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• Architectural Design for a Data-Driven Silverlight WP7 app

  - by Rosarch

  I have a Silverlight Windows Phone 7 app that pulls data from a public API. I find myself doing much of the same thing over and over again: In the UI, set a loading message or loading progress bar in place of where the content is Get the content, which may be already in memory, cached in isolated file storage, or require an HTTP request If the content can not be acquired (no network connection, etc), display an error message If the content is acquired, display it in the UI Keep the content in main memory for subsequent queries The content that is displayed to the user can be taken directly from a data source, such as an ObservableCollection, or it may be a query on a data source. I would like to factor out this repetitive process into a framework where ideally only the following needs to be specified: Where to display the content in the UI The UI elements to show while loading, on failure, and on success The URI of the HTTP request How to parse the HTTP response into the data structure that will kept in memory The location of the file in isolated storage, if it exists How to parse the file contents into the data structure that will be kept in memory It may sound like a lot, but two strings, three FrameworkElements, and two methods is less than the overhead that I currently have. Also, this needs to work for however the data is maintained in memory, and needs to work for direct collections and queries on those collections. My questions are: Has something like this already been implemented? Are my thoughts about the topic above fundamentally wrong in some way? Here is a design I'm thinking of: There are two components, a View and a Model. The View is given the FrameworkElements for loading, failure, and success. It is also given a reference to the corresponding Model. The View is a UserControl that is placed somewhere in the UI. The Model a class that is given the URI for the data, a method of how to parse the data, and optionally a filename and how to parse the file. It is responsible for retrieving the data and notifying the View whenever the current status (loading/fail/success) changes. If the data downloaded from the network is different from the cache, the network data takes precedence. When the app closes or is tombstoned, the model writes the data to the cache. How does that sound?

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• CSS- removing horizontal space in list menu using display inline property

  - by Kayote

  Hi All, Im new to CSS and have a set target of learning & publishing my website in CSS by the end of the month. My question: Im trying to build a CSS horizontal menu with hover drop downs, however, when I use the 'display: inline' property with li (list) items, I get horizontal spaces between the li (list) items in the bar. How do I remove this space? Here is the html: <div id="tabas_menu"> <ul> <li id="tabBut0" class="tabBut">Overview</li> <li id="tabBut1" class="tabBut">Collar</li> <li id="tabBut2" class="tabBut">Sleeves</li> <li id="tabBut3" class="tabBut">Body</li> </ul> </div> And here is the CSS: #tabas_menu { position: absolute; background: rgb(123,345,567); top: 110px; left: 200px; } ul#tabas_menu { padding: 0; margin: 0; } .tabBut { display: inline; white-space: list-style: none; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(rgba(255,142,190,1)),to(rgba(188,22,93,1))); background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,142,190,1), rgba(188,22,93,1)); font-family: helvetica, calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px rgba(99,99,99,0.5); -moz-border-radius: 0.3em; -moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 2px rgba(0,0,0,0.5); -webkit-border-radius: 0.3em; -webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 2px rgba(0,0,0,0.5); padding: 6px 18px; border: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,0.4); margin: 0; } I can get the space removed using the 'float: left/right' property but its bugging me as to why I cannot achieve the same effect by just using the display property.

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• Help with doctype issues

  - by James

  Hi I am having issues making my footer stick to the bottom of the page in all browsers. I have the following document structure: <html> <head> </head> <body> <div id="wrapper"> <div id="header"> <ul> <li>home</li> </ul> </div> <div class="expander"></div> </div> <div id="footer" class="expander"> </div> </body> </html> Relevant CSS is: body { margin: 0; height: 100%; } #wrapper { min-height: 100%; height: auto !important; height: 100%; margin: 0 auto -116px; } .expander { height: 116px; } #footer { width: 100%; } #header ul { list-style: none outside none; clear: both; margin: 0; } #header li { margin: 0; margin-right: 20px; padding: 0; display: inline-block; height: 85px; padding-top: 20px; margin-bottom: -20px; } When used without any doc type, the page renders as I intend it to in Chrome and Firefox. In IE8, however, the list item tabs are on separate lines When I add an XHTML doctype, the page renders correctly in IE8 except the footer is not drawn at the bottom of the page in IE8, Chrome or Firefox, i.e. the footer sits directly below the menu bar. Example doctype: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> What am I doing wrong?

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• How to Automatically Refresh Data on Page Using Ajax on an Interval?

  - by Karnak

  I would like to load an XML file every 30 seconds and display its contents inside an HTML page. So far I know how to load the file, but I don't know how to automatically refresh it and display its updated contents. It would also be great if it did some error checking and if it displayed error.png image when it's not able to load data.xml file. Here is my code: <head> <script> window.XMLHttpRequest { xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); } xmlhttp.open("GET", "data.xml", false); xmlhttp.send(); loadXMLDoc = xmlhttp.responseXML; f = loadXMLDoc.getElementsByTagName("foo") function buildBar(i) { qux = (f[i].getElementsByTagName("qux")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue); document.getElementById("displayBar").innerHTML = qux; } </script> </head> <body> <script> document.write("<ul>"); for (var i = 0; i < f.length; i++) { document.write("<li onclick='buildBar(" + i + ")'>"); document.write(f[i].getElementsByTagName("bar")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue); document.write("</li>"); } document.write("</ul>"); </script> <div id="displayBar"> </div> </body> After searching the internet for a few hours I found many examples on how to do this, but I didn't know how to implement it in my particular case. I am not a programmer, so please be kind. I would really appriciate any help. It would mean a lot.

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• Crossthread exception and invokerequired solution doesn't change my control value

  - by Pilouk

  EDIT Solution : Here i'm setting my byref value in each object then i'm running a backgroundworker Private Sub TelechargeFichier() Dim DocManquant As Boolean = False Dim docName As String = "" Dim lg As String = "" Dim telechargementFini As Boolean = False lblMessage.Text = EasyDealChangeLanguage.Instance.GetStringFromResourceName("1478") prgBar.Maximum = m_listeFichiers.Count For i As Integer = 0 To m_listeFichiers.Count - 1 m_listeFichiers(i).Set_ByRefLabel(lblMessage) m_listeFichiers(i).Set_ByRefPrgbar(prgBar) m_listeThreads.Add(New Thread(AddressOf m_listeFichiers(i).DownloadMe)) Next m_bgWorker = New BackgroundWorker m_bgWorker.WorkerReportsProgress = True AddHandler m_bgWorker.DoWork, AddressOf DownloadFiles m_bgWorker.RunWorkerAsync() ''Completed 'lblMessage.Text = EasyDealChangeLanguage.Instance.GetStringFromResourceName("1383") 'Me.DialogResult = System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK End Sub Here is my downloadFiles function : Note that each start will do the downloadMe function see below too Private Sub DownloadFiles(sender As Object, e As DoWorkEventArgs) For i As Integer = 0 To m_listeThreads.Count - 1 m_listeThreads(i).Start() Next For i As Integer = 0 To m_listeThreads.Count - 1 m_listeThreads(i).Join() Next End Sub I have multiple thread that each will download a ftp file. I would like that each file that have been completed will set a value to a progress bar and a label from my UI thread. For some reason invokerequired never change to false. Here is my little function that start all the thread Private Sub TelechargeFichier() Dim DocManquant As Boolean = False Dim docName As String = "" Dim lg As String = "" Dim telechargementFini As Boolean = False lblMessage.Text = EasyDealChangeLanguage.Instance.GetStringFromResourceName("1478") prgBar.Maximum = m_listeFichiers.Count For i As Integer = 0 To m_listeFichiers.Count - 1 m_listeFichiers(i).Set_ByRefLabel(lblMessage) m_listeFichiers(i).Set_ByRefPrgbar(prgBar) m_listeThreads.Add(New Thread(AddressOf m_listeFichiers(i).DownloadMe)) Next For i As Integer = 0 To m_listeThreads.Count - 1 m_listeThreads(i).Start() Next For i As Integer = 0 To m_listeThreads.Count - 1 m_listeThreads(i).Join() Next 'Completed lblMessage.Text = EasyDealChangeLanguage.Instance.GetStringFromResourceName("1383") Me.DialogResult = System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK End Sub Here my property that hold the Byref control from the UI thread. This is in my object which content the addressof function that will download the file (DownloadMe) Public Sub Set_ByRefPrgbar(ByRef prgbar As ProgressBar) m_prgBar = prgbar End Sub Public Sub Set_ByRefLabel(ByRef lbl As EasyDeal.Controls.EasyDealLabel3D) m_lblMessage = lbl End Sub Here is the download function : Public Sub DownloadMe() Dim ftpReq As FtpWebRequest Dim ftpResp As FtpWebResponse = Nothing Dim streamInput As Stream Dim fileStreamOutput As FileStream Try ftpReq = CType(WebRequest.Create(EasyDeal.Controls.Common.FTP_CONNECTION & m_downloadFtpPath & m_filename), FtpWebRequest) ftpReq.Credentials = New NetworkCredential(FTP_USER, FTP_PASS) ftpReq.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.DownloadFile ftpResp = ftpReq.GetResponse streamInput = ftpResp.GetResponseStream() fileStreamOutput = New FileStream(m_outputPath, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.ReadWrite) ReadWriteStream(streamInput, fileStreamOutput) Catch ex As Exception 'Au pire la fichier sera pas downloader Finally If ftpResp IsNot Nothing Then ftpResp.Close() End If Dim nomFichier As String = m_displaynameEN If EasyDealChangeLanguage.GetCurrentLanguageTypes = EasyDealChangeLanguage.EnumLanguageType.Francais Then nomFichier = m_displaynameFR End If If m_lblMessage IsNot Nothing Then EasyDealCommon.TH_SetControlText(m_lblMessage, String.Format(EasyDealChangeLanguage.Instance.GetStringFromResourceName("1479"), nomFichier)) End If If m_prgBar IsNot Nothing Then EasyDealCommon.TH_SetPrgValue(m_prgBar, 1) End If End Try End Sub Here is the crossthread invoke solution function : Public Sub TH_SetControlText(ByVal ctl As Control, ByVal text As String) If ctl.InvokeRequired Then ctl.BeginInvoke(New Action(Of Control, String)(AddressOf TH_SetControlText), ctl, text) Else ctl.Text = text End If End Sub Public Sub TH_SetPrgValue(ByVal prg As ProgressBar, ByVal value As Integer) If prg.InvokeRequired Then prg.BeginInvoke(New Action(Of ProgressBar, Integer)(AddressOf TH_SetPrgValue), prg, value) Else prg.Value += value End If End Sub The problem is the invokerequired never get to false it actually goes in to beginInvoke but never end in the Else section to set the value.

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• Code to generate random numbers in C++

  - by user1678927

  Basically I have to write a program to generate random numbers to simulate the rolling of a pair of dice. This program should be constructed in multiple files. The main function should be in one file, the other functions should be in a second source file, and their prototypes should be in a header file. First I write a short function that returns a random value between 1 and 6 to simulate the rolling of a single 6-sided die.Second, i write a function that pretends to roll a pair of dice by calling this function twice. My program starts by asking the user how many rolls should be made. Then I write a function to simulate rolling the dice this many times, keeping a count of exactly how many times the values 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12(each number is the sum of a pair of dice) occur in an array. Later I write a function to display a small bar chart using these counts that ideally would look something like below for a sample of 144 rolls, where the number of asterisks printed corresponds to the count: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Next, to see how well the random number generator is doing, I write a function to compute the average value rolled. Compare this to the ideal average of 7. Also, print out a small table showing the counts of each roll made by the program, the ideal count based on the frequencies above given the total number of rolls, and the difference between these values in separate columns. This is my incomplete code so far: "Compiler visual studio 2010" int rolling(){ //Function that returns a random value between 1 and 6 rand(unsigned(time(NULL))); int dice = 1 + (rand() %6); return dice; } int roll_dice(int num1,int num2){ //it calls 'rolling function' twice int result1,result2; num1 = rolling(); num2 = rolling(); result1 = num1; result2 = num2; return result1,result2; } int main(void){ int times,i,sum,n1,n2; int c1,c2,c3,c4,c5,c6,c7,c8,c9,c10,c11;//counters for each sum printf("Please enter how many times you want to roll the dice.\n") scanf_s("%i",&times); I pretend to use counters to count each sum and store the number(the count) in an array. I know i need a loop (for) and some conditional statements (if) but m main problem is to get the values from roll_dice and store them in n1 and n2 so then i can sum them up and store the sum in 'sum'.

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• Navigating to rootViewController of non-visible UINavigationController CRASH

  - by Bertie

  First off I'n not sure if this is exactly the issue... but it appears to be central to the problem. There are vast gaps in what I know and this may be something very obvious. I have a split view controller with various Master and Detail Views. From one 'menu' branch I want to return to the rootView of both the Master & Detail Navigation Controllers when the user taps a 'Done' button. Initially I had the button positioned on the navigation bar of the master view. This is the code I was using: - (IBAction)doneClicked:(id)sender { UINavigationController *detailNav = [self.splitViewController.viewControllers objectAtIndex:1]; NSArray *allDetailViewControllers = detailNav.viewControllers; HomePage *destinationDetailVC = [allDetailViewControllers objectAtIndex:0]; destinationDetailVC.splitViewBarButtonItem = self.splitViewButton; [detailNav popToRootViewControllerAnimated:NO]; [self.navigationController popToRootViewControllerAnimated:NO]; } That works fine but if the device is in portrait mode it means the user has to open the menus to access the button. So I decided to put the 'Done' button onto the detail view NavBar instead. Using a delegate declared in the detailVC and adopted by the masterVC I am now using this method: - (void)theUserClickedDoneInTheDetailView:(DetailVC *)controller withButton:(UIBarButtonItem *)splitViewButton { UINavigationController *detailNav = [self.splitViewController.viewControllers objectAtIndex:1]; NSArray *allDetailViewControllers = detailNav.viewControllers; HomePage *destinationDetailVC = [allDetailViewControllers objectAtIndex:0]; destinationDetailVC.splitViewBarButtonItem = splitViewButton; [detailNav popToRootViewControllerAnimated: NO]; [self.navigationController popToRootViewControllerAnimated:NO]; } Both methods are in the MasterVC.m file The only difference between the two is that on is passed a UIBarButtonItem to use and the other has already had it passed when it is set in the detail view. That seems to be working because I do get a button. When the device is in Landscape mode both methods work fine. All behaviour as expected. When the device is in Portrait the first method still works fine. The second appears to work fine and the detail view is the rootView, the button for the menus is there BUT, as soon as I turn the device to landscape it crashes. The only thing I can think of is that it is because the masterView is hidden. Can anyone help...?

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• My horizontal drop down with CSS, sub navigation menu items are being displayed on top of each other

  - by Rigo Collazo

  my sub navigation menu items are being displayed on top of each other here is the code: /* NAVIGATION */ .nav-bar {width: 100%; height: 80px; background-image:url(../images/bg-menu80.jpg);} .nav-hold {overflow: hidden;} .nav-list {float: right;} .nav-list li {float: left; width: auto; position: relative;} .nav-list li a {text-decoration: none; display:block; padding: 30px 7px 20px 7px; color: #f9f9f9; font-size: .9em; font-weight: bold;} .nav-list li ul {display: none;} .nav-list li a:hover {text-decoration: none; display: block; padding: 30px 7px 20px 7px; color: #000; font-size: .9em; font-weight: bold; background-color: #e7e4e4;} .nav-list li a:hover li{display: block; position: absolute; margin: 0; padding: 0;} .nav-list li a:hover li{float: left;} .nav-list li:hover li a{ background-color: #333; border-bottom: 1px solid #fff; color: #FFF;} <ul class="nav-list" id="navigation"><!--Menu list--> <li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li> <li><a href="about.html">About Us</a></li> <li> <ul><a href="members.html">Members</a> <li><a href="board.html">Board of Directors</a></li> <li><a href="committee.html">Committee</a></li> </ul></li> <li><a href="join.html">Join Us</a></li> <li><a href="events.html">Events</a></li> <li><a href="rules.html">Rules &amp; Guidelines</a></li> <li><a href="archive.html">Archive</a></li> <li><a href="contact.html">Contact Us</a></li> <li><a href="#">Login</a></li> </ul><!--ENDS Menu list-->

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• How to write php code to input jsonstring and insert to sql server

  - by Romi

  i am trying to OUTPUT a Json String from the phone and to get it uploaded to the sql server i have. I Do not know how to get the output Json and write the php code... i tried many methods but couldnt find a solution. public void post(String string) { HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost( "http://www.hopscriber.com/xoxoxox/testphp.php"); try { List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(); nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("myJson", string)); httppost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs)); HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost); String str = inputStreamToString(response.getEntity().getContent()) .toString(); Log.w("SENCIDE", str); } catch (Exception e) { Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), "notwork", Toast.LENGTH_LONG) .show(); } } private Object inputStreamToString(InputStream is) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub String line = ""; StringBuilder total = new StringBuilder(); // Wrap a BufferedReader around the InputStream BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is)); // Read response until the end try { while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) { total.append(line); } } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } // Return full string return total; } it outputs a json string as [myJson=[{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"org.siislab.tutorial.permission.READ_FRIENDS","level":"Normal"},{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"org.siislab.tutorial.permission.WRITE_FRIENDS","level":"Normal"},{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"org.siislab.tutorial.permission.FRIEND_SERVICE","level":"Normal"},{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"org.siislab.tutorial.permission.FRIEND_NEAR","level":"Dangerous"},{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"org.siislab.tutorial.permission.BROADCAST_FRIEND_NEAR","level":"Normal"},{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"android.permission.RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED","level":"Normal"},{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"android.permission.READ_CONTACTS","level":"Dangerous"},{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION","level":"Dangerous"},{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE","level":"Dangerous"},{"name":"FriendTracker","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"org.siislab.tutorial.friendtracker","perm":"android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE","level":"Dangerous"},{"name":"Tesing","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"com.example.tesing","perm":"null","level":"null"},{"name":"Action Bar","user":"amjgp000000000000000","pack":"name.brucephillips.actionbarexample","perm":"null","level":"null"},.......

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• css of pagination links

  - by fusion

  i'd like a basic idea of how to go about formatting the following paging of the search result. this is the paging code: //Create and print the Navigation bar $nav=""; $next = $page+1; $prev = $page-1; if($page > 1) { $nav .= "<div class=\"search_mainpg\"><div class=\"searchpage\" style=\"width:5%;\"><a onclick=\"showPage('','$prev'); return false;\" href=\"$self?page=" . $prev . "&q=" .urlencode($search_result) . "\">< Prev</a></div>"; $first = "<div class=\"searchpage\" style=\"width:2%;\"><a onclick=\"showPage('','1'); return false;\" href=\"$self?page=1&q=" .urlencode($search_result) . "\"> << </a></div>" ; } else { $nav .= "&nbsp;"; $first = "&nbsp;"; } for($i = 1 ; $i <= $numpages ; $i++) { if($i == $page) { $nav .= "<b>$i</b>"; }else{ $nav .= "<div class=\"searchpage\" style=\"width:2%;\"><a onclick=\"showPage('',$i); return false;\" href=\"$self?page=" . $i . "&q=" .urlencode($search_result) . "\">$i</a></div>"; } } if($page < $numpages) { $nav .= "<div class=\"searchpage\" style=\"width:5%;\"><a onclick=\"showPage('','$next'); return false;\" href=\"$self?page=" . $next . "&q=" .urlencode($search_result) . "\">Next ></a></div>"; $last = "<div class=\"searchpage\" style=\"width:2%;\"><a onclick=\"showPage('','$numpages'); return false;\" href=\"$self?page=$numpages&q=" .urlencode($search_result) . "\"> >> </a></div></div>"; } else { $nav .= "&nbsp;"; $last = "&nbsp;"; } echo $first . $nav . $last; currently, it displays like this:

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• Split a binary file into chunks c++

  - by L4nce0

  I've been bashing my head against trying to first divide up a file into chunks, for the purpose of sending over sockets. I can read / write a file easily without splitting it into chunks. The code below runs, works, kinda. It will write a textfile and has a garbage character. Which if this was just for txt, no problem. Jpegs aren't working with said garbage. Been at it for a few days, so I've done my research, and it's time to get some help. I do want to stick strictly to binary readers, as this need to handle any file. I've seen a lot of slick examples out there. (none of them worked for me with jpgs) Mostly something along the lines of while(file)... I subscribe to the, if you know the size, use a for-loop, not a while-loop camp. Thank you for the help!! vector<char*> readFile(const char* fn){ vector<char*> v; ifstream::pos_type size; char * memblock; ifstream file; file.open(fn,ios::in|ios::binary|ios::ate); if (file.is_open()) { size = fileS(fn); file.seekg (0, ios::beg); int bs = size/3; // arbitrary. Actual program will use the socket send size int ws = 0; int i = 0; for(i = 0; i < size; i+=bs){ if(i+bs > size) ws = size%bs; else ws = bs; memblock = new char [ws]; file.read (memblock, ws); v.push_back(memblock); } } else{ exit(-4); } return v; } int main(int argc, char **argv) { vector<char*> v = readFile("foo.txt"); ofstream myFile ("bar.txt", ios::out | ios::binary); for(vector<char*>::iterator it = v.begin(); it!=v.end(); ++it ){ myFile.write(*it,strlen(*it)); } }

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• style a navigation link when a particular div is shown

  - by Matt Meadows

  I have JQuery working to show a particular div when a certain link is clicked. I have managed to apply the effect I'm after with the main navigation bar through id'ing the body tag and using css to style when the id is found. However, i'd like to apply the same effect to the sub navigation when a certain div is present. How the main navigation is styled: HTML: <nav> <ul> <li id="nav-home"><a href="index.html">Home</a></li> <li id="nav-showreel"><a href="showreel.html">Showreel</a></li> <li id="nav-portfolio"><a href="portfolio.html">Portfolio</a></li> <li>Contact</li> </ul> </nav> CSS: body#home li#nav-home, body#portfolio li#nav-portfolio { background: url("Images/Nav_Underline.png") no-repeat; background-position: center bottom; color: white; } (Other links havent been added to styling as those pages are still in development) How the sub navigation is structured: <nav id="portfolioNav"> <ul> <li id="portfolio-compositing"><a id="compositingWork" href="#">Compositing</a></li> <li id="portfolio-animation"><a id="animationWork" href="#">Animation</a></li> <li id="portfolio-motionGfx"><a id="GFXWork" href="#">Motion Graphics</a></li> <li id="portfolio-3D"><a id="3DWork" href="#">3D</a></li> </ul> </nav> As you can see, its similar format to the main navigation, however i've tried the same approach and it doesn't work :( The Javascript that switches the divs on the navigation click: <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $('#3DWork').click(function(){ $('#portfolioWork').load('portfolioContent.html #Portfolio3D'); }); $('#GFXWork').click(function(){ $('#portfolioWork').load('portfolioContent.html #motionGraphics'); }); $('#compositingWork').click(function(){ $('#portfolioWork').load('portfolioContent.html #PortfolioCompositing'); }); $('#animationWork').click(function(){ $('#portfolioWork').load('portfolioContent.html #PortfolioAnimation'); }); }); </script> JSFiddle for full HTML & CSS : JSFiddle File The effect I'm After:

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• Large Data Table with first column fixed

  - by bhavya_w

  I have structure as shown in the fiddle http://jsfiddle.net/5LN7U/. <section class="container"> <section class="field"> <ul> <li> Question 1 </li> <li> question 2 </li> <li> question 3 </li> <li> question 4 </li> <li> question 5 </li> <li> question 6 </li> <li> question 7 </li> </ul> </section> <section class="datawrap"> <section class="datawrapinner"> <ul> <li><b>Answer 1 :</b></li> <li><b>Answer 2 :</b></li> <li><b>Answer 3 :</b></li> <li><b>Answer 4 :</b></li> <li><b>Answer 5 :</b></li> <li><b>Answer 6 :</b></li> <li><b>Answer 7 :</b></li> </ul> </section> </section> </section> Basically its a table structure made using divs. The first column contains a long list of questions and the second column contains answers/multiple answers which can be quite big ( there has to be horizontal scrolling in the second column.) The problem i am facing is when i scroll downwards the second column which has the horizontal scroll bar is also scrolling downward. I want horizontal scrollbar to be fixed there. as in it should be always fixed there no matter how much i scroll vertically. Much Like Google Spreadsheets: where the first column stays fixed and there's horizontal scrolling on rest of the columns with over vertical scrolling for whole of the data. I cannot used position fixed in the second column. P.S : please no lectures on using div's for making a table structure. I have my own reasons. and its kinda urgent. Thanks in advance.

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• How can I scale movement physics functions to frames per second (in a game engine)?

  - by Richard

  I am working on a game in Javascript (HTML5 Canvas). I implemented a simple algorithm that allows an object to follow another object with basic physics mixed in (a force vector to drive the object in the right direction, and the velocity stacks momentum, but is slowed by a constant drag force). At the moment, I set it up as a rectangle following the mouse (x, y) coordinates. Here's the code: // rectangle x, y position var x = 400; // starting x position var y = 250; // starting y position var FPS = 60; // frames per second of the screen // physics variables: var velX = 0; // initial velocity at 0 (not moving) var velY = 0; // not moving var drag = 0.92; // drag force reduces velocity by 8% per frame var force = 0.35; // overall force applied to move the rectangle var angle = 0; // angle in which to move // called every frame (at 60 frames per second): function update(){ // calculate distance between mouse and rectangle var dx = mouseX - x; var dy = mouseY - y; // calculate angle between mouse and rectangle var angle = Math.atan(dy/dx); if(dx < 0) angle += Math.PI; else if(dy < 0) angle += 2*Math.PI; // calculate the force (on or off, depending on user input) var curForce; if(keys[32]) // SPACE bar curForce = force; // if pressed, use 0.35 as force else curForce = 0; // otherwise, force is 0 // increment velocty by the force, and scaled by drag for x and y velX += curForce * Math.cos(angle); velX *= drag; velY += curForce * Math.sin(angle); velY *= drag; // update x and y by their velocities x += velX; y += velY; And that works fine at 60 frames per second. Now, the tricky part: my question is, if I change this to a different framerate (say, 30 FPS), how can I modify the force and drag values to keep the movement constant? That is, right now my rectangle (whose position is dictated by the x and y variables) moves at a maximum speed of about 4 pixels per second, and accelerates to its max speed in about 1 second. BUT, if I change the framerate, it moves slower (e.g. 30 FPS accelerates to only 2 pixels per frame). So, how can I create an equation that takes FPS (frames per second) as input, and spits out correct "drag" and "force" values that will behave the same way in real time? I know it's a heavy question, but perhaps somebody with game design experience, or knowledge of programming physics can help. Thank you for your efforts. jsFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/BadDB

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• iframe 100% height causing vertical scrollbar

  - by Keevon

  I'm trying to layout a design that has a fixed height header at the top of the screen, and then an iframe below taking up the remaining space. The solution I came up with is as follows: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <style type="text/css"><!-- * {margin: 0;} html, body {height: 100%;width: 100%;margin: 0;padding: 0;}--></style> </head> <body> <div style="height:70px;background-color:blue;"></div> <div style="position:absolute;top:70px;bottom:0;left:0;right:0;"> <iframe src="http://www.google.com" frameborder="0" style="border:0;padding:0;margin:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe> </div> </body> </html> Essentially, I'm creating an absolutely positioned div below the header and sizing it to take up the rest of the space, then putting the full size iframe in there. The problem I'm running into is that if you paste the code exactly as seen below, using XHTML Strict, in each browser (tested w/ chrome/safari/ie8) you will see a vertical scroll bar with a few pixels of white space below the div. Doing some experimenting, I found that if I remove the doctype completely it works in safari/chrome, but IE gets even worse, setting the iframe height to 300px or so. If I set the doctype to transitional, it works in safari/chrome but has the same problem as in the strict case for IE8. If I use the HTML5 doctype, it has the same problem as strict in all browsers. Finally, if I remove the iframe in any of these cases, everything is laid out just fine. Anyone have any ideas?

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• Using the West Wind Web Toolkit to set up AJAX and REST Services

  - by Rick Strahl

  I frequently get questions about which option to use for creating AJAX and REST backends for ASP.NET applications. There are many solutions out there to do this actually, but when I have a choice - not surprisingly - I fall back to my own tools in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. I've talked a bunch about the 'in-the-box' solutions in the past so for a change in this post I'll talk about the tools that I use in my own and customer applications to handle AJAX and REST based access to service resources using the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. Let me preface this by saying that I like things to be easy. Yes flexible is very important as well but not at the expense of over-complexity. The goal I've had with my tools is make it drop dead easy, with good performance while providing the core features that I'm after, which are: Easy AJAX/JSON Callbacks Ability to return any kind of non JSON content (string, stream, byte[], images) Ability to work with both XML and JSON interchangeably for input/output Access endpoints via POST data, RPC JSON calls, GET QueryString values or Routing interface Easy to use generic JavaScript client to make RPC calls (same syntax, just what you need) Ability to create clean URLS with Routing Ability to use standard ASP.NET HTTP Stack for HTTP semantics It's all about options! In this post I'll demonstrate most of these features (except XML) in a few simple and short samples which you can download. So let's take a look and see how you can build an AJAX callback solution with the West Wind Web Toolkit. Installing the Toolkit Assemblies The easiest and leanest way of using the Toolkit in your Web project is to grab it via NuGet: West Wind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) and drop it into the project by right clicking in your Project and choosing Manage NuGet Packages from anywhere in the Project.   When done you end up with your project looking like this: What just happened? Nuget added two assemblies - Westwind.Web and Westwind.Utilities and the client ww.jquery.js library. It also added a couple of references into web.config: The default namespaces so they can be accessed in pages/views and a ScriptCompressionModule that the toolkit optionally uses to compress script resources served from within the assembly (namely ww.jquery.js and optionally jquery.js). Creating a new Service The West Wind Web Toolkit supports several ways of creating and accessing AJAX services, but for this post I'll stick to the lower level approach that works from any plain HTML page or of course MVC, WebForms, WebPages. There's also a WebForms specific control that makes this even easier but I'll leave that for another post. So, to create a new standalone AJAX/REST service we can create a new HttpHandler in the new project either as a pure class based handler or as a generic .ASHX handler. Both work equally well, but generic handlers don't require any web.config configuration so I'll use that here. In the root of the project add a Generic Handler. I'm going to call this one StockService.ashx. Once the handler has been created, edit the code and remove all of the handler body code. Then change the base class to CallbackHandler and add methods that have a [CallbackMethod] attribute. Here's the modified base handler implementation now looks like with an added HelloWorld method: using System; using Westwind.Web; namespace WestWindWebAjax { /// <summary> /// Handler implements CallbackHandler to provide REST/AJAX services /// </summary> public class SampleService : CallbackHandler { [CallbackMethod] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } } } Notice that the class inherits from CallbackHandler and that the HelloWorld service method is marked up with [CallbackMethod]. We're done here. Services Urlbased Syntax Once you compile, the 'service' is live can respond to requests. All CallbackHandlers support input in GET and POST formats, and can return results as JSON or XML. To check our fancy HelloWorld method we can now access the service like this: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/StockService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick which produces a default JSON response - in this case a string (wrapped in quotes as it's JSON): (note by default JSON will be downloaded by most browsers not displayed - various options are available to view JSON right in the browser) If I want to return the same data as XML I can tack on a &format=xml at the end of the querystring which produces: <string>Hello Rick. Time is: 11/1/2011 12:11:13 PM</string> Cleaner URLs with Routing Syntax If you want cleaner URLs for each operation you can also configure custom routes on a per URL basis similar to the way that WCF REST does. To do this you need to add a new RouteHandler to your application's startup code in global.asax.cs one for each CallbackHandler based service you create: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes<StockService>(RouteTable.Routes); } With this code in place you can now add RouteUrl properties to any of your service methods. For the HelloWorld method that doesn't make a ton of sense but here is what a routed clean URL might look like in definition: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/HelloWorld/{name}")] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } The same URL I previously used now becomes a bit shorter and more readable with: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/HelloWorld/Rick It's an easy way to create cleaner URLs and still get the same functionality. Calling the Service with $.getJSON() Since the result produced is JSON you can now easily consume this data using jQuery's getJSON method. First we need a couple of scripts - jquery.js and ww.jquery.js in the page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link href="Css/Westwind.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="scripts/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> Next let's add a small HelloWorld example form (what else) that has a single textbox to type a name, a button and a div tag to receive the result: <fieldset> <legend>Hello World</legend> Please enter a name: <input type="text" name="txtHello" id="txtHello" value="" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHello" value="Say Hello (POST)" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHelloGet" value="Say Hello (GET)" /> <div id="divHelloMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none;width: 450px;" > </div> </fieldset> Then to call the HelloWorld method a little jQuery is used to hook the document startup and the button click followed by the $.getJSON call to retrieve the data from the server. <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSayHelloGet").click(function () { $.getJSON("SampleService.ashx", { Method: "HelloWorld", name: $("#txtHello").val() }, function (result) { $("#divHelloMessage") .text(result) .fadeIn(1000); }); });</script> .getJSON() expects a full URL to the endpoint of our service, which is the ASHX file. We can either provide a full URL (SampleService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick) or we can just provide the base URL and an object that encodes the query string parameters for us using an object map that has a property that matches each parameter for the server method. We can also use the clean URL routing syntax, but using the object parameter encoding actually is safer as the parameters will get properly encoded by jQuery. The result returned is whatever the result on the server method is - in this case a string. The string is applied to the divHelloMessage element and we're done. Obviously this is a trivial example, but it demonstrates the basics of getting a JSON response back to the browser. AJAX Post Syntax - using ajaxCallMethod() The previous example allows you basic control over the data that you send to the server via querystring parameters. This works OK for simple values like short strings, numbers and boolean values, but doesn't really work if you need to pass something more complex like an object or an array back up to the server. To handle traditional RPC type messaging where the idea is to map server side functions and results to a client side invokation, POST operations can be used. The easiest way to use this functionality is to use ww.jquery.js and the ajaxCallMethod() function. ww.jquery wraps jQuery's AJAX functions and knows implicitly how to call a CallbackServer method with parameters and parse the result. Let's look at another simple example that posts a simple value but returns something more interesting. Let's start with the service method: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/{symbol}")] public StockQuote GetStockQuote(string symbol) { Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.Add(new TimeSpan(0, 2, 0))); StockServer server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); return quote; } This sample utilizes a small StockServer helper class (included in the sample) that downloads a stock quote from Yahoo's financial site via plain HTTP GET requests and formats it into a StockQuote object. Lets create a small HTML block that lets us query for the quote and display it: <fieldset> <legend>Single Stock Quote</legend> Please enter a stock symbol: <input type="text" name="txtSymbol" id="txtSymbol" value="msft" /> <input type="button" id="btnStockQuote" value="Get Quote" /> <div id="divStockDisplay" class="errordisplay" style="display:none; width: 450px;"> <div class="label-left">Company:</div> <div id="stockCompany"></div> <div class="label-left">Last Price:</div> <div id="stockLastPrice"></div> <div class="label-left">Quote Time:</div> <div id="stockQuoteTime"></div> </div> </fieldset> The final result looks something like this:   Let's hook up the button handler to fire the request and fill in the data as shown: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").show().fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, HH:mm EST")); }, onPageError); }); So we point at SampleService.ashx and the GetStockQuote method, passing a single parameter of the input symbol value. Then there are two handlers for success and failure callbacks.  The success handler is the interesting part - it receives the stock quote as a result and assigns its values to various 'holes' in the stock display elements. The data that comes back over the wire is JSON and it looks like this: { "Symbol":"MSFT", "Company":"Microsoft Corpora", "OpenPrice":26.11, "LastPrice":26.01, "NetChange":0.02, "LastQuoteTime":"2011-11-03T02:00:00Z", "LastQuoteTimeString":"Nov. 11, 2011 4:20pm" } which is an object representation of the data. JavaScript can evaluate this JSON string back into an object easily and that's the reslut that gets passed to the success function. The quote data is then applied to existing page content by manually selecting items and applying them. There are other ways to do this more elegantly like using templates, but here we're only interested in seeing how the data is returned. The data in the object is typed - LastPrice is a number and QuoteTime is a date. Note about the date value: JavaScript doesn't have a date literal although the JSON embedded ISO string format used above  ("2011-11-03T02:00:00Z") is becoming fairly standard for JSON serializers. However, JSON parsers don't deserialize dates by default and return them by string. This is why the StockQuote actually returns a string value of LastQuoteTimeString for the same date. ajaxMethodCallback always converts dates properly into 'real' dates and the example above uses the real date value along with a .formatDate() data extension (also in ww.jquery.js) to display the raw date properly. Errors and Exceptions So what happens if your code fails? For example if I pass an invalid stock symbol to the GetStockQuote() method you notice that the code does this: if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); CallbackHandler automatically pushes the exception message back to the client so it's easy to pick up the error message. Regardless of what kind of error occurs: Server side, client side, protocol errors - any error will fire the failure handler with an error object parameter. The error is returned to the client via a JSON response in the error callback. In the previous examples I called onPageError which is a generic routine in ww.jquery that displays a status message on the bottom of the screen. But of course you can also take over the error handling yourself: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); }, function (error, xhr) { $("#divErrorDisplay").text(error.message).fadeIn(1000); }); }); The error object has a isCallbackError, message and  stackTrace properties, the latter of which is only populated when running in Debug mode, and this object is returned for all errors: Client side, transport and server side errors. Regardless of which type of error you get the same object passed (as well as the XHR instance optionally) which makes for a consistent error retrieval mechanism. Specifying HttpVerbs You can also specify HTTP Verbs that are allowed using the AllowedHttpVerbs option on the CallbackMethod attribute: [CallbackMethod(AllowedHttpVerbs=HttpVerbs.GET | HttpVerbs.POST)] public string HelloWorld(string name) { … } If you're building REST style API's this might be useful to force certain request semantics onto the client calling. For the above if call with a non-allowed HttpVerb the request returns a 405 error response along with a JSON (or XML) error object result. The default behavior is to allow all verbs access (HttpVerbs.All). Passing in object Parameters Up to now the parameters I passed were very simple. But what if you need to send something more complex like an object or an array? Let's look at another example now that passes an object from the client to the server. Keeping with the Stock theme here lets add a method called BuyOrder that lets us buy some shares for a stock. Consider the following service method that receives an StockBuyOrder object as a parameter: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStock(StockBuyOrder buyOrder) { var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } public class StockBuyOrder { public string Symbol { get; set; } public int Quantity { get; set; } public DateTime BuyOn { get; set; } public StockBuyOrder() { BuyOn = DateTime.Now; } } This is a contrived do-nothing example that simply echoes back what was passed in, but it demonstrates how you can pass complex data to a callback method. On the client side we now have a very simple form that captures the three values on a form: <fieldset> <legend>Post a Stock Buy Order</legend> Enter a symbol: <input type="text" name="txtBuySymbol" id="txtBuySymbol" value="GLD" />&nbsp;&nbsp; Qty: <input type="text" name="txtBuyQty" id="txtBuyQty" value="10" style="width: 50px" />&nbsp;&nbsp; Buy on: <input type="text" name="txtBuyOn" id="txtBuyOn" value="<%= DateTime.Now.ToString("d") %>" style="width: 70px;" /> <input type="button" id="btnBuyStock" value="Buy Stock" /> <div id="divStockBuyMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none"></div> </fieldset> The completed form and demo then looks something like this:   The client side code that picks up the input values and assigns them to object properties and sends the AJAX request looks like this: $("#btnBuyStock").click(function () { // create an object map that matches StockBuyOrder signature var buyOrder = { Symbol: $("#txtBuySymbol").val(), Quantity: $("#txtBuyQty").val() * 1, // number Entered: new Date() } ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStock", [buyOrder], function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError); }); The code creates an object and attaches the properties that match the server side object passed to the BuyStock method. Each property that you want to update needs to be included and the type must match (ie. string, number, date in this case). Any missing properties will not be set but also not cause any errors. Pass POST data instead of Objects In the last example I collected a bunch of values from form variables and stuffed them into object variables in JavaScript code. While that works, often times this isn't really helping - I end up converting my types on the client and then doing another conversion on the server. If lots of input controls are on a page and you just want to pick up the values on the server via plain POST variables - that can be done too - and it makes sense especially if you're creating and filling the client side object only to push data to the server. Let's add another method to the server that once again lets us buy a stock. But this time let's not accept a parameter but rather send POST data to the server. Here's the server method receiving POST data: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStockPost() { StockBuyOrder buyOrder = new StockBuyOrder(); buyOrder.Symbol = Request.Form["txtBuySymbol"]; ; int qty; int.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyQuantity"], out qty); buyOrder.Quantity = qty; DateTime time; DateTime.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyBuyOn"], out time); buyOrder.BuyOn = time; // Or easier way yet //FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } Clearly we've made this server method take more code than it did with the object parameter. We've basically moved the parameter assignment logic from the client to the server. As a result the client code to call this method is now a bit shorter since there's no client side shuffling of values from the controls to an object. $("#btnBuyStockPost").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStockPost", [], // Note: No parameters - function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError, // Force all page Form Variables to be posted { postbackMode: "Post" }); }); The client simply calls the BuyStockQuote method and pushes all the form variables from the page up to the server which parses them instead. The feature that makes this work is one of the options you can pass to the ajaxCallMethod() function: { postbackMode: "Post" }); which directs the function to include form variable POST data when making the service call. Other options include PostNoViewState (for WebForms to strip out WebForms crap vars), PostParametersOnly (default), None. If you pass parameters those are always posted to the server except when None is set. The above code can be simplified a bit by using the FormVariableBinder helper, which can unbind form variables directly into an object: FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); which replaces the manual Request.Form[] reading code. It receives the object to unbind into, a string of properties to skip, and an optional prefix which is stripped off form variables to match property names. The component is similar to the MVC model binder but it's independent of MVC. Returning non-JSON Data CallbackHandler also supports returning non-JSON/XML data via special return types. You can return raw non-JSON encoded strings like this: [CallbackMethod(ReturnAsRawString=true,ContentType="text/plain")] public string HelloWorldNoJSON(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } Calling this method results in just a plain string - no JSON encoding with quotes around the result. This can be useful if your server handling code needs to return a string or HTML result that doesn't fit well for a page or other UI component. Any string output can be returned. You can also return binary data. Stream, byte[] and Bitmap/Image results are automatically streamed back to the client. Notice that you should set the ContentType of the request either on the CallbackMethod attribute or using Response.ContentType. This ensures the Web Server knows how to display your binary response. Using a stream response makes it possible to return any of data. Streamed data can be pretty handy to return bitmap data from a method. The following is a method that returns a stock history graph for a particular stock over a provided number of years: [CallbackMethod(ContentType="image/png",RouteUrl="stocks/history/graph/{symbol}/{years}")] public Stream GetStockHistoryGraph(string symbol, int years = 2,int width = 500, int height=350) { if (width == 0) width = 500; if (height == 0) height = 350; StockServer server = new StockServer(); return server.GetStockHistoryGraph(symbol,"Stock History for " + symbol,width,height,years); } I can now hook this up into the JavaScript code when I get a stock quote. At the end of the process I can assign the URL to the service that returns the image into the src property and so force the image to display. Here's the changed code: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { var symbol = $("#txtSymbol").val(); ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [symbol], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); // display a stock chart $("#imgStockHistory").attr("src", "stocks/history/graph/" + symbol + "/2"); },onPageError); }); The resulting output then looks like this: The charting code uses the new ASP.NET 4.0 Chart components via code to display a bar chart of the 2 year stock data as part of the StockServer class which you can find in the sample download. The ability to return arbitrary data from a service is useful as you can see - in this case the chart is clearly associated with the service and it's nice that the graph generation can happen off a handler rather than through a page. Images are common resources, but output can also be PDF reports, zip files for downloads etc. which is becoming increasingly more common to be returned from REST endpoints and other applications. Why reinvent? Obviously the examples I've shown here are pretty basic in terms of functionality. But I hope they demonstrate the core features of AJAX callbacks that you need to work through in most applications which is simple: return data, send back data and potentially retrieve data in various formats. While there are other solutions when it comes down to making AJAX callbacks and servicing REST like requests, I like the flexibility my home grown solution provides. Simply put it's still the easiest solution that I've found that addresses my common use cases: AJAX JSON RPC style callbacks Url based access XML and JSON Output from single method endpoint XML and JSON POST support, querystring input, routing parameter mapping UrlEncoded POST data support on callbacks Ability to return stream/raw string data Essentially ability to return ANYTHING from Service and pass anything All these features are available in various solutions but not together in one place. I've been using this code base for over 4 years now in a number of projects both for myself and commercial work and it's served me extremely well. Besides the AJAX functionality CallbackHandler provides, it's also an easy way to create any kind of output endpoint I need to create. Need to create a few simple routines that spit back some data, but don't want to create a Page or View or full blown handler for it? Create a CallbackHandler and add a method or multiple methods and you have your generic endpoints.  It's a quick and easy way to add small code pieces that are pretty efficient as they're running through a pretty small handler implementation. I can have this up and running in a couple of minutes literally without any setup and returning just about any kind of data. Resources Download the Sample NuGet: Westwind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) ajaxCallMethod() Documentation Using the AjaxMethodCallback WebForms Control West Wind Web Toolkit Home Page West Wind Web Toolkit Source Code © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  jQuery  AJAX   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks.  2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"?  5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools.  - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Building a better mouse-trap &ndash; Improving the creation of XML Message Requests using Reflection, XML &amp; XSLT

  - by paulschapman

  Introduction The way I previously created messages to send to the GovTalk service I used the XMLDocument to create the request. While this worked it left a number of problems; not least that for every message a special function would need to created. This is OK for the short term but the biggest cost in any software project is maintenance and this would be a headache to maintain. So the following is a somewhat better way of achieving the same thing. For the purposes of this article I am going to be using the CompanyNumberSearch request of the GovTalk service – although this technique would work for any service that accepted XML. The C# functions which send and receive the messages remain the same. The magic sauce in this is the XSLT which defines the structure of the request, and the use of objects in conjunction with reflection to provide the content. It is a bit like Sweet Chilli Sauce added to Chicken on a bed of rice. So on to the Sweet Chilli Sauce The Sweet Chilli Sauce The request to search for a company based on it’s number is as follows; <GovTalkMessage xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/Egov_ch-v2-0.xsd" xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" > <EnvelopeVersion>1.0</EnvelopeVersion> <Header> <MessageDetails> <Class>NumberSearch</Class> <Qualifier>request</Qualifier> <TransactionID>1</TransactionID> </MessageDetails> <SenderDetails> <IDAuthentication> <SenderID>????????????????????????????????</SenderID> <Authentication> <Method>CHMD5</Method> <Value>????????????????????????????????</Value> </Authentication> </IDAuthentication> </SenderDetails> </Header> <GovTalkDetails> <Keys/> </GovTalkDetails> <Body> <NumberSearchRequest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/NumberSearch.xsd"> <PartialCompanyNumber>99999999</PartialCompanyNumber> <DataSet>LIVE</DataSet> <SearchRows>1</SearchRows> </NumberSearchRequest> </Body> </GovTalkMessage> This is the XML that we send to the GovTalk Service and we get back a list of companies that match the criteria passed A message is structured in two parts; The envelope which identifies the person sending the request, with the name of the request, and the body which gives the detail of the company we are looking for. The Chilli What makes it possible is the use of XSLT to define the message – and serialization to convert each request object into XML. To start we need to create an object which will represent the contents of the message we are sending. However there is a common properties in all the messages that we send to Companies House. These properties are as follows SenderId – the id of the person sending the message SenderPassword – the password associated with Id TransactionId – Unique identifier for the message AuthenticationValue – authenticates the request Because these properties are unique to the Companies House message, and because they are shared with all messages they are perfect candidates for a base class. The class is as follows; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Security.Cryptography; using System.Text; using System.Text.RegularExpressions; using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime; namespace CompanyHub.Services { public class GovTalkRequest { public GovTalkRequest() { try { SenderID = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("SenderId"); SenderPassword = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("SenderPassword"); TransactionId = DateTime.Now.Ticks.ToString(); AuthenticationValue = EncodePassword(String.Format("{0}{1}{2}", SenderID, SenderPassword, TransactionId)); } catch (System.Exception ex) { throw ex; } } /// <summary> /// returns the Sender ID to be used when communicating with the GovTalk Service /// </summary> public String SenderID { get; set; } /// <summary> /// return the password to be used when communicating with the GovTalk Service /// </summary> public String SenderPassword { get; set; } // end SenderPassword /// <summary> /// Transaction Id - uses the Time and Date converted to Ticks /// </summary> public String TransactionId { get; set; } // end TransactionId /// <summary> /// calculate the authentication value that will be used when /// communicating with /// </summary> public String AuthenticationValue { get; set; } // end AuthenticationValue property /// <summary> /// encodes password(s) using MD5 /// </summary> /// <param name="clearPassword"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static String EncodePassword(String clearPassword) { MD5CryptoServiceProvider md5Hasher = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider(); byte[] hashedBytes; UTF32Encoding encoder = new UTF32Encoding(); hashedBytes = md5Hasher.ComputeHash(ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes(clearPassword)); String result = Regex.Replace(BitConverter.ToString(hashedBytes), "-", "").ToLower(); return result; } } } There is nothing particularly clever here, except for the EncodePassword method which hashes the value made up of the SenderId, Password and Transaction id. Each message inherits from this object. So for the Company Number Search in addition to the properties above we need a partial number, which dataset to search – for the purposes of the project we only need to search the LIVE set so this can be set in the constructor and the SearchRows. Again all are set as properties. With the SearchRows and DataSet initialized in the constructor. public class CompanyNumberSearchRequest : GovTalkRequest, IDisposable { /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public CompanyNumberSearchRequest() : base() { DataSet = "LIVE"; SearchRows = 1; } /// <summary> /// Company Number to search against /// </summary> public String PartialCompanyNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// What DataSet should be searched for the company /// </summary> public String DataSet { get; set; } /// <summary> /// How many rows should be returned /// </summary> public int SearchRows { get; set; } public void Dispose() { DataSet = String.Empty; PartialCompanyNumber = String.Empty; DataSet = "LIVE"; SearchRows = 1; } } As well as inheriting from our base class, I have also inherited from IDisposable – not just because it is just plain good practice to dispose of objects when coding, but it gives also gives us more versatility when using the object. There are four stages in making a request and this is reflected in the four methods we execute in making a call to the Companies House service; Create a request Send a request Check the status If OK then get the results of the request I’ve implemented each of these stages within a static class called Toolbox – which also means I don’t need to create an instance of the class to use it. When making a request there are three stages; Get the template for the message Serialize the object representing the message Transform the serialized object using a predefined XSLT file. Each of my templates I have defined as an embedded resource. When retrieving a resource of this kind we have to include the full namespace to the resource. In making the code re-usable as much as possible I defined the full ‘path’ within the GetRequest method. requestFile = String.Format("CompanyHub.Services.Schemas.{0}", RequestFile); So we now have the full path of the file within the assembly. Now all we need do is retrieve the assembly and get the resource. asm = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); sr = asm.GetManifestResourceStream(requestFile); Once retrieved  So this can be returned to the calling function and we now have a stream of XSLT to define the message. Time now to serialize the request to create the other side of this message. // Serialize object containing Request, Load into XML Document t = Obj.GetType(); ms = new MemoryStream(); serializer = new XmlSerializer(t); xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.ASCII); serializer.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, Obj); ms = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream; GovTalkRequest = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(ms.ToArray()); First off we need the type of the object so we make a call to the GetType method of the object containing the Message properties. Next we need a MemoryStream, XmlSerializer and an XMLTextWriter so these can be initialized. The object is serialized by making the call to the Serialize method of the serializer object. The result of that is then converted into a MemoryStream. That MemoryStream is then converted into a string. ConvertByteArrayToString This is a fairly simple function which uses an ASCIIEncoding object found within the System.Text namespace to convert an array of bytes into a string. public static String ConvertByteArrayToString(byte[] bytes) { System.Text.ASCIIEncoding enc = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding(); return enc.GetString(bytes); } I only put it into a function because I will be using this in various places. The Sauce When adding support for other messages outside of creating a new object to store the properties of the message, the C# components do not need to change. It is in the XSLT file that the versatility of the technique lies. The XSLT file determines the format of the message. For the CompanyNumberSearch the XSLT file is as follows; <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:template match="/"> <GovTalkMessage xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/Egov_ch-v2-0.xsd" xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" > <EnvelopeVersion>1.0</EnvelopeVersion> <Header> <MessageDetails> <Class>NumberSearch</Class> <Qualifier>request</Qualifier> <TransactionID> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/TransactionId"/> </TransactionID> </MessageDetails> <SenderDetails> <IDAuthentication> <SenderID><xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/SenderID"/></SenderID> <Authentication> <Method>CHMD5</Method> <Value> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/AuthenticationValue"/> </Value> </Authentication> </IDAuthentication> </SenderDetails> </Header> <GovTalkDetails> <Keys/> </GovTalkDetails> <Body> <NumberSearchRequest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/NumberSearch.xsd"> <PartialCompanyNumber> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/PartialCompanyNumber"/> </PartialCompanyNumber> <DataSet> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/DataSet"/> </DataSet> <SearchRows> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/SearchRows"/> </SearchRows> </NumberSearchRequest> </Body> </GovTalkMessage> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> The outer two tags define that this is a XSLT stylesheet and the root tag from which the nodes are searched for. The GovTalkMessage is the format of the message that will be sent to Companies House. We first set up the XslCompiledTransform object which will transform the XSLT template and the serialized object into the request to Companies House. xslt = new XslCompiledTransform(); resultStream = new MemoryStream(); writer = new XmlTextWriter(resultStream, Encoding.ASCII); doc = new XmlDocument(); The Serialize method require XmlTextWriter to write the XML (writer) and a stream to place the transferred object into (writer). The XML will be loaded into an XMLDocument object (doc) prior to the transformation. // create XSLT Template xslTemplate = Toolbox.GetRequest(Template); xslTemplate.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); templateReader = XmlReader.Create(xslTemplate); xslt.Load(templateReader); I have stored all the templates as a series of Embedded Resources and the GetRequestCall takes the name of the template and extracts the relevent XSLT file. /// <summary> /// Gets the framwork XML which makes the request /// </summary> /// <param name="RequestFile"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Stream GetRequest(String RequestFile) { String requestFile = String.Empty; Stream sr = null; Assembly asm = null; try { requestFile = String.Format("CompanyHub.Services.Schemas.{0}", RequestFile); asm = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); sr = asm.GetManifestResourceStream(requestFile); } catch (Exception) { throw; } finally { asm = null; } return sr; } // end private static stream GetRequest We first take the template name and expand it to include the full namespace to the Embedded Resource I like to keep all my schemas in the same directory and so the namespace reflects this. The rest is the default namespace for the project. Then we get the currently executing assembly (which will contain the resources with the call to GetExecutingAssembly() ) Finally we get a stream which contains the XSLT file. We use this stream and then load an XmlReader with the contents of the template, and that is in turn loaded into the XslCompiledTransform object. We convert the object containing the message properties into Xml by serializing it; calling the Serialize() method of the XmlSerializer object. To set up the object we do the following; t = Obj.GetType(); ms = new MemoryStream(); serializer = new XmlSerializer(t); xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.ASCII); We first determine the type of the object being transferred by calling GetType() We create an XmlSerializer object by passing the type of the object being serialized. The serializer writes to a memory stream and that is linked to an XmlTextWriter. Next job is to serialize the object and load it into an XmlDocument. serializer.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, Obj); ms = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream; xmlRequest = new XmlTextReader(ms); GovTalkRequest = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(ms.ToArray()); doc.LoadXml(GovTalkRequest); Time to transform the XML to construct the full request. xslt.Transform(doc, writer); resultStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); request = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(resultStream.ToArray()); So that creates the full request to be sent  to Companies House. Sending the request So far we have a string with a request for the Companies House service. Now we need to send the request to the Companies House Service. Configuration within an Azure project There are entire blog entries written about configuration within an Azure project – most of this is out of scope for this article but the following is a summary. Configuration is defined in two files within the parent project *.csdef which contains the definition of configuration setting. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="OnlineCompanyHub" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WebRole name="CompanyHub.Host"> <InputEndpoints> <InputEndpoint name="HttpIn" protocol="http" port="80" /> </InputEndpoints> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" /> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </WebRole> <WebRole name="CompanyHub.Services"> <InputEndpoints> <InputEndpoint name="HttpIn" protocol="http" port="8080" /> </InputEndpoints> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" /> <Setting name="SenderId"/> <Setting name="SenderPassword" /> <Setting name="GovTalkUrl"/> </ConfigurationSettings> </WebRole> <WorkerRole name="CompanyHub.Worker"> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>   Above is the configuration definition from the project. What we are interested in however is the ConfigurationSettings tag of the CompanyHub.Services WebRole. There are four configuration settings here, but at the moment we are interested in the second to forth settings; SenderId, SenderPassword and GovTalkUrl The value of these settings are defined in the ServiceDefinition.cscfg file; <?xml version="1.0"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="OnlineCompanyHub" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration"> <Role name="CompanyHub.Host"> <Instances count="2" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> <Role name="CompanyHub.Services"> <Instances count="2" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="SenderId" value="UserID"/> <Setting name="SenderPassword" value="Password"/> <Setting name="GovTalkUrl" value="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/xmlgw/Gateway"/> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> <Role name="CompanyHub.Worker"> <Instances count="2" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>   Look for the Role tag that contains our project name (CompanyHub.Services). Having configured the parameters we can now transmit the request. This is done by ‘POST’ing a stream of XML to the Companies House servers. govTalkUrl = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("GovTalkUrl"); request = WebRequest.Create(govTalkUrl); request.Method = "POST"; request.ContentType = "text/xml"; writer = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream()); writer.WriteLine(RequestMessage); writer.Close(); We use the WebRequest object to send the object. Set the method of sending to ‘POST’ and the type of data as text/xml. Once set up all we do is write the request to the writer – this sends the request to Companies House. Did the Request Work Part I – Getting the response Having sent a request – we now need the result of that request. response = request.GetResponse(); reader = response.GetResponseStream(); result = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(Toolbox.ReadFully(reader));   The WebRequest object has a GetResponse() method which allows us to get the response sent back. Like many of these calls the results come in the form of a stream which we convert into a string. Did the Request Work Part II – Translating the Response Much like XSLT and XML were used to create the original request, so it can be used to extract the response and by deserializing the result we create an object that contains the response. Did it work? It would be really great if everything worked all the time. Of course if it did then I don’t suppose people would pay me and others the big bucks so that our programmes do not a) Collapse in a heap (this is an area of memory) b) Blow every fuse in the place in a shower of sparks (this will probably not happen this being real life and not a Hollywood movie, but it was possible to blow the sound system of a BBC Model B with a poorly coded setting) c) Go nuts and trap everyone outside the airlock (this was from a movie, and unless NASA get a manned moon/mars mission set up unlikely to happen) d) Go nuts and take over the world (this was also from a movie, but please note life has a habit of being of exceeding the wildest imaginations of Hollywood writers (note writers – Hollywood executives have no imagination and judging by recent output of that town have turned plagiarism into an art form). e) Freeze in total confusion because the cleaner pulled the plug to the internet router (this has happened) So anyway – we need to check to see if our request actually worked. Within the GovTalk response there is a section that details the status of the message and a description of what went wrong (if anything did). I have defined an XSLT template which will extract these into an XML document. <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:ev="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <xsl:template match="/"> <GovTalkStatus xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <Status> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:Header/ev:MessageDetails/ev:Qualifier"/> </Status> <Text> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Text"/> </Text> <Location> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Location"/> </Location> <Number> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Number"/> </Number> <Type> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Type"/> </Type> </GovTalkStatus> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>   Only thing different about previous XSL files is the references to two namespaces ev & gt. These are defined in the GovTalk response at the top of the response; xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/Egov_ch-v2-0.xsd" xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" If we do not put these references into the XSLT template then  the XslCompiledTransform object will not be able to find the relevant tags. Deserialization is a fairly simple activity. encoder = new ASCIIEncoding(); ms = new MemoryStream(encoder.GetBytes(statusXML)); serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(GovTalkStatus)); xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.ASCII); messageStatus = (GovTalkStatus)serializer.Deserialize(ms);   We set up a serialization object using the object type containing the error state and pass to it the results of a transformation between the XSLT above and the GovTalk response. Now we have an object containing any error state, and the error message. All we need to do is check the status. If there is an error then we can flag an error. If not then  we extract the results and pass that as an object back to the calling function. We go this by guess what – defining an XSLT template for the result and using that to create an Xml Stream which can be deserialized into a .Net object. In this instance the XSLT to create the result of a Company Number Search is; <?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:ev="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:sch="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema" exclude-result-prefixes="ev"> <xsl:template match="/"> <CompanySearchResult xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <CompanyNumber> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:Body/sch:NumberSearch/sch:CoSearchItem/sch:CompanyNumber"/> </CompanyNumber> <CompanyName> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:Body/sch:NumberSearch/sch:CoSearchItem/sch:CompanyName"/> </CompanyName> </CompanySearchResult> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> and the object definition is; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; namespace CompanyHub.Services { public class CompanySearchResult { public CompanySearchResult() { CompanyNumber = String.Empty; CompanyName = String.Empty; } public String CompanyNumber { get; set; } public String CompanyName { get; set; } } } Our entire code to make calls to send a request, and interpret the results are; String request = String.Empty; String response = String.Empty; GovTalkStatus status = null; fault = null; try { using (CompanyNumberSearchRequest requestObj = new CompanyNumberSearchRequest()) { requestObj.PartialCompanyNumber = CompanyNumber; request = Toolbox.CreateRequest(requestObj, "CompanyNumberSearch.xsl"); response = Toolbox.SendGovTalkRequest(request); status = Toolbox.GetMessageStatus(response); if (status.Status.ToLower() == "error") { fault = new HubFault() { Message = status.Text }; } else { Object obj = Toolbox.GetGovTalkResponse(response, "CompanyNumberSearchResult.xsl", typeof(CompanySearchResult)); } } } catch (FaultException<ArgumentException> ex) { fault = new HubFault() { FaultType = ex.Detail.GetType().FullName, Message = ex.Detail.Message }; } catch (System.Exception ex) { fault = new HubFault() { FaultType = ex.GetType().FullName, Message = ex.Message }; } finally { } Wrap up So there we have it – a reusable set of functions to send and interpret XML results from an internet based service. The code is reusable with a little change with any service which uses XML as a transport mechanism – and as for the Companies House GovTalk service all I need to do is create various objects for the result and message sent and the relevent XSLT files. I might need minor changes for other services but something like 70-90% will be exactly the same.

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• Long pause when accessing DFS namespace

  - by Matt

  We've recently migrated our Windows network to use DFS for shared files. DFS is working well, except for one annoying problem: users experience a significant delay when they try to access a DFS namespace that they have not accessed for some time. I have tried to troubleshoot the issue but have not had any success so far, and I was hoping someone here may have some pointers to help resolve the problem. Firstly, some background on our network: The network uses a Windows 2008 functional level Active Directory domain with two Windows 2008 DCs and two DNS servers (one on each of the DCs). The network is DNS only - no WINS. All computers are located at the same site and connected by Gigabit Ethernet. We have approximately 20 Domain-based DFS namespaces in Windows 2008 mode, and each DFS namespace has two Windows 2008 DFS namespace servers (the same two servers for all namespaces). All namespace servers are in FQDN mode and all folder targets are specified using their FQDN. All computers are up-to-date with Service Packs and patches. The actual folder targets (i.e. the SMB shares our DFS folders point to) are scattered across several file and application servers, all running Windows 2008 bar two application servers which run Windows 2003 R2, with no replication setup at all (e.g. all DFS folders currently only have one folder target). Some more detail on the problem: The namespace access delay is generally 1 - 10 seconds long and seems to occur when a particular computer has not accessed the requested namespace for approximately five minutes or more. For example, if the user has not accessed \\domain.name\namespace1\ for more than five minutes and attempts to access \\domain.name\namespace1\ via Windows Explorer, the Explorer window will freeze for 1 - 10 seconds before finally resuming and displaying the folders that exist in \\domain.name\namespace1. If they then close the Explorer window and attempt to access \\domain.name\namespace1\ again within five minutes the contents will be displayed almost instantly - if they wait longer than five minutes it will go through the 1 - 10 second pause again. Once "inside" the namespace everything is nice and snappy, it's just the initial connection to the namespace that is slow. The browsing delays seem to affect all variants of Windows that we use (Windows 2008 x64 SP2, Windows 2003 R2 x86 SP2, Windows XP Pro x86 SP3) - it is possibly a bit worse in Windows XP / 2003 than in Windows 2008, but I'm not sure if the difference isn't just psychological. Accessing the underlying folder targets directly exhibits no delay at all - i.e. if the SMB shares pointed to by DFS are accessed directly (bypassing DFS) then there is no pause. During trouble-shooting I noticed that the "Cache duration" for all of our DFS roots is set to 300 seconds - 5 minutes. Given that this is the same amount of time required to trigger the pause I assume that this caching is somehow related, although I am unsure exactly what is cached on the client and hence what needs to be looked up again after 5 minutes have elapsed. In trying to resolve the problem I have already tried / checked the following (without success): Run dcdiag on both Domain Controllers - no problems found Done some basic DNS server checks without finding any problems - I don't know how to check the DNS servers in detail, but I would add that the network is not exhibiting any other strange behavior that may point to a DNS problem Disabled Anti-virus on clients and servers Removing one of the namespace servers from a couple of namespaces - no difference So that's where I'm up to - and I'm out of ideas. Can anyone suggest what may be causing the delays and/or what I should be trying next?

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• Hive metadata permission issue

  - by Chandramohan

  We are getting this error on Hive, while creating a DB / table hive> CREATE TABLE pokes (foo INT, bar STRING); FAILED: Error in metadata: javax.jdo.JDOFatalDataStoreException: Cannot get a connection, pool error Could not create a validated object, cause: A read-only user or a user in a read-only database is not permitted to disable read-only mode on a connection. NestedThrowables: org.apache.commons.dbcp.SQLNestedException: Cannot get a connection, pool error Could not create a validated object, cause: A read-only user or a user in a read-only database is not permitted to disable read-only mode on a connection. FAILED: Execution Error, return code 1 from org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.DDLTask Hive log : org.apache.commons.dbcp.SQLNestedException: Cannot get a connection, pool error Could not create a validated object, cause: A read-only user or a user in a read-only database is not permitted to disable read-only mode on a connection. at org.datanucleus.jdo.NucleusJDOHelper.getJDOExceptionForNucleusException(NucleusJDOHelper.java:298) at org.datanucleus.jdo.JDOPersistenceManagerFactory.freezeConfiguration(JDOPersistenceManagerFactory.java:601) at org.datanucleus.jdo.JDOPersistenceManagerFactory.createPersistenceManagerFactory(JDOPersistenceManagerFactory.java:286) at org.datanucleus.jdo.JDOPersistenceManagerFactory.getPersistenceManagerFactory(JDOPersistenceManagerFactory.java:182) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at javax.jdo.JDOHelper$16.run(JDOHelper.java:1958) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at javax.jdo.JDOHelper.invoke(JDOHelper.java:1953) at javax.jdo.JDOHelper.invokeGetPersistenceManagerFactoryOnImplementation(JDOHelper.java:1159) at javax.jdo.JDOHelper.getPersistenceManagerFactory(JDOHelper.java:803) at javax.jdo.JDOHelper.getPersistenceManagerFactory(JDOHelper.java:698) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.ObjectStore.getPMF(ObjectStore.java:234) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.ObjectStore.getPersistenceManager(ObjectStore.java:261) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.ObjectStore.initialize(ObjectStore.java:196) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.ObjectStore.setConf(ObjectStore.java:171) at org.apache.hadoop.util.ReflectionUtils.setConf(ReflectionUtils.java:62) at org.apache.hadoop.util.ReflectionUtils.newInstance(ReflectionUtils.java:117) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.HiveMetaStore$HMSHandler.getMS(HiveMetaStore.java:354) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.HiveMetaStore$HMSHandler.executeWithRetry(HiveMetaStore.java:306) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.HiveMetaStore$HMSHandler.createDefaultDB(HiveMetaStore.java:451) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.HiveMetaStore$HMSHandler.init(HiveMetaStore.java:232) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.HiveMetaStore$HMSHandler.<init>(HiveMetaStore.java:197) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.HiveMetaStoreClient.<init>(HiveMetaStoreClient.java:108) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.metadata.Hive.createMetaStoreClient(Hive.java:1868) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.metadata.Hive.getMSC(Hive.java:1878) at org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.metadata.Hive.createTable(Hive.java:470) ... 15 more Caused by: org.apache.commons.dbcp.SQLNestedException: Cannot get a connection, pool error Could not create a validated object, cause: A read-only user or a user in a read-only database is not permitted to disable read-only mode on a connection. at org.apache.commons.dbcp.PoolingDataSource.getConnection(PoolingDataSource.java:114) at org.datanucleus.store.rdbms.ConnectionFactoryImpl$ManagedConnectionImpl.getConnection(ConnectionFactoryImpl.java:521) at org.datanucleus.store.rdbms.RDBMSStoreManager.<init>(RDBMSStoreManager.java:290) at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27) at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513) at org.datanucleus.plugin.NonManagedPluginRegistry.createExecutableExtension(NonManagedPluginRegistry.java:588) at org.datanucleus.plugin.PluginManager.createExecutableExtension(PluginManager.java:300) at org.datanucleus.ObjectManagerFactoryImpl.initialiseStoreManager(ObjectManagerFactoryImpl.java:161) at org.datanucleus.jdo.JDOPersistenceManagerFactory.freezeConfiguration(JDOPersistenceManagerFactory.java:583) ... 42 more Caused by: java.util.NoSuchElementException: Could not create a validated object, cause: A read-only user or a user in a read-only database is not permitted to disable read-only mode on a connection. at org.apache.commons.pool.impl.GenericObjectPool.borrowObject(GenericObjectPool.java:1191) at org.apache.commons.dbcp.PoolingDataSource.getConnection(PoolingDataSource.java:106) ... 52 more 2011-08-11 18:02:36,964 ERROR ql.Driver (SessionState.java:printError(343)) - FAILED: Execution Error, return code 1 from org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.DDLTask

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• Chrome does not re-draw properly on Windows 8

  - by Akshat Mittal

  There are a lot of problems with Chrome (24.0.1312.14 beta || But all this happened before update also) on Windows 8. Problems and explanations are listed below: Google Chrome re-draw time: When I switch tabs, the window retains the content of the previous tab and displays that even if I move my mouse, if only refreshes (re-draws) when there is a change on the webpage (like on hover) or I do a select all (or scroll). One thing to note is that the hover and select happens on the real page and not the retained image-like thing of the older webpage. Chrome is slow and laggy: Websites such as Facebook and Twitter (and more) have gone extremely laggy on Chrome (Win 8). When I was using Windows 7, I never experienced a lag or something. Also when using HTML-5 Websites, the transition (the -webkit-transition in CSS) goes extremely slow at times. Plugins Crash: Plugins like Flash Player, Shockwave Player, and more that are in-built into Chrome Crashes a lot, even when doing simple tasks like playing YouTube Videos, displaying ads or something. Chrome Crashes: Chrome has crashed over 100 times in the past month. Google Chrome just crashes randomly or I don't know the reason. Random Page crashes: Chrome results chrome://crash/(Copy-Paste this in address bar) on random pages even when the page is just loaded, I understand that this can happen on heavy HTML5 or JS websites but what about HTML only websites? Computer Freeze: Chrome sometimes, randomly, freezes my computer. Freeze in the sense, none of the other apps are also working. It's like the whole system freezes, I can not even switch to other apps. I am sure that this is because of Chrome since this happens only when Chrome is active. Most of the things above happens on Super User also, Super User never had any problem when using Chrome on Windows 7. UPDATE 1: @magicandre1981 Commented for trying to disable Hardware Acceleration. I tried it, it somewhat solved the problem but din't fix it. I am still experiencing all the above issues but less frequently (maybe because Chrome Restarted Completely) UPDATE 2: @avirk asked me to try a Stable Version of Chrome and Firefox, I din't experience any lag in Firefox, a little (negligible) lag in Chrome 22 (Maybe because its a new copy of Chrome, I haven't used it much). UPDATE 3: @NothingsImpossible said that He is also experiencing the same problem on Windows Server 2008! This seams to be a major issue now. He also said that GPU load is also high at the same time! Even I saw the same thing. UPDATE 4: Recently, Chrome updated to v24 Stable (I am using stable from a long time now). I was experiencing this problem a lot less in Chrome 23, but this is back in Chrome 24. Seams like Chrome 24 is the most affected from this bug, as this same problem was high in Chrome 24 beta also. UPDATE 5: Chrome was updated to v25 Stable. This problem is 99% Gone, it is still there in 1% of the cases. One such example is when I leave chrome inactive for a while with a few tabs open, the tabs go black and no activity can get them back to active state. If I open a new tab, the new tab is OK but the others are still black, I need to close all those tabs. UPDATE 6: Chrome updated to v27 Stable channel, this problem is nearly gone. This does happen occasionally, but not as frequent as in earlier versions of Chrome. UPDATE 7: I am on Chrome v35.0.1916.114 Stable, Windows 8.1 Pro Update 1. Some of the other problems appears to be back. Chrome is slow and laggy again. Re-draw time is getting worse. Is anybody else experiencing such issues? Does anybody have a solution to any of these?

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• Why is Automator crashing on launch?

  - by zbrimhall

  I've run into an odd problem where Automtor.app on Snow Leopard crashes on launch. At some point in the past, I put a copy of iPhoto.app into my public directory to copy over to another machine. Now, Automator.app won't run unless my public directory has a copy of iPhoto.app in it. If I remove it, Automator.app crashes on launch. Here's what happens: Launch Automator.app After the Automator menu bar appears, but before any windows appear, I get the dreaded beach ball for a few seconds Automator crashes Here's the output from Console.app: 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “Add Movie to iDVD Menu” could not be loaded because the application “iDVD” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “Get iDVD Slideshow Images” could not be loaded because the application “iDVD” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “Initiate Remote Broadcast” could not be loaded because the application “QuickTime Broadcaster” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “New iDVD Menu” could not be loaded because the application “iDVD” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “New iDVD Movie Sequence” could not be loaded because the application “iDVD” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “New iDVD Slideshow” could not be loaded because the application “iDVD” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “New QuickTime Slideshow” could not be loaded because the application “QuickTime Player” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “Set iDVD Background Image” could not be loaded because the application “iDVD” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “Set iDVD Button Face” could not be loaded because the application “iDVD” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “Set Movie Annotations” could not be loaded because the application “QuickTime Player” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “Set Movie Playback Properties” could not be loaded because the application “QuickTime Player” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “Set Movie URL” could not be loaded because the application “QuickTime Player” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:24 PM Automator[11736] The action “Show Main iDVD Menu” could not be loaded because the application “iDVD” was not found. 12/26/09 2:11:25 PM Automator[11736] Can not ID UTI for path The value %@ is invalid.: The file “The value %@ is invalid.” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file. 12/26/09 2:11:25 PM Automator[11736] Can not ID UTI for path /Users/brimhall/Public/iPhoto.app: The file “iPhoto.app” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file. 12/26/09 2:11:25 PM Automator[11736] Can not ID UTI for path The value %@ is invalid.: The file “The value %@ is invalid.” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file. 12/26/09 2:11:26 PM Automator[11736] -[NSAttributeDictionary length]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x49c770 12/26/09 2:11:26 PM Automator[11736] -[NSAttributeDictionary length]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x49c770 12/26/09 2:11:38 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[203] ([0x0-0x2ad2ad].com.apple.Automator[11736]) Job appears to have crashed: Segmentation fault I've tried deleting my Automator.app Preferences file and Application Support directory to get it to look for iPhoto.app in the system-wide Applications directory, but to no avail. Any suggestions on how I can get things working as normal?

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• how does openvpn decide which interface to get IP addrs from

  - by bkrupa

  Using ubuntu 10.04 on both ends. We have a client and server machine on the SAME network attempting to make a vpn connection. We use the config files from here and made minimal changes. The server and client start and seem to connect without any trouble. The server looks like: Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 MULTI: multi_create_instance called Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 192.168.1.55:47166 Re-using SSL/TLS context Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 192.168.1.55:47166 LZO compression initialized Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 192.168.1.55:47166 Control Channel MTU parms [ L:1574 D:138 EF:38 EB:0 ET:0 EL:0 ] Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 192.168.1.55:47166 Data Channel MTU parms [ L:1574 D:1450 EF:42 EB:135 ET:32 EL:0 AF:3/1 ] Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 192.168.1.55:47166 Local Options hash (VER=V4): 'f7df56b8' Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 192.168.1.55:47166 Expected Remote Options hash (VER=V4): 'd79ca330' Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 192.168.1.55:47166 TLS: Initial packet from 192.168.1.55:47166, sid=69112e42 5458135b *...* Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 192.168.1.55:47166 Control Channel: TLSv1, cipher TLSv1/SSLv3 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, 1024 bit RSA Wed Feb 23 22:13:22 2011 192.168.1.55:47166 [client1] Peer Connection Initiated with 192.168.1.55:47166 On the client side the connection looks like: Wed Feb 23 22:20:07 2011 [server] Peer Connection Initiated with [AF_INET]192.168.1.41:1194 Wed Feb 23 22:20:10 2011 SENT CONTROL [server]: 'PUSH_REQUEST' (status=1) Wed Feb 23 22:20:10 2011 PUSH: Received control message: 'PUSH_REPLY,route-gateway 10.8.0.4,ping 10,ping-restart 120,ifconfig 10.8.0.50 255.255.255.0' ... Wed Feb 23 22:20:10 2011 /sbin/ifconfig tap0 10.8.0.50 netmask 255.255.255.0 mtu 1500 broadcast 10.8.0.255 Wed Feb 23 22:20:10 2011 Initialization Sequence Completed The openvpn server has been configured to assign ip addresses in the range 10.8.0.* and the client has been given 10.8.0.50. When I run the following nmap from the client: Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2011-02-23 22:04 EST Host 10.8.0.50 is up (0.00047s latency). Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (1 host up) scanned in 30.34 seconds Host 192.168.1.1 is up (0.0025s latency). Host 192.168.1.18 is up (0.074s latency). Host 192.168.1.41 is up (0.0024s latency). Host 192.168.1.55 is up (0.00018s latency). Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (4 hosts up) scanned in 6.33 seconds If I run an nmap from the server on 10.8.0.* I get nothing. If the client has two interfaces (wireless and tap device) when you look for a certain ip address, how does it decide which interface to connect on? edit I am trying to set up a vpn so that I can connect to my home network from a remote network. It seems like openvpn is connecting but none of the computers on my home network appear as network machines even after the connection is "Established". Stripped versions of the client and server config files are posted below. Thanks for any help you can offer. server.conf port 1194 proto udp dev tap ca /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/ca.crt cert /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/server.crt key /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/server.key # This file should be kept secret dh /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/dh1024.pem ifconfig-pool-persist ipp.txt server-bridge 10.8.0.4 255.255.255.0 10.8.0.50 10.8.0.100 keepalive 10 120 comp-lzo persist-key persist-tun status openvpn-status.log verb 3 client.conf client dev tap dev-node tap0901 proto udp remote ********** 1194 resolv-retry infinite nobind persist-key persist-tun ca ca.crt cert client1.crt key client1.key comp-lzo verb 3 one other thing that might be helpful, I tried to connect using the openvpn gui for windows and the connection stalls out on "obtaining configuration" and the bar just scrolls forever.

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• Ubuntu 10.04: OpenVZ Kernel and pure-ftpd issues on HOST (no guest setup yet)

  - by Seidr

  After compiling and installing the OpenVZ flavour of kernel under Ubuntu 10.04, I am unable to browse to certain directories when connecting to the pure-ftpd server. The clients are dropping into PASSIVE mode, which is fine. This behaviour was happening before the change of kernel, however now when I browse to certain directories the connection just gets dropped. This only happens with a few directories under one login (web in specific), where as with another login it happens as soon as I connect. I've got the nf_conntrack_ftp kernel module installed (required to keep track of passive FTP connections as I understand, and an alias of the ip_conntrack_ftp module), however this has provided no alleviation of my problem. This module was actually required upon initial setup of my OS to get passive FTP working correctly, however when I compiled the OpenVZ kernel a lot of these modules were missing (iptables, conntrack etc). I recompiled the kernel with the missing modules, but to no effect. I've turned verbosity for the pure-ftpd server up, and still no clues have been spotted in either syslog or the transfer log. Neither did an strace provide any clues (that I could discern anyway) - although one strange thing is both in the output to the client and in the strace I notice that it does infact probe the directory and return the number of matches - it just fails after that. One more thing to mention is that if I FTP using the same credentials locally, everything works fine. This suggests that it is in fact an issue with either the conntrack_ftp module not functioning as expected, or a deeper networking issue. The Kernel was compiled and installed following the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenVZ - bar the changes to the Kernel configuration (such as add iptables as a module). Below is an example of the log sent to the data (under FileZilla). Status: Resolving address of xxxx.co.uk Status: Connecting to 78.46.xxx.xxx:21... Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message... Response: 220---------- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [privsep] [TLS] ---------- Response: 220-You are user number 4 of 10 allowed. Response: 220-Local time is now 08:52. Server port: 21. Response: 220-This is a private system - No anonymous login Response: 220-IPv6 connections are also welcome on this server. Response: 220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity. Command: USER xxx Response: 331 User xxx OK. Password required Command: PASS ******** Response: 230-User xxx has group access to: client1 sshusers Response: 230 OK. Current restricted directory is / Command: OPTS UTF8 ON Response: 200 OK, UTF-8 enabled Status: Connected Status: Retrieving directory listing... Command: PWD Response: 257 "/" is your current location Status: Directory listing successful Status: Retrieving directory listing... Command: CWD /web Response: 250 OK. Current directory is /web Command: TYPE I Response: 200 TYPE is now 8-bit binary Command: PORT 10,0,2,30,14,143 Response: 500 I won't open a connection to 10.0.2.30 (only to 188.220.xxx.xxx) Command: PASV Response: 227 Entering Passive Mode (78,46,79,147,234,110) Command: MLSD Response: 150 Accepted data connection Response: 226-ASCII Response: 226-Options: -a -l Response: 226 57 matches total Error: Could not read from transfer socket: ECONNRESET - Connection reset by peer Error: Failed to retrieve directory listing Any suggestions please? I'm willing to try anything!

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