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• DVR_PLAYER.exe reports Remote200.ocx is missing?

  - by Kalamane

  I have a program called DVR_PLAYER that is downloaded from a home security camera web interface. The web interface saves surveillance footage in the form of proprietary .drv files. I am unable to use the program to view the files on the cd on any machine that isn't the original machine I downloaded the files from. Every time I try to open it up it says, " Remote200.ocx not installed or it couldn't be installed. Please check user privilege." I need other machines to be able to open and view the footage I've downloaded using this program so that I can hand it in to the local police. Any ideas?

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• The OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI10.1" has not been registered.; 42000.

  - by lankylad

  I have a SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Project. In the Data Source View I have a Named Query which references a single Data Source containing three tables. The Project processes successfully and the cube can be browsed. I recently added a second Data Source to the Data Source View and linked a table to the original Named Query. When I try to process the project, I get the message: OLE DB error: OLE DB or ODBC error: The OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI10.1" has not been registered.; 42000. The Connection String for both Data Sources uses SQLNCLI10.1

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 - New Features

  - by imran_ku07

  Introduction:          ASP.NET MVC 3 just released by ASP.NET MVC team which includes some new features, some changes, some improvements and bug fixes. In this article, I will show you the new features of ASP.NET MVC 3. This will help you to get started using the new features of ASP.NET MVC 3. Full details of this announcement is available at Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix.   Description:       New Razor View Engine:              Razor view engine is one of the most coolest new feature in ASP.NET MVC 3. Razor is speeding things up just a little bit more. It is much smaller and lighter in size. Also it is very easy to learn. You can say ' write less, do more '. You can get start and learn more about Razor at Introducing “Razor” – a new view engine for ASP.NET.         Granular Request Validation:             Another biggest new feature in ASP.NET MVC 3 is Granular Request Validation. Default request validator will throw an exception when he see < followed by an exclamation(like <!) or < followed by the letters a through z(like <s) or & followed by a pound sign(like &#123) as a part of querystring, posted form, headers and cookie collection. In previous versions of ASP.NET MVC, you can control request validation using ValidateInputAttriubte. In ASP.NET MVC 3 you can control request validation at Model level by annotating your model properties with a new attribute called AllowHtmlAttribute. For details see Granular Request Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3.       Sessionless Controller Support:             Sessionless Controller is another great new feature in ASP.NET MVC 3. With Sessionless Controller you can easily control your session behavior for controllers. For example, you can make your HomeController's Session as Disabled or ReadOnly, allowing concurrent request execution for single user. For details see Concurrent Requests In ASP.NET MVC and HowTo: Sessionless Controller in MVC3 – what & and why?.       Unobtrusive Ajax and  Unobtrusive Client Side Validation is Supported:             Another cool new feature in ASP.NET MVC 3 is support for Unobtrusive Ajax and Unobtrusive Client Side Validation.  This feature allows separation of responsibilities within your web application by separating your html with your script. For details see Unobtrusive Ajax in ASP.NET MVC 3 and Unobtrusive Client Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3.       Dependency Resolver:             Dependency Resolver is another great feature of ASP.NET MVC 3. It allows you to register a dependency resolver that will be used by the framework. With this approach your application will not become tightly coupled and the dependency will be injected at run time. For details see ASP.NET MVC 3 Service Location.       New Helper Methods:             ASP.NET MVC 3 includes some helper methods of ASP.NET Web Pages technology that are used for common functionality. These helper methods includes: Chart, Crypto, WebGrid, WebImage and WebMail. For details of these helper methods, please see ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Notes. For using other helper methods of ASP.NET Web Pages see Using ASP.NET Web Pages Helpers in ASP.NET MVC.       Child Action Output Caching:             ASP.NET MVC 3 also includes another feature called Child Action Output Caching. This allows you to cache only a portion of the response when you are using Html.RenderAction or Html.Action. This cache can be varied by action name, action method signature and action method parameter values. For details see this.       RemoteAttribute:             ASP.NET MVC 3 allows you to validate a form field by making a remote server call through Ajax. This makes it very easy to perform remote validation at client side and quickly give the feedback to the user. For details see How to: Implement Remote Validation in ASP.NET MVC.       CompareAttribute:             ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a new validation attribute called CompareAttribute. CompareAttribute allows you to compare the values of two different properties of a model. For details see CompareAttribute in ASP.NET MVC 3.       Miscellaneous New Features:                    ASP.NET MVC 2 includes FormValueProvider, QueryStringValueProvider, RouteDataValueProvider and HttpFileCollectionValueProvider. ASP.NET MVC 3 adds two additional value providers, ChildActionValueProvider and JsonValueProvider(JsonValueProvider is not physically exist).  ChildActionValueProvider is used when you issue a child request using Html.Action and/or Html.RenderAction methods, so that your explicit parameter values in Html.Action and/or Html.RenderAction will always take precedence over other value providers. JsonValueProvider is used to model bind JSON data. For details see Sending JSON to an ASP.NET MVC Action Method Argument.           In ASP.NET MVC 3, a new property named FileExtensions added to the VirtualPathProviderViewEngine class. This property is used when looking up a view by path (and not by name), so that only views with a file extension contained in the list specified by this new property is considered. For details see VirtualPathProviderViewEngine.FileExtensions Property .           ASP.NET MVC 3 installation package also includes the NuGet Package Manager which will be automatically installed when you install ASP.NET MVC 3. NuGet makes it easy to install and update open source libraries and tools in Visual Studio. See this for details.           In ASP.NET MVC 2, client side validation will not trigger for overridden model properties. For example, if have you a Model that contains some overridden properties then client side validation will not trigger for overridden properties in ASP.NET MVC 2 but client side validation will work for overridden properties in ASP.NET MVC 3.           Client side validation is not supported for StringLengthAttribute.MinimumLength property in ASP.NET MVC 2. In ASP.NET MVC 3 client side validation will work for StringLengthAttribute.MinimumLength property.           ASP.NET MVC 3 includes new action results like HttpUnauthorizedResult, HttpNotFoundResult and HttpStatusCodeResult.           ASP.NET MVC 3 includes some new overloads of LabelFor and LabelForModel methods. For details see LabelExtensions.LabelForModel and LabelExtensions.LabelFor.           In ASP.NET MVC 3, IControllerFactory includes a new method GetControllerSessionBehavior. This method is used to get controller's session behavior. For details see IControllerFactory.GetControllerSessionBehavior Method.           In ASP.NET MVC 3, Controller class includes a new property ViewBag which is of type dynamic. This property allows you to access ViewData Dictionary using C # 4.0 dynamic features. For details see ControllerBase.ViewBag Property.           ModelMetadata includes a property AdditionalValues which is of type Dictionary. In ASP.NET MVC 3 you can populate this property using AdditionalMetadataAttribute. For details see AdditionalMetadataAttribute Class.           In ASP.NET MVC 3 you can also use MvcScaffolding to scaffold your Views and Controller. For details see Scaffold your ASP.NET MVC 3 project with the MvcScaffolding package.           If you want to convert your application from ASP.NET MVC 2 to ASP.NET MVC 3 then there is an excellent tool that automatically converts ASP.NET MVC 2 application to ASP.NET MVC 3 application. For details see MVC 3 Project Upgrade Tool.           In ASP.NET MVC 2 DisplayAttribute is not supported but in ASP.NET MVC 3 DisplayAttribute will work properly.           ASP.NET MVC 3 also support model level validation via the new IValidatableObject interface.           ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a new helper method Html.Raw. This helper method allows you to display unencoded HTML.     Summary:          In this article I showed you the new features of ASP.NET MVC 3. This will help you a lot when you start using ASP MVC 3. I also provide you the links where you can find further details. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.  

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• IIS7 - Lock Violation error, HTTP handlers, modules, and the <clear /> element

  - by Daniel Schaffer

  I have an ASP.NET site that uses its own set of HTTP handlers and does not need any modules. So, in IIS6, all I had to do was this in my web.config: <httpModules> <clear /> </httpModules> However, if I try to do the same in the system.webServer area for IIS7, I get a 500 error when I try to view the site, and in IIS manager when I try to view the handler mappings, I get a popup box with the message: There was an error while performing this operation Details: Filename: \?\C:\Sites\TheWebSiteGoesHere\web.config Line number: 39 Error: Lock violation Line 39 is where the <clear /> element is. Some googling led me to a solution involving running this command: %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe unlock config -section:system.webServer/modules ...but that did not solve the problem.

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• NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC

  - by shiju

   In this post, I will give an introduction to how to work on NoSQL and document database with MongoDB , NoRM and ASP.Net MVC 2. NoSQL and Document Database The NoSQL movement is getting big attention in this year and people are widely talking about document databases and NoSQL along with web application scalability. According to Wikipedia, "NoSQL is a movement promoting a loosely defined class of non-relational data stores that break with a long history of relational databases. These data stores may not require fixed table schemas, usually avoid join operations and typically scale horizontally. Academics and papers typically refer to these databases as structured storage". Document databases are schema free so that you can focus on the problem domain and don't have to worry about updating the schema when your domain is evolving. This enables truly a domain driven development. One key pain point of relational database is the synchronization of database schema with your domain entities when your domain is evolving.There are lots of NoSQL implementations are available and both CouchDB and MongoDB got my attention. While evaluating both CouchDB and MongoDB, I found that CouchDB can’t perform dynamic queries and later I picked MongoDB over CouchDB. There are many .Net drivers available for MongoDB document database. MongoDB MongoDB is an open source, scalable, high-performance, schema-free, document-oriented database written in the C++ programming language. It has been developed since October 2007 by 10gen. MongoDB stores your data as binary JSON (BSON) format . MongoDB has been getting a lot of attention and you can see the some of the list of production deployments from here - http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments NoRM – C# driver for MongoDB NoRM is a C# driver for MongoDB with LINQ support. NoRM project is available on Github at http://github.com/atheken/NoRM. Demo with ASP.NET MVC I will show a simple demo with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC. To work with MongoDB and  NoRM, do the following steps Download the MongoDB databse For Windows 32 bit, download from http://downloads.mongodb.org/win32/mongodb-win32-i386-1.4.1.zip  and for Windows 64 bit, download  from http://downloads.mongodb.org/win32/mongodb-win32-x86_64-1.4.1.zip . The zip contains the mongod.exe for run the server and mongo.exe for the client Download the NorM driver for MongoDB at http://github.com/atheken/NoRM Create a directory call C:\data\db. This is the default location of MongoDB database. You can override the behavior. Run C:\Mongo\bin\mongod.exe. This will start the MongoDb server Now I am going to demonstrate how to program with MongoDb and NoRM in an ASP.NET MVC application.Let’s write a domain class public class Category {            [MongoIdentifier]public ObjectId Id { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")][StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]public string Name { get; set;}public string Description { get; set; }}  ObjectId is a NoRM type that represents a MongoDB ObjectId. NoRM will automatically update the Id becasue it is decorated by the MongoIdentifier attribute. The next step is to create a mongosession class. This will do the all interactions to the MongoDB. internal class MongoSession<TEntity> : IDisposable{    private readonly MongoQueryProvider provider;     public MongoSession()    {        this.provider = new MongoQueryProvider("Expense");    }     public IQueryable<TEntity> Queryable    {        get { return new MongoQuery<TEntity>(this.provider); }    }     public MongoQueryProvider Provider    {        get { return this.provider; }    }     public void Add<T>(T item) where T : class, new()    {        this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Insert(item);    }     public void Dispose()    {        this.provider.Server.Dispose();     }    public void Delete<T>(T item) where T : class, new()    {        this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Delete(item);    }     public void Drop<T>()    {        this.provider.DB.DropCollection(typeof(T).Name);    }     public void Save<T>(T item) where T : class,new()    {        this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Save(item);                }  }    The MongoSession constrcutor will create an instance of MongoQueryProvider that supports the LINQ expression and also create a database with name "Expense". If database is exists, it will use existing database, otherwise it will create a new databse with name  "Expense". The Save method can be used for both Insert and Update operations. If the object is new one, it will create a new record and otherwise it will update the document with given ObjectId.  Let’s create ASP.NET MVC controller actions for CRUD operations for the domain class Category public class CategoryController : Controller{ //Index - Get the category listpublic ActionResult Index(){    using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        var categories = session.Queryable.AsEnumerable<Category>();        return View(categories);    }} //edit a single category[HttpGet]public ActionResult Edit(ObjectId id) {     using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        var category = session.Queryable              .Where(c => c.Id == id)              .FirstOrDefault();         return View("Save",category);    } }// GET: /Category/Create[HttpGet]public ActionResult Create(){    var category = new Category();    return View("Save", category);}//insert or update a category[HttpPost]public ActionResult Save(Category category){    if (!ModelState.IsValid)    {        return View("Save", category);    }    using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        session.Save(category);        return RedirectToAction("Index");    } }//Delete category[HttpPost]public ActionResult Delete(ObjectId Id){    using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        var category = session.Queryable              .Where(c => c.Id == Id)              .FirstOrDefault();        session.Delete(category);        var categories = session.Queryable.AsEnumerable<Category>();        return PartialView("CategoryList", categories);    } }        }  You can easily work on MongoDB with NoRM and can use with ASP.NET MVC applications. I have created a repository on CodePlex at http://mongomvc.codeplex.com and you can download the source code of the ASP.NET MVC application from here

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

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

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• SQL Developer Quick Tip: Reordering Columns

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Do you find yourself always scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to get to the column you want to see when looking at a table or view’s data? Don’t do that! Instead, just right-click on the column headers, select ‘Columns’, and reorder as desired. Access the Manage Columns dialog Then move up the columns you want to see first… Put them in the order you want – it won’t affect the database. Now I see the data I want to see, when I want to see it – no scrolling. This will only change how the data is displayed for you, and SQL Developer will remember this ordering until you ‘Delete Persisted Settings…’ What IS Remembered Via These ‘Persisted Settings?’ Column Widths Column Sorts Column Positions Find/Highlights This means if you manipulate one of these settings, SQL Developer will remember them the next time you open the tool and go to that table or view. Don’t know what I mean by ‘Find/Highlight?’ Find and highlight values in a grid with Ctrl+F

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• Full & Last Lunar Eclipse Of 2010 On December 21st

  - by Kavitha

  A total and last eclipse of the Moon occurs during the early morning hours of December 21, 2010 (for observers in western North America and Hawaii, the eclipse actually begins on the evening of December 20). You can fully view the total lunar eclipse from North America, Greenland and Iceland. The beginning stages of the eclipse is visible in Western Europe and the later stages after moonrise is visible in Western Asia. Total Lunar Eclipse Timings According to NASA “The Moon’s orbital trajectory takes it through the northern half of Earth’s umbral shadow. Although the eclipse is not central, the total phase still lasts 72 minutes”. The timings of the major eclipse phases are listed below. Penumbral Eclipse Begins 05:29:17 UT Partial Eclipse Begins 06:32:37 UT Total Eclipse Begins 07:40:47 UT Greatest Eclipse 08:16:57 UT Total Eclipse Ends 08:53:08 UT Partial Eclipse Ends 10:01:20 UT Penumbral Eclipse Ends 11:04:31 UT The timings of the major eclipse phases are listed below.   Total Lunar Eclipse of December 21, 2010   Europe North America Pacific Event GMT AST EST CST MST PST AKST HST Partial Eclipse Begins: 06:33 am 02:33 am 01:33 am 12:33 am 11:33 pm* 10:33 pm* 09:33 pm* 08:33 pm* Total Eclipse Begins: 07:41 am 03:41 am 02:41 am 01:41 am 12:41 am 11:41 pm* 10:41 pm* 09:41 pm* Mid-Eclipse: 08:17 am 04:17 am 03:17 am 02:17 am 01:17 am 12:17 am 11:17 pm* 10:17 pm* Total Eclipse Ends: 08:53 am 04:53 am 03:53 am 02:53 am 01:53 am 12:53 am 11:53 pm* 10:53 pm* Partial Eclipse Ends: 10:01 am 06:01 am 05:01 am 04:01 am 03:01 am 02:01 am 01:01 am 12:01 am Note: * Event occurs on evening of December 20, 2010 In India the Total Lunar Eclipse will take place between 13:10:47 and 14:23:08 on December 21st 2010. Animation Of Total Lunar Eclipse ShadowsAndSubstance website has a beautiful flash animation of December 21 2010 Total Lunar Eclipse and you can view it here Image Credit : flickr/stargazer95050 This article titled,Full & Last Lunar Eclipse Of 2010 On December 21st, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• dedicated server - cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi redirect when accessing via server IP

  - by Ross

  This isn't so much of a problem, but would like to know why this happens. we have a dedicated server running WHM. If I access the server via its IP address directly I am automatically redirected to http://xx.xxx.xx.xxx/cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi I know how to edit this page (this isnt the problem) I'm just curious why I get redirected to this .cgi page, rather than simply remain @ xx.xxx.xx.xxx/ and view my default "landing page", if you like. What setting could I change so that if anyone visits my server IP, they do not get redirected to xx.xxx.xx.xxx/cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi For instance if you visit 173.194.37.104 (google), you view the google home page, but URL remains the same. Hope this makes sense. thanks

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• Need help transforming DirectX 9 skybox hlsl shader to DirectX 11

  - by J2V

  I am in the middle of implementing a skybox to my game. I have been following this tutorial http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/skyboxes-2. I am using MonoGame as a framework and in order to support both Windows and Windows 8 metro I need to compile the shader with pixel and vertex shader 4. compile vs_4_0_level_9_1 compile ps_4_0_level_9_1 However some of the hlsl syntax has been updated with DX10 and DX11. I need to update this hlsl code: float4x4 World; float4x4 View; float4x4 Projection; float3 CameraPosition; Texture SkyBoxTexture; samplerCUBE SkyBoxSampler = sampler_state { texture = <SkyBoxTexture>; magfilter = LINEAR; minfilter = LINEAR; mipfilter = LINEAR; AddressU = Mirror; AddressV = Mirror; }; struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float3 TextureCoordinate : TEXCOORD0; }; VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input) { VertexShaderOutput output; float4 worldPosition = mul(input.Position, World); float4 viewPosition = mul(worldPosition, View); output.Position = mul(viewPosition, Projection); float4 VertexPosition = mul(input.Position, World); output.TextureCoordinate = VertexPosition - CameraPosition; return output; } float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0 { return texCUBE(SkyBoxSampler, normalize(input.TextureCoordinate)); } technique Skybox { pass Pass1 { VertexShader = compile vs_2_0 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } } I quess I need to change Texture into TextureCube, change sampler, swap texCUBE() with TextureCube.Sample() and change PixelShader return semantic to SV_Target0. I'm very new in shader languages and any help is appreciated!

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• XNA - Strange Texture Rendering Issue Using XNA BasicEffect

  - by Spencer Marr

  I have been reading and working through Riemers 3D XNA tutorials to expand my knowledge of XNA from 2D into 3D. Unfortunately I am having rendering issues that I am unable to solve and I need a point in the right direction. I am not expecting the Models to look identical to Blender but there is some serious discoloring from the texture files once rendering through XNA. The Character model is using completely incorrect colors (Red where Grey should be) and the Cube is rendering a strange pattern where a flat color should be drawn. My sampling mode is set to PointClamp. The Character model that I created has a 32 by 32 pixel texture that has been UV mapped to the model in blender. The model was then exported to .FBX. For the Cube Model a 64 by 64 pixel texture is used. foreach (ModelMesh mesh in samuraiModel.Meshes) { foreach (BasicEffect effect in mesh.Effects) { effect.Projection = Projection; effect.View = View; effect.World = World; } mesh.Draw(); } Does this look like it is caused by a mistake I made while UV Mapping or Creating Materials in Blender? Is this a problem with using the default XNA BasicEffect? Or something completely different that i have not considered? Thank You!

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• Log analyzer that calculates "time on page"?

  - by netvope

  I need to get an idea of the average "time on page" or "page view duration" for each page on my websites without client-side scripting (such as using onunload event handler). Is any of the free log analyzers capable of doing this? I looked at Webalizer, AWStats and Analog, but they don't seem to have such a function. The closest thing is "visits duration" in AWStats, but I'd like to see "page view duration" instead. I know that visitor tracking is inaccurate without client-side scripting, but I can bear with it. Google Analytics seems to provide a "time on page" metric without hooking the onunload event (but correct me if I'm wrong), so I believe this is possible.

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• The OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI10.1" has not been registered.; 42000

  - by lankylad

  I have a SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Project. In the Data Source View I have a Named Query which references a single Data Source containing three tables. The Project processes successfully and the cube can be browsed. I recently added a second Data Source to the Data Source View and linked a table to the original Named Query. When I try to process the project, I get the message: OLE DB error: OLE DB or ODBC error: The OLE DB provider "SQLNCLI10.1" has not been registered.; 42000. The Connection String for both Data Sources uses SQLNCLI10.1

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• Building an HTML5 App with ASP.NET

  - by Stephen Walther

  I’m teaching several JavaScript and ASP.NET workshops over the next couple of months (thanks everyone!) and I thought it would be useful for my students to have a really easy to use JavaScript reference. I wanted a simple interactive JavaScript reference and I could not find one so I decided to put together one of my own. I decided to use the latest features of JavaScript, HTML5 and jQuery such as local storage, offline manifests, and jQuery templates. What could be more appropriate than building a JavaScript Reference with JavaScript? You can try out the application by visiting: http://Superexpert.com/JavaScriptReference Because the app takes advantage of several advanced features of HTML5, it won’t work with Internet Explorer 6 (but really, you should stop using that browser). I have tested it with IE 8, Chrome 8, Firefox 3.6, and Safari 5. You can download the source for the JavaScript Reference application at the end of this article. Superexpert JavaScript Reference Let me provide you with a brief walkthrough of the app. When you first open the application, you see the following lookup screen: As you type the name of something from the JavaScript language, matching results are displayed: You can click the details link for any entry to view details for an entry in a modal dialog: Alternatively, you can click on any of the tabs -- Objects, Functions, Properties, Statements, Operators, Comments, or Directives -- to filter results by type of syntax. For example, you might want to see a list of all JavaScript built-in objects: You can login to the application to make modification to the application: After you login, you can add, update, or delete entries in the reference database: HTML5 Local Storage The application takes advantage of HTML5 local storage to store all of the reference entries on the local browser. IE 8, Chrome 8, Firefox 3.6, and Safari 5 all support local storage. When you open the application for the first time, all of the reference entries are transferred to the browser. The data is stored persistently. Even if you shutdown your computer and return to the application many days later, the data does not need to be transferred again. Whenever you open the application, the app checks with the server to see if any of the entries have been updated on the server. If there have been updates, then only the updates are transferred to the browser and the updates are merged with the existing entries in local storage. After the reference database has been transferred to your browser once, only changes are transferred in the future. You get two benefits from using local storage. First, the application loads very fast and works very fast after the data has been loaded once. The application does not query the server whenever you filter or view entries. All of the data is persisted in the browser. Second, you can browse the JavaScript reference even when you are not connected to the Internet (when you are on the proverbial airplane). The JavaScript Reference works as an offline application for browsers that support offline applications (unfortunately, not IE). When using Google Chrome, you can easily view the contents of local storage by selecting Tools, Developer Tools (CTRL-SHIFT I) and selecting Storage, Local Storage: The JavaScript Reference app stores two items in local storage: entriesLastUpdated and entries. HTML5 Offline App For browsers that support HTML5 offline applications – Chrome 8 and Firefox 3.6 but not Internet Explorer – you do not need to be connected to the Internet to use the JavaScript Reference. The JavaScript Reference can execute entirely on your machine just like any other desktop application. When you first open the application with Firefox, you are presented with the following warning: Notice the notification bar that asks whether you want to accept offline content. If you click the Allow button then all of the files (generated ASPX, images, CSS, JavaScript) needed for the JavaScript Reference will be stored on your local computer. Automatic Script Minification and Combination All of the custom JavaScript files are combined and minified automatically whenever the application is built with Visual Studio. All of the custom scripts are contained in a folder named App_Scripts: When you perform a build, the combine.js and combine.debug.js files are generated. The Combine.config file contains the list of files that should be combined (importantly, it specifies the order in which the files should be combined). Here’s the contents of the Combine.config file:   <?xml version="1.0"?> <combine> <scripts> <file path="compat.js" /> <file path="storage.js" /> <file path="serverData.js" /> <file path="entriesHelper.js" /> <file path="authentication.js" /> <file path="default.js" /> </scripts> </combine>   jQuery and jQuery UI The JavaScript Reference application takes heavy advantage of jQuery and jQuery UI. In particular, the application uses jQuery templates to format and display the reference entries. Each of the separate templates is stored in a separate ASP.NET user control in a folder named Templates: The contents of the user controls (and therefore the templates) are combined in the default.aspx page: <!-- Templates --> <user:EntryTemplate runat="server" /> <user:EntryDetailsTemplate runat="server" /> <user:BrowsersTemplate runat="server" /> <user:EditEntryTemplate runat="server" /> <user:EntryDetailsCloudTemplate runat="server" /> When the default.aspx page is requested, all of the templates are retrieved in a single page. WCF Data Services The JavaScript Reference application uses WCF Data Services to retrieve and modify database data. The application exposes a server-side WCF Data Service named EntryService.svc that supports querying, adding, updating, and deleting entries. jQuery Ajax calls are made against the WCF Data Service to perform the database operations from the browser. The OData protocol makes this easy. Authentication is handled on the server with a ChangeInterceptor. Only authenticated users are allowed to update the JavaScript Reference entry database. JavaScript Unit Tests In order to build the JavaScript Reference application, I depended on JavaScript unit tests. I needed the unit tests, in particular, to write the JavaScript merge functions which merge entry change sets from the server with existing entries in browser local storage. In order for unit tests to be useful, they need to run fast. I ran my unit tests after each build. For this reason, I did not want to run the unit tests within the context of a browser. Instead, I ran the unit tests using server-side JavaScript (the Microsoft Script Control). The source code that you can download at the end of this blog entry includes a project named JavaScriptReference.UnitTests that contains all of the JavaScripts unit tests. JavaScript Integration Tests Because not every feature of an application can be tested by unit tests, the JavaScript Reference application also includes integration tests. I wrote the integration tests using Selenium RC in combination with ASP.NET Unit Tests. The Selenium tests run against all of the target browsers for the JavaScript Reference application: IE 8, Chrome 8, Firefox 3.6, and Safari 5. For example, here is the Selenium test that checks whether authenticating with a valid user name and password correctly switches the application to Admin Mode: [TestMethod] [HostType("ASP.NET")] [UrlToTest("http://localhost:26303/JavaScriptReference")] [AspNetDevelopmentServerHost(@"C:\Users\Stephen\Documents\Repos\JavaScriptReference\JavaScriptReference\JavaScriptReference", "/JavaScriptReference")] public void TestValidLogin() { // Run test for each controller foreach (var controller in this.Controllers) { var selenium = controller.Value; var browserName = controller.Key; // Open reference page. selenium.Open("http://localhost:26303/JavaScriptReference/default.aspx"); // Click login button displays login form selenium.Click("btnLogin"); Assert.IsTrue(selenium.IsVisible("loginForm"), "Login form appears after clicking btnLogin"); // Enter user name and password selenium.Type("userName", "Admin"); selenium.Type("password", "secret"); selenium.Click("btnDoLogin"); // Should set adminMode == true selenium.WaitForCondition("selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().adminMode==true", "30000"); } }   The results for running the Selenium tests appear in the Test Results window just like the unit tests: The Selenium tests take much longer to execute than the unit tests. However, they provide test coverage for actual browsers. Furthermore, if you are using Visual Studio ALM, you can run the tests automatically every night as part of your standard nightly build. You can view the Selenium tests by opening the JavaScriptReference.QATests project. Summary I plan to write more detailed blog entries about this application over the next week. I want to discuss each of the features – HTML5 local storage, HTML5 offline apps, jQuery templates, automatic script combining and minification, JavaScript unit tests, Selenium tests -- in more detail. You can download the source control for the JavaScript Reference Application by clicking the following link: Download You need Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4 to build the application. Before running the JavaScript unit tests, install the Microsoft Script Control. Before running the Selenium tests, start the Selenium server by running the StartSeleniumServer.bat file located in the JavaScriptReference.QATests project.

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• December release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available now.

  - by Jialiang

  The code samples in Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework are updated on 2010-12-13. Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/57459#DownloadId=185534 Updated code sample index categorized by technologies: http://1code.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=All-In-One%20Code%20Framework%20Sample%20Catalog (it also allows you to download individual code samples instead of the entire All-In-One Code Framework sample package.) If it’s the first time that you hear about Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, please watch the introduction video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO5Li3APU58, or read the introduction on our homepage http://1code.codeplex.com/,  and this Port25 article http://port25.technet.com/archive/2010/01/18/the-all-in-one-code-framework.aspx.  -------------- New ASP.NET Code Samples VBASPNETAJAXWebChat and CSASPNETAJAXWebChat Most of you have some experience in chatting with friends on the web. So you may want to know how to make a web chat application, it seems to be quite complicated. But ASP.NET gives you the power to buiild a chat room easily. In this code sample, we will construct our own web chat room with the amazing AJAX feature. The principle is simple relatively. As we all know, a base chat application need 4 base controls: one List control to show the chat room members, one List control to show the message list, one TextBox control to input messages and one button to send message. User inputs his message in the textbox first and then presses Send button, it will send the message to the server. The message list will update every 2 seconds to get the newest message list in the chat room from the server. We need to know, it is hard for us to make an AJAX web chat application like a windows form application because we cannot keep the connection after one web request ended. So a lot of events which communicates between client side and server side cannot be realized. The common workaround is to make web requests in every some seconds to check whether the server side has been updated. But another technique called COMET makes it possible. But it is different with AJAX and will not be talked in details in this KB. For more details about COMET, we can get some clues from the Reference.   CSASPNETCurrentOnlineUserList and VBASPNETCurrentOnlineUserList This sample demos a system that needs to display a list of current online users' information. As a matter of fact, Membership.GetNumberOfUsersOnline Method  can get the number of online users and there is a convenient approach to check whether the user is online by using Membership.GetUser(string userName).IsOnline property,however many asp.net projects are not using membership.So in this case,the sample shows how to display a list of current online users' information without using membership provider. It is not difficult to check whether the user is online by using session.Many projects tend to be used “Session_End” event to mark a user as “Offline”,however ,it may not be a good idea,because it can’t detect the user status accurately. In addition, "Session_End" event is only available in the "InProc" session mode. If you are storing session states in the State Server or SQL Server, "Session_End" event will never fire. To handle this issue, we need to save the user online status to a  global DataTable or  DataBase. In the sample application, define a global DataTable to store the information of online users.Use XmlHttpRequest in the pages to update and check user's last active time at intervals and also retrieve information on how many users are still online. The sample project can auto delete offline users' information from a global DataTable by checking users’ last active time. A step-by-step guide illustrating how to display a list of current online users' information without using membership provider: 1. Login page. Let user sign in and add current user’s information to a global datatable while Initialize the global datatable which used to store information of current online users. 2. Current online user list page. Use XmlHttpRequest in this page to update and check user's last active time at intervals and also retrieve information on how many users are still online. 3. If user closes the page without clicking  the sign out link button ,the sample project can auto mark the user as offline and delete offline users' information from a global DataTable which used to store information of current online users  by checking users’ last active time. Then the current online user list will be like this:   CSASPNETIPtoLocation This sample demonstrates how to find the geographical location from an IP address. As we know, it is not hard for us to get the IP address of visitors via Request.ServerVariable property, but it is really difficult for us to know where they come from. To achieve this feature, the sample uses a free third party web service from http://freegeoip.appspot.com/, which returns the information about an IP address we send to the server in the format of XML, JSON or CSV. It makes all things easier.   CSASPNETBackgroundWorker Sometimes we do an operation which needs long time to complete. It will stop the response and the page is blank until the operation finished. In this case, we want the operation to run in the background, and in the page, we want to display the progress of the running operation. Therefore, the user can know the operation is running and can know the progress. CSASPNETInheritingFromTreeNode In windows forms TreeView, each tree node has a property called "Tag" which can be used to store a custom object. Many customers want to implement the same tag feature in ASP.NET TreeView. This project creates a custom TreeView control named "CustomTreeView" to achieve this goal. CSASPNETRemoteUploadAndDownload and VBASPNETRemoteUploadAndDownload This code sample was created in response to a code sample request in our new code sample request frunction for customers. The code samples demonstrate uploading files to and downloading files from a remote HTTP or FTP server. In .NET Framework 2.0 and higher versions, there are some lightweight class libraries which support HTTP and FTP protocol transmission. By using these classes, we can achieve this programming requirement.   CSASPNETImageEditUpload and VBASPNETImageEditUpload This demo will shows how to insert, edit and update a common image with the type of "jpg", "png", "gif" or "bmp" . We mainly use two different SqlDataSources with the same database to bind to GridView and FormView in order to establish the “cascading” effort. Besides we apply our self-made ImageHanlder to encoding or decoding images of different types, and use context to output the stream of images. We will explicitly assign the binary streams of images through the event of “FormView_ItemInserting” or “Form_ItemUpdating” to synchronize the stream both in what we can see on an aspx page as well as in what’s really stored in the database.   WebBrowser Control, Network and other Windows General New Code Samples   CSWebBrowserSuppressError and VBWebBrowserSuppressError The sample demonstrates how to make WebBrowser suppress errors, such as script error, navigation error and so on.   CSWebBrowserWithProxy and VBWebBrowserWithProxy The sample demonstrates how to make WebBrowser use a proxy server.   CSWebDownloadProgress and VBWebDownloadProgress The sample demonstrates how to show progress during the download. It also supplies the features to Start, Pause, Resume and Cancel a download.   CppSetDesktopWallpaper, CSSetDesktopWallpaper and VBSetDesktopWallpaper This code sample application allows you select an image, view a preview (resized smaller to fit if necessary), select a display style among Tile, Center, Stretch, Fit (Windows 7 and later) and Fill (Windows 7 and later), and set the image as the Desktop wallpaper. CSWindowsServiceRecoveryProperty and VBWindowsServiceRecoveryProperty CSWindowsServiceRecoveryProperty example demonstrates how to use ChangeServiceConfig2 to configure the service "Recovery" properties in C#. This example operates all the options you can see on the service "Recovery" tab, including setting the "Enable actions for stops with errors" option in Windows Vista and later operating systems. This example also include how to grant the shut down privilege to the process, so that we can configure a special option in the "Recovery" tab - "Restart Computer Options...".   New Office Development Code Samples   CSOneNoteRibbonAddIn and VBOneNoteRibbonAddIn The code sample demonstrates a OneNote 2010 COM add-in that implements IDTExtensibility2. The add-in also supports customizing the Ribbon by implementing the IRibbonExtensibility interface. It is a skeleton OneNote add-in that developers can extend it to implement more functions. The code sample was requested by a customer in our code sample request service. We expect that this could help developers in the community.   New Windows Shell Code Samples   CppShellExtPreviewHandler, CSShellExtPreviewHandler and VBShellExtPreviewHandler In the past two months, we released the code samples of Windows Context Menu Handler, Infotip Handler, and Thumbnail Handler. This is the fourth part of the shell extension series: Preview Handler. The code samples demo the C++, C# and VB.NET implementation of a preview handler for a new file type registered with the .recipe extension. Preview handlers are called when an item is selected to show a lightweight, rich, read-only preview of the file's contents in the view's reading pane. This is done without launching the file's associated application. Windows Vista and later operating systems support preview handlers. To be a valid preview handler, several interfaces must be implemented. This includes IPreviewHandler (shobjidl.h); IInitializeWithFile, IInitializeWithStream, or IInitializeWithItem (propsys.h); IObjectWithSite (ocidl.h); and IOleWindow (oleidl.h). There are also optional interfaces, such as IPreviewHandlerVisuals (shobjidl.h), that a preview handler can implement to provide extended support. Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework makes the implementation of these interfaces very easy in .NET. The example preview handler provides previews for .recipe files. The .recipe file type is simply an XML file registered as a unique file name extension. It includes the title of the recipe, its author, difficulty, preparation time, cook time, nutrition information, comments, an embedded preview image, and so on. The preview handler extracts the title, comments, and the embedded image, and display them in a preview window.   In response to many customers' request, we added setup projects in every shell extension samples in this release. Those setup projects allow you to deploy the shell extensions to your end users' machines. ---------- Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/57459#DownloadId=185534 Updated code sample index categorized by technologies: http://1code.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=All-In-One%20Code%20Framework%20Sample%20Catalog (it also allows you to download individual code samples instead of the entire All-In-One Code Framework sample package.) If you have any feedback for us, please email: [email protected]. We look forward to your comments.

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• DevDays ‘00 The Netherlands day #1

  - by erwin21

  First day of DevDays 2010, I was looking forward to DevDays to see all the new things like VS2010, .NET4.0, MVC2. The lineup for this year is again better than the year before, there are 100+ session of all kind of topics like Cloud, Database, Mobile, SharePoint, User experience, Visual Studio, Web. The first session of the day was a keynote by Anders Hejlsberg he talked about the history and future of programming languages. He gave his view about trends and influences in programming languages today and in the future. The second talk that i followed was from the famous Scott Hanselman, he talked about the basics of ASP.NET MVC 2, although it was a 300 level session, it was more like a level 100 session, but it was mentioned by Scott at the beginning. Although it was interesting to see all the basic things about MVC like the controllers, actions, routes, views, models etc. After the lunch the third talk for me was about moving ASP.NET webform applications to MVC from Fritz Onion. In this session he changed an example webform application part by part to a MVC application. He gave some interesting tips and tricks and showed how to solve some issues that occur while converting. Next and the fourth talk was about the difference between LINQ to SQL and  the ADO.NET  Entity Framework from Kurt Claeys. He gave a good understanding about this two options, the demos where in LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework, the goal was to get a good understanding when and where to use both options. The last talk about this day was also from Scott Hanselman, he goes deeper into the features of ASP.NET MVC 2 and gave some interesting tips, the ninja black belt tips. He gave some tips about the tooling, the new MVC 2 html helper methods, other view engines (like NHaml, spark),T4 templating. With this tips we can be more productive and create web applications better and faster. It was a long and interesting day, I am looking forward to day #2.

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• SQL SERVER – Difference Between GRANT and WITH GRANT

  - by pinaldave

  This was very interesting question recently asked me to during my session at TechMela Nepal. The question is what is the difference between GRANT and WITH GRANT when giving permissions to user. Let us first see syntax for the same. GRANT: USE master; GRANT VIEW ANY DATABASE TO username; GO WITH GRANT: USE master; GRANT VIEW ANY DATABASE TO username WITH GRANT OPTION; GO The difference between both of this option is very simple. In case of only GRANT – username can not grant the same permission to other users. In case, of the option of WITH GRANT – username will be able to give the permission it has received to other users. This is very basic definition of the subject. I would like to request my readers to come up with working script to prove this scenario. If can submit your script to me by email (pinal ‘at’ sqlauthority.com) or in comment field. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Permissions

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• Internationalize WebCenter Portal - Content Presenter

  - by Stefan Krantz

  Lately we have been involved in engagements where internationalization has been holding the project back from success. In this post we are going to explain how to get Content Presenter and its editorials to comply with the current selected locale for the WebCenter Portal session. As you probably know by now WebCenter Portal leverages the Localization support from Java Server Faces (JSF), in this post we will assume that the localization is controlled and enforced by switching the current browsers locale between English and Spanish. There is two main scenarios in internationalization of a content enabled pages, since Content Presenter offers both presentation of information as well as contribution of information, in this post we will look at how to enable seamless integration of correct localized version of the back end content file and how to enable the editor/author to edit the correct localized version of the file based on the current browser locale. Solution Scenario 1 - Localization aware content presentation Due to the amount of steps required to implement the enclosed solution proposal I have decided to share the solution with you in group components for each facet of the solution. If you want to get more details on each step, you can review the enclosed components. This post will guide you through the steps of enabling each component and what it enables/changes in each section of the system. Enable Content Presenter Customization By leveraging a predictable naming convention of the data files used to hold the content for the Content Presenter instance we can easily develop a component that will dynamically switch the name out before presenting the information. The naming convention we have leverage is the industry best practice by having a shared identifier as prefix (ContentABC) and a language enabled suffix (_EN) (_ES). So the assumption is that each file pair in above example should look like following:- English version - (ContentABC_EN)- Spanish version - (ContentABC_ES) Based on above theory we can now easily regardless of the primary version assigned to the content presenter instance switch the language out by using the localization support from JSF. Below java bean (oracle.webcenter.doclib.internal.view.presenter.NLSHelperBean) is enclosed in the customization project available for download at the bottom of the post: 1: public static final String CP_D_DOCNAME_FORMAT = "%s_%s"; 2: public static final int CP_UNIQUE_ID_INDEX = 0; 3: private ContentPresenter presenter = null; 4:   5:   6: public NLSHelperBean() { 7: super(); 8: } 9:   10: /** 11: * This method updates the configuration for the pageFlowScope to have the correct datafile 12: * for the current Locale 13: */ 14: public void initLocaleForDataFile() { 15: String dataFile = null; 16: // Checking that state of presenter is present, also make sure the item is eligible for localization by locating the "_" in the name 17: if(presenter.getConfiguration().getDatasource() != null && 18: presenter.getConfiguration().getDatasource().isNodeDatasource() && 19: presenter.getConfiguration().getDatasource().getNodeIdDatasource() != null && 20: !presenter.getConfiguration().getDatasource().getNodeIdDatasource().equals("") && 21: presenter.getConfiguration().getDatasource().getNodeIdDatasource().indexOf("_") > 0) { 22: dataFile = presenter.getConfiguration().getDatasource().getNodeIdDatasource(); 23: FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); 24: //Leveraging the current faces contenxt to get current localization language 25: String currentLocale = fc.getViewRoot().getLocale().getLanguage().toUpperCase(); 26: String newDataFile = dataFile; 27: String [] uniqueIdArr = dataFile.split("_"); 28: if(uniqueIdArr.length > 0) { 29: newDataFile = String.format(CP_D_DOCNAME_FORMAT, uniqueIdArr[CP_UNIQUE_ID_INDEX], currentLocale); 30: } 31: //Replacing the current Node datasource with localized datafile. 32: presenter.getConfiguration().getDatasource().setNodeIdDatasource(newDataFile); 33: } 34: } With this bean code available to our WebCenter Portal implementation we can start the next step, by overriding the standard behavior in content presenter by applying a MDS Taskflow customization to the content presenter taskflow, following taskflow customization has been applied to the customization project attached to this post:- Library: WebCenter Document Library Service View- Path: oracle.webcenter.doclib.view.jsf.taskflows.presenter- File: contentPresenter.xml Changes made in above customization view:1. A new method invocation activity has been added (initLocaleForDataFile)2. The method invocation invokes the new NLSHelperBean3. The default activity is moved to the new Method invocation (initLocaleForDataFile)4. The outcome from the method invocation goes to determine-navigation (original default activity) The above changes concludes the presentation modification to support a compatible localization scenario for a content driven page. In addition this customization do not limit or disables the out of the box capabilities of WebCenter Portal. Steps to enable above customization Start JDeveloper and open your WebCenter Portal Application Select "Open Project" and include the extracted project you downloaded (CPNLSCustomizations.zip) Make sure the build out put from CPNLSCustomizations project is a dependency to your Portal project Deploy your Portal Application to your WC_CustomPortal managed server Make sure your naming convention of the two data files follow above recommendation Example result of the solution: Solution Scenario 2 - Localization aware content creation and authoring As you could see from Solution Scenario 1 we require the naming convention to be strictly followed, this means in the hands of a user with limited technology knowledge this can be one of the failing links in this solutions. Therefore I strongly recommend that you also follow this part since this will eliminate this risk and also increase the editors/authors usability with a magnitude. The current WebCenter Portal Architecture leverages WebCenter Content today to maintain, publish and manage content, therefore we need to make few efforts in making sure this part of the architecture is on board with our new naming practice and also simplifies the creation of content for our end users. As you probably remember the naming convention required a prefix to be common so I propose we enable a new component that help you auto name the content items dDocName (this means that the readable title can still be in a human readable format). The new component (WCP-LocalizationSupport.zip) built for this scenario will enable a couple of things: 1. A new service where a sequential number can be generate on request - service name: GET_WCP_LOCALE_CONTENTID 2. The content presenter is leveraging a specific function when launching the content creation wizard from within Content Presenter. Assumption is that users will create the content by clicking "Create Web Content" button. When clicking the button the wizard opened is actually running in side of WebCenter Content server, file executed (contentwizard.hcsp). This file uses JSON commands that will generate operations in the content server, I have extend this file to create two identical data files instead of one.- First it creates the English version by leveraging the new Service and a Global Rule to set the dDocName on the original check in screen, this global rule is available in a configuration package attached to this blog (NLSContentProfileRule.zip)- Secondly we run a set of JSON javascripts to create the Spanish version with the same details except for the name where we replace the suffix with (_ES)- Then content creation wizard ends with its out of the box behavior and assigns the Content Presenter instance the English versionSee Javascript markup below - this can be changed in the (WCP-LocalizationSupport.zip/component/WCP-LocalizationSupport/publish/webcenter) 1: //---------------------------------------A-TEAM--------------------------------------- 2: WCM.ContentWizard.CheckinContentPage.OnCheckinComplete = function(returnParams) 3: { 4: var callback = WCM.ContentWizard.CheckinContentPage.checkinCompleteCallback; 5: WCM.ContentWizard.ChooseContentPage.OnSelectionComplete(returnParams, callback); 6: // Load latest DOC_INFO_SIMPLE 7: var cgiPath = DOCLIB.config.httpCgiPath; 8: var jsonBinder = new WCM.Idc.JSONBinder(); 9: jsonBinder.SetLocalDataValue('IdcService', 'DOC_INFO_SIMPLE'); 10: jsonBinder.SetLocalDataValue('dID', returnParams.dID); 11: jsonBinder.Send(cgiPath, $CB(this, function(http) { 12: var ret = http.GetResponseText(); 13: var binder = new WCM.Idc.JSONBinder(ret); 14: var dDocName = binder.GetResultSetValue('DOC_INFO', 'dDocName', 0); 15: if(dDocName.indexOf("_") > 0){ 16: var ssBinder = new WCM.Idc.JSONBinder(); 17: ssBinder.SetLocalDataValue('IdcService', 'SS_CHECKIN_NEW'); 18: //Additional Localization dDocName generated 19: ssBinder.SetLocalDataValue('dDocName', getLocalizedDocName(dDocName, "es")); 20: ssBinder.SetLocalDataValue('primaryFile', 'default.xml'); 21: ssBinder.SetLocalDataValue('ssDefaultDocumentToken', 'SSContributorDataFile'); 22:   23: for(var n = 0 ; n < binder.GetResultSetFields('DOC_INFO').length ; n++) { 24: var field = binder.GetResultSetFields('DOC_INFO')[n]; 25: if(field != 'dID' && 26: field != 'dDocName' && 27: field != 'dID' && 28: field != 'dReleaseState' && 29: field != 'dRevClassID' && 30: field != 'dRevisionID' && 31: field != 'dRevLabel') { 32: ssBinder.SetLocalDataValue(field, binder.GetResultSetValue('DOC_INFO', field, 0)); 33: } 34: } 35: ssBinder.Send(cgiPath, $CB(this, function(http) {})); 36: } 37: })); 38: } 39:   40: //Support function to create localized dDocNames 41: function getLocalizedDocName(dDocName, lang) { 42: var result = dDocName.replace("_EN", ("_" + lang)); 43: return result; 44: } 45: //---------------------------------------A-TEAM--------------------------------------- 3. By applying the enclosed NLSContentProfileRule.zip, the check in screen for DataFile creation will have auto naming enabled with localization suffix (default is English)You can change the default language by updating the GlobalNlsRule and assign preferred prefix.See Rule markup for dDocName field below: <$executeService("GET_WCP_LOCALE_CONTENTID")$><$dprDefaultValue=WCP_LOCALE.LocaleContentId & "_EN"$> Steps to enable above extensions and configurations Install WebCenter Component (WCP-LocalizationSupport.zip), via the AdminServer in WebCenter Content Administration menus Enable the component and restart the content server Apply the configuration bundle to enable the new Global Rule (GlobalNlsRule), via the WebCenter Content Administration/Config Migration Admin New Content Creation Experience Result Content EditingContent editing will by default be enabled for authoring in the current select locale since the content file is selected by (Solution Scenario 1), this means that a user can switch his browser locale and then get the editing experience adaptable to the current selected locale. NotesA-Team are planning to post a solution on how to inline switch the locale of the WebCenter Portal Session, so the Content Presenter, Navigation Model and other Face related features are localized accordingly. Content Presenter examples used in this post is an extension to following post:https://blogs.oracle.com/ATEAM_WEBCENTER/entry/enable_content_editing_of_iterative Downloads CPNLSCustomizations.zip - WebCenter Portal, Content Presenter Customization https://blogs.oracle.com/ATEAM_WEBCENTER/resource/stefan.krantz/CPNLSCustomizations.zip WCP-LocalizationSupport.zip - WebCenter Content, Extension Component to enable localization creation of files with compliant auto naminghttps://blogs.oracle.com/ATEAM_WEBCENTER/resource/stefan.krantz/WCP-LocalizationSupport.zip NLSContentProfileRule.zip - WebCenter Content, Configuration Update Bundle to enable Global rule for new check in naming of data fileshttps://blogs.oracle.com/ATEAM_WEBCENTER/resource/stefan.krantz/NLSContentProfileRule.zip

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• ASP.NET MVC Postbacks and HtmlHelper Controls ignoring Model Changes

  - by Rick Strahl

  So here's a binding behavior in ASP.NET MVC that I didn't really get until today: HtmlHelpers controls (like .TextBoxFor() etc.) don't bind to model values on Postback, but rather get their value directly out of the POST buffer from ModelState. Effectively it looks like you can't change the display value of a control via model value updates on a Postback operation. To demonstrate here's an example. I have a small section in a document where I display an editable email address: This is what the form displays on a GET operation and as expected I get the email value displayed in both the textbox and plain value display below, which reflects the value in the mode. I added a plain text value to demonstrate the model value compared to what's rendered in the textbox. The relevant markup is the email address which needs to be manipulated via the model in the Controller code. Here's the Razor markup: <div class="fieldcontainer"> <label> Email: &nbsp; <small>(username and <a href="http://gravatar.com">Gravatar</a> image)</small> </label> <div> @Html.TextBoxFor( mod=> mod.User.Email, new {type="email",@class="inputfield"}) @Model.User.Email </div> </div>   So, I have this form and the user can change their email address. On postback the Post controller code then asks the business layer whether the change is allowed. If it's not I want to reset the email address back to the old value which exists in the database and was previously store. The obvious thing to do would be to modify the model. Here's the Controller logic block that deals with that:// did user change email? if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(oldEmail) && user.Email != oldEmail) { if (userBus.DoesEmailExist(user.Email)) { userBus.ValidationErrors.Add("New email address exists already. Please…"); user.Email = oldEmail; } else // allow email change but require verification by forcing a login user.IsVerified = false; }… model.user = user; return View(model); The logic is straight forward - if the new email address is not valid because it already exists I don't want to display the new email address the user entered, but rather the old one. To do this I change the value on the model which effectively does this:model.user.Email = oldEmail; return View(model); So when I press the Save button after entering in my new email address ([email protected]) here's what comes back in the rendered view: Notice that the textbox value and the raw displayed model value are different. The TextBox displays the POST value, the raw value displays the actual model value which are different. This means that MVC renders the textbox value from the POST data rather than from the view data when an Http POST is active. Now I don't know about you but this is not the behavior I expected - initially. This behavior effectively means that I cannot modify the contents of the textbox from the Controller code if using HtmlHelpers for binding. Updating the model for display purposes in a POST has in effect - no effect. (Apr. 25, 2012 - edited the post heavily based on comments and more experimentation) What should the behavior be? After getting quite a few comments on this post I quickly realized that the behavior I described above is actually the behavior you'd want in 99% of the binding scenarios. You do want to get the POST values back into your input controls at all times, so that the data displayed on a form for the user matches what they typed. So if an error occurs, the error doesn't mysteriously disappear getting replaced either with a default value or some value that you changed on the model on your own. Makes sense. Still it is a little non-obvious because the way you create the UI elements with MVC, it certainly looks like your are binding to the model value:@Html.TextBoxFor( mod=> mod.User.Email, new {type="email",@class="inputfield",required="required" }) and so unless one understands a little bit about how the model binder works this is easy to trip up. At least it was for me. Even though I'm telling the control which model value to bind to, that model value is only used initially on GET operations. After that ModelState/POST values provide the display value. Workarounds The default behavior should be fine for 99% of binding scenarios. But if you do need fix up values based on your model rather than the default POST values, there are a number of ways that you can work around this. Initially when I ran into this, I couldn't figure out how to set the value using code and so the simplest solution to me was simply to not use the MVC Html Helper for the specific control and explicitly bind the model via HTML markup and @Razor expression: <input type="text" name="User.Email" id="User_Email" value="@Model.User.Email" /> And this produces the right result. This is easy enough to create, but feels a little out of place when using the @Html helpers for everything else. As you can see by the difference in the name and id values, you also are forced to remember the naming conventions that MVC imposes in order for ModelBinding to work properly which is a pain to remember and set manually (name is the same as the property with . syntax, id replaces dots with underlines). Use the ModelState Some of my original confusion came because I didn't understand how the model binder works. The model binder basically maintains ModelState on a postback, which holds a value and binding errors for each of the Post back value submitted on the page that can be mapped to the model. In other words there's one ModelState entry for each bound property of the model. Each ModelState entry contains a value property that holds AttemptedValue and RawValue properties. The AttemptedValue is essentially the POST value retrieved from the form. The RawValue is the value that the model holds. When MVC binds controls like @Html.TextBoxFor() or @Html.TextBox(), it always binds values on a GET operation. On a POST operation however, it'll always used the AttemptedValue to display the control. MVC binds using the ModelState on a POST operation, not the model's value. So, if you want the behavior that I was expecting originally you can actually get it by clearing the ModelState in the controller code:ModelState.Clear(); This clears out all the captured ModelState values, and effectively binds to the model. Note this will produce very similar results - in fact if there are no binding errors you see exactly the same behavior as if binding from ModelState, because the model has been updated from the ModelState already and binding to the updated values most likely produces the same values you would get with POST back values. The big difference though is that any values that couldn't bind - like say putting a string into a numeric field - will now not display back the value the user typed, but the default field value or whatever you changed the model value to. This is the behavior I was actually expecting previously. But - clearing out all values might be a bit heavy handed. You might want to fix up one or two values in a model but rarely would you want the entire model to update from the model. So, you can also clear out individual values on an as needed basis:if (userBus.DoesEmailExist(user.Email)) { userBus.ValidationErrors.Add("New email address exists already. Please…"); user.Email = oldEmail; ModelState.Remove("User.Email"); } This allows you to remove a single value from the ModelState and effectively allows you to replace that value for display from the model. Why? While researching this I came across a post from Microsoft's Brad Wilson who describes the default binding behavior best in a forum post: The reason we use the posted value for editors rather than the model value is that the model may not be able to contain the value that the user typed. Imagine in your "int" editor the user had typed "dog". You want to display an error message which says "dog is not valid", and leave "dog" in the editor field. However, your model is an int: there's no way it can store "dog". So we keep the old value. If you don't want the old values in the editor, clear out the Model State. That's where the old value is stored and pulled from the HTML helpers. There you have it. It's not the most intuitive behavior, but in hindsight this behavior does make some sense even if at first glance it looks like you should be able to update values from the model. The solution of clearing ModelState works and is a reasonable one but you have to know about some of the innards of ModelState and how it actually works to figure that out.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   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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• 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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• Install new root certificate authority (CA) in windows

  - by er4z0r

  I am trying to use ninite to get my new laptop set up quickly. However when I try to install, windows complains about the CA. The website ninite.com also shows certificate problems. They use a root CA (COMODO Certification Authority) that is not included into windows 7 by default. However I am not able to install that CA. I can view the certrification path for the ninite.com cert. I can view the cert for COMODO. However I cannot see any option to install it. Any clues?

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• Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012 is an Awesome Replacement for Microsoft Office

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you looking for a good free replacement for Microsoft Office, but LibreOffice and OpenOffice are not working out well for you? Then you will definitely want to have a look at Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012, which you can download as a suite or as individual apps. As soon as the installation has completed you will see this window. All relevant file types are checked by default, but you may deselect any that you do not want associated with Kingsoft Office before clicking Close. Special Note: See further below for additional information about the extra formats (i.e. Office 2007 & 2010) that the suite will open. Here is a quick overall view of what the Writer App window looks like. Each of the three apps in the suite will open with the New Document Pane displayed by default on the right side of the window. A closer view of the upper left corner in Writer, Presentation, and Spreadsheets… A look at the Start Menu options available… In our tests with the suite it opened up Microsoft Office 2007 & 2010 documents without any problems. Note: You can also see part of the built-in Tab Bar outlined in red in the upper left corner. The only drawback with the free version of the suite is that you are limited to the Classic Style Interface, which may or may not be a problem depending on your preferences. How to Get Pro Features in Windows Home Versions with Third Party Tools HTG Explains: Is ReadyBoost Worth Using? HTG Explains: What The Windows Event Viewer Is and How You Can Use It

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• Revisiting ANTS Performance Profiler 7.4

  - by James Michael Hare

  Last year, I did a small review on the ANTS Performance Profiler 6.3, now that it’s a year later and a major version number higher, I thought I’d revisit the review and revise my last post. This post will take the same examples as the original post and update them to show what’s new in version 7.4 of the profiler. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This helps when we have a program that is not running at the performance we expect, and we want to know where the program is experiencing issues. There are many profilers out there of varying capabilities. Red Gate’s typically seem to be the very easy to “jump in” and get started with very little training required. So let’s dig into the Performance Profiler. I’ve constructed a very crude program with some obvious inefficiencies. It’s a simple program that generates random order numbers (or really could be any unique identifier), adds it to a list, sorts the list, then finds the max and min number in the list. Ignore the fact it’s very contrived and obviously inefficient, we just want to use it as an example to show off the tool: 1: // our test program 2: public static class Program 3: { 4: // the number of iterations to perform 5: private static int _iterations = 1000000; 6: 7: // The main method that controls it all 8: public static void Main() 9: { 10: var list = new List<string>(); 11: 12: for (int i = 0; i < _iterations; i++) 13: { 14: var x = GetNextId(); 15: 16: AddToList(list, x); 17: 18: var highLow = GetHighLow(list); 19: 20: if ((i % 1000) == 0) 21: { 22: Console.WriteLine("{0} - High: {1}, Low: {2}", i, highLow.Item1, highLow.Item2); 23: Console.Out.Flush(); 24: } 25: } 26: } 27: 28: // gets the next order id to process (random for us) 29: public static string GetNextId() 30: { 31: var random = new Random(); 32: var num = random.Next(1000000, 9999999); 33: return num.ToString(); 34: } 35: 36: // add it to our list - very inefficiently! 37: public static void AddToList(List<string> list, string item) 38: { 39: list.Add(item); 40: list.Sort(); 41: } 42: 43: // get high and low of order id range - very inefficiently! 44: public static Tuple<int,int> GetHighLow(List<string> list) 45: { 46: return Tuple.Create(list.Max(s => Convert.ToInt32(s)), list.Min(s => Convert.ToInt32(s))); 47: } 48: } So let’s run it through the profiler and see what happens! Visual Studio Integration First, let’s look at how the ANTS profilers integrate with Visual Studio’s menu system. Once you install the ANTS profilers, you will get an ANTS menu item with several options: Notice that you can either Profile Performance or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler. These sound similar but achieve two slightly different actions: Profile Performance: this immediately launches the profiler with all defaults selected to profile the active project in Visual Studio. Launch ANTS Performance Profiler: this launches the profiler much the same way as starting it from the Start Menu. The profiler will pre-populate the application and path information, but allow you to change the settings before beginning the profile run. So really, the main difference is that Profile Performance immediately begins profiling with the default selections, where Launch ANTS Performance Profiler allows you to change the defaults and attach to an already-running application. Let’s Fire it Up! So when you fire up ANTS either via Start Menu or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler menu in Visual Studio, you are presented with a very simple dialog to get you started: Notice you can choose from many different options for application type. You can profile executables, services, web applications, or just attach to a running process. In fact, in version 7.4 we see two new options added: ASP.NET Web Application (IIS Express) SharePoint web application (IIS) So this gives us an additional way to profile ASP.NET applications and the ability to profile SharePoint applications as well. You can also choose your level of detail in the Profiling Mode drop down. If you choose Line-Level and method-level timings detail, you will get a lot more detail on the method durations, but this will also slow down profiling somewhat. If you really need the profiler to be as unintrusive as possible, you can change it to Sample method-level timings. This is performing very light profiling, where basically the profiler collects timings of a method by examining the call-stack at given intervals. Which method you choose depends a lot on how much detail you need to find the issue and how sensitive your program issues are to timing. So for our example, let’s just go with the line and method timing detail. So, we check that all the options are correct (if you launch from VS2010, the executable and path are filled in already), and fire it up by clicking the [Start Profiling] button. Profiling the Application Once you start profiling the application, you will see a real-time graph of CPU usage that will indicate how much your application is using the CPU(s) on your system. During this time, you can select segments of the graph and bookmark them, giving them mnemonic names. This can be useful if you want to compare performance in one part of the run to another part of the run. Notice that once you select a block, it will give you the call tree breakdown for that selection only, and the relative performance of those calls. Once you feel you have collected enough information, you can click [Stop Profiling] to stop the application run and information collection and begin a more thorough analysis. Analyzing Method Timings So now that we’ve halted the run, we can look around the GUI and see what we can see. By default, the times are shown in terms of percentage of time of the total run of the application, though you can change it in the View menu item to milliseconds, ticks, or seconds as well. This won’t affect the percentages of methods, it only affects what units the times are shown. Notice also that the major hotspot seems to be in a method without source, ANTS Profiler will filter these out by default, but you can right-click on the line and remove the filter to see more detail. This proves especially handy when a bottleneck is due to a method in the BCL. So now that we’ve removed the filter, we see a bit more detail: In addition, ANTS Performance Profiler gives you the ability to decompile the methods without source so that you can dive even deeper, though typically this isn’t necessary for our purposes. When looking at timings, there are generally two types of timings for each method call: Time: This is the time spent ONLY in this method, not including calls this method makes to other methods. Time With Children: This is the total of time spent in both this method AND including calls this method makes to other methods. In other words, the Time tells you how much work is being done exclusively in this method, and the Time With Children tells you how much work is being done inclusively in this method and everything it calls. You can also choose to display the methods in a tree or in a grid. The tree view is the default and it shows the method calls arranged in terms of the tree representing all method calls and the parent method that called them, etc. This is useful for when you find a hot-spot method, you can see who is calling it to determine if the problem is the method itself, or if it is being called too many times. The grid method represents each method only once with its totals and is useful for quickly seeing what method is the trouble spot. In addition, you can choose to display Methods with source which are generally the methods you wrote (as opposed to native or BCL code), or Any Method which shows not only your methods, but also native calls, JIT overhead, synchronization waits, etc. So these are just two ways of viewing the same data, and you’re free to choose the organization that best suits what information you are after. Analyzing Method Source If we look at the timings above, we see that our AddToList() method (and in particular, it’s call to the List<T>.Sort() method in the BCL) is the hot-spot in this analysis. If ANTS sees a method that is consuming the most time, it will flag it as a hot-spot to help call out potential areas of concern. This doesn’t mean the other statistics aren’t meaningful, but that the hot-spot is most likely going to be your biggest bang-for-the-buck to concentrate on. So let’s select the AddToList() method, and see what it shows in the source window below: Notice the source breakout in the bottom pane when you select a method (from either tree or grid view). This shows you the timings in this method per line of code. This gives you a major indicator of where the trouble-spot in this method is. So in this case, we see that performing a Sort() on the List<T> after every Add() is killing our performance! Of course, this was a very contrived, duh moment, but you’d be surprised how many performance issues become duh moments. Note that this one line is taking up 86% of the execution time of this application! If we eliminate this bottleneck, we should see drastic improvement in the performance. So to fix this, if we still wanted to maintain the List<T> we’d have many options, including: delay Sort() until after all Add() methods, using a SortedSet, SortedList, or SortedDictionary depending on which is most appropriate, or forgoing the sorting all together and using a Dictionary. Rinse, Repeat! So let’s just change all instances of List<string> to SortedSet<string> and run this again through the profiler: Now we see the AddToList() method is no longer our hot-spot, but now the Max() and Min() calls are! This is good because we’ve eliminated one hot-spot and now we can try to correct this one as well. As before, we can then optimize this part of the code (possibly by taking advantage of the fact the list is now sorted and returning the first and last elements). We can then rinse and repeat this process until we have eliminated as many bottlenecks as possible. Calls by Web Request Another feature that was added recently is the ability to view .NET methods grouped by the HTTP requests that caused them to run. This can be helpful in determining which pages, web services, etc. are causing hot spots in your web applications. Summary If you like the other ANTS tools, you’ll like the ANTS Performance Profiler as well. It is extremely easy to use with very little product knowledge required to get up and running. There are profilers built into the higher product lines of Visual Studio, of course, which are also powerful and easy to use. But for quickly jumping in and finding hot spots rapidly, Red Gate’s Performance Profiler 7.4 is an excellent choice. Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Performance Profiler,Profiler

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• AdSense Mobile Interface – I’m Loving It!

  - by Gopinath

  I love checking AdSense earnings every day on my mobile. All these days my mobile browser, opera, rendered the heavy desktop version of AdSense interface and it was tough to navigate around and see the earnings. To solve the problems of me as well as millions of other AdSense users, Google yesterday released a mobile version of AdSense user interface that works on almost all the mobile platforms – iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, Symbian and many others. If you have opted for the new beta user interface of AdSense, you will be presented with the mobile version when you https://www.google.com/adsense on your mobile. Here is a screen grab of how looks like on iPhone and Android device.It looks similar on my Nokia mobile too. The Adsense interface for mobile is very nice – on the home page I can quickly have a look at today’s earnings, recent payment amount, last month finalized amount and the total unpaid balances. The quick reports option available the bottom of the screen lets me access a graphical view of useful earnings reports like – Last 7 days, Last 30 days, This Month and Last Month. You can also create your own reports and save them to this list for quick viewing. To view the graphical reports, you don’t need FLASH on your mobile. For more details check out the official post on Google Adsense blog. This article titled,AdSense Mobile Interface – I’m Loving It!, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Streaming Netflix Media with My Wii

  - by Ben Griswold

  Late last year, I wrote about Streaming Media with my Sony Blu-ray Disc Player. I am still digging the Blu-ray player setup but guess what showed up in the mail yesterday?   That’s right!  A free Netflix disc which now let’s me instantly watch TV episodes and movies via my Wii console.  I popped the disc into the console and in less than 2 minutes the brain-numbingly simple activation was complete.  (Full-disclosure: I already had my Wi-Fi connection configured, but I’m confident that the Netflix installation disc would have helpfully walked me through this additional step if need be.) As it turns out, the Wii Netflix UI offers far more options than what one gets with the Blu-ray setup.  Not only can I view my Instant Queue, but there’s a list of recently watched movies, a list of recommended titles by category, the star rating system, movies information and nearly everything you find on the web.  I reread Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability on a flight back from Orlando on Wednesday, so my current view of the world may be a little skewed but, the brilliance of Netflix Wii’s user interface is undeniable. It’s not like the Blu-ray navigation is complicated but the Wii navigation feels familiar and intuitive. How intuitive?  Well, you won’t find a single bit of help text on any of the Wii screens – just a simple and obvious point-and-click navigation system.  And the UI is really pretty (which is still very important if you ask me) and so easy it became fun. Did I mention the media streaming works!  Yep, we watched 2 half-hour kid videos yesterday without any streaming issues at all.  If you have a Netflix account and a Wii, order your disc and give it a go. It’s good stuff.

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