job interview - Page 323

Finding all the shortest paths between two nodes in unweighted directed graphs using BFS algorithm

- by andra-isan

Hi All, I am working on a problem that I need to find all the shortest path between two nodes in a given directed unweighted graph. I have used BFS algorithm to do the job, but unfortunately I can only print one shortest path not all of them, for example if they are 4 paths having lenght 3, my algorithm only prints the first one but I would like it to print all the four shortest paths. I was wondering in the following code, how should I change it so that all the shortest paths between two nodes could be printed out? class graphNode{ public: int id; string name; bool status; double weight;}; map<int, map<int,graphNode>* > graph; int Graph::BFS(graphNode &v, graphNode &w){ queue <int> q; map <int, int> map1; // this is to check if the node has been visited or not. std::string str= ""; map<int,int> inQ; // just to check that we do not insert the same iterm twice in the queue map <int, map<int, graphNode>* >::iterator pos; pos = graph.find(v.id); if(pos == graph.end()) { cout << v.id << " does not exists in the graph " <<endl; return 1; } int parents[graph.size()+1]; // this vector keeps track of the parents for the node parents[v.id] = -1; // there is a direct path between these two words, simply print that path as the shortest path if (findDirectEdge(v.id,w.id) == 1 ){ cout << " Shortest Path: " << v.id << " -> " << w.id << endl; return 1; } //if else{ int gn; map <int, map<int, graphNode>* >::iterator pos; q.push(v.id); inQ.insert(make_pair(v.id, v.id)); while (!q.empty()){ gn = q.front(); q.pop(); map<int, int>::iterator it; cout << " Popping: " << gn <<endl; map1.insert(make_pair(gn,gn)); //backtracing to print all the nodes if gn is the same as our target node such as w.id if (gn == w.id){ int current = w.id; cout << current << " - > "; while (current!=v.id){ current = parents[current]; cout << current << " -> "; } cout <<endl; } if ((pos = graph.find(gn)) == graph.end()) { cout << " pos is empty " <<endl; continue; } map<int, graphNode>* pn = pos->second; map<int, graphNode>::iterator p = pn->begin(); while(p != pn->end()) { map<int, int>::iterator it; //map1 keeps track of the visited nodes it = map1.find(p->first); graphNode gn1= p->second; if (it== map1.end()) { map<int, int>::iterator it1; //if the node already exits in the inQ, we do not insert it twice it1 = inQ.find(p->first); if (it1== inQ.end()){ parents[p->first] = gn; cout << " inserting " << p->first << " into the queue " <<endl; q.push(p->first); // add it to the queue } //if } //if p++; } //while } //while } I do appreciate all your great help Thanks, Andra

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How do I run gtk demos?

- by Runner

They are located under: share\gtk-2.0\demo But none of them contains a main function, how can I make the following textscroll.c actually work: /* Text Widget/Automatic scrolling * * This example demonstrates how to use the gravity of * GtkTextMarks to keep a text view scrolled to the bottom * while appending text. */ #include <gtk/gtk.h> #include "demo-common.h" /* Scroll to the end of the buffer. */ static gboolean scroll_to_end (GtkTextView *textview) { GtkTextBuffer *buffer; GtkTextIter iter; GtkTextMark *mark; char *spaces; static int count; buffer = gtk_text_view_get_buffer (textview); /* Get "end" mark. It's located at the end of buffer because * of right gravity */ mark = gtk_text_buffer_get_mark (buffer, "end"); gtk_text_buffer_get_iter_at_mark (buffer, &iter, mark); /* and insert some text at its position, the iter will be * revalidated after insertion to point to the end of inserted text */ spaces = g_strnfill (count++, ' '); gtk_text_buffer_insert (buffer, &iter, "\n", -1); gtk_text_buffer_insert (buffer, &iter, spaces, -1); gtk_text_buffer_insert (buffer, &iter, "Scroll to end scroll to end scroll " "to end scroll to end ", -1); g_free (spaces); /* Now scroll the end mark onscreen. */ gtk_text_view_scroll_mark_onscreen (textview, mark); /* Emulate typewriter behavior, shift to the left if we * are far enough to the right. */ if (count > 150) count = 0; return TRUE; } /* Scroll to the bottom of the buffer. */ static gboolean scroll_to_bottom (GtkTextView *textview) { GtkTextBuffer *buffer; GtkTextIter iter; GtkTextMark *mark; char *spaces; static int count; buffer = gtk_text_view_get_buffer (textview); /* Get end iterator */ gtk_text_buffer_get_end_iter (buffer, &iter); /* and insert some text at it, the iter will be revalidated * after insertion to point to the end of inserted text */ spaces = g_strnfill (count++, ' '); gtk_text_buffer_insert (buffer, &iter, "\n", -1); gtk_text_buffer_insert (buffer, &iter, spaces, -1); gtk_text_buffer_insert (buffer, &iter, "Scroll to bottom scroll to bottom scroll " "to bottom scroll to bottom", -1); g_free (spaces); /* Move the iterator to the beginning of line, so we don't scroll * in horizontal direction */ gtk_text_iter_set_line_offset (&iter, 0); /* and place the mark at iter. the mark will stay there after we * insert some text at the end because it has right gravity. */ mark = gtk_text_buffer_get_mark (buffer, "scroll"); gtk_text_buffer_move_mark (buffer, mark, &iter); /* Scroll the mark onscreen. */ gtk_text_view_scroll_mark_onscreen (textview, mark); /* Shift text back if we got enough to the right. */ if (count > 40) count = 0; return TRUE; } static guint setup_scroll (GtkTextView *textview, gboolean to_end) { GtkTextBuffer *buffer; GtkTextIter iter; buffer = gtk_text_view_get_buffer (textview); gtk_text_buffer_get_end_iter (buffer, &iter); if (to_end) { /* If we want to scroll to the end, including horizontal scrolling, * then we just create a mark with right gravity at the end of the * buffer. It will stay at the end unless explicitely moved with * gtk_text_buffer_move_mark. */ gtk_text_buffer_create_mark (buffer, "end", &iter, FALSE); /* Add scrolling timeout. */ return g_timeout_add (50, (GSourceFunc) scroll_to_end, textview); } else { /* If we want to scroll to the bottom, but not scroll horizontally, * then an end mark won't do the job. Just create a mark so we can * use it with gtk_text_view_scroll_mark_onscreen, we'll position it * explicitely when needed. Use left gravity so the mark stays where * we put it after inserting new text. */ gtk_text_buffer_create_mark (buffer, "scroll", &iter, TRUE); /* Add scrolling timeout. */ return g_timeout_add (100, (GSourceFunc) scroll_to_bottom, textview); } } static void remove_timeout (GtkWidget *window, gpointer timeout) { g_source_remove (GPOINTER_TO_UINT (timeout)); } static void create_text_view (GtkWidget *hbox, gboolean to_end) { GtkWidget *swindow; GtkWidget *textview; guint timeout; swindow = gtk_scrolled_window_new (NULL, NULL); gtk_box_pack_start (GTK_BOX (hbox), swindow, TRUE, TRUE, 0); textview = gtk_text_view_new (); gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (swindow), textview); timeout = setup_scroll (GTK_TEXT_VIEW (textview), to_end); /* Remove the timeout in destroy handler, so we don't try to * scroll destroyed widget. */ g_signal_connect (textview, "destroy", G_CALLBACK (remove_timeout), GUINT_TO_POINTER (timeout)); } GtkWidget * do_textscroll (GtkWidget *do_widget) { static GtkWidget *window = NULL; if (!window) { GtkWidget *hbox; window = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL); g_signal_connect (window, "destroy", G_CALLBACK (gtk_widget_destroyed), &window); gtk_window_set_default_size (GTK_WINDOW (window), 600, 400); hbox = gtk_hbox_new (TRUE, 6); gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (window), hbox); create_text_view (hbox, TRUE); create_text_view (hbox, FALSE); } if (!gtk_widget_get_visible (window)) gtk_widget_show_all (window); else gtk_widget_destroy (window); return window; }

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Prefer extension methods for encapsulation and reusability?

- by tzaman

edit4: wikified, since this seems to have morphed more into a discussion than a specific question. In C++ programming, it's generally considered good practice to "prefer non-member non-friend functions" instead of instance methods. This has been recommended by Scott Meyers in this classic Dr. Dobbs article, and repeated by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu in C++ Coding Standards (item 44); the general argument being that if a function can do its job solely by relying on the public interface exposed by the class, it actually increases encapsulation to have it be external. While this confuses the "packaging" of the class to some extent, the benefits are generally considered worth it. Now, ever since I've started programming in C#, I've had a feeling that here is the ultimate expression of the concept that they're trying to achieve with "non-member, non-friend functions that are part of a class interface". C# adds two crucial components to the mix - the first being interfaces, and the second extension methods: Interfaces allow a class to formally specify their public contract, the methods and properties that they're exposing to the world. Any other class can choose to implement the same interface and fulfill that same contract. Extension methods can be defined on an interface, providing any functionality that can be implemented via the interface to all implementers automatically. And best of all, because of the "instance syntax" sugar and IDE support, they can be called the same way as any other instance method, eliminating the cognitive overhead! So you get the encapsulation benefits of "non-member, non-friend" functions with the convenience of members. Seems like the best of both worlds to me; the .NET library itself providing a shining example in LINQ. However, everywhere I look I see people warning against extension method overuse; even the MSDN page itself states: In general, we recommend that you implement extension methods sparingly and only when you have to. (edit: Even in the current .NET library, I can see places where it would've been useful to have extensions instead of instance methods - for example, all of the utility functions of List<T> (Sort, BinarySearch, FindIndex, etc.) would be incredibly useful if they were lifted up to IList<T> - getting free bonus functionality like that adds a lot more benefit to implementing the interface.) So what's the verdict? Are extension methods the acme of encapsulation and code reuse, or am I just deluding myself? (edit2: In response to Tomas - while C# did start out with Java's (overly, imo) OO mentality, it seems to be embracing more multi-paradigm programming with every new release; the main thrust of this question is whether using extension methods to drive a style change (towards more generic / functional C#) is useful or worthwhile..) edit3: overridable extension methods The only real problem identified so far with this approach, is that you can't specialize extension methods if you need to. I've been thinking about the issue, and I think I've come up with a solution. Suppose I have an interface MyInterface, which I want to extend - I define my extension methods in a MyExtension static class, and pair it with another interface, call it MyExtensionOverrider. MyExtension methods are defined according to this pattern: public static int MyMethod(this MyInterface obj, int arg, bool attemptCast=true) { if (attemptCast && obj is MyExtensionOverrider) { return ((MyExtensionOverrider)obj).MyMethod(arg); } // regular implementation here } The override interface mirrors all of the methods defined in MyExtension, except without the this or attemptCast parameters: public interface MyExtensionOverrider { int MyMethod(int arg); string MyOtherMethod(); } Now, any class can implement the interface and get the default extension functionality: public class MyClass : MyInterface { ... } Anyone that wants to override it with specific implementations can additionally implement the override interface: public class MySpecializedClass : MyInterface, MyExtensionOverrider { public int MyMethod(int arg) { //specialized implementation for one method } public string MyOtherMethod() { // fallback to default for others MyExtension.MyOtherMethod(this, attemptCast: false); } } And there we go: extension methods provided on an interface, with the option of complete extensibility if needed. Fully general too, the interface itself doesn't need to know about the extension / override, and multiple extension / override pairs can be implemented without interfering with each other. I can see three problems with this approach - It's a little bit fragile - the extension methods and override interface have to be kept synchronized manually. It's a little bit ugly - implementing the override interface involves boilerplate for every function you don't want to specialize. It's a little bit slow - there's an extra bool comparison and cast attempt added to the mainline of every method. Still, all those notwithstanding, I think this is the best we can get until there's language support for interface functions. Thoughts?

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Rails form submission

- by Danny McClelland

Hi Everyone, I have a simple form to enter details of a new case (kase), it's working well and clicking submit stores the information and takes the user to the show.html.erb page. However, I wanted to move part of the form to the sidebar - to make things a little easier to see and use for the user, however, when I moved the section to the sidebar - anything entered during either a creation or edit within those sidebar fields is ignored. Any idea how I keep the fields in the sidebar, but include them as before? <% content_for :header do -%> Cases <% end -%> <% form_for(@kase) do |f| %> <%= f.error_messages %>  <% content_for :sidebar do -%> <% if @kase.avatar.exists? then %> <%= image_tag @kase.avatar.url %> <% else %> <p style="font-size:smaller"> You can upload an icon for this case that will display here. Usually this would be for the year number icon for easy recognition.</p> <% end %> <div class="js_option"> <h2>Financial Options</h2><p class="finance_showhide"><%= link_to_function "Show","Element.show('finance_showhide');" %> / <%= link_to_function "Hide","Element.hide('finance_showhide');" %></p> </div> <div id="finance_showhide" style="display:none"> <ul id="kases_new_finance"> <li>Invoice Number<span><%= f.text_field :invoicenumber %></span></li> <li>Net Amount<span><%= f.text_field :netamount %></span></li> <li>VAT<span><%= f.text_field :vat %></span></li> <li>Gross Amount<span><%= f.text_field :grossamount %></span></li> <li>Date Closed<span><%= f.text_field :dateclosed %></span></li> <li>Date Paid<span><%= f.text_field :datepaid %></span></li> </ul> </div> <% end -%>  <% form_for (@kase), :html => { :multipart => true } do |f| %> <ul id="kases_new"> <li>Job Ref.<span><%= f.text_field :jobno %></span></li> <li>Case Subject<span><%= f.text_field :casesubject %></span></li> <li>Transport<span><%= f.text_field :transport %></span></li> <li>Goods<span><%= f.text_field :goods %></span></li> <li>Date Instructed<span><%= f.date_select :dateinstructed %></span></li> <li>Case Status<span><%= f.select "kase_status", ['Active', 'On Hold', 'Archived', 'Invoice Sent'] %></span></li> <li>Client Reference<span><%= f.text_field :clientref %></span></li> <li>Client Company Name<span><%= f.text_field :clientcompanyname %></span></li> <li>Client Company Address<span><%= f.text_field :clientcompanyaddress %></span></li> <li>Client Company Fax<span><%= f.text_field :clientcompanyfax %></span></li> <li>Case Handler Name<span><%= f.text_field :casehandlername %></span></li> <li>Case Handler Tel<span><%= f.text_field :casehandlertel %></span></li> <li>Case Handler Email<span><%= f.text_field :casehandleremail %></span></li> <li>Claimant Name<span><%= f.text_field :claimantname %></span></li> <li>Claimant Address<span><%= f.text_field :claimantaddress %></span></li> <li>Claimant Contact<span><%= f.text_field :claimantcontact %></span></li> <li>Claimant Tel<span><%= f.text_field :claimanttel %></span></li> <li>Claimant Mob<span><%= f.text_field :claimantmob %></span></li> <li>Claimant Email<span><%= f.text_field :claimantemail %></span></li> <li>Claimant URL<span><%= f.text_field :claimanturl %></span></li> <li>Comments<span><%= f.text_field :comments %></span></li> </ul> <p> <%= f.submit "Create" %> </p> <% end %><% end %> <%= link_to 'Back', kases_path %>

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redirecting back to php file

- by tooepic

hello again, following code is my php file that will list the people in my text file. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>viewlist php</title> </head> <body> <h1>List</h1> <?php $file = file("peoplelist.txt"); for($i=0; $i<count($file); $i++) { $person = explode(",", $file[$i]); echo "<hr />"; echo "<table cellspacing=10><tr><td>", $i+1,".", "</td>"; echo "<td>", $person[0], "<br />"; echo $person[1], "</td></tr></table>"; } ?> <hr /> <p> <a href="sortatoz.php" target="_self">Sort A-Z</a><br /> <a href="sortztoa.php" target="_self">Sort Z-A</a><br /> </p> </body> </html> what i want to do is, when i click Sort A-Z link, the file called sortatoz.php will sort the list in my text file and redirect back to viewlist.php with the list in sort order. below is my sortatoz.php: <?php header("Location: http://myserver/workspace/viewlist.php"); ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>sort a to z</title> </head> <h1>List</h1> <body> <?php $file = file("peoplelist.txt"); sort($file); for($i=0; $i<count($file); $i++) { $person = explode(",", $file[$i]); echo "<hr />"; echo "<table cellspacing=10><tr><td>", $i+1,".", "</td>"; echo "<td>", $person[0], "<br />"; echo $person[1], "</td></tr></table>"; } ?> <hr /> <p> <a href="sortvisitorsascending.php" target="_self">Sort Visitors A-Z</a><br /> <a href="sortvisitorsdescending.php" target="_self">Sort Visitors Z-A</a><br /> </p> </body> </html> now, when i click Sort A-Z link, it redirects back to viewlist.php...so I'm assuming the header() function is doing it's job. but the problem is...it's not sorting. i am very new with this, so bear with me and give me some guidance please. what can i do to my codes to redirect back viewlist.php with sorted list? thanks in advance.

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website creation - for non web programmers?

- by Tim

I thought I would find decent questions and answers for this, but none really caught my eye... I am a C++ developer and I own a few domains. I'd like to start off with simple web sites for each with a minimum of time and fuss and minimum learning. I have too many projects going and don't have the time to learn how to build websites. One is for a company that currently has only a single product with custom development as well. I hacked together some really bad html with paypal links on it. It is just one simple product. I want to add uservoice to it and maybe some other stuff like FAQ, forums, etc. Right now I just link to a google group I created. Another is a startup in development phase, but we want to provide simple content like whitepapers and press releases and a section for investors. - mostly an "about us" type of thing. We will also be providing details about our product. Then there is a blog site - currently using godaddy's quickblogcast. Not a bad start but I suspect I want to move to something else. The question is - is there a framework that I can use that will make decent, if not outstanding, sites? Again, I have my hands full with three projects in addition to my day job and don't have time to learn web programming. I also don;t want to just pay a web person and then be out in the cold for upgrades, changes, etc. I have been burned before. I am happy with a web-based app or a desktop app that builds html or whatever and then I can ftp it up to the hosting servers. To summarize: - simple to get started - low time to get a web page going - ability to integrate with a few hand-done pages - pay pal integration - uservoice integration - ability to put under my svn would be nice too EDIT Thanks to the responders. I understand now why my original searches failed. I was not searching for "CMS". I'll go back and do that. I would expect that this is a many-times-duplicate... EDIT: I am considering using Wordpress and Drupal - one for each of the sites. I did one Drupal site quickly just so I could qualify for one of the Microsoft programs for discounted dev tools - anyway - it was a quick and dirty homepage and I am still on the learning curve. I look forward to playing with it. So far it has been ok. I am not sure about doing a taste-test between the two - might be a waste of time where I could just become that much better at Drupal faster than spending time on wordpress... Will keep updated. EDIT: Selecting the Drupal answer by slim for now. That is what I am going with. Don't have time to check them all out. Wordpress sounds like a good option too, but such limited time... Results: I have tried wordpress and drupal so far. Wordpress is great for blogging or for a site that you want to run ads from, but I disagree that it is ready for a corporate site, unless you want to spend lots of time making your own theme, etc. But if you spend that time, why not work with drupal? Drupal was a little intimidating at first - but after spending about 4 hours reading the overview and step-by-step guide online was a HUGE step. I got a simple site up and running easily after that. Trying to make a website just by going to the admin panel without reading anything is a waste of time. You really need to read the docs. The site is great. start here: http://drupal.org/getting-started I'd suggest drupal to anyone. It has amazing capabilities, lots of support and lots of users. Just doing blogging? Wordpress is really great for that. So now I've got two sites running with a lot of the functionality I wanted - and they look good. ONE MORE EDIT Well, I have switched back to wordpress after buying a theme and then getting help from web developers. I guess either one will work - it is just a matter of getting comfortable witht he basics, using the right tools and trying things out.

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Am I crazy? (How) should I create a jQuery content editor?

- by Brendon Muir

Ok, so I created a CMS mainly aimed at Primary Schools. It's getting fairly popular in New Zealand but the one thing I hate with a passion is the largely bad quality of in browser WYSIWYG editors. I've been using KTML (made by InterAKT which was purchased by Adobe a few years ago). In my opinion this editor does a lot of great things (image editing/management, thumbnailing and pretty good content editing). Unfortunately time has had its nasty way with this product and new browsers are beginning to break features and generally degrade the performance of this tool. It's also quite scary basing my livelihood on a defunct product! I've been hunting, in fact I regularly hunt around to see if anything has changed in the WYSIWYG arena. The closest thing I've seen that excites me is the WYSIHAT framework, but they've decided to ignore a pretty relevant editing paradigm which I'm going to outline below. This is the idea for my proposed editor, and I don't know of any existing products that can do this properly: Right, so the traditional model for editing let's say a Page in a CMS is to log into a 'back end' and click edit on the page. This will then load another screen with the editor in it and perhaps a few other fields. More advanced CMS's will maybe have several editing boxes that are for different portions of the page. Anyway, the big problem with this way of doing things is that the user is editing a document outside of the final context it will appear in. In the simplest terms, this means the page template. Many things can be wrong, e.g. the with of the editing area might be different to the width of the actual template area. The height is nearly always fixed because existing editors always seem to use IFRAMES for backward compatibility. And there are plenty of other beefs which I'm sure you're quite aware of if you're in this development area. Here's my editor utopia: You click 'Edit Page': The actual page (with its actual template) displays. Portions of the page have been marked as editable via a class name. You click on one of these areas (in my case it'd just be the big 'body' area in the middle of the template) and a editing bar drops down from the top of the screen with all your standard controls (bold, italic, insert image etc...). Iframes are never used, instead we rely on setting contentEditable to true on the DIV's in question. Firefox 2 and IE6 can go away, let's move on. You can edit the page knowing exactly how it will look when you save it. Because all the styles for this template are loaded, your headings will look correct, everything will be just dandy. Is this such a radical concept? Why are we still content with TinyMCE and that other editor that is too embarrassing to use because it sounds like a swear word!? Let's face the facts: I'm a JavaScript novice. I did once play around in this area using the Javascript Anthology from SitePoint as a guide. It was quite a cool learning experience, but they of course used the IFRAME to make their lives easier. I tried to go a different route and just use contentEditable and even tried to sidestep the native content editing routines (execCommand) and instead wrote my own. They kind of worked but there were always issues. Now we have jQuery, and a few libraries that abstract things like IE's lack of Range support. I'm wondering, am I crazy, or is it actually a good idea to try and build an editor around this editing paradigm using jQuery and relevant plugins to make the job easier? My actual questions: Where would you start? What plugins do you know of that would help the most? Is it worth it, or is there a magical project that already exists that I should join in on? What are the biggest hurdles to overcome in a project like this? Am I crazy? I hope this question has been posted on the right board. I figured it is a technical question as I'm wanting to know specific hurdles and pitfalls to watch out for and also if it is technically feasible with todays technology. Looking forward to hearing peoples thoughts and opinions.

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Wisdom of merging 100s of Oracle instances into one instance

- by hoytster

Our application runs on the web, is mostly an inquiry tool, does some transactions. We host the Oracle database. The app has always had a different instance of Oracle for each customer. A customer is a company which pays us to provide our service to the company's employees, typically 10,000-25,000 employees per customer. We do a major release every few years, and migrating to that new release is challenging: we might have a team at the customer site for a couple weeks, explaining new functionality and setting up the driving data to suit that customer. We're considering going multi-client, putting all our customers into a single shared Oracle 11g instance on a big honkin' Windows Server 2008 server -- in order to reduce costs. I'm wondering if that's advisable. There are some advantages to having separate instances for each customer. Tell me if these are bogus, please. In my rough guess about decreasing importance: Our customers MyCorp and YourCo can be migrated separately when breaking changes are made to the schema. (With multi-client, we'd be migrating 300+ customers overnight!?!) MyCorp's data can be easily backed up and (!!!) restored, without affecting other customers. MyCorp's data is securely separated from their competitor YourCo's data, without depending on developers to get the code right and/or DBAs getting the configuration right. Performance is better because the database is smaller (5,000 vs 2,000,000 rows in ~50 tables). If MyCorp's offices are (mostly) in just one region, then the MyCorp's instance can be geographically co-located there, so network lag doesn't hurt performance. We can provide better service to global clients, for the same reason. In MyCorp wants to take their database in-house, then we can easily export their instance, to get MyCorp their data. Load-balancing is easier because instances can be placed on different servers (this is with a web farm). When a DEV or QA instance is needed, it's easier to clone the real instance and anonymize the data, because there's much less data. Because they're small enough, developers can have their own instance running locally, so they can work on code while waiting at the airport and while in-flight, without fighting VPN hassles. Q1: What are other advantages of separate instances? We are contemplating changing the database schema and merging all of our customers into one Oracle instance, running on one hefty server. Here are advantages of the multi-client instance approach, most important first (my WAG). Please snipe if these are bogus: Less work for the DBAs, since they only need to maintain one instance instead of hundreds. Less DBA work translates to cheaper, our main motive for this change. With just one instance, the DBAs can do a better job of optimizing performance. They'll have time to add appropriate indexes and review our SQL. It will be easier for developers to debug & enhance the application, because there is only one schema and one app (there might be dozens of schema versions if there are hundreds of instances, with a different version of the app for each version of the schema). This reduces costs too. The alternative is having to start every debug session with (1) What version is this customer running and (2) Let's struggle to recreate the corresponding development environment, code and database. (We need a Virtual Machine that includes the code AND database instance for each patch and release!) Licensing Oracle is cheaper because it's priced per server irrespective of heft (or something -- I don't know anything about the subject). The database becomes a viable persistent store for web session data, because there is just one instance. Some database operations are easier with one multi-client instance, like finding a participant when they're hazy about which customer they (or their spouse, maybe) works for: all the names are in one table. Reporting across customers is straightforward. Q2: What are other advantages of having multiple clients in one instance? Q3: Which approach do you think is better (why)? Instance per customer, or all customers in one instance? I'm concerned that having one multi-client instance makes migration near-impossible, and that's a deal killer... ... unless there is a compromise solution like having two multi-client instances, the old and the new. In that case case, we would design cross-instance solutions for finding participants, reporting, etc. so customers could go from one multi-client instance to the next without anything breaking. THANKS SO MUCH for your collective advice! This issue is beyond me -- but not beyond the collective you. :) Hoytster

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Zend_Navigation failing to load

- by Grant Collins

Hi, Following on from my earlier question, I am still having issues with loading the xml file into Zend_Navigation. I am now getting the following error message: <b>Fatal error</b>: Uncaught exception 'Zend_Navigation_Exception' with message 'Invalid argument: Unable to determine class to instantiate' in C:\www\mysite\development\website\library\Zend\Navigation\Page.php:223 I've tried to make my navigation.xml file look similar to the example on the Zend Documentation, However I just can't seem to get it to work. My XML file looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configdata> <navigation> <default> <label>Home</label> <controller>index</controller> <action>index</action> <module>default</module> <pages> <tour> <label>Tour</label> <controller>tour</controller> <action>index</action> <module>default</module> </tour> <blog> <label></label> <uri>http://blog.mysite.com</uri> </blog> <support> <label>Support</label> <controller>support</controller> <action>index</action> <module>default</module> </support> </pages> </default> <users> <label>Home</label> <controller>index</controller> <action>index</action> <module>users</module> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> <pages> <jobmanger> <label>Job Manager</label> <controller>jobmanager</controller> <action>index</action> <module>users</module> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> </jobmanger> <myaccount> <label>My Account</label> <controller>profile</controller> <action>index</action> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> <module>users</module> <pages> <detail> <label>Account Details</label> <controller>profile</controller> <action>detail</action> <module>users</module> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> <pages> <history> <label>Account History</label> <controller>profile</controller> <action>history</action> <module>users</module> <role>guser</role> <resource>owner</resource> </history> <password> <label>Change Password</label> <controller>profile</controller> <action>changepwd</action> <module>users</module> <role>employer</role> <resource>employers</resource> </password> </pages> </detail> ... </navigation> </configdata> Now I confess that I've totally got the wrong end of the stick with this, but rapidly running out of ideas, and it's been a long week. Thanks, Grant

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Getting Paperclip to work in Rails

- by Danny McClelland

Hi Everyone, I have installed the Paperclip plugin to attempt to upload an avatar for my kase model. For some reason, the select the file button shows, and I can choose a file - but then when I click update the kase - it takes me to the show page, but the missing.png rather than the selected image. kase.rb class Kase < ActiveRecord::Base def self.all_latest find(:all, :order => 'created_at DESC', :limit => 5) end def self.search(search, page) paginate :per_page => 5, :page => page, :conditions => ['name like ?', "%#{search}%"], :order => 'name' end # Paperclip has_attached_file :avatar, :styles => { :medium => "300x300>", :thumb => "100x100>" } end kases_controller.rb # GET /kases/new # GET /kases/new.xml def new @kase = Kase.new respond_to do |format| format.html # new.html.erb format.xml { render :xml => @kase } end end new.html.erb <% content_for :header do -%> Cases <% end -% <% form_for(@kase) do |f| %> <%= f.error_messages %> <ul id="kases_new"> <li> <%= f.file_field :avatar %></li> <li>Job Ref.<span><%= f.text_field :jobno %></span></li> <li>Case Subject<span><%= f.text_field :casesubject %></span></li> <li>Transport<span><%= f.text_field :transport %></span></li> <li>Goods<span><%= f.text_field :goods %></span></li> <li>Date Instructed<span><%= f.date_select :dateinstructed %></span></li> <li>Case Status<span><%= f.select "kase_status", ['Active', 'On Hold', 'Archived'] %> </span></li> <li>Client Company Name<span><%= f.text_field :clientcompanyname %></span></li> <li>Client Company Address<span><%= f.text_field :clientcompanyaddress %></span></li> <li>Client Company Fax<span><%= f.text_field :clientcompanyfax %></span></li> <li>Case Handler Name<span><%= f.text_field :casehandlername %></span></li> <li>Case Handler Tel<span><%= f.text_field :casehandlertel %></span></li> <li>Case Handler Email<span><%= f.text_field :casehandleremail %></span></li> <li>Claimant Name<span><%= f.text_field :claimantname %></span></li> <li>Claimant Address<span><%= f.text_field :claimantaddress %></span></li> <li>Claimant Contact<span><%= f.text_field :claimantcontact %></span></li> <li>Claimant Tel<span><%= f.text_field :claimanttel %></span></li> <li>Claimant Mob<span><%= f.text_field :claimantmob %></span></li> <li>Claimant Email<span><%= f.text_field :claimantemail %></span></li> <li>Claimant URL<span><%= f.text_field :claimanturl %></span></li> <li>Comments<span><%= f.text_field :comments %></span></li> </ul> <div class="js_option"> <%= link_to_function "Show financial options.", "Element.show('finance_showhide');" %> </div> <div id="finance_showhide" style="display:none"> <ul id="kases_new_finance"> <li>Invoice Number<span><%= f.text_field :invoicenumber %></span></li> <li>Net Amount<span><%= f.text_field :netamount %></span></li> <li>VAT<span><%= f.text_field :vat %></span></li> <li>Gross Amount<span><%= f.text_field :grossamount %></span></li> <li>Date Closed<span><%= f.date_select :dateclosed %></span></li> <li>Date Paid<span><%= f.date_select :datepaid %></span></li> </ul> <div class="js_option"> <%= link_to_function "I'm confused! Hide financial options.", "Element.hide('finance_showhide');" %> </div> </div> <p> <%= f.submit "Create" %> </p> <% end %> <%= link_to 'Back', kases_path %> I have tried putting the <%= f.file_field :avatar % in it's own form on the same page, but that didn't make a difference. Thanks in advanced! Thanks, Danny

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Does there exist an "idea checkout system" on the Internet?

- by TimeSpace Traveller

Greetings. I would like to ask the following question: is there anything on the Internet like an "idea checkout" system? Situation: I'm a software developer. Since my current job has started 2 years ago, my mentor at that time has pointed me to the open source world. I have only put little time to look at some of the open source projects, let alone any contribution. However, it is my wish to start developing something outside of the work. Well, except a little problem. I don't know what to develop! It is not about the technical knowledge; the problem is that, I am not a creative person. I am very good at analytical thinking, as well as debugging skills. When being told by my work partners to develop a solution, I could get it done without a problem. However, outside of work, I have no idea what to develop. When I look at the Internet, it seems that so many people have already been developing on so many interesting stuff, making me wonder what I could develop, so that I would not reinvent something already existed. That starts to make me wonder. On the Internet, is there anything like an "idea checkout" system or society? For example, some people would throw in as a software idea, and the system would keep it as an "inventory"; later, a potential software developer would "check out" the idea, just a how people would check out a book from the library. Then, the developer would check the "idea" back in, with a certain kind of work-in-progress or developed software, thus becoming an open-source project. I have just noticed that here at stackoverflow, there is a "Project-Ideas" tag, so perhaps that can provide me some ideas on what to develop; still, my wonder is about a system that people would provide ideas, and people would check out ideas to develop / implement into actual solution. Is there such a system or society existing anywhere on the Internet? Any input is welcome! Thank you very much. Update: Thank you for everyone who has answered my question. Certainly, "getting idea" is part of my problem; as a software developer, however, I'm concerned more than just "getting idea". What I am concerned more, as I have commented, is about the existence of such an idea exchanging ecosystem, capable to initiate open-source projects. I'll put an example here. Say, person A has an idea of music search program, but not search by the attributes of the music (composer, singer, publisher, lyrics, etc.); instead, he wants a program (and a database) to search a piece of music by melody. Very often, people only remember a piece of music by its melody, not even the name of the music (e.g. the music he wants was only once heard in a bookstore, but the melody just gets stuck in his head!). In order to find that piece, normally he would just need to blindly search for it, and spent a long time to do so. A search by melody would enable person A to find the piece much quicker. However, he would not want to personally work on it, not just because of the complexity (he is not a musician and/or programmer, knowing almost nothing about music systems in computer, search algorithms, etc.), but also legal issues (RIAA??), thus he would just like to keep the idea at some place, and let other people to work on that. Now, a developer (person B) may be at the same stage as I am right now, wishing to find something to develop, but not having an idea. With the idea exchanging ecosystem, person B will search, and somehow discover person A's music search idea, and feeling interested enough to work on it. So he "checks out" the idea, start working on it (at least a skeleton), and checks back in with the progress. An open-source project starts from here, fulfilling person A's wish, and person B's programming desire. The above is just an example, because there are already such systems exist on the Internet, but it illustrates what I think about the idea exchange system in my mind. My main concern is about idea exchanging ecosystem, not at personal and unorganized level, but at a semi-organized protocol that's specifically for software developers, having actual projects coming out as the fruits. Not about "projects", but about "ideas and product of ideas". Hopefully that would clear up some of the original idea of this question. Any input is welcome; in fact, I would like to hear as many people as possible how everyone thinks about this. Thank you very much!

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Searching a set of data with multiple terms using Linq

- by Cj Anderson

I'm in the process of moving from ADO.NET to Linq. The application is a directory search program to look people up. The users are allowed to type the search criteria into a single textbox. They can separate each term with a space, or wrap a phrase in quotes such as "park place" to indicate that it is one term. Behind the scenes the data comes from a XML file that has about 90,000 records in it and is about 65 megs. I load the data into a DataTable and then use the .Select method with a SQL query to perform the searches. The query I pass is built from the search terms the user passed. I split the string from the textbox into an array using a regular expression that will split everything into a separate element that has a space in it. However if there are quotes around a phrase, that becomes it's own element in the array. I then end up with a single dimension array with x number of elements, which I iterate over to build a long query. I then build the search expression below: query = query & _ "((userid LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(nickname LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(lastname LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(firstname LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(department LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(telephoneNumber LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(email LIKE '" & tempstr & "%') OR " & _ "(Office LIKE '" & tempstr & "%'))" Each term will have a set of the above query. If there is more than one term, I put an AND in between, and build another query like above with the next term. I'm not sure how to do this in Linq. So far, I've got the XML file loading correctly. I'm able to search it with specific criteria, but I'm not sure how to best implement the search over multiple terms. 'this works but far too simple to get the job done Dim results = From c In m_DataSet...<Users> _ Where c.<userid>.Value = "XXXX" _ Select c The above code also doesn't use the LIKE operator either. So partial matches don't work. It looks like what I'd want to use is the .Startswith but that appears to be only in Linq2SQL. Any guidance would be appreciated. I'm new to Linq, so I might be missing a simple way to do this. The XML file looks like so: <?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <theusers> <Users> <userid>person1</userid> <nickname></nickname> <lastname></lastname> <firstname></firstname> <department></department> <telephoneNumber></telephoneNumber> <email></email> </Users> <Users> <userid>person2</userid> <nickname></nickname> <lastname></lastname> <firstname></firstname> <department></department> <telephoneNumber></telephoneNumber> <email></email> </Users>

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i have made a from and want to connect it to a oracle 10g data base using php.can you please assume

- by nachiket-panse

http://www.freecsstemplates.org Released for free under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License -- Sitename.com by Free Css Templates MANAGEMEINT INFORMATION SYSTEM <p class="style2">                                                                                             REGISTRY ENTRY FORM </p> <form id="form2" method="post" action=""> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">JOB DESCRIPTION :</span>                   <textarea name="textarea"></textarea> </p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">QUANTITY :</span>           <input type="text" name="textfield5" /> </p> <p align="center"> <span class="style3">CONTACT PERSON </span>        <input type="text" name="textfield3" /> </p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">DIVISION CODE: <textarea name="textarea3"></textarea> </span></p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">ACCEPTANCE DATE </span>: <input type="text" name="textfield4" /> </p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">REFERENCE NUMBER :</span> <input type="text" name="textfield2" /> </p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">CLASSIFICATION :</span>        <input type="text" name="textfield" /></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">CUMULATIVE COST: </span> <select name="select"> </select> </p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">PLANNING ENGR: </span> <textarea name="textarea2"></textarea> </p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">PLANNING: </span> <input type="text" name="textfield6" /> </p> <p align="center"> <span class="style3">FILL THE COMPLETION DATE: </span> <input type="text" name="textfield7" /> </p> <p align="center"><span class="style3">REMARKS: </span> <input type="text" name="textfield8" /> </p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> <input type="submit" name="SAVE" value="SAVE" /> <input type="submit" name="Submit2" value="LIST" /> <input type="submit" name="Submit" value="ADD" /> <input type="submit" name="Submit3" value="CANCEL" /> <input type="submit" name="BACK" value="BACK" /></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> </p> </form> <p align="center" class="style2"> </p>

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Help with MVC controller: passing a string from view to controller

- by 109221793

Hi guys, I'm having trouble with one particular issue, I was hoping someone could help me out. I've completed the MVC Music Store tutorial, and now I'm trying to add some administrator functionality - practice as I will have to do this in an MVC application in my job. The application is using the aspnet membership api, and what I have done so far is created a view to list the users. What I want to be able to do, is click on the users name in order to change their password. To try and carry the username to the changeUserPassword controller (custom made). I registered a new route in the global.asax.cs file in order to display the username in the URL, which is working so far. UserList View <%: Html.RouteLink(user.UserName, "AdminPassword", new { controller="StoreManager", action="changeUserPassword", username = user.UserName }) %> Global.asax.cs routes.MapRoute( "AdminPassword", //Route name "{controller}/{action}/{username}", //URL with parameters new { controller = "StoreManager", action = "changeUserPassword", username = UrlParameter.Optional} ); So now the URL looks like this when I reach the changeUserPassword view: http://localhost:51236/StoreManager/changeUserPassword/Administrator Here is the GET changeUserPassword action: public ActionResult changeUserPassword(string username) { ViewData["username"] = username; return View(); } I wanted to store the username in ViewData as I would like to use it in the GET changeUserPassword for display purposes, and also as a hidden value in the form. This is in order to pass it through to enable me to reset the password. Having debugged through the code, it seems that 'username' is null. How can I get this to work so that the username carries over from the Html.RouteLink, to the changeUserPassword action? Any help would be appreciated :) Here is my complete code: UserList.aspx <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<System.Web.Security.MembershipUserCollection>" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> UserList </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>UserList</h2> <table> <tr> <th>User Name</th> <th>Last Activity date</th> <th>Locked Out</th> </tr> <%foreach (MembershipUser user in Model){ %> <tr> <td><%: Html.RouteLink(user.UserName, "AdminPassword", new { controller="StoreManager", action="changeUserPassword", username = user.UserName }) %></td> <td><%: user.LastActivityDate %></td> <td><%: user.IsLockedOut %></td> </tr> <% }%> </table> </asp:Content> changeUserPassword.aspx <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<musicStoreMVC.ViewModels.ResetPasswordAdmin>" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> changeUserPassword </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>Change Password: <%: ViewData["username"] %></h2> <% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%> <%: Html.ValidationSummary(true) %> <fieldset> <legend>Fields</legend> <div class="editor-label"> <%: Html.Hidden("username",ViewData["username"]) %> <%: Html.LabelFor(model => model.password) %> </div> <div class="editor-field"> <%: Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.password) %> <%: Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.password) %> </div> <div class="editor-label"> <%: Html.LabelFor(model => model.confirmPassword) %> </div> <div class="editor-field"> <%: Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.confirmPassword) %> <%: Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.confirmPassword) %> </div> <p> <input type="submit" value="Create" /> </p> </fieldset> <% } %> <div> <%: Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") %> </div> </asp:Content> My actions public ActionResult UserList() { var users = Membership.GetAllUsers(); return View(users); } public ActionResult changeUserPassword(string username) { ViewData["username"] = username; return View(); }

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Looking for a better way to integrate a static list into a set of classes

- by EvilTeach

I'm trying to expand my sons interest from Warcraft 3 programming into C++ to broaden his horizons to a degree. We are planning on porting a little game that he wrote. The context goes something like this. There are Ships and Missiles, for which Ships will use Missiles and interact with them A Container exists which will hold 'a list' of ships. A Container exists which will hold 'a list' of planets. One can apply a function over all elements in the Container (for_each) Ships and Missles can be created/destroyed at any time New objects automatically insert themselves into the proper container. I cobbled a small example together to do that job, so we can talk about topics (list, templates etc) but I am not pleased with the results. #include <iostream> #include <list> using namespace std; /* Base class to hold static list in common with various object groups */ template<class T> class ObjectManager { public : ObjectManager ( void ) { cout << "Construct ObjectManager at " << this << endl; objectList.push_back(this); } virtual ~ObjectManager ( void ) { cout << "Destroy ObjectManager at " << this << endl; } void for_each ( void (*function)(T *) ) { for (objectListIter = objectList.begin(); objectListIter != objectList.end(); ++objectListIter) { (*function)((T *) *objectListIter); } } list<ObjectManager<T> *>::iterator objectListIter; static list<ObjectManager<T> *> objectList; }; /* initializer for static list */ template<class T> list<ObjectManager<T> *> ObjectManager<T>::objectList; /* A simple ship for testing */ class Ship : public ObjectManager<Ship> { public : Ship ( void ) : ObjectManager<Ship>() { cout << "Construct Ship at " << this << endl; } ~Ship ( void ) { cout << "Destroy Ship at " << this << endl; } friend ostream &operator<< ( ostream &out, const Ship &that ) { out << "I am a ship"; return out; } }; /* A simple missile for testing */ class Missile : public ObjectManager<Missile> { public : Missile ( void ) : ObjectManager<Missile>() { cout << "Construct Missile at " << this << endl; } ~Missile ( void ) { cout << "Destroy Missile at " << this << endl; } friend ostream &operator<< ( ostream &out, const Missile &that ) { out << "I am a missile"; return out; } }; /* A function suitable for the for_each function */ template <class T> void show ( T *it ) { cout << "Show: " << *it << " at " << it << endl; } int main ( void ) { /* Create dummy planets for testing */ Missile p1; Missile p2; /* Demonstrate Iterator */ p1.for_each(show); /* Create dummy ships for testing */ Ship s1; Ship s2; Ship s3; /* Demonstrate Iterator */ s1.for_each(show); return 0; } Specifically, The list is effectively embedded in each ship though the inheritance mechanism. One must have a ship, in order to access the list of ships. One must have a missile in order to be able to access the list of missiles. That feels awkward. My question boils down to "Is there a better way to do this?" Automatic object container creation Automatic object insertion Container access without requiring an object in the list to access it. I am looking for better ideas. All helpful entries get an upvote. Thanks Evil.

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Hard to append a table with many records into another without generating duplicates

- by Bill Mudry

I may seem to be a bit wordy at first but for the hope it will be easier for all of you to understand what I am doing in the first place. I have an uncommon but enjoyable activity of collecting as many species of wood from around the world as I can (over 2,900 so far). Ok, that is the real world. Meanwhile I have spent over 8 years compiling over 5.8 meg of text data on all the woods of the world. That got so large that learning some basic PHP and MySQL was most welcome so I could build a new database driven home for all this research. I am still slow at it but getting there. The original premise was to find evidence of as many species of woods in the world I can. The more names identified, the more successful the project. I have named the project TAXA for ease of conversation (short for Taxonomy). You are most welcome to take a look at what I have so far at www.prowebcanada.com/taxa. It is 95% dynamically driven. So far I am reporting about 6,500 botanical wood names and, as said above, the more I can report, the more successful is the project. I have a file of all the woods in the second largest wood collection in the world, the Tervuren wood collection in the Netherlands with over 11,300 wood names even after cleaning out all duplicates. That is almost twice the number I am reporting now so porting all the new wood names from Tervuren to the 'species' table where I keep the reported data would be a major desirable advancement in the project. At one point I was able to add all the Tervuren records to the species table but over 3,000 duplicates also formed. They were not in the Tervuren file in the first place but represent the same wood names common to both files. It is common sense that there would be woods common to both that when merged would create new duplicates. At one point and with the help of others from another forum, I may very well have finally got the proper SQL statement. When I ran it, though, the system said (semi-amusingly at first) ----- that it had gone away! After looking up on the Net what could have have done this, one reason is that the MySQL timeout lapses and probably because of the large size of files I am running. I am running this on a rented account on Godaddy so I cannot go about trying to adjust any config file. For safety, I copied the tervuren.sql file as tervuren_target.sql and the species.sql file as species_master.sql tp use as working files just to make sure I protect the original files from destruction or damage. Later I can name the species_master back to just species.sql once I am happy all worked well. The species file has about 18 columns in it but only 5 columns match the columns in the Tervuren file (name for name and collation also). The rest of the columns are just along for the ride, so to speak. The common key in both is the 'species_name" columns in both. I am not sure it is at all proper to call one a primary key and the other a foreign key since there really is no relational connection to them. One is just more data for the other and can disappear after, never to be referred to the working code in the application. I have been very surprised and flabbergasted on how hard it can be to append records from one large table into another (with same column names plus others) without generating NEW duplicates in the first place. Watch out thinking that a SELECT DISTINCT statement may do the job because absolutely NO records in the species table must get destroyed in the process and there is no way (well, that I know of) to tell the 'DISTINCT" command this. Yes, the original 'species' table has duplicates in it even before all this but, trust me ---- they have to be removed the long hard way manually record by record or I will lose precious information. It is more important to just make sure no NEW duplicates form through bringing in new names in the tervuren_target.species_name into species.species_name. I am hoping and thinking that a straight SQL solution should work --- except for that nasty timeout. How do I get past that? Could it mean that I may have to turn to a PHP plus SQL method?? Or ..... would I have to break up the Tervuren files into a few smaller ones and run them independently (hope not....)" So far, what seems should be easy has proven to be unexpectedly tricky. I appreciate any help you can give but start from the assumption that this may be harder to do right than it may seem on the surface. By the way --- I am running a quad 64 bit system with Windows 7, so at least I have some fairly hefty power on the client end. I have a direct ethernet cable feeding a cable connection to the Internet. Once I get an algorithm and code working for this, I also have many other lists to process that could make the 'species' table grow even more. It could be equivalent to (ahem) lighting a rocket under my project (especially compared to do this record by record manually)! This is my first time in this forum, so I do not know how I can receive any replies. Do I have to to come back here periodically or are replies emailed out also? It would be great if you CC'd copies to me at billmudry at rogers.com :-) Much thanks for your patience and help, Bill Mudry Mississauga, Ontario Canada (next to Toronto).

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Is there any better way for creating a dynamic HTML table without using any javascript library like

- by piemesons

Dont worry we dont need to find out any bug in this code.. Its working perfectly.:-P My boss came to me and said "Hey just tell me whats the best of way of writing code for a dynamic HTML table (add row, delete row, update row).No need to add any CSS. Just javascript. No Jquery library etc. I was confused that in the middle of the project why he asking for some stupid exercise like this. What ever i wrote the following code and mailed him and after 15 mins i got a mail from him. " I was expecting much better code from a guy like you. Anyways good job monkey.(And with a picture of monkey as attachment.) thats was the mail. Line by line. I want to reply him but before that i want to know about the quality of my code. Is this really shitty...!!! Or he was just making fun of mine. I dont think that code is really shitty. Still correct me if you can.Code is working perfectly fine. Just copy paste it in a HTML file. <html> <head> <title> Exercise CSS </title> <script type="text/javascript"> function add_row() { var table = document.getElementById('table'); var rowCount = table.rows.length; var row = table.insertRow(rowCount); var cell1 = row.insertCell(0); var element1 = document.createElement("input"); element1.type = "text"; cell1.appendChild(element1); var cell2 = row.insertCell(1); var element2 = document.createElement("input"); element2.type = "text"; cell2.appendChild(element2); var cell3 = row.insertCell(2); cell3.innerHTML = ' <span onClick="edit(this)">Edit</span>/<span onClick="delete_row(this)">Delete</span>'; cell3.setAttribute("style", "display:none;"); var cell4 = row.insertCell(3); cell4.innerHTML = '<span onClick="save(this)">Save</span>'; } function save(e) { var elTableCells = e.parentNode.parentNode.getElementsByTagName("td"); elTableCells[0].innerHTML=elTableCells[0].firstChild.value; elTableCells[1].innerHTML=elTableCells[1].firstChild.value; elTableCells[2].setAttribute("style", "display:block;"); elTableCells[3].setAttribute("style", "display:none;"); } function edit(e) { var elTableCells = e.parentNode.parentNode.getElementsByTagName("td"); elTableCells[0].innerHTML='<input type="text" value="'+elTableCells[0].innerHTML+'">'; elTableCells[1].innerHTML='<input type="text" value="'+elTableCells[1].innerHTML+'">'; elTableCells[2].setAttribute("style", "display:none;"); elTableCells[3].setAttribute("style", "display:block;"); } function delete_row(e) { e.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.removeChild(e.parentNode.parentNode); } </script> </head> <body > <div id="display"> <table id='table'> <tr id='id'> <td> Piemesons </td> <td> 23 </td> <td > <span onClick="edit(this)">Edit</span>/<span onClick="delete_row(this)">Delete</span> </td> <td style="display:none;"> <span onClick="save(this)">Save</span> </td> </tr> </table> <input type="button" value="Add new row" onClick="add_row();" /> </div> </body>

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New hire expectations... (Am I being unreasonable?)

- by user295841

I work for a very small custom software shop. We currently consist me and my boss. My boss is an old FoxPro DOS developer and OOP makes him uncomfortable. He is planning on taking a back seat in the next few years to hopefully enjoy a “partial retirement”. I will be taking over the day to day operations and we are now desperately looking for more help. We tried Monster.com, Dice.com, and others a few years ago when we started our search. We had no success. We have tried outsourcing overseas (total disaster), hiring kids right out of college (mostly a disaster but that’s where I came from), interns (good for them, not so good for us) and hiring laid off “experienced” developers (there was a reason they were laid off). I have heard hiring practices discussed on podcasts, blogs, etc... and have tried a few. The “Fizz Buzz” test was a good one. One kid looked physically ill before he finally gave up. I think my problem is that I have grown so much as a developer since I started here that I now have a high standard. I hear/read very intelligent people podcasts and blogs and I know that there are lots of people out there that can do the job. I don’t want to settle for less than a “good” developer. Perhaps my expectations are unreasonable. I expect any good developer (entry level or experienced) to be billable (at least paying their own wage) in under one month. I expect any good developer to be able to be productive (at least dangerous) in any language or technology with only a few days of research/training. I expect any good developer to be able to take a project from initial customer request to completion with little or no help from others. Am I being unreasonable? What constitutes a valuable developer? What should be expected of an entry level developer? What should be expected of an experienced developer? I realize that everyone is different but there has to be some sort of expectations standard, right? I have been giving the test project below to potential canidates to weed them out. Good idea? Too much? Too little? Please let me know what you think. Thanks. Project ID: T00001 Description: Order Entry System Deadline: 1 Week Scope The scope of this project is to develop a fully function order entry system. Screen/Form design must be user friendly and promote efficient data entry and modification. User experience (Navigation, Screen/Form layouts, Look and Feel…) is at the developer’s discretion. System may be developed using any technologies that conform to the technical and system requirements. Deliverables Complete source code Database setup instructions (Scripts or restorable backup) Application installation instructions (Installer or installation procedure) Any necessary documentation Technical Requirements Server Platform – Windows XP / Windows Server 2003 / SBS Client Platform – Windows XP Web Browser (If applicable) – IE 8 Database – At developer’s discretion (Must be a relational SQL database.) Language – At developer’s discretion All data must be normalized. (+) All data must maintain referential integrity. (++) All data must be indexed for optimal performance. System must handle concurrency. System Requirements Customer Maintenance Customer records must have unique ID. Customer data will include Name, Address, Phone, etc. User must be able to perform all CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations on the Customer table. User must be able to enter a specific Customer ID to edit. User must be able to pull up a sortable/queryable search grid/utility to find a customer to edit. Validation must be performed prior to database commit. Customer record cannot be deleted if the customer has an order in the system. (++) Inventory Maintenance Part records must have unique ID. Part data will include Description, Price, UOM (Unit of Measure), etc. User must be able to perform all CRUD operations on the part table. User must be able to enter a specific Part ID to edit. User must be able to pull up a sortable/queryable search grid/utility to find a part to edit. Validation must be performed prior to database commit. Part record cannot be deleted if the part has been used in an order. (++) Order Entry Order records must have a unique auto-incrementing key (Order Number). Order data must be split into a header/detail structure. (+) Order can contain an infinite number of detail records. Order header data will include Order Number, Customer ID (++), Order Date, Order Status (Open/Closed), etc. Order detail data will include Part Number (++), Quantity, Price, etc. User must be able to perform all CRUD operations on the order tables. User must be able to enter a specific Order Number to edit. User must be able to pull up a sortable/queryable search grid/utility to find an order to edit. User must be able to print an order form from within the order entry form. Validation must be performed prior to database commit. Reports Customer Listing – All Customers in the system. Inventory Listing – All parts in the system. Open Order Listing – All open orders in system. Customer Order Listing – All orders for specific customer. All reports must include sorts and filter functions where applicable. Ex. Customer Listing by range of Customer IDs. Open Order Listing by date range.

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Access Qry Questions

- by kralco626

It was suggested that I repost this questions as I didn't do a very good job discribing my issue the first time. (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2921286/access-question) THE SITUATION: I have inspections from many months of many years. Sometimes there is more than one inspection in a month, sometimes there is no inspection. However, the report that is desired by the clients requires that I have EXACTLY ONE record per month for the time frame they request the report. They understand the data issues and have stated that if there is more than one inspection in a month to take the latest one. If the is not an inspection for that month, go back in time untill you find one and use that one. So a sample of the data is as follows: (I am including many records because I was told I did not include enough data on my last try) equip_id month year runtime date 1 5 2008 400 5/10/2008 12:34 PM 1 7 2008 500 7/12/2008 1:45 PM 1 8 2008 600 8/20/2008 1:12 PM 1 8 2008 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 1 2010 2000 1/12/2010 2:00 PM 1 3 2010 2200 3/24/2010 10:00 AM 2 7 2009 1000 7/20/2009 8:00 AM 2 10 2009 1400 10/14/2009 9:00 AM 2 1 2010 1600 1/15/2010 1:00 PM 2 1 2010 1610 1/30/2010 4:00 PM 2 3 2010 1800 3/15/2010 1:00PM After all the transformations to the data are done, it should look like this: equip_id month year runtime date 1 5 2008 400 5/10/2008 12:34 PM 1 6 2008 400 5/10/2008 12:34 PM 1 7 2008 500 7/12/2008 1:45 PM 1 8 2008 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 9 2008 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 10 2008 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 11 2008 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 12 2008 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 1 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 2 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 3 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 4 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 5 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 6 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 7 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 8 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 9 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 10 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 11 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 12 2009 605 8/30/2008 8:00 AM 1 1 2010 2000 1/12/2010 2:00 PM 1 2 2010 2000 1/12/2010 2:00 PM 1 3 2010 2200 3/24/2010 10:00 AM 2 7 2009 1000 7/20/2009 8:00 AM 2 8 2009 1000 7/20/2009 8:00 AM 2 9 2009 1000 7/20/2009 8:00 AM 2 10 2009 1400 10/14/2009 9:00 AM 2 11 2009 1400 10/14/2009 9:00 AM 2 12 2009 1400 10/14/2009 9:00 AM 2 1 2010 1610 1/30/2010 4:00 PM 2 2 2010 1610 1/30/2010 4:00 PM 2 3 2010 1800 3/15/2010 1:00PM I think that this is the most accurate dipiction of the problem that I can give. I will now say what I have tried. Although if someone else has a better approach, I am perfectly willing to throw away what I have done and do it differently... STEP 1: create a query that removes the duplicates from the data. Ie. only one record per equip_id for each month/year, keeping the latest one. (done successfully) STEP 2: create a table of the date ranges the client wants the report for. (This is done dynamically at runtime) This table two field, Month and Year. So if the client wants a report from FEb 2008 to March 2010 the table would look like: Month Year 2 2008 3 2008 . . . 12 2008 1 2009 . . . 12 2009 1 2010 2 2010 3 2010 I then left joined this table with my query from step 1. So now I have a record for every month and every year that they want the report for, with nulls(or blanks) or sometimes 0s (not sure why, access is weird, but sometiems they are nulls and sumtimes they are 0s...) for the runtimes that are not avaiable. I don't particurally like this solution, but ill do it if i have to. (this is also done successfully) STEP 3: Fill in the missing runtime values. This I HAVE NOT done successfully. Note that if the request range for the report is feb 2008 to march 2010 and the oldest record for a particular equip_id is say june 2008, it is O.K. for the runtimes to be null (or zeros) for feb - may 2008. I am working with the following query for this step: SELECT equip_id as e_id,year,month, (select top 1 runhours from qry_1_c_One_Record_per_Month a where a.equip_id = e_id order by year,month) FROM qry_1_c_One_Record_per_Month where runhours is null or runhours = 0; UNION SELECT equip_id, year, month, runhours FROM qry_1_c_One_Record_per_Month WHERE .runhours Is Not Null And runhours <> 0 However I clearly can't check the a.equip_id = e_id ... so i don't have anyway to make sure i'm looking at the correct equip_id SUMMARY: So like i said i'm willing to throw away any part, or all of what I tried. Just trying to give everyone a complete picture. I REALLY apreciate ANY help! Thanks so much in advance!

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Which workaround to use for the following SQL deadlock?

- by Marko

I found a SQL deadlock scenario in my application during concurrency. I belive that the two statements that cause the deadlock are (note - I'm using LINQ2SQL and DataContext.ExecuteCommand(), that's where this.studioId.ToString() comes into play): exec sp_executesql N'INSERT INTO HQ.dbo.SynchronizingRows ([StudioId], [UpdatedRowId]) SELECT @p0, [t0].[Id] FROM [dbo].[UpdatedRows] AS [t0] WHERE NOT (EXISTS( SELECT NULL AS [EMPTY] FROM [dbo].[ReceivedUpdatedRows] AS [t1] WHERE ([t1].[StudioId] = @p0) AND ([t1].[UpdatedRowId] = [t0].[Id]) ))',N'@p0 uniqueidentifier',@p0='" + this.studioId.ToString() + "'; and exec sp_executesql N'INSERT INTO HQ.dbo.ReceivedUpdatedRows ([UpdatedRowId], [StudioId], [ReceiveDateTime]) SELECT [t0].[UpdatedRowId], @p0, GETDATE() FROM [dbo].[SynchronizingRows] AS [t0] WHERE ([t0].[StudioId] = @p0)',N'@p0 uniqueidentifier',@p0='" + this.studioId.ToString() + "'; The basic logic of my (client-server) application is this: Every time someone inserts or updates a row on the server side, I also insert a row into the table UpdatedRows, specifying the RowId of the modified row. When a client tries to synchronize data, it first copies all of the rows in the UpdatedRows table, that don't contain a reference row for the specific client in the table ReceivedUpdatedRows, to the table SynchronizingRows (the first statement taking part in the deadlock). Afterwards, during the synchronization I look for modified rows via lookup of the SynchronizingRows table. This step is required, otherwise if someone inserts new rows or modifies rows on the server side during synchronization I will miss them and won't get them during the next synchronization (explanation scenario to long to write here...). Once synchronization is complete, I insert rows to the ReceivedUpdatedRows table specifying that this client has received the UpdatedRows contained in the SynchronizingRows table (the second statement taking part in the deadlock). Finally I delete all rows from the SynchronizingRows table that belong to the current client. The way I see it, the deadlock is occuring on tables SynchronizingRows (abbreviation SR) and ReceivedUpdatedRows (abbreviation RUR) during steps 2 and 3 (one client is in step 2 and is inserting into SR and selecting from RUR; while another client is in step 3 inserting into RUR and selecting from SR). I googled a bit about SQL deadlocks and came to a conclusion that I have three options. Inorder to make a decision I need more input about each option/workaround: Workaround 1: The first advice given on the web about SQL deadlocks - restructure tables/queries so that deadlocks don't happen in the first place. Only problem with this is that with my IQ I don't see a way to do the synchronization logic any differently. If someone wishes to dwelve deeper into my current synchronization logic, how and why it is set up the way it is, I'll post a link for the explanation. Perhaps, with the help of someone smarter than me, it's possible to create a logic that is deadlock free. Workaround 2: The second most common advice seems to be the use of WITH(NOLOCK) hint. The problem with this is that NOLOCK might miss or duplicate some rows. Duplication is not a problem, but missing rows is catastrophic! Another option is the WITH(READPAST) hint. On the face of it, this seems to be a perfect solution. I really don't care about rows that other clients are inserting/modifying, because each row belongs only to a specific client, so I may very well skip locked rows. But the MSDN documentaion makes me a bit worried - "When READPAST is specified, both row-level and page-level locks are skipped". As I said, row-level locks would not be a problem, but page-level locks may very well be, since a page might contain rows that belong to multiple clients (including the current one). While there are lots of blog posts specifically mentioning that NOLOCK might miss rows, there seems to be none about READPAST (never) missing rows. This makes me skeptical and nervous to implement it, since there is no easy way to test it (implementing would be a piece of cake, just pop WITH(READPAST) into both statements SELECT clause and job done). Can someone confirm whether the READPAST hint can miss rows? Workaround 3: The final option is to use ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION and READ_COMMITED_SNAPSHOT. This would seem to be the only option to work 100% - at least I can't find any information that would contradict with it. But it is a little bit trickier to setup (I don't care much about the performance hit), because I'm using LINQ. Off the top of my head I probably need to manually open a SQL connection and pass it to the LINQ2SQL DataContext, etc... I haven't looked into the specifics very deeply. Mostly I would prefer option 2 if somone could only reassure me that READPAST will never miss rows concerning the current client (as I said before, each client has and only ever deals with it's own set of rows). Otherwise I'll likely have to implement option 3, since option 1 is probably impossible... I'll post the table definitions for the three tables as well, just in case: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[UpdatedRows]( [Id] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL ROWGUIDCOL DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, [RowId] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL, [UpdateDateTime] [datetime] NOT NULL, ) ON [PRIMARY] GO CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_RowId ON dbo.UpdatedRows ([RowId] ASC) WITH (STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY] GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[ReceivedUpdatedRows]( [Id] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL ROWGUIDCOL DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED, [UpdatedRowId] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL REFERENCES [dbo].[UpdatedRows] ([Id]), [StudioId] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL REFERENCES, [ReceiveDateTime] [datetime] NOT NULL, ) ON [PRIMARY] GO CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX IX_Studios ON dbo.ReceivedUpdatedRows ([StudioId] ASC) WITH (STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY] GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[SynchronizingRows]( [StudioId] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL [UpdatedRowId] [uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL REFERENCES [dbo].[UpdatedRows] ([Id]) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([StudioId], [UpdatedRowId]) ) ON [PRIMARY] GO PS! Studio = Client. PS2! I just noticed that the index definitions have ALLOW_PAGE_LOCK=ON. If I would turn it off, would that make any difference to READPAST? Are there any negative downsides for turning it off?

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How should I implement simple caches with concurrency on Redis?

- by solublefish

Background I have a 2-tier web service - just my app server and an RDBMS. I want to move to a pool of identical app servers behind a load balancer. I currently cache a bunch of objects in-process. I hope to move them to a shared Redis. I have a dozen or so caches of simple, small-sized business objects. For example, I have a set of Foos. Each Foo has a unique FooId and an OwnerId. One "owner" may own multiple Foos. In a traditional RDBMS this is just a table with an index on the PK FooId and one on OwnerId. I'm caching this in one process simply: Dictionary<int,Foo> _cacheFooById; Dictionary<int,HashSet<int>> _indexFooIdsByOwnerId; Reads come straight from here, and writes go here and to the RDBMS. I usually have this invariant: "For a given group [say by OwnerId], the whole group is in cache or none of it is." So when I cache miss on a Foo, I pull that Foo and all the owner's other Foos from the RDBMS. Updates make sure to keep the index up to date and respect the invariant. When an owner calls GetMyFoos I never have to worry that some are cached and some aren't. What I did already The first/simplest answer seems to be to use plain ol' SET and GET with a composite key and json value: SET( "ServiceCache:Foo:" + theFoo.Id, JsonSerialize(theFoo)); I later decided I liked: HSET( "ServiceCache:Foo", theFoo.FooId, JsonSerialize(theFoo)); That lets me get all the values in one cache as HVALS. It also felt right - I'm literally moving hashtables to Redis, so perhaps my top-level items should be hashes. This works to first order. If my high-level code is like: UpdateCache(myFoo); AddToIndex(myFoo); That translates into: HSET ("ServiceCache:Foo", theFoo.FooId, JsonSerialize(theFoo)); var myFoos = JsonDeserialize( HGET ("ServiceCache:FooIndex", theFoo.OwnerId) ); myFoos.Add(theFoo.OwnerId); HSET ("ServiceCache:FooIndex", theFoo.OwnerId, JsonSerialize(myFoos)); However, this is broken in two ways. Two concurrent operations can read/modify/write at the same time. The latter "wins" the final HSET and the former's index update is lost. Another operation could read the index in between the first and second lines. It would miss a Foo that it should find. So how do I index properly? I think I could use a Redis set instead of a json-encoded value for the index. That would solve part of the problem since the "add-to-index-if-not-already-present" would be atomic. I also read about using MULTI as a "transaction" but it doesn't seem like it does what I want. Am I right that I can't really MULTI; HGET; {update}; HSET; EXEC since it doesn't even do the HGET before I issue the EXEC? I also read about using WATCH and MULTI for optimistic concurrency, then retrying on failure. But WATCH only works on top-level keys. So it's back to SET/GET instead of HSET/HGET. And now I need a new index-like-thing to support getting all the values in a given cache. If I understand it right, I can combine all these things to do the job. Something like: while(!succeeded) { WATCH( "ServiceCache:Foo:" + theFoo.FooId ); WATCH( "ServiceCache:FooIndexByOwner:" + theFoo.OwnerId ); WATCH( "ServiceCache:FooIndexAll" ); MULTI(); SET ("ServiceCache:Foo:" + theFoo.FooId, JsonSerialize(theFoo)); SADD ("ServiceCache:FooIndexByOwner:" + theFoo.OwnerId, theFoo.FooId); SADD ("ServiceCache:FooIndexAll", theFoo.FooId); EXEC(); //TODO somehow set succeeded properly } Finally I'd have to translate this pseudocode into real code depending how my client library uses WATCH/MULTI/EXEC; it looks like they need some sort of context to hook them together. All in all this seems like a lot of complexity for what has to be a very common case; I can't help but think there's a better, smarter, Redis-ish way to do things that I'm just not seeing. How do I lock properly? Even if I had no indexes, there's still a (probably rare) race condition. A: HGET - cache miss B: HGET - cache miss A: SELECT B: SELECT A: HSET C: HGET - cache hit C: UPDATE C: HSET B: HSET ** this is stale data that's clobbering C's update. Note that C could just be a really-fast A. Again I think WATCH, MULTI, retry would work, but... ick. I know in some places people use special Redis keys as locks for other objects. Is that a reasonable approach here? Should those be top-level keys like ServiceCache:FooLocks:{Id} or ServiceCache:Locks:Foo:{Id}? Or make a separate hash for them - ServiceCache:Locks with subkeys Foo:{Id}, or ServiceCache:Locks:Foo with subkeys {Id} ? How would I work around abandoned locks, say if a transaction (or a whole server) crashes while "holding" the lock?

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Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

- by Rick Strahl

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Web load testing utility West Wind WebSurge. One of the key components of a load testing tool is the ability to capture URLs effectively so that you can play them back later under load. One of the options in WebSurge for capturing URLs is to use its built-in capture tool which acts as an HTTP proxy to capture any HTTP and HTTPS traffic from most Windows HTTP clients, including Web Browsers as well as standalone Windows applications and services. To make this happen, I used Eric Lawrence’s awesome FiddlerCore library, which provides most of the functionality of his desktop Fiddler application, all rolled into an easy to use library that you can plug into your own applications. FiddlerCore makes it almost too easy to capture HTTP content! For WebSurge I needed to capture all HTTP traffic in order to capture the full HTTP request – URL, headers and any content posted by the client. The result of what I ended up creating is this semi-generic capture form: In this post I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to build this HTTP Capture Form. If you want to jump right in here are the links to get Telerik’s Fiddler Core and the code for the demo provided here. FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore on NuGet Show me the Code (WebSurge Integration code from GitHub) Download the WinForms Sample Form West Wind Web Surge (example implementation in live app) Note that FiddlerCore is bound by a license for commercial usage – see license.txt in the FiddlerCore distribution for details. Integrating FiddlerCore FiddlerCore is a library that simply plugs into your application. You can download it from the Telerik site and manually add the assemblies to your project, or you can simply install the NuGet package via: PM> Install-Package FiddlerCore The library consists of the FiddlerCore.dll as well as a couple of support libraries (CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll) that are used for installing SSL certificates. I’ll have more on SSL captures and certificate installation later in this post. But first let’s see how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to capture HTTP content by looking at how to build the above capture form. Capturing HTTP Content Once the library is installed it’s super easy to hook up Fiddler functionality. Fiddler includes a number of static class methods on the FiddlerApplication object that can be called to hook up callback events as well as actual start monitoring HTTP URLs. In the following code directly lifted from WebSurge, I configure a few filter options on Form level object, from the user inputs shown on the form by assigning it to a capture options object. In the live application these settings are persisted configuration values, but in the demo they are one time values initialized and set on the form. Once these options are set, I hook up the AfterSessionComplete event to capture every URL that passes through the proxy after the request is completed and start up the Proxy service:void Start() { if (tbIgnoreResources.Checked) CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = true; else CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = false; string strProcId = txtProcessId.Text; if (strProcId.Contains('-')) strProcId = strProcId.Substring(strProcId.IndexOf('-') + 1).Trim(); strProcId = strProcId.Trim(); int procId = 0; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strProcId)) { if (!int.TryParse(strProcId, out procId)) procId = 0; } CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId = procId; CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain = txtCaptureDomain.Text; FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; FiddlerApplication.Startup(8888, true, true, true); } The key lines for FiddlerCore are just the last two lines of code that include the event hookup code as well as the Startup() method call. Here I only hook up to the AfterSessionComplete event but there are a number of other events that hook various stages of the HTTP request cycle you can also hook into. Other events include BeforeRequest, BeforeResponse, RequestHeadersAvailable, ResponseHeadersAvailable and so on. In my case I want to capture the request data and I actually have several options to capture this data. AfterSessionComplete is the last event that fires in the request sequence and it’s the most common choice to capture all request and response data. I could have used several other events, but AfterSessionComplete is one place where you can look both at the request and response data, so this will be the most common place to hook into if you’re capturing content. The implementation of AfterSessionComplete is responsible for capturing all HTTP request headers and it looks something like this:private void FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete(Session sess) { // Ignore HTTPS connect requests if (sess.RequestMethod == "CONNECT") return; if (CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId > 0) { if (sess.LocalProcessID != 0 && sess.LocalProcessID != CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId) return; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain)) { if (sess.hostname.ToLower() != CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain.Trim().ToLower()) return; } if (CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources) { string url = sess.fullUrl.ToLower(); var extensions = CaptureConfiguration.ExtensionFilterExclusions; foreach (var ext in extensions) { if (url.Contains(ext)) return; } var filters = CaptureConfiguration.UrlFilterExclusions; foreach (var urlFilter in filters) { if (url.Contains(urlFilter)) return; } } if (sess == null || sess.oRequest == null || sess.oRequest.headers == null) return; string headers = sess.oRequest.headers.ToString(); var reqBody = sess.GetRequestBodyAsString(); // if you wanted to capture the response //string respHeaders = session.oResponse.headers.ToString(); //var respBody = session.GetResponseBodyAsString(); // replace the HTTP line to inject full URL string firstLine = sess.RequestMethod + " " + sess.fullUrl + " " + sess.oRequest.headers.HTTPVersion; int at = headers.IndexOf("\r\n"); if (at < 0) return; headers = firstLine + "\r\n" + headers.Substring(at + 1); string output = headers + "\r\n" + (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(reqBody) ? reqBody + "\r\n" : string.Empty) + Separator + "\r\n\r\n"; BeginInvoke(new Action<string>((text) => { txtCapture.AppendText(text); UpdateButtonStatus(); }), output); } The code starts by filtering out some requests based on the CaptureOptions I set before the capture is started. These options/filters are applied when requests actually come in. This is very useful to help narrow down the requests that are captured for playback based on options the user picked. I find it useful to limit requests to a certain domain for captures, as well as filtering out some request types like static resources – images, css, scripts etc. This is of course optional, but I think it’s a common scenario and WebSurge makes good use of this feature. AfterSessionComplete like other FiddlerCore events, provides a Session object parameter which contains all the request and response details. There are oRequest and oResponse objects to hold their respective data. In my case I’m interested in the raw request headers and body only, as you can see in the commented code you can also retrieve the response headers and body. Here the code captures the request headers and body and simply appends the output to the textbox on the screen. Note that the Fiddler events are asynchronous, so in order to display the content in the UI they have to be marshaled back the UI thread with BeginInvoke, which here simply takes the generated headers and appends it to the existing textbox test on the form. As each request is processed, the headers are captured and appended to the bottom of the textbox resulting in a Session HTTP capture in the format that Web Surge internally supports, which is basically raw request headers with a customized 1st HTTP Header line that includes the full URL rather than a server relative URL. When the capture is done the user can either copy the raw HTTP session to the clipboard, or directly save it to file. This raw capture format is the same format WebSurge and also Fiddler use to import/export request data. While this code is application specific, it demonstrates the kind of logic that you can easily apply to the request capture process, which is one of the reasonsof why FiddlerCore is so powerful. You get to choose what content you want to look up as part of your own application logic and you can then decide how to capture or use that data as part of your application. The actual captured data in this case is only a string. The user can edit the data by hand or in the the case of WebSurge, save it to disk and automatically open the captured session as a new load test. Stopping the FiddlerCore Proxy Finally to stop capturing requests you simply disconnect the event handler and call the FiddlerApplication.ShutDown() method:void Stop() { FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete -= FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; if (FiddlerApplication.IsStarted()) FiddlerApplication.Shutdown(); } As you can see, adding HTTP capture functionality to an application is very straight forward. FiddlerCore offers tons of features I’m not even touching on here – I suspect basic captures are the most common scenario, but a lot of different things can be done with FiddlerCore’s simple API interface. Sky’s the limit! The source code for this sample capture form (WinForms) is provided as part of this article. Adding Fiddler Certificates with FiddlerCore One of the sticking points in West Wind WebSurge has been that if you wanted to capture HTTPS/SSL traffic, you needed to have the full version of Fiddler and have HTTPS decryption enabled. Essentially you had to use Fiddler to configure HTTPS decryption and the associated installation of the Fiddler local client certificate that is used for local decryption of incoming SSL traffic. While this works just fine, requiring to have Fiddler installed and then using a separate application to configure the SSL functionality isn’t ideal. Fortunately FiddlerCore actually includes the tools to register the Fiddler Certificate directly using FiddlerCore. Why does Fiddler need a Certificate in the first Place? Fiddler and FiddlerCore are essentially HTTP proxies which means they inject themselves into the HTTP conversation by re-routing HTTP traffic to a special HTTP port (8888 by default for Fiddler) and then forward the HTTP data to the original client. Fiddler injects itself as the system proxy in using the WinInet Windows settings which are the same settings that Internet Explorer uses and that are configured in the Windows and Internet Explorer Internet Settings dialog. Most HTTP clients running on Windows pick up and apply these system level Proxy settings before establishing new HTTP connections and that’s why most clients automatically work once Fiddler – or FiddlerCore/WebSurge are running. For plain HTTP requests this just works – Fiddler intercepts the HTTP requests on the proxy port and then forwards them to the original port (80 for HTTP and 443 for SSL typically but it could be any port). For SSL however, this is not quite as simple – Fiddler can easily act as an HTTPS/SSL client to capture inbound requests from the server, but when it forwards the request to the client it has to also act as an SSL server and provide a certificate that the client trusts. This won’t be the original certificate from the remote site, but rather a custom local certificate that effectively simulates an SSL connection between the proxy and the client. If there is no custom certificate configured for Fiddler the SSL request fails with a certificate validation error. The key for this to work is that a custom certificate has to be installed that the HTTPS client trusts on the local machine. For a much more detailed description of the process you can check out Eric Lawrence’s blog post on Certificates. If you’re using the desktop version of Fiddler you can install a local certificate into the Windows certificate store. Fiddler proper does this from the Options menu: This operation does several things: It installs the Fiddler Root Certificate It sets trust to this Root Certificate A new client certificate is generated for each HTTPS site monitored Certificate Installation with FiddlerCore You can also provide this same functionality using FiddlerCore which includes a CertMaker class. Using CertMaker is straight forward to use and it provides an easy way to create some simple helpers that can install and uninstall a Fiddler Root certificate:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } return true; } InstallCertificate() works by first checking whether the root certificate is already installed and if it isn’t goes ahead and creates a new one. The process of creating the certificate is a two step process – first the actual certificate is created and then it’s moved into the certificate store to become trusted. I’m not sure why you’d ever split these operations up since a cert created without trust isn’t going to be of much value, but there are two distinct steps. When you trigger the trustRootCert() method, a message box will pop up on the desktop that lets you know that you’re about to trust a local private certificate. This is a security feature to ensure that you really want to trust the Fiddler root since you are essentially installing a man in the middle certificate. It’s quite safe to use this generated root certificate, because it’s been specifically generated for your machine and thus is not usable from external sources, the only way to use this certificate in a trusted way is from the local machine. IOW, unless somebody has physical access to your machine, there’s no useful way to hijack this certificate and use it for nefarious purposes (see Eric’s post for more details). Once the Root certificate has been installed, FiddlerCore/Fiddler create new certificates for each site that is connected to with HTTPS. You can end up with quite a few temporary certificates in your certificate store. To uninstall you can either use Fiddler and simply uncheck the Decrypt HTTPS traffic option followed by the remove Fiddler certificates button, or you can use FiddlerCore’s CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts() which removes the root cert and any of the intermediary certificates Fiddler created. Keep in mind that when you uninstall you uninstall the certificate for both FiddlerCore and Fiddler, so use UninstallCertificate() with care and realize that you might affect the Fiddler application’s operation by doing so as well. When to check for an installed Certificate Note that the check to see if the root certificate exists is pretty fast, while the actual process of installing the certificate is a relatively slow operation that even on a fast machine takes a few seconds. Further the trust operation pops up a message box so you probably don’t want to install the certificate repeatedly. Since the check for the root certificate is fast, you can easily put a call to InstallCertificate() in any capture startup code – in which case the certificate installation only triggers when a certificate is in fact not installed. Personally I like to make certificate installation explicit – just like Fiddler does, so in WebSurge I use a small drop down option on the menu to install or uninstall the SSL certificate: This code calls the InstallCertificate and UnInstallCertificate functions respectively – the experience with this is similar to what you get in Fiddler with the extra dialog box popping up to prompt confirmation for installation of the root certificate. Once the cert is installed you can then capture SSL requests. There’s a gotcha however… Gotcha: FiddlerCore Certificates don’t stick by Default When I originally tried to use the Fiddler certificate installation I ran into an odd problem. I was able to install the certificate and immediately after installation was able to capture HTTPS requests. Then I would exit the application and come back in and try the same HTTPS capture again and it would fail due to a missing certificate. CertMaker.rootCertExists() would return false after every restart and if re-installed the certificate a new certificate would get added to the certificate store resulting in a bunch of duplicated root certificates with different keys. What the heck? CertMaker and BcMakeCert create non-sticky CertificatesI turns out that FiddlerCore by default uses different components from what the full version of Fiddler uses. Fiddler uses a Windows utility called MakeCert.exe to create the Fiddler Root certificate. FiddlerCore however installs the CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll assemblies, which use a different crypto library (Bouncy Castle) for certificate creation than MakeCert.exe which uses the Windows Crypto API. The assemblies provide support for non-windows operation for Fiddler under Mono, as well as support for some non-Windows certificate platforms like iOS and Android for decryption. The bottom line is that the FiddlerCore provided bouncy castle assemblies are not sticky by default as the certificates created with them are not cached as they are in Fiddler proper. To get certificates to ‘stick’ you have to explicitly cache the certificates in Fiddler’s internal preferences. A cache aware version of InstallCertificate looks something like this:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", null); App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", null); } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = null; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = null; return true; } In this code I store the Fiddler cert and private key in an application configuration settings that’s stored with the application settings (App.Configuration.UrlCapture object). These settings automatically persist when WebSurge is shut down. The values are read out of Fiddler’s internal preferences store which is set after a new certificate has been created. Likewise I clear out the configuration settings when the certificate is uninstalled. In order for these setting to be used you have to also load the configuration settings into the Fiddler preferences *before* a call to rootCertExists() is made. I do this in the capture form’s constructor:public FiddlerCapture(StressTestForm form) { InitializeComponent(); CaptureConfiguration = App.Configuration.UrlCapture; MainForm = form; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert)) { FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key); FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert); }} This is kind of a drag to do and not documented anywhere that I could find, so hopefully this will save you some grief if you want to work with the stock certificate logic that installs with FiddlerCore. MakeCert provides sticky Certificates and the same functionality as Fiddler But there’s actually an easier way. If you want to skip the above Fiddler preference configuration code in your application you can choose to distribute MakeCert.exe instead of certmaker.dll and bcmakecert.dll. When you use MakeCert.exe, the certificates settings are stored in Windows so they are available without any custom configuration inside of your application. It’s easier to integrate and as long as you run on Windows and you don’t need to support iOS or Android devices is simply easier to deal with. To integrate into your project, you can remove the reference to CertMaker.dll (and the BcMakeCert.dll assembly) from your project. Instead copy MakeCert.exe into your output folder. To make sure MakeCert.exe gets pushed out, include MakeCert.exe in your project and set the Build Action to None, and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer. Note that the CertMaker.dll reference in the project has been removed and on disk the files for Certmaker.dll, as well as the BCMakeCert.dll files on disk. Keep in mind that these DLLs are resources of the FiddlerCore NuGet package, so updating the package may end up pushing those files back into your project. Once MakeCert.exe is distributed FiddlerCore checks for it first before using the assemblies so as long as MakeCert.exe exists it’ll be used for certificate creation (at least on Windows). Summary FiddlerCore is a pretty sweet tool, and it’s absolutely awesome that we get to plug in most of the functionality of Fiddler right into our own applications. A few years back I tried to build this sort of functionality myself for an app and ended up giving up because it’s a big job to get HTTP right – especially if you need to support SSL. FiddlerCore now provides that functionality as a turnkey solution that can be plugged into your own apps easily. The only downside is FiddlerCore’s documentation for more advanced features like certificate installation which is pretty sketchy. While for the most part FiddlerCore’s feature set is easy to work with without any documentation, advanced features are often not intuitive to gleam by just using Intellisense or the FiddlerCore help file reference (which is not terribly useful). While Eric Lawrence is very responsive on his forum and on Twitter, there simply isn’t much useful documentation on Fiddler/FiddlerCore available online. If you run into trouble the forum is probably the first place to look and then ask a question if you can’t find the answer. The best documentation you can find is Eric’s Fiddler Book which covers a ton of functionality of Fiddler and FiddlerCore. The book is a great reference to Fiddler’s feature set as well as providing great insights into the HTTP protocol. The second half of the book that gets into the innards of HTTP is an excellent read for anybody who wants to know more about some of the more arcane aspects and special behaviors of HTTP – it’s well worth the read. While the book has tons of information in a very readable format, it’s unfortunately not a great reference as it’s hard to find things in the book and because it’s not available online you can’t electronically search for the great content in it. But it’s hard to complain about any of this given the obvious effort and love that’s gone into this awesome product for all of these years. A mighty big thanks to Eric Lawrence for having created this useful tool that so many of us use all the time, and also to Telerik for picking up Fiddler/FiddlerCore and providing Eric the resources to support and improve this wonderful tool full time and keeping it free for all. Kudos! Resources FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore NuGet Fiddler Capture Sample Form Fiddler Capture Form in West Wind WebSurge (GitHub) Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler Book© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in .NET HTTP Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Using JSON.NET for dynamic JSON parsing

- by Rick Strahl

With the release of ASP.NET Web API as part of .NET 4.5 and MVC 4.0, JSON.NET has effectively pushed out the .NET native serializers to become the default serializer for Web API. JSON.NET is vastly more flexible than the built in DataContractJsonSerializer or the older JavaScript serializer. The DataContractSerializer in particular has been very problematic in the past because it can't deal with untyped objects for serialization - like values of type object, or anonymous types which are quite common these days. The JavaScript Serializer that came before it actually does support non-typed objects for serialization but it can't do anything with untyped data coming in from JavaScript and it's overall model of extensibility was pretty limited (JavaScript Serializer is what MVC uses for JSON responses). JSON.NET provides a robust JSON serializer that has both high level and low level components, supports binary JSON, JSON contracts, Xml to JSON conversion, LINQ to JSON and many, many more features than either of the built in serializers. ASP.NET Web API now uses JSON.NET as its default serializer and is now pulled in as a NuGet dependency into Web API projects, which is great. Dynamic JSON Parsing One of the features that I think is getting ever more important is the ability to serialize and deserialize arbitrary JSON content dynamically - that is without mapping the JSON captured directly into a .NET type as DataContractSerializer or the JavaScript Serializers do. Sometimes it isn't possible to map types due to the differences in languages (think collections, dictionaries etc), and other times you simply don't have the structures in place or don't want to create them to actually import the data. If this topic sounds familiar - you're right! I wrote about dynamic JSON parsing a few months back before JSON.NET was added to Web API and when Web API and the System.Net HttpClient libraries included the System.Json classes like JsonObject and JsonArray. With the inclusion of JSON.NET in Web API these classes are now obsolete and didn't ship with Web API or the client libraries. I re-linked my original post to this one. In this post I'll discus JToken, JObject and JArray which are the dynamic JSON objects that make it very easy to create and retrieve JSON content on the fly without underlying types. Why Dynamic JSON? So, why Dynamic JSON parsing rather than strongly typed parsing? Since applications are interacting more and more with third party services it becomes ever more important to have easy access to those services with easy JSON parsing. Sometimes it just makes lot of sense to pull just a small amount of data out of large JSON document received from a service, because the third party service isn't directly related to your application's logic most of the time - and it makes little sense to map the entire service structure in your application. For example, recently I worked with the Google Maps Places API to return information about businesses close to me (or rather the app's) location. The Google API returns a ton of information that my application had no interest in - all I needed was few values out of the data. Dynamic JSON parsing makes it possible to map this data, without having to map the entire API to a C# data structure. Instead I could pull out the three or four values I needed from the API and directly store it on my business entities that needed to receive the data - no need to map the entire Maps API structure. Getting JSON.NET The easiest way to use JSON.NET is to grab it via NuGet and add it as a reference to your project. You can add it to your project with: PM> Install-Package Newtonsoft.Json From the Package Manager Console or by using Manage NuGet Packages in your project References. As mentioned if you're using ASP.NET Web API or MVC 4 JSON.NET will be automatically added to your project. Alternately you can also go to the CodePlex site and download the latest version including source code: http://json.codeplex.com/ Creating JSON on the fly with JObject and JArray Let's start with creating some JSON on the fly. It's super easy to create a dynamic object structure with any of the JToken derived JSON.NET objects. The most common JToken derived classes you are likely to use are JObject and JArray. JToken implements IDynamicMetaProvider and so uses the dynamic keyword extensively to make it intuitive to create object structures and turn them into JSON via dynamic object syntax. Here's an example of creating a music album structure with child songs using JObject for the base object and songs and JArray for the actual collection of songs:[TestMethod] public void JObjectOutputTest() { // strong typed instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here using class interface jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // or cast to dynamic to dynamically add/read properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; album.Artist = "AC/DC"; album.YearReleased = 1976; album.Songs = new JArray() as dynamic; dynamic song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; song.SongLength = "4:11"; album.Songs.Add(song); song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Love at First Feel"; song.SongLength = "3:10"; album.Songs.Add(song); Console.WriteLine(album.ToString()); } This produces a complete JSON structure: { "Entered": "2012-08-18T13:26:37.7137482-10:00", "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "Artist": "AC/DC", "YearReleased": 1976, "Songs": [ { "SongName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "SongLength": "4:11" }, { "SongName": "Love at First Feel", "SongLength": "3:10" } ] } Notice that JSON.NET does a nice job formatting the JSON, so it's easy to read and paste into blog posts :-). JSON.NET includes a bunch of configuration options that control how JSON is generated. Typically the defaults are just fine, but you can override with the JsonSettings object for most operations. The important thing about this code is that there's no explicit type used for holding the values to serialize to JSON. Rather the JSON.NET objects are the containers that receive the data as I build up my JSON structure dynamically, simply by adding properties. This means this code can be entirely driven at runtime without compile time restraints of structure for the JSON output. Here I use JObject to create a album 'object' and immediately cast it to dynamic. JObject() is kind of similar in behavior to ExpandoObject in that it allows you to add properties by simply assigning to them. Internally, JObject values are stored in pseudo collections of key value pairs that are exposed as properties through the IDynamicMetaObject interface exposed in JSON.NET's JToken base class. For objects the syntax is very clean - you add simple typed values as properties. For objects and arrays you have to explicitly create new JObject or JArray, cast them to dynamic and then add properties and items to them. Always remember though these values are dynamic - which means no Intellisense and no compiler type checking. It's up to you to ensure that the names and values you create are accessed consistently and without typos in your code. Note that you can also access the JObject instance directly (not as dynamic) and get access to the underlying JObject type. This means you can assign properties by string, which can be useful for fully data driven JSON generation from other structures. Below you can see both styles of access next to each other:// strong type instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // expando style instance you can just 'use' properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; JContainer (the base class for JObject and JArray) is a collection so you can also iterate over the properties at runtime easily:foreach (var item in jsonObject) { Console.WriteLine(item.Key + " " + item.Value.ToString()); } The functionality of the JSON objects are very similar to .NET's ExpandObject and if you used it before, you're already familiar with how the dynamic interfaces to the JSON objects works. Importing JSON with JObject.Parse() and JArray.Parse() The JValue structure supports importing JSON via the Parse() and Load() methods which can read JSON data from a string or various streams respectively. Essentially JValue includes the core JSON parsing to turn a JSON string into a collection of JsonValue objects that can be then referenced using familiar dynamic object syntax. Here's a simple example:public void JValueParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"{""Name"":""Rick"",""Company"":""West Wind"", ""Entered"":""2012-03-16T00:03:33.245-10:00""}"; dynamic json = JValue.Parse(jsonString); // values require casting string name = json.Name; string company = json.Company; DateTime entered = json.Entered; Assert.AreEqual(name, "Rick"); Assert.AreEqual(company, "West Wind"); } The JSON string represents an object with three properties which is parsed into a JObject class and cast to dynamic. Once cast to dynamic I can then go ahead and access the object using familiar object syntax. Note that the actual values - json.Name, json.Company, json.Entered - are actually of type JToken and I have to cast them to their appropriate types first before I can do type comparisons as in the Asserts at the end of the test method. This is required because of the way that dynamic types work which can't determine the type based on the method signature of the Assert.AreEqual(object,object) method. I have to either assign the dynamic value to a variable as I did above, or explicitly cast ( (string) json.Name) in the actual method call. The JSON structure can be much more complex than this simple example. Here's another example of an array of albums serialized to JSON and then parsed through with JsonValue():[TestMethod] public void JsonArrayParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"[ { ""Id"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""AlbumName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""Artist"": ""AC/DC"", ""YearReleased"": 1976, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2810521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61kTaH-uZBL._AA115_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/…ASIN=B00008BXJ4"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""SongLength"": ""4:11"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Love at First Feel"", ""SongLength"": ""3:10"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Big Balls"", ""SongLength"": ""2:38"" } ] }, { ""Id"": ""7b919432"", ""AlbumName"": ""End of the Silence"", ""Artist"": ""Henry Rollins Band"", ""YearReleased"": 1992, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2800521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FO3rb1tuL._SL160_AA160_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/End-Silence-Rollins-Band/dp/B0000040OX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1302232195&sr=8-5"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Low Self Opinion"", ""SongLength"": ""5:24"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Grip"", ""SongLength"": ""4:51"" } ] } ]"; JArray jsonVal = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; dynamic albums = jsonVal; foreach (dynamic album in albums) { Console.WriteLine(album.AlbumName + " (" + album.YearReleased.ToString() + ")"); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { Console.WriteLine("\t" + song.SongName); } } Console.WriteLine(albums[0].AlbumName); Console.WriteLine(albums[0].Songs[1].SongName); } JObject and JArray in ASP.NET Web API Of course these types also work in ASP.NET Web API controller methods. If you want you can accept parameters using these object or return them back to the server. The following contrived example receives dynamic JSON input, and then creates a new dynamic JSON object and returns it based on data from the first:[HttpPost] public JObject PostAlbumJObject(JObject jAlbum) { // dynamic input from inbound JSON dynamic album = jAlbum; // create a new JSON object to write out dynamic newAlbum = new JObject(); // Create properties on the new instance // with values from the first newAlbum.AlbumName = album.AlbumName + " New"; newAlbum.NewProperty = "something new"; newAlbum.Songs = new JArray(); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { song.SongName = song.SongName + " New"; newAlbum.Songs.Add(song); } return newAlbum; } The raw POST request to the server looks something like this: POST http://localhost/aspnetwebapi/samples/PostAlbumJObject HTTP/1.1User-Agent: FiddlerContent-type: application/jsonHost: localhostContent-Length: 88 {AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds",Songs:[ { SongName: "Problem Child"},{ SongName: "Squealer"}]} and the output that comes back looks like this: { "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds New", "NewProperty": "something new", "Songs": [ { "SongName": "Problem Child New" }, { "SongName": "Squealer New" } ]} The original values are echoed back with something extra appended to demonstrate that we're working with a new object. When you receive or return a JObject, JValue, JToken or JArray instance in a Web API method, Web API ignores normal content negotiation and assumes your content is going to be received and returned as JSON, so effectively the parameter and result type explicitly determines the input and output format which is nice. Dynamic to Strong Type Mapping You can also map JObject and JArray instances to a strongly typed object, so you can mix dynamic and static typing in the same piece of code. Using the 2 Album jsonString shown earlier, the code below takes an array of albums and picks out only a single album and casts that album to a static Album instance.[TestMethod] public void JsonParseToStrongTypeTest() { JArray albums = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; // pick out one album JObject jalbum = albums[0] as JObject; // Copy to a static Album instance Album album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); Assert.IsNotNull(album); Assert.AreEqual(album.AlbumName,jalbum.Value<string>("AlbumName")); Assert.IsTrue(album.Songs.Count > 0); } This is pretty damn useful for the scenario I mentioned earlier - you can read a large chunk of JSON and dynamically walk the property hierarchy down to the item you want to access, and then either access the specific item dynamically (as shown earlier) or map a part of the JSON to a strongly typed object. That's very powerful if you think about it - it leaves you in total control to decide what's dynamic and what's static. Strongly typed JSON Parsing With all this talk of dynamic let's not forget that JSON.NET of course also does strongly typed serialization which is drop dead easy. Here's a simple example on how to serialize and deserialize an object with JSON.NET:[TestMethod] public void StronglyTypedSerializationTest() { // Demonstrate deserialization from a raw string var album = new Album() { AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", Artist = "AC/DC", Entered = DateTime.Now, YearReleased = 1976, Songs = new List<Song>() { new Song() { SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", SongLength = "4:11" }, new Song() { SongName = "Love at First Feel", SongLength = "3:10" } } }; // serialize to string string json2 = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(album,Formatting.Indented); Console.WriteLine(json2); // make sure we can serialize back var album2 = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Album>(json2); Assert.IsNotNull(album2); Assert.IsTrue(album2.AlbumName == "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"); Assert.IsTrue(album2.Songs.Count == 2); } JsonConvert is a high level static class that wraps lower level functionality, but you can also use the JsonSerializer class, which allows you to serialize/parse to and from streams. It's a little more work, but gives you a bit more control. The functionality available is easy to discover with Intellisense, and that's good because there's not a lot in the way of documentation that's actually useful. Summary JSON.NET is a pretty complete JSON implementation with lots of different choices for JSON parsing from dynamic parsing to static serialization, to complex querying of JSON objects using LINQ. It's good to see this open source library getting integrated into .NET, and pushing out the old and tired stock .NET parsers so that we finally have a bit more flexibility - and extensibility - in our JSON parsing. Good to go! Resources Sample Test Project http://json.codeplex.com/© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET Web Api AJAX Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

- by mbcrump

Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created. Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands. For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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Differences Between NHibernate and Entity Framework

- by Ricardo Peres

Introduction NHibernate and Entity Framework are two of the most popular O/RM frameworks on the .NET world. Although they share some functionality, there are some aspects on which they are quite different. This post will describe this differences and will hopefully help you get started with the one you know less. Mind you, this is a personal selection of features to compare, it is by no way an exhaustive list. History First, a bit of history. NHibernate is an open-source project that was first ported from Java’s venerable Hibernate framework, one of the first O/RM frameworks, but nowadays it is not tied to it, for example, it has .NET specific features, and has evolved in different ways from those of its Java counterpart. Current version is 3.3, with 3.4 on the horizon. It currently targets .NET 3.5, but can be used as well in .NET 4, it only makes no use of any of its specific functionality. You can find its home page at NHForge. Entity Framework 1 came out with .NET 3.5 and is now on its second major version, despite being version 4. Code First sits on top of it and but came separately and will also continue to be released out of line with major .NET distributions. It is currently on version 4.3.1 and version 5 will be released together with .NET Framework 4.5. All versions will target the current version of .NET, at the time of their release. Its home location is located at MSDN. Architecture In NHibernate, there is a separation between the Unit of Work and the configuration and model instances. You start off by creating a Configuration object, where you specify all global NHibernate settings such as the database and dialect to use, the batch sizes, the mappings, etc, then you build an ISessionFactory from it. The ISessionFactory holds model and metadata that is tied to a particular database and to the settings that came from the Configuration object, and, there will typically be only one instance of each in a process. Finally, you create instances of ISession from the ISessionFactory, which is the NHibernate representation of the Unit of Work and Identity Map. This is a lightweight object, it basically opens and closes a database connection as required and keeps track of the entities associated with it. ISession objects are cheap to create and dispose, because all of the model complexity is stored in the ISessionFactory and Configuration objects. As for Entity Framework, the ObjectContext/DbContext holds the configuration, model and acts as the Unit of Work, holding references to all of the known entity instances. This class is therefore not lightweight as its NHibernate counterpart and it is not uncommon to see examples where an instance is cached on a field. Mappings Both NHibernate and Entity Framework (Code First) support the use of POCOs to represent entities, no base classes are required (or even possible, in the case of NHibernate). As for mapping to and from the database, NHibernate supports three types of mappings: XML-based, which have the advantage of not tying the entity classes to a particular O/RM; the XML files can be deployed as files on the file system or as embedded resources in an assembly; Attribute-based, for keeping both the entities and database details on the same place at the expense of polluting the entity classes with NHibernate-specific attributes; Strongly-typed code-based, which allows dynamic creation of the model and strongly typing it, so that if, for example, a property name changes, the mapping will also be updated. Entity Framework can use: Attribute-based (although attributes cannot express all of the available possibilities – for example, cascading); Strongly-typed code mappings. Database Support With NHibernate you can use mostly any database you want, including: SQL Server; SQL Server Compact; SQL Server Azure; Oracle; DB2; PostgreSQL; MySQL; Sybase Adaptive Server/SQL Anywhere; Firebird; SQLLite; Informix; Any through OLE DB; Any through ODBC. Out of the box, Entity Framework only supports SQL Server, but a number of providers exist, both free and commercial, for some of the most used databases, such as Oracle and MySQL. See a list here. Inheritance Strategies Both NHibernate and Entity Framework support the three canonical inheritance strategies: Table Per Type Hierarchy (Single Table Inheritance), Table Per Type (Class Table Inheritance) and Table Per Concrete Type (Concrete Table Inheritance). Associations Regarding associations, both support one to one, one to many and many to many. However, NHibernate offers far more collection types: Bags of entities or values: unordered, possibly with duplicates; Lists of entities or values: ordered, indexed by a number column; Maps of entities or values: indexed by either an entity or any value; Sets of entities or values: unordered, no duplicates; Arrays of entities or values: indexed, immutable. Querying NHibernate exposes several querying APIs: LINQ is probably the most used nowadays, and really does not need to be introduced; Hibernate Query Language (HQL) is a database-agnostic, object-oriented SQL-alike language that exists since NHibernate’s creation and still offers the most advanced querying possibilities; well suited for dynamic queries, even if using string concatenation; Criteria API is an implementation of the Query Object pattern where you create a semi-abstract conceptual representation of the query you wish to execute by means of a class model; also a good choice for dynamic querying; Query Over offers a similar API to Criteria, but using strongly-typed LINQ expressions instead of strings; for this, although more refactor-friendlier that Criteria, it is also less suited for dynamic queries; SQL, including stored procedures, can also be used; Integration with Lucene.NET indexer is available. As for Entity Framework: LINQ to Entities is fully supported, and its implementation is considered very complete; it is the API of choice for most developers; Entity-SQL, HQL’s counterpart, is also an object-oriented, database-independent querying language that can be used for dynamic queries; SQL, of course, is also supported. Caching Both NHibernate and Entity Framework, of course, feature first-level cache. NHibernate also supports a second-level cache, that can be used among multiple ISessionFactorys, even in different processes/machines: Hashtable (in-memory); SysCache (uses ASP.NET as the cache provider); SysCache2 (same as above but with support for SQL Server SQL Dependencies); Prevalence; SharedCache; Memcached; Redis; NCache; Appfabric Caching. Out of the box, Entity Framework does not have any second-level cache mechanism, however, there are some public samples that show how we can add this. ID Generators NHibernate supports different ID generation strategies, coming from the database and otherwise: Identity (for SQL Server, MySQL, and databases who support identity columns); Sequence (for Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others who support sequences); Trigger-based; HiLo; Sequence HiLo (for databases that support sequences); Several GUID flavors, both in GUID as well as in string format; Increment (for single-user uses); Assigned (must know what you’re doing); Sequence-style (either uses an actual sequence or a single-column table); Table of ids; Pooled (similar to HiLo but stores high values in a table); Native (uses whatever mechanism the current database supports, identity or sequence). Entity Framework only supports: Identity generation; GUIDs; Assigned values. Properties NHibernate supports properties of entity types (one to one or many to one), collections (one to many or many to many) as well as scalars and enumerations. It offers a mechanism for having complex property types generated from the database, which even include support for querying. It also supports properties originated from SQL formulas. Entity Framework only supports scalars, entity types and collections. Enumerations support will come in the next version. Events and Interception NHibernate has a very rich event model, that exposes more than 20 events, either for synchronous pre-execution or asynchronous post-execution, including: Pre/Post-Load; Pre/Post-Delete; Pre/Post-Insert; Pre/Post-Update; Pre/Post-Flush. It also features interception of class instancing and SQL generation. As for Entity Framework, only two events exist: ObjectMaterialized (after loading an entity from the database); SavingChanges (before saving changes, which include deleting, inserting and updating). Tracking Changes For NHibernate as well as Entity Framework, all changes are tracked by their respective Unit of Work implementation. Entities can be attached and detached to it, Entity Framework does, however, also support self-tracking entities. Optimistic Concurrency Control NHibernate supports all of the imaginable scenarios: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Oracle’s ORA_ROWSCN; A column containing date and time; A column containing a version number; All/dirty columns comparison. Entity Framework is more focused on Entity Framework, so it only supports: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Comparing all/some columns. Batching NHibernate has full support for insertion batching, but only if the ID generator in use is not database-based (for example, it cannot be used with Identity), whereas Entity Framework has no batching at all. Cascading Both support cascading for collections and associations: when an entity is deleted, their conceptual children are also deleted. NHibernate also offers the possibility to set the foreign key column on children to NULL instead of removing them. Flushing Changes NHibernate’s ISession has a FlushMode property that can have the following values: Auto: changes are sent to the database when necessary, for example, if there are dirty instances of an entity type, and a query is performed against this entity type, or if the ISession is being disposed; Commit: changes are sent when committing the current transaction; Never: changes are only sent when explicitly calling Flush(). As for Entity Framework, changes have to be explicitly sent through a call to AcceptAllChanges()/SaveChanges(). Lazy Loading NHibernate supports lazy loading for Associated entities (one to one, many to one); Collections (one to many, many to many); Scalar properties (thing of BLOBs or CLOBs). Entity Framework only supports lazy loading for: Associated entities; Collections. Generating and Updating the Database Both NHibernate and Entity Framework Code First (with the Migrations API) allow creating the database model from the mapping and updating it if the mapping changes. Extensibility As you can guess, NHibernate is far more extensible than Entity Framework. Basically, everything can be extended, from ID generation, to LINQ to SQL transformation, HQL native SQL support, custom column types, custom association collections, SQL generation, supported databases, etc. With Entity Framework your options are more limited, at least, because practically no information exists as to what can be extended/changed. It features a provider model that can be extended to support any database. Integration With Other Microsoft APIs and Tools When it comes to integration with Microsoft technologies, it will come as no surprise that Entity Framework offers the best support. For example, the following technologies are fully supported: ASP.NET (through the EntityDataSource); ASP.NET Dynamic Data; WCF Data Services; WCF RIA Services; Visual Studio (through the integrated designer). Documentation This is another point where Entity Framework is superior: NHibernate lacks, for starters, an up to date API reference synchronized with its current version. It does have a community mailing list, blogs and wikis, although not much used. Entity Framework has a number of resources on MSDN and, of course, several forums and discussion groups exist. Conclusion Like I said, this is a personal list. I may come as a surprise to some that Entity Framework is so behind NHibernate in so many aspects, but it is true that NHibernate is much older and, due to its open-source nature, is not tied to product-specific timeframes and can thus evolve much more rapidly. I do like both, and I chose whichever is best for the job I have at hands. I am looking forward to the changes in EF5 which will add significant value to an already interesting product. So, what do you think? Did I forget anything important or is there anything else worth talking about? Looking forward for your comments!

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