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How do you hide an image tag based on an ajax response?

- by Chris

What is the correct jquery statement to replace the "//Needed magic" comments below so that the image tags are hidden or unhidden based on the AJAX responses? <!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> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>JQuery</title> <style type="text/css"> .isSolvedImage{ width: 68px; height: 47px; border: 1px solid red; cursor: pointer; } </style> <script src="_js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"> </script> </head> <body> <div id='true1.txt' class='isSolvedImage'> <img src="_images/solved.png"> </div> <div id='false1.txt' class='isSolvedImage'> <img src="_images/solved.png"> </div> <div id='true2.txt' class='isSolvedImage'> <img src="_images/solved.png"> </div> <div id='false2.txt' class='isSolvedImage'> <img src="_images/solved.png"> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function(){ var getDivs = 0; //iterate div with class isSolvedImage $("div.isSolvedImage").each(function() { alert('div id--'+this.id); // send ajax requrest $.get(this.id, function(data) { // check if ajax response is 1 alert('div id--'+this.url+'--ajax response--'+data); if(data == 1){ alert('div id--'+this.url+'--Unhiding image--'); //Needed magic //Show image if data==1 } else{ alert('div id--'+this.url+'--Hiding image--'); //Needed magic //Hide image if data!=1 } }); }); }); </script> </body> </html>

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Is there really a need for encryption to have true wireless security? [closed]

- by Cawas

I welcome better key-wording here, both on tags and title. I'm trying to conceive a free, open and secure network environment that would work anywhere, from big enterprises to small home networks of just 1 machine. I think since wireless Access Points are the most, if not only, true weak point of a Local Area Network (let's not consider every other security aspect of having internet) there would be basically two points to consider here: Having an open AP for anyone to use the internet through Leaving the whole LAN also open for guests to be able to easily read (only) files on it, and even a place to drop files on Considering these two aspects, once everything is done properly... What's the most secure option between having that, or having just an encrypted password-protected wifi? Of course "both" would seem "more secure". But it shouldn't actually be anything substantial. That's the question, but I think it may need more elaborating on. If you don't think so, please feel free to skip the next (long) part. Elaborating more on the two aspects ... I've always had the feeling using any kind of the so called "wireless security" methods is actually a bad design. I'm talking mostly about encrypting and pass-phrasing (which are actually two different concepts), since I won't even consider hiding SSID and mac filtering. I understand it's a natural way of thinking. With cable networking nobody can access the network unless they have access to the physical cable, so you're "secure" in the physical way. In a way, encrypting is for wireless what building walls is for the cables. And giving pass-phrases would be adding a door with a key. But the cabling without encryption is also insecure. If someone plugin all the data is right there. So, while I can see the use for encrypting data, I don't think it's a security measure in wireless networks. It's wasting resources for too little gain. I believe we should encrypt only sensitive data regardless of wires. That's already done with HTTPS, so I don't really need to encrypt my torrents, for instance. They're torrents, they are meant to be freely shared! As for using passwords, they should be added to the users, always. Not to wifi. For securing files, truly, best solution is backup. Sure all that doesn't happen that often, but I won't consider the most situations where people just don't care. I think there are enough situations where we actually use passwords on our OS users, so let's go with that in mind. I keep promoting the Fonera concept as an instance. It opens up a free wifi port, if you choose so, and anyone can connect to the internet through that, without having any access to your LAN. It also uses a QoS which will never let your bandwidth drop from that public usage. That's security, and it's open. But it's lacking the second aspect. I'll probably be bashed for promoting the non-usage of WPA 2 with AES or whatever, but I wanted to know from more experienced (super) users out there: what do you think?

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What *exactly* gets screwed when I kill -9 or pull the power?

- by Mike

Set-Up I've been a programmer for quite some time now but I'm still a bit fuzzy on deep, internal stuff. Now. I am well aware that it's not a good idea to either: kill -9 a process (bad) spontaneously pull the power plug on a running computer or server (worse) However, sometimes you just plain have to. Sometimes a process just won't respond no matter what you do, and sometimes a computer just won't respond, no matter what you do. Let's assume a system running Apache 2, MySQL 5, PHP 5, and Python 2.6.5 through mod_wsgi. Note: I'm most interested about Mac OS X here, but an answer that pertains to any UNIX system would help me out. My Concern Each time I have to do either one of these, especially the second, I'm very worried for a period of time that something has been broken. Some file somewhere could be corrupt -- who knows which file? There are over 1,000,000 files on the computer. I'm often using OS X, so I'll run a "Verify Disk" operation through the Disk Utility. It will report no problems, but I'm still concerned about this. What if some configuration file somewhere got screwed up. Or even worse, what if a binary file somewhere is corrupt. Or a script file somewhere is corrupt now. What if some hardware is damaged? What if I don't find out about it until next month, in a critical scenario, when the corruption or damage causes a catastrophe? Or, what if valuable data is already lost? My Hope My hope is that these concerns and worries are unfounded. After all, after doing this many times before, nothing truly bad has happened yet. The worst is I've had to repair some MySQL tables, but I don't seem to have lost any data. But, if my worries are not unfounded, and real damage could happen in either situation 1 or 2, then my hope is that there is a way to detect it and prevent against it. My Question(s) Could this be because modern operating systems are designed to ensure that nothing is lost in these scenarios? Could this be because modern software is designed to ensure that nothing lost? What about modern hardware design? What measures are in place when you pull the power plug? My question is, for both of these scenarios, what exactly can go wrong, and what steps should be taken to fix it? I'm under the impression that one thing that can go wrong is some programs might not have flushed their data to the disk, so any highly recent data that was supposed to be written to the disk (say, a few seconds before the power pull) might be lost. But what about beyond that? And can this very issue of 5-second data loss screw up a system? What about corruption of random files hiding somewhere in the huge forest of files on my hard drives? What about hardware damage? What Would Help Me Most Detailed descriptions about what goes on internally when you either kill -9 a process or pull the power on the whole system. (it seems instant, but can someone slow it down for me?) Explanations of all things that could go wrong in these scenarios, along with (rough of course) probabilities (i.e., this is very unlikely, but this is likely)... Descriptions of measures in place in modern hardware, operating systems, and software, to prevent damage or corruption when these scenarios occur. (to comfort me) Instructions for what to do after a kill -9 or a power pull, beyond "verifying the disk", in order to truly make sure nothing is corrupt or damaged somewhere on the drive. Measures that can be taken to fortify a computer setup so that if something has to be killed or the power has to be pulled, any potential damage is mitigated. Thanks so much!

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Getting Started with ASP.NET Membership, Profile and RoleManager

- by Ben Griswold

A new ASP.NET MVC project includes preconfigured Membership, Profile and RoleManager providers right out of the box. Try it yourself – create a ASP.NET MVC application, crack open the web.config file and have a look. First, you’ll find the ApplicationServices database connection: <connectionStrings> <add name="ApplicationServices" connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|aspnetdb.mdf;User Instance=true" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/> </connectionStrings> Notice the connection string is referencing the aspnetdb.mdf database hosted by SQL Express and it’s using integrated security so it’ll just work for you without having to call out a specific database login or anything. Scroll down the file a bit and you’ll find each of the three noted sections: <membership> <providers> <clear/> <add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" connectionStringName="ApplicationServices" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" passwordFormat="Hashed" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordAttemptWindow="10" passwordStrengthRegularExpression="" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </membership> <profile> <providers> <clear/> <add name="AspNetSqlProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" connectionStringName="ApplicationServices" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </profile> <roleManager enabled="false"> <providers> <clear /> <add connectionStringName="ApplicationServices" applicationName="/" name="AspNetSqlRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" /> <add applicationName="/" name="AspNetWindowsTokenRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.WindowsTokenRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" /> </providers> </roleManager> Really. It’s all there. Still don’t believe me. Run the application, walk through the registration process and finally login and logout. Completely functional – and you didn’t have to do a thing! What else? Well, you can manage your users via the Configuration Manager which is hiding in Visual Studio behind Projects > ASP.NET Configuration. The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool isn’t MVC-specific (neither is the Membership, Profile or RoleManager stuff) but it’s neat and I hardly ever see anyone using it. Here you can set up and edit users, roles, and set access permissions for your site. You can manage application settings, establish your SMTP settings, configure debugging and tracing, define default error page and even take your application offline. The UI is rather plain-Jane but it works great. And here’s the best of all. Let’s say you, like most of us, don’t want to run your application on top of the aspnetdb.mdf database. Let’s suppose you want to use your own database and you’d like to add the membership stuff to it. Well, that’s easy enough. Take a look inside your [drive:]\%windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\ folder. Here you’ll find a bunch of files. If you were to run the InstallCommon.sql, InstallMembership.sql, InstallRoles.sql and InstallProfile.sql files against the database of your choices, you’d be installing the same membership, profile and role artifacts which are found in the aspnet.db to your own database. Too much trouble? Okay. Run [drive:]\%windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regsql.exe from the command line instead. This will launch the ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard which walks you through the installation of those same database objects into the new or existing database of your choice. You may not always have the luxury of using this tool on your destination server, but you should use it whenever you can. Last tip: don’t forget to update the ApplicationServices connectionstring to point to your custom database after the setup is complete. At the risk of sounding like a smarty, everything I’ve mentioned in this post has been around for quite a while. The thing is that not everyone has had the opportunity to use it. And it makes sense. I know I’ve worked on projects which used custom membership services. Why bother with the out-of-the-box stuff, right? And the .NET framework is so massive, who can know it all. Well, eventually you might have a chance to architect your own solution using any implementation you’d like or you will have the time to play around with another aspect of the framework. When you do, think back to this post.

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Responsive Inline Elements with Twitter Bootstrap

- by MightyZot

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/MightyZot/archive/2013/11/12/responsive-inline-elements-with-twitter-bootstrap.aspxTwitter Boostrap is a responsive css platform created by some dudes affiliated with Twitter and since supported and maintained by an open source following. I absolutely love the new version of this css toolkit. They rebuilt it with a mobile first strategy and it’s very easy to layout pages once you get the hang of it. Using a css / javascript framework like bootstrap is certainly much easier than coding your layout by hand. And, you get a “leg up” when it comes to adding responsive features to your site. Bootstrap includes column layout classes that let you specify size and placement based upon the viewport width. In addition, there are a handful of responsive helpers to hide and show content based upon the user’s device size. Most notably, the visible-xs, visible-sm, visible-md, and visible-lg classes let you show content for devices corresponding to those sizes (they are listed in the bootstrap docs.) hidden-xs, hidden-sm, hidden-md, and hidden-lg let you hide content for devices with those respective sizes. These helpers work great for showing and hiding block elements. Unfortunately, there isn’t a provision yet in Twitter Bootstrap (as of the time of this writing) for inline elements. We are using the navbar classes to create a navigation bar at the top of our website, www.crowdit.com. When you shrink the width of the screen to tablet or phone size, the tools in the navbar are turned into a drop down menu, and a button appears on the right side of the navbar. This is great! But, we wanted different content to display based upon whether the items were on the navbar versus when they were in the dropdown menu. The visible-?? and hidden-?? classes make this easy for images and block elements. In our case, we wanted our anchors to show different text depending upon whether they’re in the navbar, or in the dropdown. span is inherently inline and it can be a block element. My first approach was to create two anchors for each options, one set visible when the navbar is on a desktop or laptop with a wide display and another set visible when the elements converted to a dropdown menu. That works fine with the visible-?? and hidden-?? classes, but it just doesn’t seem that clean to me. I put up with that for about a week…last night I created the following classes to augment the block-based classes provided by bootstrap. .cdt-hidden-xs, .cdt-hidden-sm, .cdt-hidden-md, .cdt-hidden-lg { display: inline !important; } @media (max-width:767px) { .cdt-hidden-xs, .cdt-hidden-sm.cdt-hidden-xs, .cdt-hidden-md.cdt-hidden-xs, .cdt-hidden-lg.cdt-hidden-xs { display: none !important; } } @media (min-width:768px) and (max-width:991px) { .cdt-hidden-xs.cdt-hidden-sm, .cdt-hidden-sm, .cdt-hidden-md.cdt-hidden-sm, .cdt-hidden-lg.cdt-hidden-sm { display: none !important; } } @media (min-width:992px) and (max-width:1199px) { .cdt-hidden-xs.cdt-hidden-md, .cdt-hidden-sm.cdt-hidden-md, .cdt-hidden-md, .cdt-hidden-lg.cdt-hidden-md { display: none !important; } } @media (min-width:1200px) { .cdt-hidden-xs.cdt-hidden-lg, .cdt-hidden-sm.cdt-hidden-lg, .cdt-hidden-md.cdt-hidden-lg, .cdt-hidden-lg { display: none !important; } } .cdt-visible-xs, .cdt-visible-sm, .cdt-visible-md, .cdt-visible-lg { display: none !important; } @media (max-width:767px) { .cdt-visible-xs, .cdt-visible-sm.cdt-visible-xs, .cdt-visible-md.cdt-visible-xs, .cdt-visible-lg.cdt-visible-xs { display: inline !important; } } @media (min-width:768px) and (max-width:991px) { .cdt-visible-xs.cdt-visible-sm, .cdt-visible-sm, .cdt-visible-md.cdt-visible-sm, .cdt-visible-lg.cdt-visible-sm { display: inline !important; } } @media (min-width:992px) and (max-width:1199px) { .cdt-visible-xs.cdt-visible-md, .cdt-visible-sm.cdt-visible-md, .cdt-visible-md, .cdt-visible-lg.cdt-visible-md { display: inline !important; } } @media (min-width:1200px) { .cdt-visible-xs.cdt-visible-lg, .cdt-visible-sm.cdt-visible-lg, .cdt-visible-md.cdt-visible-lg, .cdt-visible-lg { display: inline !important; } } I created these by looking at the example provided by bootstrap and consolidating the styles. “cdt” is just a prefix that I’m using to distinguish these classes from the block-based classes in bootstrap. You are welcome to change the prefix to whatever feels right for you. These classes can be applied to spans in textual content to hide and show text based upon the browser width. Applying the styles is simple… <span class=”cdt-visible-xs”>This text is visible in extra small</span> <span class=”cdt-visible-sm”>This text is visible in small</span> Why would you want to do this? Here are a couple of examples, shown in screen shots. This is the CrowdIt navbar on larger displays. Notice how the text is two line and certain words are capitalized? Now, check this out! Here is a screen shot showing the dropdown menu that’s displayed when the browser window is tablet or phone sized. The markup to make this happen is quite simple…take a look. <li> <a href="@Url.Action("what-is-crowdit","home")" title="Learn about what CrowdIt can do for your Small Business"> <span class="cdt-hidden-xs">WHAT<br /><small>is CrowdIt?</small></span> <span class="cdt-visible-xs">What is CrowdIt?</span> </a> </li> There is a single anchor tag in this example and only the spans change visibility based on browser width. I left them separate for readability and because I wanted to use the small tag; however, you could just as easily hide the “WHAT” and the br tag on small displays and replace them with “What “, consolidating this even further to text containing a single span. <span class=”cdt-hidden-xs”>WHAT<br /></span><span class=”cdt-visible-xs”>What </span>is CrowdIt? You might be a master of css and have a better method of handling this problem. If so, I’d love to hear about your solution…leave me some feedback! You’ll be entered into a drawing for a chance to win an autographed picture of ME! Yay!

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Modern/Metro Internet Explorer: What were they thinking???

- by Rick Strahl

As I installed Windows 8.1 last week I decided that I really should take a closer look at Internet Explorer in the Modern/Metro environment again. Right away I ran into two issues that are real head scratchers to me.Modern Split Windows don't resize Viewport but Zoom OutThis one falls in the "WTF, really?" department: It looks like Modern Internet Explorer's Modern doesn't resize the browser window as every other browser (including IE 11 on the desktop) does, but rather tries to adjust the zoom to the width of the browser. This means that if you use the Modern IE browser and you split the display between IE and another application, IE will be zoomed out, with text becoming much, much smaller, rather than resizing the browser viewport and adjusting the pixel width as you would when a browser window is typically resized.Here's what I'm talking about in a couple of pictures. First here's the full screen Internet Explorer version (this shot is resized down since it's full screen at 1080p, click to see the full image):This brings up the first issue which is: On the desktop who wants to browse a site full screen? Most sites aren't fully optimized for 1080p widescreen experience and frankly most content that wide just looks weird. Even in typical 10" resolutions of 1280 width it's weird to look at things this way. At least this issue can be worked around with @media queries and either constraining the view, or adding additional content to make use of the extra space. Still running a desktop browser full screen is not optimal on a desktop machine - ever.Regardless, this view, while oversized, is what I expect: Everything is rendered in the right ratios, with font-size and the responsive design styling properly respected.But now look what happens when you split the desktop windows and show half desktop and have modern IE (this screen shot is not resized but cropped - this is actual size content as you can see in the cropped Twitter window on the right half of the screen):What's happening here is that IE is zooming out of the content to make it fit into the smaller width, shrinking the content rather than resizing the viewport's pixel width. In effect it looks like the pixel width stays at 1080px and the viewport expands out height-wise in response resulting in some crazy long portrait view.There goes responsive design - out the window literally. If you've built your site using @media queries and fixed viewport sizes, Internet Explorer completely screws you in this split view. On my 1080p monitor, the site shown at a little under half width becomes completely unreadable as the fonts are too small and break up. As you go into split view and you resize the window handle the content of the browser gets smaller and smaller (and effectively longer and longer on the bottom) effectively throwing off any responsive layout to the point of un-readability even on a big display, let alone a small tablet screen.What could POSSIBLY be the benefit of this screwed up behavior? I checked around a bit trying different pages in this shrunk down view. Other than the Microsoft home page, every page I went to was nearly unreadable at a quarter width. The only page I found that worked 'normally' was the Microsoft home page which undoubtedly is optimized just for Internet Explorer specifically.Bottom Address Bar opaquely overlays ContentAnother problematic feature for me is the browser address bar on the bottom. Modern IE shows the status bar opaquely on the bottom, overlaying the content area of the Web Page - until you click on the page. Until you do though, the address bar overlays the bottom content solidly. And not just a little bit but by good sizable chunk.In the application from the screen shot above I have an application toolbar on the bottom and the IE Address bar completely hides that bottom toolbar when the page is first loaded, until the user clicks into the content at which point the address bar shrinks down to a fat border style bar with a … on it. Toolbars on the bottom are pretty common these days, especially for mobile optimized applications, so I'd say this is a common use case. But even if you don't have toolbars on the bottom maybe there's other fixed content on the bottom of the page that is vital to display. While other browsers often also show address bars and then later hide them, these other browsers tend to resize the viewport when the address bar status changes, so the content can respond to the size change. Not so with Modern IE. The address bar overlays content and stays visible until content is clicked. No resize notification or viewport height change is sent to the browser.So basically Internet Explorer is telling me: "Our toolbar is more important than your content!" - AND gives me no chance to re-act to that behavior. The result on this page/application is that the user sees no actionable operations until he or she clicks into the content area, which is terrible from a UI perspective as the user has no idea what options are available on initial load.It's doubly confounding in that IE is running in full screen mode and has an the entire height of the screen at its disposal - there's plenty of real estate available to not require this sort of hiding of content in the first place. Heck, even Windows Phone with its more constrained size doesn't hide content - in fact the address bar on Windows Phone 8 is always visible.What were they thinking?Every time I use anything in the Modern Metro interface in Windows 8/8.1 I get angry. I can pretty much ignore Metro/Modern for my everyday usage, but unfortunately with Internet Explorer in the modern shell I have to live with, because there will be users using it to access my sites. I think it's inexcusable by Microsoft to build such a crappy shell around the browser that impacts the actual usability of Web content. In both of the cases above I can only scratch my head at what could have possibly motivated anybody designing the UI for the browser to make these screwed up choices, that manipulate the content in a totally unmaintainable way.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Windows HTML5 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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Cloud Computing = Elasticity * Availability

- by Herve Roggero

What is cloud computing? Is hosting the same thing as cloud computing? Are you running a cloud if you already use virtual machines? What is the difference between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and a cloud provider? And the list goes on… these questions keep coming up and all try to fundamentally explain what “cloud” means relative to other concepts. At the risk of over simplification, answering these questions becomes simpler once you understand the primary foundations of cloud computing: Elasticity and Availability. Elasticity The basic value proposition of cloud computing is to pay as you go, and to pay for what you use. This implies that an application can expand and contract on demand, across all its tiers (presentation layer, services, database, security…). This also implies that application components can grow independently from each other. So if you need more storage for your database, you should be able to grow that tier without affecting, reconfiguring or changing the other tiers. Basically, cloud applications behave like a sponge; when you add water to a sponge, it grows in size; in the application world, the more customers you add, the more it grows. Pure IaaS providers will provide certain benefits, specifically in terms of operating costs, but an IaaS provider will not help you in making your applications elastic; neither will Virtual Machines. The smallest elasticity unit of an IaaS provider and a Virtual Machine environment is a server (physical or virtual). While adding servers in a datacenter helps in achieving scale, it is hardly enough. The application has yet to use this hardware. If the process of adding computing resources is not transparent to the application, the application is not elastic. As you can see from the above description, designing for the cloud is not about more servers; it is about designing an application for elasticity regardless of the underlying server farm. Availability The fact of the matter is that making applications highly available is hard. It requires highly specialized tools and trained staff. On top of it, it's expensive. Many companies are required to run multiple data centers due to high availability requirements. In some organizations, some data centers are simply on standby, waiting to be used in a case of a failover. Other organizations are able to achieve a certain level of success with active/active data centers, in which all available data centers serve incoming user requests. While achieving high availability for services is relatively simple, establishing a highly available database farm is far more complex. In fact it is so complex that many companies establish yearly tests to validate failover procedures. To a certain degree certain IaaS provides can assist with complex disaster recovery planning and setting up data centers that can achieve successful failover. However the burden is still on the corporation to manage and maintain such an environment, including regular hardware and software upgrades. Cloud computing on the other hand removes most of the disaster recovery requirements by hiding many of the underlying complexities. Cloud Providers A cloud provider is an infrastructure provider offering additional tools to achieve application elasticity and availability that are not usually available on-premise. For example Microsoft Azure provides a simple configuration screen that makes it possible to run 1 or 100 web sites by clicking a button or two on a screen (simplifying provisioning), and soon SQL Azure will offer Data Federation to allow database sharding (which allows you to scale the database tier seamlessly and automatically). Other cloud providers offer certain features that are not available on-premise as well, such as the Amazon SC3 (Simple Storage Service) which gives you virtually unlimited storage capabilities for simple data stores, which is somewhat equivalent to the Microsoft Azure Table offering (offering a server-independent data storage model). Unlike IaaS providers, cloud providers give you the necessary tools to adopt elasticity as part of your application architecture. Some cloud providers offer built-in high availability that get you out of the business of configuring clustered solutions, or running multiple data centers. Some cloud providers will give you more control (which puts some of that burden back on the customers' shoulder) and others will tend to make high availability totally transparent. For example, SQL Azure provides high availability automatically which would be very difficult to achieve (and very costly) on premise. Keep in mind that each cloud provider has its strengths and weaknesses; some are better at achieving transparent scalability and server independence than others. Not for Everyone Note however that it is up to you to leverage the elasticity capabilities of a cloud provider, as discussed previously; if you build a website that does not need to scale, for which elasticity is not important, then you can use a traditional host provider unless you also need high availability. Leveraging the technologies of cloud providers can be difficult and can become a journey for companies that build their solutions in a scale up fashion. Cloud computing promises to address cost containment and scalability of applications with built-in high availability. If your application does not need to scale or you do not need high availability, then cloud computing may not be for you. In fact, you may pay a premium to run your applications with cloud providers due to the underlying technologies built specifically for scalability and availability requirements. And as such, the cloud is not for everyone. Consistent Customer Experience, Predictable Cost With all its complexities, buzz and foggy definition, cloud computing boils down to a simple objective: consistent customer experience at a predictable cost. The objective of a cloud solution is to provide the same user experience to your last customer than the first, while keeping your operating costs directly proportional to the number of customers you have. Making your applications elastic and highly available across all its tiers, with as much automation as possible, achieves the first objective of a consistent customer experience. And the ability to expand and contract the infrastructure footprint of your application dynamically achieves the cost containment objectives. Herve Roggero is a SQL Azure MVP and co-author of Pro SQL Azure (APress). He is the co-founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (www.bluesyntax.net), a company focusing on cloud computing technologies helping customers understand and adopt cloud computing technologies. For more information contact herve at hroggero @ bluesyntax.net .

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MySQL for Excel 1.1.3 has been released

- by Javier Treviño

The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.1.3, the latest addition to the MySQL Installer for Windows. MySQL for Excel is an application plug-in enabling data analysts to very easily access and manipulate MySQL data within Microsoft Excel. It enables you to directly work with a MySQL database from within Microsoft Excel so you can easily do tasks such as: Importing MySQL Data into Excel Exporting Excel data directly into MySQL to a new or existing table Editing MySQL data directly within Excel MySQL for Excel is installed using the MySQL Installer for Windows. The MySQL installer comes in 2 versions Full (150 MB) which includes a complete set of MySQL products with their binaries included in the download Web (1.5 MB - a network install) which will just pull MySQL for Excel over the web and install it when run. You can download MySQL Installer from our official Downloads page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/installer/. MySQL for Excel 1.1.3 introduces the following features: Upon saving a Workbook containing Worksheets in Edit Mode, the user is asked if he wants to exit the Edit Mode on all Worksheets before their parent Workbook is saved so the Worksheets are saved unprotected, otherwise the Worksheets will remain protected and the users will be able to unprotect them later retrieving the passkeys from the application log after closing MySQL for Excel. Added background coloring to the column names header row of an Import Data operation to have the same look as the one in an Edit Data operation (i.e. gray-ish background). Connection passwords can be stored securely just like MySQL Workbench does and these secured passwords are shared with Workbench in the same way connections are. Changed the way the MySQL for Excel ribbon toggle button works, instead of just showing or hiding the add-in it actually opens and closes it. Added a connection test before any operation against the database (schema creation, data import, append, export or edition) so the operation dialog is not shown and a friendlier error message is shown. Also this release contains the following bug fixes: Added a check on every connection test for an expired password, if the password has been expired a dialog is now shown to the user to reset the password. Bug #17354118 - DON'T HANDLE EXPIRED PASSWORDS Added code to escape text values to be imported to an Excel worksheet that start with an equals sign so Excel does not treat those values as formulas that will fail evaluation. This is an option turned on by default that can be turned off by users if they wish to import values to be treated as Excel formulas. Bug #17354102 - ERROR IMPORTING TEXT VALUES TO EXCEL STARTING WITH AN EQUALS SIGN Added code to properly check the reason for a failing connection, if it's a failing password the user gets a dialog to retry the connection with a different password until the connection succeeds, a connection error not related to the password is thrown or the user cancels. If the failing connection is not related to a bad password an error message is shown to the users indicating the reason of the failure. Bug #16239007 - CONNECTIONS TO MYSQL SERVICES NOT RUNNING DISPLAY A WRONG PASSWORD ERROR MESSAGE Added global options dialog that can be accessed from the Schema Selection and DB Object Selection panels where the timeouts for the connection to the DB Server and for the query commands can be changed from their default values (15 seconds for the connection timeout and 30 seconds for the query timeout). MySQL Bug #68732, Bug #17191646 - QUERY TIMEOUT CANNOT BE ADJUSTED IN MYSQL FOR EXCEL Changed the Varchar(65,535) data type shown in the Export Data data type combo box to Text since the maximum row size is 65,535 bytes and any autodetected column data type with a length greater than 4,000 should be set to Text actually for the table to be created successfully. MySQL Bug #69779, Bug #17191633 - EXPORT FAILS FOR EXCEL FILES CONTAINING > 4000 CHARACTERS OF TEXT PER CELL Removed code that was replacing all spaces typed by the user in an overriden data type for a new column in an Export Data operation, also improved the data type detection code to flag as invalid data types with parenthesis but without any text inside or where the contents inside the parenthesis are not valid for the specific data type. Bug #17260260 - EXPORT DATA SET TYPE NOT WORKING WITH MEMBER VALUES CONTAINING SPACES Added support for the year data type with a length of 2 or 4 and a validation that valid values are integers between 1901-2155 (for 4-digit years) or between 0-99 (for 2-digit years). Bug #17259915 - EXPORT DATA YEAR DATA TYPE NOT RECOGNIZED IF DECLARED WITH A DISPLAY WIDTH) Fixed code for Export Data operations where users overrode the data type for columns typing Text in the data type combobox, which is a valid data type but was not recognized as such. Bug #17259490 - EXPORT DATA TEXT DATA TYPE NOT RECOGNIZED AS A VALID DATA TYPE Changed the location of the registry where the MySQL for Excel add-in is installed to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER so the add-in is accessible by all users and not only to the user that installed it. For this to work with Excel 2007 a hotfix may be required (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976477). MySQL Bug #68746, Bug #16675992 - EXCEL-ADD-IN IS ONLY INSTALLED FOR USER ACCOUNT THAT THE INSTALLATION RUNS UNDER Added support for Excel 2013 Single Document Interface, now that Excel 2013 creates 1 window per workbook also the Excel Add-In maintains an independent custom task pane in each window. MySQL Bug #68792, Bug #17272087 - MYSQL FOR EXCEL SIDEBAR DOES NOT APPEAR IN EXCEL 2013 (WITH WORKAROUND) Included the latest MySQL Utility with a code fix for the COM exception thrown when attempting to open Workbench in the Manage Connections window. Bug #17258966 - MYSQL WORKBENCH NOT OPENED BY CLICKING MANAGE CONNECTIONS HOTLABEL Fixed code for Append Data operations that was not applying a calculated automatic mapping correctly when the source and target tables had different number of columns, some columns with the same name but some of those lying on column indexes beyond the limit of the other source/target table. MySQL Bug #69220, Bug #17278349 - APPEND DOESN'T AUTOMATICALLY DETECT EXCEL COL HEADER WITH SAME NAME AS SQL FIELD Fixed some code for Edit Data operations that was escaping special characters twice (during edition in Excel and then upon sending the query to the MySQL server). MySQL Bug #68669, Bug #17271693 - A BACKSLASH IS INSERTED BEFORE AN APOSTROPHE EDITING TABLE WITH MYSQL FOR EXCEL Upgraded MySQL Utility with latest version that encapsulates dialog base classes and introduces more classes to handle Workbench connections, and removed these from the Excel project. Bug #16500331 - CAN'T DELETE CONNECTIONS CREATED WITHIN ADDIN You can access the MySQL for Excel documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-for-excel.html You can find our team’s blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. You can also post questions on our MySQL for Excel forum found at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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Exception Handling Differences Between 32/64 Bit

- by Alois Kraus

I do quite a bit of debugging .NET applications but from time to time I see things that are impossible (at a first look). I may ask you dear reader what your mental exception handling model is. Exception handling is easy after all right? Lets suppose the following code: private void F1(object sender, EventArgs e) { try { F2(); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new Exception("even worse Exception"); } } private void F2() { try { F3(); } finally { throw new Exception("other exception"); } } private void F3() { throw new NotImplementedException(); } What will the call stack look like when you break into the catch(Exception) clause in Windbg (32 and 64 bit on .NET 3.5 SP1)? The mental model I have is that when an exception is thrown the stack frames are unwound until the catch handler can execute. An exception does propagate the call chain upwards. So when F3 does throw an exception the control flow will resume at the finally handler in F2 which does throw another exception hiding the original one (that is nasty) and then the new Exception will be catched in F1 where the catch handler is executed. So we should see in the catch handler in F1 as call stack only the F1 stack frame right? Well lets try it out in Windbg. For this I created a simple Windows Forms application with one button which does execute the F1 method in its click handler. When you compile the application for 64 bit and the catch handler is reached you will find with the following commands in Windbg Load sos extension from the same path where mscorwks was loaded in the current process .loadby sos mscorwks Beak on clr exceptions sxe clr Continue execution g Dump mixed call stack container C++ and .NET Stacks interleaved 0:000> !DumpStack OS Thread Id: 0x1d8 (0) Child-SP RetAddr Call Site 00000000002c88c0 000007fefa68f0bd KERNELBASE!RaiseException+0x39 00000000002c8990 000007fefac42ed0 mscorwks!RaiseTheExceptionInternalOnly+0x295 00000000002c8a60 000007ff005dd7f4 mscorwks!JIT_Throw+0x130 00000000002c8c10 000007fefa6942e1 WindowsFormsApplication1!WindowsFormsApplication1.Form1.F1(System.Object, System.EventArgs)+0xb4 00000000002c8c60 000007fefa661012 mscorwks!ExceptionTracker::CallHandler+0x145 00000000002c8d60 000007fefa711a72 mscorwks!ExceptionTracker::CallCatchHandler+0x9e 00000000002c8df0 0000000077b055cd mscorwks!ProcessCLRException+0x25e 00000000002c8e90 0000000077ae55f8 ntdll!RtlpExecuteHandlerForUnwind+0xd 00000000002c8ec0 000007fefa637c1a ntdll!RtlUnwindEx+0x539 00000000002c9560 000007fefa711a21 mscorwks!ClrUnwindEx+0x36 00000000002c9a70 0000000077b0554d mscorwks!ProcessCLRException+0x20d 00000000002c9b10 0000000077ae5d1c ntdll!RtlpExecuteHandlerForException+0xd 00000000002c9b40 0000000077b1fe48 ntdll!RtlDispatchException+0x3cb 00000000002ca220 000007fefdaeaa7d ntdll!KiUserExceptionDispatcher+0x2e 00000000002ca7e0 000007fefa68f0bd KERNELBASE!RaiseException+0x39 00000000002ca8b0 000007fefac42ed0 mscorwks!RaiseTheExceptionInternalOnly+0x295 00000000002ca980 000007ff005dd8df mscorwks!JIT_Throw+0x130 00000000002cab30 000007fefa6942e1 WindowsFormsApplication1!WindowsFormsApplication1.Form1.F2()+0x9f 00000000002cab80 000007fefa71b5b3 mscorwks!ExceptionTracker::CallHandler+0x145 00000000002cac80 000007fefa70dcd0 mscorwks!ExceptionTracker::ProcessManagedCallFrame+0x683 00000000002caed0 000007fefa7119af mscorwks!ExceptionTracker::ProcessOSExceptionNotification+0x430 00000000002cbd90 0000000077b055cd mscorwks!ProcessCLRException+0x19b 00000000002cbe30 0000000077ae55f8 ntdll!RtlpExecuteHandlerForUnwind+0xd 00000000002cbe60 000007fefa637c1a ntdll!RtlUnwindEx+0x539 00000000002cc500 000007fefa711a21 mscorwks!ClrUnwindEx+0x36 00000000002cca10 0000000077b0554d mscorwks!ProcessCLRException+0x20d 00000000002ccab0 0000000077ae5d1c ntdll!RtlpExecuteHandlerForException+0xd 00000000002ccae0 0000000077b1fe48 ntdll!RtlDispatchException+0x3cb 00000000002cd1c0 000007fefdaeaa7d ntdll!KiUserExceptionDispatcher+0x2e 00000000002cd780 000007fefa68f0bd KERNELBASE!RaiseException+0x39 00000000002cd850 000007fefac42ed0 mscorwks!RaiseTheExceptionInternalOnly+0x295 00000000002cd920 000007ff005dd968 mscorwks!JIT_Throw+0x130 00000000002cdad0 000007ff005dd875 WindowsFormsApplication1!WindowsFormsApplication1.Form1.F3()+0x48 00000000002cdb10 000007ff005dd786 WindowsFormsApplication1!WindowsFormsApplication1.Form1.F2()+0x35 00000000002cdb60 000007ff005dbe6a WindowsFormsApplication1!WindowsFormsApplication1.Form1.F1(System.Object, System.EventArgs)+0x46 00000000002cdbc0 000007ff005dd452 System_Windows_Forms!System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(System.EventArgs)+0x5a Hm okaaay. I see my method F1 two times in this call stack. Looks like we did get some recursion bug. But that can´t be given the obvious code above. Let´s try the same thing in a 32 bit process. 0:000> !DumpStack OS Thread Id: 0x33e4 (0) Current frame: KERNELBASE!RaiseException+0x58 ChildEBP RetAddr Caller,Callee 0028ed38 767db727 KERNELBASE!RaiseException+0x58, calling ntdll!RtlRaiseException 0028ed4c 68b9008c mscorwks!Binder::RawGetClass+0x20, calling mscorwks!Module::LookupTypeDef 0028ed5c 68b904ff mscorwks!Binder::IsClass+0x23, calling mscorwks!Binder::RawGetClass 0028ed68 68bfb96f mscorwks!Binder::IsException+0x14, calling mscorwks!Binder::IsClass 0028ed78 68bfb996 mscorwks!IsExceptionOfType+0x23, calling mscorwks!Binder::IsException 0028ed80 68bfbb1c mscorwks!RaiseTheExceptionInternalOnly+0x2a8, calling KERNEL32!RaiseExceptionStub 0028eda8 68ba0713 mscorwks!Module::ResolveStringRef+0xe0, calling mscorwks!BaseDomain::GetStringObjRefPtrFromUnicodeString 0028edc8 68b91e8d mscorwks!SetObjectReferenceUnchecked+0x19 0028ede0 68c8e910 mscorwks!JIT_Throw+0xfc, calling mscorwks!RaiseTheExceptionInternalOnly 0028ee44 68c8e734 mscorwks!JIT_StrCns+0x22, calling mscorwks!LazyMachStateCaptureState 0028ee54 68c8e865 mscorwks!JIT_Throw+0x1e, calling mscorwks!LazyMachStateCaptureState 0028eea4 02ffaecd (MethodDesc 0x7af08c +0x7d WindowsFormsApplication1.Form1.F1(System.Object, System.EventArgs)), calling mscorwks!JIT_Throw 0028eeec 02ffaf19 (MethodDesc 0x7af098 +0x29 WindowsFormsApplication1.Form1.F2()), calling 06370634 0028ef58 02ffae37 (MethodDesc 0x7a7bb0 +0x4f System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(System.EventArgs)) That does look more familar. The call stack has been unwound and we do see only some frames into the history where the debugger was smart enough to find out that we have called F2 from F1. The exception handling on 64 bit systems does work quite differently which seems to have the nice property to remember the called methods not only during the first pass of exception filter clauses (during first pass all catch handler are called if they are going to catch the exception which is about to be thrown) but also when the actual stack unwind has taken place. This makes it possible to follow not only the call stack right at the moment but also to look into the “history” of the catch/finally clauses. In a 64 bit process you only need to look at the ExceptionTracker to find out if a catch or finally handler was called. The two frames ProcessManagedCallFrame/CallHandler does indicate a finally clause whereas CallCatchHandler/CallHandler indicates a catch clause. That was a interesting one. Oh and by the way if you manage to load the Microsoft symbols you can also find out the hidden exception which. When you encounter in the call stack a line 0016eb34 75b79617 KERNELBASE!RaiseException+0x58 ====> Exception Code e0434f4d cxr@16e850 exr@16e838 Then it is a good idea to execute .exr 16e838 !analyze –v to find out more. In the managed world it is even easier since we can dump the objects allocated on the stack which have not yet been garbage collected to look at former method parameters. The command !dso which is the abbreviation for dump stack objects will give you 0:000> !dso OS Thread Id: 0x46c (0) ESP/REG Object Name 0016dd4c 020737f0 System.Exception 0016dd98 020737f0 System.Exception 0016dda8 01f5c6cc System.Windows.Forms.Button 0016ddac 01f5d2b8 System.EventHandler 0016ddb0 02071744 System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs 0016ddc0 01f5d2b8 System.EventHandler 0016ddcc 01f5c6cc System.Windows.Forms.Button 0016dddc 020737f0 System.Exception 0016dde4 01f5d2b8 System.EventHandler 0016ddec 02071744 System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs 0016de40 020737f0 System.Exception 0016de80 02071744 System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs 0016de8c 01f5d2b8 System.EventHandler 0016de90 01f5c6cc System.Windows.Forms.Button 0016df10 02073784 System.SByte[] 0016df5c 02073684 System.NotImplementedException 0016e2a0 02073684 System.NotImplementedException 0016e2e8 01ed69f4 System.Resources.ResourceManager From there it is easy to do 0:000> !pe 02073684 Exception object: 02073684 Exception type: System.NotImplementedException Message: Die Methode oder der Vorgang sind nicht implementiert. InnerException: <none> StackTrace (generated): SP IP Function 0016ECB0 006904AD WindowsFormsApplication2!WindowsFormsApplication2.Form1.F3()+0x35 0016ECC0 00690411 WindowsFormsApplication2!WindowsFormsApplication2.Form1.F2()+0x29 0016ECF0 0069038F WindowsFormsApplication2!WindowsFormsApplication2.Form1.F1(System.Object, System.EventArgs)+0x3f StackTraceString: <none> HResult: 80004001 to see the former exception. That´s all for today.

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Cost Comparison Hard Disk Drive to Solid State Drive on Price per Gigabyte - dispelling a myth!

- by tonyrogerson

It is often said that Hard Disk Drive storage is significantly cheaper per GiByte than Solid State Devices – this is wholly inaccurate within the database space. People need to look at the cost of the complete solution and not just a single component part in isolation to what is really required to meet the business requirement. Buying a single Hitachi Ultrastar 600GB 3.5” SAS 15Krpm hard disk drive will cost approximately £239.60 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012) compared to an OCZ 600GB Z-Drive R4 CM84 PCIe costing £2,316.54 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012); I’ve not included FusionIO ioDrive because there is no public pricing available for it – something I never understand and personally when companies do this I immediately think what are they hiding, luckily in FusionIO’s case the product is proven though is expensive compared to OCZ enterprise offerings. On the face of it the single 15Krpm hard disk has a price per GB of £0.39, the SSD £3.86; this is what you will see in the press and this is what sales people will use in comparing the two technologies – do not be fooled by this bullshit people! What is the requirement? The requirement is the database will have a static size of 400GB kept static through archiving so growth and trim will balance the database size, the client requires resilience, there will be several hundred call centre staff querying the database where queries will read a small amount of data but there will be no hot spot in the data so the randomness will come across the entire 400GB of the database, estimates predict that the IOps required will be approximately 4,000IOps at peak times, because it’s a call centre system the IO latency is important and must remain below 5ms per IO. The balance between read and write is 70% read, 30% write. The requirement is now defined and we have three of the most important pieces of the puzzle – space required, estimated IOps and maximum latency per IO. Something to consider with regard SQL Server; write activity requires synchronous IO to the storage media specifically the transaction log; that means the write thread will wait until the IO is completed and hardened off until the thread can continue execution, the requirement has stated that 30% of the system activity will be write so we can expect a high amount of synchronous activity. The hardware solution needs to be defined; two possible solutions: hard disk or solid state based; the real question now is how many hard disks are required to achieve the IO throughput, the latency and resilience, ditto for the solid state. Hard Drive solution On a test on an HP DL380, P410i controller using IOMeter against a single 15Krpm 146GB SAS drive, the throughput given on a transfer size of 8KiB against a 40GiB file on a freshly formatted disk where the partition is the only partition on the disk thus the 40GiB file is on the outer edge of the drive so more sectors can be read before head movement is required: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 3,733 IOps at an average latency of 34.06ms (34 MiB/s). The same test was done on the same disk but the test file was 130GiB: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 528 IOps at an average latency of 217.49ms (4 MiB/s). From the result it is clear random performance gets worse as the disk fills up – I’m currently writing an article on short stroking which will cover this in detail. Given the work load is random in nature looking at the random performance of the single drive when only 40 GiB of the 146 GB is used gives near the IOps required but the latency is way out. Luckily I have tested 6 x 15Krpm 146GB SAS 15Krpm drives in a RAID 0 using the same test methodology, for the same test above on a 130 GiB for each drive added the performance boost is near linear, for each drive added throughput goes up by 5 MiB/sec, IOps by 700 IOps and latency reducing nearly 50% per drive added (172 ms, 94 ms, 65 ms, 47 ms, 37 ms, 30 ms). This is because the same 130GiB is spread out more as you add drives 130 / 1, 130 / 2, 130 / 3 etc. so implicit short stroking is occurring because there is less file on each drive so less head movement required. The best latency is still 30 ms but we have the IOps required now, but that’s on a 130GiB file and not the 400GiB we need. Some reality check here: a) the drive randomness is more likely to be 50/50 and not a full 100% but the above has highlighted the effect randomness has on the drive and the more a drive fills with data the worse the effect. For argument sake let us assume that for the given workload we need 8 disks to do the job, for resilience reasons we will need 16 because we need to RAID 1+0 them in order to get the throughput and the resilience, RAID 5 would degrade performance. Cost for hard drives: 16 x £239.60 = £3,833.60 For the hard drives we will need disk controllers and a separate external disk array because the likelihood is that the server itself won’t take the drives, a quick spec off DELL for a PowerVault MD1220 which gives the dual pathing with 16 disks 146GB 15Krpm 2.5” disks is priced at £7,438.00, note its probably more once we had two controller cards to sit in the server in, racking etc. Minimum cost taking the DELL quote as an example is therefore: {Cost of Hardware} / {Storage Required} £7,438.60 / 400 = £18.595 per GB £18.59 per GiB is a far cry from the £0.39 we had been told by the salesman and the myth. Yes, the storage array is composed of 16 x 146 disks in RAID 10 (therefore 8 usable) giving an effective usable storage availability of 1168GB but the actual storage requirement is only 400 and the extra disks have had to be purchased to get the IOps up. Solid State Drive solution A single card significantly exceeds the IOps and latency required, for resilience two will be required. ( £2,316.54 * 2 ) / 400 = £11.58 per GB With the SSD solution only two PCIe sockets are required, no external disk units, no additional controllers, no redundant controllers etc. Conclusion I hope by showing you an example that the myth that hard disk drives are cheaper per GiB than Solid State has now been dispelled - £11.58 per GB for SSD compared to £18.59 for Hard Disk. I’ve not even touched on the running costs, compare the costs of running 18 hard disks, that’s a lot of heat and power compared to two PCIe cards!Just a quick note: I've left a fair amount of information out due to this being a blog! If in doubt, email me :)I'll also deal with the myth that SSD's wear out at a later date as well - that's just way over done still, yes, 5 years ago, but now - no.

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Consuming the Amazon S3 service from a Win8 Metro Application

- by cibrax

As many of the existing Http APIs for Cloud Services, AWS also provides a set of different platform SDKs for hiding many of complexities present in the APIs. While there is a platform SDK for .NET, which is open source and available in C#, that SDK does not work in Win8 Metro Applications for the changes introduced in WinRT. WinRT offers a complete different set of APIs for doing I/O operations such as doing http calls or using cryptography for signing or encrypting data, two aspects that are absolutely necessary for consuming AWS. All the I/O APIs available as part of WinRT are asynchronous, and uses the TPL model for .NET applications (HTML and JavaScript Metro applications use a model based in promises, which is similar concept). In the case of S3, the http Authorization header is used for two purposes, authenticating clients and make sure the messages were not altered while they were in transit. For doing that, it uses a signature or hash of the message content and some of the headers using a symmetric key (That's just one of the available mechanisms). Windows Azure for example also uses the same mechanism in many of its APIs. There are three challenges that any developer working for first time in Metro will have to face to consume S3, the new WinRT APIs, the asynchronous nature of them and the complexity introduced for generating the Authorization header. Having said that, I decided to write this post with some of the gotchas I found myself trying to consume this Amazon service. 1. Generating the signature for the Authorization header All the cryptography APIs in WinRT are available under Windows.Security.Cryptography namespace. Many of operations available in these APIs uses the concept of buffers (IBuffer) for representing a chunk of binary data. As you will see in the example below, these buffers are mainly generated with the use of static methods in a WinRT class CryptographicBuffer available as part of the namespace previously mentioned. private string DeriveAuthToken(string resource, string httpMethod, string timestamp) { var stringToSign = string.Format("{0}\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "x-amz-date:{1}\n" + "/{2}/", httpMethod, timestamp, resource); var algorithm = MacAlgorithmProvider.OpenAlgorithm("HMAC_SHA1"); var keyMaterial = CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(this.secret)); var hmacKey = algorithm.CreateKey(keyMaterial); var signature = CryptographicEngine.Sign( hmacKey, CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringToSign)) ); return CryptographicBuffer.EncodeToBase64String(signature); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The algorithm that determines the information or content you need to use for generating the signature is very well described as part of the AWS documentation. In this case, this method is generating a signature required for creating a new bucket. A HmacSha1 hash is computed using a secret or symetric key provided by AWS in the management console. 2. Sending an Http Request to the S3 service WinRT also ships with the System.Net.Http.HttpClient that was first introduced some months ago with ASP.NET Web API. This client provides a rich interface on top the traditional WebHttpRequest class, and also solves some of limitations found in this last one. There are a few things that don't work with a raw WebHttpRequest such as setting the Host header, which is something absolutely required for consuming S3. Also, HttpClient is more friendly for doing unit tests, as it receives a HttpMessageHandler as part of the constructor that can fake to emulate a real http call. This is how the code for consuming the service with HttpClient looks like, public async Task<S3Response> CreateBucket(string name, string region = null, params string[] acl) { var timestamp = string.Format("{0:r}", DateTime.UtcNow); var auth = DeriveAuthToken(name, "PUT", timestamp); var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Put, "http://s3.amazonaws.com/"); request.Headers.Host = string.Format("{0}.s3.amazonaws.com", name); request.Headers.TryAddWithoutValidation("Authorization", "AWS " + this.key + ":" + auth); request.Headers.Add("x-amz-date", timestamp); var client = new HttpClient(); var response = await client.SendAsync(request); return new S3Response { Succeed = response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK, Message = (response.Content != null) ? await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync() : null }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You will notice a few additional things in this code. By default, HttpClient validates the values for some well-know headers, and Authorization is one of them. It won't allow you to set a value with ":" on it, which is something that S3 expects. However, that's not a problem at all, as you can skip the validation by using the TryAddWithoutValidation method. Also, the code is heavily relying on the new async and await keywords to transform all the asynchronous calls into synchronous ones. In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, public class FakeHttpMessageHandler : HttpMessageHandler { HttpResponseMessage response; public FakeHttpMessageHandler(HttpResponseMessage response) { this.response = response; } protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<HttpResponseMessage>(); tcs.SetResult(response); return tcs.Task; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You can use this handler for injecting any response while you are unit testing the code.

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Consuming the Amazon S3 service from a Win8 Metro Application

- by cibrax

As many of the existing Http APIs for Cloud Services, AWS also provides a set of different platform SDKs for hiding many of complexities present in the APIs. While there is a platform SDK for .NET, which is open source and available in C#, that SDK does not work in Win8 Metro Applications for the changes introduced in WinRT. WinRT offers a complete different set of APIs for doing I/O operations such as doing http calls or using cryptography for signing or encrypting data, two aspects that are absolutely necessary for consuming AWS. All the I/O APIs available as part of WinRT are asynchronous, and uses the TPL model for .NET applications (HTML and JavaScript Metro applications use a model based in promises, which is similar concept). In the case of S3, the http Authorization header is used for two purposes, authenticating clients and make sure the messages were not altered while they were in transit. For doing that, it uses a signature or hash of the message content and some of the headers using a symmetric key (That's just one of the available mechanisms). Windows Azure for example also uses the same mechanism in many of its APIs. There are three challenges that any developer working for first time in Metro will have to face to consume S3, the new WinRT APIs, the asynchronous nature of them and the complexity introduced for generating the Authorization header. Having said that, I decided to write this post with some of the gotchas I found myself trying to consume this Amazon service. 1. Generating the signature for the Authorization header All the cryptography APIs in WinRT are available under Windows.Security.Cryptography namespace. Many of operations available in these APIs uses the concept of buffers (IBuffer) for representing a chunk of binary data. As you will see in the example below, these buffers are mainly generated with the use of static methods in a WinRT class CryptographicBuffer available as part of the namespace previously mentioned. private string DeriveAuthToken(string resource, string httpMethod, string timestamp) { var stringToSign = string.Format("{0}\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "x-amz-date:{1}\n" + "/{2}/", httpMethod, timestamp, resource); var algorithm = MacAlgorithmProvider.OpenAlgorithm("HMAC_SHA1"); var keyMaterial = CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(this.secret)); var hmacKey = algorithm.CreateKey(keyMaterial); var signature = CryptographicEngine.Sign( hmacKey, CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringToSign)) ); return CryptographicBuffer.EncodeToBase64String(signature); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The algorithm that determines the information or content you need to use for generating the signature is very well described as part of the AWS documentation. In this case, this method is generating a signature required for creating a new bucket. A HmacSha1 hash is computed using a secret or symetric key provided by AWS in the management console. 2. Sending an Http Request to the S3 service WinRT also ships with the System.Net.Http.HttpClient that was first introduced some months ago with ASP.NET Web API. This client provides a rich interface on top the traditional WebHttpRequest class, and also solves some of limitations found in this last one. There are a few things that don't work with a raw WebHttpRequest such as setting the Host header, which is something absolutely required for consuming S3. Also, HttpClient is more friendly for doing unit tests, as it receives a HttpMessageHandler as part of the constructor that can fake to emulate a real http call. This is how the code for consuming the service with HttpClient looks like, public async Task<S3Response> CreateBucket(string name, string region = null, params string[] acl) { var timestamp = string.Format("{0:r}", DateTime.UtcNow); var auth = DeriveAuthToken(name, "PUT", timestamp); var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Put, "http://s3.amazonaws.com/"); request.Headers.Host = string.Format("{0}.s3.amazonaws.com", name); request.Headers.TryAddWithoutValidation("Authorization", "AWS " + this.key + ":" + auth); request.Headers.Add("x-amz-date", timestamp); var client = new HttpClient(); var response = await client.SendAsync(request); return new S3Response { Succeed = response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK, Message = (response.Content != null) ? await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync() : null }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You will notice a few additional things in this code. By default, HttpClient validates the values for some well-know headers, and Authorization is one of them. It won't allow you to set a value with ":" on it, which is something that S3 expects. However, that's not a problem at all, as you can skip the validation by using the TryAddWithoutValidation method. Also, the code is heavily relying on the new async and await keywords to transform all the asynchronous calls into synchronous ones. In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, public class FakeHttpMessageHandler : HttpMessageHandler { HttpResponseMessage response; public FakeHttpMessageHandler(HttpResponseMessage response) { this.response = response; } protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<HttpResponseMessage>(); tcs.SetResult(response); return tcs.Task; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You can use this handler for injecting any response while you are unit testing the code.

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The Faces in the Crowdsourcing

- by Applications User Experience

By Jeff Sauro, Principal Usability Engineer, Oracle Imagine having access to a global workforce of hundreds of thousands of people who can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately. Distributing simple tasks not easily done by computers to the masses is called "crowdsourcing" and until recently was an interesting concept, but due to practical constraints wasn't used often. Enter Amazon.com. For five years, Amazon has hosted a service called Mechanical Turk, which provides an easy interface to the crowds. The service has almost half a million registered, global users performing a quarter of a million human intelligence tasks (HITs). HITs are submitted by individuals and companies in the U.S. and pay from $.01 for simple tasks (such as determining if a picture is offensive) to several dollars (for tasks like transcribing audio). What do we know about the people who toil away in this digital crowd? Can we rely on the work done in this anonymous marketplace? A rendering of the actual Mechanical Turk (from Wikipedia) Knowing who is behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is fitting, considering the history of the actual Mechanical Turk. In the late 1800's, a mechanical chess-playing machine awed crowds as it beat master chess players in what was thought to be a mechanical miracle. It turned out that the creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, had a small person (also a chess master) hiding inside the machine operating the arms to provide the illusion of automation. The field of human computer interaction (HCI) is quite familiar with gathering user input and incorporating it into all stages of the design process. It makes sense then that Mechanical Turk was a popular discussion topic at the recent Computer Human Interaction usability conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery in Atlanta. It is already being used as a source for input on Web sites (for example, Feedbackarmy.com) and behavioral research studies. Two papers shed some light on the faces in this crowd. One paper tells us about the shifting demographics from mostly stay-at-home moms to young men in India. The second paper discusses the reliability and quality of work from the workers. Just who exactly would spend time doing tasks for pennies? In "Who are the crowdworkers?" University of California researchers Ross, Silberman, Zaldivar and Tomlinson conducted a survey of Mechanical Turk worker demographics and compared it to a similar survey done two years before. The initial survey reported workers consisting largely of young, well-educated women living in the U.S. with annual household incomes above $40,000. The more recent survey reveals a shift in demographics largely driven by an influx of workers from India. Indian workers went from 5% to over 30% of the crowd, and this block is largely male (two-thirds) with a higher average education than U.S. workers, and 64% report an annual income of less than $10,000 (keeping in mind $1 has a lot more purchasing power in India). This shifting demographic certainly has implications as language and culture can play critical roles in the outcome of HITs. Of course, the demographic data came from paying Turkers $.10 to fill out a survey, so there is some question about both a self-selection bias (characteristics which cause Turks to take this survey may be unrepresentative of the larger population), not to mention whether we can really trust the data we get from the crowd. Crowds can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately for usability testing. (Photo attributed to victoriapeckham Flikr While having immediate access to a global workforce is nice, one major problem with Mechanical Turk is the incentive structure. Individuals and companies that deploy HITs want quality responses for a low price. Workers, on the other hand, want to complete the task and get paid as quickly as possible, so that they can get on to the next task. Since many HITs on Mechanical Turk are surveys, how valid and reliable are these results? How do we know whether workers are just rushing through the multiple-choice responses haphazardly answering? In "Are your participants gaming the system?" researchers at Carnegie Mellon (Downs, Holbrook, Sheng and Cranor) set up an experiment to find out what percentage of their workers were just in it for the money. The authors set up a 30-minute HIT (one of the more lengthy ones for Mechanical Turk) and offered a very high $4 to those who qualified and $.20 to those who did not. As part of the HIT, workers were asked to read an email and respond to two questions that determined whether workers were likely rushing through the HIT and not answering conscientiously. One question was simple and took little effort, while the second question required a bit more work to find the answer. Workers were led to believe other factors than these two questions were the qualifying aspect of the HIT. Of the 2000 participants, roughly 1200 (or 61%) answered both questions correctly. Eighty-eight percent answered the easy question correctly, and 64% answered the difficult question correctly. In other words, about 12% of the crowd were gaming the system, not paying enough attention to the question or making careless errors. Up to about 40% won't put in more than a modest effort to get paid for a HIT. Young men and those that considered themselves in the financial industry tended to be the most likely to try to game the system. There wasn't a breakdown by country, but given the demographic information from the first article, we could infer that many of these young men come from India, which makes language and other cultural differences a factor. These articles raise questions about the role of crowdsourcing as a means for getting quick user input at low cost. While compensating users for their time is nothing new, the incentive structure and anonymity of Mechanical Turk raises some interesting questions. How complex of a task can we ask of the crowd, and how much should these workers be paid? Can we rely on the information we get from these professional users, and if so, how can we best incorporate it into designing more usable products? Traditional usability testing will still play a central role in enterprise software. Crowdsourcing doesn't replace testing; instead, it makes certain parts of gathering user feedback easier. One can turn to the crowd for simple tasks that don't require specialized skills and get a lot of data fast. As more studies are conducted on Mechanical Turk, I suspect we will see crowdsourcing playing an increasing role in human computer interaction and enterprise computing. References: Downs, J. S., Holbrook, M. B., Sheng, S., and Cranor, L. F. 2010. Are your participants gaming the system?: screening mechanical turk workers. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2399-2402. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753688 Ross, J., Irani, L., Silberman, M. S., Zaldivar, A., and Tomlinson, B. 2010. Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2863-2872. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753873

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SQL SERVER – Windows File/Folder and Share Permissions – Notes from the Field #029

- by Pinal Dave

[Note from Pinal]: This is a 29th episode of Notes from the Field series. Security is the task which we should give it to the experts. If there is a small overlook or misstep, there are good chances that security of the organization is compromised. This is very true, but there are always devils’s advocates who believe everyone should know the security. As a DBA and Administrator, I often see people not taking interest in the Windows Security hiding behind the reason of not expert of Windows Server. We all often miss the important mission statement for the success of any organization – Teamwork. In this blog post Brian tells the story in very interesting lucid language. Read On! In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Brian Kelley explains a very crucial issue DBAs and Developer faces on their production server. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. Read the experience of Brian in his own words. When I talk security among database professionals, I find that most have at least a working knowledge of how to apply security within a database. When I talk with DBAs in particular, I find that most have at least a working knowledge of security at the server level if we’re speaking of SQL Server. One area I see continually that is weak is in the area of Windows file/folder (NTFS) and share permissions. The typical response is, “I’m a database developer and the Windows system administrator is responsible for that.” That may very well be true – the system administrator may have the primary responsibility and accountability for file/folder and share security for the server. However, if you’re involved in the typical activities surrounding databases and moving data around, you should know these permissions, too. Otherwise, you could be setting yourself up where someone is able to get to data he or she shouldn’t, or you could be opening the door where human error puts bad data in your production system. File/Folder Permission Basics: I wrote about file/folder permissions a few years ago to give the basic permissions that are most often seen. Here’s what you must know as a minimum at the file/folder level: Read - Allows you to read the contents of the file or folder. Having read permissions allows you to copy the file or folder. Write – Again, as the name implies, it allows you to write to the file or folder. This doesn’t include the ability to delete, however, nothing stops a person with this access from writing an empty file. Delete - Allows the file/folder to be deleted. If you overwrite files, you may need this permission. Modify - Allows read, write, and delete. Full Control - Same as modify + the ability to assign permissions. File/Folder permissions aggregate, unless there is a DENY (where it trumps, just like within SQL Server), meaning if a person is in one group that gives Read and antoher group that gives Write, that person has both Read and Write permissions. As you might expect me to say, always apply the Principle of Least Privilege. This likely means that any additional permission you might add does not need Full Control. Share Permission Basics: At the share level, here are the permissions. Read - Allows you to read the contents on the share. Change - Allows you to read, write, and delete contents on the share. Full control - Change + the ability to modify permissions. Like with file/folder permissions, these permissions aggregate, and DENY trumps. So What Access Does a Person / Process Have? Figuring out what someone or some process has depends on how the location is being accessed: Access comes through the share (\\ServerName\Share) – a combination of permissions is considered. Access is through a drive letter (C:\, E:\, S:\, etc.) – only the file/folder permissions are considered. The only complicated one here is access through the share. Here’s what Windows does: Figures out what the aggregated permissions are at the file/folder level. Figures out what the aggregated permissions are at the share level. Takes the most restrictive of the two sets of permissions. You can test this by granting Full Control over a folder (this is likely already in place for the Users local group) and then setting up a share. Give only Read access through the share, and that includes to Administrators (if you’re creating a share, likely you have membership in the Administrators group). Try to read a file through the share. Now try to modify it. The most restrictive permission is the Share level permissions. It’s set to only allow Read. Therefore, if you come through the share, it’s the most restrictive. Does This Knowledge Really Help Me? In my experience, it does. I’ve seen cases where sensitive files were accessible by every authenticated user through a share. Auditors, as you might expect, have a real problem with that. I’ve also seen cases where files to be imported as part of the nightly processing were overwritten by files intended from development. And I’ve seen cases where a process can’t get to the files it needs for a process because someone changed the permissions. If you know file/folder and share permissions, you can spot and correct these types of security flaws. Given that there are a lot of database professionals that don’t understand these permissions, if you know it, you set yourself apart. And if you’re able to help on critical processes, you begin to set yourself up as a linchpin (link to .pdf) for your organization. If you want to get started with performance tuning and database security with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

- by Kyle Burns

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

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Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 10 – In Depth TCP/IP Networking

- by MarkPearl

After reading this section you should be able to Understand methods of network design unique to TCP/IP networks, including subnetting, CIDR, and address translation Explain the differences between public and private TCP/IP networks Describe protocols used between mail clients and mail servers, including SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 Employ multiple TCP/IP utilities for network discovery and troubleshooting Designing TCP/IP-Based Networks The following sections explain how network and host information in an IPv4 address can be manipulated to subdivide networks into smaller segments. Subnetting Subnetting separates a network into multiple logically defined segments, or subnets. Networks are commonly subnetted according to geographic locations, departmental boundaries, or technology types. A network administrator might separate traffic to accomplish the following… Enhance security Improve performance Simplify troubleshooting The challenges of Classful Addressing in IPv4 (No subnetting) The simplest type of IPv4 is known as classful addressing (which was the Class A, Class B & Class C network addresses). Classful addressing has the following limitations. Restriction in the number of usable IPv4 addresses (class C would be limited to 254 addresses) Difficult to separate traffic from various parts of a network Because of the above reasons, subnetting was introduced. IPv4 Subnet Masks Subnetting depends on the use of subnet masks to identify how a network is subdivided. A subnet mask indicates where network information is located in an IPv4 address. The 1 in a subnet mask indicates that corresponding bits in the IPv4 address contain network information (likewise 0 indicates the opposite) Each network class is associated with a default subnet mask… Class A = 255.0.0.0 Class B = 255.255.0.0 Class C = 255.255.255.0 An example of calculating the network ID for a particular device with a subnet mask is shown below.. IP Address = 199.34.89.127 Subnet Mask = 255.255.255.0 Resultant Network ID = 199.34.89.0 IPv4 Subnetting Techniques Subnetting breaks the rules of classful IPv4 addressing. Read page 490 for a detailed explanation Calculating IPv4 Subnets Read page 491 – 494 for an explanation Important… Subnetting only applies to the devices internal to your network. Everything external looks at the class of the IP address instead of the subnet network ID. This way, traffic directed to your network externally still knows where to go, and once it has entered your internal network it can then be prioritized and segmented. CIDR (classless Interdomain Routing) CIDR is also known as classless routing or supernetting. In CIDR conventional network class distinctions do not exist, a subnet boundary can move to the left, therefore generating more usable IP addresses on your network. A subnet created by moving the subnet boundary to the left is known as a supernet. With CIDR also came new shorthand for denoting the position of subnet boundaries known as CIDR notation or slash notation. CIDR notation takes the form of the network ID followed by a forward slash (/) followed by the number of bits that are used for the extended network prefix. To take advantage of classless routing, your networks routers must be able to interpret IP addresses that don;t adhere to conventional network class parameters. Routers that rely on older routing protocols (i.e. RIP) are not capable of interpreting classless IP addresses. Internet Gateways Gateways are a combination of software and hardware that enable two different network segments to exchange data. A gateway facilitates communication between different networks or subnets. Because on device cannot send data directly to a device on another subnet, a gateway must intercede and hand off the information. Every device on a TCP/IP based network has a default gateway (a gateway that first interprets its outbound requests to other subnets, and then interprets its inbound requests from other subnets). The internet contains a vast number of routers and gateways. If each gateway had to track addressing information for every other gateway on the Internet, it would be overtaxed. Instead, each handles only a relatively small amount of addressing information, which it uses to forward data to another gateway that knows more about the data’s destination. The gateways that make up the internet backbone are called core gateways. Address Translation An organizations default gateway can also be used to “hide” the organizations internal IP addresses and keep them from being recognized on a public network. A public network is one that any user may access with little or no restrictions. On private networks, hiding IP addresses allows network managers more flexibility in assigning addresses. Clients behind a gateway may use any IP addressing scheme, regardless of whether it is recognized as legitimate by the Internet authorities but as soon as those devices need to go on the internet, they must have legitimate IP addresses to exchange data. When a clients transmission reaches the default gateway, the gateway opens the IP datagram and replaces the client’s private IP address with an Internet recognized IP address. This process is known as NAT (Network Address Translation). TCP/IP Mail Services All Internet mail services rely on the same principles of mail delivery, storage, and pickup, though they may use different types of software to accomplish these functions. Email servers and clients communicate through special TCP/IP application layer protocols. These protocols, all of which operate on a variety of operating systems are discussed below… SMTP (Simple Mail transfer Protocol) The protocol responsible for moving messages from one mail server to another over TCP/IP based networks. SMTP belongs to the application layer of the ODI model and relies on TCP as its transport protocol. Operates from port 25 on the SMTP server Simple sub-protocol, incapable of doing anything more than transporting mail or holding it in a queue MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) The standard message format specified by SMTP allows for lines that contain no more than 1000 ascii characters meaning if you relied solely on SMTP you would have very short messages and nothing like pictures included in an email. MIME us a standard for encoding and interpreting binary files, images, video, and non-ascii character sets within an email message. MIME identifies each element of a mail message according to content type. MIME does not replace SMTP but works in conjunction with it. Most modern email clients and servers support MIME POP (Post Office Protocol) POP is an application layer protocol used to retrieve messages from a mail server POP3 relies on TCP and operates over port 110 With POP3 mail is delivered and stored on a mail server until it is downloaded by a user Disadvantage of POP3 is that it typically does not allow users to save their messages on the server because of this IMAP is sometimes used IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) IMAP is a retrieval protocol that was developed as a more sophisticated alternative to POP3 The single biggest advantage IMAP4 has over POP3 is that users can store messages on the mail server, rather than having to continually download them Users can retrieve all or only a portion of any mail message Users can review their messages and delete them while the messages remain on the server Users can create sophisticated methods of organizing messages on the server Users can share a mailbox in a central location Disadvantages of IMAP are typically related to the fact that it requires more storage space on the server. Additional TCP/IP Utilities Nearly all TCP/IP utilities can be accessed from the command prompt on any type of server or client running TCP/IP. The syntaxt may differ depending on the OS of the client. Below is a list of additional TCP/IP utilities – research their use on your own! Ipconfig (Windows) & Ifconfig (Linux) Netstat Nbtstat Hostname, Host & Nslookup Dig (Linux) Whois (Linux) Traceroute (Tracert) Mtr (my traceroute) Route

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“It’s only test code…”

- by Chris George

“Let me hack this in, it’s only test code”, “Don’t worry about getting it reviewed, it’s only test code”, “It doesn’t have to be elegant or efficient, it’s only test code”… do these phrases sound familiar? Chances are if you’ve working with test automation, at one point or other you will have heard these phrases, you have probably even used them yourself! What is certain is that code written under this “it’s only test code” mantra will come back and bite you in the arse! I’ve recently encountered a case where a test was giving a false positive, therefore hiding a real product bug because that test code was very badly written. Firstly it was very difficult to understand what the test was actually trying to achieve let alone how it was doing it, and this complexity masked a simple logic error. These issues are real and they do happen. Let’s take a step back from this and look at what we are trying to do. We are writing test code that tests product code, and we do this to create a suite of tests that will help protect our software against regressions. This test code is making sure that the product behaves as it should by employing some sort of expected result verification. The simple cases of these are generally not a problem. However, automation allows us to explore more complex scenarios in many more permutations. As this complexity increases then so does the complexity of the test code. It is at this point that code which has not been architected properly will cause problems. Keep your friends close… So, how do we make sure we are doing it right? The development teams I have worked on have always had Test Engineers working very closely with their Software Engineers. This is something that I have always tried to take full advantage of. They are coding experts! So run your ideas past them, ask for advice on how to structure your code, help you design your data structures. This may require a shift in your teams viewpoint, as contrary to this section title and folklore, Software Engineers are not actually the mortal enemy of Test Engineers. As time progresses, and test automation becomes more and more ingrained in what we do, the two roles are converging more than ever. Over the 16 years I have spent as a Test Engineer, I have seen the grey area between the two roles grow significantly larger. This serves to strengthen the relationship and common bond between the two roles which helps to make test code activities so much easier! Pair for the win Possibly the best thing you could do to write good test code is to pair program on the task. This will serve a few purposes. you will get the benefit of the Software Engineers knowledge and experience the Software Engineer will gain knowledge on the testing process. Sharing the love is a wonderful thing! two pairs of eyes are always better than one… And so are two brains. Between the two of you, I will guarantee you will derive more useful test cases than if it was just one of you. Code reviews Another policy which certainly pays dividends is the practice of code reviews. By having one of your peers review your code before you commit it serves two purposes. Firstly, it forces you to explain your code. Just the act of doing this will often pick up errors in your code. Secondly, it gets yet another pair of eyes on your code! I cannot stress enough how important code reviews are. The benefits they offer apply as much to product code as test code. In short, Software and Test Engineers should all be doing them! It can be extended even further by getting test code reviewed by a Software Engineer and a Test Engineer, and likewise product code. This serves to keep both functions in the loop with changes going on within your code base. Learn from your devs I briefly touched on this earlier but I’d like to go into more detail here. Pairing with your Software Engineers when writing your test code is such an amazing opportunity to improve your coding skills. As I sit here writing this article waiting to be called into court for jury service, it reminds me that it takes a lot of patience to be a Test Engineer, almost as much as it takes to be a juror! However tempting it is to go rushing in and start writing your automated tests, resist that urge. Discuss what you want to achieve then talk through the approach you’re going to take. Then code it up together. I find it really enlightening to ask questions like ‘is there a better way to do this?’ Or ‘is this how you would code it?’ The latter question, especially, is where I learn the most. I’ve found that most Software Engineers will be reluctant to show you the ‘right way’ to code something when writing tests because they perceive the ‘right way’ to be too complicated for the Test Engineer (e.g. not mentioning LINQ and instead doing something verbose). So by asking how THEY would code it, it unleashes their true dev-ness and advanced code usually ensues! I would like to point out, however, that you don’t have to accept their method as the final answer. On numerous occasions I have opted for the more simple/verbose solution because I found the code written by the Software Engineer too advanced and therefore I would find it unreadable when I return to the code in a months’ time! Always keep the target audience in mind when writing clever code, and in my case that is mostly Test Engineers.

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Different Not Automatically Implies Better

- by Alois Kraus

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/11/05/154556.aspxRecently I was digging deeper why some WCF hosted workflow application did consume quite a lot of memory although it did basically only load a xaml workflow. The first tool of choice is Process Explorer or even better Process Hacker (has more options and the best feature copy&paste does work). The three most important numbers of a process with regards to memory are Working Set, Private Working Set and Private Bytes. Working set is the currently consumed physical memory (parts can be shared between processes e.g. loaded dlls which are read only) Private Working Set is the physical memory needed by this process which is not shareable Private Bytes is the number of non shareable which is only visible in the current process (e.g. all new, malloc, VirtualAlloc calls do create private bytes) When you have a bigger workflow it can consume under 64 bit easily 500MB for a 1-2 MB xaml file. This does not look very scalable. Under 64 bit the issue is excessive private bytes consumption and not the managed heap. The picture is quite different for 32 bit which looks a bit strange but it seems that the hosted VB compiler is a lot less memory hungry under 32 bit. I did try to repro the issue with a medium sized xaml file (400KB) which does contain 1000 variables and 1000 if which can be represented by C# code like this: string Var1; string Var2; ... string Var1000; if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var1) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var1”); } if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var2) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var2”); } .... Since WF is based on VB.NET expressions you are bound to the hosted VB.NET compiler which does result in (x64) 140 MB of private bytes which is ca. 140 KB for each if clause which is quite a lot if you think about the actually present functionality. But there is hope. .NET 4.5 does allow now C# expressions for WF which is a major step forward for all C# lovers. I did create some simple patcher to “cross compile” my xaml to C# expressions. Lets look at the result: C# Expressions VB Expressions x86 x86 On my home machine I have only 32 bit which gives you quite exactly half of the memory consumption under 64 bit. C# expressions are 10 times more memory hungry than VB.NET expressions! I wanted to do more with less memory but instead it did consume a magnitude more memory. That is surprising to say the least. The workflow does initialize in about the same time under x64 and x86 where the VB code does it in 2s whereas the C# version needs 18s. Also nearly ten times slower. That is a too high price to pay for any bigger sized xaml workflow to convert from VB.NET to C# expressions. If I do reduce the number of expressions to 500 then it does need 400MB which is about half of the memory. It seems that the cost per if does rise linear with the number of total expressions in a xaml workflow. Expression Language Cost per IF Startup Time C# 1000 Ifs x64 1,5 MB 18s C# 500 Ifs x64 750 KB 9s VB 1000 Ifs x64 140 KB 2s VB 500 Ifs x64 70 KB 1s Now we can directly compare two MS implementations. It is clear that the VB.NET compiler uses the same underlying structure but it has much higher offset compared to the highly inefficient C# expression compiler. I have filed a connect bug here with a harsher wording about recent advances in memory consumption. The funniest thing is that one MS employee did give an Azure AppFabric demo around early 2011 which was so slow that he needed to investigate with xperf. He was after startup time and the call stacks with regards to VB.NET expression compilation were remarkably similar. In fact I only found this post by googling for parts of my call stacks. … “C# expressions will be coming soon to WF, and that will have different performance characteristics than VB” … What did he know Jan 2011 what I did no know until today? ;-). He knew that C# expression will come but that they will not be automatically have better footprint. It is about time to fix that. In its current state C# expressions are not usable for bigger workflows. That also explains the headline for today. You can cheat startup time by prestarting workflows so that the demo looks nice and snappy but it does hurt scalability a lot since you do need much more memory than necessary. I did find the stacks by enabling virtual allocation tracking within XPerf which is still the best tool out there. But first you need to look at your process to check where the memory is hiding: For the C# Expression compiler you do not need xperf. You can directly dump the managed heap and check with a profiler of your choice. But if the allocations are happening on the Private Data ( VirtualAlloc ) you can find it with xperf. There is a nice video on channel 9 explaining VirtualAlloc tracking it in greater detail. If your data allocations are on the Heap it does mean that the C/C++ runtime did create a heap for you where all malloc, new calls do allocate from it. You can enable heap tracing with xperf and full call stack support as well which is doable via xperf like it is shown also on channel 9. Or you can use WPRUI directly: To make “Heap Usage” it work you need to set for your executable the tracing flags (before you start it). For example devenv.exe HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\devenv.exe DWORD TracingFlags 1 Do not forget to disable it after you did complete profiling the process or it will impact the startup time quite a lot. You can with xperf attach directly to a running process and collect heap allocation information from a gone wild process. Very handy if you need to find out what a process was doing which has arrived in a funny state. “VirtualAlloc usage” does work without explicitly enabling stuff for a specific process and is always on machine wide. I had issues on my Windows 7 machines with the call stack collection and the latest Windows 8.1 Performance Toolkit. I was told that WPA from Windows 8.0 should work fine but I do not want to downgrade.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 24, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 24, 2010New ProjectsADO.Net DataSets to ExtJs.data.Store: A JavaScript (and C#) based project to reduce the amount of client-side code necessary to consume ADO.Net / ASP.Net web services when using ExtJS.AMP.Net Wrapper: AMP is a platform to build on-line marketplaces (http://www.poweredbyamp.com). AMP.Net provided Object-Like interaction with AMP's restful service...ArkSwitch: ArkSwitch is an easy to use, finger-friendly task manager for Windows Mobile 6.5.3 (with a WM6.5 compatibility mode). It is developed mainly in C#,...Biffen: Cinema-booking project in Computer Science at University College Nordjylland, Denmark.Braintree Client Library: Client library for integrating with the Braintree Gateway.Business Framework: A framework which helps building business applications. It provides business rules, validation rules and a text-based language for writing rules. I...Camp Araminta: This project will be used to coordinate development efforts on the Camp Araminta website.ChoServiceHost: Simple and easy way to create and host Windows Service Applications in .NET 3.5/Visual Studio 2008Delta College Game Development Project: Project site for cs 16 game development classDotNetNuke® Labs: DotNetNuke Labs is a collection of "research & development" type projects for the DotNetNuke platform.Generic web part for hosting Silverlight content on SharePoint sites (WSS,MOSS): This is a generic web part for hosting Silverlight content on WSS 30 and MOSS 2007 sites. The objective of this web part was to make it easy for us...GpTiming: GpTiming is a simple "lab" application related to race events, based on a Domain Model.HTML Forms in Windows Forms: As the names suggests this code library is designed to introduce HTML code (primarily form code) into Windows Forms. It was created because standar...imgur uploader - .net open source uploader for image sharing site imgur: Imgur uploader strives to be an easy to use uploader for images you would like to share with friends and family. It is written in c#.kuuy static system: kuuy static system is a full static publish website system!LaTeX Grapher: The goal of this project is to make a tool that facilitates making high quality two dimensional vector graphic function plots with a minimal amount...LightREST: A .NET library to consume REST-based HTTP services.Machiavelli: Machiavelli is Stackoverflow inspired project that I am working on following Andrew Siemer's article on DotNetSlackers. Mover: Mover makes it easier for developers to create programmatic animations in Silverlight. It provides an expressive API to the platform's underlying S...MVC Presenter: ASP.NET MVC 2で作るプレゼンビューアーnHibernate Attribute mapping: How to use Attibute mapping with a ManyToMany Relationship with nHibernateNIPO Data Processing Component Framework: NIPO is a general purpose component framework for data processing applications (that follow the IPO-principle). Its plugin-based architecture makes...PowerShell Remote File Explorer: This project intends to develop a Windows forms based file explorer to browse/transfer files over PowerShell 2.0 remoting channel. The file transfe...Process Flow Tracking of Biomass Distribution Project (University of Mumbai): At Larsen & Toubro Infotech India Ltd., my team worked on a SCM (Supply Chain Management) based project titled 'Process Flow Tracking of Biomass Di...VS2010 Rc1 Fix: Illustrates a fix for working with the ASAP.NET Wizard control with VS2010 RC1Yicker: a microblog program devolep by c#.New ReleasesADO.Net DataSets to ExtJs.data.Store: Ext.net: This is the first version of Ext.net. This version contains a single class, Ext.net.Store which extends the Ext.data.Store class to consume ADO.Ne...AMP.Net Wrapper: AMP.Net v1.0: Provides abstraction for all the product search functionality offered by AMP.ArkSwitch: ArkSwitch legacy versions: Old versions - no need to download themArkSwitch: ArkSwitch v1.1.0: ArkSwitch v1.1.0Braintree Client Library: Braintree 1.0.0: Braintree .NET client library 1.0.0Business Framework: BusinessFramework preview: Early preview bits. See Rules for a sample.Business Framework: Samples: SamplesCC.Votd: CC.Votd 1.0.10.224: This is the initial release of CC.Votd. Marking as beta since I'm the only one who has used it up to this point.ChoServiceHost: ChoServiceHost.msi: Easy way to develop Windows Service applications in .NET 3.5/VS.NET 2008. (Installer)ChoServiceHost: ChoServiceHost-Src.zip: Easy way to develop Windows Service applications in .NET 3.5/VS.NET 2008. (Source Files)CHS Extranet: Beta 2.4: Beta 2.4 Release: Change Log: Added HTML preview options for XLS, XLSX, DOCX File Changes: ~/MyComputer.aspx ~/mycomputer.css ~/basestyle.css...Composure: AvalonDock-55751-VS2010.NET4: This is a "convenience build" of AvalonDock (drop 55751) for VIsual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. Nothing has been altered in the source code (which ...Data Access Component: Version 2.6: Add LINQ support.Desktop Google Reader: 1.3 Beta 1: New features: Read it Later included (see http://readitlaterlist.com/) Liking added (working: see number of liking users, see if liking yourself,...Explorer Plus: Explorer Plus v0.3: Amazon Locales AddedFree Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.3 Released: Hi, Today we have released the final version of Visifire v3.0.3 which contains the following major features: * DataBinding. * IndicatorEn...Generic web part for hosting Silverlight content on SharePoint sites (WSS,MOSS): CTP: The objective of this release was to gather feedback from the wider community. I intend to pursue further development and make fixes wherever appro...HTML Forms in Windows Forms: HTMLForms 1.0: First Release.imgur uploader - .net open source uploader for image sharing site imgur: Release 2010-02-23-01: This is the first codeplex release! Let mayhem commence...Jeremi Stadler: Stick Tops 2.5: Sticktops is a very light program that makes it easy to paste stuff on small notes on the screen. All notes you have is saved on a server so you ca...kuuy static system: kss_v1.0beta sql: kss_v1.0beta sql scripts sourceMDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.2.55998: Fixed detecting uploading.com dead links; Added hiding rss entries without files;Mover: MoverLib for Silverlight 3: A first version of MoverLib for Silverlight 3.nHibernate Attribute mapping: 1.0: Source CodenHibernate Attribute mapping: Download 1: Zip fileNodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Class Libraries, version 1.0.1.113: The NodeXL class libraries can be used to display network graphs in .NET applications. To include a NodeXL network graph in a WPF desktop or Windo...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.113: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis version inclu...OAuthLib: OAuthLib (1.6.0.0): Difference between previous version is as next. 7079 Make it possible to pass factory method of request in ObtainUnauthorizedRequestToken and Reque...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG2010 Drop 5: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices ****************************************** ***************************************...PowerShell Remote File Explorer: PSRemoteExplorer 0.1: This release is the initial release of PowerShell remote file explorer. This enables the basic functionality of a remote file explorer. This also p...Reusable Library: v1.0.3: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developer.SharePoint Outlook Connector: Version 1.0.2.4: Version 1.0.2.4 Minor bugs have been fixed.Silverlight Server File Manager: First production release: This release is in production. Release on change set 37268.SIMD Detector: 2nd Release: Released C/CLI assembly project for use in CSharp and VB. Tested in CSharp console application. A Windows Form application coming soon. Projects ma...Source Analysis Policy: Source Analysis Policy v1.1 SP1: This release contains the compiled, and signed binaries in an installation package. This package also registers the policy with Microsoft Visual St...SpecExpress : A Fluent Validation Framework: SpecExpress 1.1: UpdatesAdded Validation Contexts feature Fixed bug with handling for Bool Types and Required MessageStore now allows for overriding individual ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30223.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVS2010 Rc1 Fix: RC1Fix01: This is a very simple project implementing a Microsoft Walkthrough at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wdb4eb30%28VS.100%29.aspx and the man...WPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: version 1.0: Initial releaseMost Popular ProjectsASP.NET Ajax LibraryManaged Extensibility FrameworkAccelerators for Microsoft Dynamics CRMWindows 7 USB/DVD Download ToolDotNetZip LibraryMDownloaderVirtual Router - Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2MFCMAPIDroid ExplorerUseful Sharepoint Designer Custom Workflow ActivitiesMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrBlogEngine.NETInfoServiceNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleRapid Entity Framework. (ORM). CTP 2SharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLRjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Servicespatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryXcoordination Application Space

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add_shown & add_hiding ModalPopupExtender Events

- by Yousef_Jadallah

In this topic, I’ll discuss the Client events we usually need while using ModalPopupExtender. The add_shown fires when the ModalPopupExtender had shown and add_hiding fires when the user cancels it by CancelControlID,note that it fires before hiding the modal. They are useful in many cases, for example may you need to set focus to specific Textbox when the user display the modal, or if you need to reset the controls values inside the Modal after it has been hidden. To declare Client event either in pageLoad javascript function or you can attach the function by Sys.Application.add_load like this: Sys.Application.add_load(modalInit); function modalInit() { var modalPopup = $find('mpeID'); modalPopup.add_hiding(onHiding); } function onHiding(sender, args) { } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I’ll use the first way in the current example. So lets start with the illustration: 1- In this example am using simple panel which contain UserName and Password Textboxes besides submit and cancel buttons, this Panel will be used as PopupControlID in the ModalPopupExtender : <asp:Panel ID="panModal" runat="server" Height="180px" Width="300px" style="display:none" CssClass="ModalWindow"> <table width="100%" > <tr> <td> User Name </td> <td> <asp:TextBox ID="txtName" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Password </td> <td> <asp:TextBox ID="txtPassword" runat="server" TextMode="Password"></asp:TextBox> </td> </tr> </table> <br /> <asp:Button ID="btnSubmit" runat="server" Text="Submit" /> <asp:Button ID="btnCancel" runat="server" Text="Cancel" /> </asp:Panel> You can use this simple style for the Panel : <style type="text/css"> .ModalWindow { border: solid; border-width:3px; background:#f0f0f0; } </style> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 2- Create the view button (TargetControlID) as you know this contain the ID of the element that activates the modal popup: <asp:Button ID="btnView" runat="server" Text="View" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 3-Add the ModalPopupExtender ,moreover don’t forget to add the ScriptManager: <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server"/> <cc1:ModalPopupExtender ID="ModalPopupExtender1" runat="server" TargetControlID="btnView" PopupControlID="panModal" CancelControlID="btnCancel"/> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 4-In the pageLoad javascript function inside add_shown event set the focus on the txtName , and inside add_hiding reset the two Textboxes. <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function pageLoad() { $find('ModalPopupExtender1').add_shown(function() { alert('add_shown event fires'); $get('<%=txtName.ClientID%>').focus(); }); $find('ModalPopupExtender1').add_hiding(function() { alert('add_hiding event fires'); $get('<%=txtName.ClientID%>').value = ""; $get('<%=txtPassword.ClientID%>').value = ""; }); } </script> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I’ve added the two alerts just to let you show when the event fires. Hope this simple example show you the benefit and how to use these events.

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Creating HTML5 Offline Web Applications with ASP.NET

- by Stephen Walther

The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can create HTML5 Offline Web Applications when building ASP.NET web applications. I describe the method that I used to create an offline Web application when building the JavaScript Reference application. You can read about the HTML5 Offline Web Application standard by visiting the following links: Offline Web Applications Firefox Offline Web Applications Safari Offline Web Applications Currently, the HTML5 Offline Web Applications feature works with all modern browsers with one important exception. You can use Offline Web Applications with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (including iPhone Safari). Unfortunately, however, Internet Explorer does not support Offline Web Applications (not even IE 9). Why Build an HTML5 Offline Web Application? The official reason to build an Offline Web Application is so that you do not need to be connected to the Internet to use it. For example, you can use the JavaScript Reference Application when flying in an airplane, riding a subway, or hiding in a cave in Borneo. The JavaScript Reference Application works great on my iPhone even when I am completely disconnected from any network. The following screenshot shows the JavaScript Reference Application running on my iPhone when airplane mode is enabled (notice the little orange airplane): Admittedly, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find locations where you can’t get Internet access. A second, and possibly better, reason to create Offline Web Applications is speed. An Offline Web Application must be downloaded only once. After it gets downloaded, all of the files required by your Web application (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Image) are stored persistently on your computer. Think of Offline Web Applications as providing you with a super browser cache. Normally, when you cache files in a browser, the files are cached on a file-by-file basis. For each HTML, CSS, image, or JavaScript file, you specify how long the file should remain in the cache by setting cache headers. Unlike the normal browser caching mechanism, the HTML5 Offline Web Application cache is used to specify a caching policy for an entire set of files. You use a manifest file to list the files that you want to cache and these files are cached until the manifest is changed. Another advantage of using the HTML5 offline cache is that the HTML5 standard supports several JavaScript events and methods related to the offline cache. For example, you can be notified in your JavaScript code whenever the offline application has been updated. You can use JavaScript methods, such as the ApplicationCache.update() method, to update the cache programmatically. Creating the Manifest File The HTML5 Offline Cache uses a manifest file to determine the files that get cached. Here’s what the manifest file looks like for the JavaScript Reference application: CACHE MANIFEST # v30 Default.aspx # Standard Script Libraries Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.7.custom.min.js Scripts/jquery.tmpl.min.js Scripts/json2.js # App Scripts App_Scripts/combine.js App_Scripts/combine.debug.js # Content (CSS & images) Content/default.css Content/logo.png Content/ui-lightness/jquery-ui-1.8.7.custom.css Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_glass_65_ffffff_1x400.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_glass_100_f6f6f6_1x400.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_highlight-soft_100_eeeeee_1x100.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-icons_222222_256x240.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_glass_100_fdf5ce_1x400.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_diagonals-thick_20_666666_40x40.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_gloss-wave_35_f6a828_500x100.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-icons_ffffff_256x240.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-icons_ef8c08_256x240.png Content/browsers/c8.png Content/browsers/es3.png Content/browsers/es5.png Content/browsers/ff3_6.png Content/browsers/ie8.png Content/browsers/ie9.png Content/browsers/sf5.png NETWORK: Services/EntryService.svc http://superexpert.com/resources/JavaScriptReference/ A Cache Manifest file always starts with the line of text Cache Manifest. In the manifest above, all of the CSS, image, and JavaScript files required by the JavaScript Reference application are listed. For example, the Default.aspx ASP.NET page, jQuery library, JQuery UI library, and several images are listed. Notice that you can add comments to a manifest by starting a line with the hash character (#). I use comments in the manifest above to group JavaScript and image files. Finally, notice that there is a NETWORK: section of the manifest. You list any file that you do not want to cache (any file that requires network access) in this section. In the manifest above, the NETWORK: section includes the URL for a WCF Service named EntryService.svc. This service is called to get the JavaScript entries displayed by the JavaScript Reference. There are two important things that you need to be aware of when using a manifest file. First, all relative URLs listed in a manifest are resolved relative to the manifest file. The URLs listed in the manifest above are all resolved relative to the root of the application because the manifest file is located in the application root. Second, whenever you make a change to the manifest file, browsers will download all of the files contained in the manifest (all of them). For example, if you add a new file to the manifest then any browser that supports the Offline Cache standard will detect the change in the manifest and download all of the files listed in the manifest automatically. If you make changes to files in the manifest (for example, modify a JavaScript file) then you need to make a change in the manifest file in order for the new version of the file to be downloaded. The standard way of updating a manifest file is to include a comment with a version number. The manifest above includes a # v30 comment. If you make a change to a file then you need to modify the comment to be # v31 in order for the new file to be downloaded. When Are Updated Files Downloaded? When you make changes to a manifest, the changes are not reflected the very next time you open the offline application in your web browser. Your web browser will download the updated files in the background. This can be very confusing when you are working with JavaScript files. If you make a change to a JavaScript file, and you have cached the application offline, then the changes to the JavaScript file won’t appear when you reload the application. The HTML5 standard includes new JavaScript events and methods that you can use to track changes and make changes to the Application Cache. You can use the ApplicationCache.update() method to initiate an update to the application cache and you can use the ApplicationCache.swapCache() method to switch to the latest version of a cached application. My heartfelt recommendation is that you do not enable your application for offline storage until after you finish writing your application code. Otherwise, debugging the application can become a very confusing experience. Offline Web Applications versus Local Storage Be careful to not confuse the HTML5 Offline Web Application feature and HTML5 Local Storage (aka DOM storage) feature. The JavaScript Reference Application uses both features. HTML5 Local Storage enables you to store key/value pairs persistently. Think of Local Storage as a super cookie. I describe how the JavaScript Reference Application uses Local Storage to store the database of JavaScript entries in a separate blog entry. Offline Web Applications enable you to store static files persistently. Think of Offline Web Applications as a super cache. Creating a Manifest File in an ASP.NET Application A manifest file must be served with the MIME type text/cache-manifest. In order to serve the JavaScript Reference manifest with the proper MIME type, I added two files to the JavaScript Reference Application project: Manifest.txt – This text file contains the actual manifest file. Manifest.ashx – This generic handler sends the Manifest.txt file with the MIME type text/cache-manifest. Here’s the code for the generic handler: using System.Web; namespace JavaScriptReference { public class Manifest : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/cache-manifest"; context.Response.WriteFile(context.Server.MapPath("Manifest.txt")); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } } } The Default.aspx file contains a reference to the manifest. The opening HTML tag in the Default.aspx file looks like this: <html manifest="Manifest.ashx"> Notice that the HTML tag contains a manifest attribute that points to the Manifest.ashx generic handler. Internet Explorer simply ignores this attribute. Every other modern browser will download the manifest when the Default.aspx page is requested. Seeing the Offline Web Application in Action The experience of using an HTML5 Web Application is different with different browsers. When you first open the JavaScript Reference application with Firefox, you get the following warning: Notice that you are provided with the choice of whether you want to use the application offline or not. Browsers other than Firefox, such as Chrome and Safari, do not provide you with this choice. Chrome and Safari will create an offline cache automatically. If you click the Allow button then Firefox will download all of the files listed in the manifest. You can view the files contained in the Firefox offline application cache by typing about:cache in the Firefox address bar: You can view the actual items being cached by clicking the List Cache Entries link: The Offline Web Application experience is different in the case of Google Chrome. You can view the entries in the offline cache by opening the Developer Tools (hit Shift+CTRL+I), selecting the Storage tab, and selecting Application Cache: Notice that you view the status of the Application Cache. In the screen shot above, the status is UNCACHED which means that the files listed in the manifest have not been downloaded and cached yet. The different possible values for the status are included in the HTML5 Offline Web Application standard: UNCACHED – The Application Cache has not been initialized. IDLE – The Application Cache is not currently being updated. CHECKING – The Application Cache is being fetched and checked for updates. DOWNLOADING – The files in the Application Cache are being updated. UPDATEREADY – There is a new version of the Application. OBSOLETE – The contents of the Application Cache are obsolete. Summary In this blog entry, I provided a description of how you can use the HTML5 Offline Web Application feature in the context of an ASP.NET application. I described how this feature is used with the JavaScript Reference Application to store the entire application on a user’s computer. By taking advantage of this new feature of the HTML5 standard, you can improve the performance of your ASP.NET web applications by requiring users of your web application to download your application once and only once. Furthermore, you can enable users to take advantage of your applications anywhere -- regardless of whether or not they are connected to the Internet.

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Customize the Windows Media Center Start Menu with Media Center Studio

- by DigitalGeekery

Do you ever wish you could change the WMC start menu? Maybe move some of the tiles and strips around to different locations, add new ones, or eliminate some altogether? Today we look at how to do it using Media Center Studio. Download and install Media Center Studio. (Download link below) You’ll also want to make sure you have Windows Media Center closed before running Media Center Studio. Many of the actions cannot be performed with Media Center open. Once installed, you can open Media Center Studio from the Windows Start Menu. When you first open Media Center Studio you’ll be on the Themes tab. Click on the Start Menu tab. It should be noted that Media Center Studio is a Beta application, and it did crash on us a few times, so it’s a good idea to save your work frequently. You can save your changes by selecting Save on the Home tab, or by clicking the small disk icon at the top left. We also found that that trying to launch Media Center from the Start Media Center button on the application ribbon typically didn’t work. Opening Windows Media Center from the Windows Start Menu is preferred. When you’re on the Start Menu tab you will see the Windows Media Center menu strips and tiles. Click the arrows located at the right, left, top, and bottom of the screen to scroll through the various menu strips. Hiding and Removing Tiles and Menu Strips. If there is an entire menu strip that you never use and would like to remove from Media Center, simply uncheck the box to the left of the the title above that menu strip. If you’d like to hide individual tiles, uncheck the box next to the name of the individual tile. Renaming Tiles and Strips To rename a tile or menu strip, click on the small notepad icon next to the title. Note: If you do not see a small notepad icon next to the title, then the title is not editable. This applies to many of the “Promo” tiles. The title will turn into a text input box so that you can edit the name. Click away from the text box when finished. Here we will change the title of the default Movie strip to “Flicks.” Change the Default Tile and Menu Strip The Default menu strip is the strip that is highlighted, or on focus, when you open Media Center. To change the default strip, simply click once on another strip to highlight it, and then save your work. In our example, I’m going to make our newly renamed “Flicks” strip the default. Each menu strip has a default tile. This is the tile that is active, or on focus, when you select the menu strip. To change the default tile on a strip, click once on the tile. You will see it outlined in light blue. Now just simply save your changes. In our example below, we’ve changed the default tile on the TV strip to “guide.” Moving Tiles and Menu Strips You can move an entire Menu Strip up or down on the screen. When you hover your mouse over the a menu strip, you will see up and down arrows appear to the right and left of the title. Click on the arrows to move the strip up or down. You will see the menu strip appear in it’s new position. To move a tile to a new menu strip, click and drag the tile you’d like to move. When you begin to drag the tile, green plus (+) signs will appear in between the tiles. Drag and drop the tile onto to any of these green plus signs to move it to that location. When you’ve dragged the tile over an acceptable position, you’ll see the red “Move” label next to your cursor turn to a blue “Move to” label. Now you can drop the tile into position. You’ll see the tile located in it’s new position. Adding a New Custom Menu Strip Click on the Start Menu tab and then select the Menu Strip button. You will see a new Custom Menu strip appear on your Start Menu with the default name of Custom menu. You can change the name by clicking on the notepad icon just as we did earlier. For our example, we’ll change the name of the new strip to Add-ins. To add a new tile, click on Entry Points at the lower left of the application window. This will reveal all of your available Entry Points that can be added to the Media Center Menu. You should see the built-in Media Center Games and any Media Center Plug-ins you have added to your system. You can then drag and drop any of the Entry Points onto any of the Menu Strips. Below we’ve added Media Browser to our custom Add-ins menu strip. You can also add additional applications to launch directly from Media Center. Click on the Application button on the Start Menu tab. Note: Many applications may not work with your remote, but with keyboard and mouse only. Type in a title which will appear under the tile in Media Center, and then type the path to the application. In our example, we will add Internet Explorer 8. Note: Be sure to add the actual path to the application and not just a link on the desktop. Click any of the check boxes to select any options under Required Capabilities. You can also browse to choose an image if you don’t care for the image that appears automatically. Next, you can select keyboard strokes to press to exit the application and return to Media Center. Click the green plus (+) button. When prompted, press a key you’ll use to close the program. Repeat the process if you’d also like to select a keystroke to kill the program. You’ll see your button programs listed below. When you’re finished, save your work and close out of Media Center Studio. Now your new program entry point will appear in the Entry Points section. Drag the icon to the desired position on the Start Menu and save again before exiting Media Center Studio. When you open Media Center you will see your new application on the start menu. Click the tile to open the application just as you would any other tile. The application will open and minimize Media Center. When you press the key you choose to close the program, Windows Media Center will automatically be restored. Note: You can also exit the application through normal methods by clicking the red “X” or File > Exit. Conclusion Media Center Studio is a Beta application which the developer freely admits still has some bugs. Despite it’s flaws Media Center Studio is a powerful tool, and when it comes to customizing your Media Center start menu, it’s pretty much the only game in town. It works with both Vista and Windows 7, and according to the developer, has not been officially tested with extenders. Media Center Studio can also be used to add custom themes to Windows 7 Media Center and we’ll be covering that in a future article. Looking for more ways to customize your Media Center experience? Be sure to check out our earlier posts on Media Browser, as well as how to add Hulu, Boxee, and weather conditions your Windows 7 Media Center. Download Media Center Studio Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)How To Rip a Music CD in Windows 7 Media CenterSchedule Updates for Windows Media CenterStartup Customizations for Media Center in Windows 7Automatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV Mode 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 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall

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Not All “Viruses” Are Viruses: 10 Malware Terms Explained

- by Chris Hoffman

Most people seem to call every type of malware a “virus”, but that isn’t technically accurate. You’ve probably heard of many more terms beyond virus: malware, worm, Trojan, rootkit, keylogger, spyware, and more. But what do all these terms mean? These terms aren’t just used by geeks. They make their way into even mainstream news stories about the latest web security problems and tech scares. Understanding them will help you understand the dangers your\ hear about. Malware The word “malware” is short for “malicious software.” Many people use the word “virus” to indicate any type of harmful software, but a virus is actually just a specific type of malware. The word “malware” encompasses all harmful software, including all the ones listed below. Virus Let’s start with viruses. A virus is a type of malware that copies itself by infecting other files, just as viruses in the real world infect biological cells and use those biological cells to reproduce copies of themselves. A virus can do many different things — watch in the background and steal your passwords, display advertisements, or just crash your computer — but the key thing that makes it a virus is how it spreads. When you run a virus, it will infect programs on your computer. When you run the program on another computer, the virus will infect programs on that computer, and so on. For example, a virus might infect program files on a USB stick. When the programs on that USB stick are run on another computer, the virus runs on the other computer and infects more program files. The virus will continue to spread in this way. Worm A worm is similar to a virus, but it spreads a different way. Rather than infecting files and relying on human activity to move those files around and run them on different systems, a worm spreads over computer networks on its own accord. For example, the Blaster and Sasser worms spread very quickly in the days of Windows XP because Windows XP did not come properly secured and exposed system services to the Internet. The worm accessed these system services over the Internet, exploited a vulnerability, and infected the computer. The worm then used the new infected computer to continue replicating itself. Such worms are less common now that Windows is properly firewalled by default, but worms can also spread in other ways — for example, by mass-emailing themselves to every email address in an effected user’s address book. Like a virus, a worm can do any number of other harmful things once it infects a computer. The key thing that makes it a worm is simply how it spreads copies of itself. Trojan (or Trojan Horse) A Trojan horse, or Trojan, is a type of malware that disguises itself as a legitimate file. When you download and run the program, the Trojan horse will run in the background, allowing third-parties to access your computer. Trojans can do this for any number of reasons — to monitor activity on your computer, to join your computer to a botnet. Trojans may also be used to open the floodgates and download many other types of malware onto your computer. The key thing that makes this type of malware a Trojan is how it arrives. It pretends to be a useful program and, when run, it hides in the background and gives malicious people access to your computer. It isn’t obsessed with copying itself into other files or spreading over the network, as viruses and worms are. For example, a piece of pirated software on an unscrupulous website may actually contain a Trojan. Spyware Spyware is a type of malicious software that spies on you without your knowledge. It collects a variety of different types of data, depending on the piece of spyware. Different types of malware can function as spyware — there may be malicious spyware included in Trojans that spies on your keystrokes to steal financial data, for example. More “legitimate” spyware may be bundled along with free software and simply monitor your web browsing habits, uploading this data to advertising servers so the software’s creator can make money from selling their knowledge of your activities. Adware Adware often comes along with spyware. It’s any type of software that displays advertising on your computer. Programs that display advertisements inside the program itself aren’t generally classified as malware. The kind of “adware” that’s particularly malicious is the kind that abuses its access to your system to display ads when it shouldn’t. For example, a piece of harmful adware may cause pop-up advertisements to appear on your computer when you’re not doing anything else. Or, adware may inject additional advertising into other web pages as you browse the web. Adware is often combined with spyware — a piece of malware may monitor your browsing habits and use them to serve you more targeted ads. Adware is more “socially acceptable” than other types of malware on Windows and you may see adware bundled with legitimate programs. For example, some people consider the Ask Toolbar included with Oracle’s Java software adware. Keylogger A keylogger is a type of malware that runs in the background, recording every key stroke you make. These keystrokes can include usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive data. The keylogger then, most likely, uploads these keystrokes to a malicious server, where it can be analyzed and people can pick out the useful passwords and credit card numbers. Other types of malware can act as keyloggers. A virus, worm, or Trojan may function as a keylogger, for example. Keyloggers may also be installed for monitoring purposes by businesses or even jealous spouses. Botnet, Bot A botnet is a large network of computers that are under the botnet creator’s control. Each computer functions as a “bot” because it’s infected with a specific piece of malware. Once the bot software infects the computer, ir will connect to some sort of control server and wait for instructions from the botnet’s creator. For example, a botnet may be used to initiate a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. Every computer in the botnet will be told to bombard a specific website or server with requests at once, and such millions or requests can cause a server to become unresponsive or crash. Botnet creators may sell access to their botnets, allowing other malicious individuals to use large botnets to do their dirty work. Rootkit A rootkit is a type of malware designed to burrow deep into your computer, avoiding detection by security programs and users. For example, a rootkit might load before most of Windows, burying itself deep into the system and modifying system functions so that security programs can’t detect it. A rootkit might hide itself completely, preventing itself from showing up in the Windows task manager. The key thing that makes a type of malware a rootkit is that it’s stealthy and focused on hiding itself once it arrives. Ransomware Ransomware is a fairly new type of malware. It holds your computer or files hostage and demands a ransom payment. Some ransomware may simply pop up a box asking for money before you can continue using your computer. Such prompts are easily defeated with antivirus software. More harmful malware like CryptoLocker literally encrypts your files and demands a payment before you can access them. Such types of malware are dangerous, especially if you don’t have backups. Most malware these days is produced for profit, and ransomware is a good example of that. Ransomware doesn’t want to crash your computer and delete your files just to cause you trouble. It wants to take something hostage and get a quick payment from you. So why is it called “antivirus software,” anyway? Well, most people continue to consider the word “virus” synonymous with malware as a whole. Antivirus software doesn’t just protect against viruses, but against all types of malware. It may be more accurately referred to as “antimalware” or “security” software. Image Credit: Marcelo Alves on Flickr, Tama Leaver on Flickr, Szilard Mihaly on Flickr

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Dotfuscator Deep Dive with WP7

- by Bil Simser

I thought I would share some experience with code obfuscation (specifically the Dotfuscator product) and Windows Phone 7 apps. These days twitter is a buzz with black hat and white operations coming out about how the marketplace is insecure and Microsoft failed, blah, blah, blah. So it’s that much more important to protect your intellectual property. You should protect it no matter what when releasing apps into the wild but more so when someone is paying for them. You want to protect the time and effort that went into your code and have some comfort that the casual hacker isn’t going to usurp your next best thing. Enter code obfuscation. Code obfuscation is one tool that can help protect your IP. Basically it goes into your compiled assemblies, rewrites things at an IL level (like renaming methods and classes and hiding logic flow) and rewrites it back so that the assembly or executable is still fully functional but prying eyes using a tool like ILDASM or Reflector can’t see what’s going on. You can read more about code obfuscation here on Wikipedia. A word to the wise. Code obfuscation isn’t 100% secure. More so on the WP7 platform where the OS expects certain things to be as they were meant to be. So don’t expect 100% obfuscation of every class and every method and every property. It’s just not going to happen. What this does do is give you some level of protection but don’t put all your eggs in one basket and call it done. Like I said, this is just one step in the process. There are a few tools out there that provide code obfuscation and support the Windows Phone 7 platform (see links to other tools at the end of this post). One such tool is Dotfuscator from PreEmptive solutions. The thing about Dotfuscator is that they’ve struck a deal with Microsoft to provide a *free* copy of their commercial product for Windows Phone 7. The only drawback is that it only runs until March 31, 2010. However it’s a good place to start and the focus of this article. Getting Started When you fire up Dotfuscator you’re presented with a dialog to start a new project or load a previous one. We’ll start with a new project. You’re then looking at a somewhat blank screen that shows an Input tab (among others) and you’re probably wondering what to do? Click on the folder icon (first one) and browse to where your xap file is. At this point you can save the project and click on the arrow to start the process. Bam! You’re done. Right? Think again. The program did indeed run and create a new version of your xap (doing it’s thing and rewriting back your *obfuscated* assemblies) but let’s take a look at the assembly in Reflector to see the end result. Remember a xap file is really just a glorified zip file (or cab file if you prefer). When you ran Dotfuscator for the first time with the default settings you’ll see it created a new version of your xap in a folder under “My Documents” called “Dotfuscated” (you can configure the output directory in settings). Here’s the new xap file. Since a xap is just a zip, rename it to .cab or .zip or something and open it with your favorite unarchive program (I use WinRar but it doesn’t matter as long as it can unzip files). If you already have the xap file associated with your unarchive tool the rename isn’t needed. Once renamed extract the contents of the xap to your hard drive: Now you’ll have a folder with the contents of the xap file extracted: Double click or load up your assembly (WindowsPhoneDataBoundApplication1.dll in the example) in Reflector and let’s see the results: Hmm. That doesn’t look right. I can see all the methods and the code is all there for my LoadData method I wanted to protect. Product failure. Let’s return it for a refund. Hold your horses. We need to check out the settings in the program first. Remember when we loaded up our xap file. It started us on the Input tab but there was a settings tab before that. Wonder what it does? Here’s the default settings: Renaming Taking a closer look, all of the settings in Feature are disabled. WTF? Yeah, it leaves me scratching my head why an obfuscator by default doesn’t obfuscate. However it’s a simple fix to change these settings. Let’s enable Renaming as it sounds like a good start. Renaming obscures code by renaming methods and fields to names that are not understandable. Great. Run the tool again and go through the process of unzipping the updated xap and let’s take a look in Reflector again at our project. This looks a lot better. Lots of methods named a, b, c, d, etc. That’ll help slow hackers down a bit. What about our logic that we spent days weeks on? Let’s take a look at the LoadData method: What gives? We have renaming enabled but all of our code is still there. If you look through all your methods you’ll find it’s still sitting there out in the open. Control Flow Back to the settings page again. Let’s enable Control Flow now. Control Flow obfuscation synthesizes branching, conditional, and iterative constructs (such as if, for, and while) that produce valid executable logic, but yield non-deterministic semantic results when decompilation is attempted. In other words, the code runs as before, but decompilers cannot reproduce the original code. Do the dance again and let’s see the results in Reflector. Ahh, that’s better. Methods renamed *and* nobody can look at our LoadData method now. Life is good. More than Minimum This is the bare minimum to obfuscate your xap to at least a somewhat comfortable level. However I did find that while this worked in my Hello World demo, it didn’t work on one of my real world apps. I had to do some extra tweaking with that. Below are the screens that I used on one app that worked. I’m not sure what it was about the app that the approach above didn’t work with (maybe the extra assembly?) but it works and I’m happy with it. YMMV. Remember to test your obfuscated app on your device first before submitting to ensure you haven’t obfuscated the obfuscator. settings tab: rename tab: string encryption tab: premark tab: A few final notes Play with the settings and keep bumping up the bar to try to get as much obfuscation as you can. The more the better but remember you can overdo it. Always (always, always, always) deploy your obfuscated xap to your device and test it before submitting to the marketplace. I didn’t and got rejected because I had gone overboard with the obfuscation so the app wouldn’t launch at all. Not everything is going to be obfuscated. Specifically I don’t see a way to obfuscate auto properties and a few other language features. Again, if you crank the settings up you might hide these but I haven’t spent a lot of time optimizing the process. Some people might say to obfuscate your xaml using string encryption but again, test, test, test. Xaml is picky so too much obfuscation (or any) might disable your app or produce odd rendering effets. Remember, obfuscation is not 100% secure! Don’t rely on it as a sole way of protecting your assets. Other Tools Dotfuscator is one just product and isn’t the end-all be-all to obfuscation so check out others below. For example, Crypto can make it so Reflector doesn’t even recognize the app as a .NET one and won’t open it. Others can encrypt resources and Xaml markup files. Here are some other obfuscators that support the Windows Phone 7 platform. Feel free to give them a try and let people know your experience with them! Dotfuscator Windows Phone Edition Crypto Obfuscator for .NET DeepSea Obfuscation

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Metro: Namespaces and Modules

- by Stephen.Walther

The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can use the Windows JavaScript (WinJS) library to create namespaces. In particular, you learn how to use the WinJS.Namespace.define() and WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() methods. You also learn how to hide private methods by using the module pattern. Why Do We Need Namespaces? Before we do anything else, we should start by answering the question: Why do we need namespaces? What function do they serve? Do they just add needless complexity to our Metro applications? After all, plenty of JavaScript libraries do just fine without introducing support for namespaces. For example, jQuery has no support for namespaces and jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library in the universe. If jQuery can do without namespaces, why do we need to worry about namespaces at all? Namespaces perform two functions in a programming language. First, namespaces prevent naming collisions. In other words, namespaces enable you to create more than one object with the same name without conflict. For example, imagine that two companies – company A and company B – both want to make a JavaScript shopping cart control and both companies want to name the control ShoppingCart. By creating a CompanyA namespace and CompanyB namespace, both companies can create a ShoppingCart control: a CompanyA.ShoppingCart and a CompanyB.ShoppingCart control. The second function of a namespace is organization. Namespaces are used to group related functionality even when the functionality is defined in different physical files. For example, I know that all of the methods in the WinJS library related to working with classes can be found in the WinJS.Class namespace. Namespaces make it easier to understand the functionality available in a library. If you are building a simple JavaScript application then you won’t have much reason to care about namespaces. If you need to use multiple libraries written by different people then namespaces become very important. Using WinJS.Namespace.define() In the WinJS library, the most basic method of creating a namespace is to use the WinJS.Namespace.define() method. This method enables you to declare a namespace (of arbitrary depth). The WinJS.Namespace.define() method has the following parameters: · name – A string representing the name of the new namespace. You can add nested namespace by using dot notation · members – An optional collection of objects to add to the new namespace For example, the following code sample declares two new namespaces named CompanyA and CompanyB.Controls. Both namespaces contain a ShoppingCart object which has a checkout() method: // Create CompanyA namespace with ShoppingCart WinJS.Namespace.define("CompanyA"); CompanyA.ShoppingCart = { checkout: function (){ return "Checking out from A"; } }; // Create CompanyB.Controls namespace with ShoppingCart WinJS.Namespace.define( "CompanyB.Controls", { ShoppingCart: { checkout: function(){ return "Checking out from B"; } } } ); // Call CompanyA ShoppingCart checkout method console.log(CompanyA.ShoppingCart.checkout()); // Writes "Checking out from A" // Call CompanyB.Controls checkout method console.log(CompanyB.Controls.ShoppingCart.checkout()); // Writes "Checking out from B" In the code above, the CompanyA namespace is created by calling WinJS.Namespace.define(“CompanyA”). Next, the ShoppingCart is added to this namespace. The namespace is defined and an object is added to the namespace in separate lines of code. A different approach is taken in the case of the CompanyB.Controls namespace. The namespace is created and the ShoppingCart object is added to the namespace with the following single line of code: WinJS.Namespace.define( "CompanyB.Controls", { ShoppingCart: { checkout: function(){ return "Checking out from B"; } } } ); Notice that CompanyB.Controls is a nested namespace. The top level namespace CompanyB contains the namespace Controls. You can declare a nested namespace using dot notation and the WinJS library handles the details of creating one namespace within the other. After the namespaces have been defined, you can use either of the two shopping cart controls. You call CompanyA.ShoppingCart.checkout() or you can call CompanyB.Controls.ShoppingCart.checkout(). Using WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() The WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() method is similar to the WinJS.Namespace.define() method. Both methods enable you to define a new namespace. The difference is that the defineWithParent() method enables you to add a new namespace to an existing namespace. The WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() method has the following parameters: · parentNamespace – An object which represents a parent namespace · name – A string representing the new namespace to add to the parent namespace · members – An optional collection of objects to add to the new namespace The following code sample demonstrates how you can create a root namespace named CompanyA and add a Controls child namespace to the CompanyA parent namespace: WinJS.Namespace.define("CompanyA"); WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent(CompanyA, "Controls", { ShoppingCart: { checkout: function () { return "Checking out"; } } } ); console.log(CompanyA.Controls.ShoppingCart.checkout()); // Writes "Checking out" One significant advantage of using the defineWithParent() method over the define() method is the defineWithParent() method is strongly-typed. In other words, you use an object to represent the base namespace instead of a string. If you misspell the name of the object (CompnyA) then you get a runtime error. Using the Module Pattern When you are building a JavaScript library, you want to be able to create both public and private methods. Some methods, the public methods, are intended to be used by consumers of your JavaScript library. The public methods act as your library’s public API. Other methods, the private methods, are not intended for public consumption. Instead, these methods are internal methods required to get the library to function. You don’t want people calling these internal methods because you might need to change them in the future. JavaScript does not support access modifiers. You can’t mark an object or method as public or private. Anyone gets to call any method and anyone gets to interact with any object. The only mechanism for encapsulating (hiding) methods and objects in JavaScript is to take advantage of functions. In JavaScript, a function determines variable scope. A JavaScript variable either has global scope – it is available everywhere – or it has function scope – it is available only within a function. If you want to hide an object or method then you need to place it within a function. For example, the following code contains a function named doSomething() which contains a nested function named doSomethingElse(): function doSomething() { console.log("doSomething"); function doSomethingElse() { console.log("doSomethingElse"); } } doSomething(); // Writes "doSomething" doSomethingElse(); // Throws ReferenceError You can call doSomethingElse() only within the doSomething() function. The doSomethingElse() function is encapsulated in the doSomething() function. The WinJS library takes advantage of function encapsulation to hide all of its internal methods. All of the WinJS methods are defined within self-executing anonymous functions. Everything is hidden by default. Public methods are exposed by explicitly adding the public methods to namespaces defined in the global scope. Imagine, for example, that I want a small library of utility methods. I want to create a method for calculating sales tax and a method for calculating the expected ship date of a product. The following library encapsulates the implementation of my library in a self-executing anonymous function: (function (global) { // Public method which calculates tax function calculateTax(price) { return calculateFederalTax(price) + calculateStateTax(price); } // Private method for calculating state tax function calculateStateTax(price) { return price * 0.08; } // Private method for calculating federal tax function calculateFederalTax(price) { return price * 0.02; } // Public method which returns the expected ship date function calculateShipDate(currentDate) { currentDate.setDate(currentDate.getDate() + 4); return currentDate; } // Export public methods WinJS.Namespace.define("CompanyA.Utilities", { calculateTax: calculateTax, calculateShipDate: calculateShipDate } ); })(this); // Show expected ship date var shipDate = CompanyA.Utilities.calculateShipDate(new Date()); console.log(shipDate); // Show price + tax var price = 12.33; var tax = CompanyA.Utilities.calculateTax(price); console.log(price + tax); In the code above, the self-executing anonymous function contains four functions: calculateTax(), calculateStateTax(), calculateFederalTax(), and calculateShipDate(). The following statement is used to expose only the calcuateTax() and the calculateShipDate() functions: // Export public methods WinJS.Namespace.define("CompanyA.Utilities", { calculateTax: calculateTax, calculateShipDate: calculateShipDate } ); Because the calculateTax() and calcuateShipDate() functions are added to the CompanyA.Utilities namespace, you can call these two methods outside of the self-executing function. These are the public methods of your library which form the public API. The calculateStateTax() and calculateFederalTax() methods, on the other hand, are forever hidden within the black hole of the self-executing function. These methods are encapsulated and can never be called outside of scope of the self-executing function. These are the internal methods of your library. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe why and how you use namespaces with the WinJS library. You learned how to define namespaces using both the WinJS.Namespace.define() and WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() methods. We also discussed how to hide private members and expose public members using the module pattern.

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