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  • Parallelism in .NET – Part 8, PLINQ’s ForAll Method

    - by Reed
    Parallel LINQ extends LINQ to Objects, and is typically very similar.  However, as I previously discussed, there are some differences.  Although the standard way to handle simple Data Parellelism is via Parallel.ForEach, it’s possible to do the same thing via PLINQ. PLINQ adds a new method unavailable in standard LINQ which provides new functionality… LINQ is designed to provide a much simpler way of handling querying, including filtering, ordering, grouping, and many other benefits.  Reading the description in LINQ to Objects on MSDN, it becomes clear that the thinking behind LINQ deals with retrieval of data.  LINQ works by adding a functional programming style on top of .NET, allowing us to express filters in terms of predicate functions, for example. PLINQ is, generally, very similar.  Typically, when using PLINQ, we write declarative statements to filter a dataset or perform an aggregation.  However, PLINQ adds one new method, which provides a very different purpose: ForAll. The ForAll method is defined on ParallelEnumerable, and will work upon any ParallelQuery<T>.  Unlike the sequence operators in LINQ and PLINQ, ForAll is intended to cause side effects.  It does not filter a collection, but rather invokes an action on each element of the collection. At first glance, this seems like a bad idea.  For example, Eric Lippert clearly explained two philosophical objections to providing an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method, one of which still applies when parallelized.  The sole purpose of this method is to cause side effects, and as such, I agree that the ForAll method “violates the functional programming principles that all the other sequence operators are based upon”, in exactly the same manner an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method would violate these principles.  Eric Lippert’s second reason for disliking a ForEach extension method does not necessarily apply to ForAll – replacing ForAll with a call to Parallel.ForEach has the same closure semantics, so there is no loss there. Although ForAll may have philosophical issues, there is a pragmatic reason to include this method.  Without ForAll, we would take a fairly serious performance hit in many situations.  Often, we need to perform some filtering or grouping, then perform an action using the results of our filter.  Using a standard foreach statement to perform our action would avoid this philosophical issue: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action foreach (var item in filteredItems) { // These will now run serially item.DoSomething(); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This would cause a loss in performance, since we lose any parallelism in place, and cause all of our actions to be run serially. We could easily use a Parallel.ForEach instead, which adds parallelism to the actions: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action once the filter completes Parallel.ForEach(filteredItems, item => { // These will now run in parallel item.DoSomething(); }); This is a noticeable improvement, since both our filtering and our actions run parallelized.  However, there is still a large bottleneck in place here.  The problem lies with my comment “perform an action once the filter completes”.  Here, we’re parallelizing the filter, then collecting all of the results, blocking until the filter completes.  Once the filtering of every element is completed, we then repartition the results of the filter, reschedule into multiple threads, and perform the action on each element.  By moving this into two separate statements, we potentially double our parallelization overhead, since we’re forcing the work to be partitioned and scheduled twice as many times. This is where the pragmatism comes into play.  By violating our functional principles, we gain the ability to avoid the overhead and cost of rescheduling the work: // Perform an action on the results of our filter collection .AsParallel() .Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ) .ForAll( i => i.DoSomething() ); The ability to avoid the scheduling overhead is a compelling reason to use ForAll.  This really goes back to one of the key points I discussed in data parallelism: Partition your problem in a way to place the most work possible into each task.  Here, this means leaving the statement attached to the expression, even though it causes side effects and is not standard usage for LINQ. This leads to my one guideline for using ForAll: The ForAll extension method should only be used to process the results of a parallel query, as returned by a PLINQ expression. Any other usage scenario should use Parallel.ForEach, instead.

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  • Good ol fashioned debugging

    - by Tim Dexter
    I have been helping out one of our new customers over the last day or two and I have even managed to get to the bottom of their problem FTW! They use BIEE and BIP and wanted to mount a BIP report in a dashboard page, so far so good, BIP does that! Just follow the instructions in the BIEE user guide. The wrinkle is that they want to enter some fixed instruction strings into the dashboard prompts to help the user. These are added as fixed values to the prompt as the default values so they appear first. Once the user makes a selection, the default strings disappear. Its a fair requirement but the BIP report chokes Now, the BIP report had been setup with the Autorun checkbox, unchecked. I expected the BIP report to wait for the Go button to be hit but it was trying to run immediately and failing. That was the first issue. You can not stop the BIP report from trying to run in a dashboard. Even if the Autorun is turned off, it seems that dashboard still makes the request to BIP to run the report. Rather than BIP refusing because its waiting for input it goes ahead anyway, I guess the mechanism does not check the autorun flag when the request is coming from the dashboard. It appears that between BIEE and BIP, they collectively ignore the autorun flag. A bug? might be, at least an enhancement request. With that in mind, how could we get BIP to not at least not fail? This fact was stumping me on the parameter error, if the autorun flag was being respected then why was BIP complaining about the parameter values it should not even be doing anything until the Go button is clicked. I now knew that the autorun flag was being ignored, it was a simple case of putting BIP into debug mode. I use the OC4J server on my laptop so debug msgs are routed through the dos box used to start the OC4J container. When I changed a value on the dashboard prompt I spotted some debug text rushing by that subsequently disappeared from the log once the operation was complete. Another bug? I needed to catch that text as it went by, using the print screen function with some software to grab multiple screens as the log appeared and then disappeared. The upshot is that when you change the dashboard prompt value, BIP validates the value against its own LOVs, if its not in the list then it throws the error. Because 'Fill this first' and 'Fill this second' ie fixed strings from the dashboard prompts, are not in the LOV lists and because the report is auto running as soon as the dashboard page is brought up, the report complains about invalid parameters. To get around this, I needed to get the strings into the LOVs. Easily done with a UNION clause: select 'Fill this first' from SH.Products Products UNION select Products."Prod Category" as "Prod Category" from SH.Products Products Now when BIP wants to validate the prompt value, the LOV query fires and finds the fixed string -> No Error. No data, but definitely no errors :0) If users do run with the fixed values, you can capture that in the template. If there is no data in the report, either the fixed values were used or the parameters selected resulted in no rows. You can capture this in the template and display something like. 'Either your parameter values resulted in no data or you have not changed the default values' Thats the upside, the downside is that if your users run the report in the BP UI they re going to see the fixed strings. You could alleviate that by having BIP display the fixed strings in top of its parameter drop boxes (just set them as the default value for the parameter.) But they will not disappear like they do in the dashboard prompts, see below. If the expected autorun behaviour worked ie wait for the Go button, then we would not have to workaround it but for now, its a pretty good solution. It was an enjoyable hour or so for me, took me back to my developer daze, when we used to race each other for the most number of bug fixes. I used to run a distant 2nd behind 'Bugmeister Chen Hu' but led the chasing pack by a reasonable distance.

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  • The Top Ten Security Top Ten Lists

    - by Troy Kitch
    As a marketer, we're always putting together the top 3, or 5 best, or an assortment of top ten lists. So instead of going that route, I've put together my top ten security top ten lists. These are not only for security practitioners, but also for the average Joe/Jane; because who isn't concerned about security these days? Now, there might not be ten for each one of these lists, but the title works best that way. Starting with my number ten (in no particular order): 10. Top 10 Most Influential Security-Related Movies Amrit Williams pulls together a great collection of security-related movies. He asks for comments on which one made you want to get into the business. I would have to say that my most influential movie(s), that made me want to get into the business of "stopping the bad guys" would have to be the James Bond series. I grew up on James Bond movies: thwarting the bad guy and saving the world. I recall being both ecstatic and worried when Silicon Valley-themed "A View to A Kill" hit theaters: "An investigation of a horse-racing scam leads 007 to a mad industrialist who plans to create a worldwide microchip monopoly by destroying California's Silicon Valley." Yikes! 9. Top Ten Security Careers From movies that got you into the career, here’s a top 10 list of security-related careers. It starts with number then, Information Security Analyst and ends with number one, Malware Analyst. They point out the significant growth in security careers and indicate that "according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the field is expected to experience growth rates of 22% between 2010-2020. If you are interested in getting into the field, Oracle has many great opportunities all around the world.  8. Top 125 Network Security Tools A bit outside of the range of 10, the top 125 Network Security Tools is an important list because it includes a prioritized list of key security tools practitioners are using in the hacking community, regardless of whether they are vendor supplied or open source. The exhaustive list provides ratings, reviews, searching, and sorting. 7. Top 10 Security Practices I have to give a shout out to my alma mater, Cal Poly, SLO: Go Mustangs! They have compiled their list of top 10 practices for students and faculty to follow. Educational institutions are a common target of web based attacks and miscellaneous errors according to the 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.    6. (ISC)2 Top 10 Safe and Secure Online Tips for Parents This list is arguably the most important list on my list. The tips were "gathered from (ISC)2 member volunteers who participate in the organization’s Safe and Secure Online program, a worldwide initiative that brings top cyber security experts into schools to teach children ages 11-14 how to protect themselves in a cyber-connected world…If you are a parent, educator or organization that would like the Safe and Secure Online presentation delivered at your local school, or would like more information about the program, please visit here.” 5. Top Ten Data Breaches of the Past 12 Months This type of list is always changing, so it's nice to have a current one here from Techrader.com. They've compiled and commented on the top breaches. It is likely that most readers here were effected in some way or another. 4. Top Ten Security Comic Books Although mostly physical security controls, I threw this one in for fun. My vote for #1 (not on the list) would be Professor X. The guy can breach confidentiality, integrity, and availability just by messing with your thoughts. 3. The IOUG Data Security Survey's Top 10+ Threats to Organizations The Independent Oracle Users Group annual survey on enterprise data security, Leaders Vs. Laggards, highlights what Oracle Database users deem as the top 12 threats to their organization. You can find a nice graph on page 9; Figure 7: Greatest Threats to Data Security. 2. The Ten Most Common Database Security Vulnerabilities Though I don't necessarily agree with all of the vulnerabilities in this order...I like a list that focuses on where two-thirds of your sensitive and regulated data resides (Source: IDC).  1. OWASP Top Ten Project The Online Web Application Security Project puts together their annual list of the 10 most critical web application security risks that organizations should be including in their overall security, business risk and compliance plans. In particular, SQL injection risks continues to rear its ugly head each year. Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall can help prevent SQL injection attacks and monitor database and system activity as a detective security control. Did I miss any?

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  • Simultaneously calling multiple methods on a WCF service from silverlight

    - by ola karlsson
    A while back I had to debug some performance issues in an existing Silverlight app, as the problem / solution was a bit obscure and finding info about it was quite tricky, I thought I’d share, maybe it can help the next person with this problem. The App On start, the app would do a number of calls to different methods on a WCF service, this to populate the UI with the necessary data. Recently one of those services had been changed and was now taking quite a bit longer than it used to. This was resulting in quite a long loading time for the whole UI, which was set up so it wouldn’t let the user interact with anything, until all the service calls had finished. First I broke out the longer running service call from the others, then removed the constraint that it had to be loaded for the UI in general to become responsive. I also added a loading indicator just on that area of the UI, thinking that the main UI would load while this particular section could keep loading independently. The Problem However this is where things started to get a bit strange. I found that even after these changes, the main UI wouldn’t activate until the long running call returned. So now, I did what I should have done to start with, I got Fiddler out and had a look at what was really happening. What I found was that, once the call to the long running service method was placed, all subsequent call were waiting for that one to return before executing. Not having really worked with WCF previously or knowing much about it in general, I was stumped… I knew of the issues where Silverlight is restricted by the browsers networking features in regards to number of simultaneous connections etc. However that just didn’t seem to be the issue here, you can clearly see in Fiddler that there’s numerous calls, but they’re just not returning. I thought of the problem maybe being in the WCF service, but the calls were really not that complicated and surely the service should be able to handle a lot more than what I was throwing at it! So I did what every developer does in this type of scenario, I hit the search engines. I did a whole bunch of searching on things like “multiple simultaneous WCF calls from Silverlight” and “Calling long running WCF services from Silverlight” etc. etc. This however, pretty much got me nowhere, I found a whole heap of resources on how to do WCF calls from Silverlight but most of them were very basic and of no use what so ever. The fog is clearing It wasn’t until I came across the term “ WCF blocking calls” and started incorporating that in my searches I started to get somewhere. Those searches quite quickly brought me to the following thread in the Silverlight forum “Long-running WCF call blocking subsequent calls” which discussed the exact problem I was facing and the best part, one of the guys there had the solution! The short answer is in the forum post and the guys answering, has also done a more extensive blog post about it called “Silverlight, WCF, and ASP.Net Configuration Gotchas” which covers it very well.  So come on what’s the solution?! I heard you ask, unless you’ve already gone to the links and looked it up ;) The Solution Well, it turns out that the issue is founded in a mix of Silverlight, Asp.Net and WCF, basically if you’re doing multiple calls to a single WCF web-service and you have Asp.Net session state enabled, the calls will be executed sequentially by the service, hence any long running calls will block subsequent ones. So why is Asp.Net session state effecting us, we’re working in Silverlight, right? We'll as mentioned earlier, by default Silverlight uses the browsers networking stack when doing service calls, hence to the WCF service, the call looks like it might as well be coming from a normal Asp.Net. To get around this, we look to a feature introduced in Silverlight 3, namely the Client HTTP Stack. The Client HTTP Stack to the rescue By using the following syntax (for example in our App.xaml.cs, Application_Startup method) WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp); we can set our Silverlight application to use the Client HTTP Stack, which incidentally solves our problem! By using Silverlights own networking stack, rather than that of the browser, we get around the Asp.Net - WCF session state issue. The above code specifies that all calls to addresses starting with “http://” should go through the client stack, this can actually be set more granular and you can specify it to be used only for certain domains etc. Summary The actual solution is well covered in the forum and blog posts I link to above. This post is more about sharing my experience, hopefully helping to spread the word about this and maybe make it a bit easier for the next poor guy with this issue to find the solution. Until next time, Ola

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  • SOA, Empowerment and Continuous Improvement

    - by Tanu Sood
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick will be hosting the IT Leader Editorial on a regular basis. I met my twin at Open World. We share backgrounds, experiences and even names. I hosted an invitation-only AppAdvantage Leadership Forum with an overcapacity 85 participants: 55 customers, 15 from the Oracle AppAdvantage team and 15 Partners. It was a lively, open and positive discussion of pace layered architectures and Oracle’s AppAdvantage approach to a unified view of Applications and Middleware. Rick Hassman from Pella was one of the customer panelists and during the pre event prep, Rick and I shared backgrounds and found that we had both been plant managers and led ERP deployments prior to leading IT itself. During the panel conversation I explored this with him, discussing the unique perspectives that this provides to CIO’s. He then hit on a point that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until a week later. First though, some background. The week after the Forum, one of the participants emailed me with the following thoughts: “I am 150% behind this concept……but we are struggling with the concept of web services and the potential use of the Oracle Service Bus technology let alone moving into using the full SOA/BPM/BAM software to extend our JD Edwards application to both integrate and support business processes”. After thinking a bit I responded this way: While I certainly appreciate the degree of change and effort involved, perhaps I could offer the following: One of the underlying principles behind Oracle AppAdvantage is that more often than not, the choice between changing a business process and invasively customizing ERP represents a Hobson's Choice: neither is acceptable. In this case the third option, moving the process out of ERP, is the only acceptable one. Providing this choice typically requires end to end, real time interoperability across applications and/or services. This real time interoperability, to be sustainable over time requires a service oriented architecture. There's just no way around this. SOA adaptation is admittedly tough at the beginning. New skills, new technology and new headaches. But, like any radically new technology, it has a learning curve that drives cost down rather dramatically over time. Tough choices to be sure, but not entirely different than we face with every major technology cycle. Good points of course, but I felt that something was missing. The points were convincing, perhaps even a bit insightful, but they didn’t get at the heart of what Oracle AppAdvantage is focused upon: how the optimization of technology, applications, processes and relationships can change the very way that organizations operate. And then I thought back to the panel discussion with Rick Hassman at Oracle OpenWorld. Rick stressed that Continuous Improvement is a fundamental business strategy at Pella. I remember Continuous Improvement well as I suspect does everyone who was in American manufacturing during the 80’s. Pioneered by W. Edwards Deming in Japan (and still known alternatively as Kaizen), Continuous Improvement sets in place the business culture that we must not become complacent with success and resistant to the ongoing need for change. Many believe that this single handedly drove the renaissance in American manufacturing through the last two decades, which had become complacent during the 70’s and early 80’s. But what exactly does this have to do with SOA? It was Rick’s next point. He drew the connection that moving those business processes that need to continually change over time out of ERP and into edge applications and services enables continuous improvement by empowering people to continually strive for better ways of doing things rather than be being bound by workflows that cannot change. A compelling connection: that SOA, and the overall Oracle AppAdvantage framework of which it is an integral part, can empower people towards continuous improvement in business processes and as a result drive business leadership and business excellence. What better a case for technology innovation?

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  • TDD and WCF behavior

    - by Frederic Hautecoeur
    Some weeks ago I wanted to develop a WCF behavior using TDD. I have lost some time trying to use mocks. After a while i decided to just use a host and a client. I don’t like this approach but so far I haven’t found a good and fast solution to use Unit Test for testing a WCF behavior. To Implement my solution I had to : Create a Dummy Service Definition; Create the Dummy Service Implementation; Create a host; Create a client in my test; Create and Add the behavior; Dummy Service Definition This is just a simple service, composed of an Interface and a simple implementation. The structure is aimed to be easily customizable for my future needs.   Using Clauses : 1: using System.Runtime.Serialization; 2: using System.ServiceModel; 3: using System.ServiceModel.Channels; The DataContract: 1: [DataContract()] 2: public class MyMessage 3: { 4: [DataMember()] 5: public string MessageString; 6: } The request MessageContract: 1: [MessageContract()] 2: public class RequestMessage 3: { 4: [MessageHeader(Name = "MyHeader", Namespace = "http://dummyservice/header", Relay = true)] 5: public string myHeader; 6:  7: [MessageBodyMember()] 8: public MyMessage myRequest; 9: } The response MessageContract: 1: [MessageContract()] 2: public class ResponseMessage 3: { 4: [MessageHeader(Name = "MyHeader", Namespace = "http://dummyservice/header", Relay = true)] 5: public string myHeader; 6:  7: [MessageBodyMember()] 8: public MyMessage myResponse; 9: } The ServiceContract: 1: [ServiceContract(Name="DummyService", Namespace="http://dummyservice",SessionMode=SessionMode.Allowed )] 2: interface IDummyService 3: { 4: [OperationContract(Action="Perform", IsOneWay=false, ProtectionLevel=System.Net.Security.ProtectionLevel.None )] 5: ResponseMessage DoThis(RequestMessage request); 6: } Dummy Service Implementation 1: public class DummyService:IDummyService 2: { 3: #region IDummyService Members 4: public ResponseMessage DoThis(RequestMessage request) 5: { 6: ResponseMessage response = new ResponseMessage(); 7: response.myHeader = "Response"; 8: response.myResponse = new MyMessage(); 9: response.myResponse.MessageString = 10: string.Format("Header:<{0}> and Request was <{1}>", 11: request.myHeader, request.myRequest.MessageString); 12: return response; 13: } 14: #endregion 15: } Host Creation The most simple host implementation using a Named Pipe binding. The GetBinding method will create a binding for the host and can be used to create the same binding for the client. 1: public static class TestHost 2: { 3: 4: internal static string hostUri = "net.pipe://localhost/dummy"; 5:  6: // Create Host method. 7: internal static ServiceHost CreateHost() 8: { 9: ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(typeof(DummyService)); 10:  11: // Creating Endpoint 12: Uri namedPipeAddress = new Uri(hostUri); 13: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IDummyService), GetBinding(), namedPipeAddress); 14:  15: return host; 16: } 17:  18: // Binding Creation method. 19: internal static Binding GetBinding() 20: { 21: NamedPipeTransportBindingElement namedPipeTransport = new NamedPipeTransportBindingElement(); 22: TextMessageEncodingBindingElement textEncoding = new TextMessageEncodingBindingElement(); 23:  24: return new CustomBinding(textEncoding, namedPipeTransport); 25: } 26:  27: // Close Method. 28: internal static void Close(ServiceHost host) 29: { 30: if (null != host) 31: { 32: host.Close(); 33: host = null; 34: } 35: } 36: } Checking the service A simple test tool check the plumbing. 1: [TestMethod] 2: public void TestService() 3: { 4: using (ServiceHost host = TestHost.CreateHost()) 5: { 6: host.Open(); 7:  8: using (ChannelFactory<IDummyService> channel = 9: new ChannelFactory<IDummyService>(TestHost.GetBinding() 10: , new EndpointAddress(TestHost.hostUri))) 11: { 12: IDummyService svc = channel.CreateChannel(); 13: try 14: { 15: RequestMessage request = new RequestMessage(); 16: request.myHeader = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); 17: request.myRequest = new MyMessage(); 18: request.myRequest.MessageString = "I want some beer."; 19:  20: ResponseMessage response = svc.DoThis(request); 21: } 22: catch (Exception ex) 23: { 24: Assert.Fail(ex.Message); 25: } 26: } 27: host.Close(); 28: } 29: } Running the service should show that the client and the host are running fine. So far so good. Adding the Behavior Add a reference to the Behavior project and add the using entry in the test class. We just need to add the behavior to the service host : 1: [TestMethod] 2: public void TestService() 3: { 4: using (ServiceHost host = TestHost.CreateHost()) 5: { 6: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(new MyBehavior()); 7: host.Open();¨ 8: …  If you set a breakpoint in your behavior and run the test in debug mode, you will hit the breakpoint. In this case I used a ServiceBehavior. To add an Endpoint behavior you have to add it to the endpoints. 1: host.Description.Endpoints[0].Behaviors.Add(new MyEndpointBehavior()) To add a contract or an operation behavior a custom attribute should work on the service contract definition. I haven’t tried that yet.   All the code provided in this blog and in the following files are for sample use. Improvements I don’t like to instantiate a client and a service to test my behaviors. But so far I have' not found an easy way to do it. Today I am passing a type of endpoint to the host creator and it creates the right binding type. This allows me to easily switch between bindings at will. I have used the same approach to test Mex Endpoints, another post should come later for this. Enjoy !

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  • SQL SERVER – Identifying guest User using Policy Based Management

    - by pinaldave
    If you are following my recent blog posts, you may have noticed that I’ve been writing a lot about Guest User in SQL Server. Here are all the blog posts which I have written on this subject: SQL SERVER – Disable Guest Account – Serious Security Issue SQL SERVER – Force Removing User from Database – Fix: Error: Could not drop login ‘test’ as the user is currently logged in SQL SERVER – Detecting guest User Permissions – guest User Access Status SQL SERVER – guest User and MSDB Database – Enable guest User on MSDB Database One of the requests I received was whether we could create a policy that would prevent users unable guest user in user databases. Well, here is a quick tutorial to answer this. Let us see how quickly we can do it. Requirements Check if the guest user is disabled in all the user-created databases. Exclude master, tempdb and msdb database for guest user validation. We will create the following conditions based on the above two requirements: If the name of the user is ‘guest’ If the user has connect (@hasDBAccess) permission in the database Check in All user databases, except: master, tempDB and msdb Once we create two conditions, we will create a policy which will validate the conditions. Condition 1: Is the User Guest? Expand the Database >> Management >> Policy Management >> Conditions Right click on the Conditions, and click on “New Condition…”. First we will create a condition where we will validate if the user name is ‘guest’, and if it’s so, then we will further validate if it has DB access. Check the image for the necessary configuration for condition: Facet: User Expression: @Name = ‘guest’ Condition 2: Does the User have DBAccess? Expand the Database >> Management >> Policy Management >> Conditions Right click on Conditions and click on “New Condition…”. Now we will validate if the user has DB access. Check the image for necessary configuration for condition: Facet: User Expression: @hasDBAccess = False Condition 3: Exclude Databases Expand the Database >> Management >> Policy Management >> Conditions Write click on Conditions and click on “New Condition…” Now we will create condition where we will validate if database name is master, tempdb or msdb and if database name is any of them, we will not validate our first one condition with them. Check the image for necessary configuration for condition: Facet: Database Expression: @Name != ‘msdb’ AND @Name != ‘tempdb’ AND @Name != ‘master’ The next step will be creating a policy which will enforce these conditions. Creating a Policy Right click on Policies and click “New Policy…” Here, we justify what condition we want to validate against what the target is. Condition: Has User DBAccess Target Database: Every Database except (master, tempdb and MSDB) Target User: Every User in Target Database with name ‘guest’ Now we have options for two evaluation modes: 1) On Demand and 2) On Schedule We will select On Demand in this example; however, you can change the mode to On Schedule through the drop down menu, and select the interval of the evaluation of the policy. Evaluate the Policies We have selected OnDemand as our policy evaluation mode. We will now evaluate by means of executing Evaluate policy. Click on Evaluate and it will give the following result: The result demonstrates that one of the databases has a policy violation. Username guest is enabled in AdventureWorks database. You can disable the guest user by running the following code in AdventureWorks database. USE AdventureWorks; REVOKE CONNECT FROM guest; Once you run above query, you can already evaluate the policy again. Notice that the policy violation is fixed now. You can change the method of the evaluation policy to On Schedule and validate policy on interval. You can check the history of the policy and detect the violation. Quiz I have created three conditions to check if the guest user has database access or not. Now I want to ask you: Is it possible to do the same with 2 conditions? If yes, HOW? If no, WHY NOT? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, CodeProject, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Policy Management

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  • Dynamic Data Connections

    - by Tim Dexter
    I have had a long running email thread running between Dan and David over at Valspar and myself. They have built some impressive connectivity between their in house apps and BIP using web services. The crux of their problem has been that they have multiple databases that need the same report executed against them. Not such an unusual request as I have spoken to two customers in the last month with the same situation. Of course, you could create a report against each data connection and just run or call the appropriate report. Not too bad if you have two or three data connections but more than that and it becomes a maintenance nightmare having to update queries or layouts. Ideally you want to have just a single report definition on the BIP server and to dynamically set the connection to be used at runtime based on the user or system that the user is in. A quick bit of digging and help from Shinji on the development team and I had an answer. Rather embarassingly, the solution has been around since the Oct 2010 rollup patch last year. Still, I grabbed the latest Jan 2011 patch - check out Note 797057.1 for the latest available patches. Once installed, I used the best web service testing tool I have yet to come across - SoapUI. Just point it at the WSDL and you can check out the available services and their parameters and then test them too. The XML packet has a new dynamic data source entry. You can set you own custom JDBC connection or just specify an existing data source name thats defined on the server. <pub:runReport> <pub:reportRequest> <pub:attributeFormat>xml</pub:attributeFormat> <pub:attributeTemplate>0</pub:attributeTemplate> <pub:byPassCache>true</pub:byPassCache> <pub:dynamicDataSource> <pub:JDBCDataSource> <pub:JDBCDriverClass></pub:JDBCDriverClass> <pub:JDBCDriverType></pub:JDBCDriverType> <pub:JDBCPassword></pub:JDBCPassword> <pub:JDBCURL></pub:JDBCURL> <pub:JDBCUserName></pub:JDBCUserName> <pub:dataSourceName>Conn1</pub:dataSourceName> </pub:JDBCDataSource> </pub:dynamicDataSource> <pub:reportAbsolutePath>/Test/Employee Report/Employee Report.xdo</pub:reportAbsolutePath> </pub:reportRequest> <pub:userID>Administrator</pub:userID> <pub:password>Administrator</pub:password> </pub:runReport> So I have Conn1 and Conn2 defined that are connections to different databases. I can just flip the name, make the WS call and get the appropriate dataset in my report. Just as an example, here's my web service call java code. Just a case of bringing in the BIP java libs to my java project. publicReportServiceService = new PublicReportServiceService(); PublicReportService publicReportService = publicReportServiceService.getPublicReportService_v11(); String userID = "Administrator"; String password = "Administrator"; ReportRequest rr = new ReportRequest(); rr.setAttributeFormat("xml"); rr.setAttributeTemplate("1"); rr.setByPassCache(true); rr.setReportAbsolutePath("/Test/Employee Report/Employee Report.xdo"); rr.setReportOutputPath("c:\\temp\\output.xml"); BIPDataSource bipds = new BIPDataSource(); JDBCDataSource jds = new JDBCDataSource(); jds.setDataSourceName("Conn1"); bipds.setJDBCDataSource(jds); rr.setDynamicDataSource(bipds); try { publicReportService.runReport(rr, userID, password); } catch (InvalidParametersException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (AccessDeniedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (OperationFailedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } Note, Im no java whiz kid or whizzy old bloke, at least not unless Ive had a coffee. JDeveloper has a nice feature where you point it at the WSDL and it creates everything to support your calling code for you. Couple of things to remember: 1. When you call the service, remember to set the bypass the cache option. Forget it and much scratching of your head and taking my name in vain will ensue. 2. My demo actually hit the same database but used two users, one accessed the base tables another views with the same name. For far too long I thought the connection swapping was not working. I was getting the same results for both users until I realized I was specifying the schema name for the table/view in my query e.g. select * from EMP.EMPLOYEES. So remember to have a generic query that will depend entirely on the connection. Its a neat feature if you want to be able to switch connections and only define a single report and call it remotely. Now if you want the connection to be set dynamically based on the user and the report run via the user interface, thats going to be more tricky ... need to think about that one!

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  • Class Loading Deadlocks

    - by tomas.nilsson
    Mattis follows up on his previous post with one more expose on Class Loading Deadlocks As I wrote in a previous post, the class loading mechanism in Java is very powerful. There are many advanced techniques you can use, and when used wrongly you can get into all sorts of trouble. But one of the sneakiest deadlocks you can run into when it comes to class loading doesn't require any home made class loaders or anything. All you need is classes depending on each other, and some bad luck. First of all, here are some basic facts about class loading: 1) If a thread needs to use a class that is not yet loaded, it will try to load that class 2) If another thread is already loading the class, the first thread will wait for the other thread to finish the loading 3) During the loading of a class, one thing that happens is that the <clinit method of a class is being run 4) The <clinit method initializes all static fields, and runs any static blocks in the class. Take the following class for example: class Foo { static Bar bar = new Bar(); static { System.out.println("Loading Foo"); } } The first time a thread needs to use the Foo class, the class will be initialized. The <clinit method will run, creating a new Bar object and printing "Loading Foo" But what happens if the Bar object has never been used before either? Well, then we will need to load that class as well, calling the Bar <clinit method as we go. Can you start to see the potential problem here? A hint is in fact #2 above. What if another thread is currently loading class Bar? The thread loading class Foo will have to wait for that thread to finish loading. But what happens if the <clinit method of class Bar tries to initialize a Foo object? That thread will have to wait for the first thread, and there we have the deadlock. Thread one is waiting for thread two to initialize class Bar, thread two is waiting for thread one to initialize class Foo. All that is needed for a class loading deadlock is static cross dependencies between two classes (and a multi threaded environment): class Foo { static Bar b = new Bar(); } class Bar { static Foo f = new Foo(); } If two threads cause these classes to be loaded at exactly the same time, we will have a deadlock. So, how do you avoid this? Well, one way is of course to not have these circular (static) dependencies. On the other hand, it can be very hard to detect these, and sometimes your design may depend on it. What you can do in that case is to make sure that the classes are first loaded single threadedly, for example during an initialization phase of your application. The following program shows this kind of deadlock. To help bad luck on the way, I added a one second sleep in the static block of the classes to trigger the unlucky timing. Notice that if you uncomment the "//Foo f = new Foo();" line in the main method, the class will be loaded single threadedly, and the program will terminate as it should. public class ClassLoadingDeadlock { // Start two threads. The first will instansiate a Foo object, // the second one will instansiate a Bar object. public static void main(String[] arg) { // Uncomment next line to stop the deadlock // Foo f = new Foo(); new Thread(new FooUser()).start(); new Thread(new BarUser()).start(); } } class FooUser implements Runnable { public void run() { System.out.println("FooUser causing class Foo to be loaded"); Foo f = new Foo(); System.out.println("FooUser done"); } } class BarUser implements Runnable { public void run() { System.out.println("BarUser causing class Bar to be loaded"); Bar b = new Bar(); System.out.println("BarUser done"); } } class Foo { static { // We are deadlock prone even without this sleep... // The sleep just makes us more deterministic try { Thread.sleep(1000); } catch(InterruptedException e) {} } static Bar b = new Bar(); } class Bar { static { try { Thread.sleep(1000); } catch(InterruptedException e) {} } static Foo f = new Foo(); }

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  • SQL SERVER – Fundamentals of Columnstore Index

    - by pinaldave
    There are two kind of storage in database. Row Store and Column Store. Row store does exactly as the name suggests – stores rows of data on a page – and column store stores all the data in a column on the same page. These columns are much easier to search – instead of a query searching all the data in an entire row whether the data is relevant or not, column store queries need only to search much lesser number of the columns. This means major increases in search speed and hard drive use. Additionally, the column store indexes are heavily compressed, which translates to even greater memory and faster searches. I am sure this looks very exciting and it does not mean that you convert every single index from row store to column store index. One has to understand the proper places where to use row store or column store indexes. Let us understand in this article what is the difference in Columnstore type of index. Column store indexes are run by Microsoft’s VertiPaq technology. However, all you really need to know is that this method of storing data is columns on a single page is much faster and more efficient. Creating a column store index is very easy, and you don’t have to learn new syntax to create them. You just need to specify the keyword “COLUMNSTORE” and enter the data as you normally would. Keep in mind that once you add a column store to a table, though, you cannot delete, insert or update the data – it is READ ONLY. However, since column store will be mainly used for data warehousing, this should not be a big problem. You can always use partitioning to avoid rebuilding the index. A columnstore index stores each column in a separate set of disk pages, rather than storing multiple rows per page as data traditionally has been stored. The difference between column store and row store approaches is illustrated below: In case of the row store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple rows of the columns spanning across multiple pages. In case of column store indexes multiple pages will contain multiple single columns. This will lead only the columns needed to solve a query will be fetched from disk. Additionally there is good chance that there will be redundant data in a single column which will further help to compress the data, this will have positive effect on buffer hit rate as most of the data will be in memory and due to same it will not need to be retrieved. Let us see small example of how columnstore index improves the performance of the query on a large table. As a first step let us create databaseset which is large enough to show performance impact of columnstore index. The time taken to create sample database may vary on different computer based on the resources. USE AdventureWorks GO -- Create New Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail]( [SalesOrderID] [int] NOT NULL, [SalesOrderDetailID] [int] NOT NULL, [CarrierTrackingNumber] [nvarchar](25) NULL, [OrderQty] [smallint] NOT NULL, [ProductID] [int] NOT NULL, [SpecialOfferID] [int] NOT NULL, [UnitPrice] [money] NOT NULL, [UnitPriceDiscount] [money] NOT NULL, [LineTotal] [numeric](38, 6) NOT NULL, [rowguid] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL, [ModifiedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Create clustered index CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [CL_MySalesOrderDetail] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] ( [SalesOrderDetailID]) GO -- Create Sample Data Table -- WARNING: This Query may run upto 2-10 minutes based on your systems resources INSERT INTO [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] SELECT S1.* FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail S1 GO 100 Now let us do quick performance test. I have kept STATISTICS IO ON for measuring how much IO following queries take. In my test first I will run query which will use regular index. We will note the IO usage of the query. After that we will create columnstore index and will measure the IO of the same. -- Performance Test -- Comparing Regular Index with ColumnStore Index USE AdventureWorks GO SET STATISTICS IO ON GO -- Select Table with regular Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO -- Table 'MySalesOrderDetail'. Scan count 1, logical reads 342261, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0. -- Create ColumnStore Index CREATE NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [MySalesOrderDetail] (UnitPrice, OrderQty, ProductID) GO -- Select Table with Columnstore Index SELECT ProductID, SUM(UnitPrice) SumUnitPrice, AVG(UnitPrice) AvgUnitPrice, SUM(OrderQty) SumOrderQty, AVG(OrderQty) AvgOrderQty FROM [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GROUP BY ProductID ORDER BY ProductID GO It is very clear from the results that query is performance extremely fast after creating ColumnStore Index. The amount of the pages it has to read to run query is drastically reduced as the column which are needed in the query are stored in the same page and query does not have to go through every single page to read those columns. If we enable execution plan and compare we can see that column store index performance way better than regular index in this case. Let us clean up the database. -- Cleanup DROP INDEX [IX_MySalesOrderDetail_ColumnStore] ON [dbo].[MySalesOrderDetail] GO TRUNCATE TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO DROP TABLE dbo.MySalesOrderDetail GO In future posts we will see cases where Columnstore index is not appropriate solution as well few other tricks and tips of the columnstore index. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • How to get sound on macbook pro 4,1

    - by Thomas
    I have just installed Xubuntu 12.04.2. My soundcard is detected: thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 Everything is put to max in alsamixer and nothing is muted (all the sliders are on OO. My speakers do not work, but when I plug in a headphone I hear it very soft. When I connect my stereo and put the sound VERY loud (3-blocks-of-complaining-neighbours loud) I hear it on a normal level but crackling. I added options snd-hda-intel model=mbp5 amixer set IEC958 off to at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. When it's still not working I tried everything here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting 1 >>> list-sinks 1 sink(s) available. * index: 0 name: <alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo> driver: <module-alsa-card.c> flags: HARDWARE HW_MUTE_CTRL HW_VOLUME_CTRL DECIBEL_VOLUME LATENCY DYNAMIC_LATENCY state: SUSPENDED suspend cause: IDLE priority: 9959 volume: 0: 100% 1: 100% 0: 0.00 dB 1: 0.00 dB balance 0.00 base volume: 100% 0.00 dB volume steps: 65537 muted: no current latency: 0.00 ms max request: 0 KiB max rewind: 0 KiB monitor source: 0 sample spec: s16le 2ch 44100Hz channel map: front-left,front-right Stereo used by: 0 linked by: 0 configured latency: 0.00 ms; range is 0.50 .. 371.52 ms card: 0 <alsa_card.pci-0000_00_1b.0> module: 4 properties: alsa.resolution_bits = "16" device.api = "alsa" device.class = "sound" alsa.class = "generic" alsa.subclass = "generic-mix" alsa.name = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.id = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.subdevice = "0" alsa.subdevice_name = "subdevice #0" alsa.device = "0" alsa.card = "0" alsa.card_name = "HDA Intel" alsa.long_card_name = "HDA Intel at 0x9b500000 irq 46" alsa.driver_name = "snd_hda_intel" device.bus_path = "pci-0000:00:1b.0" sysfs.path = "/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0" device.bus = "pci" device.vendor.id = "8086" device.vendor.name = "Intel Corporation" device.product.name = "82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller" device.form_factor = "internal" device.string = "front:0" device.buffering.buffer_size = "65536" device.buffering.fragment_size = "32768" device.access_mode = "mmap+timer" device.profile.name = "analog-stereo" device.profile.description = "Analog Stereo" device.description = "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" alsa.mixer_name = "Realtek ALC889A" alsa.components = "HDA:10ec0885,106b3a00,00100103" module-udev-detect.discovered = "1" device.icon_name = "audio-card-pci" ports: analog-output-speaker: Speakers (priority 10000, available: unknown) properties: analog-output-headphones: Headphones (priority 9000, available: no) properties: active port: <analog-output-speaker> 2 and 3: Doesn't seem an permission issue, the sound is very far away (See opening paragraph). 4 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 5 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep snd /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-hwdep.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-pcm.ko [.. huge lists continues ..] /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/pdaudiocf/snd-pdaudiocf.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/vx/snd-vxpocket.ko thomas@thomas-pc:~$ 6 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Apple Inc. Device 00a4 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 46 Memory at 9b500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel 7 I guess it's supported. Linux mint and Xubuntu 13.04 had no trouble with sounds. Everything worked out of the box Thanks in advance Edit: alsa-info.sh output: WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' ALSA Information Script v 0.4.62 -------------------------------- This script visits the following commands/files to collect diagnostic information about your ALSA installation and sound related hardware. dmesg lspci lsmod aplay amixer alsactl /proc/asound/ /sys/class/sound/ ~/.asoundrc (etc.) See './alsa-info.sh --help' for command line options. WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' Automatically upload ALSA information to www.alsa-project.org? [y/N] : y Uploading information to www.alsa-project.org ... Done! Your ALSA information is located at http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=6cffc584284d4c0b266eb53249824ef83d6c4e3e Please inform the person helping you. thomas@thomas-pc:~$

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  • GitHub Integration in Windows Azure Web Site

    - by Shaun
    Microsoft had just announced an update for Windows Azure Web Site (a.k.a. WAWS). There are four major features added in WAWS which are free scaling mode, GitHub integration, custom domain and multi branches. Since I ‘m working in Node.js and I would like to have my code in GitHub and deployed automatically to my Windows Azure Web Site once I sync my code, this feature is a big good news to me.   It’s very simple to establish the GitHub integration in WAWS. First we need a clean WAWS. In its dashboard page click “Set up Git publishing”. Currently WAWS doesn’t support to change the publish setting. So if you have an existing WAWS which published by TFS or local Git then you have to create a new WAWS and set the Git publishing. Then in the deployment page we can see now WAWS supports three Git publishing modes: - Push my local files to Windows Azure: In this mode we will create a new Git repository on local machine and commit, publish our code to Windows Azure through Git command or some GUI. - Deploy from my GitHub project: In this mode we will have a Git repository created on GitHub. Once we publish our code to GitHub Windows Azure will download the code and trigger a new deployment. - Deploy from my CodePlex project: Similar as the previous one but our code would be in CodePlex repository.   Now let’s back to GitHub and create a new publish repository. Currently WAWS GitHub integration only support for public repositories. The private repositories support will be available in several weeks. We can manage our repositories in GitHub website. But as a windows geek I prefer the GUI tool. So I opened the GitHub for Windows, login with my GitHub account and select the “github” category, click the “add” button to create a new repository on GitHub. You can download the GitHub for Windows here. I specified the repository name, description, local repository, do not check the “Keep this code private”. After few seconds it will create a new repository on GitHub and associate it to my local machine in that folder. We can find this new repository in GitHub website. And in GitHub for Windows we can also find the local repository by selecting the “local” category.   Next, we need to associate this repository with our WAWS. Back to windows developer portal, open the “Deploy from my GitHub project” in the deployment page and click the “Authorize Windows Azure” link. It will bring up a new windows on GitHub which let me allow the Windows Azure application can access your repositories. After we clicked “Allow”, windows azure will retrieve all my GitHub public repositories and let me select which one I want to integrate to this WAWS. I selected the one I had just created in GitHub for Windows. So that’s all. We had completed the GitHub integration configuration. Now let’s have a try. In GitHub for Windows, right click on this local repository and click “open in explorer”. Then I added a simple HTML file. 1: <html> 2: <head> 3: </head> 4: <body> 5: <h1> 6: I came from GitHub, WOW! 7: </h1> 8: </body> 9: </html> Save it and back to GitHub for Windows, commit this change and publish. This will upload our changes to GitHub, and Windows Azure will detect this update and trigger a new deployment. If we went back to azure developer portal we can find the new deployment. And our commit message will be shown as the deployment description as well. And here is the page deployed to WAWS.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Guest Post: Instantiate SharePoint Workflow On Item Deleted

    - by Brian Jackett
    In this post, guest author Lucas Eduardo Silva will walk you through the steps of instantiating a workflow using an item event receiver from a custom list.  The ItemDeleting event will require approval via the workflow. Foreword     As you may have read recently, I injured my right hand and have had it in a cast for the past 3 weeks.  Due to this I planned to reduce my blogging while my hand heals.  As luck would have it, I was actually approached by someone who asked if they could be a guest author on my blog.  I’ve never had a guest author, but considering my injury now seemed like as good a time as ever to try it out. About the Guest Author     Lucas Eduardo Silva (email) works for CPM Braxis, a sibling company to my employer Sogeti in the CapGemini family.  Lucas and I exchanged emails a few times after one of my  recent posts and continued into various topics.  When I posted that I had injured my hand, Lucas mentioned that he had a post idea that he would like to publish and asked if it could be published on my blog.  The below content is the result of that collaboration. The Problem     Lucas has a big problem.  He has a workflow that he wants to fire every time an item is deleted from a custom list. He has already created the association in the "item deleting event", but needs to approve the deletion but the workflow is finishing first. Lucas put an onWorkflowItemChanged wait for the change of status approval, but it is not being hit. The Solution Note: This solution assumes you have the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS) installed to access the SharePoint project templates within VIsual Studio. 1 - Create a workflow that will be activated by ItemEventReceiver. 2 - Create the list by Visual Studio clicking in File -> New -> Project. Select SharePoint, then List Definition. 3 - Select the type of document to be created. List, Document Library, Wiki, Tasks, etc.. 4 - Visual Studio creates the file ItemEventReceiver.cs with all possible events in a list. 5 – In the workflow project, open the workflow.xml and copy the ID. 6 - Uncomment the ItemDeleting and insert the following code by replacing the ID that you copied earlier.   //Cancel the Exclusion properties.Cancel = true;   //Activating Exclusion Workflow SPWorkflowManager workflowManager = properties.ListItem.Web.Site.WorkflowManager;   SPWorkflowAssociation wfAssociation = properties.ListItem.ParentList.WorkflowAssociations. GetAssociationByBaseID(new Guid("37b5aea8-792a-4ded-be25-d283d9fe1f9d"));   workflowManager.StartWorkflow(properties.ListItem, wfAssociation, wfAssociation.AssociationData, true);   properties.Status = SPEventReceiverStatus.CancelNoError;   7 - properties.Cancel cancels the event being activated and executes the code that is inside the event. In the example, it cancels the deletion of the item to start the workflow that will be active as an association list with the workflow ID. 8 - Create and deploy the workflow and the list for SharePoint. 9 - Create a list through the model that was created. 10 - Enable the workflow in the list and Congratulations! Every time you try to delete the item the workflow is activated. TIP: If you really want to delete the item after the workflow is done you will have to delete the item by the workflow.   this.workflowProperties.Site.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true; this.workflowProperties.Item.Delete(); this.workflowProperties.List.Update();   Conclusion     In this guest post Lucas took you through the steps of creating an item deletion approval workflow with an event receiver.  This was also the first time I’ve had a guest author on this blog.  Many thanks to Lucas for putting together this content and offering it.  I haven’t decided how I’d handle future guest authors, mostly because I don’t know if there are others who would want to submit content.  If you do have something that you would like to guest author on my blog feel free to drop me a line and we can discuss.  As a disclaimer, there are no guarantees that it will be published though.  For now enjoy Lucas’ post and look for my return to regular blogging soon.         -Frog Out   <Update 1> If you wish to contact Lucas you can reach him at [email protected] </Update 1>

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  • SQL SERVER – An Efficiency Tool to Compare and Synchronize SQL Server Databases

    - by Pinal Dave
    There is no need to reinvent the wheel if it is already invented and if the wheel is already available at ease, there is no need to wait to grab it. Here is the similar situation. I came across a very interesting situation and I had to look for an efficient tool which can make my life easier and solve my business problem. Here is the scenario. One of the developers had deleted few rows from the very important mapping table of our development server (thankfully, it was not the production server). Though it was a development server, the entire development team had to stop working as the application started to crash on every page. Think about the lost of manpower and efficiency which we started to loose.  Pretty much every department had to stop working as our internal development application stopped working. Thankfully, we even take a backup of our development server and we had access to full backup of the entire database at 6 AM morning. We do not take as a frequent backup of development server as production server (naturally!). Even though we had a full backup, the solution was not to restore the database. Think about it, there were plenty of the other operations since the last good full backup and if we restore a full backup, we will pretty much overwrite on the top of the work done by developers since morning. Now, as restoring the full backup was not an option we decided to restore the same database on another server. Once we had restored our database to another server, the challenge was to compare the table from where the database was deleted. The mapping table from where the data were deleted contained over 5000 rows and it was humanly impossible to compare both the tables manually. Finally we decided to use efficiency tool dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server from DevArt. dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server is a powerful, fast and easy to use SQL compare tool, capable of using native SQL Server backups as metadata source. (FYI we Downloaded dbForge Data Compare) Once we discovered the product, we immediately downloaded the product and installed on our development server. After we installed the product, we were greeted with the following screen. We clicked on the New Data Comparision to start our new comparison project. It brought up following screen. Here is the best part of the product, we just had to enter our database connection username and password along with source and destination details and we are done. The entire process is very simple and self intuiting. The best part was that for the source, we can either select database or even backup. This was indeed fantastic feature. Think about this, if you have a very big database, it will take long time to restore on the server. Once it is restored, you will be able to work with it. However, when you are working with dbForge Data Compare it will accept database backup as your source or destination. Once I click on the execute it brought up following screen where it displayed an excellent summary of the data compare. It has dedicated tabs for the what is changing in what table as well had details of the changed data. The best part is that, once we had reviewed the change. We click on the Synchronize button in the menu bar and it brought up following screen. You can see that the screen has very simple straight forward but very powerful features. You can generate a script to synchronize from target to source or even from source to target. Additionally, the database is a very complicated world and there are extensive options to configure various database options on the next screen. We also have the option to either generate script or directly execute the script to target server. I like to play on the safe side and I generated the script for my synchronization and later on after review I deployed the scripts on the server. Well, my team and we were able to get going from our disaster in less than 10 minutes. There were few people in our team were indeed disappointed as they were thinking of going home early that day but in less than 10 minutes they had to get back to work. There are so many other features in  dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server, I am already planning to make this product company wide recommended product for Data Compare tool. Hats off to the team who have build this product. Here are few of the features salient features of the dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server Perform SQL Server database comparison to detect changes Compare SQL Server backups with live databases Analyze data differences between two databases Synchronize two databases that went out of sync Restore data of a particular table from the backup Generate data comparison reports in Excel and HTML formats Copy look-up data from development database to production Automate routine data synchronization tasks with command-line interface Go Ahead and Download the dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server right away. It is always a good idea to get familiar with the important tools before hand instead of learning it under pressure of disaster. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

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  • Gene Hunt Says:

    - by BizTalk Visionary
    "She's as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot"   "He's got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course" "You so much as belch out of line and I'll have your scrotum on a barbed wire plate" "Let's go play slappyface" "your surrounded by armed barstewards" “Right, get out and find this murdering scum right now!” [pause] “Scratch that, we start 9am sharp tomorrow, it's beer-o-clock.” "So then Cartwright, you're such a good Detective.... Go and Detect me a packet of Garibaldies" "You're not the one who is going to have to knit himself a new arsehole after 25 years of aggressive male love in prison" “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “They reckon you've got concussion - but personally, I couldn't give a tart's furry cup if half your brains are falling out. Don't ever waltz into my kingdom playing king of the jungle.” “You great... soft... sissy... girlie... nancy... french... bender... Man-United supporting POOF!!” “Drugs eh? What's the point. They make you forget, make you talk funny, make you see things that aren't there. My old grandma got all of that for free when she had a stroke.” “He's Dead! It's quite serious!” “Fanny in the flat...Nice Work” “SoopaDoopa” “Tits in a Jumper!” “Drop your weapons! You are surrounded by armed bastards!” “It's 1973, almost dinnertime. I'm 'avin 'oops!” “Trust the Gene Genie!” “I wanna hump Britt Ekland...What're we gonna do...!” “Was that 'E' and you don't know the rest?! or you going 'Eeee, I Dunno'” “Good Girl! Prostate probe and no jelly. “ “Give over, it's nothing like Spain!” “I'll come over your houses and stamp on all your toys!” “The Wizard will sort it out. It's cos of the wonderful things he does” “Cartwright can jump up and down on his knackers!” “It's not a windup love, he really thinks like this!” “Women! You can't say two words to them” “I was thinking, maybe, a Berni Inn!” “If I wanted a bollocking for drinking too much...!” “Shhhh...hear that...that's the sound of this case being closed! “Chicken!? In a basket!?” “Seems a large quantity of cocaine...” “You probably thought he kept his cock in his keks!” “The tail-end of Rays demotion speech!” “Stephen Warren is gay!?” “You're a smart boy, use your initiative!” “Don't be such a Jessie!” “I find the idea of a bird brushing her teeth...!” “Never been tempted to the Magic talcum powder?” “Make sure she's got nice tits!” “You're more likely to find an ostrich with a plum up it's arse!” “Drink this lot under the table and have a pint on the way home!” “Never be a female Prime Minister!” “Pub? Pub! pub!.....Pub!” “Thou shalt not suck off rent boys!” “The number for the special clinic is on the notice board!” “If me uncle had tits, would he be me auntie!” “Got your vicars in a twist!” “We Done?!” “Your mates got balls...If they were any bigger he'd need a wheelbarrow!” “The Ending - from 'I want to go home' to the end music.”

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  • Microsoft Sql Server driver for Nodejs - Part 2

    - by chanderdhall
    Nodejs, Sql server and Json response with Rest This post is part 2 of Microsoft Sql Server driver for Node js.In this post we will look at the JSON responses from the Microsoft Sql Server driver for Node js. Pre-requisites: If you have read the Part 1 of the series, you should be good. We will be using a framework for Rest within Nodejs - Restify, but that would need no prior learning. Restify: Restify is a simple node module for building RESTful services. It is slimmer than Express. Express is a complete module that has all what you need to create a full-blown browser app. However, Restify does not have additional overhead of templating, rendering etc that would be needed if your app has views. So, as the name suggests it's an awesome framework for building RESTful services and is very light-weight. Set up - You can continue with the same directory or project structure we had in the previous post, or can start a new one. Install restify using npm and you are good to go. npm install restify Go to Server.js and include Restify in your solution. Then create the server object using restify.CreateServer() - SLICK - ha? var restify = require('restify'); var server = restify.createServer(); server.listen(8080, function () { console.log('%s listening at %s', server.name, server.url); }); Then make sure you provide a port for the Server to listen at. The call back function is optional but helps you for debugging purposes. Once you are done, save the file and then go to the command prompt and hit 'node server.js' and you should see the following:   To test the server, go to your browser and type the address 'http://localhost:8080/' and oops you will see an error.   Why is that? - Well because we haven't defined any routes. Let's go ahead and create a route. To begin with I'd like to return whatever is typed in the url after my name and the following code should do it. server.get('/ChanderDhall/:status', function respond(req, res, next) { res.end("hello " + req.params.name + "") }); You can also avoid writing call backs inline. Something like this. function respond(req, res, next) { res.end("Chander Dhall " + req.params.name + ""); } server.get('/hello/:name', respond); Now if you go ahead and type http://localhost:8080/ChanderDhall/LovesNode you will get the response 'Chander Dhall loves node'. NOTE: Make sure your url has the right case as it's case-sensitive. You could have also typed it in as 'server.get('/chanderdhall/:name', respond);' Stored procedure: We've talked a lot about Restify now, but keep in mind the post is about being able to use Sql server with Node and return JSON. To see this in action, let's go ahead and create another route to a list of Employees from a stored procedure. server.get('/Employees', Employees); The following code will return a JSON response.  function Employees(req, res, next) { res.header("Content-Type: application/json"); //Need to specify the Content-Type which is //JSON in our case. sql.open(conn_str, function (err, conn) { if (err) { //Logs an error console.log("Error opening the database connection!"); return; } console.log("before query!"); conn.queryRaw("exec sp_GetEmployees", function (err, results) { if (err) { //Connection is open but an error occurs whileWhat else can be done? May be create a formatter or may be even come up with a hypermedia type but that may upset some pragmatists. Well, that's going to be a totally different discussion and is really not part of this series. Summary: We've discussed how to execute a stored procedure using Microsoft Sql Server driver for Node. Also, we have discussed how to format and send out a clean JSON to the app calling this API.  

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  • Convert a PDF eBook to ePub Format

    - by Matthew Guay
    Would you like to read a PDF eBook on an eReader or mobile device, but aren’t happy with the performance? Here’s how you can convert your PDFs to the popular ePub format so you can easily read them on any device. PDFs are a popular format for eBooks since they render the same on any device and can preserve the exact layout of the print book.  However, this benefit is their major disadvantage on mobile devices, as you often have to zoom and pan back and forth to see everything on the page.  ePub files, on the other hand, are an increasingly popular option. They can reflow to fill your screen instead of sticking to a strict layout style.  With the free Calibre program, you can quickly convert your PDF eBooks to ePub format. Getting Started Download the Calibre installer (link below) for your operating system, and install as normal.  Calibre works on recent versions of Windows, OS X, and Linux.  The Calibre installer is very streamlined, so the install process was quite quick. Calibre is a great application for organizing your eBooks.  It can automatically sort your books by their metadata, and even display their covers in a Coverflow-style viewer. To add an eBook to your library, simply drag-and-drop the file into the Calibre window, or click Add books at the top.  Here you can choose to add all the books from a folder and more. Calibre will then add the book(s) to your library, import the associated metadata, and organize them in the catalog. Convert your Books Once you’ve imported your books into Calibre, it’s time to convert them to the format you want.  Select the book or books you want to convert, and click Convert E-books.  Select whether you want to convert them individually or bulk convert them. The convertor window has lots of options, so you can get your ePub book exactly like you want.  You can simply click Ok and go with the defaults, or you can tweak the settings. Do note that the conversion will only work successfully with PDFs that contain actual text.  Some PDFs are actually images scanned in from the original books; these will appear just like the PDF after the conversion, and won’t be any easier to read. On the first tab, you’ll notice that Calibri will repopulate most of the metadata fields with info from your PDF.  It will also use the first page of the PDF as the cover.  Edit any of the information that may be incorrect, and add any additional information you want associated with the book. If you want to convert your eBook to a different format other than ePub, Calibri’s got you covered, too.  On the top right, you can choose to output the converted eBook into a many different file formats, including the Kindle-friendly MOBI format. One other important settings page is the Structure Detection tab.  Here you can choose to have it remove headers and footers in the converted book, as well as automatically detect chapter breaks. Click Ok when you’ve finished choosing your settings and Calibre will convert the book.  This may take a few minutes, depending on the size of the PDF.  If the conversion seems to be taking too long, you can click Show job details for more information on the progress.   The conversion usually works good, but we did have one job freeze on us.  When we checked the job details, it indicated that the PDF was copy-protected.  Most PDF eBooks, however, worked fine. Now, back in the main Calibri window, select your book and save it to disk.  You can choose to save only the EPUB format, or you can select Save to disk to save all formats of the book to your computer. You can also view the ePub file directly in Calibri’s built-in eBook viewer.  This is the PDF book we converted, and it looks fairly good in the converted format.  It does have some odd line breaks and some misplaced numbers, but on the whole, the converted book is much easier to read, especially on small mobile devices.   Even images get included inline, so you shouldn’t be missing anything from the original eBook. Conclusion Calibri makes it simple to read your eBooks in any format you need. It is a project that is in constant development, and updates regularly adding better stability and features.  Whether you want to ready your PDF eBooks on a Sony Reader, Kindle, netbook or Smartphone, your books will now be more accessible than ever.  And with thousands of free PDF eBooks out there, you’ll be sure to always have something to read. If you’d like some Geeky PDF eBooks, Microsoft Press is offering a number of free PDF eBooks right now.  Check them out at this link (Account Required). Download the Calibre eBook program Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Format a String as Currency in C#Convert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 FormatShare OneNote 2010 Notebooks with OneNote 2007Install an RPM Package on Ubuntu LinuxConvert PDF Files to Word Documents and Other Formats TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos

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  • Spotlight on Claims: Serving Customers Under Extreme Conditions

    - by [email protected]
    Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, recently attended the CII Spotlight on Claims event in London. Bad weather and its implications for the insurance industry have become very topical as the frequency and diversity of natural disasters - including rains, wind and snow - has surged across Europe this winter. On England's wettest day on record, the county of Cumbria was flooded with 12 inches of rain within 24 hours. Freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on European travel, causing high speed TVG trains to break down and stranding hundreds of passengers under the English Chanel in a tunnel all night long without heat or electricity. A storm named Xynthia thrashed France and surrounding countries with hurricane force, flooding ports and killing 51 people. After the Spring Equinox, insurers may have thought the worst had past. Then came along Eyjafjallajökull, spewing out vast quantities of volcanic ash in what is turning out to be one of most costly natural disasters in history. Such extreme events challenge insurance companies' ability to service their customers just when customers need their help most. When you add economic downturn and competitive pressures to the mix, insurers are further stretched and required to continually learn and innovate to meet high customer expectations with reduced budgets. These and other issues were hot topics of discussion at the recent "Spotlight on Claims" seminar in London, focused on how weather is affecting claims and the insurance industry. The event was organized by the CII (Chartered Insurance Institute), a group with 90,000 members. CII has been at the forefront in setting professional standards for the insurance industry for over a century. Insurers came to the conference to hear how they could better serve their customers under extreme weather conditions, learn from the experience of their peers, and hear about technological breakthroughs in climate modeling, geographic intelligence and IT. Customer case studies at the conference highlighted the importance of effective and constant communication in handling the overflow of catastrophe related claims. First and foremost is the need to rapidly establish initial communication with claimants to build their confidence in a positive outcome. Ongoing communication then needs to be continued throughout the claims cycle to mange expectations and maintain ownership of the process from start to finish. Strong internal communication to support frontline staff was also deemed critical to successful crisis management, as was communication with the broader insurance ecosystem to tap into extended resources and business intelligence. Advances in technology - such web based systems to access policies and enter first notice of loss in the field - as well as customer-focused self-service portals and multichannel alerts, are instrumental in improving customer satisfaction and helping insurers to deal with the claims surge, which often can reach four or more times normal workloads. Dynamic models of the global climate system can now be used to better understand weather-related risks, and as these models mature it is hoped that they will soon become more accurate in predicting the timing of catastrophic events. Geographic intelligence is also being used within a claims environment to better assess loss reserves and detect fraud. Despite these advances in dealing with catastrophes and predicting their occurrence, there will never be a substitute for qualified front line staff to deal with customers. In light of pressures to streamline efficiency, there was debate as to whether outsourcing was the solution, or whether it was better to build on the people you have. In the final analysis, nearly everybody agreed that in the future insurance companies would have to work better and smarter to keep on top. An appeal was also made for greater collaboration amongst industry participants in dealing with the extreme conditions and systematic stress brought on by natural disasters. It was pointed out that the public oftentimes judged the industry as a whole rather than the individual carriers when it comes to freakish events, and that all would benefit at such times from the pooling of limited resources and professional skills rather than competing in silos for competitive advantage - especially the end customer. One case study that stood out was on how The Motorists Insurance Group was able to power through one of the most devastating catastrophes in recent years - Hurricane Ike. The keys to Motorists' success were superior people, processes and technology. They did a lot of upfront planning and invested in their people, creating a healthy team environment that delivered "max service" even when they were experiencing the same level of devastation as the rest of the population. Processes were rapidly adapted to meet the challenge of the catastrophe and continually adapted to Ike's specific conditions as they evolved. Technology was fundamental to the execution of their strategy, enabling them anywhere access, on the fly reassigning of resources and rapid training to augment the work force. You can learn more about the Motorists experience by watching this video. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.

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  • Find only physical network adapters with WMI Win32_NetworkAdapter class

    - by Mladen Prajdic
    WMI is Windows Management Instrumentation infrastructure for managing data and machines. We can access it by using WQL (WMI querying language or SQL for WMI). One thing to remember from the WQL link is that it doesn't support ORDER BY. This means that when you do SELECT * FROM wmiObject, the returned order of the objects is not guaranteed. It can return adapters in different order based on logged-in user, permissions of that user, etc… This is not documented anywhere that I've looked and is derived just from my observations. To get network adapters we have to query the Win32_NetworkAdapter class. This returns us all network adapters that windows detect, real and virtual ones, however it only supplies IPv4 data. I've tried various methods of combining properties that are common on all systems since Windows XP. The first thing to do to remove all virtual adapters (like tunneling, WAN miniports, etc…) created by Microsoft. We do this by adding WHERE Manufacturer!='Microsoft' to our WMI query. This greatly narrows the number of adapters we have to work with. Just on my machine it went from 20 adapters to 5. What was left were one real physical Realtek LAN adapter, 2 virtual adapters installed by VMware and 2 virtual adapters installed by VirtualBox. If you read the Win32_NetworkAdapter help page you'd notice that there's an AdapterType that enumerates various adapter types like LAN or Wireless and AdapterTypeID that gives you the same information as AdapterType only in integer form. The dirty little secret is that these 2 properties don't work. They are both hardcoded, AdapterTypeID to "0" and AdapterType to "Ethernet 802.3". The only exceptions I've seen so far are adapters that have no values at all for the two properties, "RAS Async Adapter" that has values of AdapterType = "Wide Area Network" and AdapterTypeID = "3" and various tunneling adapters that have values of AdapterType = "Tunnel" and AdapterTypeID = "15". In the help docs there isn't even a value for 15. So this property was of no help. Next property to give hope is NetConnectionId. This is the name of the network connection as it appears in the Control Panel -> Network Connections. Problem is this value is also localized into various languages and can have different names for different connection. So both of these properties don't help and we haven't even started talking about eliminating virtual adapters. Same as the previous one this property was also of no help. Next two properties I checked were ConfigManagerErrorCode and NetConnectionStatus in hopes of finding disabled and disconnected adapters. If an adapter is enabled but disconnected the ConfigManagerErrorCode = 0 with different NetConnectionStatus. If the adapter is disabled it reports ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22. This looked like a win by using (ConfigManagerErrorCode=0 or ConfigManagerErrorCode=22) in our condition. This way we get enabled (connected and disconnected adapters). Problem with all of the above properties is that none of them filter out the virtual adapters installed by virtualization software like VMware and VirtualBox. The last property to give hope is PNPDeviceID. There's an interesting observation about physical and virtual adapters with this property. Every virtual adapter PNPDeviceID starts with "ROOT\". Even VMware and VirtualBox ones. There were some really, really old physical adapters that had PNPDeviceID starting with "ROOT\" but those were in pre win XP era AFAIK. Since my minimum system to check was Windows XP SP2 I didn't have to worry about those. The only virtual adapter I've seen to not have PNPDeviceID start with "ROOT\" is the RAS Async Adapter for Wide Area Network. But because it is made by Microsoft we've eliminated it with the first condition for the manufacturer. Using the PNPDeviceID has so far proven to be really effective and I've tested it on over 20 different computers of various configurations from Windows XP laptops with wireless and bluetooth cards to virtualized Windows 2008 R2 servers. So far it always worked as expected. I will appreciate you letting me know if you find a configuration where it doesn't work. Let's see some C# code how to do this: ManagementObjectSearcher mos = null;// WHERE Manufacturer!='Microsoft' removes all of the // Microsoft provided virtual adapters like tunneling, miniports, and Wide Area Network adapters.mos = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE Manufacturer != 'Microsoft'");// Trying the ConfigManagerErrorCode and NetConnectionStatus variations // proved to still not be enough and it returns adapters installed by // the virtualization software like VMWare and VirtualBox// ConfigManagerErrorCode = 0 -> Device is working properly. This covers enabled and/or disconnected devices// ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22 AND NetConnectionStatus = 0 -> Device is disabled and Disconnected. // Some virtual devices report ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22 (disabled) and some other NetConnectionStatus than 0mos = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE Manufacturer != 'Microsoft' AND (ConfigManagerErrorCode = 0 OR (ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22 AND NetConnectionStatus = 0))");// Final solution with filtering on the Manufacturer and PNPDeviceID not starting with "ROOT\"// Physical devices have PNPDeviceID starting with "PCI\" or something else besides "ROOT\"mos = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE Manufacturer != 'Microsoft' AND NOT PNPDeviceID LIKE 'ROOT\\%'");// Get the physical adapters and sort them by their index. // This is needed because they're not sorted by defaultIList<ManagementObject> managementObjectList = mos.Get() .Cast<ManagementObject>() .OrderBy(p => Convert.ToUInt32(p.Properties["Index"].Value)) .ToList();// Let's just show all the properties for all physical adapters.foreach (ManagementObject mo in managementObjectList){ foreach (PropertyData pd in mo.Properties) Console.WriteLine(pd.Name + ": " + (pd.Value ?? "N/A"));}   That's it. Hope this helps you in some way.

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  • Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL Definitions: CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language) is an XML based markup language used in Microsoft SharePoint technologies  Anonymous: A camel is a horse designed by committee  Dov Trietsch: A CAML is a HORS designed by Microsoft  I was advised against putting any Camel and Sphinx rhymes in here. Look it up in Google!  _____ Now that we have dispensed with the dromedary jokes (BTW, I have many more, but they are not fit to print!), here is an interesting problem and its solution.  We have built a list where the title must be kept unique so I needed to verify the existence (or absence) of a list item with a particular title. Two methods came to mind:  1: Span the list until the title is found (result = found) or until the list ends (result = not found). This is an algorithm of complexity O(N) and for long lists it is a performance sucker. 2: Use a CAML query instead. Here, for short list we’ll encounter some overhead, but because the query results in an SQL query on the content database, it is of complexity O(LogN), which is significantly better and scales perfectly. Obviously I decided to go with the latter and this is where the CAML s--t hit the fan.   A CAML query returns a SPListItemCollection and I simply checked its Count. If it was 0, the item did not already exist and it was safe to add a new item with the given title. Otherwise I cancelled the operation and warned the user. The trouble was that I always got a positive. Most of the time a false positive. The count was greater than 0 regardles of the title I checked (except when the list was empty, which happens only once). This was very disturbing indeed. To solve my immediate problem which was speedy delivery, I reverted to the “Span the list” approach, but the problem bugged me, so I wrote a little console app by which I tested and tweaked and tested, time and again, until I found the solution. Yes, one can pass the proverbial CAML thru the ey of the needle (e’s missing on purpose).  So here are my conclusions:  CAML that does not work:  Note: QT is my quote:  char QT = Convert.ToChar((int)34); string titleQuery = "<Query>><Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where></Query>"; titleQuery += "<ViewFields><FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/></ViewFields>";  Why? Even though U2U generates it, the <Query> and </Query> tags do not belong in the query that you pass. Start your query with the <Where> clause.  Also the <ViewFiels> clause does not belong. I used this clause to limit the returned collection to a single column, and I still wish to do it. I’ll show how this is done a bit later.   When you use the <Query> </Query> tags in you query, it’s as if you did not specify the query at all. What you get is the all inclusive default query for the list. It returns evey column and every item. It is expensive for both server and network because it does all the extra processing and eats plenty of bandwidth.   Now, here is the CAML that works  string titleQuery = "<Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where>";  You’ll also notice that inside the unusable <ViewFields> clause above, we have a <FieldRef> clause. This is what we pass to the SPQuery object. Here is how:  SPQuery query = new SPQuery(); query.Query = titleQuery; query.ViewFields = "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; query.RowLimit = 1; SPListItemCollection col = masterList.GetItems(query);  Two thing to note: we enter the view fields into the SPQuery object and we also limited the number of rows that the query returns. The latter is not always done, but in an existence test, there is no point in returning hundreds of rows. The query will now return one item or none, which is all we need in order to verify the existence (or non-existence) of items. Limiting the number of columns and the number of rows is a great performance enhancer. That’s all folks!!

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  • F# for the C# Programmer

    - by mbcrump
    Are you a C# Programmer and can’t make it past a day without seeing or hearing someone mention F#?  Today, I’m going to walk you through your first F# application and give you a brief introduction to the language. Sit back this will only take about 20 minutes. Introduction Microsoft's F# programming language is a functional language for the .NET framework that was originally developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge by Don Syme. In October 2007, the senior vice president of the developer division at Microsoft announced that F# was being officially productized to become a fully supported .NET language and professional developers were hired to create a team of around ten people to build the product version. In September 2008, Microsoft released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP), an official beta release, of the F# distribution . In December 2008, Microsoft announced that the success of this CTP had encouraged them to escalate F# and it is now will now be shipped as one of the core languages in Visual Studio 2010 , alongside C++, C# 4.0 and VB. The F# programming language incorporates many state-of-the-art features from programming language research and ossifies them in an industrial strength implementation that promises to revolutionize interactive, parallel and concurrent programming. Advantages of F# F# is the world's first language to combine all of the following features: Type inference: types are inferred by the compiler and generic definitions are created automatically. Algebraic data types: a succinct way to represent trees. Pattern matching: a comprehensible and efficient way to dissect data structures. Active patterns: pattern matching over foreign data structures. Interactive sessions: as easy to use as Python and Mathematica. High performance JIT compilation to native code: as fast as C#. Rich data structures: lists and arrays built into the language with syntactic support. Functional programming: first-class functions and tail calls. Expressive static type system: finds bugs during compilation and provides machine-verified documentation. Sequence expressions: interrogate huge data sets efficiently. Asynchronous workflows: syntactic support for monadic style concurrent programming with cancellations. Industrial-strength IDE support: multithreaded debugging, and graphical throwback of inferred types and documentation. Commerce friendly design and a viable commercial market. Lets try a short program in C# then F# to understand the differences. Using C#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: Sample Program. using System;   namespace ConsoleApplication9 {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             var a = 2;             Console.WriteLine(a);             Console.ReadLine();         }     } } A breeze right? 14 Lines of code. We could have condensed it a bit by removing the “using” statment and tossing the namespace. But this is the typical C# program. Using F#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: To start, open Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008. Note: If using VS2008, then please download the SDK first before getting started. If you are using VS2010 then you are already setup and ready to go. So, click File-> New Project –> Other Languages –> Visual F# –> Windows –> F# Application. You will get the screen below. Go ahead and enter a name and click OK. Now, you will notice that the Solution Explorer contains the following: Double click the Program.fs and enter the following information. Hit F5 and it should run successfully. Sample Program. open System let a = 2        Console.WriteLine a As Shown below: Hmm, what? F# did the same thing in 3 lines of code. Show me the interactive evaluation that I keep hearing about. The F# development environment for Visual Studio 2010 provides two different modes of execution for F# code: Batch compilation to a .NET executable or DLL. (This was accomplished above). Interactive evaluation. (Demo is below) The interactive session provides a > prompt, requires a double semicolon ;; identifier at the end of a code snippet to force evaluation, and returns the names (if any) and types of resulting definitions and values. To access the F# prompt, in VS2010 Goto View –> Other Window then F# Interactive. Once you have the interactive window type in the following expression: 2+3;; as shown in the screenshot below: I hope this guide helps you get started with the language, please check out the following books for further information. F# Books for further reading   Foundations of F# Author: Robert Pickering An introduction to functional programming with F#. Including many samples, this book walks through the features of the F# language and libraries, and covers many of the .NET Framework features which can be leveraged with F#.       Functional Programming for the Real World: With Examples in F# and C# Authors: Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet An introduction to functional programming for existing C# developers written by Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet. This book explains the core principles using both C# and F#, shows how to use functional ideas when designing .NET applications and presents practical examples such as design of domain specific language, development of multi-core applications and programming of reactive applications.

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  • Changing enum in a different class for screen

    - by user2434321
    I'm trying to make a start menu for my game and my code uses Enum's to moniter the screen state. Now i want to change the screenstate declared in the main class, in my Background class Screen screen = new Screen(); is declared in the Game1 class Background(ref screen); This is in the update method for the Background Class KeyboardState keystate = Keyboard.GetState(); switch (screen) { case Screen.Start: if (isPressed && keystate.IsKeyUp(Keys.Up) && keystate.IsKeyUp(Keys.Down) && keystate.IsKeyUp(Keys.Enter)) { isPressed = false; } if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Down) && isPressed != true) { if (menuState == MenuState.Options) menuState = MenuState.Credits; if (menuState == MenuState.Play) menuState = MenuState.Options; isPressed = true; } if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up) && isPressed != true) { if (menuState == MenuState.Options) menuState = MenuState.Play; if (menuState == MenuState.Credits) menuState = MenuState.Options; isPressed = true; } switch (menuState) { case MenuState.Play: arrowRect.X = 450; arrowRect.Y = 220; if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Enter) && isPressed != true) screen = Screen.Play; break; case MenuState.Options: arrowRect.X = 419; arrowRect.Y = 340; if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Enter) && isPressed != true) screen = Screen.Options; break; case MenuState.Credits: arrowRect.X = 425; arrowRect.Y = 460; if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Enter) && isPressed != true) screen = Screen.Credits; break; } break; } } For some reason when I play this and I hit the enter button the Background class's screen is changed but the main class's screen isn't how can i change this? EDIT 1* class Background { private Texture2D background; private Rectangle backgroundRect; private Texture2D arrow; private Rectangle arrowRect; private Screen screen; private MenuState menuState; private bool isPressed = false; public Screen getScreenState(ref Screen screen) { this.screen = screen; return this.screen; } public Background(ref Screen screen) { this.screen = screen; } public void Update() { KeyboardState keystate = Keyboard.GetState(); switch (screen) { case Screen.Start: if (isPressed && keystate.IsKeyUp(Keys.Up) && keystate.IsKeyUp(Keys.Down) && keystate.IsKeyUp(Keys.Enter)) { isPressed = false; } if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Down) && isPressed != true) { if (menuState == MenuState.Options) menuState = MenuState.Credits; if (menuState == MenuState.Play) menuState = MenuState.Options; isPressed = true; } if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up) && isPressed != true) { if (menuState == MenuState.Options) menuState = MenuState.Play; if (menuState == MenuState.Credits) menuState = MenuState.Options; isPressed = true; } switch (menuState) { case MenuState.Play: arrowRect.X = 450; arrowRect.Y = 220; if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Enter) && isPressed != true) screen = Screen.Play; break; case MenuState.Options: arrowRect.X = 419; arrowRect.Y = 340; if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Enter) && isPressed != true) screen = Screen.Options; break; case MenuState.Credits: arrowRect.X = 425; arrowRect.Y = 460; if (keystate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Enter) && isPressed != true) screen = Screen.Credits; break; } break; case Screen.Pause: break; case Screen.Over: break; } } public void LoadStartContent(ContentManager Content, GraphicsDeviceManager graphics) { background = Content.Load<Texture2D>("startBackground"); arrow = Content.Load<Texture2D>("arrow"); backgroundRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width, graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height); arrowRect = new Rectangle(450, 225, arrow.Width, arrow.Height); screen = Screen.Start; } public void LoadPlayContent(ContentManager Content, GraphicsDeviceManager graphics) { background = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Background"); backgroundRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width, graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height); screen = Screen.Play; } public void LoadOverContent(ContentManager Content, GraphicsDeviceManager graphics) { } public void Draw(SpriteBatch spritebatch) { if (screen == Screen.Start) { spritebatch.Draw(background, backgroundRect, Color.White); spritebatch.Draw(arrow, arrowRect, Color.White); } else spritebatch.Draw(background, backgroundRect, Color.White); } } Thats my background class!

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  • Killing Stuck Child JVM's

    - by ACShorten
    Note: This facility only applies to Oracle Utilities Application Framework products using COBOL. In some situations, the Child JVM's may spin. This causes multiple startup/shutdown Child JVM messages to be displayed and recursive child JVM's to be initiated and shunned. If the following: Unable to establish connection on port …. after waiting .. seconds.The issue can be caused intermittently by CPU spins in connection to the creation of new processes, specifically Child JVMs. Recursive (or double) invocation of the System.exit call in the remote JVM may be caused by a Process.destroy call that the parent JVM always issues when shunning a JVM. The issue may happen when the thread in the parent JVM that is responsible for the recycling gets stuck and it affects all child JVMs. If this issue occurs at your site then there are a number of options to address the issue: Configure an Operating System level kill command to force the Child JVM to be shunned when it becomes stuck. Configure a Process.destroy command to be used if the kill command is not configured or desired. Specify a time tolerance to detect stuck threads before issuing the Process.destroy or kill commands. Note: This facility is also used when the Parent JVM is also shutdown to ensure no zombie Child JVM's exit. The following additional settings must be added to the spl.properties for the Business Application Server to use this facility: spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command – Specify the command to kill the Child JVM process. This can be a command or specify a script to execute to provide additional information. The kill.command property can accept two arguments, {pid} and {jvmNumber}, in the specified string. The arguments must be enclosed in curly braces as shown here. Note: The PID will be appended to the killcmd string, unless the {pid} and {jvmNumber} arguments are specified. The jvmNumber can be useful if passed to a script for logging purposes. Note: If a script is used it must be in the path and be executable by the OS user running the system. spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled – Specify whether to use the Process.destroy command instead of the kill command. Specify true or false. Default value is false. Note: Unless otherwise required, it is recommended to use the kill command option if shunning JVM's is an issue. There this value can remain its default value, false, unless otherwise required. spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.delaysecs – Specify the number of seconds to wait for the Child JVM to terminate naturally before issuing the Process.destroy or kill commands. Default is 10 seconds. For example: spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command=kill -9 {pid} {jvmNumber}spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled=falsespl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.delaysecs=10 When a Child JVM is to be recycled, these properties are inspected and the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command, executed if provided. This is done after waiting for spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.delaysecs seconds to give the JVM time to shut itself down. The spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled property must be set to true AND the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command omitted for the original Process.destroy command to be used on the process. Note: By default the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy enabled is set to false and is therefore disabled. If neither spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command nor spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled is specified, child JVMs will not beforcibly killed. They will be left to shut themselves down (which may lead to orphan JVMs). If both are specified, the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command is preferred and spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled defaulted to false.It is recommended to invoke a script to issue the direct kill command instead of directly using the kill -9 commands.For example, the following sample script ensures that the process Id is an active cobjrun process before issuing the kill command: forcequit.sh #!/bin/shTHETIME=`date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"`if [ "$1" = "" ]then  echo "$THETIME: Process Id is required" >>$SPLSYSTEMLOGS/forcequit.log  exit 1fijavaexec=cobjrunps e $1 | grep -c $javaexecif [ $? = 0 ]then  echo "$THETIME: Process $1 is an active $javaexec process -- issuing kill-9 $1" >>$SPLSYSTEMLOGS/forcequit.log  kill -9 $1exit 0else  echo "$THETIME: Process id $1 is not a $javaexec process or not active --  kill will not be issued" >>$SPLSYSTEMLOGS/forcequit.logexit 1fi This script's name would then be specified as the value for the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command property, for example: spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command=forcequit.sh The forcequit script does not have any explicit parameters but pid is passed automatically. To use the jvmNumber parameter it must explicitly specified in the command. For example, to call script forcequit.sh and pass it the pid and the child JVM number, specify it as follows: spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command=forcequit.sh {pid} {jvmNumber} The script can then use the JVM number for logging purposes or to further ensure that the correct pid is being killed.If the arguments are omitted, the pid is automatically appended to the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command string. To use this facility the following patches must be installed: Patch 13719584 for Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1, Patches 13684595 and 13634933 for Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.2 Group Fix 4 (as Patch 13640668) for Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.1.

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  • Happy 3rd Birthday SilverlightCream!

    - by Dave Campbell
    Happy 3rd Birthday!     Yesterday (May 16) was the 'Birthday' of SilverlightCream, which started just after MIX in 2007 with a post "Interesting Silverlight posts today: Silverlight Control & Silverlight Pad". Too many good posts flying around led me to want to archive them, particularly since I was being aggregated at a new site Silverlight.net, and I could give some of that 'reach' to the community. Saturday's post was number 862, and as of that post, there were 5697 blog posts archived in the database all tagged up and searchable at SilverlightCream.com using the search page. The search needs to be better, and that's another discussion, but it does work. The blog didn't begin life as the SilverlightCream blog, as is obvious from the name, but once I realized people were following it closely, I've tried to keep the signal-to-noise ratio very high. I even secured another blog for when I just want to rant about something to keep that stuff out of this one :) If you've been around since MIX07 days you've heard all this, but after talking to some people at MIX10 I realized not everyone knows all the ways the information is presented, so I figured doing a post like this once a year probably isn't a bad idea :) I scrounge through an ever-growing list of blogs (right now sitting at 505) looking for good stuff. I try to spin through the list every day, but with the list growing that large, it's getting tough. I usually use it as a background task while working or watching TV. If I just sit and go through the blogs it takes about an hour. The list is long enough now that from time to time, I'll only get partway through it and have 10 to 13 entries, so I'll just stop there and go on the next day... I don't like to have more than 15 in any single post. It's all pattern recognition as in "seen that", "seen that", "that's new", etc... so if you're a blogger, look at a heading below for some comments about blogging from my perspective. When I see something new, I make sure you're not pulling a 'Mike Taulty' on me and dumping 6 or 8 new posts in one day :), and I tag the ones I want to review. If there's not a lot going on, I may just push the posts as I come across them. Some days there may be 60 posts in that 'to review' list! Some are non-Silverlight, some are essentially duplicates of others, some are demos, ads, new releases of something, session materials, etc. I push lots of material into a database at WynApse.com, and the "Tagged Posts" menu on the left sidebar there takes you to a tag cloud of (at this very moment) "9224 articles tagged 13915 different ways using 459 unique tags". There are links in there on Gibson guitars, Jazz Guitar instructional stuff, Ford F-250 links, and tons of technical and non-technical stuff I've been aggregating for about 5 years now. So when I decide to blog (or shoutout) something, I first push it into the database at WynApse.com. Then I tag it all up and push it into the database at SilverlightCream.com. Then it gets pushed to @SilverlightNews. For a little over a year now, we're tracking unique IP hits on posts launched from either the blog post or from one of the SilverlightCream.com pages, and the posts with top hits from unique IP addresses in the last 7 days are displayed in a 'Skim' page at SilverlightCream... and that page needs work as well. The Skim page and tracking was the brainchild of my buddy Michael Washington. What I blog/shoutout After some time doing posts, I decided there were things that probably have no need to be searchable, but are good information, so I post those as 'Shoutouts'. Eventually I also decided the Shoutouts should get posted to @SilverlightNews, and that's now taking place. Notes to bloggers Remember I said spinning throught the Big List-o-BlogsTM is pattern recognition... that means I don't spend a lot of time on any individual blog deciding if it has new content. If you're familiar with the term 'Above the Fold', then you're probably ok. If I have to scroll the page to see if there's something new, or wade through some maze of menus, I'm probably going to miss new stuff. Likewise if you only show the latest on the front page and make it a puzzle to find the rest of them, or if you make the titles and initial graphics almost identical to the previous article, I'll miss it. Another thing is name/brand-recognition. Far be it for me (WynApse) to comment on someone blogging with a pseudonym, but if you want to get get some recognition, you are going to want your name to be available somewhere. I can think right off the top of my head of a couple good blogs that I have no idea of the individuals' real names. I can pull that off a bit because I've been around so long almost everyone knows who I am, but if you're new to the blog-o-sphere, being able to be name-recognized is as important as getting your brand out there. Kick my tires Finally, stuff happens... I may hit the wrong key and delete your blog, or a post might slip past me and I not realize it's new because of the naming, and never blog it. If you think I missed something, send me an email or use the submit page at SilverlightCream.com. Some bloggers have figured out that if they submit (one way or another) to me, their posts will go out next. I try to honor anyone that takes the time to submit with a quicker 'Cream posting. Thanks! Finally, thanks to everyone that contributes to the community as a whole... the blogs, the videos, and the presentations. A special thanks to everyone that reads SilverlightCream, or follows @WynApse or @SilverlightNews. Keep it all coming, and... Stay in the 'Light

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  • What Will Happen to Real Estate Leases when Operating Leases are Gone?

    - by Theresa Hickman
    Many people are concerned about what will happen to real estate leases when FASB and IASB abolish operating leases. They plan to unveil the proposed standards on treating leases this summer as part of the convergence project but no "finalized ruling" is expected for at least a year because it will need to get formal consensus from many players, such as the SEC, American Association of Investors, Congress, the Big Four, American Associate of Realtors, the international equivalents of these, etc. If your accounting is a bit rusty, an Operating Lease is where you lease equipment or some asset for a shorter period than the actual (expected) life of the asset and then give the asset back while it still has some useful life in it. (Think leasing a car). Because an Operating Lease does not contain any of the provisions that would qualify it as a Capital Lease, the lease is not treated as a sale or purchase and hits the lessee's rental expense and the lessor's revenue. So it all stays on the P&L (assuming no prepayments are made). Capital Leases, on the other hand, hit lessee's and lessor's balance sheets because the asset is treated as a sale. (I'm ignoring interest and depreciation here to emphasize my point). Question: What will happen to real estate leases when Operating Leases go away and how will Oracle Financials address these changes? Before I attempt to address these questions, here's a real-life example to expound on some of the issues: Let's say a U.S. retailer leases a store in a mall for 15 years. Under U.S. GAAP, the lease is considered an operating or expense lease. Will that same lease be considered a capital lease under IFRS? Real estate leases are supposedly going to be capitalized under IFRS. If so, will everyone need to change all leases from operating to capital? Or, could we make some adjustments so we report the lease as an expense for operations reporting but capitalize it for SEC reporting? Would all aspects of the lease be capitalized, or would some line items still be expensed? For example, many retail store leases are defined to include (1) the agreed-to rent amount; (2) a negotiated increase in base rent, e.g., maybe a 5% increase in Year 5; (3) a sales rent component whereby the retailer pays a variable additional amount based on the sales generated in the prior month; (4) parking lot maintenance fees. Would the entire lease be capitalized, or would some portions still be expensed? To help answer these questions, I met up with our resident accounting expert and walking encyclopedia, Seamus Moran. Here's what he had to say: Oracle is aware of the potential changes specific to reporting/capitalization of real estate leases; i.e., we are aware that FASB and IASB have identified real estate leases as one of the areas for standards convergence. Oracle stays apprised of the on-going convergence through our domain expertise staff, our relationship with customers, our market awareness, and, of course, our relationships with the Big 4. This is part of our normal process with respect to regulatory compliance worldwide. At this time, Oracle expects that the standards convergence committee will make a recommendation about reporting standards for real estate leases in about a year. Following typical procedures, we also expect that the recommendation will be up for review for a year, and customers will then need to start reporting to the new standard about a year after that. So that means we would expect the first customer to report under the new standard in maybe 3 years. Typically, after the new standard is finalized and distributed, we find that our customers then begin to evaluate how they plan to meet the new standard. And through groups like the Customer Advisory Boards (CABs), our customers tell us what kind of product changes are needed in order to satisfy their new reporting requirements. Of course, Oracle is also working with the Big 4 and Accenture and other implementers in order to ascertain that these recommended changes will indeed meet new reporting standards. So the best advice we can offer right now is, stay apprised of the standards convergence committee; know that Oracle is also staying abreast of developments; get involved with your CAB so your voice is heard; know that Oracle products continue to be GAAP compliant, and we will continue to maintain that as our standard. But exactly what is that "standard"--we need to wait on the standards convergence committee. In a nut shell, operating leases will become either capital leases or month to month rentals, but it is still too early, too political and too uncertain to call out at this point.

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