Search Results

Search found 9658 results on 387 pages for 'authentication provider'.

Page 324/387 | < Previous Page | 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331  | Next Page >

• Silverlight Cream for November 16, 2011 -- #1167

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Crump, Andrea Boschin, Michael Sync, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Erno de Weerd, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Antoni Dol, Walter Ferrari, and Jeff Blankenburg(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 6 of 10)" Michael Crump WP7: "31 Days of Mango | Day #2: Device Status" Jeff Blankenburg Metro/WinRT/W8: "Lighting up your C# Metro apps by being a Share Target" Derik Whittaker Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up SilverlightShow has announced a webinar you probably don't want to miss: Webinar – Introduction to XAML Development on Windows 8 Check out the top 5 from last week at SilverlightShow: SilverlightShow for November 07 - 13, 2011 From SilverlightCream.com: 10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 6 of 10) Michael Crump covers a lot of territory in this Part 6 of his Silverlight 5 Beta series at SilverlightShow: P/Invoke, Multiple Windows, and Full Trust Windows Phone 7.5 - Manipulating camera stream Andrea Boschin has Part 4 of his Mango series up at SilverlightShow. He's discussing accessing the raw stream from the camera and saving it to a file. Blend 4 + VS 2011 (Preview) = Problem? Michael Sync reports a problem with Blend 4 and the VS2011 preview... followed up by a set of scripts that were posted on Connect to make the problem go away (at least for Michael) Windows Phone Toolkit MultiselectList in depth | Part1: key concepts and API WindowsPhoneGeek begins a series on the MultiselectList in the Phone Toolkit... if you've seen his tutorials, you know they're great... this one is no exception.. lots of code, info and notes getting you on-board with the features Getting Started with Windows Phone Alarms WindowsPhoneGeek next takes a sidestep from his new series and has this post on Alarms in WP7 apps .. one of the type of scheduled actions in WP7.1 ... good write-up, pictures and code Using AppHarbor, Bitbucket and Mercurial with ASP.NET and Silverlight – Part 3 Membership and Role Provider in SQL Server Erno de Weerd's part 3 of his series is up... adding Role and Membership to his application... check it out in this 17-step tutorial Yet Another Podcast #51–Shawn Wildermuth: //build, Xaml Programming & Beyond Jesse Liberty has another of his Yet Another Podcasts up and he's talking with Jon Galloway and Shawn Wildermuth... hear what *that* trio has to say about post //BUILD, and all things XAML Lighting up your C# Metro apps by being a Share Target Derik Whittaker continues to work with Metro... evidenced by this post on wiring your app up to be a Share Target .. allowing your app to consume data from other apps Photoshop in METRO style 2: Filters Antoni Dol follows up his Photoshop in Metro post with this one on filters... he's got some great screenshots... was hoping to see a link to the code... maybe I missed it! Silverlight and Sharepoint working together: a Silverlight menu for Sharepoint - Part 1 Walter Ferrari has part 1 of a series up at SilverlightShow talking about Sharepoint and Silverlight, and using Silverlight Navigation in place of what Sharepoint offers up. 31 Days of Mango | Day #2: Device Status Jeff Blankenburg is motoring along on his 31 Days of Mango. This is his Day 2 post and all about DeviceStatus, or just about everything you would like to know about your user's phone 31 Days of Mango | Day #3: Alarms and Reminders Day 3 of Jeff Blankenburg's series is about Alarms and Reminders... a way to alert your user that something needs to be done... you can create, edit, and delete them as needed Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• Using the latest (stable release) of Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 11.1.0.7.20.

  - by mbcrump

  +  = Simple and safe Data connections.   This guide is for someone wanting to use the latest ODP.NET quickly without reading the official documentation. This guide will get you up and running in about 15 minutes. I have reviewed my referral link to my simple Setting up ODP.net with Win7 x64 and noticed most people were searching for one of the following terms: “how to use odp.net with vs” “setup connection odp.net” “query db using odp and vs” While my article provided links and a sample tnsnames.ora file, it really didn’t tell you how to use it. I’m hoping that this brief tutorial will help. So before we get started, you will need the following: Download the following: www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/dotnet/utilsoft.html from oracle and install it. It is the first one on the page. Visual Studio 2008 or 2010. It should be noted that The System.Data.OracleClient namespace is the OLD .NET Framework Data Provider for Oracle. It should not be used anymore as it has been depreciated. The latest version which is what we are using is Oracle.DataAccess.Client. First things first, Add a reference to the Oracle.DataAccess.Client after you install ODP.NET   Copy and paste the following C# code into your project and replace the relevant info including the query string and you should be able to return data. I have commented several lines of code to assist in understanding what it is doing.   Lambda Expression. using System; using System.Data; using Oracle.DataAccess.Client;   namespace ConsoleApplication1 {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {           try         {             //Setup DataSource             string oradb = "Data Source=(DESCRIPTION ="                                    + "(ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = hostname)(PORT = 1521)))"                                    + "(CONNECT_DATA = (SERVICE_NAME = SERVICENAME))) ;"                                    + "Persist Security Info=True;User ID=USER;Password=PASSWORD;";                        //Open Connection to Oracle - this could be moved outside the try.             OracleConnection conn = new OracleConnection(oradb);             conn.Open();               //Create cmd and use parameters to prevent SQL injection attacks.             OracleCommand cmd = new OracleCommand();             cmd.Connection = conn;               cmd.CommandText = "select username from table where username = :username";               OracleParameter p1 = new OracleParameter("username", OracleDbType.Varchar2);             p1.Value = username;             cmd.Parameters.Add(p1);               cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text;               OracleDataReader dr = cmd.ExecuteReader();             dr.Read();               //Contains the value of the datarow             Console.WriteLine(dr["username"].ToString());               //Disposes of objects.             dr.Dispose();             cmd.Dispose();             conn.Dispose();         }           catch (OracleException ex) // Catches only Oracle errors         {             switch (ex.Number)             {                 case 1:                     Console.WriteLine("Error attempting to insert duplicate data.");                     break;                 case 12545:                     Console.WriteLine("The database is unavailable.");                     break;                 default:                     Console.WriteLine(ex.Message.ToString());                     break;             }         }           catch (Exception ex) // Catches any error not previously caught         {                   Console.WriteLine("Unidentified Error: " + ex.Message.ToString());              }         }       }           } At this point, you should have a working Program that returns data from an oracle database. If you are still having trouble then drop me a line and I will be happy to assist. As of this writing, oracle has announced the latest beta release of ODP.NET 11.2.0.1.1 Beta.  This release includes .NET Framework 4 and .NET Framework 4 Client Profile support. You may want to hold off on this version for a while as its BETA, and I wouldn’t want any production code using any BETA software.

  Read the article

• Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

  - by Etienne Tremblay

  I’d like to thank Packt for providing me with a review version of Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices eBook. In fairness I also know the author Peter having seen him speak at DevTeach on many occasions.  I started by looking at the table of content to see what this book was about, knowing that “best practices” is a real misnomer I wanted to see what they were.  I really like the fact that he starts the book by really saying they are not really best practices but actually recommend practices.  As a Team Foundation Server user I found that chapter 2 was more for the open source crowd and I really skimmed it.  The portion on Branching was well documented, although I’m not a fan of the testing branch myself, but the rest was right on. The section on merge remote changes (bring the outside to you) paradigm is really important and was touched on. Chapter 3 has good solid practices on low level constructs like generics and exceptions. Chapter 4 dives into architectural practices like decoupling, distributed architecture and data based architecture.  DTOs and ORMs are touched on briefly as is NoSQL. Chapter 5 is about deployment and is really a great primer on all the “packaging” technologies like Visual Studio Setup and Deployment (depreciated in 2012), Click Once and WIX the major player outside of commercial solutions.  This is a nice section on how to move from VSSD to WIX this is going to be important in the coming years due to the fact that VS 2012 doesn’t support VSSD. In chapter 6 we dive into automated testing practices, including test coverage, mocking, TDD, SpecDD and Continuous Testing.  Peter covers all those concepts really nicely albeit succinctly. Being a book on recommended practices I find this is really good. I really enjoyed chapter 7 that gave me a lot of great tips to enhance my Visual Studio “experience”.  Tips on organizing projects where good.  Also even though I knew about configurations I like that he put that in there so you can move all your settings to another machine, a lot of people don’t know about that. Quick find and Resharper are also briefly covered.  He touches on macros (depreciated in 2012).  Finally he touches on Continuous Integration a very important concept in today’s ALM landscape. Chapter 8 is all about Parallelization, threads, Async, division of labor, reactive extensions.  All those concepts are touched on and again generalized approaches to those modern problems are giving.       Chapter 9 goes into distributed apps, the most used and accepted practice in the industry for .NET projects the chapter tackles concepts like Scalability, Messaging and Cloud (the flavor of the month of distributed apps, although I think this will stick ;-)).  He also looks a protocols TCP/UDP and how to debug distributed apps.  He touches on logging and health monitoring. Chapter 10 tackles recommended practices for web services starting with implementing WCF services, which goes into all sort of goodness like how to host in IIS or self-host.  How to manual test WCF services, also a section on authentication and authorization.  ASP.NET Web services are also touched on in that chapter All in all a good read, nice tips and accepted practices.  I like the conciseness of the subjects and Peter touches on a lot of things in this book and uses a lot of the current technologies flavors to explain the concepts.   Cheers, ET

  Read the article

• Xsigo and Oracle's Storage

  - by Philippe Deverchère

  Xsigo, a virtual network infrastructure provider, has recently been acquired by Oracle. Following this acquisition, one might ask ourselves why it is important to Oracle and how Oracle's storage is going to benefit on the long term from this virtualized infrastructure layer. Well, the first thing to understand is that Virtual Networking addresses both network and storage connectivity. Oracle Virtual Networking, as the Xsigo technology is now called, connects any server to any network and storage, so this is not just about connecting servers to the Internet or Intranet. It is also for a large part connecting servers to NAS and SAN storage. Connecting servers to storage has become increasingly complex in the past few years because of the strong emergence of virtualization at the Operating System level. 50% of enterprise workloads are now virtualized, up from 18% in 2009, resulting in a strong consolidation of various applications in a high density server footprint. At the same time, server I/O capability increased 8x in the last 8 years. All this has pushed IT administrators to multiply the number of I/O connections in the back-end of their physical servers, resulting in a messy and very hard to manage networking infrastructure. Here is a typical view of a rack back-end when no virtual networking is used. We consider that today: - 75% of users have ten or more Ethernet ports per server - 85% of users have two or more SAN ports per server - 58% have had to add connectivity to a server specifically for VMs - 65% consider cable reduction a priority The average is 12 or more ports per server, resulting in an extremely complex infrastructure to manage. What Oracle wants to achieve with its Oracle Virtual Networking offering is pretty simple. The objective is to eliminate the complexity through a dramatic reduction of cabling between servers and storage/networks. It is also to provide a software based management system so that any server can be connected to any network or any storage, on demand, and without physical intervention on the infrastructure. At the end of the day, the picture on the left shows what one wants to get for the back-end of customer's racks: just a couple of connections on each physical server to provide a simple, agile and fast network infrastructure for both storage and networking access. This is exactly what the Oracle Virtual Networking solution does. It transforms a complex, error-prone, difficult to manage and expensive networking infrastructure into a simple, high performance and agile solution for the data center. Practically speaking, and for the sake of simplicity, imagine that each server just hosts a minimal number of physical InfiniBand HCAs (Host Channel Adapter) with two links (for redundancy) onto the Oracle Fabric Interconnect director. Using the Oracle Fabric Manager software, you'll then be able to create virtual NICs and HBAs (called vNIC and vHBA) that will be seen by the servers as standard NICs and HBAs and associate them to networks and storage systems which are physically connected to the back-end of the director through standard Fibre Channel and Ethernet GbE/10GbE ports. In addition to this incredibly simple "at-a-click" connectivity capability, the Oracle Virtual Networking solution offers powerful features such as network isolation, Quality of Service, advanced performance monitoring and non-disruptive reconfiguration, migration and scalability of networking infrastructure. So let's go back now to our initial question: why is Oracle Virtual Networking especially important to Oracle's storage solutions? After all, one could connect any storage in the back-end of the Oracle Fabric Interconnect directors, right? The answer is pretty simple: since Oracle owns both the virtualized networking infrastructure and the storage (ZFS-SA, Pillar Axiom and tape), it is possible to imagine several ways in the future to add value when it comes to connect storage to a virtualized storage network: enhanced storage capabilities, converged management between storage and network, improved diagnostic capabilities and optimized integration resulting in higher performance and unique features/functions. Of course, all this is not going to be done overnight, and future will tell us is which evolutions come first. But there is little doubt that the integration of Xsigo within Oracle is going to create opportunities for Oracle's storage!

  Read the article

• Oracle Database Upcoming Event dates to know

  - by mandy.ho

  February may be a short month, but it's not short of exciting Oracle events. From information packed "Real Performance Days" to participation in one of the biggest IT Security events - look out for Oracle Database and let us know if you are there with us! Feb 13-18, 2011 - Las Vegas, NV TDWI World Conference Series Join Oracle in highlighting Exadata x2-2 and x2-8, along with Oracle Business Intelligence, Enterprise Performance management and Data Warehousing solutions. Oracle will be presenting a workshop - Oracle Data Integration: Best-of-Breed Solutions for the Enterprise Wednesday, February 16, 2011 7p.m - 9p.m Glen Goodrich, Director of Product Management Christophe Dupupet, Director of Product Management, Data Integration http://events.tdwi.org/events/las-vegas-world-conference-2011/sessions/session-list.aspx Feb 14-17, 2011 - Barcelona, Spain Mobile World Congress MWC is an event where Oracle showcases the near complete breadth and depth of value that our Communications Industry strategy and Hardware and Software Solutions can deliver. Oracle supports Communications Service Providers today and delivers platforms and flexibility primed for the future. Oracle will have a two story Pavilion, along with an Oracle Java and Embedded Solutions Center - App Planet. The Exhibition times are Monday, 14th February 09.00 - 19.00 Tuesday, 15th February 09.00 - 19.00 Wednesday, 16th February 09.00 - 19.00 Thursday, 17th February 09.00 - 16.00 Have questions? Meet with Oracle Sales representatives at the Oracle Café. Open every day from 9am to 17:00pm. http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=109912&src=6973382&src=6973382&Act=4 Feb 14-18, 2011 - San Francisco, CA RSA Conference As the world's most complete, open, integrated business software and hardware systems provider, Oracle can uniquely safeguard your information throughout its entire lifecycle. Learn more by attending these sessions: Cloud Computing: A Brave New World for Security and Privacy (CLD-201) Wednesday, February 16 at 8:30 a.m. Databases Under Attack - Securing Heterogeneous Database Infrastructures (DAS-301) Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 8:30 a.m. Seven Steps to Protecting Databases (DAS-402) Friday, February 18 at 10:10 a.m. RSA Conference Attendees will also have the opportunity to meet with Oracle Security Solution experts, see live product demos and more by visiting booth # 1559. Hours: Monday, February 14, 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m., Tuesday, February 15, 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. - 6:00p.m., Wednesday, February 16, 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m., and Thursday, February 17, 11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. http://eventreg.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=127657&src=6967733&src=6967733&Act=12 Feb 21-25, 2011 - Various Locations IOUG Presents - A Day of Real World Performance with Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth and Graham Wood These Oracle experts will debate, discuss and delineate the best practices for designing hardware architectures, deploying Oracle databases, and developing applications that deliver the fastest possible performance for your business.Topics are covered in a conversational format - with all three chiming in where appropriate. Each presenter has their own screen projector to demonstrate their individual points to the participants. Customers will have the opportunity to get their specific performance/tuning questions answered and learn how to balance all the different environmental requirements for their applications to improve performance. Register today for the following dates and locations • February 21 in San Diego, CA • February 22 in Los Angeles, CA • February 23 in Seattle, WA • February 25 in Phoenix, AZ http://www.ioug.org/tabid/194/Default.aspx Feb 8-24 - Various Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit This series of full-day events with cloud experts, sharing real-world best practices, reference architectures and more continues during the month of February. Attend the Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit to learn how to: • Build a state-of-the-art cloud architecture • Leverage your existing IT investments • Optimize your IT management processes Whether you are considering a move to cloud computing or have already adopted a cloud model, this event offers you the insights you need to take full advantage of cloud computing. Check below to see if the event is coming to a city near you. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/events/cloud-events-214342.html

  Read the article

• Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: Industry Best Practices + Flexibility

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  By Richard Garraputa, VP of Sales & Marketing, brij Richard joined brij in 1996 after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with degrees in Information Systems and Accounting. He directs brij’s overall strategies of both the business development and marketing departments. Companies looking for new ERP systems spend so much time comparing features and functions of software products but too often short change the value of their own processes.  Company managers I meet often claim that they are implementing a new ERP system so they can perform better and faster.  When asked how, the answer is often “by implementing best practices”.  But the term ‘best practices’ is frequently used to mean ‘doing things the way everyone else does them’ rather than a starting point or benchmark to build upon by adding your own value. Of course, implementing standardized processes across an enterprise is an important step in improving operational efficiencies.  But not all companies are alike.  Do you ever tell your customers “We are just like our competition and have no competitive differentiation”?  Probably not.  So why should the implementation of your business processes be just like your competitor’s?  Even within the same industry, companies differentiate themselves by leveraging their unique expertise and approach to business.  These unique aspects—the competitive differentiators that companies use to thrive in a crowded marketplace—can and should be supported by the implementation of business systems like ERP. Modern ERP systems like Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne have a broad and deep functional footprint designed to integrate a company’s core operations.  But how can a company take advantage of this footprint without blowing up their implementation budget?  Some ERP vendors claim to solve this challenge by stating that their systems come pre-configured with ‘best practices’.  Too often what they are really saying is that you will have to abandon your key operational differentiators to fit a vendor’s template for your business—or extend your implementation and postpone the realization of any benefits. Thankfully for midsize companies, there is an alternative to the undesirable options of extended implementation projects or abandoning their competitive differentiators.  Oracle Accelerate Solutions speed the time it takes to implement JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solution based on your unique business characteristics, getting your new ERP system up and running faster without forcing your business to fit a cookie-cutter solution. We’ve been a JD Edwards implementation partner since 1986 and we now leverage Oracle Business Accelerators—cloud based rapid implementation tools built and maintained by Oracle. Oracle Business Accelerators deliver the benefits of embedded industry best practices without forcing every customer in to one set of processes like many template or “clone and go” approaches do. You retain the ability to reconfigure your applications—without customization—as your business changes. Wielded by Oracle partners with industry-specific domain expertise, Oracle Accelerate Solution implementations powered by Oracle Business Accelerators help automate the application configuration to fit your business better, faster. For example, on a recent project at a manufacturing company, the project manager told me that Oracle Business Accelerators helped get them to Conference Room Pilot 20% faster than with a traditional approach. Time savings equal cost savings. And if ‘better and faster’ is your goal for your business performance, shouldn’t it be the goal for your ERP implementation as well? Established in 1986, brij has been dedicated solely to helping its customers implement Oracle’s JD Edwards solutions and to maximize the value of those customers’ IT investments. They are a Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork and an Oracle Accelerate Solution provider.

  Read the article

• trying to use mod_proxy with httpd and tomcat

  - by techsjs2012

  I been trying to use mod_proxy with httpd and tomcat... I have on VirtualBox running Scientific Linux which has httpd and tomcat 6 on it.. I made two nodes of tomcat6. I followed this guide like 10 times and still cant get the 2nd node of tomcat working.. http://www.richardnichols.net/2010/08/5-minute-guide-clustering-apache-tomcat/ Here is the lines from my http.conf file <Proxy balancer://testcluster stickysession=JSESSIONID> BalancerMember ajp://127.0.0.1:8009 min=10 max=100 route=node1 loadfactor=1 BalancerMember ajp://127.0.0.1:8109 min=10 max=100 route=node2 loadfactor=1 </Proxy> ProxyPass /examples balancer://testcluster/examples <Location /balancer-manager> SetHandler balancer-manager AuthType Basic AuthName "Balancer Manager" AuthUserFile "/etc/httpd/conf/.htpasswd" Require valid-user </Location> Now here is my server.xml from node1 <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?> <!-- Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. --> <!-- Note: A "Server" is not itself a "Container", so you may not define subcomponents such as "Valves" at this level. Documentation at /docs/config/server.html --> <Server port="8005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN"> <!--APR library loader. Documentation at /docs/apr.html --> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" /> <!--Initialize Jasper prior to webapps are loaded. Documentation at /docs/jasper-howto.html --> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" /> <!-- Prevent memory leaks due to use of particular java/javax APIs--> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JreMemoryLeakPreventionListener" /> <!-- JMX Support for the Tomcat server. Documentation at /docs/non-existent.html --> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener" /> <!-- Global JNDI resources Documentation at /docs/jndi-resources-howto.html --> <GlobalNamingResources> <!-- Editable user database that can also be used by UserDatabaseRealm to authenticate users --> <Resource name="UserDatabase" auth="Container" type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase" description="User database that can be updated and saved" factory="org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabaseFactory" pathname="conf/tomcat-users.xml" /> </GlobalNamingResources> <!-- A "Service" is a collection of one or more "Connectors" that share a single "Container" Note: A "Service" is not itself a "Container", so you may not define subcomponents such as "Valves" at this level. Documentation at /docs/config/service.html --> <Service name="Catalina"> <!--The connectors can use a shared executor, you can define one or more named thread pools--> <!-- <Executor name="tomcatThreadPool" namePrefix="catalina-exec-" maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="4"/> --> <!-- A "Connector" represents an endpoint by which requests are received and responses are returned. Documentation at : Java HTTP Connector: /docs/config/http.html (blocking & non-blocking) Java AJP Connector: /docs/config/ajp.html APR (HTTP/AJP) Connector: /docs/apr.html Define a non-SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080 <Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" /> --> <!-- A "Connector" using the shared thread pool--> <!-- <Connector executor="tomcatThreadPool" port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" /> --> <!-- Define a SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8443 This connector uses the JSSE configuration, when using APR, the connector should be using the OpenSSL style configuration described in the APR documentation --> <!-- <Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true" maxThreads="150" scheme="https" secure="true" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" /> --> <!-- Define an AJP 1.3 Connector on port 8009 --> <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" /> <!-- An Engine represents the entry point (within Catalina) that processes every request. The Engine implementation for Tomcat stand alone analyzes the HTTP headers included with the request, and passes them on to the appropriate Host (virtual host). Documentation at /docs/config/engine.html --> <!-- You should set jvmRoute to support load-balancing via AJP ie : <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="jvm1"> --> <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="node1"> <!--For clustering, please take a look at documentation at: /docs/cluster-howto.html (simple how to) /docs/config/cluster.html (reference documentation) --> <!-- <Cluster className="org.apache.catalina.ha.tcp.SimpleTcpCluster"/> --> <!-- The request dumper valve dumps useful debugging information about the request and response data received and sent by Tomcat. Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html --> <!-- <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RequestDumperValve"/> --> <!-- This Realm uses the UserDatabase configured in the global JNDI resources under the key "UserDatabase". Any edits that are performed against this UserDatabase are immediately available for use by the Realm. --> <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/> <!-- Define the default virtual host Note: XML Schema validation will not work with Xerces 2.2. --> <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false"> <!-- SingleSignOn valve, share authentication between web applications Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html --> <!-- <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.authenticator.SingleSignOn" /> --> <!-- Access log processes all example. Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html --> <!-- <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs" prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".txt" pattern="common" resolveHosts="false"/> --> </Host> </Engine> </Service> </Server> now here is the server.xml file from node2 <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?> <!-- Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. --> <!-- Note: A "Server" is not itself a "Container", so you may not define subcomponents such as "Valves" at this level. Documentation at /docs/config/server.html --> <Server port="8105" shutdown="SHUTDOWN"> <!--APR library loader. Documentation at /docs/apr.html --> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" /> <!--Initialize Jasper prior to webapps are loaded. Documentation at /docs/jasper-howto.html --> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" /> <!-- Prevent memory leaks due to use of particular java/javax APIs--> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JreMemoryLeakPreventionListener" /> <!-- JMX Support for the Tomcat server. Documentation at /docs/non-existent.html --> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener" /> <!-- Global JNDI resources Documentation at /docs/jndi-resources-howto.html --> <GlobalNamingResources> <!-- Editable user database that can also be used by UserDatabaseRealm to authenticate users --> <Resource name="UserDatabase" auth="Container" type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase" description="User database that can be updated and saved" factory="org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabaseFactory" pathname="conf/tomcat-users.xml" /> </GlobalNamingResources> <!-- A "Service" is a collection of one or more "Connectors" that share a single "Container" Note: A "Service" is not itself a "Container", so you may not define subcomponents such as "Valves" at this level. Documentation at /docs/config/service.html --> <Service name="Catalina"> <!--The connectors can use a shared executor, you can define one or more named thread pools--> <!-- <Executor name="tomcatThreadPool" namePrefix="catalina-exec-" maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="4"/> --> <!-- A "Connector" represents an endpoint by which requests are received and responses are returned. Documentation at : Java HTTP Connector: /docs/config/http.html (blocking & non-blocking) Java AJP Connector: /docs/config/ajp.html APR (HTTP/AJP) Connector: /docs/apr.html Define a non-SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080 <Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" /> --> <!-- A "Connector" using the shared thread pool--> <!-- <Connector executor="tomcatThreadPool" port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" /> --> <!-- Define a SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8443 This connector uses the JSSE configuration, when using APR, the connector should be using the OpenSSL style configuration described in the APR documentation --> <!-- <Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true" maxThreads="150" scheme="https" secure="true" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" /> --> <!-- Define an AJP 1.3 Connector on port 8009 --> <Connector port="8109" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" /> <!-- An Engine represents the entry point (within Catalina) that processes every request. The Engine implementation for Tomcat stand alone analyzes the HTTP headers included with the request, and passes them on to the appropriate Host (virtual host). Documentation at /docs/config/engine.html --> <!-- You should set jvmRoute to support load-balancing via AJP ie : <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="jvm1"> --> <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="node2"> <!--For clustering, please take a look at documentation at: /docs/cluster-howto.html (simple how to) /docs/config/cluster.html (reference documentation) --> <!-- <Cluster className="org.apache.catalina.ha.tcp.SimpleTcpCluster"/> --> <!-- The request dumper valve dumps useful debugging information about the request and response data received and sent by Tomcat. Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html --> <!-- <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RequestDumperValve"/> --> <!-- This Realm uses the UserDatabase configured in the global JNDI resources under the key "UserDatabase". Any edits that are performed against this UserDatabase are immediately available for use by the Realm. --> <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/> <!-- Define the default virtual host Note: XML Schema validation will not work with Xerces 2.2. --> <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false"> <!-- SingleSignOn valve, share authentication between web applications Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html --> <!-- <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.authenticator.SingleSignOn" /> --> <!-- Access log processes all example. Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html --> <!-- <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs" prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".txt" pattern="common" resolveHosts="false"/> --> </Host> </Engine> </Service> </Server> I dont know what it is. but I been trying for days

  Read the article

• Weird SSIS Configuration Error

  - by Christopher House

  I ran into an interesting SSIS issue that I thought I'd share in hopes that it may save someone from bruising their head after repeatedly banging it on the desk like I did.  I was trying to setup what I believe is referred to as "indirect configuration" in SSIS.  This is where you store your configuration in some repository like a database or a file, then store the location of that repository in an environment variable and use that to configure the connection to your configuration repository.  In my specific situation, I was using a SQL database.  I had this all working, but for reasons I'll not bore you with, I had to move my SSIS development to a new VM last week.  When I got my new VM, I set about creating a new package.  I finished up development on the package and started setting up configuration.  I created an OLE DB connection that pointed to my configuration table then went through the configuration wizard to have the connection string for this connection set through my environment variable.  I then went through the wizard to set another property through a value stored in the configuration table.  When I got to the point where you select the connection, my connection wasn't in the list: As you can see in the screen capture above, the ConfigurationDb connection isn't in the list of available SQL connections in the configuration wizard.  Strange.  I canceled out of the wizard, went to the properties for ConfigurationDb, tested the connection and it was successful.  I went back to the wizard again and this time ConfigurationDb was there.  I completed the wizard then went to test my package.  Unfortunately the package wouldn't run, I got the following error: Unfortunately, googling for this error code didn't help much as none of the results appears related to package configuration.  I did notice that when I went back through the package configuration and tried to edit a previously saved config entry,  I was getting the following error: I checked the connection string I had stored in my environment variable and noticed that indeed, it did not have a provider name.  I didn't recall having included one on my previous VM, but I figured I'd include it just to see what happened.  That made no difference at all.  After a day and a half of trying to figure out what the problem was, I'm pleased to report that through extensive trial and error, I have resolved the error. As it turns out, the person who setup this new VM for me named the server SQLSERVER2008.  This meant my configuration connection string was: Initial Catalog=SSISConfigDb;Data Source=SQLSERVER2008;Integrated Security=SSPI; Just for the heck of it, I tried changing it to: Initial Catalog=SSISConfigDb;Data Source=(local);Integrated Security=SSPI; That did the trick!  As soon as I restarted BIDS, I was able to run the package with no errors at all.  Crazy.  So, the moral of the story is, don't name your server SQLSERVER2008 if you want SSIS configuration to work when using SQL as your config store.

  Read the article

• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 - September 16-22, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the week of September 16-22, 2012. The Real Architects of LA: OTN Architect Day in Los Angeles - Oct 25No gossip. No drama. No hair pulling. Just a full day of technical sessions and peer interaction focused on using Oracle technologies in today's cloud and SOA architectures. The event is free, but seating is limited, so register now. Thursday October 25, 2012. 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. OIM-OAM-OAAM integration using TAP – Request Flow you must understand!! | Atul KumarAtul Kumar's post addresses "key points and request flow that you must understand" when integrating three Oracle Identity Management product Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Access Management, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager. Cloud, automation drive new growth in SOA governance market | ZDNet "SOA governance tools and processes learned over the past decade are now underpinning cloud projects as they scale across enterprises," reports Joe McKendrick. But there remains a lack of understanding about SOA Governance. DevOps Basics: Track Down High CPU Thread with ps, top and the new JDK7 jcmd Tool | Frank Munz "The approach is very generic and works for WebLogic, Glassfish or any other Java application," say Frank Munz. "UNIX commands in the example are run on CentOS, so they will work without changes for Oracle Enterprise Linux or RedHat. Creating the thread dump at the end of the video is done with the jcmd tool from JDK7." Frank has captured the process in the posted video. Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Hands-on Lab: "Leading Your Everyday Application Integration Projects with Enterprise SOA" Yet another session to squeeze into your already-jammed Oracle OpenWorld schedule. This hands-on lab focuses on how "Oracle Enterprise Repository, Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Foundation Pack, and Oracle SOA Suite work together to help you drive your enterprisewide integration projects." Loving VirtualBox 4.2… | The ORACLE-BASE Blog Is it wrong for a man to love a technology? Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall has several very good reasons for his feelings… ADF Create and CreateInsert Operations for ADF Table | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis answers the question, "What operation is best to use to insert a new row into an ADF table, Create or CreateInsert?" Fault Handling Slides and Q&A | Ronald van Luttikhuizen Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen shares the slides and a Q&A transcript from a presentation he and fellow ACE Director Guido Schmutz gave at the recent Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne preview event organized by AMIS Technology. Why IT is a profession in 'flux' | ZDNet I usuallly don't post two items from the same person in one day, but this post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick deals with some critical issues affecting those in IT. As McKendrick puts it: "IT professionals are under considerable pressure to deliver more value to the business, versus being good at coding and testing and deploying and integrating." Running RichFaces on WebLogic 12c | Markus Eisele "With all the JMS magic and the different provider checks in the showcase this has become some kind of a challenge to simply build and deploy it," says Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele. His detailed post will help you to meet that challenge. Thought for the Day "Less is more." — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) Source: BrainyQuote.com

  Read the article

• My search what the Cloud will mean for my Work, part 2

  - by Kay Sellenrode

  My experience with the cloud and why work will change and not disappear. Until now I have multiple experiences with the cloud, for the most good. i have worked on multiple cloud solutions in the past but let me describe them as 0.x versions. For me the 1st real serious cloud experience was a bit more than 1 year ago, when our company switched from an in house server to Microsoft BPOS as a complete replacement. Since we are a small consultancy firm and don’t have that much else to do than consulting, our IT requirements are quite simple. We need Mail and Storage space for our documents. With the in house server we had multiple outages during a year, mostly by lack of administering. Being consultants in the field and hardly having time to maintain a server, BPOS was and still is for us the right solution. Since the migration we have less outages and a much more robust solution. Have we run into issues with BPOS for our own environment? No not that I’m aware of. Based on this experience I made a stance about deploy ability of BPOS and cloud solutions, they are suitable for MKB (Dutch for Medium and Small Businesses). Most Small businesses don’t have the amount of work to hire a full time it admin. Hiring a service provider to maintain their own server might be even more costly than hiring an admin. So seeing the capabilities of BPOS and the needs of most businesses I see it as a great solution that gives the business a complete Server replacement solution for a fixed price per user. resulting in a clear budget for IT spending, something most small businesses were looking for, for a long time. So right now I’m deploying BPOS with a customer, and I run into some of the Cloud 1.0 issues. In my opinion BPOS is a good working Cloud version 1.0 solution. What do I mean with 1.0? Well 1.0 is mostly a tested solution (unlike 0.x versions) but still have quite some limitations caused by too few market experience. in my opnion this is also the reason why we don’t see that much BPOS customers yet and why I think Office 365 will make a huge difference. What I have seen of 365 shows me it is a Cloud 2.0 version, meaning it has all needed features and is much more flexible to the customer. This is also why I see changes happen in my work field, changes and not unemployment due to Cloud solutions. Cloud 1.0 solutions gave me the idea that if every customer would adopt them I would be out of work. But in reality Cloud 1.0 solutions are here just to set the market needs. The Cloud 2.0 and higher versions will give the customer much more flexibility, but also require the need for a consultant. Where the 1.0 versions are simple to setup and maintain, the 2.0 solution needs more thought upfront and afterwards. ie. BPOS in its 1.0 version brings you a very simplified Exchange 2007 solution, Suitable for some customers. Looking at Office 365 you receive almost a full blown Exchange 2010 solution. I expect this to be even more customizable in the next version. In my search for the changes to my work I try to regulary write a post with my thought around the Cloud and the impact on my work as a consultant. I'm also planning to present around this topic, so if anyone is interested to see me present around this topic, you're more than welcome to contact me.

  Read the article

• Deploying an SSL Application to Windows Azure &ndash; The Dark Secret

  - by ToStringTheory

  When working on an application that had been in production for some time, but was about to have a shopping cart added to it, the necessity for SSL certificates came up.  When ordering the certificates through the vendor, the certificate signing request (CSR) was generated through the providers (http://register.com) web interface, and within a day, we had our certificate. At first, I thought that the certification process would be the hard part…  Little did I know that my fun was just beginning… The Problem I’ll be honest, I had never really secured a site before with SSL.  This was a learning experience for me in the first place, but little did I know that I would be learning more than the simple procedure.  I understood a bit about SSL already, the mechanisms in how it works – the secure handshake, CA’s, chains, etc…  What I didn’t realize was the importance of the CSR in the whole process.  Apparently, when the CSR is created, a public key is created at the same time, as well as a private key that is stored locally on the PC that generated the request.  When the certificate comes back and you import it back into IIS (assuming you used IIS to generate the CSR), all of the information is combined together and the SSL certificate is added into your store. Since at the time the certificate had been ordered for our site, the selection to use the online interface to generate the CSR was chosen, the certificate came back to us in 5 separate files: A root certificate – (*.crt file) An intermediate certifcate – (*.crt file) Another intermediate certificate – (*.crt file) The SSL certificate for our site – (*.crt file) The private key for our certificate – (*.key file) Well, in case you don’t know much about Windows Azure and SSL certificates, the first thing you should learn is that certificates can only be uploaded to Azure if they are in a PFX package – securable by a password.  Also, in the case of our SSL certificate, you need to include the Private Key with the file.  As you can see, we didn’t have a PFX file to upload. If you don’t get the simple PFX from your hosting provider, but rather the multiple files, you will soon find out that the process has turned from something that should be simple – to one that borders on a circle of hell… Probably between the fifth and seventh somewhere… The Solution The solution is to take the files that make up the certificates chain and key, and combine them into a file that can be imported into your local computers store, as well as uploaded to Windows Azure.  I can not take the credit for this information, as I simply researched a while before finding out how to do this. Download the OpenSSL for Windows toolkit (Win32 OpenSSL v1.0.1c) Install the OpenSSL for Windows toolkit Download and move all of your certificate files to an easily accessible location (you'll be pointing to them in the command prompt, so I put them in a subdirectory of the OpenSSL installation) Open a command prompt Navigate to the folder where you installed OpenSSL Run the following command: openssl pkcs12 -export –out {outcert.pfx} –inkey {keyfile.key}      –in {sslcert.crt} –certfile {ca1.crt} –certfile (ca2.crt) From this command, you will get a file, outcert.pfx, with the sum total of your ssl certificate (sslcert.crt), private key {keyfile.key}, and as many CA/chain files as you need {ca1.crt, ca2.crt}. Taking this file, you can then import it into your own IIS in one operation, instead of importing each certificate individually.  You can also upload the PFX to Azure, and once you add the SSL certificate links to the cloud project in Visual Studio, your good to go! Conclusion When I first looked around for a solution to this problem, there were not many places online that had the information that I was looking for.  While what I ended up having to do may seem obvious, it isn’t for everyone, and I hope that this can at least help one developer out there solve the problem without hours of work!

  Read the article

• HOWTO Turn off SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration.

  - by darrenm

  Since we released hardware crypto acceleration for SPARC T4 and Intel AES-NI support we have had a common question come up: 'How do I test without the hardware crypto acceleration?'. Initially this came up just for development use so developers can do unit testing on a machine that has hardware offload but still cover the code paths for a machine that doesn't (our integration and release testing would run on all supported types of hardware anyway).  I've also seen it asked in a customer context too so that we can show that there is a performance gain from the hardware crypto acceleration, (not just the fact that SPARC T4 much faster performing processor than T3) and measure what it is for their application. With SPARC T2/T3 we could easily disable the hardware crypto offload by running 'cryptoadm disable provider=n2cp/0'.  We can't do that with SPARC T4 or with Intel AES-NI because in both of those classes of processor the encryption doesn't require a device driver instead it is unprivileged user land callable instructions. Turns out there is away to do this by using features of the Solaris runtime loader (ld.so.1). First I need to expose a little bit of implementation detail about how the Solaris Cryptographic Framework is implemented in Solaris 11.  One of the new Solaris 11 features of the linker/loader is the ability to have a single ELF object that has multiple different implementations of the same functions that are selected at runtime based on the capabilities of the machine.  The alternate to this is having the application coded to call getisax() and make the choice itself.  We use this functionality of the linker/loader when we build the userland libraries for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (specifically libmd.so, and the unfortunately misnamed due to historical reasons libsoftcrypto.so) The Solaris linker/loader allows control of a lot of its functionality via environment variables, we can use that to control the version of the cryptographic functions we run.  To do this we simply export the LD_HWCAP environment variable with values that tell ld.so.1 to not select the HWCAP section matching certain features even if isainfo says they are present.  For SPARC T4 that would be: export LD_HWCAP="-aes -des -md5 -sha256 -sha512 -mont -mpul" and for Intel systems with AES-NI support: export LD_HWCAP="-aes" This will work for consumers of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework that use the Solaris PKCS#11 libraries or use libmd.so interfaces directly.  It also works for the Oracle DB and Java JCE.  However does not work for the default enabled OpenSSL "t4" or "aes-ni" engines (unfortunately) because they do explicit calls to getisax() themselves rather than using multiple ELF cap sections. However we can still use OpenSSL to demonstrate this by explicitly selecting "pkcs11" engine  using only a single process and thread.  $ openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 54170.81k 187416.00k 489725.70k 805445.63k 1018880.00k $ LD_HWCAP="-aes" openssl speed -engine pkcs11 -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 29376.37k 58328.13k 79031.55k 86738.26k 89191.77k We can clearly see the difference this makes in the case where AES offload to the SPARC T4 was disabled. The "t4" engine is faster than the pkcs11 one because there is less overhead (again on a SPARC T4-1 using only a single process/thread - using -multi you will get even bigger numbers). $ openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc ... type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes aes-128-cbc 85526.61k 89298.84k 91970.30k 92662.78k 92842.67k Yet another cool feature of the Solaris linker/loader, thanks Rod and Ali. Note these above openssl speed output is not intended to show the actual performance of any particular benchmark just that there is a significant improvement from using hardware acceleration on SPARC T4. For cryptographic performance benchmarks see the http://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/ postings.

  Read the article

• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Ancestry.com

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryAncestry.com Inc is the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world and it operates a network of genealogical and historical record websites focused on the U.S. and nine foreign countries, develops and markets genealogical software, and offers a wide array of genealogical related services. As of June 2012, the company provided access to more than 10 billion records, 38 million family trees, and 2 million paying subscribers. Their main business challenges were to improve time to market and agility to respond quickly to fast changing Internet waves while integrating with their existing content (4 PetaByte) and legacy systems. Ancestry.com implemented Oracle WebCenter Sites as their Web Experience Management System for their landing pages and marketing micro sites, added dynamic sections to their existing websites and integrated the existing content and legacy systems through web services. The Ancestry.com landing pages and marketing sites are now managed by the business team without any involvement of engineering resources. Managed content can quickly be added to existing pages without having to refactor the whole page and existing content (4 PetaBytes)  is now served trough Oracle WebCenter Sites without having to migrate from existing systems. Company OverviewAncestry.com Inc is a publicly traded Internet company (NASDAQ: ACOM) based in Provo, Utah, USA. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical and historical record websites focused on the U.S. and nine foreign countries, develops and markets genealogical software, and offers a wide array of genealogical related services. As of June 2012, the company provided access to more than 10 billion records, 38 million family trees, and 2 million paying subscribers. Business ChallengesAncestry main business challenge was to respond quickly to fast changing Internet waves.  Product marketing could not change Web site content without going through development. They needed dedicated developers just to support their marketing efforts. Technical Requirements Support current systems and environments - ASP.NET, MVC.NET, Java, JSP, PHP Scalable and manageable for a world wide network Marketing Requirements Easy to enter content – Without having a degree in HTML Scheduling of content – When is content visible to users Product Requirements Easy to manage content – See when content is out-of-date Rotation of content – Producing new content as old content expires Solution DeployedAncestry implemented  Oracle WebCenter Sites as their Web Experience Management System to manage their landing pages and marketing micro sites. This sites are fully managed by their business team without involvement of any engineering resources. The integration with their existing Web sites is done through Spot Management which allows the ability to add dynamic content to certain sections of a web page. The dynamic content is managed by  Oracle WebCenter Sites. The integration with the existing content (4 PetaBytes!) is done trough  a custom content provider interface which allows to mix existing content with content from  Oracle WebCenter Sites. Business ResultsAncestry.com has achieved following impressive business results: Landing pages and marketing sites are now managed by the business team without any involvement of engineering resources Managed content can quickly be added to existing pages without having to refactor the whole page Provide access to existing content (4 PetaBytes)  without having to migrate from existing systems Additional Information Ancestry Webcast Oracle WebCenter Sites

  Read the article

• Windows Azure Emulators On Your Desktop

  - by BuckWoody

  Many people feel they have to set up a full Azure subscription online to try out and develop on Windows Azure. But you don’t have to do that right away. In fact, you can download the Windows Azure Compute Emulator – a “cloud development environment” – right on your desktop. No, it’s not for production use, and no, you won’t have other people using your system as a cloud provider, and yes, there are some differences with Production Windows Azure, but you’ll be able code, run, test, diagnose, watch, change and configure code without having any connection to the Internet at all. The best thing about this approach is that when you are ready to deploy the code you’ve been testing, a few clicks deploys it to your subscription when you make one.   So what deep-magic does it take to run such a thing right on your laptop or even a Virtual PC? Well, it’s actually not all that difficult. You simply download and install the Windows Azure SDK (you can even get a free version of Visual Studio for it to run on – you’re welcome) from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/cc974146.aspx   This SDK will also install the Windows Azure Compute Emulator and the Windows Azure Storage Emulator – and then you’re all set. Right-click the icon for Visual Studio and select “Run as Administrator”:    Now open a new “Cloud” type of project:   Add your Web and Worker Roles that you want to code:   And when you’re done with your design, press F5 to start the desktop version of Azure:   Want to learn more about what’s happening underneath? Right-click the tray icon with the Azure logo, and select the two emulators to see what they are doing:          In the configuration files, you’ll see a “Use Development Storage” setting. You can call the BLOB, Table or Queue storage and it will all run on your desktop. When you’re ready to deploy everything to Windows Azure, you simply change the configuration settings and add the storage keys and so on that you need.   Want to learn more about all this?   Overview of the Windows Azure Compute Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432968.aspx Overview of the Windows Azure Storage Emulator: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432983.aspx January 2011 Training Kit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=413E88F8-5966-4A83-B309-53B7B77EDF78&displaylang=en      

  Read the article

• Hyper-V Live Migration across Sites!

  - by Ryan Roussel

  One of the great sessions I sat in on at Tech Ed this week was stretching a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V  Failover Cluster across sites.  With this ability, you could actually implement a Hyper-V cluster where you could migrate or even Live Migrate VMs across sites.   With this area’s propensity for Hurricanes, this will be a very popular topic for me over the next few months. While this technology is possible today, it’s also very complicated and can be very expensive to implement.    First your WAN connection has to support the ability to trunk your VLAN across both sites in order to Live Migrate.  This means you can’t use a Layer 3 routed connection like MPLS.  It has to be a Metro Ethernet connection or "Dark Fiber”.  Dark Fiber is unused Fiber already in the ground that can be leased from  various providers. Both of these connections would allow you to trunk layer 2 across your WAN.  Cisco does have the ability to trunk layer 2 across a routed connection by muxing the traffic but this is only available in their Nexus product line which has a very steep price tag.   If you are stuck with MPLS or the like and Nexus switching is not a realistic possibility, you will have to implement a multi-subnet cluster in which case Live Migration won’t be possible.  However you can still failover VMs to the remote site with some planning and manual intervention.  The consideration here is that the VMs will be on a different subnet once migrated, so you will have to change the IP addressing of your VMs.  This also has ramifications with DNS and Name resolution to control your down time.  DHCP with Reservations for your VMs is the preferred method to achieve the IP changes as this will automate that part of the process.   Secondly, you will have to have  a mechanism to replicate your storage across both sites.  Many SAN vendors natively support hardware based synchronous and asynchronous replication.  Some even support cluster shared volumes which were introduced in 2008 R2.   If your SANs do not support this natively, there are alternative file based replication products either software based like Double Take or hardware appliance like EMC.  Be sure to check with your vendor on the support of Disk majority if you’re replicating your quorum disk between SANs.   The last consideration is the ability to maintain quorum for your cluster.  If your replication provider does not support Disk Majority through replication, you will have to explore Node Majority with File Share Witness.  This will affect your design as a 3 node cluster with 1 node at the remote site and FSW at the production site would not have the ability to maintain quorum if the production site was lost. MS best practice for this would be to implement an even node cluster with 2 nodes at  each site and the FSW at a third site.   And there you have it.  While some considerations and research goes into implementing this solution, even a multi-subnet solution would be invaluable to organizations in the implementations of “warm” DR sites.

  Read the article

• Authenticating your windows domain users in the cloud

  - by cibrax

  Moving to the cloud can represent a big challenge for many organizations when it comes to reusing existing infrastructure. For applications that drive existing business processes in the organization, reusing IT assets like active directory represent good part of that challenge. For example, a new web mobile application that sales representatives can use for interacting with an existing CRM system in the organization. In the case of Windows Azure, the Access Control Service (ACS) already provides some integration with ADFS through WS-Federation. That means any organization can create a new trust relationship between the STS running in the ACS and the STS running in ADFS. As the following image illustrates, the ADFS running in the organization should be somehow exposed out of network boundaries to talk to the ACS. This is usually accomplish through an ADFS proxy running in a DMZ. This is the official story for authenticating existing domain users with the ACS.  Getting an ADFS up and running in the organization, which talks to a proxy and also trust the ACS could represent a painful experience. It basically requires  advance knowledge of ADSF and exhaustive testing to get everything right.  However, if you want to get an infrastructure ready for authenticating your domain users in the cloud in a matter of minutes, you will probably want to take a look at the sample I wrote for talking to an existing Active Directory using a regular WCF service through the Service Bus Relay Binding. You can use the WCF ability for self hosting the authentication service within a any program running in the domain (a Windows service typically). The service will not require opening any port as it is opening an outbound connection to the cloud through the Relay Service. In addition, the service will be protected from being invoked by any unauthorized party with the ACS, which will act as a firewall between any client and the service. In that way, we can get a very safe solution up and running almost immediately. To make the solution even more convenient, I implemented an STS in the cloud that internally invokes the service running on premises for authenticating the users. Any existing web application in the cloud can just establish a trust relationship with this STS, and authenticate the users via WS-Federation passive profile with regular http calls, which makes this very attractive for web mobile for example. This is how the WCF service running on premises looks like, [ServiceBehavior(Namespace = "http://agilesight.com/active_directory/agent")] public class ProxyService : IAuthenticationService { IUserFinder userFinder; IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator;   public ProxyService() : this(new UserFinder(), new UserAuthenticator()) { }   public ProxyService(IUserFinder userFinder, IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator) { this.userFinder = userFinder; this.userAuthenticator = userAuthenticator; }   public AuthenticationResponse Authenticate(AuthenticationRequest request) { if (userAuthenticator.Authenticate(request.Username, request.Password)) { return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = true, Attributes = this.userFinder.GetAttributes(request.Username) }; }   return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = false }; } } Two external dependencies are used by this service for authenticating users (IUserAuthenticator) and for retrieving user attributes from the user’s directory (IUserFinder). The UserAuthenticator implementation is just a wrapper around the LogonUser Win Api. The UserFinder implementation relies on Directory Services in .NET for searching the user attributes in an existing directory service like Active Directory or the local user store. public UserAttribute[] GetAttributes(string username) { var attributes = new List<UserAttribute>();   var identity = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(new PrincipalContext(this.contextType, this.server, this.container), IdentityType.SamAccountName, username); if (identity != null) { var groups = identity.GetGroups(); foreach(var group in groups) { attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "Group", Value = group.Name }); } if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.DisplayName)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "DisplayName", Value = identity.DisplayName }); if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.EmailAddress)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "EmailAddress", Value = identity.EmailAddress }); }   return attributes.ToArray(); } As you can see, the code is simple and uses all the existing infrastructure in Azure to simplify a problem that looks very complex at first glance with ADFS. All the source code for this sample is available to download (or change) in this GitHub repository, https://github.com/AgileSight/ActiveDirectoryForCloud

  Read the article

• Windows Azure Recipe: Consumer Portal

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Nearly every company on the internet has a web presence. Many are merely using theirs for informational purposes. More sophisticated portals allow customers to register their contact information and provide some level of interaction or customer support. But as our understanding of how consumers use the web increases, the more progressive companies are taking advantage of social web and rich media delivery to connect at a deeper level with the consumers of their goods and services. Drivers Cost reduction Scalability Global distribution Time to market Solution Here’s a sketch of how a Windows Azure Consumer Portal might be built out: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the solution. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control (optional) – if identity needs to be tracked within the solution, the access control service combined with the Windows Identity Foundation framework provides out-of-the-box support for several social media platforms including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook. It also has a provider model to allow integration with other platforms as well. Caching (optional) – for sites with high traffic with lots of read-only data and lists, the distributed in-memory caching service can be used to cache and serve up static data at higher scale and speed than direct database requests. It can also be used to manage user session state. Blob Storage (optional) – for sites that serve up unstructured data such as documents, video, audio, device drivers, and more. The data is highly available and stored redundantly across data centers. Each entry in blob storage is provided with it’s own unique URL for direct access by the browser. Content Delivery Network (CDN) (optional) – for sites that service users around the globe, the CDN is an extension to blob storage that, when enabled, will automatically cache frequently accessed blobs and static site content at edge data centers around the world. The data can be delivered statically or streamed in the case of rich media content. Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

  Read the article

• Webcast Q&A: Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the third webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter", where customer Sean Mattson from HDS and Rob Vandenberg from Oracle Partner Lingotek shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Hitachi Data System’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Sean Mattson, Hitachi Data Systems  Q: Did you run into any issues in the deployment of the platform?A: There were some challenges, we were one of the first enterprise ‘on premise’ installations for Lingotek and our WebCenter platform also has a lot of custom features.  There were a lot of iterations and back and forth working with Lingotek at first.  We both helped each other, learned a lot and in the end managed to resolve all issues and roll out a very compelling solution for HDS. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Being able to manage and govern the content lifecycle globally and centrally and at the same time enabling the field to update, review and publish the incremental content changes without a lot of touchpoints has helped us streamline and simplify the entire publishing process. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: I wouldn't say resistance as much as skepticism that we could actually deploy an automated and self publishing solution.  Even if a solution is great, adoption of a new process can be a challenge and we are still pursuing our adoption targets.  One of the most important aspects is to include lots of training and support materials and offer as much helpdesk type support as needed to get the field self sufficient and confident in the capabilities of the system.  Rob Vandenberg, Lingotek  Q: Are there any limitations regarding supported languages such as support for French Canadian and Indian languages?A: Lingotek supports all language pairs. Including right to left languages and double byte languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean Q: Is the Lingotek solution integrated with the new 11g release of WebCenter Sites? A: Yes! In fact, Lingotek is the first OVI partner for Oracle WebCenter Sites  Q: Can translation memories help to improve the accuracy of machine translation?A: One of the greatest long term strategic benefits of using Lingotek is the accumulation of translation memories, or past human translations. These TMs can be used to "train" statistical machine translation engines to have higher and higher quality. This virtuous cycle is ongoing and will consistently improve both machine and human translations.  Q: We have existing translation memories from previous work with our translation service provider. Can they be easily imported in to the Lingotek solution for re-use? Q: Yes, Lingotek is standards compliant. We support TM import in both the TMX and XLIFF formats. Q: If we use Lingotek as a service to do our professional translation and also use the Lingotek software solution, do we get the translation memories to give us a means of just translating future adds and changes ourselves? A: Yes, all the data is yours, always. Lingotek can provide both the integrated translation software as well as the professional translation services. All the content and translation memories are yours. Q: Can you give us an example of where community translation has proved to be successful?A: The key word here is community. If you have a community that cares about you, your content, and the rest of the community, then community translation can work for you. We've seen effective use cases in Product User Groups content, Support Communities, and other types of User Generated content, like wikis and blogs.   If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!   Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

  Read the article

• The Evolution of Oracle Direct EMEA by John McGann

  - by user769227

  John is expanding his Dublin based team and is currently recruiting a Director with marketing and sales leadership experience: http://bit.ly/O8PyDF Should you wish to apply, please send your CV to [email protected] Hi, my name is John McGann and I am part of the Oracle Direct management team, based in Dublin.   Today I’m writing from the Oracle London City office, right in the heart of the financial district and up to very recently at the centre of a fantastic Olympic Games. The Olympics saw individuals and teams from across the globe competing to decide who is Citius, Altius, Fortius - “Faster, Higher, Stronger" There are lots of obvious parallels between the competitive world of the Olympics and the Business environments that many of us operate in, but there are also some interesting differences – especially in my area of responsibility within Oracle. We are of course constantly striving to be the best - the best solution on offer for our clients, bringing simplicity to their management, consumption and application of information technology, and the best provider when compared with our many niche competitors.   In Oracle and especially in Oracle Direct, a key aspect of how we achieve this is what sets us apart from the Olympians.  We have long ago eliminated geographic boundaries as a limitation to what we can achieve. We assemble the strongest individuals across multiple countries and bring them together in teams focussed on a single goal. One such team is the Oracle Direct Sales Programs team. In case you don’t know, Oracle Direct EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa) is the inside sales division in Oracle and it is where I started my Oracle career.  I remember that my first role involved putting direct mail in envelopes.... things have moved on a bit since then – for me, for Oracle Direct and in how we interact with our customers. Today, the team of over 1000 people is located in the different Oracle Direct offices around Europe – the main ones are Malaga, Berlin, Prague and Dubai plus the headquarters in Dublin. We work in over 20 languages and are in constant contact with current and future Oracle customers, using the latest internet and telephone technologies to effectively communicate and collaborate with each other, our customers and prospects. One of my areas of responsibility within Oracle Direct is the Sales Programs team. This team of 25 people manages the planning and execution of demand generation, leading the process of finding new and incremental revenue within Oracle Direct. The Sales Programs Managers or ‘SPMs’ are embedded within each of the Oracle Direct sales teams, focussed on distinct geographies or product groups. The SPMs are virtual members of the regional sales management teams, and work closely with the sales and marketing teams to define and deliver demand generation activities. The customer contact elements of these activities are executed via the Oracle Direct Sales and Business Development/Lead Generation teams, to deliver the pipeline required to meet our revenue goals. Activities can range from pan-EMEA joint sales and marketing campaigns, to very localised niche campaigns. The campaigns might focus on particular segments of our existing customers, introducing elements of our evolving solution portfolio which customers may not be familiar with. The Sales Programs team also manages ‘Nurture’ activities to ensure that we develop potential business opportunities with contacts and organisations that do not have immediate requirements. Looking ahead, it is really important that we continue to evolve our ability to add value to our clients and reduce the physical limitations of our distance from them through the innovative application of technology. This enables us to enhance the customer buying experience and to enable the Inside Sales teams to manage ever more complex sales cycles from start to finish.  One of my expectations of my team is to actively drive innovation in how we leverage data to better understand our customers, and exploit emerging technologies to better communicate with them.   With the rate of innovation and acquisition within Oracle, we need to ensure that existing and potential customers are aware of all we have to offer that relates to their business goals.   We need to achieve this via a coherent communication and sales strategy to effectively target the right people using the most effective medium. This is another area where the Sales Programs team plays a key role.

  Read the article

• PowerShell: Read Excel to Create Inserts

  - by BuckWoody

  I’m writing a series of articles on how to migrate “departmental” data into SQL Server. I also hold workshops on the entire process – from discovering that the data exists to the modeling process and then how to design the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process. Finally I write about (and teach) a few methods on actually moving the data. One of those options is to use PowerShell. There are a lot of ways even with that choice, but the one I show is to read two columns from the spreadsheet and output statements that would insert the data using a stored procedure. Of course, you could re-write this as INSERT statements, out to a text file for bcp, or even use a database connection in the script to move the data directly from Excel into SQL Server. This snippet won’t run on your system, of course – it assumes a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet located at c:\temp called VendorList.xlsx. It looks for a tab in that spreadsheet called Vendors. The statement that does the writing just uses one column: Vendor Code. Here’s the breakdown of what I’m doing: In the first block, I connect to Microsoft Office Excel. That connection string is specific to Excel 2007, so if you need a different version you’ll need to look that up. In the second block I set up a selection from the entire spreadsheet based on that tab. Note that if you’re only after certain data you shouldn’t get the whole spreadsheet – that’s just good practice. In the next block I create the text I want, inserting the Vendor Code field as I go. Finally I close the connection. Enjoy! $ExcelConnection= New-Object -com "ADODB.Connection" $ExcelFile="c:\temp\VendorList.xlsx" $ExcelConnection.Open("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;` Data Source=$ExcelFile;Extended Properties=Excel 12.0;") $strQuery="Select * from [Vendors$]" $ExcelRecordSet=$ExcelConnection.Execute($strQuery) do { Write-Host "EXEC sp_InsertVendors '" $ExcelRecordSet.Fields.Item("Vendor Code").Value "'" $ExcelRecordSet.MoveNext()} Until ($ExcelRecordSet.EOF) $ExcelConnection.Close() Script Disclaimer, for people who need to be told this sort of thing: Never trust any script, including those that you find here, until you understand exactly what it does and how it will act on your systems. Always check the script on a test system or Virtual Machine, not a production system. All scripts on this site are performed by a professional stunt driver on a closed course. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Offer good for a limited time only. Keep out of reach of small children. Do not operate heavy machinery while using this script. If you experience blurry vision, indigestion or diarrhea during the operation of this script, see a physician immediately. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• Friday Tips #3

  - by Chris Kawalek

  Even though yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the US, we still have a Friday tip for those of you around your computers today. In fact, we have two! The first one came in last week via our #AskOracleVirtualization Twitter hashtag. The tweet has disappeared into the ether now, but we remember the gist, so here it is: Question: Will there be an Oracle Virtual Desktop Client for Android? Answer by our desktop virtualization product development team: We are looking at Android as a supported platform for future releases. Question: How can I make a Sun Ray Client automatically connect to a virtual machine? Answer by Rick Butland, Principal Sales Consultant, Oracle Desktop Virtualization: Someone recently asked how they can assign VM’s to specific Sun Ray Desktop Units (“DTU’s”) without any user interfaction being required, without the “Desktop Selector” being displayed, or any User Directory.  That is, they wanted each Sun Ray to power on and immediately connect to a pre-assigned Solaris VM.   This can be achieved by using “tokens” for user assignment – that is, the tokens found on Smart Cards, DTU’s, or OVDC clients can be used in place of user credentials.  Note, however, that mixing “token-only” assignments and “User Directories” in the same VDI Center won’t work.   Much of this procedure is covered in the documentation, particularly here. But it can useful to have everything in one place, “cookbook-style”:  1. Create the “token-only” directory type: From the VDI administration interface, select:  “Settings”, “Company”, “New”, select the “None” radio button, and click “Next.” Enter a name for the new “Company”, and click “Next”, then “Finish.” 2. Create Desktop Providers, Pools, and VM’s as appropriate. 3. Access the Sun Ray administration interface at http://servername:1660 and login using “root” credentials, and access the token-id’s you wish to use for assignment.  If you’re using DTU tokens rather than Smart Card tokens, these can be found under the “Tokens” tab, and “Search-ing” using the “Currently Used Tokens” tab.  DTU’s can be identified by the prefix “psuedo.”   For example: 4. Copy/paste this token into the VDI administrative interface, by selecting “Users”, “New”, and pasting in the token ID, and click “OK” - for example: 5. Assign the token (DTU) to a desktop, that is, in the VDI Admin Gui, select “Pool”, “Desktop”, select the VM, and click "Assign" and select the token you want, for example: In addition to assigning tokens to desktops, you'll need to bypass the login screen.  To do this, you need to do two things:  1.  Disable VDI client authentication with:  /opt/SUNWvda/sbin/vda settings-setprops -p clientauthentication=Disabled 2. Disable the VDI login screen – to do this,  add a kiosk argument of "-n" to the Sun Ray kiosk arguments screen.   You set this on the Sun Ray administration page - "Advanced", "Kiosk Mode", "Edit", and add the “-n” option to the arguments screen, for example: 3.  Restart both the Sun Ray and VDI services: # /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utstart –c # /opt/SUNWvda/sbin/vda-service restart Remember, if you have a question for us, please post on Twitter with our hashtag (again, it's #AskOracleVirtualization), and we'll try to answer it if we can. See you next time!

  Read the article

• Cloud hosted CI for .NET projects

  - by Scott Dorman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2014/06/02/cloud-hosted-ci-for-.net-projects.aspxContinuous integration (CI) is important. If you don’t have it set up…you should. There are a lot of different options available for hosting your own CI server, but they all require you to maintain your own infrastructure. If you’re a business, that generally isn’t a problem. However, if you have some open source projects hosted, for example on GitHub, there haven’t really been any options. That has changed with the latest release of AppVeyor, which bills itself as “Continuous integration for busy developers.” What’s different about AppVeyor is that it’s a hosted solution. Why is that important? By being a hosted solution, it means that I don’t have to maintain my own infrastructure for a build server. How does that help if you’re hosting an open source project? AppVeyor has a really competitive pricing plan. For an unlimited amount of public repositories, it’s free. That gives you a cloud hosted CI system for all of your GitHub projects for the cost of some time to set them up, which actually isn’t hard to do at all. I have several open source projects (hosted at https://github.com/scottdorman), so I signed up using my GitHub credentials. AppVeyor fully supported my two-factor authentication with GitHub, so I never once had to enter my password for GitHub into AppVeyor. Once it was done, I authorized GitHub and it instantly found all of the repositories I have (both the ones I created and the ones I cloned from elsewhere). You can even add “build badges” to your markdown files in GitHub, so anyone who visits your project can see the status of the lasted build. Out of the box, you can simply select a repository, add the build project, click New Build and wait for the build to complete. You now have a complete CI server running for your project. The best part of this, besides the fact that it “just worked” with almost zero configuration is that you can configure it through a web-based interface which is very streamlined, clean and easy to use or you can use a appveyor.yml file. This means that you can define your CI build process (including any scripts that might need to be run, etc.) in a standard file format (the YAML format) and store it in your repository. The benefits to that are huge. The file becomes a versioned artifact in your source control system, so it can be branched, merged, and is completely transparent to anyone working on the project. By the way, AppVeyor isn’t limited to just GitHub. It currently supports GitHub, BitBucket, Visual Studio Online, and Kiln. I did have a few issues getting one of my projects to build, but the same day I posted the problem to the support forum a fix was deployed, and I had a functioning CI build about 5 minutes after that. Since then, I’ve provided some additional feature requests and had a few other questions, all of which have seen responses within a 24-hour period. I have to say that it’s easily been one of the best customer support experiences I’ve seen in a long time. AppVeyor is still young, so it doesn’t yet have full feature parity with some of the older (more established) CI systems available,  but it’s getting better all the time and I have no doubt that it will quickly catch up to those other CI systems and then pass them. The bottom line, if you’re looking for a good cloud-hosted CI system for your .NET-based projects, look at AppVeyor.

  Read the article

• Roles / Profiles / Perspectives in NetBeans IDE 7.1

  - by Geertjan

  With a check out of main-silver from yesterday, I'm able to use the brand new "role" attribute in @TopComponent.Registration, as you can see below, in the bit in bold: @ConvertAsProperties(dtd = "-//org.role.demo.ui//Admin//EN", autostore = false) @TopComponent.Description(preferredID = "AdminTopComponent", //iconBase="SET/PATH/TO/ICON/HERE", persistenceType = TopComponent.PERSISTENCE_ALWAYS) @TopComponent.Registration(mode = "editor", openAtStartup = true, role="admin") public final class AdminTopComponent extends TopComponent { And here's a window for general users of the application, with the "role" attribute set to "user": @ConvertAsProperties(dtd = "-//org.role.demo.ui//User//EN", autostore = false) @TopComponent.Description(preferredID = "UserTopComponent", //iconBase="SET/PATH/TO/ICON/HERE", persistenceType = TopComponent.PERSISTENCE_ALWAYS) @TopComponent.Registration(mode = "explorer", openAtStartup = true, role="user") public final class UserTopComponent extends TopComponent { So, I have two windows. One is assigned to the "admin" role, the other to the "user" role. In the "ModuleInstall" class, I add a "WindowSystemListener" and set "user" as the application's role: public class Installer extends ModuleInstall implements WindowSystemListener { @Override public void restored() { WindowManager.getDefault().addWindowSystemListener(this); } @Override public void beforeLoad(WindowSystemEvent event) { WindowManager.getDefault().setRole("user"); WindowManager.getDefault().removeWindowSystemListener(this); } @Override public void afterLoad(WindowSystemEvent event) { } @Override public void beforeSave(WindowSystemEvent event) { } @Override public void afterSave(WindowSystemEvent event) { } } So, when the application starts, the "UserTopComponent" is shown, not the "AdminTopComponent". Next, I have two Actions, for switching between the two roles, as shown below: @ActionID(category = "Window", id = "org.role.demo.ui.SwitchToAdminAction") @ActionRegistration(displayName = "#CTL_SwitchToAdminAction") @ActionReferences({ @ActionReference(path = "Menu/Window", position = 250) }) @Messages("CTL_SwitchToAdminAction=Switch To Admin") public final class SwitchToAdminAction extends AbstractAction { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { WindowManager.getDefault().setRole("admin"); } @Override public boolean isEnabled() { return !WindowManager.getDefault().getRole().equals("admin"); } } @ActionID(category = "Window", id = "org.role.demo.ui.SwitchToUserAction") @ActionRegistration(displayName = "#CTL_SwitchToUserAction") @ActionReferences({ @ActionReference(path = "Menu/Window", position = 250) }) @Messages("CTL_SwitchToUserAction=Switch To User") public final class SwitchToUserAction extends AbstractAction { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { WindowManager.getDefault().setRole("user"); } @Override public boolean isEnabled() { return !WindowManager.getDefault().getRole().equals("user"); } } When I select one of the above actions, the role changes, and the other window is shown. I could, of course, add a Login dialog to the "SwitchToAdminAction", so that authentication is required in order to switch to the "admin" role. Now, let's say I am now in the "user" role. So, the "UserTopComponent" shown above is now opened. I decide to also open another window, the Properties window, as below... ...and, when I am in the "admin" role, when the "AdminTopComponent" is open, I decide to also open the Output window, as below... Now, when I switch from one role to the other, the additional window/s I opened will also be opened, together with the explicit members of the currently selected role. And, the main window position and size are also persisted across roles. When I look in the "build" folder of my project in development, I see two different Windows2Local folders, one per role, automatically created by the fact that there is something to be persisted for a particular role, e.g., when a switch to a different role is done: And, with that, we now clearly have roles/profiles/perspectives in NetBeans Platform applications from NetBeans Platform 7.1 onwards.

  Read the article

• Scenarios for Throwing Exceptions

  - by Joe Mayo

  I recently came across a situation where someone had an opinion that differed from mine of when an exception should be thrown. This particular case was an issue opened on LINQ to Twitter for an Exception on EndSession.  The premise of the issue was that the poster didn’t feel an exception should be raised, regardless of authentication status.  As first, this sounded like a valid point.  However, I went back to review my code and decided not to make any changes. Here's my rationale: 1. The exception doesn’t occur if the user is authenticated when EndAccountSession is called. 2. The exception does occur if the user is not authenticated when EndAccountSession is called. 3. The exception represents the fact that EndAccountSession is not able to fulfill its intended purpose - to end the session.  If a session never existed, then it would not be possible to perform the requested action.  Therefore, an exception is appropriate. To help illustrate how to handle this situation, I've modified the following code in Program.cs in the LinqToTwitterDemo project to illustrate the situation: static void EndSession(ITwitterAuthorizer auth) { using (var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://search.twitter.com/")) { try { //Log twitterCtx.Log = Console.Out; var status = twitterCtx.EndAccountSession(); Console.WriteLine("Request: {0}, Error: {1}" , status.Request , status.Error); } catch (TwitterQueryException tqe) { var webEx = tqe.InnerException as WebException; if (webEx != null) { var webResp = webEx.Response as HttpWebResponse; if (webResp != null && webResp.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized) Console.WriteLine("Twitter didn't recognize you as having been logged in. Therefore, your request to end session is illogical.\n"); } var status = tqe.Response; Console.WriteLine("Request: {0}, Error: {1}" , status.Request , status.Error); } } } As expected, LINQ to Twitter wraps the exception in a TwitterQueryException as the InnerException.  The TwitterQueryException serves a very useful purpose through it's Response property.  Notice in the example above that the response has Request and Error proprieties.  These properties correspond to the information that Twitter returns as part of it's response payload.  This is often useful while debugging to help you understand why Twitter was unable to perform the  requested action.  Other times, it's cryptic, but that's another story.  At least you have some way of knowing in your code how to anticipate and handle these situations, along with having extra information to debug with. To sum things up, there are two points to make: when and why an exception should be raised and when to wrap and re-throw an exception in a custom exception type. I felt it was necessary to allow the exception to be raised because the called method was unable to perform the task it was designed for.  I also felt that it is inappropriate for a general library to do anything with exceptions because that could potentially hide a problem from the caller.  A related point is that it should be the exclusive decision of the application that uses the library on what to do with an exception.  Another aspect of this situation is that I wrapped the exception in a custom exception and re-threw.  This is a tough call because I don’t want to hide any stack trace information.  However, the need to make the exception more meaningful by including vital information returned from Twitter swayed me in the direction to design an interface that was as helpful as possible to library consumers.  As shown in the code above, you can dig into the exception and pull out a lot of good information, such as the fact that the underlying HTTP response was a 401 Unauthorized.  In all, trade-offs are seldom perfect for all cases, but combining the fact that the method was unable to perform its intended function, this is a library, and the extra information can be more helpful, it seemed to be the better design. @JoeMayo

  Read the article

• Enabling Google Webmaster Tools With Your GWB Blog

  - by ToStringTheory

  I’ll be honest and save you some time, if you don’t have your own domain for your GWB blog, this won’t help, you may just want to move on…  I don’t want to waste your time……… Still here?  Good.  How great are Google’s website tools?  I don’t just mean Analytics which rocks, but also their Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) which gives you a glimpse into the queries that provide you your website traffic, search engine behavior on your site, and important keywords, just to name a few.   Pictured Above: Cool statistics. Problem Thanks to svickn over at wtfnext.com (another GeeksWithBlogs blog), we already have the knowledge on how to setup Google Analytics (wtfnext.com - How to: Set up Google Analytics on your GeeksWithBlogs blog).  However, one of the questions raised in the post, and even semi-answered in the questions, was how to setup Google Webmaster Tools with your blog as well. At first glance, it seems like it can’t be done.  Google graciously gives you several different options on how to authorize that you own a site.  The authentication options are: 1. (Recommended) – Upload an HTML file to your server 2. Add a meta tag to your site’s home page 3. Use your Google Analytics account 4. Add a DNS record to your domain’s configuration Since you don’t have access to the base path, you can’t do #1.  Same goes for #2 since you can’t edit the master/index page.  As for #3, they REQUIRE the Analytics code to be in the <head> section of your page, so even though we can use the workaround of hosting it in the news section, it won’t allow it since it isn’t in the correct place. Solution Last I checked, I didn’t see the DNS record option for Webmaster Tools.  Maybe this was recently added, or maybe I don’t remember it since I was always able to use some other method to authorize it.  In this case though, this is the option that we need.  My registrar wasn’t in their list, but they provide detailed enough instructions for the ‘Other’ option: Simply create a TXT record with your domain hoster (mine is DynDns), fill in the tag information, and then click verify.  My entry was able to be resolved immediately, but since you are working with DNS, it may take longer.  If after 24 hours you still aren’t able to verify, you can use a site such as mxtoolbox.com, and in the searchbox type “txt: {domain-name-here}”, to see if your TXT record was entered successfully. It is pretty simple to setup the TXT entry in DynDns, but if you have questions/comments, feel free to post them. Conclusion With this simple workaround (not really a workaround, but feature since they offer it..), you are now able to see loads of information regarding your standings in the world of the Google Search Engine.  No critical issues?  Did I do something wrong?! As an aside, you can do the same thing with the Bing Webmaster Tools by adding a CNAME record to bing.verify.com…  Instructions can be found on the ‘Add Site’ popup when adding your site. If you don’t have your own domain, but continued, to read to this point – thank you!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331  | Next Page >