d-f544401a3c91-1" xmlns:u="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <o:Username>TheUsername</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText">ThePassword</o:Password> <o:Nonce EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" >PjVE24TC6HtdAnsf3U9c5WMsECY=</o:Nonce> <u:Created>2012-11-23T07:10:04.670Z</u:Created> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> which is exactly as it should be. Password Digest? In my case the password is passed in plain text over an SSL connection, so there's no digest required so I was done with the code above. Since I don't have a service handy that requires a password digest,  I had no way of testing the code for the digest implementation, but here is how this is likely to work. If you need to pass a digest encoded password things are a little bit trickier. The password type namespace needs to change to: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#Digest and then the password value needs to be encoded. The format for password digest encoding is this: Base64(SHA-1(Nonce + Created + Password)) and it can be handled in the code above with this code (that's commented in the snippet above): string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); The entire WriteTokenCore method for digest code looks like this:protected override void WriteTokenCore(System.Xml.XmlWriter writer, System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityToken token) { UserNameSecurityToken userToken = token as UserNameSecurityToken; string tokennamespace = "o"; DateTime created = DateTime.Now; string createdStr = created.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss.fffZ"); // unique Nonce value - encode with SHA-1 for 'randomness' // in theory the nonce could just be the GUID by itself string phrase = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); var nonce = GetSHA1String(phrase); string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); writer.WriteRaw(string.Format( "<{0}:UsernameToken u:Id=\"" + token.Id + "\" xmlns:u=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd\">" + "<{0}:Username>" + userToken.UserName + "</{0}:Username>" + "<{0}:Password Type=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#Digest\">" + password + "</{0}:Password>" + "<{0}:Nonce EncodingType=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary\">" + nonce + "</{0}:Nonce>" + "<u:Created>" + createdStr + "</u:Created></{0}:UsernameToken>", tokennamespace)); } I had no service to connect to to try out Digest auth - if you end up needing it and get it to work please drop a comment… How to use the custom Credentials The easiest way to use the custom credentials is to create the client in code. Here's a factory method I use to create an instance of my service client:  public static RealTimeOnlineClient CreateRealTimeOnlineProxy(string url, string username, string password) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(url)) url = "https://notrealurl.com:443/cows/services/RealTimeOnline"; CustomBinding binding = new CustomBinding(); var security = TransportSecurityBindingElement.CreateUserNameOverTransportBindingElement(); security.IncludeTimestamp = false; security.DefaultAlgorithmSuite = SecurityAlgorithmSuite.Basic256; security.MessageSecurityVersion = MessageSecurityVersion.WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10; var encoding = new TextMessageEncodingBindingElement(); encoding.MessageVersion = MessageVersion.Soap11; var transport = new HttpsTransportBindingElement(); transport.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 20000000; // 20 megs binding.Elements.Add(security); binding.Elements.Add(encoding); binding.Elements.Add(transport); RealTimeOnlineClient client = new RealTimeOnlineClient(binding, new EndpointAddress(url)); // to use full client credential with Nonce uncomment this code: // it looks like this might not be required - the service seems to work without it client.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Remove<System.ServiceModel.Description.ClientCredentials>(); client.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add(new CustomCredentials()); client.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = username; client.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = password; return client; } This returns a service client that's ready to call other service methods. The key item in this code is the ChannelFactory endpoint behavior modification that that first removes the original ClientCredentials and then adds the new one. The ClientCredentials property on the client is read only and this is the way it has to be added.   Summary It's a bummer that WCF doesn't suport WSE Security authentication with nonce values out of the box. From reading the comments in posts/articles while I was trying to find a solution, I found that this feature was omitted by design as this protocol is considered unsecure. While I agree that plain text passwords are rarely a good idea even if they go over secured SSL connection as WSE Security does, there are unfortunately quite a few services (mosly Java services I suspect) that use this protocol. I've run into this twice now and trying to find a solution online I can see that this is not an isolated problem - many others seem to have struggled with this. It seems there are about a dozen questions about this on StackOverflow all with varying incomplete answers. Hopefully this post provides a little more coherent content in one place. Again I marvel at WCF and its breadth of support for protocol features it has in a single tool. And even when it can't handle something there are ways to get it working via extensibility. But at the same time I marvel at how freaking difficult it is to arrive at these solutions. I mean there's no way I could have ever figured this out on my own. It takes somebody working on the WCF team or at least being very, very intricately involved in the innards of WCF to figure out the interconnection of the various objects to do this from scratch. Luckily this is an older problem that has been discussed extensively online and I was able to cobble together a solution from the online content. I'm glad it worked out that way, but it feels dirty and incomplete in that there's a whole learning path that was omitted to get here… Man am I glad I'm not dealing with SOAP services much anymore. REST service security - even when using some sort of federation is a piece of cake by comparison :-) I'm sure once standards bodies gets involved we'll be right back in security standard hell…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in WCF  Web Services   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Using jQuery and OData to Insert a Database Record

  - by Stephen Walther

  In my previous blog entry, I explored two ways of inserting a database record using jQuery. We added a new Movie to the Movie database table by using a generic handler and by using a WCF service. In this blog entry, I want to take a brief look at how you can insert a database record using OData. Introduction to OData The Open Data Protocol (OData) was developed by Microsoft to be an open standard for communicating data across the Internet. Because the protocol is compatible with standards such as REST and JSON, the protocol is particularly well suited for Ajax. OData has undergone several name changes. It was previously referred to as Astoria and ADO.NET Data Services. OData is used by Sharepoint Server 2010, Azure Storage Services, Excel 2010, SQL Server 2008, and project code name “Dallas.” Because OData is being adopted as the public interface of so many important Microsoft technologies, it is a good protocol to learn. You can learn more about OData by visiting the following websites: http://www.odata.org http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx When using the .NET framework, you can easily expose database data through the OData protocol by creating a WCF Data Service. In this blog entry, I will create a WCF Data Service that exposes the Movie database table. Create the Database and Data Model The MoviesDB database is a simple database that contains the following Movies table: You need to create a data model to represent the MoviesDB database. In this blog entry, I use the ADO.NET Entity Framework to create my data model. However, WCF Data Services and OData are not tied to any particular OR/M framework such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework. For details on creating the Entity Framework data model for the MoviesDB database, see the previous blog entry. Create a WCF Data Service You create a new WCF Service by selecting the menu option Project, Add New Item and selecting the WCF Data Service item template (see Figure 1). Name the new WCF Data Service MovieService.svc. Figure 1 – Adding a WCF Data Service Listing 1 contains the default code that you get when you create a new WCF Data Service. There are two things that you need to modify. Listing 1 – New WCF Data Service File using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel.Web; using System.Web; namespace WebApplication1 { public class MovieService : DataService< /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ > { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc. // Examples: // config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("MyEntityset", EntitySetRights.AllRead); // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } } First, you need to replace the comment /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ with a class that represents the data that you want to expose from the service. In our case, we need to replace the comment with a reference to the MoviesDBEntities class generated by the Entity Framework. Next, you need to configure the security for the WCF Data Service. By default, you cannot query or modify the movie data. We need to update the Entity Set Access Rule to enable us to insert a new database record. The updated MovieService.svc is contained in Listing 2: Listing 2 – MovieService.svc using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; namespace WebApplication1 { public class MovieService : DataService<MoviesDBEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Movies", EntitySetRights.AllWrite); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } } That’s all we have to do. We can now insert a new Movie into the Movies database table by posting a new Movie to the following URL: /MovieService.svc/Movies The request must be a POST request. The Movie must be represented as JSON. Using jQuery with OData The HTML page in Listing 3 illustrates how you can use jQuery to insert a new Movie into the Movies database table using the OData protocol. Listing 3 – Default.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>jQuery OData Insert</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input id="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input id="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { // Convert the form into an object var data = { Title: $("#title").val(), Director: $("#director").val() }; // JSONify the data var data = JSON.stringify(data); // Post it $.ajax({ type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", url: "MovieService.svc/Movies", data: data, dataType: "json", success: insertCallback }); }); function insertCallback(result) { // unwrap result var newMovie = result["d"]; // Show primary key alert("Movie added with primary key " + newMovie.Id); } </script> </body> </html> jQuery does not include a JSON serializer. Therefore, we need to include the JSON2 library to serialize the new Movie that we wish to create. The Movie is serialized by calling the JSON.stringify() method: var data = JSON.stringify(data); You can download the JSON2 library from the following website: http://www.json.org/js.html The jQuery ajax() method is called to insert the new Movie. Notice that both the contentType and dataType are set to use JSON. The jQuery ajax() method is used to perform a POST operation against the URL MovieService.svc/Movies. Because the POST payload contains a JSON representation of a new Movie, a new Movie is added to the database table of Movies. When the POST completes successfully, the insertCallback() method is called. The new Movie is passed to this method. The method simply displays the primary key of the new Movie: Summary The OData protocol (and its enabling technology named WCF Data Services) works very nicely with Ajax. By creating a WCF Data Service, you can quickly expose your database data to an Ajax application by taking advantage of open standards such as REST, JSON, and OData. In the next blog entry, I want to take a closer look at how the OData protocol supports different methods of querying data.

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• Creating STA COM compatible ASP.NET Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  When building ASP.NET applications that interface with old school COM objects like those created with VB6 or Visual FoxPro (MTDLL), it's extremely important that the threads that are serving requests use Single Threaded Apartment Threading. STA is a COM built-in technology that allows essentially single threaded components to operate reliably in a multi-threaded environment. STA's guarantee that COM objects instantiated on a specific thread stay on that specific thread and any access to a COM object from another thread automatically marshals that thread to the STA thread. The end effect is that you can have multiple threads, but a COM object instance lives on a fixed never changing thread. ASP.NET by default uses MTA (multi-threaded apartment) threads which are truly free spinning threads that pay no heed to COM object marshaling. This is vastly more efficient than STA threading which has a bit of overhead in determining whether it's OK to run code on a given thread or whether some sort of thread/COM marshaling needs to occur. MTA COM components can be very efficient, but STA COM components in a multi-threaded environment always tend to have a fair amount of overhead. It's amazing how much COM Interop I still see today so while it seems really old school to be talking about this topic, it's actually quite apropos for me as I have many customers using legacy COM systems that need to interface with other .NET applications. In this post I'm consolidating some of the hacks I've used to integrate with various ASP.NET technologies when using STA COM Components. STA in ASP.NET Support for STA threading in the ASP.NET framework is fairly limited. Specifically only the original ASP.NET WebForms technology supports STA threading directly via its STA Page Handler implementation or what you might know as ASPCOMPAT mode. For WebForms running STA components is as easy as specifying the ASPCOMPAT attribute in the @Page tag:<%@ Page Language="C#" AspCompat="true" %> which runs the page in STA mode. Removing it runs in MTA mode. Simple. Unfortunately all other ASP.NET technologies built on top of the core ASP.NET engine do not support STA natively. So if you want to use STA COM components in MVC or with class ASMX Web Services, there's no automatic way like the ASPCOMPAT keyword available. So what happens when you run an STA COM component in an MTA application? In low volume environments - nothing much will happen. The COM objects will appear to work just fine as there are no simultaneous thread interactions and the COM component will happily run on a single thread or multiple single threads one at a time. So for testing running components in MTA environments may appear to work just fine. However as load increases and threads get re-used by ASP.NET COM objects will end up getting created on multiple different threads. This can result in crashes or hangs, or data corruption in the STA components which store their state in thread local storage on the STA thread. If threads overlap this global store can easily get corrupted which in turn causes problems. STA ensures that any COM object instance loaded always stays on the same thread it was instantiated on. What about COM+? COM+ is supposed to address the problem of STA in MTA applications by providing an abstraction with it's own thread pool manager for COM objects. It steps in to the COM instantiation pipeline and hands out COM instances from its own internally maintained STA Thread pool. This guarantees that the COM instantiation threads are STA threads if using STA components. COM+ works, but in my experience the technology is very, very slow for STA components. It adds a ton of overhead and reduces COM performance noticably in load tests in IIS. COM+ can make sense in some situations but for Web apps with STA components it falls short. In addition there's also the need to ensure that COM+ is set up and configured on the target machine and the fact that components have to be registered in COM+. COM+ also keeps components up at all times, so if a component needs to be replaced the COM+ package needs to be unloaded (same is true for IIS hosted components but it's more common to manage that). COM+ is an option for well established components, but native STA support tends to provide better performance and more consistent usability, IMHO. STA for non supporting ASP.NET Technologies As mentioned above only WebForms supports STA natively. However, by utilizing the WebForms ASP.NET Page handler internally it's actually possible to trick various other ASP.NET technologies and let them work with STA components. This is ugly but I've used each of these in various applications and I've had minimal problems making them work with FoxPro STA COM components which is about as dififcult as it gets for COM Interop in .NET. In this post I summarize several STA workarounds that enable you to use STA threading with these ASP.NET Technologies: ASMX Web Services ASP.NET MVC WCF Web Services ASP.NET Web API ASMX Web Services I start with classic ASP.NET ASMX Web Services because it's the easiest mechanism that allows for STA modification. It also clearly demonstrates how the WebForms STA Page Handler is the key technology to enable the various other solutions to create STA components. Essentially the way this works is to override the WebForms Page class and hijack it's init functionality for processing requests. Here's what this looks like for Web Services:namespace FoxProAspNet { public class WebServiceStaHandler : System.Web.UI.Page, IHttpAsyncHandler { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { IHttpHandler handler = new WebServiceHandlerFactory().GetHandler( this.Context, this.Context.Request.HttpMethod, this.Context.Request.FilePath, this.Context.Request.PhysicalPath); handler.ProcessRequest(this.Context); this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest( HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } } public class AspCompatWebServiceStaHandlerWithSessionState : WebServiceStaHandler, IRequiresSessionState { } } This class overrides the ASP.NET WebForms Page class which has a little known AspCompatBeginProcessRequest() and AspCompatEndProcessRequest() method that is responsible for providing the WebForms ASPCOMPAT functionality. These methods handle routing requests to STA threads. Note there are two classes - one that includes session state and one that does not. If you plan on using ASP.NET Session state use the latter class, otherwise stick to the former. This maps to the EnableSessionState page setting in WebForms. This class simply hooks into this functionality by overriding the BeginProcessRequest and EndProcessRequest methods and always forcing it into the AspCompat methods. The way this works is that BeginProcessRequest() fires first to set up the threads and starts intializing the handler. As part of that process the OnInit() method is fired which is now already running on an STA thread. The code then creates an instance of the actual WebService handler factory and calls its ProcessRequest method to start executing which generates the Web Service result. Immediately after ProcessRequest the request is stopped with Application.CompletRequest() which ensures that the rest of the Page handler logic doesn't fire. This means that even though the fairly heavy Page class is overridden here, it doesn't end up executing any of its internal processing which makes this code fairly efficient. In a nutshell, we're highjacking the Page HttpHandler and forcing it to process the WebService process handler in the context of the AspCompat handler behavior. Hooking up the Handler Because the above is an HttpHandler implementation you need to hook up the custom handler and replace the standard ASMX handler. To do this you need to modify the web.config file (here for IIS 7 and IIS Express): <configuration> <system.webServer> <handlers> <remove name="WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0" /> <add name="Asmx STA Web Service Handler" path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" precondition="integrated"/> </handlers> </system.webServer> </configuration> (Note: The name for the WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0 might be slightly different depending on your server version. Check the IIS Handler configuration in the IIS Management Console for the exact name or simply remove the handler from the list there which will propagate to your web.config). For IIS 5 & 6 (Windows XP/2003) or the Visual Studio Web Server use:<configuration> <system.web> <httpHandlers> <remove path="*.asmx" verb="*" /> <add path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" /> </httpHandlers> </system.web></configuration> To test, create a new ASMX Web Service and create a method like this: [WebService(Namespace = "http://foxaspnet.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] public class FoxWebService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string HelloWorld() { return "Hello World. Threading mode is: " + System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState(); } } Run this before you put in the web.config configuration changes and you should get: Hello World. Threading mode is: MTA Then put the handler mapping into Web.config and you should see: Hello World. Threading mode is: STA And you're on your way to using STA COM components. It's a hack but it works well! I've used this with several high volume Web Service installations with various customers and it's been fast and reliable. ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC has quickly become the most popular ASP.NET technology, replacing WebForms for creating HTML output. MVC is more complex to get started with, but once you understand the basic structure of how requests flow through the MVC pipeline it's easy to use and amazingly flexible in manipulating HTML requests. In addition, MVC has great support for non-HTML output sources like JSON and XML, making it an excellent choice for AJAX requests without any additional tools. Unlike WebForms ASP.NET MVC doesn't support STA threads natively and so some trickery is needed to make it work with STA threads as well. MVC gets its handler implementation through custom route handlers using ASP.NET's built in routing semantics. To work in an STA handler requires working in the Page Handler as part of the Route Handler implementation. As with the Web Service handler the first step is to create a custom HttpHandler that can instantiate an MVC request pipeline properly:public class MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler : Page, IHttpAsyncHandler, IRequiresSessionState { private RequestContext _requestContext; public MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); _requestContext = requestContext; } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { var controllerName = _requestContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller"); var controllerFactory = ControllerBuilder.Current.GetControllerFactory(); var controller = controllerFactory.CreateController(_requestContext, controllerName); if (controller == null) throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not find controller: " + controllerName); try { controller.Execute(_requestContext); } finally { controllerFactory.ReleaseController(controller); } this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } public override void ProcessRequest(HttpContext httpContext) { throw new NotSupportedException("STAThreadRouteHandler does not support ProcessRequest called (only BeginProcessRequest)"); } } This handler code figures out which controller to load and then executes the controller. MVC internally provides the information needed to route to the appropriate method and pass the right parameters. Like the Web Service handler the logic occurs in the OnInit() and performs all the processing in that part of the request. Next, we need a RouteHandler that can actually pick up this handler. Unlike the Web Service handler where we simply registered the handler, MVC requires a RouteHandler to pick up the handler. RouteHandlers look at the URL's path and based on that decide on what handler to invoke. The route handler is pretty simple - all it does is load our custom handler: public class MvcStaThreadRouteHandler : IRouteHandler { public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); return new MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(requestContext); } } At this point you can instantiate this route handler and force STA requests to MVC by specifying a route. The following sets up the ASP.NET Default Route:Route mvcRoute = new Route("{controller}/{action}/{id}", new RouteValueDictionary( new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute);   To make this code a little easier to work with and mimic the behavior of the routes.MapRoute() functionality extension method that MVC provides, here is an extension method for MapMvcStaRoute(): public static class RouteCollectionExtensions { public static void MapMvcStaRoute(this RouteCollection routeTable, string name, string url, object defaults = null) { Route mvcRoute = new Route(url, new RouteValueDictionary(defaults), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute); } } With this the syntax to add  route becomes a little easier and matches the MapRoute() method:RouteTable.Routes.MapMvcStaRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); The nice thing about this route handler, STA Handler and extension method is that it's fully self contained. You can put all three into a single class file and stick it into your Web app, and then simply call MapMvcStaRoute() and it just works. Easy! To see whether this works create an MVC controller like this: public class ThreadTestController : Controller { public string ThreadingMode() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Try this test both with only the MapRoute() hookup in the RouteConfiguration in which case you should get MTA as the value. Then change the MapRoute() call to MapMvcStaRoute() leaving all the parameters the same and re-run the request. You now should see STA as the result. You're on your way using STA COM components reliably in ASP.NET MVC. WCF Web Services running through IIS WCF Web Services provide a more robust and wider range of services for Web Services. You can use WCF over HTTP, TCP, and Pipes, and WCF services support WS* secure services. There are many features in WCF that go way beyond what ASMX can do. But it's also a bit more complex than ASMX. As a basic rule if you need to serve straight SOAP Services over HTTP I 'd recommend sticking with the simpler ASMX services especially if COM is involved. If you need WS* support or want to serve data over non-HTTP protocols then WCF makes more sense. WCF is not my forte but I found a solution from Scott Seely on his blog that describes the progress and that seems to work well. I'm copying his code below so this STA information is all in one place and quickly explain. Scott's code basically works by creating a custom OperationBehavior which can be specified via an [STAOperation] attribute on every method. Using his attribute you end up with a class (or Interface if you separate the contract and class) that looks like this: [ServiceContract] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldMta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } // Make sure you use this custom STAOperationBehavior // attribute to force STA operation of service methods [STAOperationBehavior] [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldSta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Pretty straight forward. The latter method returns STA while the former returns MTA. To make STA work every method needs to be marked up. The implementation consists of the attribute and OperationInvoker implementation. Here are the two classes required to make this work from Scott's post:public class STAOperationBehaviorAttribute : Attribute, IOperationBehavior { public void AddBindingParameters(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyClientBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ClientOperation clientOperation) { // If this is applied on the client, well, it just doesn’t make sense. // Don’t throw in case this attribute was applied on the contract // instead of the implementation. } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperation dispatchOperation) { // Change the IOperationInvoker for this operation. dispatchOperation.Invoker = new STAOperationInvoker(dispatchOperation.Invoker); } public void Validate(OperationDescription operationDescription) { if (operationDescription.SyncMethod == null) { throw new InvalidOperationException("The STAOperationBehaviorAttribute " + "only works for synchronous method invocations."); } } } public class STAOperationInvoker : IOperationInvoker { IOperationInvoker _innerInvoker; public STAOperationInvoker(IOperationInvoker invoker) { _innerInvoker = invoker; } public object[] AllocateInputs() { return _innerInvoker.AllocateInputs(); } public object Invoke(object instance, object[] inputs, out object[] outputs) { // Create a new, STA thread object[] staOutputs = null; object retval = null; Thread thread = new Thread( delegate() { retval = _innerInvoker.Invoke(instance, inputs, out staOutputs); }); thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); thread.Start(); thread.Join(); outputs = staOutputs; return retval; } public IAsyncResult InvokeBegin(object instance, object[] inputs, AsyncCallback callback, object state) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public object InvokeEnd(object instance, out object[] outputs, IAsyncResult result) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public bool IsSynchronous { get { return true; } } } The key in this setup is the Invoker and the Invoke method which creates a new thread and then fires the request on this new thread. Because this approach creates a new thread for every request it's not super efficient. There's a bunch of overhead involved in creating the thread and throwing it away after each thread, but it'll work for low volume requests and insure each thread runs in STA mode. If better performance is required it would be useful to create a custom thread manager that can pool a number of STA threads and hand off threads as needed rather than creating new threads on every request. If your Web Service needs are simple and you need only to serve standard SOAP 1.x requests, I would recommend sticking with ASMX services. It's easier to set up and work with and for STA component use it'll be significantly better performing since ASP.NET manages the STA thread pool for you rather than firing new threads for each request. One nice thing about Scotts code is though that it works in any WCF environment including self hosting. It has no dependency on ASP.NET or WebForms for that matter. STA - If you must STA components are a  pain in the ass and thankfully there isn't too much stuff out there anymore that requires it. But when you need it and you need to access STA functionality from .NET at least there are a few options available to make it happen. Each of these solutions is a bit hacky, but they work - I've used all of them in production with good results with FoxPro components. I hope compiling all of these in one place here makes it STA consumption a little bit easier. I feel your pain :-) Resources Download STA Handler Code Examples Scott Seely's original STA WCF OperationBehavior Article© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in FoxPro   ASP.NET  .NET  COM   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Twitter traffic might not be what it seems

  - by Piet

  Are you using bit.ly stats to measure interest in the links you post on twitter? I’ve been hearing for a while about people claiming to get the majority of their traffic originating from twitter these days. Now, I’ve been playing with the twitter ruby gem recently, doing various experiments which I’ll not go into detail here because they could be regarded as spamming… if I’d conduct them on a large scale, that is. It’s scary to see people actually engaging with @replies crafted with some regular expressions and eliza-like trickery on status updates found using the twitter api. I’m wondering how Twitter is going to contain the coming spam-flood. When posting links I used bit.ly as url shortener, since this one seems to be the de-facto standard on twitter. A nice thing about bit.ly is that it shows some basic stats about the redirects it performs for your shortened links. To my surprise, most links posted almost immediately resulted in several visitors. Now, seeing that I was posting the links together with some information concerning what the link is about, I concluded that the people who were actually clicking the links should be very targeted visitors. This felt a bit like free adwords, and I suddenly started to understand why everyone was raving about getting traffic from twitter. How wrong I was! (and I think several 1000 online marketers with me) On the destination site I used a traffic logging solution that works by including a little javascript snippet in your pages. It seemed that somehow all visitors disappeared after the bit.ly redirect and before getting to the site, because I was hardly seeing any visitors there. So I started investigating what was happening: by looking at the logfiles of the destination site, and by making my own ’shortened’ urls by doing redirects using a very short domain name I own. This way, I could check the apache access_log before the redirects. Most user agents turned out to be bots without a doubt. Here’s an excerpt of user-agents awk’ed from apache’s access_log for a time period of about one hour, right after posting some links: AideRSS 2.0 (postrank.com) Java/1.6.0_13 Java/1.6.0_14 libwww-perl/5.816 MLBot (www.metadatalabs.com/mlbot) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 - real-url.org) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twitturls; +http://twitturls.com) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Viralheat Bot/1.0; +http://www.viralheat.com/) Mozilla/5.0 (Danger hiptop 4.6; U; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.5 OpenCalaisSemanticProxy PycURL/7.18.2 PycURL/7.19.3 Python-urllib/1.17 Twingly Recon twitmatic Twitturly / v0.6 Wget/1.10.2 (Red Hat modified) Wget/1.11.1 (Red Hat modified) Of the few user-agents that seem ‘real’ at first, half are originating from an ip-address used by Amazon EC2. And I doubt people are setting op proxies on there. Oh yeah, Googlebot (the real deal, from a legit google owned address) is sucking up posted links like fresh oysters. I guess google is trying to make sure in advance to never be beaten by twitter in the ‘realtime search’ department. Actually, I think it’d be almost stupid NOT to post any new pages/posts/websites on Twitter, it must be one of the fastest ways to get a Googlebot visit. Same experiment with a real, established twitter account Now, because I was posting the url’s either as ’status’ messages or directed @people, on a test-account with hardly any (human) followers, I checked again using the twitter accounts from a commercial site I’m involved with. These accounts all have between 500 and 1000 targeted (I think) followers. I checked the destination access_logs and also added ‘my’ redirect after the bit.ly redirect: same results, although seemingly a bit higher real visitor/bot ratio. Btw: one of these account was ‘punished’ with a 1 week lock recently because the same (1 one!) status update was sent that was sent right before using another account. They got an email explaining the lock because the account didn’t act according to their TOS. I can’t find anything in their TOS about it, can you? I don’t think Twitter is on the right track punishing a legit account, knowing the trickery I had been doing with it’s api went totally unpunished. I might be wrong though, I often am. On the other hand: this commercial site reported targeted traffic and actual signups from visitors coming from Twitter. The ones that are really real visitors are also very targeted. I’m just not sure if the amount of work involved could hold up against an adwords campaign. Reposting the same link over and over again helps On thing I noticed: It helps to keep on reposting the same links with regular intervals. I guess most people only look at their first page when checking out recent posts of the ones they’re following, or don’t look too far back when performing a search. Now, this probably isn’t according to the twitter TOS. Actually, it might be spamming but no-one is obligated to follow anyone else of course. This way, I was getting more real visitors and less bots. To my surprise (when my programmer’s hat is on) there were still repeated visits from the same bots coming from the same ip-addresses. Did they expect to find something else when visiting for a 2nd or 3rd time? (actually,this gave me an idea: you can’t change a link once it’s posted, but you can change where it redirects to) Most bots were smart enough not to follow the same link again though. Are you successful in getting real visitors from Twitter? Are you only relying on bit.ly to provide traffic stats?

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• How to use SharePoint modal dialog box to display Custom Page Part3

  - by ybbest

  In the second part of the series, I showed you how to display and close a custom page in a SharePoint modal dialog using JavaScript and display a message after the modal dialog is closed. In this post, I’d like to show you how to use SPLongOperation with the Modal dialog box. You can download the source code here. 1. Firstly, modify the element file as follow <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> <CustomAction Id="ReportConcern" RegistrationType="ContentType" RegistrationId="0x010100866B1423D33DDA4CA1A4639B54DD4642" Location="EditControlBlock" Sequence="107" Title="Display Custom Page" Description="To Display Custom Page in a modal dialog box on this item"> <UrlAction Url="javascript: function emitStatus(messageToDisplay) { statusId = SP.UI.Status.addStatus(messageToDisplay.message + ' ' +messageToDisplay.location ); SP.UI.Status.setStatusPriColor(statusId, 'Green'); } function portalModalDialogClosedCallback(result, value) { if (value !== null) { emitStatus(value); } } var options = { url: '{SiteUrl}' + '/_layouts/YBBEST/TitleRename.aspx?List={ListId}&amp;ID={ItemId}', title: 'Rename title', allowMaximize: false, showClose: true, width: 500, height: 300, dialogReturnValueCallback: portalModalDialogClosedCallback }; SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog(options);" /> </CustomAction> </Elements> 2. In your code behind, you can implement a close dialog function as below. This will close your modal dialog box once the button is clicked and display a status bar. Note that you need to use window.frameElement.commonModalDialogClose instead of window.frameElement.commonModalDialogClose protected void SubmitClicked(object sender, EventArgs e) { //Process stuff string message = "You clicked the Submit button"; string newLocation="http://www.google.com"; string information = string.Format("{{'message':'{0}','location':'{1}' }}", message, newLocation); var longOperation = new SPLongOperation(Page); longOperation.LeadingHTML = "Processing the  application"; longOperation.TrailingHTML = "Please wait while the application is being processed."; longOperation.Begin(); Thread.Sleep(5*1000); var closeDialogScript = GetCloseDialogScriptForLongProcess(information); longOperation.EndScript(closeDialogScript); } protected static string GetCloseDialogScriptForLongProcess(string message) { var scriptBuilder = new StringBuilder(); scriptBuilder.Append("window.frameElement.commonModalDialogClose(1,").Append(message).Append(");"); return scriptBuilder.ToString(); }   References: How to: Display a Page as a Modal Dialog Box

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• Maintaining shared service in ASP.NET MVC Application

  - by kazimanzurrashid

  Depending on the application sometimes we have to maintain some shared service throughout our application. Let’s say you are developing a multi-blog supported blog engine where both the controller and view must know the currently visiting blog, it’s setting , user information and url generation service. In this post, I will show you how you can handle this kind of case in most convenient way. First, let see the most basic way, we can create our PostController in the following way: public class PostController : Controller { public PostController(dependencies...) { } public ActionResult Index(string blogName, int? page) { BlogInfo blog = blogSerivce.FindByName(blogName); if (blog == null) { return new NotFoundResult(); } IEnumerable<PostInfo> posts = postService.FindPublished(blog.Id, PagingCalculator.StartIndex(page, blog.PostPerPage), blog.PostPerPage); int count = postService.GetPublishedCount(blog.Id); UserInfo user = null; if (HttpContext.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) { user = userService.FindByName(HttpContext.User.Identity.Name); } return View(new IndexViewModel(urlResolver, user, blog, posts, count, page)); } public ActionResult Archive(string blogName, int? page, ArchiveDate archiveDate) { BlogInfo blog = blogSerivce.FindByName(blogName); if (blog == null) { return new NotFoundResult(); } IEnumerable<PostInfo> posts = postService.FindArchived(blog.Id, archiveDate, PagingCalculator.StartIndex(page, blog.PostPerPage), blog.PostPerPage); int count = postService.GetArchivedCount(blog.Id, archiveDate); UserInfo user = null; if (HttpContext.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) { user = userService.FindByName(HttpContext.User.Identity.Name); } return View(new ArchiveViewModel(urlResolver, user, blog, posts, count, page, achiveDate)); } public ActionResult Tag(string blogName, string tagSlug, int? page) { BlogInfo blog = blogSerivce.FindByName(blogName); if (blog == null) { return new NotFoundResult(); } TagInfo tag = tagService.FindBySlug(blog.Id, tagSlug); if (tag == null) { return new NotFoundResult(); } IEnumerable<PostInfo> posts = postService.FindPublishedByTag(blog.Id, tag.Id, PagingCalculator.StartIndex(page, blog.PostPerPage), blog.PostPerPage); int count = postService.GetPublishedCountByTag(tag.Id); UserInfo user = null; if (HttpContext.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) { user = userService.FindByName(HttpContext.User.Identity.Name); } return View(new TagViewModel(urlResolver, user, blog, posts, count, page, tag)); } } As you can see the above code heavily depends upon the current blog and the blog retrieval code is duplicated in all of the action methods, once the blog is retrieved the same blog is passed in the view model. Other than the blog the view also needs the current user and url resolver to render it properly. One way to remove the duplicate blog retrieval code is to create a custom model binder which converts the blog from a blog name and use the blog a parameter in the action methods instead of the string blog name, but it only helps the first half in the above scenario, the action methods still have to pass the blog, user and url resolver etc in the view model. Now lets try to improve the the above code, first lets create a new class which would contain the shared services, lets name it as BlogContext: public class BlogContext { public BlogInfo Blog { get; set; } public UserInfo User { get; set; } public IUrlResolver UrlResolver { get; set; } } Next, we will create an interface, IContextAwareService: public interface IContextAwareService { BlogContext Context { get; set; } } The idea is, whoever needs these shared services needs to implement this interface, in our case both the controller and the view model, now we will create an action filter which will be responsible for populating the context: public class PopulateBlogContextAttribute : FilterAttribute, IActionFilter { private static string blogNameRouteParameter = "blogName"; private readonly IBlogService blogService; private readonly IUserService userService; private readonly BlogContext context; public PopulateBlogContextAttribute(IBlogService blogService, IUserService userService, IUrlResolver urlResolver) { Invariant.IsNotNull(blogService, "blogService"); Invariant.IsNotNull(userService, "userService"); Invariant.IsNotNull(urlResolver, "urlResolver"); this.blogService = blogService; this.userService = userService; context = new BlogContext { UrlResolver = urlResolver }; } public static string BlogNameRouteParameter { [DebuggerStepThrough] get { return blogNameRouteParameter; } [DebuggerStepThrough] set { blogNameRouteParameter = value; } } public void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { string blogName = (string) filterContext.Controller.ValueProvider.GetValue(BlogNameRouteParameter).ConvertTo(typeof(string), Culture.Current); if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(blogName)) { context.Blog = blogService.FindByName(blogName); } if (context.Blog == null) { filterContext.Result = new NotFoundResult(); return; } if (filterContext.HttpContext.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) { context.User = userService.FindByName(filterContext.HttpContext.User.Identity.Name); } IContextAwareService controller = filterContext.Controller as IContextAwareService; if (controller != null) { controller.Context = context; } } public void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext) { Invariant.IsNotNull(filterContext, "filterContext"); if ((filterContext.Exception == null) || filterContext.ExceptionHandled) { IContextAwareService model = filterContext.Controller.ViewData.Model as IContextAwareService; if (model != null) { model.Context = context; } } } } As you can see we are populating the context in the OnActionExecuting, which executes just before the controllers action methods executes, so by the time our action methods executes the context is already populated, next we are are assigning the same context in the view model in OnActionExecuted method which executes just after we set the  model and return the view in our action methods. Now, lets change the view models so that it implements this interface: public class IndexViewModel : IContextAwareService { // More Codes } public class ArchiveViewModel : IContextAwareService { // More Codes } public class TagViewModel : IContextAwareService { // More Codes } and the controller: public class PostController : Controller, IContextAwareService { public PostController(dependencies...) { } public BlogContext Context { get; set; } public ActionResult Index(int? page) { IEnumerable<PostInfo> posts = postService.FindPublished(Context.Blog.Id, PagingCalculator.StartIndex(page, Context.Blog.PostPerPage), Context.Blog.PostPerPage); int count = postService.GetPublishedCount(Context.Blog.Id); return View(new IndexViewModel(posts, count, page)); } public ActionResult Archive(int? page, ArchiveDate archiveDate) { IEnumerable<PostInfo> posts = postService.FindArchived(Context.Blog.Id, archiveDate, PagingCalculator.StartIndex(page, Context.Blog.PostPerPage), Context.Blog.PostPerPage); int count = postService.GetArchivedCount(Context.Blog.Id, archiveDate); return View(new ArchiveViewModel(posts, count, page, achiveDate)); } public ActionResult Tag(string blogName, string tagSlug, int? page) { TagInfo tag = tagService.FindBySlug(Context.Blog.Id, tagSlug); if (tag == null) { return new NotFoundResult(); } IEnumerable<PostInfo> posts = postService.FindPublishedByTag(Context.Blog.Id, tag.Id, PagingCalculator.StartIndex(page, Context.Blog.PostPerPage), Context.Blog.PostPerPage); int count = postService.GetPublishedCountByTag(tag.Id); return View(new TagViewModel(posts, count, page, tag)); } } Now, the last thing where we have to glue everything, I will be using the AspNetMvcExtensibility to register the action filter (as there is no better way to inject the dependencies in action filters). public class RegisterFilters : RegisterFiltersBase { private static readonly Type controllerType = typeof(Controller); private static readonly Type contextAwareType = typeof(IContextAwareService); protected override void Register(IFilterRegistry registry) { TypeCatalog controllers = new TypeCatalogBuilder() .Add(GetType().Assembly) .Include(type => controllerType.IsAssignableFrom(type) && contextAwareType.IsAssignableFrom(type)); registry.Register<PopulateBlogContextAttribute>(controllers); } } Thoughts and Comments?

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Creating your first sealed document

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g indexThe previous articles in this guide have detailed how to install, configure and secure your Oracle IRM 11g service. This article walks you through the process of now creating your first context and securing a document against it. I should mention that it would be worth reviewing the following to ensure your installation is ready for that all important first document. Ensure you have correctly configured the keystore for the IRM wrapper keys. If this is not correctly configured, creating the context below will fail. Make sure the IRM server URL correctly resolves and uses the right protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) ContentsCreate the first contextInstall the Oracle IRM Desktop Seal your first document Create the first contextIn Oracle 11g there is a built in classification and rights system called the "standard rights model" which is based on 10 years of customer use cases and innovation. It is a system which enables IRM to scale massively whilst retaining the ability to balance security and usability and also separate duties by allowing contacts in the business to own classifications. The final article in this guide goes into detail on this inbuilt classification model, but for the purposes of this current article all we need to do is create at least one context to test our system out.With a new IRM server there are a set of predefined context templates and roles which again are setup in a way which reflects the most common use we've learned from our customers. We will use these out of the box configurations as they are to create the first context against which we will seal some content.First login to your Oracle IRM Management Website located at https://irm.company.com/irm_rights/. Currently the system is only configured to use the built in LDAP for users, so use the only account we have at the moment, which by default is weblogic. Once logged in switch to the Contexts tab. Click on the New Context icon () in the menu bar on the left. In the resulting dialog select the Standard context template and enter in a name for the context. Then just hit finish, the weblogic account will automatically be made the manager. You'll now see your brand new context ready for users to be assigned. Now click on the Assign Role icon () in the menu bar and in the resulting dialog search for your only user account, weblogic, and add to the list on the right. Now select a role for this user. Because we need to create a document with this user we must select contributor, as this is the only role which allows for the ability to seal. Finally hit next and then finish. We now have a context with a user that has the rights to create a document. The next step is to configure the IRM Desktop to get these rights from the server. Install the Oracle IRM Desktop Before we can seal a document we need the client software installed. Oracle IRM has a very small, lightweight client called the Oracle IRM Desktop which can be freely downloaded in 27 languages from here. Double click on the installer and click on next... Next again... And finally on install... Very easy. You may get a warning about closing Outlook, Word or another application and most of the time no reboots are required. Once it is installed you will see the IRM Desktop icon running in your tool tray, bottom right of the desktop. Seal your first document Finally the prize is within reach, creating your first sealed document. The server is running, we've got a context ready, a user assigned a role in the context but there is the simple and obvious hoop left to jump through. To seal a document we need to have the users rights cached to the local machine. For this to take place, the IRM Desktop needs to know where the Oracle IRM server is on the network so we can synchronize these rights and then be able to seal a document. The usual way for the IRM Desktop to know about the IRM server is it learns automatically when you open an existing piece of content that someone has sent you... ack. Bit of a chicken or the egg dilemma. The solution is to manually tell the IRM Desktop the location of the IRM Server and then force a synchronization of rights. Right click on the Oracle IRM Desktop icon in the system tray and select Options.... Then switch to the Servers tab in the resulting dialog. There are no servers in the list because you've never opened any content. This list is usually populated automatically but we are going to add a server manually, so click on New.... Into the dialog enter in the full URL to the IRM server. Note that this time you use the path /irm_desktop/ and not /irm_rights/. You can see an example from the image below. Click on the validate button and you'll be asked to authenticate. Enter in your weblogic username and password and also check the Remember my password check box. Click OK and the IRM Desktop will confirm a successful connection to the server. OK all the dialogs and we are ready to Synchronize this users rights to the desktop. Right click once more on the Oracle IRM Desktop icon in the system tray. Now the Synchronize menu option is available. Select this and the IRM Desktop will now talk to the IRM server, authenticate using your weblogic account and get your rights to the context we created. Because this is the first time this users has communicated with the IRM server the IRM Desktop presents a privacy policy dialog. This is a chance for the business to ask users to agree to any policy about the use of IRM before opening secured documents. In our guide we've not bothered to setup this URL so just click on the check box and hit Accept. The IRM Desktop will then talk to the server, get your rights and display a success dialog. Lets protect a documentNow we are ready to seal a piece of content. In my guide i'm going to protect a Microsoft Word document. This mean's I have to have copy of Office installed, in this guide i'm using Microsoft Office 2007. You could also seal a PDF document, you'll need to download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader. A very simple test could be to seal a GIF/JPG/PNG or piece of HTML because this is rendered using Internet Explorer. But as I say, i'm going to protect a Word document. The following example demonstrates choosing a file in Windows Explorer, there are many ways to seal a file and you can watch a few in this video.Open a copy of Windows Explorer and locate the file you wish to seal. Right click on the document and select Seal To -> Context You are now presented with the Select Context dialog. You'll now have a sealed copy of the document sat in the same location. Double click on this document and it will open, again using the credentials you've already provided. That is it, now you just need to add more users, more documents, more classifications and start exploring the different roles and experiment with different offline periods etc. You may wish to setup the server against an existing LDAP or Active Directory environment instead of using the built in WebLogic LDAP store. You can read how to use your corporate directory here. But before we finish this guide, there is one more article and arguably the most important article of all. Next I discuss the all important decision making surrounding the actually implementation of Oracle IRM inside your business. Who has rights to what? How do you map contexts to your existing business practices? It is the next article which actually ensures you deploy a successful IRM solution by looking at the business and understanding how they use your sensitive information and then configuring Oracle IRM to reflect their use.

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• Tip #104: Did you know … How to view text for the ‘hint’ buttons on the Publish Web Dialog?

  - by Latest Microsoft Blogs

  After the Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2010, the Publish Web Dialog was modified to include two information buttons associated with the Service URL and Site/application text boxes. (See Figure 1) Figure 1 – New information (‘hint’) buttons (see circled Read More......(read more)

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• Tip #104: Did you know … How to view text for the ‘hint’ buttons on the Publish Web Dialog?

  - by The Official Microsoft IIS Site

  After the Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2010, the Publish Web Dialog was modified to include two information buttons associated with the Service URL and Site/application text boxes. (See Figure 1) Figure 1 – New information (‘hint’) buttons (see circled question marks) There are two keys to remember when trying to view the ‘help’ text associated with these buttons: Patience Hover – don’t click In order to reveal the valuable information that these help icons can unlock, simply move your mouse to...(read more)

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• Free Online Performance Tuning Event

  - by Andrew Kelly

    On June 9th 2010 I will be showing several sessions related to performance tuning for SQL Server and they are the best kind because they are free :).  So mark your calendars. Here is the event info and URL: June 29, 2010 - 10:00 am - 3:00 pm Eastern SQL Server is the platform for business. In this day-long free virtual event, well-known SQL Server performance expert Andrew Kelly will provide you with the tools and knowledge you need to stay on top of three key areas related to peak performance...(read more)

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• blocking bad bots with robots.txt in 2012 [closed]

  - by Rachel Sparks

  does it still work good? I have this: # Generated using http://solidshellsecurity.com services # Begin block Bad-Robots from robots.txt User-agent: asterias Disallow:/ User-agent: BackDoorBot/1.0 Disallow:/ User-agent: Black Hole Disallow:/ User-agent: BlowFish/1.0 Disallow:/ User-agent: BotALot Disallow:/ User-agent: BuiltBotTough Disallow:/ User-agent: Bullseye/1.0 Disallow:/ User-agent: BunnySlippers Disallow:/ User-agent: Cegbfeieh Disallow:/ User-agent: CheeseBot Disallow:/ User-agent: CherryPicker Disallow:/ User-agent: CherryPickerElite/1.0 Disallow:/ User-agent: CherryPickerSE/1.0 Disallow:/ User-agent: CopyRightCheck Disallow:/ User-agent: cosmos Disallow:/ User-agent: Crescent Disallow:/ User-agent: Crescent Internet ToolPak HTTP OLE Control v.1.0 Disallow:/ User-agent: DittoSpyder Disallow:/ User-agent: EmailCollector Disallow:/ User-agent: EmailSiphon Disallow:/ User-agent: EmailWolf Disallow:/ User-agent: EroCrawler Disallow:/ User-agent: ExtractorPro Disallow:/ User-agent: Foobot Disallow:/ User-agent: Harvest/1.5 Disallow:/ User-agent: hloader Disallow:/ User-agent: httplib Disallow:/ User-agent: humanlinks Disallow:/ User-agent: InfoNaviRobot Disallow:/ User-agent: JennyBot Disallow:/ User-agent: Kenjin Spider Disallow:/ User-agent: Keyword Density/0.9 Disallow:/ User-agent: LexiBot Disallow:/ User-agent: libWeb/clsHTTP Disallow:/ User-agent: LinkextractorPro Disallow:/ User-agent: LinkScan/8.1a Unix Disallow:/ User-agent: LinkWalker Disallow:/ User-agent: LNSpiderguy Disallow:/ User-agent: lwp-trivial Disallow:/ User-agent: lwp-trivial/1.34 Disallow:/ User-agent: Mata Hari Disallow:/ User-agent: Microsoft URL Control - 5.01.4511 Disallow:/ User-agent: Microsoft URL Control - 6.00.8169 Disallow:/ User-agent: MIIxpc Disallow:/ User-agent: MIIxpc/4.2 Disallow:/ User-agent: Mister PiX Disallow:/ User-agent: moget Disallow:/ User-agent: moget/2.1 Disallow:/ User-agent: mozilla/4 Disallow:/ User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; BullsEye; Windows 95) Disallow:/ User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows 95) Disallow:/ User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows 98) Disallow:/ User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT) Disallow:/ User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows XP) Disallow:/ User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows 2000) Disallow:/ User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows ME) Disallow:/ User-agent: mozilla/5 Disallow:/ User-agent: NetAnts Disallow:/ User-agent: NICErsPRO Disallow:/ User-agent: Offline Explorer Disallow:/ User-agent: Openfind Disallow:/ User-agent: Openfind data gathere Disallow:/ User-agent: ProPowerBot/2.14 Disallow:/ User-agent: ProWebWalker Disallow:/ User-agent: QueryN Metasearch Disallow:/ User-agent: RepoMonkey Disallow:/ User-agent: RepoMonkey Bait & Tackle/v1.01 Disallow:/ User-agent: RMA Disallow:/ User-agent: SiteSnagger Disallow:/ User-agent: SpankBot Disallow:/ User-agent: spanner Disallow:/ User-agent: suzuran Disallow:/ User-agent: Szukacz/1.4 Disallow:/ User-agent: Teleport Disallow:/ User-agent: TeleportPro Disallow:/ User-agent: Telesoft Disallow:/ User-agent: The Intraformant Disallow:/ User-agent: TheNomad Disallow:/ User-agent: TightTwatBot Disallow:/ User-agent: Titan Disallow:/ User-agent: toCrawl/UrlDispatcher Disallow:/ User-agent: True_Robot Disallow:/ User-agent: True_Robot/1.0 Disallow:/ User-agent: turingos Disallow:/ User-agent: URLy Warning Disallow:/ User-agent: VCI Disallow:/ User-agent: VCI WebViewer VCI WebViewer Win32 Disallow:/ User-agent: Web Image Collector Disallow:/ User-agent: WebAuto Disallow:/ User-agent: WebBandit Disallow:/ User-agent: WebBandit/3.50 Disallow:/ User-agent: WebCopier Disallow:/ User-agent: WebEnhancer Disallow:/ User-agent: WebmasterWorldForumBot Disallow:/ User-agent: WebSauger Disallow:/ User-agent: Website Quester Disallow:/ User-agent: Webster Pro Disallow:/ User-agent: WebStripper Disallow:/ User-agent: WebZip Disallow:/ User-agent: WebZip/4.0 Disallow:/ User-agent: Wget Disallow:/ User-agent: Wget/1.5.3 Disallow:/ User-agent: Wget/1.6 Disallow:/ User-agent: WWW-Collector-E Disallow:/ User-agent: Xenu's Disallow:/ User-agent: Xenu's Link Sleuth 1.1c Disallow:/ User-agent: Zeus Disallow:/ User-agent: Zeus 32297 Webster Pro V2.9 Win32 Disallow:/

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• Make curl download using non-Privacy extension IPv6 address?

  - by Azendale

  I currently use net.ipv6.conf.all.use_tempaddr=2 to get IPv6 privacy addresses (which have a random host part are regenerated a couple times a day). I need dynamic DNS because the computer is connected to different networks and that changes the network part of the address. I'm using curl to download a dynamic DNS url and want it to use the Non-random address that uses my MAC. How can I make curl prefer the non-privacy address?

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• Diving into OpenStack Network Architecture - Part 1

  - by Ronen Kofman

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} rkofman Normal rkofman 83 3045 2014-05-23T21:11:00Z 2014-05-27T06:58:00Z 3 1883 10739 Oracle Corporation 89 25 12597 12.00 140 Clean Clean false false false false EN-US X-NONE HE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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-qformat:yes; 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:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-bidi-language:AR-SA;} Before we begin OpenStack networking has very powerful capabilities but at the same time it is quite complicated. In this blog series we will review an existing OpenStack setup using the Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview and explain the different network components through use cases and examples. The goal is to show how the different pieces come together and provide a bigger picture view of the network architecture in OpenStack. This can be very helpful to users making their first steps in OpenStack or anyone wishes to understand how networking works in this environment.  We will go through the basics first and build the examples as we go. According to the recent Icehouse user survey and the one before it, Neutron with Open vSwitch plug-in is the most widely used network setup both in production and in POCs (in terms of number of customers) and so in this blog series we will analyze this specific OpenStack networking setup. As we know there are many options to setup OpenStack networking and while Neturon + Open vSwitch is the most popular setup there is no claim that it is either best or the most efficient option. Neutron + Open vSwitch is an example, one which provides a good starting point for anyone interested in understanding OpenStack networking. Even if you are using different kind of network setup such as different Neutron plug-in or even not using Neutron at all this will still be a good starting point to understand the network architecture in OpenStack. The setup we are using for the examples is the one used in the Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview. Installing it is simple and it would be helpful to have it as reference. In this setup we use eth2 on all servers for VM network, all VM traffic will be flowing through this interface.The Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview is using VLANs for L2 isolation to provide tenant and network isolation. The following diagram shows how we have configured our deployment: This first post is a bit long and will focus on some basic concepts in OpenStack networking. The components we will be discussing are Open vSwitch, network namespaces, Linux bridge and veth pairs. Note that this is not meant to be a comprehensive review of these components, it is meant to describe the component as much as needed to understand OpenStack network architecture. All the components described here can be further explored using other resources. Open vSwitch (OVS) In the Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview OVS is used to connect virtual machines to the physical port (in our case eth2) as shown in the deployment diagram. OVS contains bridges and ports, the OVS bridges are different from the Linux bridge (controlled by the brctl command) which are also used in this setup. To get started let’s view the OVS structure, use the following command: # ovs-vsctl show 7ec51567-ab42-49e8-906d-b854309c9edf     Bridge br-int         Port br-int             Interface br-int type: internal         Port "int-br-eth2"             Interface "int-br-eth2"     Bridge "br-eth2"         Port "br-eth2"             Interface "br-eth2" type: internal         Port "eth2"             Interface "eth2"         Port "phy-br-eth2"             Interface "phy-br-eth2" ovs_version: "1.11.0" We see a standard post deployment OVS on a compute node with two bridges and several ports hanging off of each of them. The example above is a compute node without any VMs, we can see that the physical port eth2 is connected to a bridge called “br-eth2”. We also see two ports "int-br-eth2" and "phy-br-eth2" which are actually a veth pair and form virtual wire between the two bridges, veth pairs are discussed later in this post. When a virtual machine is created a port is created on one the br-int bridge and this port is eventually connected to the virtual machine (we will discuss the exact connectivity later in the series). Here is how OVS looks after a VM was launched: # ovs-vsctl show efd98c87-dc62-422d-8f73-a68c2a14e73d     Bridge br-int         Port "int-br-eth2"             Interface "int-br-eth2"         Port br-int             Interface br-int type: internal         Port "qvocb64ea96-9f" tag: 1             Interface "qvocb64ea96-9f"     Bridge "br-eth2"         Port "phy-br-eth2"             Interface "phy-br-eth2"         Port "br-eth2"             Interface "br-eth2" type: internal         Port "eth2"             Interface "eth2" ovs_version: "1.11.0" Bridge "br-int" now has a new port "qvocb64ea96-9f" which connects to the VM and tagged with VLAN 1. Every VM which will be launched will add a port on the “br-int” bridge for every network interface the VM has. Another useful command on OVS is dump-flows for example: # ovs-ofctl dump-flows br-int NXST_FLOW reply (xid=0x4): cookie=0x0, duration=735.544s, table=0, n_packets=70, n_bytes=9976, idle_age=17, priority=3,in_port=1,dl_vlan=1000 actions=mod_vlan_vid:1,NORMAL cookie=0x0, duration=76679.786s, table=0, n_packets=0, n_bytes=0, idle_age=65534, hard_age=65534, priority=2,in_port=1 actions=drop cookie=0x0, duration=76681.36s, table=0, n_packets=68, n_bytes=7950, idle_age=17, hard_age=65534, priority=1 actions=NORMAL As we see the port which is connected to the VM has the VLAN tag 1. However the port on the VM network (eth2) will be using tag 1000. OVS is modifying the vlan as the packet flow from the VM to the physical interface. In OpenStack the Open vSwitch agent takes care of programming the flows in Open vSwitch so the users do not have to deal with this at all. If you wish to learn more about how to program the Open vSwitch you can read more about it at http://openvswitch.org looking at the documentation describing the ovs-ofctl command. Network Namespaces (netns) Network namespaces is a very cool Linux feature can be used for many purposes and is heavily used in OpenStack networking. Network namespaces are isolated containers which can hold a network configuration and is not seen from outside of the namespace. A network namespace can be used to encapsulate specific network functionality or provide a network service in isolation as well as simply help to organize a complicated network setup. Using the Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview we are using the latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R3 (UEK3), this kernel provides a complete support for netns. Let's see how namespaces work through couple of examples to control network namespaces we use the ip netns command: Defining a new namespace: # ip netns add my-ns # ip netns list my-ns As mentioned the namespace is an isolated container, we can perform all the normal actions in the namespace context using the exec command for example running the ifconfig command: # ip netns exec my-ns ifconfig -a lo        Link encap:Local Loopback           LOOPBACK  MTU:16436 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) We can run every command in the namespace context, this is especially useful for debug using tcpdump command, we can ping or ssh or define iptables all within the namespace. Connecting the namespace to the outside world: There are various ways to connect into a namespaces and between namespaces we will focus on how this is done in OpenStack. OpenStack uses a combination of Open vSwitch and network namespaces. OVS defines the interfaces and then we can add those interfaces to namespace. So first let's add a bridge to OVS: # ovs-vsctl add-br my-bridge Now let's add a port on the OVS and make it internal: # ovs-vsctl add-port my-bridge my-port # ovs-vsctl set Interface my-port type=internal And let's connect it into the namespace: # ip link set my-port netns my-ns Looking inside the namespace: # ip netns exec my-ns ifconfig -a lo        Link encap:Local Loopback           LOOPBACK  MTU:65536 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) my-port   Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 22:04:45:E2:85:21           BROADCAST  MTU:1500 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) Now we can add more ports to the OVS bridge and connect it to other namespaces or other device like physical interfaces. Neutron is using network namespaces to implement network services such as DCHP, routing, gateway, firewall, load balance and more. In the next post we will go into this in further details. Linux Bridge and veth pairs Linux bridge is used to connect the port from OVS to the VM. Every port goes from the OVS bridge to a Linux bridge and from there to the VM. The reason for using regular Linux bridges is for security groups’ enforcement. Security groups are implemented using iptables and iptables can only be applied to Linux bridges and not to OVS bridges. Veth pairs are used extensively throughout the network setup in OpenStack and are also a good tool to debug a network problem. Veth pairs are simply a virtual wire and so veths always come in pairs. Typically one side of the veth pair will connect to a bridge and the other side to another bridge or simply left as a usable interface. In this example we will create some veth pairs, connect them to bridges and test connectivity. This example is using regular Linux server and not an OpenStack node: Creating a veth pair, note that we define names for both ends: # ip link add veth0 type veth peer name veth1 # ifconfig -a . . veth0     Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 5E:2C:E6:03:D0:17           BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) veth1     Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr E6:B6:E2:6D:42:B8           BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) . . To make the example more meaningful this we will create the following setup: veth0 => veth1 => br-eth3 => eth3 ======> eth2 on another Linux server br-eth3 – a regular Linux bridge which will be connected to veth1 and eth3 eth3 – a physical interface with no IP on it, connected to a private network eth2 – a physical interface on the remote Linux box connected to the private network and configured with the IP of 50.50.50.1 Once we create the setup we will ping 50.50.50.1 (the remote IP) through veth0 to test that the connection is up: # brctl addbr br-eth3 # brctl addif br-eth3 eth3 # brctl addif br-eth3 veth1 # brctl show bridge name     bridge id               STP enabled     interfaces br-eth3         8000.00505682e7f6       no              eth3                                                         veth1 # ifconfig veth0 50.50.50.50 # ping -I veth0 50.50.50.51 PING 50.50.50.51 (50.50.50.51) from 50.50.50.50 veth0: 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 50.50.50.51: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.454 ms 64 bytes from 50.50.50.51: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.298 ms When the naming is not as obvious as the previous example and we don't know who are the paired veth interfaces we can use the ethtool command to figure this out. The ethtool command returns an index we can look up using ip link command, for example: # ethtool -S veth1 NIC statistics: peer_ifindex: 12 # ip link . . 12: veth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000 Summary That’s all for now, we quickly reviewed OVS, network namespaces, Linux bridges and veth pairs. These components are heavily used in the OpenStack network architecture we are exploring and understanding them well will be very useful when reviewing the different use cases. In the next post we will look at how the OpenStack network is laid out connecting the virtual machines to each other and to the external world. @RonenKofman

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• Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!

  - by mbcrump

  Infragistics recently released their new Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. I saw a couple of samples and had to take a look. I headed over to their website and downloaded the controls. I first noticed the hospital floor-plan demo shown on their site and started thinking of ways that I could use this in my own organization. I emailed them asking if I could give away the Silverlight Data Visualization controls on my site and they said, Yes! They also wanted to throw in the standard Silverlight Line of Business controls. (combined they are worth about $3000 US). I am very thankful they were willing to help the Silverlight community with this giveaway. So some quick rules below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization ($3000 Value) Random winner will be announced on January 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) For extra entries simply: Retweet a link to this page using the following URL [ http://mcrump.me/iscfree ]. It does not matter what the tweet says, just as long as the URL is the same. Unlimited tweets, but please don’t go crazy! This URL will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit Infragistics because they made this possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark: The Silverlight Line of Business Control page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. The Data Visualization page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. Don’t worry about the Samples/Help Documentation. You can install all of that to your local HDD when you are installing it. I am going to walk you through the Silverlight Controls recently released by Infragistics. Begin by downloading the trial version and running the executable. If you downloaded the Complete bundle then you will have the following options to pick from. I like having help documentation and samples on my local HDD in case I do not have access to the internet and want to code. After it is installed, you may want to take a look at your Toolbox in Visual Studio 2010. Look for NetAdvantage 10.3 Silverlight and you will see that you now have access to all of these controls. At this point, to use the controls it’s as simple as drag/drop onto your Silverlight container. It will create the proper Namespaces for you. I wanted to highlight a few of the controls that I liked the most: Grid – After using the Infragistics grid you will wonder how you ever survived using the grid supplied by Microsoft standard controls.  This grid was designed to get your application up and running very fast. It’s simple to bind, it handles LARGE DataSets, easy to filter and allows endless possibilities of formatting data. The screenshot below is an example of the grid. For a real-time updating demo click here. SpellChecker- If your users are creating emails or performing any other function that requires Spell Checking then this control is great. Check out the screenshots below: In this first screen, I have a word that is not in the dictionary [DotNet]. The Spell Checker finds the word and allows the user to correct it. What is so great about Infragistics controls is that it only takes a few lines of code to have a full-featured Spell Checker in your application. TagCloud – This is a control that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It allows you to create keywords for popular search terms. This is very similar to TagCloud seen all over the internet.  Below is a screenshot that shows “Facebook” being a very popular item in the cloud. You can link these items to a hyperlink if you wanted. Importing/Exporting from Excel – I work with data a majority of the time. We all know the importance of Excel in our organizations, its used a lot. With Infragistics controls it make importing and exporting data from a Grid into Excel a snap. One of the things that I liked most about this control was the option to choose the Excel format (2003 or 2007). I haven’t seen this feature in other controls. Creating/Saving/Extracting/Uploading Zip Files – This is another control that I haven’t seen many others making. It allows you to basically manipulate a zip file in any way you like. You can even create a password on the zip file. Schedule – The Schedule that Infragistics provides resembles Outlook’s calendar. I think that it’s important for a user to see your app for the first time and immediately be able to start using because they are already familiar with the UI. The Schedule control accomplishes that in my opinion. I have just barely scratched the surface with the Infragistics Silverlight Line of Business controls. To check all of them then click here. A quick thing to note is that this giveaway also comes with the following Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. Below is a screenshot that list all of them:   I wanted to highlight 2 of the controls that I liked the most: xamBarcode– The xamBarcode supports the following Symbologies: Below is an example of the barcode generated by Infragistics controls. This is a high resolution barcode that you will not have to wonder if your scanner can read it. As long as you have ink in your printer your barcode will read it. I used a Symbol barcode reader to test this barcode. xamTreemap– I’ve never seen a way of displaying data like this before, but I like it. You can style this anyway that you like of course and it also comes with an Office 2010 Theme. Thanks to Infragistics for providing the controls to one lucky reader. I hope that you enjoyed this post and good luck to those that entered the contest.  Subscribe to my feed

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• Urban Turtle is such an awesome product !

  - by Vincent Grondin

  Mario Cardinal, the host of the Visual Studio Talk Show, is quite happy these days. He works with the Urban Turtle team and they received significant support from Microsoft. Brian Harry, who is the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server, has published an outstanding blog post about Urban Turtle that says: "...awesome Scrum experience for TFS.” You can read Brian Harry's blog post at the following URL: http://urbanturtle.com/awesome.

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• ISO Mount for Windown 7 and/or Server 2008

  - by Eric Johnson

  Apparently it's hard to locate a free ISO mapper these days.  Like most people I've use Microsoft's Virtual CD ROM to mount ISO images on XP and server 2003 machines.   This will not work in Windows 7 and Server 2008 machines.  Therefore, I recommend people try out magic ISO instead.   It's freeware and can be downloaded from the following URL. http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-history.htm

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 02, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 02, 2010New ProjectsAdventureWorks in Access: AdventureWorks database in Access format. Data has been ported in Access starting from Adventure Works database for SQL Server 2008.amplifi: This project is still under construction. We will add more information here as soon as it is available.ASP.NET MVC Bug Tracker: Bug Track written in C# ASP.NET MVC 2BigDecimal: BigDecimal is an attempt to create a number class that can have large precision. It is developed in vb.net (.net 4).CBM-Command: Coming soon....Chuyou: ChuyouCMinus: A C Minus Compiler!Complex and advanced mathematical functions: Mathematics toolkit is a Class Library Project which help Programmers to Calculate Mathematics Functions easily.Confuser: Confuser is a obfuscator for .NET. It is developed in C# and using Mono.Cecil for assembly manipulation.easypos: Micro punto de venta que permite ventas express de ropa, que se acopla fácil y transaparente con el ERP Click OneElmech Address Book: Web based Address Book for maintaining details of your business clients. This project targets Suppliers - Traders - Manufacturers - users. Applicat...Feed Viewer: Feed Viewer is able to synchronize subscribed feed and red news among all computers you are using. It understands both RSS and Atom format. It can ...Google URL Shortener, C#: Implementation in C# of generating short URLs by Goo.gl service (Google URL Shortener)MARS - Medical Assistant Record System: MARS - Medical Assistant Record SystemRx Contrib: Rx Contrib is a library which contain extensions for the Rx frameworkSimple Service Administration Tool: A simple tool to start/stop/restart a service of a WinNT based system. The tool is placed in the task bar as a notify icon, so the specified servic...Vis3D: Visual 3D controls for Silverlight.VisContent: XML content controls for ASP.NET.Windows Phone 7 database: This project implements a Isolated Storage (IsolatedStorage) based database for Windows Phone 7. The database consists of table object, each one s...New Releases$log$ / Keyword Substitution / Expansion Check-In Policy (TFS - LogSubstPol): LogSubstPol_v1.2010.0.4 (VS2010): LogSubstPol is a TFS check-in policy which insertes the check-in comments and other keywords into your source code, so you can keep track of the ch...Bojinx: Bojinx Core V4.5.1: The following new features were added: You can now use either BojinxMXMLContext or ContextModule to configure your application or module context. ...CBM-Command: Initial Public Demonstration: Initial public demonstration version. Can browse attached drives and display directory of any attached drive. A common question is "How does it w...Confuser: Confuser v1.0: It is the Confuser v1.0 that used to confuse the reverse-engineers :)Font Family Name Retrieval: 2nd Release: Added New MKV Font Extractor application to showcase the library. MKV Font Extractor depends on MKVToolnix to be installed before it will work. R...Google URL Shortener, C#: Goo.gl-CS v1 Beta: Extract the ZIP file to any location. Two files have to be in the same folder!HouseFly controls: HouseFly controls alpha 0.9.6.1: HouseFly controls release 0.9.6.1 alphaIsWiX: IsWiX 1.0.261.0: Build 1.0.261.0 - built against Fireworks 1.0.264.0. Adds support for VS2010 Integration to support WiX 3.5 beta releases.Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) Contrib: MefContrib 0.9.2.0: Added conventions based catalog (read more at http://www.thecodejunkie.com/2010/03/bringing-convention-based-registration.html) MEF + Unity integ...MARS - Medical Assistant Record System: license: licenseNSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.5: This release includes source code, executable binary, files and example materials.PHP.net: Release 0.0.0.1: This is the first release of PHP.Net. The features available in this release are: new File Save File Save As Open File In the rar file is th...Rx Contrib: V1: Rx Contrib is ongoing effort for community additions for Rx. Current features are: ReactiveQueue: ISubject that does not loose values if there are ...Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: Context Menu for Silverlight 4 v1.0: - Added a margin for icon display. - Added the PopupMenuItem class which is a derivative of the DockPanel. - Find* methods can now drill down the v...Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: Context Menu for Silverlight 4 v1.1 Beta: - Added a margin for icon display. - Added the PopupMenuItem class which is a derivative of the DockPanel. - Added a AddSeperator method. - The Fin...Simple Service Administration Tool: SSATool 0.1.3: New Simple Service Administration Tool Version 0.1.3 compiled with Visual Studio .NET 2010.sMAPedit: sMAPedit v0.7a + Map-Pack: Required Additional Map-Pack Added: height setting by color picker (shift+leftclick)sMAPedit: sMAPedit v0.7b: Fixed: force a gargabe collection update to prevent pictureBox's memory leaksqwarea: Sqwarea 0.0.228.0 (alpha): This release corrects a critical bug in ConnexityNotifier service. We strongly recommend you to upgrade to this version. Known bugs : if you open...StackOverflow Desktop Client in C# and WPF: StackOverflow Client 0.1: Source code for the sample.TortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.0.2: This is a bug fix release, we recommend all users upgrade to 1.0.2VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30501.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVidCoder: 0.4.0: Changes: Added ability to queue up multiple video files or titles at once. These queued jobs will use the currently selected encoding settings. Mul...WabbitStudio Z80 Software Tools: Wabbitemu 32-bit Test Release: Wabbitemu Visual Studio build for testing purposesWindows Phone 7 database: Initial Release v1.0: This project implements a Isolated Storage (IsolatedStorage) based database for Windows Phone 7. The usage of this software is very simple. You cre...YouTubeEmbeddedVideo WebControl for ASP.NET: VideoControls version 1: This zip file contains the VideoControls.dll, version 1.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)iTuner - The iTunes CompanionASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Serverpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceTinyProjectNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBlogEngine.NETDambach Linear Algebra FrameworkFacebook Developer Toolkit

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• Problem installing eclipse-platform in fresh Ubuntu 10.10

  - by pablo

  I am trying to install the eclipse-platform package in a new Ubuntu 10.10 and I am getting the following error (via the Ubuntu software center): Failed to fetch http://nz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/libs/libservlet2.4-java/libservlet2.4-java_5.0.30-12_all.deb 404 Not Found Browsing to the mentioned URL, I can obviously verify that the .deb file in question is missing. Is the package broken, or is it just the NZ mirror?

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• Movie Database in 2 Minutes with Running Objects

  - by edurdias

  Demonstrating how to use Running Objects, we have published a tutorial in how to create a Movie Database, like the one from Stephen Walther, in just 2 minutes. The tutorial demonstrate how to create the application end-to-end. You can access the tutorial in the following URL: http://runningobjects.azurewebsites.net/p/movie-database-in-2-minutes I hope you enjoy it!   Regards, Eduardo...(read more)

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• SQL – Migrate Database from SQL Server to NuoDB – A Quick Tutorial

  - by Pinal Dave

  Data is growing exponentially and every organization with growing data is thinking of next big innovation in the world of Big Data. Big data is a indeed a future for every organization at one point of the time. Just like every other next big thing, big data has its own challenges and issues. The biggest challenge associated with the big data is to find the ideal platform which supports the scalability and growth of the data. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you must be familiar with NuoDB. I have been working with NuoDB for a while and their recent release is the best thus far. NuoDB is an elastically scalable SQL database that can run on local host, datacenter and cloud-based resources. A key feature of the product is that it does not require sharding (read more here). Last week, I was able to install NuoDB in less than 90 seconds and have explored their Explorer and Admin sections. You can read about my experiences in these posts: SQL – Step by Step Guide to Download and Install NuoDB – Getting Started with NuoDB SQL – Quick Start with Admin Sections of NuoDB – Manage NuoDB Database SQL – Quick Start with Explorer Sections of NuoDB – Query NuoDB Database Many SQL Authority readers have been following me in my journey to evaluate NuoDB. One of the frequently asked questions I’ve received from you is if there is any way to migrate data from SQL Server to NuoDB. The fact is that there is indeed a way to do so and NuoDB provides a fantastic tool which can help users to do it. NuoDB Migrator is a command line utility that supports the migration of Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL schemas and data to NuoDB. The migration to NuoDB is a three-step process: NuoDB Migrator generates a schema for a target NuoDB database It loads data into the target NuoDB database It dumps data from the source database Let’s see how we can migrate our data from SQL Server to NuoDB using a simple three-step approach. But before we do that we will create a sample database in MSSQL and later we will migrate the same database to NuoDB: Setup Step 1: Build a sample data CREATE DATABASE [Test]; CREATE TABLE [Department]( [DepartmentID] [smallint] NOT NULL, [Name] VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL, [GroupName] VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL, [ModifiedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_Department_DepartmentID] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ( [DepartmentID] ASC ) ) ON [PRIMARY]; INSERT INTO Department SELECT * FROM AdventureWorks2012.HumanResources.Department; Note that I am using the SQL Server AdventureWorks database to build this sample table but you can build this sample table any way you prefer. Setup Step 2: Install Java 64 bit Before you can begin the migration process to NuoDB, make sure you have 64-bit Java installed on your computer. This is due to the fact that the NuoDB Migrator tool is built in Java. You can download 64-bit Java for Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux from the following link: http://java.com/en/download/manual.jsp. One more thing to remember is that you make sure that the path in your environment settings is set to your JAVA_HOME directory or else the tool will not work. Here is how you can do it: Go to My Computer >> Right Click >> Select Properties >> Click on Advanced System Settings >> Click on Environment Variables >> Click on New and enter the following values. Variable Name: JAVA_HOME Variable Value: C:\Program Files\Java\jre7 Make sure you enter your Java installation directory in the Variable Value field. Setup Step 3: Install JDBC driver for SQL Server. There are two JDBC drivers available for SQL Server.  Select the one you prefer to use by following one of the two links below: Microsoft JDBC Driver jTDS JDBC Driver In this example we will be using jTDS JDBC driver. Once you download the driver, move the driver to your NuoDB installation folder. In my case, I have moved the JAR file of the driver into the C:\Program Files\NuoDB\tools\migrator\jar folder as this is my NuoDB installation directory. Now we are all set to start the three-step migration process from SQL Server to NuoDB: Migration Step 1: NuoDB Schema Generation Here is the command I use to generate a schema of my SQL Server Database in NuoDB. First I go to the folder C:\Program Files\NuoDB\tools\migrator\bin and execute the nuodb-migrator.bat file. Note that my database name is ‘test’. Additionally my username and password is also ‘test’. You can see that my SQL Server database is running on my localhost on port 1433. Additionally, the schema of the table is ‘dbo’. nuodb-migrator schema –source.driver=net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver –source.url=jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://localhost:1433/ –source.username=test –source.password=test –source.catalog=test –source.schema=dbo –output.path=/tmp/schema.sql The above script will generate a schema of all my SQL Server tables and will put it in the folder C:\tmp\schema.sql . You can open the schema.sql file and execute this file directly in your NuoDB instance. You can follow the link here to see how you can execute the SQL script in NuoDB. Please note that if you have not yet created the schema in the NuoDB database, you should create it before executing this step. Step 2: Generate the Dump File of the Data Once you have recreated your schema in NuoDB from SQL Server, the next step is very easy. Here we create a CSV format dump file, which will contain all the data from all the tables from the SQL Server database. The command to do so is very similar to the above command. Be aware that this step may take a bit of time based on your database size. nuodb-migrator dump –source.driver=net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver –source.url=jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://localhost:1433/ –source.username=test –source.password=test –source.catalog=test –source.schema=dbo –output.type=csv –output.path=/tmp/dump.cat Once the above command is successfully executed you can find your CSV file in the C:\tmp\ folder. However, you do not have to do anything manually. The third and final step will take care of completing the migration process. Migration Step 3: Load the Data into NuoDB After building schema and taking a dump of the data, the very next step is essential and crucial. It will take the CSV file and load it into the NuoDB database. nuodb-migrator load –target.url=jdbc:com.nuodb://localhost:48004/mytest –target.schema=dbo –target.username=test –target.password=test –input.path=/tmp/dump.cat Please note that in the above script we are now targeting the NuoDB database, which we have already created with the name of “MyTest”. If the database does not exist, create it manually before executing the above script. I have kept the username and password as “test”, but please make sure that you create a more secure password for your database for security reasons. Voila!  You’re Done That’s it. You are done. It took 3 setup and 3 migration steps to migrate your SQL Server database to NuoDB.  You can now start exploring the database and build excellent, scale-out applications. In this blog post, I have done my best to come up with simple and easy process, which you can follow to migrate your app from SQL Server to NuoDB. Download NuoDB I strongly encourage you to download NuoDB and go through my 3-step migration tutorial from SQL Server to NuoDB. Additionally here are two very important blog post from NuoDB CTO Seth Proctor. He has written excellent blog posts on the concept of the Administrative Domains. NuoDB has this concept of an Administrative Domain, which is a collection of hosts that can run one or multiple databases.  Each database has its own TEs and SMs, but all are managed within the Admin Console for that particular domain. http://www.nuodb.com/techblog/2013/03/11/getting-started-provisioning-a-domain/ http://www.nuodb.com/techblog/2013/03/14/getting-started-running-a-database/ Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: NuoDB

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• Tip of the day: Don’t misuse the Link button control

  - by anas

  Misuse ? Yes it is ! I have seen a lot of developers who are using the LinkButton to do redirection only ! They are handling it’s click event to just write Response.Redirect ("url”) like this: protected void LinkButton1_Click( object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Redirect( "~/ForgotPassword.aspx" ); } Ok so to understand why it’s not a good practice let’s discuss the redirection steps involved when using the mentioned method: User submits the page by clicking on the LinkButton control...(read more)

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• Error trapping for a missing data source in a Spring MVC / Spring JDBC web app [migrated]

  - by Geeb

  I have written a web app that uses Spring MVC libraries and Spring JDBC to connect to an Oracle DB. (I don't use any ORM type libraries as I create stored procedures on Oracle that do my stuff and I'm quite happy with that.) I use a connection pool to Oracle managed by the Tomcat container The app generally works absolutely fine by the way! BUT... I noticed the other day when I tried to set up the app on another Tomcat instance that I had forgotten to configure the connection pool and obviously the app could not get hold of an org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource object, so it crashed. I define the pool params in the tomcat "context.conf" In my "web.xml" I have: <servlet> <servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class> <init-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value>/WEB-INF/Spring/appServlet/servlet-context.xml</param-value> </init-param> <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name> <!-- Map *everything* to appServlet --> <url-pattern>/</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> <resource-ref> <description>Oracle Datasource example</description> <res-ref-name>jdbc/ora1</res-ref-name> <res-type>org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource</res-type> <res-auth>Container</res-auth> </resource-ref> And I have a Spring "servlet-context.xml" where JNDI is used to map the data source object provided by the connection pool to a Spring bean with the ID of "dataSource": <jee:jndi-lookup id="dataSource" jndi-name="java:comp/env/jdbc/ora1" resource-ref="true" /> Here's the question: Where do I trap the case where the database cannot be accessed for whatever reason? I don't want the user to see a yard-and-a-half of Java stack trace in their browser, rather a nicer message that tells them there is a database problem etc. It seems that my app tries to configure the "dataSource" bean (in "servlet-context.xml") before any code has tested it can actually provide a dataSource object from the pool?! Maybe I'm not fully understanding exactly what is going on in these stages of the app firing up ... Thanks for any advice!

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• Manage Your Twitter Account from the Sidebar in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you a Twitter addict and need an easy way to manage your account in Firefox? Now you can access Twitter in your Sidebar or as a separate window with the TwitKit+ extension for Firefox. Accessing TwitKit+ There are three ways that you can access TwitKit+ after installing the extension. The first is by adding the “Toolbar Button” to your browser’s UI. The second and third methods are through the “View & Tools Menus”.   TwitKit+ in Action When you open TwitKit+ for the first time you will see Twitter’s “Public Tweet Stream”. To get started login into your account. Note: If you do not care for the “brown theme” you can select a different one in “Preferences”. Here is a closer look at the top area and the commands available. Notice the “blue arrow symbol” in the upper left corner…very useful if you want to separate TwitKit+ from your main browser window for a bit. Secure Mode, Undock, Preferences, Login/Logout Google Search, Twitter Search, Copy Selection To Status Box, Shorten Selected URL Public, User, Friends, Followers, @ Messages, Direct Messages, Profile Note: To use Google or Twitter search enter your term in the “Status Area” and click on the appropriate service icon. Here is the regular timeline for our account…the “clickable tab buttons” make everything easy to view and work with. You can perform actions such as replying, retweeting, marking as a favorite, etc. using the set of “management buttons” at the bottom of each tweet. To add a new tweet to your timeline enter your text and press “Enter”. A look at the “Following List” for our account. Having a more defined and separate “view categories” set makes this better than directly accessing the Twitter website. Preferences The preferences can be quickly sorted out…choose how often the timeline is updated, name display, favorite URL shortening service, theme, and font size. Note: The default connection setting is for “Secure Access”. Conclusion TwitKit+ makes a nice addition to Firefox for anyone who loves keeping up with Twitter throughout the day. There when you want it and out of your way the rest of the time. Links Download the TwitKit+ extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Move Add-on Management to the Sidebar in FirefoxPreview and Manage Multiple Tabs in Firefox with Tab SidebarDisable Windows Sidebar in VistaQuick Tip: Use Google Talk Sidebar in FirefoxRun Windows Sidebar Gadgets Without the Sidebar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Manage Your Twitter Account from the Sidebar in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you a Twitter addict and need an easy way to manage your account in Firefox? Now you can access Twitter in your Sidebar or as a separate window with the TwitKit+ extension for Firefox. Accessing TwitKit+ There are three ways that you can access TwitKit+ after installing the extension. The first is by adding the “Toolbar Button” to your browser’s UI. The second and third methods are through the “View & Tools Menus”.   TwitKit+ in Action When you open TwitKit+ for the first time you will see Twitter’s “Public Tweet Stream”. To get started login into your account. Note: If you do not care for the “brown theme” you can select a different one in “Preferences”. Here is a closer look at the top area and the commands available. Notice the “blue arrow symbol” in the upper left corner…very useful if you want to separate TwitKit+ from your main browser window for a bit. Secure Mode, Undock, Preferences, Login/Logout Google Search, Twitter Search, Copy Selection To Status Box, Shorten Selected URL Public, User, Friends, Followers, @ Messages, Direct Messages, Profile Note: To use Google or Twitter search enter your term in the “Status Area” and click on the appropriate service icon. Here is the regular timeline for our account…the “clickable tab buttons” make everything easy to view and work with. You can perform actions such as replying, retweeting, marking as a favorite, etc. using the set of “management buttons” at the bottom of each tweet. To add a new tweet to your timeline enter your text and press “Enter”. A look at the “Following List” for our account. Having a more defined and separate “view categories” set makes this better than directly accessing the Twitter website. Preferences The preferences can be quickly sorted out…choose how often the timeline is updated, name display, favorite URL shortening service, theme, and font size. Note: The default connection setting is for “Secure Access”. Conclusion TwitKit+ makes a nice addition to Firefox for anyone who loves keeping up with Twitter throughout the day. There when you want it and out of your way the rest of the time. Links Download the TwitKit+ extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Move Add-on Management to the Sidebar in FirefoxPreview and Manage Multiple Tabs in Firefox with Tab SidebarDisable Windows Sidebar in VistaQuick Tip: Use Google Talk Sidebar in FirefoxRun Windows Sidebar Gadgets Without the Sidebar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

  Read the article

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