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• Option Trading: Getting the most out of the event session options

  - by extended_events

  You can control different aspects of how an event session behaves by setting the event session options as part of the CREATE EVENT SESSION DDL. The default settings for the event session options are designed to handle most of the common event collection situations so I generally recommend that you just use the defaults. Like everything in the real world though, there are going to be a handful of “special cases” that require something different. This post focuses on identifying the special cases and the correct use of the options to accommodate those cases. There is a reason it’s called Default The default session options specify a total event buffer size of 4 MB with a 30 second latency. Translating this into human terms; this means that our default behavior is that the system will start processing events from the event buffer when we reach about 1.3 MB of events or after 30 seconds, which ever comes first. Aside: What’s up with the 1.3 MB, I thought you said the buffer was 4 MB?The Extended Events engine takes the total buffer size specified by MAX_MEMORY (4MB by default) and divides it into 3 equally sized buffers. This is done so that a session can be publishing events to one buffer while other buffers are being processed. There are always at least three buffers; how to get more than three is covered later. Using this configuration, the Extended Events engine can “keep up” with most event sessions on standard workloads. Why is this? The fact is that most events are small, really small; on the order of a couple hundred bytes. Even when you start considering events that carry dynamically sized data (eg. binary, text, etc.) or adding actions that collect additional data, the total size of the event is still likely to be pretty small. This means that each buffer can likely hold thousands of events before it has to be processed. When the event buffers are finally processed there is an economy of scale achieved since most targets support bulk processing of the events so they are processed at the buffer level rather than the individual event level. When all this is working together it’s more likely that a full buffer will be processed and put back into the ready queue before the remaining buffers (remember, there are at least three) are full. I know what you’re going to say: “My server is exceptional! My workload is so massive it defies categorization!” OK, maybe you weren’t going to say that exactly, but you were probably thinking it. The point is that there are situations that won’t be covered by the Default, but that’s a good place to start and this post assumes you’ve started there so that you have something to look at in order to determine if you do have a special case that needs different settings. So let’s get to the special cases… What event just fired?! How about now?! Now?! If you believe the commercial adage from Heinz Ketchup (Heinz Slow Good Ketchup ad on You Tube), some things are worth the wait. This is not a belief held by most DBAs, particularly DBAs who are looking for an answer to a troubleshooting question fast. If you’re one of these anxious DBAs, or maybe just a Program Manager doing a demo, then 30 seconds might be longer than you’re comfortable waiting. If you find yourself in this situation then consider changing the MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY option for your event session. This option will force the event buffers to be processed based on your time schedule. This option only makes sense for the asynchronous targets since those are the ones where we allow events to build up in the event buffer – if you’re using one of the synchronous targets this option isn’t relevant. Avoid forgotten events by increasing your memory Have you ever had one of those days where you keep forgetting things? That can happen in Extended Events too; we call it dropped events. In order to optimizes for server performance and help ensure that the Extended Events doesn’t block the server if to drop events that can’t be published to a buffer because the buffer is full. You can determine if events are being dropped from a session by querying the dm_xe_sessions DMV and looking at the dropped_event_count field. Aside: Should you care if you’re dropping events?Maybe not – think about why you’re collecting data in the first place and whether you’re really going to miss a few dropped events. For example, if you’re collecting query duration stats over thousands of executions of a query it won’t make a huge difference to miss a couple executions. Use your best judgment. If you find that your session is dropping events it means that the event buffer is not large enough to handle the volume of events that are being published. There are two ways to address this problem. First, you could collect fewer events – examine you session to see if you are over collecting. Do you need all the actions you’ve specified? Could you apply a predicate to be more specific about when you fire the event? Assuming the session is defined correctly, the next option is to change the MAX_MEMORY option to a larger number. Picking the right event buffer size might take some trial and error, but a good place to start is with the number of dropped events compared to the number you’ve collected. Aside: There are three different behaviors for dropping events that you specify using the EVENT_RETENTION_MODE option. The default is to allow single event loss and you should stick with this setting since it is the best choice for keeping the impact on server performance low.You’ll be tempted to use the setting to not lose any events (NO_EVENT_LOSS) – resist this urge since it can result in blocking on the server. If you’re worried that you’re losing events you should be increasing your event buffer memory as described in this section. Some events are too big to fail A less common reason for dropping an event is when an event is so large that it can’t fit into the event buffer. Even though most events are going to be small, you might find a condition that occasionally generates a very large event. You can determine if your session is dropping large events by looking at the dm_xe_sessions DMV once again, this time check the largest_event_dropped_size. If this value is larger than the size of your event buffer [remember, the size of your event buffer, by default, is max_memory / 3] then you need a large event buffer. To specify a large event buffer you set the MAX_EVENT_SIZE option to a value large enough to fit the largest event dropped based on data from the DMV. When you set this option the Extended Events engine will create two buffers of this size to accommodate these large events. As an added bonus (no extra charge) the large event buffer will also be used to store normal events in the cases where the normal event buffers are all full and waiting to be processed. (Note: This is just a side-effect, not the intended use. If you’re dropping many normal events then you should increase your normal event buffer size.) Partitioning: moving your events to a sub-division Earlier I alluded to the fact that you can configure your event session to use more than the standard three event buffers – this is called partitioning and is controlled by the MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE option. The result of setting this option is fairly easy to explain, but knowing when to use it is a bit more art than science. First the science… You can configure partitioning in three ways: None, Per NUMA Node & Per CPU. This specifies the location where sets of event buffers are created with fairly obvious implication. There are rules we follow for sub-dividing the total memory (specified by MAX_MEMORY) between all the event buffers that are specific to the mode used: None: 3 buffers (fixed)Node: 3 * number_of_nodesCPU: 2.5 * number_of_cpus Here are some examples of what this means for different Node/CPU counts: Configuration None Node CPU 2 CPUs, 1 Node 3 buffers 3 buffers 5 buffers 6 CPUs, 2 Node 3 buffers 6 buffers 15 buffers 40 CPUs, 5 Nodes 3 buffers 15 buffers 100 buffers   Aside: Buffer size on multi-processor computersAs the number of Nodes or CPUs increases, the size of the event buffer gets smaller because the total memory is sub-divided into more pieces. The defaults will hold up to this for a while since each buffer set is holding events only from the Node or CPU that it is associated with, but at some point the buffers will get too small and you’ll either see events being dropped or you’ll get an error when you create your session because you’re below the minimum buffer size. Increase the MAX_MEMORY setting to an appropriate number for the configuration. The most likely reason to start partitioning is going to be related to performance. If you notice that running an event session is impacting the performance of your server beyond a reasonably expected level [Yes, there is a reasonably expected level of work required to collect events.] then partitioning might be an answer. Before you partition you might want to check a few other things: Is your event retention set to NO_EVENT_LOSS and causing blocking? (I told you not to do this.) Consider changing your event loss mode or increasing memory. Are you over collecting and causing more work than necessary? Consider adding predicates to events or removing unnecessary events and actions from your session. Are you writing the file target to the same slow disk that you use for TempDB and your other high activity databases? <kidding> <not really> It’s always worth considering the end to end picture – if you’re writing events to a file you can be impacted by I/O, network; all the usual stuff. Assuming you’ve ruled out the obvious (and not so obvious) issues, there are performance conditions that will be addressed by partitioning. For example, it’s possible to have a successful event session (eg. no dropped events) but still see a performance impact because you have many CPUs all attempting to write to the same free buffer and having to wait in line to finish their work. This is a case where partitioning would relieve the contention between the different CPUs and likely reduce the performance impact cause by the event session. There is no DMV you can check to find these conditions – sorry – that’s where the art comes in. This is  largely a matter of experimentation. On the bright side you probably won’t need to to worry about this level of detail all that often. The performance impact of Extended Events is significantly lower than what you may be used to with SQL Trace. You will likely only care about the impact if you are trying to set up a long running event session that will be part of your everyday workload – sessions used for short term troubleshooting will likely fall into the “reasonably expected impact” category. Hey buddy – I think you forgot something OK, there are two options I didn’t cover: STARTUP_STATE & TRACK_CAUSALITY. If you want your event sessions to start automatically when the server starts, set the STARTUP_STATE option to ON. (Now there is only one option I didn’t cover.) I’m going to leave causality for another post since it’s not really related to session behavior, it’s more about event analysis. - Mike Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Revisiting ANTS Performance Profiler 7.4

  - by James Michael Hare

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

  - by Shaun

  With the new release of the Windows Azure platform there are a lot of new features available. In my previous post I introduced a little bit about one of them, the remote desktop access to azure virtual machine. Now I would like to talk about another cool stuff – Windows Azure Connect.   What’s Windows Azure Connect I would like to quote the definition of the Windows Azure Connect in MSDN With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IP-sec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. IP-sec protects communications over Internet Protocol (IP) networks through the use of cryptographic security services. There’s an image available at the MSDN as well that I would like to forward here As we can see, using the Windows Azure Connect the Worker Role 1 and Web Role 1 are connected with the development machines and database servers which some of them are inside the organization some are not. With the Windows Azure Connect, the roles deployed on the cloud could consume the resource which located inside our Intranet or anywhere in the world. That means the roles can connect to the local database, access the local shared resource such as share files, folders and printers, etc.   Difference between Windows Azure Connect and AppFabric It seems that the Windows Azure Connect are duplicated with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Both of them are aiming to solve the problem on how to communication between the resource in the cloud and inside the local network. The table below lists the differences in my understanding. Category Windows Azure Connect Windows Azure AppFabric Purpose An IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure roles. An application service running on the cloud. Connectivity IP-sec, Domain-joint Net Tcp, Http, Https Components Windows Azure Connect Driver Service Bus, Access Control, Caching Usage Azure roles connect to local database server Azure roles use local shared files,  folders and printers, etc. Azure roles join the local AD. Expose the local service to Internet. Move the authorization process to the cloud. Integrate with existing identities such as Live ID, Google ID, etc. with existing local services. Utilize the distributed cache.   And also some scenarios on which of them should be used. Scenario Connect AppFabric I have a service deployed in the Intranet and I want the people can use it from the Internet.   Y I have a website deployed on Azure and need to use a database which deployed inside the company. And I don’t want to expose the database to the Internet. Y   I have a service deployed in the Intranet and is using AD authorization. I have a website deployed on Azure which needs to use this service. Y   I have a service deployed in the Intranet and some people on the Internet can use it but need to be authorized and authenticated.   Y I have a service in Intranet, and a website deployed on Azure. This service can be used from Internet and that website should be able to use it as well by AD authorization for more functionalities. Y Y   How to Enable Windows Azure Connect OK we talked a lot information about the Windows Azure Connect and differences with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Now let’s see how to enable and use the Windows Azure Connect. First of all, since this feature is in CTP stage we should apply before use it. On the Windows Azure Portal we can see our CTP features status under Home, Beta Program page. You can send the apply to join the Beta Programs to Microsoft in this page. After a few days the Microsoft will send an email to you (the email of your Live ID) when it’s available. In my case we can see that the Windows Azure Connect had been activated by Microsoft and then we can click the Connect button on top, or we can click the Virtual Network item from the left navigation bar.   The first thing we need, if it’s our first time to enter the Connect page, is to enable the Windows Azure Connect. After that we can see our Windows Azure Connect information in this page.   Add a Local Machine to Azure Connect As we explained below the Windows Azure Connect can make an IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure role instances. So that we firstly add a local machine into our Azure Connect. To do this we will click the Install Local Endpoint button on top and then the portal will give us an URL. Copy this URL to the machine we want to add and it will download the software to us. This software will be installed in the local machines which we want to join the Connect. After installed there will be a tray-icon appeared to indicate this machine had been joint our Connect. The local application will be refreshed to the Windows Azure Platform every 5 minutes but we can click the Refresh button to let it retrieve the latest status at once. Currently my local machine is ready for connect and we can see my machine in the Windows Azure Portal if we switched back to the portal and selected back Activated Endpoints node.   Add a Windows Azure Role to Azure Connect Let’s create a very simple azure project with a basic ASP.NET web role inside. To make it available on Windows Azure Connect we will open the azure project property of this role from the solution explorer in the Visual Studio, and select the Virtual Network tab, check the Activate Windows Azure Connect. The next step is to get the activation token from the Windows Azure Portal. In the same page there is a button named Get Activation Token. Click this button then the portal will display the token to me. We copied this token and pasted to the box in the Visual Studio tab. Then we deployed this application to azure. After completed the deployment we can see the role instance was listed in the Windows Azure Portal - Virtual Connect section.   Establish the Connect Group The final task is to create a connect group which contains the machines and role instances need to be connected each other. This can be done in the portal very easy. The machines and instances will NOT be connected until we created the group for them. The machines and instances can be used in one or more groups. In the Virtual Connect section click the Groups and Roles node from the left side navigation bar and clicked the Create Group button on top. This will bring up a dialog to us. What we need to do is to specify a group name, description; and then we need to select the local computers and azure role instances into this group. After the Azure Fabric updated the group setting we can see the groups and the endpoints in the page. And if we switch back to the local machine we can see that the tray-icon have been changed and the status turned connected. The Windows Azure Connect will update the group information every 5 minutes. If you find the status was still in Disconnected please right-click the tray-icon and select the Refresh menu to retrieve the latest group policy to make it connected.   Test the Azure Connect between the Local Machine and the Azure Role Instance Now our local machine and azure role instance had been connected. This means each of them can communication to others in IP level. For example we can open the SQL Server port so that our azure role can connect to it by using the machine name or the IP address. The Windows Azure Connect uses IPv6 to connect between the local machines and role instances. You can get the IP address from the Windows Azure Portal Virtual Network section when select an endpoint. I don’t want to take a full example for how to use the Connect but would like to have two very simple tests. The first one would be PING.   When a local machine and role instance are connected through the Windows Azure Connect we can PING any of them if we opened the ICMP protocol in the Filewall setting. To do this we need to run a command line before test. Open the command window on the local machine and the role instance, execute the command as following netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMPv6" dir=in action=allow enable=yes protocol=icmpv6 Thanks to Jason Chen, Patriek van Dorp, Anton Staykov and Steve Marx, they helped me to enable  the ICMPv6 setting. For the full discussion we made please visit here. You can use the Remote Desktop Access feature to logon the azure role instance. Please refer my previous blog post to get to know how to use the Remote Desktop Access in Windows Azure. Then we can PING the machine or the role instance by specifying its name. Below is the screen I PING my local machine from my azure instance. We can use the IPv6 address to PING each other as well. Like the image following I PING to my role instance from my local machine thought the IPv6 address.   Another example I would like to demonstrate here is folder sharing. I shared a folder in my local machine and then if we logged on the role instance we can see the folder content from the file explorer window.   Summary In this blog post I introduced about another new feature – Windows Azure Connect. With this feature our local resources and role instances (virtual machines) can be connected to each other. In this way we can make our azure application using our local stuff such as database servers, printers, etc. without expose them to Internet.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 04, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 04, 2010New ProjectsAcPrac: A educational program designed to run on Windows. It is fully customizable. It is developed in C# 2008.argo: Linguistic Tool Camelot: A simple utility for testing cross site data queries in SharePointdelta: Delta is a difference tool for large files. Delta will have several clients, including AJAX and Silverlight. You can view differences in a scroll...EF Dorsal: A dorsal spine for Entity Framework based project. This code generator provides a powerfull Business Layer with almost all high important best p...Excel formatting: Excel formatting projectEyes Recognition: eye recognitionGameOfLife: The Game of Life is a the best example of a cellular automaton. It's developed in C#, SilverLight.GKO Libraries: .NET tool libraries written in C# that we have used in our projectsHello Demo: A simple Hello World application, used to demonstrate access to CodePlex using Team Explorerjog.Portal: jogportal lays the foundation for an extensible portal solution leveraging the latest technology including linq and silver lightKM Brasil: k-meleon, km, gecko, brasil, browser, web, web browser, navegador, navegação, kmeleon, k meleonLost in Translation: Ever find yourself in a foreign country eager (or clueless) to what is written on a shop sign or restaurant menu? With your trusty phone, its came...Machine Learning for .NET: Machine Learning Library for .NET. Initial inclusions will be binary and multi-class classification as well as standard clustering algorithms.Maito: Iron Kingdoms Name GeneratorManPowerEngine: ManPowerEngine is a Silverlight 2D Game Engine. It has an game application framework and supports game object hierarchy management, 2D physics simu...Marvin's Arena: Marvin's Arena is a free and entertaining programming game. The game is designed to easily learn programming in any .NET compatible language. It is...MultiMediaPlayer: 整合我们的内容NCacheD - A Simple Distributed .NET Cache using the TPL and WCF: NCacheD is a simple distributed cache system written in .NET. NCacheD offers functionality similar to that of MemcacheD but scaled back. NCacheD ...NDAP: OPeNDAP is a client/server system for making local scientific data accessible to remote locations without regard to the local or remote storage for...Open Guide CMS: Open Guide makes your traveling through city more adventurous, mode educational and more funny. You can support us by lines of code, by interesti...Rollback - A social backup tool.: Rollback is a simple and intuitive social backup application. You can create multiple backup jobs with a few mouse clicks and even schedule it to ...sELedit: An editor for elements.data file of the popular MMORPG Perfect World.SharePoint Theme Applicator: SharePoint Theme Applicator will give SharePoint administrators the ability to apply a theme accross a whole web application (i.e. apply a theme to...sPATCH: ! sPATCH - Perfect World Client Autopatcher This beta patcher is an alternative to the default perfect world patcher. It offers easy client patc...Wiggle: A-life investigation. Let's make little squirmies!WPFSLBlendModeFx: A blend mode library for WPF & Silverlight.休息提醒: 程序员们，尤其是像我这样对程序痴狂的程序员们。一旦研究起自己感兴趣的程序时，觉得上厕所都是浪费时间。 这个程序是在设定的时间后锁定计算机或关闭显示器，从而从某种程度强迫程序员们去休息New ReleasesAMFParser: 1.1.0: Add handling of DSK object when using BlazeDS Add handling of string references Add handling of DateTime values Correct handling of Double values B...Camelot: Camelot 0.1 Alpha: Early release: 1) Query by content type, optionally list or base template 2) Query by list or base templateDictionary Translator for Umbraco: Dictionary Translator 1.1: This is a minor release that fixes a bug that Thomas Hohler found on the first day of release This package is to be used with the ASP.NET open sou...Dynamic Configuration: Sample Application Release 1: These binaries demonstrate the effect of using DynamicConfigurationManager. The source-code for these binaries is available in the 'Source Code' t...EF Dorsal: EFDorsal v0.3b: Second real version. 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It contains Binary files, pdb files and xml files for the PERWAPI and SymbolRW compone...Prolog.NET: Prolog.NET 1.0 Beta 1.2: Installer includes: primary Prolog.NET assembly Prolog.NET Workbench PrologTest console application all required dependencies Beta 1.2 in...Protoforma | Tactica Adversa: Skilful 0.2.4.320: BetaRoTwee: RoTwee 6.1.0.0: 16604 "Post playing tune feature" is added. Using this new feature, you can tweet tune playing in iTunes. 16625 Error processing for network error...sELedit: sELedit v1.0: -SharePoint 2007 Deployment Wizard: Support for SharePoint Server and Foundation 2010: This release encompasses the supported install paths for the default install of SPS 2010 (the 14 hive). 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Now uses the increased Rate Limit...TwitterVB - A .NET Twitter Library: TwitterVB-2.3: Patch 5151: Added BlockedUsers function to get a page other then the first Patch 5420: The ListMembers function will now return more then just th...休息提醒: 初始版本: 初始版本Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Microsoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETLiveUpload to FacebookMost Active ProjectsRawrBlogEngine.NETMapWindow GISpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesMDT Web FrontEndsvn2tfsDiffPlex - a .NET Diff GeneratorIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterFarseer Physics Engine

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• ASP.NET MVC Validation Complete

  - by Ricardo Peres

  OK, so let’s talk about validation. Most people are probably familiar with the out of the box validation attributes that MVC knows about, from the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace, such as EnumDataTypeAttribute, RequiredAttribute, StringLengthAttribute, RangeAttribute, RegularExpressionAttribute and CompareAttribute from the System.Web.Mvc namespace. All of these validators inherit from ValidationAttribute and perform server as well as client-side validation. In order to use them, you must include the JavaScript files MicrosoftMvcValidation.js, jquery.validate.js or jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js, depending on whether you want to use Microsoft’s own library or jQuery. No significant difference exists, but jQuery is more extensible. You can also create your own attribute by inheriting from ValidationAttribute, but, if you want to have client-side behavior, you must also implement IClientValidatable (all of the out of the box validation attributes implement it) and supply your own JavaScript validation function that mimics its server-side counterpart. Of course, you must reference the JavaScript file where the declaration function is. Let’s see an example, validating even numbers. First, the validation attribute: 1: [Serializable] 2: [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Property, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)] 3: public class IsEvenAttribute : ValidationAttribute, IClientValidatable 4: { 5: protected override ValidationResult IsValid(Object value, ValidationContext validationContext) 6: { 7: Int32 v = Convert.ToInt32(value); 8:  9: if (v % 2 == 0) 10: { 11: return (ValidationResult.Success); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: return (new ValidationResult("Value is not even")); 16: } 17: } 18:  19: #region IClientValidatable Members 20:  21: public IEnumerable<ModelClientValidationRule> GetClientValidationRules(ModelMetadata metadata, ControllerContext context) 22: { 23: yield return (new ModelClientValidationRule() { ValidationType = "iseven", ErrorMessage = "Value is not even" }); 24: } 25:  26: #endregion 27: } The iseven validation function is declared like this in JavaScript, using jQuery validation: 1: jQuery.validator.addMethod('iseven', function (value, element, params) 2: { 3: return (true); 4: return ((parseInt(value) % 2) == 0); 5: }); 6:  7: jQuery.validator.unobtrusive.adapters.add('iseven', [], function (options) 8: { 9: options.rules['iseven'] = options.params; 10: options.messages['iseven'] = options.message; 11: }); Do keep in mind that this is a simple example, for example, we are not using parameters, which may be required for some more advanced scenarios. As a side note, if you implement a custom validator that also requires a JavaScript function, you’ll probably want them together. One way to achieve this is by including the JavaScript file as an embedded resource on the same assembly where the custom attribute is declared. You do this by having its Build Action set as Embedded Resource inside Visual Studio: Then you have to declare an attribute at assembly level, perhaps in the AssemblyInfo.cs file: 1: [assembly: WebResource("SomeNamespace.IsEven.js", "text/javascript")] In your views, if you want to include a JavaScript file from an embedded resource you can use this code: 1: public static class UrlExtensions 2: { 3: private static readonly MethodInfo getResourceUrlMethod = typeof(AssemblyResourceLoader).GetMethod("GetWebResourceUrlInternal", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static); 4:  5: public static IHtmlString Resource<TType>(this UrlHelper url, String resourceName) 6: { 7: return (Resource(url, typeof(TType).Assembly.FullName, resourceName)); 8: } 9:  10: public static IHtmlString Resource(this UrlHelper url, String assemblyName, String resourceName) 11: { 12: String resourceUrl = getResourceUrlMethod.Invoke(null, new Object[] { Assembly.Load(assemblyName), resourceName, false, false, null }).ToString(); 13: return (new HtmlString(resourceUrl)); 14: } 15: } And on the view: 1: <script src="<%: this.Url.Resource("SomeAssembly", "SomeNamespace.IsEven.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> Then there’s the CustomValidationAttribute. It allows externalizing your validation logic to another class, so you have to tell which type and method to use. The method can be static as well as instance, if it is instance, the class cannot be abstract and must have a public parameterless constructor. It can be applied to a property as well as a class. It does not, however, support client-side validation. Let’s see an example declaration: 1: [CustomValidation(typeof(ProductValidator), "OnValidateName")] 2: public String Name 3: { 4: get; 5: set; 6: } The validation method needs this signature: 1: public static ValidationResult OnValidateName(String name) 2: { 3: if ((String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(name) == false) && (name.Length <= 50)) 4: { 5: return (ValidationResult.Success); 6: } 7: else 8: { 9: return (new ValidationResult(String.Format("The name has an invalid value: {0}", name), new String[] { "Name" })); 10: } 11: } Note that it can be either static or instance and it must return a ValidationResult-derived class. ValidationResult.Success is null, so any non-null value is considered a validation error. The single method argument must match the property type to which the attribute is attached to or the class, in case it is applied to a class: 1: [CustomValidation(typeof(ProductValidator), "OnValidateProduct")] 2: public class Product 3: { 4: } The signature must thus be: 1: public static ValidationResult OnValidateProduct(Product product) 2: { 3: } Continuing with attribute-based validation, another possibility is RemoteAttribute. This allows specifying a controller and an action method just for performing the validation of a property or set of properties. This works in a client-side AJAX way and it can be very useful. Let’s see an example, starting with the attribute declaration and proceeding to the action method implementation: 1: [Remote("Validate", "Validation")] 2: public String Username 3: { 4: get; 5: set; 6: } The controller action method must contain an argument that can be bound to the property: 1: public ActionResult Validate(String username) 2: { 3: return (this.Json(true, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet)); 4: } If in your result JSON object you include a string instead of the true value, it will consider it as an error, and the validation will fail. This string will be displayed as the error message, if you have included it in your view. You can also use the remote validation approach for validating your entire entity, by including all of its properties as included fields in the attribute and having an action method that receives an entity instead of a single property: 1: [Remote("Validate", "Validation", AdditionalFields = "Price")] 2: public String Name 3: { 4: get; 5: set; 6: } 7:  8: public Decimal Price 9: { 10: get; 11: set; 12: } The action method will then be: 1: public ActionResult Validate(Product product) 2: { 3: return (this.Json("Product is not valid", JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet)); 4: } Only the property to which the attribute is applied and the additional properties referenced by the AdditionalFields will be populated in the entity instance received by the validation method. The same rule previously stated applies, if you return anything other than true, it will be used as the validation error message for the entity. The remote validation is triggered automatically, but you can also call it explicitly. In the next example, I am causing the full entity validation, see the call to serialize(): 1: function validate() 2: { 3: var form = $('form'); 4: var data = form.serialize(); 5: var url = '<%: this.Url.Action("Validation", "Validate") %>'; 6:  7: var result = $.ajax 8: ( 9: { 10: type: 'POST', 11: url: url, 12: data: data, 13: async: false 14: } 15: ).responseText; 16:  17: if (result) 18: { 19: //error 20: } 21: } Finally, by implementing IValidatableObject, you can implement your validation logic on the object itself, that is, you make it self-validatable. This will only work server-side, that is, the ModelState.IsValid property will be set to false on the controller’s action method if the validation in unsuccessful. Let’s see how to implement it: 1: public class Product : IValidatableObject 2: { 3: public String Name 4: { 5: get; 6: set; 7: } 8:  9: public Decimal Price 10: { 11: get; 12: set; 13: } 14:  15: #region IValidatableObject Members 16: 17: public IEnumerable<ValidationResult> Validate(ValidationContext validationContext) 18: { 19: if ((String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(this.Name) == true) || (this.Name.Length > 50)) 20: { 21: yield return (new ValidationResult(String.Format("The name has an invalid value: {0}", this.Name), new String[] { "Name" })); 22: } 23: 24: if ((this.Price <= 0) || (this.Price > 100)) 25: { 26: yield return (new ValidationResult(String.Format("The price has an invalid value: {0}", this.Price), new String[] { "Price" })); 27: } 28: } 29: 30: #endregion 31: } The errors returned will be matched against the model properties through the MemberNames property of the ValidationResult class and will be displayed in their proper labels, if present on the view. On the controller action method you can check for model validity by looking at ModelState.IsValid and you can get actual error messages and related properties by examining all of the entries in the ModelState dictionary: 1: Dictionary<String, String> errors = new Dictionary<String, String>(); 2:  3: foreach (KeyValuePair<String, ModelState> keyValue in this.ModelState) 4: { 5: String key = keyValue.Key; 6: ModelState modelState = keyValue.Value; 7:  8: foreach (ModelError error in modelState.Errors) 9: { 10: errors[key] = error.ErrorMessage; 11: } 12: } And these are the ways to perform date validation in ASP.NET MVC. Don’t forget to use them!

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• Oracle WebCenter Partner Program

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  In competitive marketplaces, your company needs to quickly respond to changes and new trends, in order to open opportunities and build long-term growth. Oracle has a variety of next-generation services, solutions and resources that will leverage the differentiators in your offerings. Name your partnering needs: Oracle has the answer. This week we’d like to focus on Partners and the value your organization can gain from working with the Oracle PartnerNetwork. The Oracle PartnerNetwork will empower your company with exceptional resources to distinguish your offerings from the competition, seize opportunities, and increase your sales. We’re happy to welcome Christine Kungl, and Brian Buzzell, from Oracle’s World Wide Alliances & Channels (WWA&C) WebCenter Partner Enablement team, as today’s guests on the Oracle WebCenter blog. Q: What is the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN)?A: Christine: Oracle’s PartnerNetwork (OPN) is a collaborative partnership which allows registered companies specific added value resources to help differentiate themselves from their competition. Through OPN programs it provides companies the ability to seize and target opportunities, educate and train their teams, and leverage unparalleled opportunity given Oracle’s large market footprint. OPN’s multi-level programs are targeted at different levels allowing companies to grow and evolve with Oracle based on their business needs.  As part of their OPN memberships partners are encouraged to become OPN Specialized allowing those partners additional differentiation in Oracle’s Partner Network Community.  Q: What is an OPN Specialization and what resources are available for Specialized Partners?A: Brian: Oracle wanted a better way for our partners to differentiate their special skills and expertise, as well a more effective way to communicate that difference to customers.  Oracle’s expanding product portfolio demanded that we be able to identify partners with significant product knowledge—those who had made an investment in Oracle and a continuing commitment to deliver Oracle solutions. And with more than 30,000 Oracle partners around the world, Oracle needed a way for our customers to choose the right partner for their business. So how did Oracle meet this need? With the new partner program:  Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized. In this new program, Oracle partners are: Specialized :  Differentiating themselves from the competition with expertise that set them apart Recognized:  Being acknowledged for investing in becoming Oracle experts in specialized areas. Preferred :  Connecting with potential customers who are seeking  value-added solutions for their business OPN Specialized provides all partners with educational opportunities, training, and tools specially designed to build competency and grow business.  Partners can serve their customers better through key resources:OPN Specialized Knowledge Zones – Located on the updated and enhanced OPN portal— provide a single point of entry for all education and training information for Oracle partners. Enablement 2.0 Resources —Enablement 2.0 helps Oracle partners build their competencies and skills through a variety of educational opportunities and expanded training choices. These resources include: Enablement 2.0 “Boot camps” provide three-tiered learning levels that help jump-start partner training The role-based training covers Oracle’s application and technology products and offers a combination of classroom lectures, hands-on lab exercises, and case studies. Enablement 2.0 Interactive guided learning paths (GLPs) with recommendations on how to achieve specialization Upgraded partner solution kits Enhanced, specialized business centers available 24/7 around the globe on the OPN portal OPN Competency Center—Tracking ProgressThe OPN Competency Center keeps track as a partner applies for and achieves specialization in selected areas. You start with an assessment that compares your organization’s current skills and experience with the requirements for specialization in the area you have chosen. The OPN Competency Center then provides a roadmap that itemizes the skills and the knowledge you need to earn specialized status. In summary, OPN Specialization not only includes key training resources but a way to track and show progression for your partner organization. Q: What is are the OPN Membership Levels and what are the benefits?A:  Christine: The base OPN membership levels are: Remarketer: At the Remarketer level, retailers can choose to resell select Oracle products with the backing of authorized, regionally located, value-added distributors (VADs). The Remarketer level has no fees and no partner agreement with Oracle, but does offer online training and sales tools through the OPN portal.Program Details: RemarketerSilver Level: The Silver level is for Oracle partners who are focused on reselling and developing business with products ordered through the Oracle 1-Click Ordering Program. The Silver level provides a cost-effective, yet scalable way for partners to start an OPN Specialized membership and offers a substantial set of benefits that lets partners increase their competitive positioning. Program Details: SilverGold Level: Gold-level partners have the ability to specialize, helping them grow their business and create differentiation in the marketplace. Oracle partners at the Gold level can develop, sell, or implement the full stack of Oracle solutions and can apply to resell Oracle Applications.Program Details: GoldPlatinum Level: The Platinum level is for Oracle partners who want the highest level of benefits and are committed to reaching a minimum of five specializations. Platinum partners are recognized for their expertise in a broad range of products and technology, and receive dedicated support from Oracle.Program Details: PlatinumIn addition we recently introduced a new level:Diamond Level: This level is the most prestigious level of OPN Specialized. It allows companies to differentiate further because of their focused depth and breadth of their expertise. Program Details: DiamondSo as you can see there are various levels cost effective ways that Partners can get assistance, differentiation through OPN membership. Q: What role does the Oracle's World Wide Alliances & Channels (WWA&C), Partner Enablement teams and the WebCenter Community play?  A: Brian: Oracle’s WWA&C teams are responsible for manage relationships, educating their teams, creating go-to-market solutions and fostering communities for Oracle partners worldwide.  The WebCenter Partner Enablement Middleware Team is tasked to create, manage and distribute Specialization resources for the WebCenter Partner community. Q: What WebCenter Specializations are currently available?A: Christine:  As of now here are the following WebCenter Specializations and their availability: Oracle WebCenter Portal Specialization (Oracle WebCenter Portal): Available NowThe Oracle WebCenter Specialization provides insight into the following products: WebCenter Services, WebCenter Spaces, and WebLogic Portal.Oracle WebCenter Specialized Partners can efficiently use Oracle WebCenter products to create social applications, enterprise portals, communities, composite applications, and Internet or intranet Web sites on a standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA). The suite combines the development of rich internet applications; a multi-channel portal framework; and a suite of horizontal WebCenter applications, which provide content, presence, and social networking capabilities to create a highly interactive user experience. Oracle WebCenter Content Specialization: Available NowThe Oracle WebCenter Content Specialization provides insight into the following products; Universal Content Management, WebCenter Records Management, WebCenter Imaging, WebCenter Distributed Capture, and WebCenter Capture.Oracle WebCenter Content Specialized Partners can efficiently build content-rich business applications, reuse content, and integrate hundreds of content services with other business applications. This allows our customers to decrease costs, automate processes, reduce resource bottlenecks, share content effectively, minimize the number of lost documents, and better manage risk. Oracle WebCenter Sites Specialization: Available Q1 2012Oracle WebCenter Sites is part of the broader Oracle WebCenter platform that provides organizations with a complete customer experience management solution.  Partners that align with the new Oracle WebCenter Sites platform allow their customers organizations to: Leverage customer information from all channels and systems Manage interactions across all channels Unify commerce, merchandising, marketing, and service across all channels Provide personalized, choreographed consumer journeys across all channels Integrate order orchestration, supply chain management and order fulfillment Q: What criteria does the Partner organization need to achieve Specialization? What about individual Sales, PreSales & Implementation Specialist/Technical consultants?A: Brian: Each Oracle WebCenter Specialization has unique Business Criteria that must be met in order to achieve that Specialization.  This includes a unique number of transactions (co-sell, re-sell, and referral), customer references and then unique number of specialists as part of a partner team (Sales, Pre-Sales, Implementation, and Support).   Each WebCenter Specialization provides training resources (GLPs, BootCamps, Assessments and Exams for individuals on a partner’s staff to fulfill those requirements.  That criterion can be found for each Specialization on the Specialize tab for each WebCenter Knowledge Zone.  Here are the sample criteria, recommended courses, exams for the WebCenter Portal Specialization: WebCenter Portal Specialization Criteria Q: Do you have any suggestions on the best way for partners to get started if they would like to know more?A: Christine:   The best way to start is for partners is look at their business and core Oracle team focus and then look to become specialized in one or more areas.  Once you have selected the Specializations that are right for your business, you need to follow the first 3 key steps described below. The fourth step outlines the additional process to follow if you meet the criteria to be Advanced Specialized. Note that Step 4 may not be done without first following Steps 1-3.1. Join the Knowledge Zone(s) where you want to achieve Specialized status Go to the Knowledge Zone lick on the "Why Partner" tab Click on the "Join Knowledge Zone" link 2. Meet the Specialization criteria - Define and implement plans in your organization to achieve the competency and business criteria targets of the Specialization. (Note: Worldwide OPN members at the Gold, Platinum, or Diamond level and their Associates at the Gold, Platinum, or Diamond level may count their collective resources to meet the business and competency criteria required for specialization in this area.) 3. Apply for Specialization – when you have met the business and competency criteria required, inform Oracle by completing the following steps: Click on the "Specialize" tab in the Knowledge Zone Click on the "Apply Now" button Complete the online application form Oracle will validate the information provided, and once approved, you will receive notification from Oracle of your awarded Specialized status. Need more information? Access our Step by Step Guide (PDF) 4. Apply for Advanced Specialization (Optional) – If your company has on staff 50 unique Certified Implementation Specialists in your company's approved Specialization's product set, let Oracle know by following these steps: Ensure that you have 50 or more unique individuals that are Certified Implementation Specialists in the specific Specialization awarded to your company If you are pooling resources from another Associate or Worldwide entity, ensure you know that company’s name and country Have your Oracle PRM Administrator complete the online Advanced Specialization Application Oracle will validate the information provided, and once approved, you will receive notification from Oracle of your awarded Advanced Specialized status. There are additional resources on OPN as well as the broader WebCenter Community: v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Cryptographic Validation Explained

  - by MarkPearl

  We have been using LogicNP’s CryptoLicensing for some of our software and I was battling to understand how exactly the whole process worked. I was sent the following document which really helped explain it – so if you ever use the same tool it is well worth a read. Licensing Basics LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net is the most advanced and state-of-the art licensing and copy protection system you can use for your software. LogicNP CryptoLicensing System uses the latest cryptographic technology to generate and validate licenses. The cryptographic algorithm used is the RSA algorithm which consists of a pair of keys called as the generation key and the validation key. Data encrypted using the generation key can only be decrypted using the corresponding validation key. How does cryptographic validation work? When a new license project is created, a unique validation-generation key pair is created for the project. When LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net generates licenses, it encrypts the license settings using the generation key. The validation key can be safely distributed with your software and is used during validation. During license validation, LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net attempts to decrypt the encrypted license code using the validation key. If the decryption is successful, this means that the data was encrypted using the generation key, since only the corresponding validation key can decrypt data encrypted with the generation key. This further means that not only is the license valid but that it was generated by you and only you since nobody else has access to the generation key. Generation Key This key is used by CryptoLicensing Generator to generate encrypted license codes. This key is stored in the license project file, so the license project file must be kept secure and confidential and must be accorded the same care as any other critical asset such as source code. Validation Key This key is used for validating generated license codes. It is the same key displayed in the 'Get Validation Key And Code' dialog (Ctrl+K) and is used by your software when validating license codes (using LogicNP.CryptoLicensing.dll). Unlike the generation key, it is not necessary to keep this key secure and confidential. Note that the generation key pair is stored in the project file created by LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net, so it is very important to backup this file and to keep it secure. Once the file is lost, it is not possible to retrieve the key pair. FAQ Do I use the same validation key to validate all license codes? Yes, the validation key (and generation key) for the project remains the same; you use the same key to validate all license codes generated using the project. You can retrieve the validation key using the "Project" menu --> "Get Validation Key & Code" menu item. Can license codes generated using generation key from one project be validated using validation key of another project? No! Q. Is every generated license code unique? A. Yes, every license code generated by CryptoLicensing is guaranteed to be unique, even if you generate thousands of codes at a time. Q. What makes CryptoLicensing so secure? A. CryptoLicensing uses the latest cryptographic technology to generate and validate licenses. The cryptographic algorithm used is the RSA asymmetric key algorithm which can use upto 3072-bit keys. Given current computing power, it takes years to break a 3072-bit key. Q. Is is possible for a hacker to develop a keygen for my software? A. Impossible. The cryptographic algorithm used by CryptoLicensing consists of a pair of keys called as the generation key and the validation key. Data encrypted with one key can only be decrypted by the other key and vice versa. Licenses are generated using the generation key and validated using the validation key. Without the generation key, it is impossible to generate valid licenses. Q. What is the difference between validation key and generation key? Generation Key This key is used by CryptoLicensing Generator to generate encrypted license codes. This key is stored in the license project file, so the license project file must be kept secure and confidential and must be accorded the same care as any other critical asset such as source code. Validation Key This key is used for validating generated license codes. It is the same key displayed in the 'Get Validation Key And Code' dialog (Ctrl+K) and is used by your software when validating license codes (using LogicNP.CryptoLicensing.dll). Unlike the generation key, it is not necessary to keep this key secure and confidential. Q. Do I have to include the license project file (.licproj) with my software? A. No!!! This goes against the very essence of the security of the asymmetric cryptographic scheme because the project file contains both the validation and generation key. With your software, you only need to include the validation key which will be used to validate licenses generated by CryptoLicensing using the generation key. The license project file should be treated as any other valuable and confidential asset such as your source code. Q. Does the license service need the license project file? A. Yes. The license project file is needed whenever new licenses are generated (via the UI, via the API or via the license service). As just one example, the license service generates new machine-locked licenses when activated licenses are presented to it for activation, therefore the license service needs the license project file. Q. Is it possible to embed my own data in the generated licenses? A. Yes. You can embed any amount of additional data in the licenses. This data will have the same amount of security as the license code itself and will be tamper-proof. The embedded user data can be retrieved from your software. Q. What additional steps can I take to ensure that my software does not get cracked? A. There are many methods and techniques which can make it extremely difficult for a hacker to crack your software. See Writing Effective License Checking Code And Designing Effective Licenses for more information. Q. Why is the license service not working? A. The most common cause is not setting the CryptoLicense.LicenseServiceURL property before trying to validate a license. Make sure that this property is set to the correct URL where your license service is hosted. The most common cause after this is that the license project file on the web server where your license service is hosted is not the latest. This happens if you make changes to the license project (for example, set the 'Enable With Serials' setting for a profile), but don't upload the updated project file to your web server. Q. Why are my serials not working? Serial codes require the user of a license service. See Using Serial Codes for more details. Also see the earlier question 'Why is the license service not working?' Q. Is the same validation key used to validate license codes generated from different profiles. A. Yes. Profiles are just pre specified license settings for quickly generating licenses having those settings. The actual license code is still generated using the license project's cryptographic generation key and thus, can be validated using the project's validation key. Q. Why are changes made to a profile not getting saved? A. Simply changing license settings via UI and saving the license project does not save those license settings to the active profile. You must first save the license settings to a profile using the Save/Save As command from the Profiles menu (see above). Q. Why is validation of activated licenses failing from CryptoLicensing Generator, but works from my software? A. Make sure that you have specified the URL of the license service using the Project Properties Dialog. Also see the earlier question 'Why is the license service not working?' Q. How can I extend the trial period of my customer? A. To extend the evaluation period of the customer, simply send him a new license code specifying the desired evaluation limits. Evaluation information such as the current used days, executions, etc are stored in garbled form in a registry location which is derived from the license code. Therefore, when a new license code is used, the old evaluation information will not be used and a new evaluation period will be started.

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• Creating a Dynamic DataRow for easier DataRow Syntax

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been thrown back into an older project that uses DataSets and DataRows as their entity storage model. I have several applications internally that I still maintain that run just fine (and I sometimes wonder if this wasn't easier than all this ORM crap we deal with with 'newer' improved technology today - but I disgress) but use this older code. For the most part DataSets/DataTables/DataRows are abstracted away in a pseudo entity model, but in some situations like queries DataTables and DataRows are still surfaced to the business layer. Here's an example. Here's a business object method that runs dynamic query and the code ends up looping over the result set using the ugly DataRow Array syntax:public int UpdateAllSafeTitles() { int result = this.Execute("select pk, title, safetitle from " + Tablename + " where EntryType=1", "TPks"); if (result < 0) return result; result = 0; foreach (DataRow row in this.DataSet.Tables["TPks"].Rows) { string title = row["title"] as string; string safeTitle = row["safeTitle"] as string; int pk = (int)row["pk"]; string newSafeTitle = this.GetSafeTitle(title); if (newSafeTitle != safeTitle) { this.ExecuteNonQuery("update " + this.Tablename + " set safeTitle=@safeTitle where pk=@pk", this.CreateParameter("@safeTitle",newSafeTitle), this.CreateParameter("@pk",pk) ); result++; } } return result; } The problem with looping over DataRow objecs is two fold: The array syntax is tedious to type and not real clear to look at, and explicit casting is required in order to do anything useful with the values. I've highlighted the place where this matters. Using the DynamicDataRow class I'll show in a minute this code can be changed to look like this:public int UpdateAllSafeTitles() { int result = this.Execute("select pk, title, safetitle from " + Tablename + " where EntryType=1", "TPks"); if (result < 0) return result; result = 0; foreach (DataRow row in this.DataSet.Tables["TPks"].Rows) { dynamic entry = new DynamicDataRow(row); string newSafeTitle = this.GetSafeTitle(entry.title); if (newSafeTitle != entry.safeTitle) { this.ExecuteNonQuery("update " + this.Tablename + " set safeTitle=@safeTitle where pk=@pk", this.CreateParameter("@safeTitle",newSafeTitle), this.CreateParameter("@pk",entry.pk) ); result++; } } return result; } The code looks much a bit more natural and describes what's happening a little nicer as well. Well, using the new dynamic features in .NET it's actually quite easy to implement the DynamicDataRow class. Creating your own custom Dynamic Objects .NET 4.0 introduced the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and opened up a whole bunch of new capabilities for .NET applications. The dynamic type is an easy way to avoid Reflection and directly access members of 'dynamic' or 'late bound' objects at runtime. There's a lot of very subtle but extremely useful stuff that dynamic does (especially for COM Interop scenearios) but in its simplest form it often allows you to do away with manual Reflection at runtime. In addition you can create DynamicObject implementations that can perform  custom interception of member accesses and so allow you to provide more natural access to more complex or awkward data structures like the DataRow that I use as an example here. Bascially you can subclass DynamicObject and then implement a few methods (TryGetMember, TrySetMember, TryInvokeMember) to provide the ability to return dynamic results from just about any data structure using simple property/method access. In the code above, I created a custom DynamicDataRow class which inherits from DynamicObject and implements only TryGetMember and TrySetMember. Here's what simple class looks like:/// <summary> /// This class provides an easy way to turn a DataRow /// into a Dynamic object that supports direct property /// access to the DataRow fields. /// /// The class also automatically fixes up DbNull values /// (null into .NET and DbNUll to DataRow) /// </summary> public class DynamicDataRow : DynamicObject { /// <summary> /// Instance of object passed in /// </summary> DataRow DataRow; /// <summary> /// Pass in a DataRow to work off /// </summary> /// <param name="instance"></param> public DynamicDataRow(DataRow dataRow) { DataRow = dataRow; } /// <summary> /// Returns a value from a DataRow items array. /// If the field doesn't exist null is returned. /// DbNull values are turned into .NET nulls. /// /// </summary> /// <param name="binder"></param> /// <param name="result"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result) { result = null; try { result = DataRow[binder.Name]; if (result == DBNull.Value) result = null; return true; } catch { } result = null; return false; } /// <summary> /// Property setter implementation tries to retrieve value from instance /// first then into this object /// </summary> /// <param name="binder"></param> /// <param name="value"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool TrySetMember(SetMemberBinder binder, object value) { try { if (value == null) value = DBNull.Value; DataRow[binder.Name] = value; return true; } catch {} return false; } } To demonstrate the basic features here's a short test: [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(RuntimeBinderException))] public void BasicDataRowTests() { DataTable table = new DataTable("table"); table.Columns.Add( new DataColumn() { ColumnName = "Name", DataType=typeof(string) }); table.Columns.Add( new DataColumn() { ColumnName = "Entered", DataType=typeof(DateTime) }); table.Columns.Add(new DataColumn() { ColumnName = "NullValue", DataType = typeof(string) }); DataRow row = table.NewRow(); DateTime now = DateTime.Now; row["Name"] = "Rick"; row["Entered"] = now; row["NullValue"] = null; // converted in DbNull dynamic drow = new DynamicDataRow(row); string name = drow.Name; DateTime entered = drow.Entered; string nulled = drow.NullValue; Assert.AreEqual(name, "Rick"); Assert.AreEqual(entered,now); Assert.IsNull(nulled); // this should throw a RuntimeBinderException Assert.AreEqual(entered,drow.enteredd); } The DynamicDataRow requires a custom constructor that accepts a single parameter that sets the DataRow. Once that's done you can access property values that match the field names. Note that types are automatically converted - no type casting is needed in the code you write. The class also automatically converts DbNulls to regular nulls and vice versa which is something that makes it much easier to deal with data returned from a database. What's cool here isn't so much the functionality - even if I'd prefer to leave DataRow behind ASAP -  but the fact that we can create a dynamic type that uses a DataRow as it's 'DataSource' to serve member values. It's pretty useful feature if you think about it, especially given how little code it takes to implement. By implementing these two simple methods we get to provide two features I was complaining about at the beginning that are missing from the DataRow: Direct Property Syntax Automatic Type Casting so no explicit casts are required Caveats As cool and easy as this functionality is, it's important to understand that it doesn't come for free. The dynamic features in .NET are - well - dynamic. Which means they are essentially evaluated at runtime (late bound). Rather than static typing where everything is compiled and linked by the compiler/linker, member invokations are looked up at runtime and essentially call into your custom code. There's some overhead in this. Direct invocations - the original code I showed - is going to be faster than the equivalent dynamic code. However, in the above code the difference of running the dynamic code and the original data access code was very minor. The loop running over 1500 result records took on average 13ms with the original code and 14ms with the dynamic code. Not exactly a serious performance bottleneck. One thing to remember is that Microsoft optimized the DLR code significantly so that repeated calls to the same operations are routed very efficiently which actually makes for very fast evaluation. The bottom line for performance with dynamic code is: Make sure you test and profile your code if you think that there might be a performance issue. However, in my experience with dynamic types so far performance is pretty good for repeated operations (ie. in loops). While usually a little slower the perf hit is a lot less typically than equivalent Reflection work. Although the code in the second example looks like standard object syntax, dynamic is not static code. It's evaluated at runtime and so there's no type recognition until runtime. This means no Intellisense at development time, and any invalid references that call into 'properties' (ie. fields in the DataRow) that don't exist still cause runtime errors. So in the case of the data row you still get a runtime error if you mistype a column name:// this should throw a RuntimeBinderException Assert.AreEqual(entered,drow.enteredd); Dynamic - Lots of uses The arrival of Dynamic types in .NET has been met with mixed emotions. Die hard .NET developers decry dynamic types as an abomination to the language. After all what dynamic accomplishes goes against all that a static language is supposed to provide. On the other hand there are clearly scenarios when dynamic can make life much easier (COM Interop being one place). Think of the possibilities. What other data structures would you like to expose to a simple property interface rather than some sort of collection or dictionary? And beyond what I showed here you can also implement 'Method missing' behavior on objects with InvokeMember which essentially allows you to create dynamic methods. It's all very flexible and maybe just as important: It's easy to do. There's a lot of power hidden in this seemingly simple interface. Your move…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in CSharp  .NET   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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• SQL SERVER – Concurrency Basics – Guest Post by Vinod Kumar

  - by pinaldave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versions from SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. Learning is always fun when it comes to SQL Server and learning the basics again can be more fun. I did write about Transaction Logs and recovery over my blogs and the concept of simplifying the basics is a challenge. In the real world we always see checks and queues for a process – say railway reservation, banks, customer supports etc there is a process of line and queue to facilitate everyone. Shorter the queue higher is the efficiency of system (a.k.a higher is the concurrency). Every database does implement this using checks like locking, blocking mechanisms and they implement the standards in a way to facilitate higher concurrency. In this post, let us talk about the topic of Concurrency and what are the various aspects that one needs to know about concurrency inside SQL Server. Let us learn the concepts as one-liners: Concurrency can be defined as the ability of multiple processes to access or change shared data at the same time. The greater the number of concurrent user processes that can be active without interfering with each other, the greater the concurrency of the database system. Concurrency is reduced when a process that is changing data prevents other processes from reading that data or when a process that is reading data prevents other processes from changing that data. Concurrency is also affected when multiple processes are attempting to change the same data simultaneously. Two approaches to managing concurrent data access: Optimistic Concurrency Model Pessimistic Concurrency Model Concurrency Models Pessimistic Concurrency Default behavior: acquire locks to block access to data that another process is using. Assumes that enough data modification operations are in the system that any given read operation is likely affected by a data modification made by another user (assumes conflicts will occur). Avoids conflicts by acquiring a lock on data being read so no other processes can modify that data. Also acquires locks on data being modified so no other processes can access the data for either reading or modifying. Readers block writer, writers block readers and writers. Optimistic Concurrency Assumes that there are sufficiently few conflicting data modification operations in the system that any single transaction is unlikely to modify data that another transaction is modifying. Default behavior of optimistic concurrency is to use row versioning to allow data readers to see the state of the data before the modification occurs. Older versions of the data are saved so a process reading data can see the data as it was when the process started reading and not affected by any changes being made to that data. Processes modifying the data is unaffected by processes reading the data because the reader is accessing a saved version of the data rows. Readers do not block writers and writers do not block readers, but, writers can and will block writers. Transaction Processing A transaction is the basic unit of work in SQL Server. Transaction consists of SQL commands that read and update the database but the update is not considered final until a COMMIT command is issued (at least for an explicit transaction: marked with a BEGIN TRAN and the end is marked by a COMMIT TRAN or ROLLBACK TRAN). Transactions must exhibit all the ACID properties of a transaction. ACID Properties Transaction processing must guarantee the consistency and recoverability of SQL Server databases. Ensures all transactions are performed as a single unit of work regardless of hardware or system failure. A – Atomicity C – Consistency I – Isolation D- Durability Atomicity: Each transaction is treated as all or nothing – it either commits or aborts. Consistency: ensures that a transaction won’t allow the system to arrive at an incorrect logical state – the data must always be logically correct.  Consistency is honored even in the event of a system failure. Isolation: separates concurrent transactions from the updates of other incomplete transactions. SQL Server accomplishes isolation among transactions by locking data or creating row versions. Durability: After a transaction commits, the durability property ensures that the effects of the transaction persist even if a system failure occurs. If a system failure occurs while a transaction is in progress, the transaction is completely undone, leaving no partial effects on data. Transaction Dependencies In addition to supporting all four ACID properties, a transaction might exhibit few other behaviors (known as dependency problems or consistency problems). Lost Updates: Occur when two processes read the same data and both manipulate the data, changing its value and then both try to update the original data to the new value. The second process might overwrite the first update completely. Dirty Reads: Occurs when a process reads uncommitted data. If one process has changed data but not yet committed the change, another process reading the data will read it in an inconsistent state. Non-repeatable Reads: A read is non-repeatable if a process might get different values when reading the same data in two reads within the same transaction. This can happen when another process changes the data in between the reads that the first process is doing. Phantoms: Occurs when membership in a set changes. It occurs if two SELECT operations using the same predicate in the same transaction return a different number of rows. Isolation Levels SQL Server supports 5 isolation levels that control the behavior of read operations. Read Uncommitted All behaviors except for lost updates are possible. Implemented by allowing the read operations to not take any locks, and because of this, it won’t be blocked by conflicting locks acquired by other processes. The process can read data that another process has modified but not yet committed. When using the read uncommitted isolation level and scanning an entire table, SQL Server can decide to do an allocation order scan (in page-number order) instead of a logical order scan (following page pointers). If another process doing concurrent operations changes data and move rows to a new location in the table, the allocation order scan can end up reading the same row twice. Also can happen if you have read a row before it is updated and then an update moves the row to a higher page number than your scan encounters later. Performing an allocation order scan under Read Uncommitted can cause you to miss a row completely – can happen when a row on a high page number that hasn’t been read yet is updated and moved to a lower page number that has already been read. Read Committed Two varieties of read committed isolation: optimistic and pessimistic (default). Ensures that a read never reads data that another application hasn’t committed. If another transaction is updating data and has exclusive locks on data, your transaction will have to wait for the locks to be released. Your transaction must put share locks on data that are visited, which means that data might be unavailable for others to use. A share lock doesn’t prevent others from reading but prevents them from updating. Read committed (snapshot) ensures that an operation never reads uncommitted data, but not by forcing other processes to wait. SQL Server generates a version of the changed row with its previous committed values. Data being changed is still locked but other processes can see the previous versions of the data as it was before the update operation began. Repeatable Read This is a Pessimistic isolation level. Ensures that if a transaction revisits data or a query is reissued the data doesn’t change. That is, issuing the same query twice within a transaction cannot pickup any changes to data values made by another user’s transaction because no changes can be made by other transactions. However, this does allow phantom rows to appear. Preventing non-repeatable read is a desirable safeguard but cost is that all shared locks in a transaction must be held until the completion of the transaction. Snapshot Snapshot Isolation (SI) is an optimistic isolation level. Allows for processes to read older versions of committed data if the current version is locked. Difference between snapshot and read committed has to do with how old the older versions have to be. It’s possible to have two transactions executing simultaneously that give us a result that is not possible in any serial execution. Serializable This is the strongest of the pessimistic isolation level. Adds to repeatable read isolation level by ensuring that if a query is reissued rows were not added in the interim, i.e, phantoms do not appear. Preventing phantoms is another desirable safeguard, but cost of this extra safeguard is similar to that of repeatable read – all shared locks in a transaction must be held until the transaction completes. In addition serializable isolation level requires that you lock data that has been read but also data that doesn’t exist. Ex: if a SELECT returned no rows, you want it to return no. rows when the query is reissued. This is implemented in SQL Server by a special kind of lock called the key-range lock. Key-range locks require that there be an index on the column that defines the range of values. If there is no index on the column, serializable isolation requires a table lock. Gets its name from the fact that running multiple serializable transactions at the same time is equivalent of running them one at a time. Now that we understand the basics of what concurrency is, the subsequent blog posts will try to bring out the basics around locking, blocking, deadlocks because they are the fundamental blocks that make concurrency possible. Now if you are with me – let us continue learning for SQL Server Locking Basics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Concurrency

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• Entity Framework v1 &ndash; tips and Tricks Part 3

  - by Rohit Gupta

  General Tips on Entity Framework v1 & Linq to Entities: ToTraceString() If you need to know the underlying SQL that the EF generates for a Linq To Entities query, then use the ToTraceString() method of the ObjectQuery class. (or use LINQPAD) Note that you need to cast the LINQToEntities query to ObjectQuery before calling TotraceString() as follows: 1: string efSQL = ((ObjectQuery)from c in ctx.Contact 2: where c.Address.Any(a => a.CountryRegion == "US") 3: select c.ContactID).ToTraceString(); ================================================================================ MARS or MultipleActiveResultSet When you create a EDM Model (EDMX file) from the database using Visual Studio, it generates a connection string with the same name as the name of the EntityContainer in CSDL. In the ConnectionString so generated it sets the MultipleActiveResultSet attribute to true by default. So if you are running the following query then it streams multiple readers over the same connection: 1: using (BAEntities context = new BAEntities()) 2: { 3: var cons = 4: from con in context.Contacts 5: where con.FirstName == "Jose" 6: select con; 7: foreach (var c in cons) 8: { 9: if (c.AddDate < new System.DateTime(2007, 1, 1)) 10: { 11: c.Addresses.Load(); 12: } 13: } 14: } ================================================================================= Explicitly opening and closing EntityConnection When you call ToList() or foreach on a LINQToEntities query the EF automatically closes the connection after all the records from the query have been consumed. Thus if you need to run many LINQToEntities queries over the same connection then explicitly open and close the connection as follows: 1: using (BAEntities context = new BAEntities()) 2: { 3: context.Connection.Open(); 4: var cons = from con in context.Contacts where con.FirstName == "Jose" 5: select con; 6: var conList = cons.ToList(); 7: var allCustomers = from con in context.Contacts.OfType<Customer>() 8: select con; 9: var allcustList = allCustomers.ToList(); 10: context.Connection.Close(); 11: } ====================================================================== Dispose ObjectContext only if required After you retrieve entities using the ObjectContext and you are not explicitly disposing the ObjectContext then insure that your code does consume all the records from the LinqToEntities query by calling .ToList() or foreach statement, otherwise the the database connection will remain open and will be closed by the garbage collector when it gets to dispose the ObjectContext. Secondly if you are making updates to the entities retrieved using LinqToEntities then insure that you dont inadverdently dispose of the ObjectContext after the entities are retrieved and before calling .SaveChanges() since you need the SAME ObjectContext to keep track of changes made to the Entities (by using ObjectStateEntry objects). So if you do need to explicitly dispose of the ObjectContext do so only after calling SaveChanges() and only if you dont need to change track the entities retrieved any further. ======================================================================= SQL InjectionAttacks under control with EFv1 LinqToEntities and LinqToSQL queries are parameterized before they are sent to the DB hence they are not vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks. EntitySQL may be slightly vulnerable to attacks since it does not use parameterized queries. However since the EntitySQL demands that the query be valid Entity SQL syntax and valid native SQL syntax at the same time. So the only way one can do a SQLInjection Attack is by knowing the SSDL of the EDM Model and be able to write the correct EntitySQL (note one cannot append regular SQL since then the query wont be a valid EntitySQL syntax) and append it to a parameter. ====================================================================== Improving Performance You can convert the EntitySets and AssociationSets in a EDM Model into precompiled Views using the edmgen utility. for e.g. the Customer Entity can be converted into a precompiled view using edmgen and all LinqToEntities query against the contaxt.Customer EntitySet will use the precompiled View instead of the EntitySet itself (the same being true for relationships (EntityReference & EntityCollections of a Entity)). The advantage being that when using precompiled views the performance will be much better. The syntax for generating precompiled views for a existing EF project is : edmgen /mode:ViewGeneration /inssdl:BAModel.ssdl /incsdl:BAModel.csdl /inmsl:BAModel.msl /p:Chap14.csproj Note that this will only generate precompiled views for EntitySets and Associations and not for existing LinqToEntities queries in the project.(for that use CompiledQuery.Compile<>) Secondly if you have a LinqToEntities query that you need to run multiple times, then one should precompile the query using CompiledQuery.Compile method. The CompiledQuery.Compile<> method accepts a lamda expression as a parameter, which denotes the LinqToEntities query  that you need to precompile. The following is a example of a lamda that we can pass into the CompiledQuery.Compile() method 1: Expression<Func<BAEntities, string, IQueryable<Customer>>> expr = (BAEntities ctx1, string loc) => 2: from c in ctx1.Contacts.OfType<Customer>() 3: where c.Reservations.Any(r => r.Trip.Destination.DestinationName == loc) 4: select c; Then we call the Compile Query as follows: 1: var query = CompiledQuery.Compile<BAEntities, string, IQueryable<Customer>>(expr); 2:  3: using (BAEntities ctx = new BAEntities()) 4: { 5: var loc = "Malta"; 6: IQueryable<Customer> custs = query.Invoke(ctx, loc); 7: var custlist = custs.ToList(); 8: foreach (var item in custlist) 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine(item.FullName); 11: } 12: } Note that if you created a ObjectQuery or a Enitity SQL query instead of the LINQToEntities query, you dont need precompilation for e.g. 1: An Example of EntitySQL query : 2: string esql = "SELECT VALUE c from Contacts AS c where c is of(BAGA.Customer) and c.LastName = 'Gupta'"; 3: ObjectQuery<Customer> custs = CreateQuery<Customer>(esql); 1: An Example of ObjectQuery built using ObjectBuilder methods: 2: from c in Contacts.OfType<Customer>().Where("it.LastName == 'Gupta'") 3: select c This is since the Query plan is cached and thus the performance improves a bit, however since the ObjectQuery or EntitySQL query still needs to materialize the results into Entities hence it will take the same amount of performance hit as with LinqToEntities. However note that not ALL EntitySQL based or QueryBuilder based ObjectQuery plans are cached. So if you are in doubt always create a LinqToEntities compiled query and use that instead ============================================================ GetObjectStateEntry Versus GetObjectByKey We can get to the Entity being referenced by the ObjectStateEntry via its Entity property and there are helper methods in the ObjectStateManager (osm.TryGetObjectStateEntry) to get the ObjectStateEntry for a entity (for which we know the EntityKey). Similarly The ObjectContext has helper methods to get an Entity i.e. TryGetObjectByKey(). TryGetObjectByKey() uses GetObjectStateEntry method under the covers to find the object, however One important difference between these 2 methods is that TryGetObjectByKey queries the database if it is unable to find the object in the context, whereas TryGetObjectStateEntry only looks in the context for existing entries. It will not make a trip to the database ============================================================= POCO objects with EFv1: To create POCO objects that can be used with EFv1. We need to implement 3 key interfaces: IEntityWithKey IEntityWithRelationships IEntityWithChangeTracker Implementing IEntityWithKey is not mandatory, but if you dont then we need to explicitly provide values for the EntityKey for various functions (for e.g. the functions needed to implement IEntityWithChangeTracker and IEntityWithRelationships). Implementation of IEntityWithKey involves exposing a property named EntityKey which returns a EntityKey object. Implementation of IEntityWithChangeTracker involves implementing a method named SetChangeTracker since there can be multiple changetrackers (Object Contexts) existing in memory at the same time. 1: public void SetChangeTracker(IEntityChangeTracker changeTracker) 2: { 3: _changeTracker = changeTracker; 4: } Additionally each property in the POCO object needs to notify the changetracker (objContext) that it is updating itself by calling the EntityMemberChanged and EntityMemberChanging methods on the changeTracker. for e.g.: 1: public EntityKey EntityKey 2: { 3: get { return _entityKey; } 4: set 5: { 6: if (_changeTracker != null) 7: { 8: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanging("EntityKey"); 9: _entityKey = value; 10: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanged("EntityKey"); 11: } 12: else 13: _entityKey = value; 14: } 15: } 16: ===================== Custom Property ==================================== 17:  18: [EdmScalarPropertyAttribute(IsNullable = false)] 19: public System.DateTime OrderDate 20: { 21: get { return _orderDate; } 22: set 23: { 24: if (_changeTracker != null) 25: { 26: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanging("OrderDate"); 27: _orderDate = value; 28: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanged("OrderDate"); 29: } 30: else 31: _orderDate = value; 32: } 33: } Finally you also need to create the EntityState property as follows: 1: public EntityState EntityState 2: { 3: get { return _changeTracker.EntityState; } 4: } The IEntityWithRelationships involves creating a property that returns RelationshipManager object: 1: public RelationshipManager RelationshipManager 2: { 3: get 4: { 5: if (_relManager == null) 6: _relManager = RelationshipManager.Create(this); 7: return _relManager; 8: } 9: } ============================================================ Tip : ProviderManifestToken – change EDMX File to use SQL 2008 instead of SQL 2005 To use with SQL Server 2008, edit the EDMX file (the raw XML) changing the ProviderManifestToken in the SSDL attributes from "2005" to "2008" ============================================================= With EFv1 we cannot use Structs to replace a anonymous Type while doing projections in a LINQ to Entities query. While the same is supported with LINQToSQL, it is not with LinqToEntities. For e.g. the following is not supported with LinqToEntities since only parameterless constructors and initializers are supported in LINQ to Entities. (the same works with LINQToSQL) 1: public struct CompanyInfo 2: { 3: public int ID { get; set; } 4: public string Name { get; set; } 5: } 6: var companies = (from c in dc.Companies 7: where c.CompanyIcon == null 8: select new CompanyInfo { Name = c.CompanyName, ID = c.CompanyId }).ToList(); ;

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• PASS Summit Feedback

  - by Rob Farley

  PASS Feedback came in last week. I also saw my dentist for some fillings... At the PASS Summit this year, I delivered a couple of regular sessions and a Lightning Talk. People told me they enjoyed it, but when the rankings came out, they showed that I didn’t score particularly well. Brent Ozar was keen to discuss it with me. Brent: PASS speaker feedback is out. You did two sessions and a Lightning Talk. How did you go? Rob: Not so well actually, thanks for asking. Brent: Ha! Sorry. Of course you know that's why I wanted to discuss this with you. I was in one of your sessions at SQLBits in the UK a month before PASS, and I thought you rocked. You've got a really good and distinctive delivery style.  Then I noticed your talks were ranked in the bottom quarter of the Summit ratings and wanted to discuss it. Rob: Yeah, I know. You did ask me if we could do this...  I should explain – my presentation style is not the stereotypical IT conference one. I throw in jokes, and try to engage the audience thoroughly. I find many talks amazingly dry, and I guess I try to buck that trend. I also run training courses, and find that I get a lot of feedback from people thanking me for keeping things interesting. That said, I also get feedback criticising me for my style, and that’s basically what’s happened here. For the rest of this discussion, let’s focus on my talk about the Incredible Shrinking Execution Plan, which I considered to be my main talk. Brent: I thought that session title was the very best one at the entire Summit, and I had it on my recommended sessions list.  In four words, you managed to sum up the topic and your sense of humor.  I read that and immediately thought, "People need to be in this session," and then it didn't score well.  Tell me about your scores. Rob: The questions on the feedback form covered the usefulness of the information, the speaker’s presentation skills, their knowledge of the subject, how well the session was described, the amount of time allocated, and the quality of the presentation materials. Brent: Presentation materials? But you don’t do slides.  Did they rate your thong? Rob: No-one saw my flip-flops in this talk, Brent. I created a script in Management Studio, and published that afterwards, but I think people will have scored that question based on the lack of slides. I wasn’t expecting to do particularly well on that one. That was the only section that didn’t have 5/5 as the most popular score. Brent: See, that sucks, because cookbook-style scripts are often some of my favorites.  Adam Machanic's Service Broker workbench series helped me immensely when I was prepping for the MCM.  As an attendee, I'd rather have a commented script than a slide deck.  So how did you rank so low? Rob: When I look at the scores that you got (based on your blog post), you got very few scores below 3 – people that felt strong enough about your talk to post a negative score. In my scores, between 5% and 10% were below 3 (except on the question about whether I knew my stuff – I guess I came as knowledgeable). Brent: Wow – so quite a few people really didn’t like your talk then? Rob: Yeah. Mind you, based on the comments, some people really loved it. I’d like to think that there would be a certain portion of the room who may have rated the talk as one of the best of the conference. Some of my comments included “amazing!”, “Best presentation so far!”, “Wow, best session yet”, “fantastic” and “Outstanding!”. I think lots of talks can be “Great”, but not so many talks can be “Outstanding” without the word losing its meaning. One wrote “Pretty amazing presentation, considering it was completely extemporaneous.” Brent: Extemporaneous, eh? Rob: Yeah. I guess they don’t realise how much preparation goes into coming across as unprepared. In many ways it’s much easier to give a written speech than to deliver a presentation without slides as a prompt. Brent: That delivery style, the really relaxed, casual, college-professor approach was one of the things I really liked about your presentation at SQLbits.  As somebody who presents a lot, I "get" it - I know how hard it is to come off as relaxed and comfortable with your own material.  It's like improv done by jazz players and comedians - if you've never tried it, you don't realize how hard it is.  People also don't realize how hard it is to make a tough subject fun. Rob: Yeah well... There will be people writing comments on this post that say I wasn't trying to make the subject fun, and that I was making it all about me. Sometimes the style works, sometimes it doesn't. Most of the comments mentioned the fact that I tell jokes, some in a nice way, but some not so much (and it wasn't just a PASS thing - that's the mix of feedback I generally get). One comment at PASS was: “great stand up comedian - not what I'm looking for at pass”, and there were certainly a few that said “too many jokes”. I’m not trying to do stand-up – jokes are my way of engaging with the audience while I demonstrate some of the amazing things that the Query Optimizer can do if you write your queries the right way. Some people didn’t think it was technical enough, but I’ve also had some people tell me that the concepts I’m explaining are deep and profound. Brent: To me, that's a hallmark of a great explanation - when someone says, "But of course it has to work that way - how could it work any other way?  It seems so simple and logical."  Well, sure it does when it's explained correctly, but now pick up any number of thick SQL Server books and try to understand the Redundant Joins concept.  I guarantee it'll take more than 45 minutes. Rob: Some people in my audiences realise that, but definitely not everyone. There's only so much you can tell someone that something is profound. Generally it's something that they either have an epiphany on or not. I like to lull my audience into knowing what's going on, and do something that surprises them. Gain their trust, build a rapport, and then show them the deeper truth of what just happened. Brent: So you've learned your lesson about presentation scores, right?  From here on out, you're going to be dry, humorless, and all your presentations will consist of you reading bullet points off the screen. Rob: No Brent, I’m not. I'm also not going to suggest that most presentations at PASS are like that. No-one tries to present like that. There's a big space to occupy between what "dry and humourless" and me. My difference is to focus on the relationship I have with the crowd, rather than focussing on delivering the perfect session. I want to see people smiling and know they're relaxed. I think most presenters focus on the material, which is completely reasonable and safe. I remember once hearing someone talking about product creation. They talked about mediocrity. They said that one of the worst things that people can ever say about your product is that it’s “good”. What you want is for 10% of the world to love it enough to want to buy it. If 10% the world gave me a dollar, I’d have more money than I could ever use (assuming it wasn’t the SAME dollar they were giving me I guess). Brent: It's the Raving Fans theory.  It's better to have a small number of raving customers than a large number of almost-but-not-really customers who don't care that much about your product or service.  I know exactly how you feel - when I got survey feedback from my Quest video presentation when I was dressed up in a Richard Simmons costume, some of the attendees said I was unprofessional and distracting.  Some of the attendees couldn't get enough and Photoshopped all kinds of stuff into the screen captures.  On a whole, I probably didn't score that well, and I'm fine with that.  It sucks to look at the scores though - do those lower scores bother you? Rob: Of course they do. It hurts deeply. I open myself up and give presentations in a very personal way. All presenters do that, and we all feel the pain of negative feedback. I hate coming 146th & 162nd out of 185, but have to acknowledge that many sessions did worse still. Plus, once I feel the wounds have healed, I’ll be able to remember that there are people in the world that rave about my presentation style, and figure that people will hopefully talk about me. One day maybe those people that don’t like my presentation style will stay away and I might be able to score better. You don’t pay to hear country music if you prefer western... Lots of people find chili too spicy, but it’s still a popular food. Brent: But don’t you want to appeal to everyone? Rob: I do, but I don’t want to be lukewarm as in Revelation 3:16. I’d rather disgust and be discussed. Well, maybe not ‘disgust’, but I don’t want to conform. Conformity just isn’t the same any more. I’m not sure I’ve ever been one to do that. I try not to offend, but definitely like to be different. Brent: Count me among your raving fans, sir.  Where can we see you next? Rob: Considering I live in Adelaide in Australia, I’m not about to appear at anyone’s local SQL Saturday. I’m still trying to plan which events I’ll get to in 2011. I’ve submitted abstracts for TechEd North America, but won’t hold my breath. I’m also considering the SQLBits conferences in the UK in April, PASS in October, and I’m sure I’ll do some LiveMeeting presentations for user groups. Online, people download some of my recent SQLBits presentations at http://bit.ly/RFSarg and http://bit.ly/Simplification though. And they can download a 5-minute MP3 of my Lightning Talk at http://www.lobsterpot.com.au/files/Collation.mp3, in which I try to explain the idea behind collation, using thongs as an example. Brent: I was in the audience for http://bit.ly/RFSarg. That was a great presentation. Rob: Thanks, Brent. Now where’s my dollar?

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• Option Trading: Getting the most out of the event session options

  - by extended_events

  You can control different aspects of how an event session behaves by setting the event session options as part of the CREATE EVENT SESSION DDL. The default settings for the event session options are designed to handle most of the common event collection situations so I generally recommend that you just use the defaults. Like everything in the real world though, there are going to be a handful of “special cases” that require something different. This post focuses on identifying the special cases and the correct use of the options to accommodate those cases. There is a reason it’s called Default The default session options specify a total event buffer size of 4 MB with a 30 second latency. Translating this into human terms; this means that our default behavior is that the system will start processing events from the event buffer when we reach about 1.3 MB of events or after 30 seconds, which ever comes first. Aside: What’s up with the 1.3 MB, I thought you said the buffer was 4 MB?The Extended Events engine takes the total buffer size specified by MAX_MEMORY (4MB by default) and divides it into 3 equally sized buffers. This is done so that a session can be publishing events to one buffer while other buffers are being processed. There are always at least three buffers; how to get more than three is covered later. Using this configuration, the Extended Events engine can “keep up” with most event sessions on standard workloads. Why is this? The fact is that most events are small, really small; on the order of a couple hundred bytes. Even when you start considering events that carry dynamically sized data (eg. binary, text, etc.) or adding actions that collect additional data, the total size of the event is still likely to be pretty small. This means that each buffer can likely hold thousands of events before it has to be processed. When the event buffers are finally processed there is an economy of scale achieved since most targets support bulk processing of the events so they are processed at the buffer level rather than the individual event level. When all this is working together it’s more likely that a full buffer will be processed and put back into the ready queue before the remaining buffers (remember, there are at least three) are full. I know what you’re going to say: “My server is exceptional! My workload is so massive it defies categorization!” OK, maybe you weren’t going to say that exactly, but you were probably thinking it. The point is that there are situations that won’t be covered by the Default, but that’s a good place to start and this post assumes you’ve started there so that you have something to look at in order to determine if you do have a special case that needs different settings. So let’s get to the special cases… What event just fired?! How about now?! Now?! If you believe the commercial adage from Heinz Ketchup (Heinz Slow Good Ketchup ad on You Tube), some things are worth the wait. This is not a belief held by most DBAs, particularly DBAs who are looking for an answer to a troubleshooting question fast. If you’re one of these anxious DBAs, or maybe just a Program Manager doing a demo, then 30 seconds might be longer than you’re comfortable waiting. If you find yourself in this situation then consider changing the MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY option for your event session. This option will force the event buffers to be processed based on your time schedule. This option only makes sense for the asynchronous targets since those are the ones where we allow events to build up in the event buffer – if you’re using one of the synchronous targets this option isn’t relevant. Avoid forgotten events by increasing your memory Have you ever had one of those days where you keep forgetting things? That can happen in Extended Events too; we call it dropped events. In order to optimizes for server performance and help ensure that the Extended Events doesn’t block the server if to drop events that can’t be published to a buffer because the buffer is full. You can determine if events are being dropped from a session by querying the dm_xe_sessions DMV and looking at the dropped_event_count field. Aside: Should you care if you’re dropping events?Maybe not – think about why you’re collecting data in the first place and whether you’re really going to miss a few dropped events. For example, if you’re collecting query duration stats over thousands of executions of a query it won’t make a huge difference to miss a couple executions. Use your best judgment. If you find that your session is dropping events it means that the event buffer is not large enough to handle the volume of events that are being published. There are two ways to address this problem. First, you could collect fewer events – examine you session to see if you are over collecting. Do you need all the actions you’ve specified? Could you apply a predicate to be more specific about when you fire the event? Assuming the session is defined correctly, the next option is to change the MAX_MEMORY option to a larger number. Picking the right event buffer size might take some trial and error, but a good place to start is with the number of dropped events compared to the number you’ve collected. Aside: There are three different behaviors for dropping events that you specify using the EVENT_RETENTION_MODE option. The default is to allow single event loss and you should stick with this setting since it is the best choice for keeping the impact on server performance low.You’ll be tempted to use the setting to not lose any events (NO_EVENT_LOSS) – resist this urge since it can result in blocking on the server. If you’re worried that you’re losing events you should be increasing your event buffer memory as described in this section. Some events are too big to fail A less common reason for dropping an event is when an event is so large that it can’t fit into the event buffer. Even though most events are going to be small, you might find a condition that occasionally generates a very large event. You can determine if your session is dropping large events by looking at the dm_xe_sessions DMV once again, this time check the largest_event_dropped_size. If this value is larger than the size of your event buffer [remember, the size of your event buffer, by default, is max_memory / 3] then you need a large event buffer. To specify a large event buffer you set the MAX_EVENT_SIZE option to a value large enough to fit the largest event dropped based on data from the DMV. When you set this option the Extended Events engine will create two buffers of this size to accommodate these large events. As an added bonus (no extra charge) the large event buffer will also be used to store normal events in the cases where the normal event buffers are all full and waiting to be processed. (Note: This is just a side-effect, not the intended use. If you’re dropping many normal events then you should increase your normal event buffer size.) Partitioning: moving your events to a sub-division Earlier I alluded to the fact that you can configure your event session to use more than the standard three event buffers – this is called partitioning and is controlled by the MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE option. The result of setting this option is fairly easy to explain, but knowing when to use it is a bit more art than science. First the science… You can configure partitioning in three ways: None, Per NUMA Node & Per CPU. This specifies the location where sets of event buffers are created with fairly obvious implication. There are rules we follow for sub-dividing the total memory (specified by MAX_MEMORY) between all the event buffers that are specific to the mode used: None: 3 buffers (fixed)Node: 3 * number_of_nodesCPU: 2.5 * number_of_cpus Here are some examples of what this means for different Node/CPU counts: Configuration None Node CPU 2 CPUs, 1 Node 3 buffers 3 buffers 5 buffers 6 CPUs, 2 Node 3 buffers 6 buffers 15 buffers 40 CPUs, 5 Nodes 3 buffers 15 buffers 100 buffers   Aside: Buffer size on multi-processor computersAs the number of Nodes or CPUs increases, the size of the event buffer gets smaller because the total memory is sub-divided into more pieces. The defaults will hold up to this for a while since each buffer set is holding events only from the Node or CPU that it is associated with, but at some point the buffers will get too small and you’ll either see events being dropped or you’ll get an error when you create your session because you’re below the minimum buffer size. Increase the MAX_MEMORY setting to an appropriate number for the configuration. The most likely reason to start partitioning is going to be related to performance. If you notice that running an event session is impacting the performance of your server beyond a reasonably expected level [Yes, there is a reasonably expected level of work required to collect events.] then partitioning might be an answer. Before you partition you might want to check a few other things: Is your event retention set to NO_EVENT_LOSS and causing blocking? (I told you not to do this.) Consider changing your event loss mode or increasing memory. Are you over collecting and causing more work than necessary? Consider adding predicates to events or removing unnecessary events and actions from your session. Are you writing the file target to the same slow disk that you use for TempDB and your other high activity databases? <kidding> <not really> It’s always worth considering the end to end picture – if you’re writing events to a file you can be impacted by I/O, network; all the usual stuff. Assuming you’ve ruled out the obvious (and not so obvious) issues, there are performance conditions that will be addressed by partitioning. For example, it’s possible to have a successful event session (eg. no dropped events) but still see a performance impact because you have many CPUs all attempting to write to the same free buffer and having to wait in line to finish their work. This is a case where partitioning would relieve the contention between the different CPUs and likely reduce the performance impact cause by the event session. There is no DMV you can check to find these conditions – sorry – that’s where the art comes in. This is  largely a matter of experimentation. On the bright side you probably won’t need to to worry about this level of detail all that often. The performance impact of Extended Events is significantly lower than what you may be used to with SQL Trace. You will likely only care about the impact if you are trying to set up a long running event session that will be part of your everyday workload – sessions used for short term troubleshooting will likely fall into the “reasonably expected impact” category. Hey buddy – I think you forgot something OK, there are two options I didn’t cover: STARTUP_STATE & TRACK_CAUSALITY. If you want your event sessions to start automatically when the server starts, set the STARTUP_STATE option to ON. (Now there is only one option I didn’t cover.) I’m going to leave causality for another post since it’s not really related to session behavior, it’s more about event analysis. - Mike Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• NEC uPD720200 USB 3.0 not working on Ubuntu 12.04

  - by Jagged

  I've recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit on a HP Envy 15 1104tx. Most stuff appears to be working fine with the exception of the two USB3 ports (USB2 port works fine). I've read a lot of articles but so far have not been able to find a solution. I've tried adding 'pci=nomsi' to '/etc/default/grub' but this made no difference. Some articles suggest booting into Windows and upgrading the firmware on the uPD720200. Any body had any experience of this? Is there a way I can checked the firmware version of the NEC uPD720200 in Linux to see if there is an update available? Any help appreciated. uname -a: Linux HP-ENVY-15-1104tx 3.2.0-26-generic #41-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 14 17:49:24 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux lshw: hp-envy-15-1104tx description: Notebook product: HP ENVY 15 Notebook PC (WF591PA#ABG) vendor: Hewlett-Packard version: 0492110000241910001420000 serial: CNF0301C79 width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-2.6 dmi-2.6 vsyscall32 configuration: boot=normal chassis=notebook family=103C_5335KV sku=WF591PA#ABG uuid=434E4630-3330-3143-3739-60EB6906688F *-core description: Motherboard product: 1522 vendor: Hewlett-Packard physical id: 0 version: 36.35 serial: CNF0301C79 slot: Base Board Chassis Location *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: Hewlett-Packard physical id: 0 version: F.2B date: 10/12/2010 size: 1MiB capacity: 1472KiB capabilities: pci upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect edd int13floppynec int13floppytoshiba int13floppy360 int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int9keyboard int10video acpi usb biosbootspecification *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 13 slot: System board or motherboard size: 16GiB *-bank:0 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: 9905428-043.A00LF physical id: 0 serial: E13C4316 slot: Bottom size: 4GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:1 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: 9905428-043.A00LF physical id: 1 serial: E03C3E16 slot: Bottom size: 4GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:2 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: 9905428-043.A00LF physical id: 2 serial: 672279CC slot: On Board size: 4GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:3 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: 9905428-043.A00LF physical id: 3 serial: 652286CC slot: On Board size: 4GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-cpu description: CPU product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 820 @ 1.73GHz vendor: Intel Corp. physical id: 1d bus info: cpu@0 version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 820 @ 1.73GHz slot: CPU size: 1199MHz capacity: 1199MHz width: 64 bits clock: 1066MHz capabilities: x86-64 fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm ida tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid cpufreq configuration: cores=4 enabledcores=4 threads=8 *-cache:0 description: L3 cache physical id: 1e slot: L3 Cache size: 8MiB capacity: 8MiB capabilities: synchronous internal write-through unified *-cache:1 description: L2 cache physical id: 20 slot: L2 Cache size: 256KiB capacity: 256KiB capabilities: synchronous internal write-through unified *-cache:2 description: L1 cache physical id: 21 slot: L1 Cache size: 32KiB capacity: 32KiB capabilities: synchronous internal write-through instruction *-cache description: L1 cache physical id: 1f slot: L1 Cache size: 32KiB capacity: 32KiB capabilities: synchronous internal write-through data *-pci:0 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor DMI vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 11 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: Core Processor PCI Express Root Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 3 bus info: pci@0000:00:03.0 version: 11 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci msi pciexpress pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:16 ioport:4000(size=4096) memory:d4100000-d41fffff ioport:c0000000(size=268435456) *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: Broadway PRO [Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series] vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics) physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=fglrx_pci latency=0 resources: irq:58 memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d4100000-d411ffff ioport:4000(size=256) memory:d4140000-d415ffff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series] vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics) physical id: 0.1 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.1 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:56 memory:d4120000-d4123fff *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: Core Processor PCI Express Root Port 3 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 5 bus info: pci@0000:00:05.0 version: 11 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci msi pciexpress pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:16 memory:d4000000-d40fffff *-usb description: USB controller product: uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller vendor: NEC Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 version: 03 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi msix pciexpress xhci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=xhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:d4000000-d4001fff *-generic:0 UNCLAIMED description: System peripheral product: Core Processor System Management Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 8 bus info: pci@0000:00:08.0 version: 11 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pciexpress cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-generic:1 UNCLAIMED description: System peripheral product: Core Processor Semaphore and Scratchpad Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 8.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:08.1 version: 11 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pciexpress cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-generic:2 UNCLAIMED description: System peripheral product: Core Processor System Control and Status Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 8.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:08.2 version: 11 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pciexpress cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-generic:3 UNCLAIMED description: System peripheral product: Core Processor Miscellaneous Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 8.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:08.3 version: 11 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 *-generic:4 UNCLAIMED description: System peripheral product: Core Processor QPI Link vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 10 bus info: pci@0000:00:10.0 version: 11 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 *-generic:5 UNCLAIMED description: System peripheral product: Core Processor QPI Routing and Protocol Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 10.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:10.1 version: 11 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 *-multimedia description: Audio device product: 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1b bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:55 memory:d4200000-d4203fff *-pci:2 description: PCI bridge product: 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:17 ioport:3000(size=4096) memory:d3000000-d3ffffff ioport:d0000000(size=16777216) *-network description: Wireless interface product: Centrino Advanced-N 6200 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 35 serial: 00:27:10:40:e4:68 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=3.2.0-26-generic firmware=9.221.4.1 build 25532 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abgn resources: irq:54 memory:d3000000-d3001fff *-pci:3 description: PCI bridge product: 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.1 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:16 ioport:2000(size=4096) memory:d2000000-d2ffffff ioport:d1000000(size=16777216) *-network description: Ethernet interface product: AR8131 Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Atheros Communications Inc. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: c0 serial: 60:eb:69:06:68:8f size: 1Gbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=atl1c driverversion=1.0.1.0-NAPI duplex=full firmware=N/A ip=10.161.0.147 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=1Gbit/s resources: irq:57 memory:d2000000-d203ffff ioport:2000(size=128) *-usb description: USB controller product: 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:20 memory:d4205800-d4205bff *-pci:4 description: PCI bridge product: 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1e bus info: pci@0000:00:1e.0 version: a5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci subtractive_decode bus_master cap_list *-isa description: ISA bridge product: Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: isa bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-storage description: RAID bus controller product: 82801 Mobile SATA Controller [RAID mode] vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 logical name: scsi0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage msi pm bus_master cap_list emulated configuration: driver=ahci latency=0 resources: irq:45 ioport:5048(size=8) ioport:5054(size=4) ioport:5040(size=8) ioport:5050(size=4) ioport:5020(size=32) memory:d4205000-d42057ff *-disk description: ATA Disk product: OCZ-VERTEX3 physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: 2.15 serial: OCZ-0350P6H316X5KUQE size: 223GiB (240GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=000592dd *-volume:0 description: EXT4 volume vendor: Linux physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 logical name: / version: 1.0 serial: e741f18c-cfc5-4bce-b1e7-f80e517a3a22 size: 207GiB capacity: 207GiB capabilities: primary bootable journaled extended_attributes large_files huge_files dir_nlink recover extents ext4 ext2 initialized configuration: created=2012-06-15 06:49:27 filesystem=ext4 lastmountpoint=/ modified=2012-06-14 21:23:42 mount.fstype=ext4 mount.options=rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered mounted=2012-07-10 16:18:20 state=mounted *-volume:1 description: Extended partition physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 logical name: /dev/sda2 size: 15GiB capacity: 15GiB capabilities: primary extended partitioned partitioned:extended *-logicalvolume description: Linux swap / Solaris partition physical id: 5 logical name: /dev/sda5 capacity: 15GiB capabilities: nofs *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:d4205c00-d4205cff ioport:5000(size=32) *-pci:1 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-Core Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 101 bus info: pci@0000:ff:00.0 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:2 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 102 bus info: pci@0000:ff:00.1 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:3 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor QPI Link 0 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 103 bus info: pci@0000:ff:02.0 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:4 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor QPI Physical 0 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 104 bus info: pci@0000:ff:02.1 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:5 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 105 bus info: pci@0000:ff:03.0 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:6 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Target Address Decoder vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 106 bus info: pci@0000:ff:03.1 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:7 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Test Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 107 bus info: pci@0000:ff:03.4 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:8 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Control Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 108 bus info: pci@0000:ff:04.0 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:9 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Address Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 109 bus info: pci@0000:ff:04.1 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:10 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Rank Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 10a bus info: pci@0000:ff:04.2 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:11 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Thermal Control Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 10b bus info: pci@0000:ff:04.3 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:12 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Control Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 10c bus info: pci@0000:ff:05.0 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:13 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Address Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 10d bus info: pci@0000:ff:05.1 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:14 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Rank Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 10e bus info: pci@0000:ff:05.2 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:15 description: Host bridge product: Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Thermal Control Registers vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 10f bus info: pci@0000:ff:05.3 version: 04 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-battery description: Lithium Ion Battery product: NK06053 vendor: SMP-ATL24 physical id: 1 slot: Primary capacity: 4800mWh configuration: voltage=11.1V lspci: 02:00.0 USB controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 30 [XHCI]) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 1522 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16 Memory at d4000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K] Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [70] MSI: Enable- Count=1/8 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [90] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=8 Masked- Capabilities: [a0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number ff-ff-ff-ff-ff-ff-ff-ff Capabilities: [150] Latency Tolerance Reporting Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd lsusb (with thumb drive plugged into USB3 port): Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 5986:01d0 Acer, Inc Bus 001 Device 004: ID 03f0:231d Hewlett-Packard

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• Additional options in MDL

  - by Jane Zhang

      The Metadata Loader(MDL) enables you to populate a new repository as well as transfer, update, or restore a backup of existing repository metadata. It consists of two utilities: metadata export and metadata import. The export utility extracts metadata objects from a repository and writes the information into a file. The import utility reads the metadata information from an exported file and inserts the metadata objects into a repository.      While the Design Client provides an intuitive UI that helps you perform the most commonly used export and import tasks, OMBPlus scripting enables you to specify some additional options, and manage a control file that allows you to perform more specialized export and import tasks. Is it possible to utilize these options in MDL from Design Client? This article will tell you how to achieve it.      A property file named mdl.properties is used to configure the additional options. It stores options in name/value pairs. This file can be created and placed under the directory <owb installation path>/owb/bin/admin/. Below we will introduce the options that can be specified in the mdl.properties file. 1. DEFAULTDIRECTORY     When we open a Metadata Export/Import dialog in Design Client, a default directory is provided for MDL file and log file. For MDL Export, the default directory is <owb installation path>/owb/bin/. As for MDL Import, the default directory is <owb installation path>/owb/mdl/. It may not be the one you would want to use as a default. You can specify the option DEFAULTDIRECTORY in the mdl.properties file to set your own default directory for MDL Export/Import, for example, DEFAULTDIRECOTRY=/tmp/     In this example, the default directory is set to /tmp/. Be sure the value ends with a file separator since it represents a directory. In Windows, the file separator is “\”. In linux, the file separator is “/”. 2. MDLTRACEFILE     Sometimes we would like to trace the whole process of MDL Export/Import, and get detailed information about operations to help developers or supports troubleshooting. To turn on MDL trace, set the option MDLTRACEFILE in the mdl.properties file. MDLTRACEFILE=/tmp/mdl.trc    The right side of the equals sign is to specify the name of the file for MDL trace information to be written. If no path is specified, the file will be placed under directory <owb installation path>/owb/bin/admin/. However, the trace file may be large if the MDL file contains a large number of metadata objects, so please use this option sparingly. 3. CONTROLFILE       We can use a control file to specify how objects are imported or exported. We can set an option called CONTROLFILE in the mdl.properties file, so the control file can also be utilized in Design Client, for example, CONTROLFILE=/tmp/mdl_control_file.ctl     The control file stores options in name/value pairs. When using control file, be sure the file exists, otherwise an exception java.lang.Exception: CNV0002-0031(ERROR): Cannot find specified file will be thrown out during MDL Export/Import.      Next we will introduce some options specified in control file. ZIPFILEFORMAT     By default, MDL exports objects into a zip format file. This zip file has an .mdl extension and contains two files. For example, you export the repository metadata into a file called projects.mdl. When you unzip this MDL file, you obtain two files. The file projects.mdx contains the repository objects. The file mdlcatalog.xml contains internal information about the MDL XML file. Another choice is to combine these two files into one unzip text format file when doing MDL exporting.    In OMBPlus command related to MDL, there is an option called FILE_FORMAT which is used to specify the file format for the exported file. Its acceptable values are ZIP or TEXT. When the value TEXT is selected, the exported file is in text format, for example, OMBEXPORT MDL_FILE '/tmp/options_file_format_test.mdl' FILE_FORMAT TEXT FROM PROJECT 'MY_PROJECT'    How to achieve this via Design Client when doing an MDL exporting? Here we have another option called ZIPFILEFORMAT which has the same function as the FILE_FORMAT. The difference is the acceptable values for ZIPFILEFORMAT are Y or N. When the value is set to N, the exported file is in text format, otherwise it is in zip file format. LOGMESSAGELEVEL     Whenever you export or import repository metadata, MDL writes diagnostic and statistical information to a log file. Their are 3 types of status messages: Informational, Warning and Error. By default, the log file includes all types of message. Sometimes, user may only care about one type of messages, for example, they would like only error messages written to the log file. In order to achieve this, we can set an option called LOGMESSAGELEVEL in control file. The acceptable values for LOGMESSAGELEVEL are ALL, WARNING and ERROR. ALL: If the option LOGMESSAGELEVEL is set to ALL, all types of messages (Informational, Warning and Error) will be written into the log file. WARNING: If the option LOGMESSAGELEVEL is set to WARNING, only warning messages will be written into log file. ERROR: If the option LOGMESSAGELEVEL is set to ERROR, only error messages will be written into log file. UPDATEPROJECTATTRIBUTES, UPDATEMODULEATTRIBUTES      These two options are used to decide whether updating the attributes of projects/modules. The options work when projects/modules being imported already exist in repository and we use update metadata mode or replace metadata mode to do the MDL import. The acceptable values for these two options are Y or N. If the value is set to Y, the attributes of projects/modules will be updated, otherwise not.      Next, let’s give an example to see how these options take effect in MDL. 1. First of all, create the property file mdl.properties under the directory <owb installation path>/owb/bin/admin/. 2. Specify the options in the mdl.properties file, see the following screenshot. 3. Create the control file mdl_control_file.ctl under the directory /tmp/. Set the following options in control file. 4. Log into the OWB Design Client. 5. Create an Oracle module named ORA_MOD_1 under the project MY_PROJECT, then export the project MY_PROJECT into file my_project.mdl. 6. Check the trace file mdl.trc under the directory /tmp/. In this file, we can see very detail information for the above export task. 7. Check the exported MDL file. The file my_project.mdl is in text format. Opening the file, you can see the content of the file directly. It concats the file my_project.mdx and mdlcatalog.xml. 8. Modify the project MY_PROJECT and Oracle module ORA_MOD_1, add descriptions for them separately. Delete the location created in step 5. 9. Import the MDL file my_project.mdl. From the Metadata Import dialog, we can see the default directory for MDL file and log file has been changed to /tmp/. Here we use update metadata mode, match by names to do the importing. 10. After importing, check the description of the project MY_PROJECT, we can see the description is still there. But the description of the Oracle module ORA_MOD_1 has gone. That because we set the option UPDATEPROJECTATTRIBUTES to N, and set the option UPDATEMODULEATTRIBUTES to Y. 11. Check the log file, the log file only contains warning messages and the log message level is set to WARNING.      For more details about the 3 types of status messages, see Oracle® Warehouse Builder Installation and Administration Guide11g Release 2.

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• Lightning talk: Coderetreat

  - by Michael Williamson

  In the spirit of trying to encourage more deliberate practice amongst coders in Red Gate, Lauri Pesonen had the idea of running a coderetreat in Red Gate. Lauri and I ran the first one a few weeks ago: given that neither of us hadn’t even been to a coderetreat before, let alone run one, I think it turned out quite well. The participants gave positive feedback, saying that they enjoyed the day, wrote some thought-provoking code and would do it again. Sam Blackburn was one of the attendees, and gave a lightning talk to the other developers in one of our regular lightning talk sessions: In case you can’t watch the video, I’ve transcribed the talk below, although I’d recommend watching the video if you can — I didn’t have much time to do the transcribing! So, what is a coderetreat? So it’s not just something in Red Gate, there’s a website and everything, although it’s not a very big website. It calls itself a community network. The basic ideas behind coderetreat are: you’ve got one day, and you split it into one hour sections. You spend three quarters of that coding, and do a little retrospective at the end. You’re supposed to start fresh each, we were told to delete our code after every session. We were in pairs, swapping after each session, and we did the same task every time. In fact, Conway’s Game of Life is the only task mentioned anywhere that I find for coderetreat. So I don’t know what we’ll do next time, or if we’re meant to do the same thing again. There are some guiding principles which felt to us like restrictions, that you have to code in crazy ways to encourage better code. Final thing is that it’s supposed to be free for outsiders to join. It’s meant to be a kind of networking thing, where you link up with people from other companies. We had a pilot day with Michael and Lauri. Since it was basically the first time any of us had done anything like this, everybody was from Red Gate. We didn’t chat to anybody else for the initial one. The task was Conway’s Game of Life, which most of you have probably heard of it, all but one of us knew about it when did the coderetreat. I won’t got into the details of what it is, but it felt like the right size of task, basically one or two groups actually produced something working by the end of the day, and of course that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a day’s work to produce that because we were starting again every hour. The task really drives you more than trying to create good code, I found. It was really tempting to try and get it working rather than stick to the rules. But it’s really good to stop and try again because there are so many what-ifs when you’ve finished writing something, “what if I’d done it this way?”. You can answer all those questions at a coderetreat because it’s not about getting a product out the door, it’s about learning and playing with ideas. So we had all these different practices we were trying. I’ll try and go through most of these. Single responsibility is this idea that everything should do just one thing. It was the very first session, we were still trying to figure out how do you go about the Game of Life? So by the end of forty-five minutes hadn’t produced very much for that first session. We were still thinking, “Do we start with a board, how do we represent all these squares? It can be infinitely big, help, this is getting really difficult!”. So, most of us didn’t really get anywhere on the first one. Although it was interesting that some people started with the board, one group started with the FateDecider class that decides whether things live or die. A sort of god class, but in a good way. They managed to implement all of the rules without even defining how the squares were arranged or anything like that. Another thing we tried was TDD (test-driven development). I’m sure most of you know what TDD is: Watch a test, watch it fail for the right reason Write code to pass the test, watch it pass Refactor, check the test still passes Repeat! It basically worked, we were able to produce code, but we often found the tests defined the direction that code went, which is obviously the idea of TDD. But you tend to find that by the time you’ve even written your first assertion, which is supposed to be the very first thing you write, because you write your tests backwards from the assertions back to the initial conditions, you’ve already constrained the logic of the code in some way by the time you’ve done that. You then get to this situation of, “Well, we actually want to go in a slightly different direction. Can we do this?”. Can we write tests that don’t constrain the architecture? Wrapping up all primitives: it’s kind of turtles all the way down. We had a Size, which has a Width and Height, which both derive from Dimension. You’ve got pages of code before you’ve even done anything. No getters and setters (use tell don’t ask instead): mocks and stubs for tests are required if you want to assert that your results are what you think they should be. You can’t just check the internal state of the code. And people found that really challenging and it made them think in a different way which I think is really good. Not having mutable state: that was kind of confusing because we weren’t quite sure what fitted within that rule and what didn’t, and I think we were trying too hard to follow the rule rather than the guideline. No if-statements: supposed to use polymorphism instead, but polymorphism still requires a factory with conditional behaviour. We did something really crazy to get around this: public T If(bool condition, Func<T> left, Func<T> right) { var dict = new Dictionary<bool, Func<T>> {{true, left}, {false, right}}; return dict[condition].Invoke(); } That is not really polymorphism, is it? For-loops: you can always replace a for-loop with recursion, but it doesn’t tend to make it any more readable unless it’s the kind of task that really lends itself to that. So it was interesting, it was good practice, but it wouldn’t make it easier it’s the kind of tree-structure algorithm where that would help. Having a limit on the number of levels of indentation: again, I think it does produce very nice, clean code, but it wasn’t actually a challenge because you just extract methods. That’s quite a useful thing because you can apply that to real code and say, “Okay, should this method really be going crazy like this?” No talking: we hated that. It’s like there’s two of you at a computer, and one of you is doing the typing, what does the other guy do if they’re not allowed to talk. The answer is TDD ping-pong – one person writes the tests, and then the other person writes the code to pass the test. And that creates communication without actually having to have discussion about things which is kind of cool. No code comments: just makes no difference to anything. It’s a forty-five minute exercise, so what are you going to put comments in code for? Finally, this is my fault. I discovered an entertaining way of doing the calculation that was kind of cool (using convolutions over the state of the board). Unfortunately, it turns out to be really hard to implement in C#, so didn’t even manage to work out how to do that convolution in C#. It’s trivial in some high-level languages, but you need something matrix-orientated for it to really work. That’s most of it, really. The thoughts that people went away with: we put down our answers to questions like “What have you learnt?” and “What surprised you?”, “How are you going to do things differently?”, and most people said redoing the problem is really, really good for understanding it properly. People hate having a massive legacy codebase that they can’t change, so being able to attack something three different ways in an environment where the end-product isn’t important: that’s something people really enjoyed. Pair-programming: also people said that they wanted to do more of that, especially with TDD ping-pong, where you write the test and somebody else writes the code. Various people thought different things about immutables, but most people thought they were good, they promote functional programming. And TDD people found really hard. “Tell, don’t ask” people found really, really hard and really, really, really hard to do well. And the recursion just made things trickier to debug. But most people agreed that coderetreats are really cool, and we should do more of them.

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• Looking Back at MIX10

  - by WeigeltRo

  It’s the sad truth of my life that even though I’m fascinated by airplanes and flight in general since my childhood days, my body doesn’t like flying. Even the ridiculously short flights inside Germany are taking their toll on me each time. Now combine this with sitting in the cramped space of economy class for many hours on a transatlantic flight from Germany to Las Vegas and back, and factor in some heavy dose of jet lag (especially on my way eastwards), and you get an idea why after coming back home I had this question on my mind: Was it really worth it to attend MIX10? This of course is a question that will also be asked by my boss at Comma Soft (for other reasons, obviously), who decided to send me and my colleague Jens Schaller, to the MIX10 conference. (A note to my German readers: An dieser Stelle der Hinweis, dass Comma Soft noch Silverlight-Entwickler und/oder UI-Designer für den Standort Bonn sucht – aussagekräftige Bewerbungen bitte an [email protected]) Too keep things short: My answer is yes. Before I’ll go into detail, let me ask the heretical questions whether tech conferences in general still make sense. There was a time, where actually being at a tech conference gave you a head-start in regard to learning about new technologies. Nowadays this is no longer true, where every bit of information and every detail is immediately twittered, blogged and whatevered to death. In the case of MIX10 you even can download the video-taped sessions shortly after. So: Does visiting a conference still make sense? It depends on what you expect from a conference. It should be clear to everybody that you’ll neither get exclusive information, nor receive training in a small group. What a conference does offer that sitting in front of your computer does not can be summarized as follows: Focus Being away from work and home will help you to focus on the presented information. Of course there are always the poor guys who are haunted by their work (with mails and short text messages reporting the latest showstopper problem), but in general being out of your office makes a huge difference. Inspiration With the focus comes the emotional involvement. I find it much easier to absorb information if I feel that certain vibe when sitting in a session. This still means that I have put work into reviewing the information later, but it’s a better starting point. And all the impressions collected at a (good) conference combined lead to a higher motivation – be it by the buzz (“this is gonna be sooo cool!”) or by the fear to fall behind (“man, we’ll have work on this, or else…”). People At a conference it’s pretty easy to get into contact with other people during breakfast, lunch and other breaks. This is a good opportunity to get a feel for what other development teams are doing (on a very general level of course, nobody will tell you about their secret formula) and what they are thinking about specific technologies. So MIX10 did offer focus, inspiration and people, but that would have meant nothing without valuable content. When I (being a frontend developer with a strong interest in UI/UX) planned my visit to MIX10, I made the decision to focus on the "soft" topics of design, interaction and user experience. I figured that I would be bombarded with all the technical details about Silverlight 4 anyway in the weeks and months to come. Actually, I would have liked to catch a few technical sessions, but the agenda wasn’t exactly in favor of people interested in any kind of Silverlight and UI/UX/Design topics. That’s one of my few complaints about the conference – I would have liked one more day and/or more sessions per day. Overall, the quality of the workshops and sessions was pretty high. In fact, looking back at my collection of conferences I’ve visited in the past I’d say that MIX10 ranks somewhere near the top spot. Here’s an overview of the workshops/sessions I attended (I’ll leave out the keynotes): Day 0 (Workshops on Sunday) Design Fundamentals for Developers Robby Ingebretsen is the man! Great workshop in three parts with the perfect mix of examples, well-structured definition of terminology and the right dose of humor. Robby was part of the WPF team before founding his own company so he not only has a strong interest in design (and the skillz!) but also the technical background.   Design Tools and Techniques Originally announced to be held by Arturo Toledo, the Rosso brothers from ArcheType filled in for the first two parts, and Corrina Black had a pretty general part about the Windows Phone UI. The first two thirds were a mixed bag; the two guys definitely knew what they were talking about, and the demos were great, but the talk lacked the preparation and polish of a truly great presentation. Corrina was not allowed to go into too much detail before the keynote on Monday, but the session was still very interesting as it showed how much thought went into the Windows Phone UI (and there’s always a lot to learn when people talk about their thought process). Day 1 (Monday) Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications I wonder whether there was ever a test-run for this session, but what Ken Azuma and Yoshihiro Saito delivered in the first 15 minutes of a 30-minutes-session made me walk out. A commercial for a product (just great: a video showing a SharePoint plug-in in an all-Japanese UI) combined with the most generic blah blah one could imagine. EPIC FAIL.   Great User Experiences: Seamlessly Blending Technology & Design I switched to this session from the one above but I guess I missed the interesting part – what I did catch was what looked like a “look at the cool stuff we did” without being helpful. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after the other session.   The Art, Technology and Science of Reading This talk by Kevin Larson was very interesting, but was more a presentation of what Microsoft is doing in research (pretty impressive) and in the end lacked a bit the helpful advice one could have hoped for.   10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning Robby Ingebretsen again, and again a great mix of theory and practice. The clean and simple, yet effective, UI of the reader app resulted in a simultaneous “wow” of Jens and me. If you’d watch only one session video, this should be it. Microsoft has to bring Robby back next year! Day 2 (Tuesday) Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks & Architectural Experiences Very interesting session by Jason Brush, a great inspiration with many details to look out for in the examples. Exactly what I was hoping for – and then some!   Designing Bing: Heart and Science How hard can it be to design the UI for a search engine? An input field and a list of results, that should be it, right? Well, not so fast! The talk by Paul Ray showed the many iterations to finally get it right (up to the choice of a specific blue for the links). And yes, I want an eye-tracking device to play around with!   The Elephant in the Room When Nishant Kothary presented a long list of what his session was not about, I told to myself (not having the description text present) “Am I in the wrong talk? Should I leave?”. Boy, was I wrong. A great talk about human factors in the process of designing stuff.   An Hour with Bill Buxton Having seen Bill Buxton’s presentation in the keynote, I just had to see this man again – even though I didn’t know what to expect. Being more or less unplanned and intended to be more of a conversation, the session didn’t provide a wealth of immediately useful information. Nevertheless Bill Buxton was impressive with his huge knowledge of seemingly everything. But this could/should have been a session some when in the evening and not in parallel to at least two other interesting talks. Day 3 (Wednesday) Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie This session by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura started really well and brought across the message to keep things simple. But towards the end the talk lost some of its steam. And, as a member of the audience pointed out, they kind of ignored their own advice when they used a fancy presentation software other then PowerPoint that sometimes got in the way of showing things.   Developing Natural User Interfaces Speaking of alternative presentation software, Joshua Blake definitely had the most remarkable alternative to PowerPoint, a self-written program called NaturalShow that was controlled using multi-touch on a touch screen. Not a PowerPoint-killer, but impressive nevertheless. The (excellent) talk itself was kind of eye-opening in regard to what “multi-touch support” on various platforms (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone) actually means.   Treat your Content Right The talk by Tiffani Jones Brown wasn’t even on my planned schedule, but somehow I ended up in that session – and it was great. And even for people who don’t necessarily have to write content for websites, some points made by Tiffani are valid in many places, notably wherever you put texts with more than a single word into your UI. Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight The last session of MIX10 I attended was kind of disappointing. At first things were very promising, with Matthias Shapiro giving a brief but well-structured introduction to info graphics and interactive visualizations. Then the live-coding began and while the result was interesting, too much time was spend on wrestling to get the code working. Ending earlier than planned, the talk was a bit light on actual content, but at least it included a nice list of resources. Conclusion It could be felt all across MIX10, UIs will take a huge leap forward; in fact, there are enough examples that have already. People who both have the technical know-how and at least a basic understanding of design (“literacy” as Bill Buxton called it) are in high demand. The concept of the MIX conference and initiatives like design.toolbox shows that Microsoft understands very well that frontend developers have to acquire new knowledge besides knowing how to hack code and putting buttons on a form. There are extremely exciting times before us, with lots of opportunity for those who are eager to develop their skills, that is for sure.

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• Imperative vs. LINQ Performance on WP7

  - by Bil Simser

  Jesse Liberty had a nice post presenting the concepts around imperative, LINQ and fluent programming to populate a listbox. Check out the post as it’s a great example of some foundational things every .NET programmer should know. I was more interested in what the IL code that would be generated from imperative vs. LINQ was like and what the performance numbers are and how they differ. The code at the instruction level is interesting but not surprising. The imperative example with it’s creating lists and loops weighs in at about 60 instructions. .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: .method private hidebysig instance void ImperativeMethod() cil managed 2: { 3: .maxstack 3 4: .locals init ( 5: [0] class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<int32> someData, 6: [1] class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32> inLoop, 7: [2] int32 n, 8: [3] class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerator`1<int32> CS$5$0000, 9: [4] bool CS$4$0001) 10: L_0000: nop 11: L_0001: ldc.i4.1 12: L_0002: ldc.i4.s 50 13: L_0004: call class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<int32> [System.Core]System.Linq.Enumerable::Range(int32, int32) 14: L_0009: stloc.0 15: L_000a: newobj instance void [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32>::.ctor() 16: L_000f: stloc.1 17: L_0010: nop 18: L_0011: ldloc.0 19: L_0012: callvirt instance class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerator`1<!0> [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<int32>::GetEnumerator() 20: L_0017: stloc.3 21: L_0018: br.s L_003a 22: L_001a: ldloc.3 23: L_001b: callvirt instance !0 [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerator`1<int32>::get_Current() 24: L_0020: stloc.2 25: L_0021: nop 26: L_0022: ldloc.2 27: L_0023: ldc.i4.5 28: L_0024: cgt 29: L_0026: ldc.i4.0 30: L_0027: ceq 31: L_0029: stloc.s CS$4$0001 32: L_002b: ldloc.s CS$4$0001 33: L_002d: brtrue.s L_0039 34: L_002f: ldloc.1 35: L_0030: ldloc.2 36: L_0031: ldloc.2 37: L_0032: mul 38: L_0033: callvirt instance void [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.List`1<int32>::Add(!0) 39: L_0038: nop 40: L_0039: nop 41: L_003a: ldloc.3 42: L_003b: callvirt instance bool [mscorlib]System.Collections.IEnumerator::MoveNext() 43: L_0040: stloc.s CS$4$0001 44: L_0042: ldloc.s CS$4$0001 45: L_0044: brtrue.s L_001a 46: L_0046: leave.s L_005a 47: L_0048: ldloc.3 48: L_0049: ldnull 49: L_004a: ceq 50: L_004c: stloc.s CS$4$0001 51: L_004e: ldloc.s CS$4$0001 52: L_0050: brtrue.s L_0059 53: L_0052: ldloc.3 54: L_0053: callvirt instance void [mscorlib]System.IDisposable::Dispose() 55: L_0058: nop 56: L_0059: endfinally 57: L_005a: nop 58: L_005b: ldarg.0 59: L_005c: ldfld class [System.Windows]System.Windows.Controls.ListBox PerfTest.MainPage::LB1 60: L_0061: ldloc.1 61: L_0062: callvirt instance void [System.Windows]System.Windows.Controls.ItemsControl::set_ItemsSource(class [mscorlib]System.Collections.IEnumerable) 62: L_0067: nop 63: L_0068: ret 64: .try L_0018 to L_0048 finally handler L_0048 to L_005a 65: } 66:   67: Compare that to the IL generated for the LINQ version which has about half of the instructions and just gets the job done, no fluff. .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: .method private hidebysig instance void LINQMethod() cil managed 2: { 3: .maxstack 4 4: .locals init ( 5: [0] class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<int32> someData, 6: [1] class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<int32> queryResult) 7: L_0000: nop 8: L_0001: ldc.i4.1 9: L_0002: ldc.i4.s 50 10: L_0004: call class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<int32> [System.Core]System.Linq.Enumerable::Range(int32, int32) 11: L_0009: stloc.0 12: L_000a: ldloc.0 13: L_000b: ldsfld class [System.Core]System.Func`2<int32, bool> PerfTest.MainPage::CS$<>9__CachedAnonymousMethodDelegate6 14: L_0010: brtrue.s L_0025 15: L_0012: ldnull 16: L_0013: ldftn bool PerfTest.MainPage::<LINQProgramming>b__4(int32) 17: L_0019: newobj instance void [System.Core]System.Func`2<int32, bool>::.ctor(object, native int) 18: L_001e: stsfld class [System.Core]System.Func`2<int32, bool> PerfTest.MainPage::CS$<>9__CachedAnonymousMethodDelegate6 19: L_0023: br.s L_0025 20: L_0025: ldsfld class [System.Core]System.Func`2<int32, bool> PerfTest.MainPage::CS$<>9__CachedAnonymousMethodDelegate6 21: L_002a: call class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<!!0> [System.Core]System.Linq.Enumerable::Where<int32>(class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<!!0>, class [System.Core]System.Func`2<!!0, bool>) 22: L_002f: ldsfld class [System.Core]System.Func`2<int32, int32> PerfTest.MainPage::CS$<>9__CachedAnonymousMethodDelegate7 23: L_0034: brtrue.s L_0049 24: L_0036: ldnull 25: L_0037: ldftn int32 PerfTest.MainPage::<LINQProgramming>b__5(int32) 26: L_003d: newobj instance void [System.Core]System.Func`2<int32, int32>::.ctor(object, native int) 27: L_0042: stsfld class [System.Core]System.Func`2<int32, int32> PerfTest.MainPage::CS$<>9__CachedAnonymousMethodDelegate7 28: L_0047: br.s L_0049 29: L_0049: ldsfld class [System.Core]System.Func`2<int32, int32> PerfTest.MainPage::CS$<>9__CachedAnonymousMethodDelegate7 30: L_004e: call class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<!!1> [System.Core]System.Linq.Enumerable::Select<int32, int32>(class [mscorlib]System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1<!!0>, class [System.Core]System.Func`2<!!0, !!1>) 31: L_0053: stloc.1 32: L_0054: ldarg.0 33: L_0055: ldfld class [System.Windows]System.Windows.Controls.ListBox PerfTest.MainPage::LB2 34: L_005a: ldloc.1 35: L_005b: callvirt instance void [System.Windows]System.Windows.Controls.ItemsControl::set_ItemsSource(class [mscorlib]System.Collections.IEnumerable) 36: L_0060: nop 37: L_0061: ret 38: } Again, not surprising here but a good indicator that you should consider using LINQ where possible. In fact if you have ReSharper installed you’ll see a squiggly (technical term) in the imperative code that says “Hey Dude, I can convert this to LINQ if you want to be c00L!” (or something like that, it’s the 2010 geek version of Clippy). What about the fluent version? As Jon correctly pointed out in the comments, when you compare the IL for the LINQ code and the IL for the fluent code it’s the same. LINQ and the fluent interface are just syntactical sugar so you decide what you’re most comfortable with. At the end of the day they’re both the same. Now onto the numbers. Again I expected the imperative version to be better performing than the LINQ version (before I saw the IL that was generated). Call it womanly instinct. A gut feel. Whatever. Some of the numbers are interesting though. For Jesse’s example of 50 items, the numbers were interesting. The imperative sample clocked in at 7ms while the LINQ version completed in 4. As the number of items went up, the elapsed time didn’t necessarily climb exponentially. At 500 items they were pretty much the same and the results were similar up to about 50,000 items. After that I tried 500,000 items where the gap widened but not by much (2.2 seconds for imperative, 2.3 for LINQ). It wasn’t until I tried 5,000,000 items where things were noticeable. Imperative filled the list in 20 seconds while LINQ took 8 seconds longer (although personally I wouldn’t suggest you put 5 million items in a list unless you want your users showing up at your door with torches and pitchforks). Here’s the table with the full results. Method/Items 50 500 5,000 50,000 500,000 5,000,000 Imperative 7ms 7ms 38ms 223ms 2230ms 20974ms LINQ/Fluent 4ms 6ms 41ms 240ms 2310ms 28731ms Like I said, at the end of the day it’s not a huge difference and you really don’t want your users waiting around for 30 seconds on a mobile device filling lists. In fact if Windows Phone 7 detects you’re taking more than 10 seconds to do any one thing, it considers the app hung and shuts it down. The results here are for Windows Phone 7 but frankly they're the same for desktop and web apps so feel free to apply it generally. From a programming perspective, choose what you like. Some LINQ statements can get pretty hairy so I usually fall back with my simple mind and write it imperatively. If you really want to impress your friends, write it old school then let ReSharper do the hard work for! Happy programming!

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• Following the Thread in OSB

  - by Antony Reynolds

  Threading in OSB The Scenario I recently led an OSB POC where we needed to get high throughput from an OSB pipeline that had the following logic: 1. Receive Request 2. Send Request to External System 3. If Response has a particular value   3.1 Modify Request   3.2 Resend Request to External System 4. Send Response back to Requestor All looks very straightforward and no nasty wrinkles along the way.  The flow was implemented in OSB as follows (see diagram for more details): Proxy Service to Receive Request and Send Response Request Pipeline   Copies Original Request for use in step 3 Route Node   Sends Request to External System exposed as a Business Service Response Pipeline   Checks Response to Check If Request Needs to Be Resubmitted Modify Request Callout to External System (same Business Service as Route Node) The Proxy and the Business Service were each assigned their own Work Manager, effectively giving each of them their own thread pool. The Surprise Imagine our surprise when, on stressing the system we saw it lock up, with large numbers of blocked threads.  The reason for the lock up is due to some subtleties in the OSB thread model which is the topic of this post.   Basic Thread Model OSB goes to great lengths to avoid holding on to threads.  Lets start by looking at how how OSB deals with a simple request/response routing to a business service in a route node. Most Business Services are implemented by OSB in two parts.  The first part uses the request thread to send the request to the target.  In the diagram this is represented by the thread T1.  After sending the request to the target (the Business Service in our diagram) the request thread is released back to whatever pool it came from.  A multiplexor (muxer) is used to wait for the response.  When the response is received the muxer hands off the response to a new thread that is used to execute the response pipeline, this is represented in the diagram by T2. OSB allows you to assign different Work Managers and hence different thread pools to each Proxy Service and Business Service.  In out example we have the “Proxy Service Work Manager” assigned to the Proxy Service and the “Business Service Work Manager” assigned to the Business Service.  Note that the Business Service Work Manager is only used to assign the thread to process the response, it is never used to process the request. This architecture means that while waiting for a response from a business service there are no threads in use, which makes for better scalability in terms of thread usage. First Wrinkle Note that if the Proxy and the Business Service both use the same Work Manager then there is potential for starvation.  For example: Request Pipeline makes a blocking callout, say to perform a database read. Business Service response tries to allocate a thread from thread pool but all threads are blocked in the database read. New requests arrive and contend with responses arriving for the available threads. Similar problems can occur if the response pipeline blocks for some reason, maybe a database update for example. Solution The solution to this is to make sure that the Proxy and Business Service use different Work Managers so that they do not contend with each other for threads. Do Nothing Route Thread Model So what happens if there is no route node?  In this case OSB just echoes the Request message as a Response message, but what happens to the threads?  OSB still uses a separate thread for the response, but in this case the Work Manager used is the Default Work Manager. So this is really a special case of the Basic Thread Model discussed above, except that the response pipeline will always execute on the Default Work Manager.   Proxy Chaining Thread Model So what happens when the route node is actually calling a Proxy Service rather than a Business Service, does the second Proxy Service use its own Thread or does it re-use the thread of the original Request Pipeline? Well as you can see from the diagram when a route node calls another proxy service then the original Work Manager is used for both request pipelines.  Similarly the response pipeline uses the Work Manager associated with the ultimate Business Service invoked via a Route Node.  This actually fits in with the earlier description I gave about Business Services and by extension Route Nodes they “… uses the request thread to send the request to the target”. Call Out Threading Model So what happens when you make a Service Callout to a Business Service from within a pipeline.  The documentation says that “The pipeline processor will block the thread until the response arrives asynchronously” when using a Service Callout.  What this means is that the target Business Service is called using the pipeline thread but the response is also handled by the pipeline thread.  This implies that the pipeline thread blocks waiting for a response.  It is the handling of this response that behaves in an unexpected way. When a Business Service is called via a Service Callout, the calling thread is suspended after sending the request, but unlike the Route Node case the thread is not released, it waits for the response.  The muxer uses the Business Service Work Manager to allocate a thread to process the response, but in this case processing the response means getting the response and notifying the blocked pipeline thread that the response is available.  The original pipeline thread can then continue to process the response. Second Wrinkle This leads to an unfortunate wrinkle.  If the Business Service is using the same Work Manager as the Pipeline then it is possible for starvation or a deadlock to occur.  The scenario is as follows: Pipeline makes a Callout and the thread is suspended but still allocated Multiple Pipeline instances using the same Work Manager are in this state (common for a system under load) Response comes back but all Work Manager threads are allocated to blocked pipelines. Response cannot be processed and so pipeline threads never unblock – deadlock! Solution The solution to this is to make sure that any Business Services used by a Callout in a pipeline use a different Work Manager to the pipeline itself. The Solution to My Problem Looking back at my original workflow we see that the same Business Service is called twice, once in a Routing Node and once in a Response Pipeline Callout.  This was what was causing my problem because the response pipeline was using the Business Service Work Manager, but the Service Callout wanted to use the same Work Manager to handle the responses and so eventually my Response Pipeline hogged all the available threads so no responses could be processed. The solution was to create a second Business Service pointing to the same location as the original Business Service, the only difference was to assign a different Work Manager to this Business Service.  This ensured that when the Service Callout completed there were always threads available to process the response because the response processing from the Service Callout had its own dedicated Work Manager. Summary Request Pipeline Executes on Proxy Work Manager (WM) Thread so limited by setting of that WM.  If no WM specified then uses WLS default WM. Route Node Request sent using Proxy WM Thread Proxy WM Thread is released before getting response Muxer is used to handle response Muxer hands off response to Business Service (BS) WM Response Pipeline Executes on Routed Business Service WM Thread so limited by setting of that WM.  If no WM specified then uses WLS default WM. No Route Node (Echo functionality) Proxy WM thread released New thread from the default WM used for response pipeline Service Callout Request sent using proxy pipeline thread Proxy thread is suspended (not released) until the response comes back Notification of response handled by BS WM thread so limited by setting of that WM.  If no WM specified then uses WLS default WM. Note this is a very short lived use of the thread After notification by callout BS WM thread that thread is released and execution continues on the original pipeline thread. Route/Callout to Proxy Service Request Pipeline of callee executes on requestor thread Response Pipeline of caller executes on response thread of requested proxy Throttling Request message may be queued if limit reached. Requesting thread is released (route node) or suspended (callout) So what this means is that you may get deadlocks caused by thread starvation if you use the same thread pool for the business service in a route node and the business service in a callout from the response pipeline because the callout will need a notification thread from the same thread pool as the response pipeline.  This was the problem we were having. You get a similar problem if you use the same work manager for the proxy request pipeline and a business service callout from that request pipeline. It also means you may want to have different work managers for the proxy and business service in the route node. Basically you need to think carefully about how threading impacts your proxy services. References Thanks to Jay Kasi, Gerald Nunn and Deb Ayers for helping to explain this to me.  Any errors are my own and not theirs.  Also thanks to my colleagues Milind Pandit and Prasad Bopardikar who travelled this road with me. OSB Thread Model Great Blog Post on Thread Usage in OSB

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 25, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 25, 2011Popular ReleasesMono.Addins: Mono.Addins 0.6: The 0.6 release of Mono.Addins includes many improvements, bug fixes and new features: Add-in engine Add-in name and description can now be localized. There are new custom attributes for defining them, and can also be specified as xml elements in an add-in manifest instead of attributes. Support for custom add-in properties. It is now possible to specify arbitrary properties in add-ins, which can be queried at install time (using the Mono.Addins.Setup API) or at run-time. Custom extensio...patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 3 - 25 Feb 2011: IntroductionWelcome to the third community drop of Project Silk. For this drop we are requesting feedback on overall application architecture, code review of the JavaScript Conductor and Widgets, and general direction of the application. Project Silk provides guidance and sample implementations that describe and illustrate recommended practices for building modern web applications using technologies such as HTML5, jQuery, CSS3 and Internet Explorer 9. This guidance is intended for experien...PhoneyTools: Initial Release (0.1): This is the 0.1 version for preview of the features.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.5: Now supports new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format, thanks to updated mcmap. Disabled biomes, until Minecraft Biome Extractor supports new format.Smartkernel: Smartkernel: ????，??????Document.Editor: 2011.7: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.7: New Find dialog Improved Email dialog Improved Home tab Improved Format tab Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsChiave File Encryption: Chiave 0.9.1: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Change Log from 0.9 Beta to 0.9.1: ======================= >Added option for system shutdown, sleep, hibernate after operation completed. >Minor Changes to the UI. >Numerous Bug fixes. Feedbacks are Welcome!....Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.2: New control, Toast Prompt! Removed progress bar since Silverlight Toolkit Feb 2010 has it.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.7: Service release fixing 31 issues. A full changelog will be available with the final stable release of 4.7 Important when upgradingUpgrade as if it was a patch release (update /bin, /umbraco and /umbraco_client). For general upgrade information follow the guide found at http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/install-and-setup/upgrading-an-umbraco-installation 4.7 requires the .NET 4.0 framework Web.Config changes Update the web web.config to include the 4 changes found in (they're clearly marked in...HubbleDotNet - Open source full-text search engine: V1.1.0.0: Add Sqlite3 DBAdapter Add App Report when Query Cache is Collecting. Improve the performance of index through Synchronize. Add top 0 feature so that we can only get count of the result. Improve the score calculating algorithm of match. Let the score of the record that match all items large then others. Add MySql DBAdapter Improve performance for multi-fields sort . Using hash table to access the Payload data. The version before used bin search. Using heap sort instead of qui...Silverlight????[???]: silverlight????[???]2.0: ???????，?????，????????silverlight??????。DBSourceTools: DBSourceTools_1.3.0.0: Release 1.3.0.0 Changed editors from FireEdit to ICSharpCode.TextEditor. Complete re-vamp of Intellisense ( further testing needed). Hightlight Field and Table Names in sql scripts. Added field dropdown on all tables and views in DBExplorer. Added data option for viewing data in Tables. Fixed comment / uncomment bug as reported by tareq. Included Synonyms in scripting engine ( nickt_ch ).IronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 1: We are pleased to announce the first Release Candidate for IronPython 2.7. This release contains over two dozen bugs fixed in preparation for 2.7 Final. See the release notes for 60193 for details and what has already been fixed in the earlier 2.7 prereleases. - IronPython TeamCaliburn Micro: A Micro-Framework for WPF, Silverlight and WP7: Caliburn.Micro 1.0 RC: This is the official Release Candicate for Caliburn.Micro 1.0. The download contains the binaries, samples and VS templates. VS Templates The templates included are designed for situations where the Caliburn.Micro source needs to be embedded within a single project solution. This was targeted at government and other organizations that expressed specific requirements around using an open source project like this. NuGet This release does not have a corresponding NuGet package. The NuGet pack...Caliburn: A Client Framework for WPF and Silverlight: Caliburn 2.0 RC: This is the official Release Candidate for Caliburn 2.0. It contains all binaries, samples and generated code docs.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.20 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...Azure Storage Samples: Version 1.0 (February 2011): These downloads contain source code. Each is a complete sample that fully exercises Windows Azure Storage across blobs, queues, and tables. The difference between the downloads is implementation approach. Storage DotNet CS.zip is a .NET StorageClient library implementation in the C# language. This library come with the Windows Azure SDK. Contains helper classes for accessing blobs, queues, and tables. Storage REST CS.zip is a REST implementation in the C# language. The code to implement R...PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.3.2: New FeaturesPowerGUI Console Tool Window PowerShell Project Type PowerGUI 2.4 SupportMiniTwitter: 1.66: MiniTwitter 1.66 ???? ?? ?????????? 2 ??????????????????? User Streams ?????????Windows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer: WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer v1.0 Beta: Current release features:WPF desktop explorer client Visual Studio integrated tool window explorer client (Visual Studio 2010 Professional and above) Supported operations: Refresh (isolated storage information), Add Folder, Add Existing Item, Download File, Delete Folder, Delete File Explorer supports operations running on multiple remote applications at the same time Explorer detects application disconnect (1-2 second delay) Explorer confirms operation completed status Explorer d...New ProjectsAgriscope: This is an open information visualization tool used to assist RADA and other Agriculture officers in retrieving and analyzing data in day to day tasks.AVCampos NF-e: Realizar a emissão e controle de nf-e, através de ambientes moveis.Babel Obfuscator NAnt Tasks: This is an NAnt task for Babel Obfuscator. Babel Obfuscator protect software components realized with Microsoft .NET Framework in order to make reverse engineering difficult. Babel Obfuscator can be downloaded at http://www.babelfor.netConcurrent Programming Library: Concurrent Programming Library provides an opportunity to develop a parallel programs using .net framework 2.0 and above. It includes an implementation of various parallel algorithms, thread-safe collections and patterns.EOrg: Gelistirme maksatli yaptigim çalismalar.Extend Grid View: Extend grid view is user control. It help paging a dataset is set on gridview.FinlogiK ReSharper Contrib: FinlogiK ReSharper Contrib is a plugin for ReSharper 5.1 which adds code cleanup and inspection options for static qualifiers.Game development with Playstation Move and Ogre3D: This project is a research aiming to develop a program which can handle the Playstation Move on PC. After that, we will implement a game based on it. The programming language is C++. The graphics is handled by Ogre3D.JAD: Projeto de software.JSARP: This tool allows describing and verifying Petri Nets with the support of a graphical interface. This tool, is being developed in Java.KangmoDB - A replacement for the storage engine of SQLite: KangmoDB claims to be a real-time storage engine that replaces the one in SQLite. KangmoDB tries to achieve the lowest latency time for a transaction with ACID properties. It will be mainly used for the stock market that requires lowest latency with highest stability. MetaprogrammingInDotNetBook: This project will contain code and other artifacts related to the "Metaprogramming in .NET" book that should be avaible in October 2011.munix workstation: The µnix project is an endeavour to create a complete workstation and UNIX-like OS using standard logic IC's and 8-bit AVR microcontrollers. The goal isn't to make something that will compete with a traditional workstation in computation but instead to have a great DIY project.PhoneyTools: Set of controls and utilities for WP7 development.Plist Builder: Serialize non-circular-referencing .NET objects to plist in .NET.Quake3.NET: A port of the Quake 3 engine to C#. This is not merely a port of Quake 3 to run in a managed environment, but a complete rewrite of the engine using C# 4.0's powerful language features.SecViz: Web server security attack graph alert correlation IDS SerialNome: This is a multiport serial applicationsprout sms: a wp7 cabbage clientUsing external assembly in Biztalk 2009 map: Using external assembly in Biztalk 2009 map.

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• Metro: Namespaces and Modules

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can use the Windows JavaScript (WinJS) library to create namespaces. In particular, you learn how to use the WinJS.Namespace.define() and WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() methods. You also learn how to hide private methods by using the module pattern. Why Do We Need Namespaces? Before we do anything else, we should start by answering the question: Why do we need namespaces? What function do they serve? Do they just add needless complexity to our Metro applications? After all, plenty of JavaScript libraries do just fine without introducing support for namespaces. For example, jQuery has no support for namespaces and jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library in the universe. If jQuery can do without namespaces, why do we need to worry about namespaces at all? Namespaces perform two functions in a programming language. First, namespaces prevent naming collisions. In other words, namespaces enable you to create more than one object with the same name without conflict. For example, imagine that two companies – company A and company B – both want to make a JavaScript shopping cart control and both companies want to name the control ShoppingCart. By creating a CompanyA namespace and CompanyB namespace, both companies can create a ShoppingCart control: a CompanyA.ShoppingCart and a CompanyB.ShoppingCart control. The second function of a namespace is organization. Namespaces are used to group related functionality even when the functionality is defined in different physical files. For example, I know that all of the methods in the WinJS library related to working with classes can be found in the WinJS.Class namespace. Namespaces make it easier to understand the functionality available in a library. If you are building a simple JavaScript application then you won’t have much reason to care about namespaces. If you need to use multiple libraries written by different people then namespaces become very important. Using WinJS.Namespace.define() In the WinJS library, the most basic method of creating a namespace is to use the WinJS.Namespace.define() method. This method enables you to declare a namespace (of arbitrary depth). The WinJS.Namespace.define() method has the following parameters: · name – A string representing the name of the new namespace. You can add nested namespace by using dot notation · members – An optional collection of objects to add to the new namespace For example, the following code sample declares two new namespaces named CompanyA and CompanyB.Controls. Both namespaces contain a ShoppingCart object which has a checkout() method: // Create CompanyA namespace with ShoppingCart WinJS.Namespace.define("CompanyA"); CompanyA.ShoppingCart = { checkout: function (){ return "Checking out from A"; } }; // Create CompanyB.Controls namespace with ShoppingCart WinJS.Namespace.define( "CompanyB.Controls", { ShoppingCart: { checkout: function(){ return "Checking out from B"; } } } ); // Call CompanyA ShoppingCart checkout method console.log(CompanyA.ShoppingCart.checkout()); // Writes "Checking out from A" // Call CompanyB.Controls checkout method console.log(CompanyB.Controls.ShoppingCart.checkout()); // Writes "Checking out from B" In the code above, the CompanyA namespace is created by calling WinJS.Namespace.define(“CompanyA”). Next, the ShoppingCart is added to this namespace. The namespace is defined and an object is added to the namespace in separate lines of code. A different approach is taken in the case of the CompanyB.Controls namespace. The namespace is created and the ShoppingCart object is added to the namespace with the following single line of code: WinJS.Namespace.define( "CompanyB.Controls", { ShoppingCart: { checkout: function(){ return "Checking out from B"; } } } ); Notice that CompanyB.Controls is a nested namespace. The top level namespace CompanyB contains the namespace Controls. You can declare a nested namespace using dot notation and the WinJS library handles the details of creating one namespace within the other. After the namespaces have been defined, you can use either of the two shopping cart controls. You call CompanyA.ShoppingCart.checkout() or you can call CompanyB.Controls.ShoppingCart.checkout(). Using WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() The WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() method is similar to the WinJS.Namespace.define() method. Both methods enable you to define a new namespace. The difference is that the defineWithParent() method enables you to add a new namespace to an existing namespace. The WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() method has the following parameters: · parentNamespace – An object which represents a parent namespace · name – A string representing the new namespace to add to the parent namespace · members – An optional collection of objects to add to the new namespace The following code sample demonstrates how you can create a root namespace named CompanyA and add a Controls child namespace to the CompanyA parent namespace: WinJS.Namespace.define("CompanyA"); WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent(CompanyA, "Controls", { ShoppingCart: { checkout: function () { return "Checking out"; } } } ); console.log(CompanyA.Controls.ShoppingCart.checkout()); // Writes "Checking out" One significant advantage of using the defineWithParent() method over the define() method is the defineWithParent() method is strongly-typed. In other words, you use an object to represent the base namespace instead of a string. If you misspell the name of the object (CompnyA) then you get a runtime error. Using the Module Pattern When you are building a JavaScript library, you want to be able to create both public and private methods. Some methods, the public methods, are intended to be used by consumers of your JavaScript library. The public methods act as your library’s public API. Other methods, the private methods, are not intended for public consumption. Instead, these methods are internal methods required to get the library to function. You don’t want people calling these internal methods because you might need to change them in the future. JavaScript does not support access modifiers. You can’t mark an object or method as public or private. Anyone gets to call any method and anyone gets to interact with any object. The only mechanism for encapsulating (hiding) methods and objects in JavaScript is to take advantage of functions. In JavaScript, a function determines variable scope. A JavaScript variable either has global scope – it is available everywhere – or it has function scope – it is available only within a function. If you want to hide an object or method then you need to place it within a function. For example, the following code contains a function named doSomething() which contains a nested function named doSomethingElse(): function doSomething() { console.log("doSomething"); function doSomethingElse() { console.log("doSomethingElse"); } } doSomething(); // Writes "doSomething" doSomethingElse(); // Throws ReferenceError You can call doSomethingElse() only within the doSomething() function. The doSomethingElse() function is encapsulated in the doSomething() function. The WinJS library takes advantage of function encapsulation to hide all of its internal methods. All of the WinJS methods are defined within self-executing anonymous functions. Everything is hidden by default. Public methods are exposed by explicitly adding the public methods to namespaces defined in the global scope. Imagine, for example, that I want a small library of utility methods. I want to create a method for calculating sales tax and a method for calculating the expected ship date of a product. The following library encapsulates the implementation of my library in a self-executing anonymous function: (function (global) { // Public method which calculates tax function calculateTax(price) { return calculateFederalTax(price) + calculateStateTax(price); } // Private method for calculating state tax function calculateStateTax(price) { return price * 0.08; } // Private method for calculating federal tax function calculateFederalTax(price) { return price * 0.02; } // Public method which returns the expected ship date function calculateShipDate(currentDate) { currentDate.setDate(currentDate.getDate() + 4); return currentDate; } // Export public methods WinJS.Namespace.define("CompanyA.Utilities", { calculateTax: calculateTax, calculateShipDate: calculateShipDate } ); })(this); // Show expected ship date var shipDate = CompanyA.Utilities.calculateShipDate(new Date()); console.log(shipDate); // Show price + tax var price = 12.33; var tax = CompanyA.Utilities.calculateTax(price); console.log(price + tax); In the code above, the self-executing anonymous function contains four functions: calculateTax(), calculateStateTax(), calculateFederalTax(), and calculateShipDate(). The following statement is used to expose only the calcuateTax() and the calculateShipDate() functions: // Export public methods WinJS.Namespace.define("CompanyA.Utilities", { calculateTax: calculateTax, calculateShipDate: calculateShipDate } ); Because the calculateTax() and calcuateShipDate() functions are added to the CompanyA.Utilities namespace, you can call these two methods outside of the self-executing function. These are the public methods of your library which form the public API. The calculateStateTax() and calculateFederalTax() methods, on the other hand, are forever hidden within the black hole of the self-executing function. These methods are encapsulated and can never be called outside of scope of the self-executing function. These are the internal methods of your library. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe why and how you use namespaces with the WinJS library. You learned how to define namespaces using both the WinJS.Namespace.define() and WinJS.Namespace.defineWithParent() methods. We also discussed how to hide private members and expose public members using the module pattern.

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• Clustering Basics and Challenges

  - by Karoly Vegh

  For upcoming posts it seemed to be a good idea to dedicate some time for cluster basic concepts and theory. This post misses a lot of details that would explode the articlesize, should you have questions, do not hesitate to ask them in the comments.  The goal here is to get some concepts straight. I can't promise to give you an overall complete definitions of cluster, cluster agent, quorum, voting, fencing, split brain condition, so the following is more of an explanation. Here we go. -------- Cluster, HA, failover, switchover, scalability -------- An attempted definition of a Cluster: A cluster is a set (2+) server nodes dedicated to keep application services alive, communicating through the cluster software/framework with eachother, test and probe health status of servernodes/services and with quorum based decisions and with switchover/failover techniques keep the application services running on them available. That is, should a node that runs a service unexpectedly lose functionality/connection, the other ones would take over the and run the services, so that availability is guaranteed. To provide availability while strictly sticking to a consistent clusterconfiguration is the main goal of a cluster.  At this point we have to add that this defines a HA-cluster, a High-Availability cluster, where the clusternodes are planned to run the services in an active-standby, or failover fashion. An example could be a single instance database. Some applications can be run in a distributed or scalable fashion. In the latter case instances of the application run actively on separate clusternodes serving servicerequests simultaneously. An example for this version could be a webserver that forwards connection requests to many backend servers in a round-robin way. Or a database running in active-active RAC setup.  -------- Cluster arhitecture, interconnect, topologies -------- Now, what is a cluster made of? Servers, right. These servers (the clusternodes) need to communicate. This of course happens over the network, usually over dedicated network interfaces interconnecting all the clusternodes. These connection are called interconnects.How many clusternodes are in a cluster? There are different cluster topologies. The most simple one is a clustered pair topology, involving only two clusternodes:  There are several more topologies, clicking the image above will take you to the relevant documentation. Also, to answer the question Solaris Cluster allows you to run up to 16 servers in a cluster. Where shall these clusternodes be placed? A very important question. The right answer is: It depends on what you plan to achieve with the cluster. Do you plan to avoid only a server outage? Then you can place them right next to eachother in the datacenter. Do you need to avoid DataCenter outage? In that case of course you should place them at least in different fire zones. Or in two geographically distant DataCenters to avoid disasters like floods, large-scale fires or power outages. We call this a stretched- or campus cluster, the clusternodes being several kilometers away from eachother. To cover really large distances, you probably need to move to a GeoCluster, which is a different kind of animal.  What is a geocluster? A Geographic Cluster in Solaris Cluster terms is actually a metacluster between two, separate (locally-HA) clusters.  -------- Cluster resource types, agents, resources, resource groups -------- So how does the cluster manage my applications? The cluster needs to start, stop and probe your applications. If you application runs, the cluster needs to check regularly if the application state is healthy, does it respond over the network, does it have all the processes running, etc. This is called probing. If the cluster deems the application is in a faulty state, then it can try to restart it locally or decide to switch (stop on node A, start on node B) the service. Starting, stopping and probing are the three actions that a cluster agent does. There are many different kinds of agents included in Solaris Cluster, but you can build your own too. Examples are an agent that manages (mounts, moves) ZFS filesystems, or the Oracle DB HA agent that cares about the database, or an agent that moves a floating IP address between nodes. There are lots of other agents included for Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, Oracle DB, Oracle Weblogic, Zones, LDoms, NFS, DNS, etc.We also need to clarify the difference between a cluster resource and the cluster resource group.A cluster resource is something that is managed by a cluster agent. Cluster resource types are included in Solaris cluster (see above, e.g. HAStoragePlus, HA-Oracle, LogicalHost). You can group cluster resources into cluster resourcegroups, and switch these groups together from one node to another. To stick to the example above, to move an Oracle DB service from one node to another, you have to switch the group between nodes, and the agents of the cluster resources in the group will do the following:  On node A Shut down the DB Unconfigure the LogicalHost IP the DB Listener listens on unmount the filesystem   Then, on node B: mount the FS configure the IP  startup the DB -------- Voting, Quorum, Split Brain Condition, Fencing, Amnesia -------- How do the clusternodes agree upon their action? How do they decide which node runs what services? Another important question. Running a cluster is a strictly democratic thing.Every node has votes, and you need the majority of votes to have the deciding power. Now, this is usually no problem, clusternodes think very much all alike. Still, every action needs to be governed upon in a productive system, and has to be agreed upon. Agreeing is easy as long as the clusternodes all behave and talk to eachother over the interconnect. But if the interconnect is gone/down, this all gets tricky and confusing. Clusternodes think like this: "My job is to run these services. The other node does not answer my interconnect communication, it must be down. I'd better take control and run the services!". The problem is, as I have already mentioned, clusternodes very much think alike. If the interconnect is gone, they all assume the other node is down, and they all want to mount the data backend, enable the IP and run the database. Double IPs, double mounts, double DB instances - now that is trouble. Also, in a 2-node cluster they both have only 50% of the votes, that is, they themselves alone are not allowed to run a cluster.  This is where you need a quorum device. According to Wikipedia, the "requirement for a quorum is protection against totally unrepresentative action in the name of the body by an unduly small number of persons.". They need additional votes to run the cluster. For this requirement a 2-node cluster needs a quorum device or a quorum server. If the interconnect is gone, (this is what we call a split brain condition) both nodes start to race and try to reserve the quorum device to themselves. They do this, because the quorum device bears an additional vote, that could ensure majority (50% +1). The one that manages to lock the quorum device (e.g. if it's an FC LUN, it SCSI reserves it) wins the right to build/run a cluster, the other one - realizing he was late - panics/reboots to ensure the cluster config stays consistent.  Losing the interconnect isn't only endangering the availability of services, but it also endangers the cluster configuration consistence. Just imagine node A being down and during that the cluster configuration changes. Now node B goes down, and node A comes up. It isn't uptodate about the cluster configuration's changes so it will refuse to start a cluster, since that would lead to cluster amnesia, that is the cluster had some changes, but now runs with an older cluster configuration repository state, that is it's like it forgot about the changes.  Also, to ensure application data consistence, the clusternode that wins the race makes sure that a server that isn't part of or can't currently join the cluster can access the devices. This procedure is called fencing. This usually happens to storage LUNs via SCSI reservation.  Now, another important question: Where do I place the quorum disk?  Imagine having two sites, two separate datacenters, one in the north of the city and the other one in the south part of it. You run a stretched cluster in the clustered pair topology. Where do you place the quorum disk/server? If you put it into the north DC, and that gets hit by a meteor, you lose one clusternode, which isn't a problem, but you also lose your quorum, and the south clusternode can't keep the cluster running lacking the votes. This problem can't be solved with two sites and a campus cluster. You will need a third site to either place the quorum server to, or a third clusternode. Otherwise, lacking majority, if you lose the site that had your quorum, you lose the cluster. Okay, we covered the very basics. We haven't talked about virtualization support, CCR, ClusterFilesystems, DID devices, affinities, storage-replication, management tools, upgrade procedures - should those be interesting for you, let me know in the comments, along with any other questions. Given enough demand I'd be glad to write a followup post too. Now I really want to move on to the second part in the series: ClusterInstallation.  Oh, as for additional source of information, I recommend the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23623_01/index.html, and the OTN Oracle Solaris Cluster site: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris-cluster/index.html

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 06, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 06, 2013Popular ReleasesMedia Companion: Media Companion MC3.580b: Fixed IMDB Actor names and Actor Roles, empty <actor> entries in movie nfo, and actor scraping during initial movie scrape. Revision HistoryEvent-Based Components AppBuilder: AB3.Iteration.53: Iteration 53 (Feature): Allow drag&drop of existing component (flow, step) from component list to chart. Duplicate names are automatically recognized and solved. By the color of the draged component you can see what kind of component (flow or step) is currently draged. New: AddExistingComponentFlow, PartDragDropEventHandler, ExistingStepPreparerPulse: Pulse 0.6.7.3: Pulse is now accepting donations. To donate by Bitcoin or PayPal see https://pulse.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Donations Lots of updates in v0.6.7.3: (Feature) New option allows you to disable wallpaper changing when a full screen application is running. This way Pulse doesn't slow down/lag your videos and games :) (Fix) Some users were getting Wallbase errors when logging in. This has been fixed. (Feature) Right click a provider and you can now make a copy of it by selecting the "Dupl...MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.1: Release 1.11.1 =========== =Bug Fixes= =========== Added more tile blocks (Clouds, crimstone) Added items (binoculars, rope, Pirahna Gun) Added ores (Lead, Tin) Chests now work, I broke them yesterday. =============== =Known Issues= =============== I am having trouble with new background walls. So you will see a red outline for crimson then a pink inside. Same with where I think the queen bee lives.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.19: NEW: Added Option to login as Guest NEW: Added Menu Option to delete an Forum Account NEW: Added Support for "ImageTeam.org links FIXED: Fixed Ripping of http://forum.babeunion.com ForumsSimpleExcelReportMaker: Serm 0.03: SourceCode and Sample .Net Framework 3.5 AnyCPU compile.Application Architecture Guidelines: App Architecture Guidelines 3.0.8: This document is an overview of software qualities, principles, patterns, practices, tools and libraries.fastJSON: v2.0.22: 2.0.22 - added .net 3.5 project - now compiling to 'output' directory - added signed assembly - version numbers will stay at 2.0.0.0 for drop in compatibility - file version will reflect the build number - bug fix deserializing to dictionaries instead of dataset when type is not definedResponsive SharePoint: Bootstrap 3 for SharePoint 2013 - Alpha 0.1: Bootstrap 3 for SharePoint 2013 Alpha version 0.1 NOTE - This is an alpha version, there are bound to be issues. Please help us solve them by contributing in our Discussion. Publishing - The source for Twitter Bootstrap 3.0.0 integrated into SharePoint 2013 for a site with Publishing enabled. Non-Publishing - A master page and branding assets for Twitter Bootstrap 3.0.0 integrated into SharePoint 2013 without Publishing enabled. PageLayoutSampleContent - Sample content for included page l...C++ AMP Conformance Test Suite: C++ AMP Conformance Test Suite 1.0.0: This release contains following changes from previous release: Removed the tests that were testing Microsoft specific behavior not part of open specification. The test suite now contains two folders, containing set of test cases, named ‘Tests’ and ‘TestsWithProp'. The set of tests under these two folders are identical except one difference. The set of test cases under directory ‘TestsWithProp’ makes use of ‘properties’ (which the compiler being tested should handle as mentioned in the open ...ASP.NET dhtmxGantt Class: dhtmlxGantt2.vb class: This is the latest class based on work performed. For more information read the project description and get the source files from dhtmlx.comExpressiveDataGenerators: Alpha 2: Fix serveral bugs, more testsQuickTestsFramework: 1.0.0: First release with stable API.VS Tiny Extension for TortoiseGit: 0.1c: + Icons revised + Push button disappeared when IDE loads the menu instead of toolbar. + Detected twice loading and prevented. + About box deprecated. + Next version will have major improvements. NEW: Visual Studio 2013 Support!BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.6: 2013.09.30 Ver5.9.6 (1)SMTP???????、???????????????? (2)WinAPI??????? (3)Web???????CGI???????????????????????PayBox payment gateway provider for NB_Store: NB_Store_Gateway_01.00.02_PayBox: Paybox DNN module installMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.2: Mostly internal code tweaks. added -nosize switch to turn off the size- and gzip-calculations done after minification. removed the comments in the build targets script for the old AjaxMin build task (discussion #458831). Fixed an issue with extended Unicode characters encoded inside a string literal with adjacent \uHHHH\uHHHH sequences. Fixed an IndexOutOfRange exception when encountering a CSS identifier that's a single underscore character (_). In previous builds, the net35 and net20...AJAX Control Toolkit: September 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - September 2013 Release (Updated) Version 7.1005September 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Important UpdateThis release has been updated to fix three issues: Up...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha is for testers to figure out if we got the NEW api plugged in ok. thanksVisual Log Parser: VisualLogParser: Portable Visual Log Parser for Dotnet 4.0New ProjectsBasic4Android (B4A) Charting Framework: dhtlmxCharts, GoogleCharts etc: Basic4Android (B4A) mobile charting framework.Client Meeting Tool: This site facilitate users to create and schedule meetings for an event.FoodScan: This app focuses on implementing diet monitoring application for Malaysian overweight and obese adolescents using AR technique on Windows Phone 8.Hello Team foundation server: Try to use team foundation server and compare it with GitKDG C# Password Generator: C# password generator developed by KDG.KDG's C# Password Generator: C# password generator that uses Random to create strong passwords based on user input.Meta: Meta is the EECS 111 programming language at Northwestern University. Meta is a dynamically-typed scheme-like language built on .NET. This is its home.Monoscript: Allows using Mono and C# for scripting on Unix. Source files are automatically compiled and executed. Caching is employed to avoid recompiling unchanged files.mtdsharp: Developed by Chris Hyndman, Alec KC, Lu Huang and Merrill Huang for CS 196 at the University of Illinois.Planr.me: Planr is a time management website currently in the early development stageProject Hermes: This very project is currently closed door and under core development. The project description and other works would be published soon.Remindme for Windows Phone 8: Simple, open source Pocket client for Windows Phone 8Remindme for WinRT: Simple, open source Pocket client for WinRT and Windows 8.SQL Server Periodic Table with Molecules: This a SQL Server Database intended to be used by students and researchers for Chemistry and Physics projects. Tesseract: The Tesseract Project aims to easily display and rotate 4 Dimensional Objects in 3D Test Case Manager: A Windows Application which extends Microsoft Test Manager. Features: * one click search * test case export * better test case reader * extended edit modeTest Project for Assignment 1: This is a test ProjectTorah File: Torah File is an project that allow you to use Torah Bible and Mishneh for the computer by type of the programming languages that will be able to use the ToUSAePay nopCommerce Payment Plugin: A simple plugin for nopCommerce to use the USAePay SOAP API interface for processing credit cards.Veterinaria Dr Leo: Este es nuestro Proyecto del curso Calidad y Pruebas de Software 2013-2 Arevalo Ticlla, Susan. Chalán Malca, Elvis. Cruzado Asencio, Gustavo.Visual Studio Test Extensions: The Visual Studio Test Extensions provides extensions and tools for the Visual Studio MSTest engine. It allows to execute unit tests in a separate AppDomain.WSAAD7COM1052: Central repository for 7COM1052 - Web Scripting & Application Development (COM)wscc2013online: this is a project related to Web Application Development at the University of Hertfordshire

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• Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

  - by Alois Kraus

  Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

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• The fastest way to resize images from ASP.NET. And it’s (more) supported-ish.

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  I’ve shown before how to resize images using GDI, which is fairly common but is explicitly unsupported because we know of very real problems that this can cause. Still, many sites still use that method because those problems are fairly rare, and because most people assume it’s the only way to get the job done. Plus, it works in medium trust. More recently, I’ve shown how you can use WPF APIs to do the same thing and get JPEG thumbnails, only 2.5 times faster than GDI (even now that GDI really ultimately uses WIC to read and write images). The boost in performance is great, but it comes at a cost, that you may or may not care about: it won’t work in medium trust. It’s also just as unsupported as the GDI option. What I want to show today is how to use the Windows Imaging Components from ASP.NET APIs directly, without going through WPF. The approach has the great advantage that it’s been tested and proven to scale very well. The WIC team tells me you should be able to call support and get answers if you hit problems. Caveats exist though. First, this is using interop, so until a signed wrapper sits in the GAC, it will require full trust. Second, the APIs have a very strong smell of native code and are definitely not .NET-friendly. And finally, the most serious problem is that older versions of Windows don’t offer MTA support for image decoding. MTA support is only available on Windows 7, Vista and Windows Server 2008. But on 2003 and XP, you’ll only get STA support. that means that the thread safety that we so badly need for server applications is not guaranteed on those operating systems. To make it work, you’d have to spin specialized threads yourself and manage the lifetime of your objects, which is outside the scope of this article. We’ll assume that we’re fine with al this and that we’re running on 7 or 2008 under full trust. Be warned that the code that follows is not simple or very readable. This is definitely not the easiest way to resize an image in .NET. Wrapping native APIs such as WIC in a managed wrapper is never easy, but fortunately we won’t have to: the WIC team already did it for us and released the results under MS-PL. The InteropServices folder, which contains the wrappers we need, is in the WicCop project but I’ve also included it in the sample that you can download from the link at the end of the article. In order to produce a thumbnail, we first have to obtain a decoding frame object that WIC can use. Like with WPF, that object will contain the command to decode a frame from the source image but won’t do the actual decoding until necessary. Getting the frame is done by reading the image bytes through a special WIC stream that you can obtain from a factory object that we’re going to reuse for lots of other tasks: var photo = File.ReadAllBytes(photoPath); var factory = (IWICComponentFactory)new WICImagingFactory(); var inputStream = factory.CreateStream(); inputStream.InitializeFromMemory(photo, (uint)photo.Length); var decoder = factory.CreateDecoderFromStream( inputStream, null, WICDecodeOptions.WICDecodeMetadataCacheOnLoad); var frame = decoder.GetFrame(0); We can read the dimensions of the frame using the following (somewhat ugly) code: uint width, height; frame.GetSize(out width, out height); This enables us to compute the dimensions of the thumbnail, as I’ve shown in previous articles. We now need to prepare the output stream for the thumbnail. WIC requires a special kind of stream, IStream (not implemented by System.IO.Stream) and doesn’t directlyunderstand .NET streams. It does provide a number of implementations but not exactly what we need here. We need to output to memory because we’ll want to persist the same bytes to the response stream and to a local file for caching. The memory-bound version of IStream requires a fixed-length buffer but we won’t know the length of the buffer before we resize. To solve that problem, I’ve built a derived class from MemoryStream that also implements IStream. The implementation is not very complicated, it just delegates the IStream methods to the base class, but it involves some native pointer manipulation. Once we have a stream, we need to build the encoder for the output format, which could be anything that WIC supports. For web thumbnails, our only reasonable options are PNG and JPEG. I explored PNG because it’s a lossless format, and because WIC does support PNG compression. That compression is not very efficient though and JPEG offers good quality with much smaller file sizes. On the web, it matters. I found the best PNG compression option (adaptive) to give files that are about twice as big as 100%-quality JPEG (an absurd setting), 4.5 times bigger than 95%-quality JPEG and 7 times larger than 85%-quality JPEG, which is more than acceptable quality. As a consequence, we’ll use JPEG. The JPEG encoder can be prepared as follows: var encoder = factory.CreateEncoder( Consts.GUID_ContainerFormatJpeg, null); encoder.Initialize(outputStream, WICBitmapEncoderCacheOption.WICBitmapEncoderNoCache); The next operation is to create the output frame: IWICBitmapFrameEncode outputFrame; var arg = new IPropertyBag2[1]; encoder.CreateNewFrame(out outputFrame, arg); Notice that we are passing in a property bag. This is where we’re going to specify our only parameter for encoding, the JPEG quality setting: var propBag = arg[0]; var propertyBagOption = new PROPBAG2[1]; propertyBagOption[0].pstrName = "ImageQuality"; propBag.Write(1, propertyBagOption, new object[] { 0.85F }); outputFrame.Initialize(propBag); We can then set the resolution for the thumbnail to be 96, something we weren’t able to do with WPF and had to hack around: outputFrame.SetResolution(96, 96); Next, we set the size of the output frame and create a scaler from the input frame and the computed dimensions of the target thumbnail: outputFrame.SetSize(thumbWidth, thumbHeight); var scaler = factory.CreateBitmapScaler(); scaler.Initialize(frame, thumbWidth, thumbHeight, WICBitmapInterpolationMode.WICBitmapInterpolationModeFant); The scaler is using the Fant method, which I think is the best looking one even if it seems a little softer than cubic (zoomed here to better show the defects): Cubic Fant Linear Nearest neighbor We can write the source image to the output frame through the scaler: outputFrame.WriteSource(scaler, new WICRect { X = 0, Y = 0, Width = (int)thumbWidth, Height = (int)thumbHeight }); And finally we commit the pipeline that we built and get the byte array for the thumbnail out of our memory stream: outputFrame.Commit(); encoder.Commit(); var outputArray = outputStream.ToArray(); outputStream.Close(); That byte array can then be sent to the output stream and to the cache file. Once we’ve gone through this exercise, it’s only natural to wonder whether it was worth the trouble. I ran this method, as well as GDI and WPF resizing over thirty twelve megapixel images for JPEG qualities between 70% and 100% and measured the file size and time to resize. Here are the results: Size of resized images   Time to resize thirty 12 megapixel images Not much to see on the size graph: sizes from WPF and WIC are equivalent, which is hardly surprising as WPF calls into WIC. There is just an anomaly for 75% for WPF that I noted in my previous article and that disappears when using WIC directly. But overall, using WPF or WIC over GDI represents a slight win in file size. The time to resize is more interesting. WPF and WIC get similar times although WIC seems to always be a little faster. Not surprising considering WPF is using WIC. The margin of error on this results is probably fairly close to the time difference. As we already knew, the time to resize does not depend on the quality level, only the size does. This means that the only decision you have to make here is size versus visual quality. This third approach to server-side image resizing on ASP.NET seems to converge on the fastest possible one. We have marginally better performance than WPF, but with some additional peace of mind that this approach is sanctioned for server-side usage by the Windows Imaging team. It still doesn’t work in medium trust. That is a problem and shows the way for future server-friendly managed wrappers around WIC. The sample code for this article can be downloaded from: http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/WicResize.zip The benchmark code can be found here (you’ll need to add your own images to the Images directory and then add those to the project, with content and copy if newer in the properties of the files in the solution explorer): http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/WicWpfGdiImageResizeBenchmark.zip WIC tools can be downloaded from: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wictools To conclude, here are some of the resized thumbnails at 85% fant:

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• Unity – Part 5: Injecting Values

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction This is the fifth post on Unity. You can find the introductory post here, the second post, on dependency injection here, a third one on Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) here and the latest so far, on writing custom extensions, here. This time we will talk about injecting simple values. An Inversion of Control (IoC) / Dependency Injector (DI) container like Unity can be used for things other than injecting complex class dependencies. It can also be used for setting property values or method/constructor parameters whenever a class is built. The main difference is that these values do not have a lifetime manager associated with them and do not come from the regular IoC registration store. Unlike, for instance, MEF, Unity won’t let you register as a dependency a string or an integer, so you have to take a different approach, which I will describe in this post. Scenario Let’s imagine we have a base interface that describes a logger – the same as in previous examples: 1: public interface ILogger 2: { 3: void Log(String message); 4: } And a concrete implementation that writes to a file: 1: public class FileLogger : ILogger 2: { 3: public String Filename 4: { 5: get; 6: set; 7: } 8:  9: #region ILogger Members 10:  11: public void Log(String message) 12: { 13: using (Stream file = File.OpenWrite(this.Filename)) 14: { 15: Byte[] data = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(message); 16: 17: file.Write(data, 0, data.Length); 18: } 19: } 20:  21: #endregion 22: } And let’s say we want the Filename property to come from the application settings (appSettings) section on the Web/App.config file. As usual with Unity, there is an extensibility point that allows us to automatically do this, both with code configuration or statically on the configuration file. Extending Injection We start by implementing a class that will retrieve a value from the appSettings by inheriting from ValueElement: 1: sealed class AppSettingsParameterValueElement : ValueElement, IDependencyResolverPolicy 2: { 3: #region Private methods 4: private Object CreateInstance(Type parameterType) 5: { 6: Object configurationValue = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[this.AppSettingsKey]; 7:  8: if (parameterType != typeof(String)) 9: { 10: TypeConverter typeConverter = this.GetTypeConverter(parameterType); 11:  12: configurationValue = typeConverter.ConvertFromInvariantString(configurationValue as String); 13: } 14:  15: return (configurationValue); 16: } 17: #endregion 18:  19: #region Private methods 20: private TypeConverter GetTypeConverter(Type parameterType) 21: { 22: if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(this.TypeConverterTypeName) == false) 23: { 24: return (Activator.CreateInstance(TypeResolver.ResolveType(this.TypeConverterTypeName)) as TypeConverter); 25: } 26: else 27: { 28: return (TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(parameterType)); 29: } 30: } 31: #endregion 32:  33: #region Public override methods 34: public override InjectionParameterValue GetInjectionParameterValue(IUnityContainer container, Type parameterType) 35: { 36: Object value = this.CreateInstance(parameterType); 37: return (new InjectionParameter(parameterType, value)); 38: } 39: #endregion 40:  41: #region IDependencyResolverPolicy Members 42:  43: public Object Resolve(IBuilderContext context) 44: { 45: Type parameterType = null; 46:  47: if (context.CurrentOperation is ResolvingPropertyValueOperation) 48: { 49: ResolvingPropertyValueOperation op = (context.CurrentOperation as ResolvingPropertyValueOperation); 50: PropertyInfo prop = op.TypeBeingConstructed.GetProperty(op.PropertyName); 51: parameterType = prop.PropertyType; 52: } 53: else if (context.CurrentOperation is ConstructorArgumentResolveOperation) 54: { 55: ConstructorArgumentResolveOperation op = (context.CurrentOperation as ConstructorArgumentResolveOperation); 56: String args = op.ConstructorSignature.Split('(')[1].Split(')')[0]; 57: Type[] types = args.Split(',').Select(a => Type.GetType(a.Split(' ')[0])).ToArray(); 58: ConstructorInfo ctor = op.TypeBeingConstructed.GetConstructor(types); 59: parameterType = ctor.GetParameters().Where(p => p.Name == op.ParameterName).Single().ParameterType; 60: } 61: else if (context.CurrentOperation is MethodArgumentResolveOperation) 62: { 63: MethodArgumentResolveOperation op = (context.CurrentOperation as MethodArgumentResolveOperation); 64: String methodName = op.MethodSignature.Split('(')[0].Split(' ')[1]; 65: String args = op.MethodSignature.Split('(')[1].Split(')')[0]; 66: Type[] types = args.Split(',').Select(a => Type.GetType(a.Split(' ')[0])).ToArray(); 67: MethodInfo method = op.TypeBeingConstructed.GetMethod(methodName, types); 68: parameterType = method.GetParameters().Where(p => p.Name == op.ParameterName).Single().ParameterType; 69: } 70:  71: return (this.CreateInstance(parameterType)); 72: } 73:  74: #endregion 75:  76: #region Public properties 77: [ConfigurationProperty("appSettingsKey", IsRequired = true)] 78: public String AppSettingsKey 79: { 80: get 81: { 82: return ((String)base["appSettingsKey"]); 83: } 84:  85: set 86: { 87: base["appSettingsKey"] = value; 88: } 89: } 90: #endregion 91: } As you can see from the implementation of the IDependencyResolverPolicy.Resolve method, this will work in three different scenarios: When it is applied to a property; When it is applied to a constructor parameter; When it is applied to an initialization method. The implementation will even try to convert the value to its declared destination, for example, if the destination property is an Int32, it will try to convert the appSettings stored string to an Int32. Injection By Configuration If we want to configure injection by configuration, we need to implement a custom section extension by inheriting from SectionExtension, and registering our custom element with the name “appSettings”: 1: sealed class AppSettingsParameterInjectionElementExtension : SectionExtension 2: { 3: public override void AddExtensions(SectionExtensionContext context) 4: { 5: context.AddElement<AppSettingsParameterValueElement>("appSettings"); 6: } 7: } And on the configuration file, for setting a property, we use it like this: 1: <appSettings> 2: <add key="LoggerFilename" value="Log.txt"/> 3: </appSettings> 4: <unity xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/practices/2010/unity"> 5: <container> 6: <register type="MyNamespace.ILogger, MyAssembly" mapTo="MyNamespace.ConsoleLogger, MyAssembly"/> 7: <register type="MyNamespace.ILogger, MyAssembly" mapTo="MyNamespace.FileLogger, MyAssembly" name="File"> 8: <lifetime type="singleton"/> 9: <property name="Filename"> 10: <appSettings appSettingsKey="LoggerFilename"/> 11: </property> 12: </register> 13: </container> 14: </unity> If we would like to inject the value as a constructor parameter, it would be instead: 1: <unity xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/practices/2010/unity"> 2: <sectionExtension type="MyNamespace.AppSettingsParameterInjectionElementExtension, MyAssembly" /> 3: <container> 4: <register type="MyNamespace.ILogger, MyAssembly" mapTo="MyNamespace.ConsoleLogger, MyAssembly"/> 5: <register type="MyNamespace.ILogger, MyAssembly" mapTo="MyNamespace.FileLogger, MyAssembly" name="File"> 6: <lifetime type="singleton"/> 7: <constructor> 8: <param name="filename" type="System.String"> 9: <appSettings appSettingsKey="LoggerFilename"/> 10: </param> 11: </constructor> 12: </register> 13: </container> 14: </unity> Notice the appSettings section, where we add a LoggerFilename entry, which is the same as the one referred by our AppSettingsParameterInjectionElementExtension extension. For more advanced behavior, you can add a TypeConverterName attribute to the appSettings declaration, where you can pass an assembly qualified name of a class that inherits from TypeConverter. This class will be responsible for converting the appSettings value to a destination type. Injection By Attribute If we would like to use attributes instead, we need to create a custom attribute by inheriting from DependencyResolutionAttribute: 1: [Serializable] 2: [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Parameter | AttributeTargets.Property, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)] 3: public sealed class AppSettingsDependencyResolutionAttribute : DependencyResolutionAttribute 4: { 5: public AppSettingsDependencyResolutionAttribute(String appSettingsKey) 6: { 7: this.AppSettingsKey = appSettingsKey; 8: } 9:  10: public String TypeConverterTypeName 11: { 12: get; 13: set; 14: } 15:  16: public String AppSettingsKey 17: { 18: get; 19: private set; 20: } 21:  22: public override IDependencyResolverPolicy CreateResolver(Type typeToResolve) 23: { 24: return (new AppSettingsParameterValueElement() { AppSettingsKey = this.AppSettingsKey, TypeConverterTypeName = this.TypeConverterTypeName }); 25: } 26: } As for file configuration, there is a mandatory property for setting the appSettings key and an optional TypeConverterName  for setting the name of a TypeConverter. Both the custom attribute and the custom section return an instance of the injector AppSettingsParameterValueElement that we implemented in the first place. Now, the attribute needs to be placed before the injected class’ Filename property: 1: public class FileLogger : ILogger 2: { 3: [AppSettingsDependencyResolution("LoggerFilename")] 4: public String Filename 5: { 6: get; 7: set; 8: } 9:  10: #region ILogger Members 11:  12: public void Log(String message) 13: { 14: using (Stream file = File.OpenWrite(this.Filename)) 15: { 16: Byte[] data = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(message); 17: 18: file.Write(data, 0, data.Length); 19: } 20: } 21:  22: #endregion 23: } Or, if we wanted to use constructor injection: 1: public class FileLogger : ILogger 2: { 3: public String Filename 4: { 5: get; 6: set; 7: } 8:  9: public FileLogger([AppSettingsDependencyResolution("LoggerFilename")] String filename) 10: { 11: this.Filename = filename; 12: } 13:  14: #region ILogger Members 15:  16: public void Log(String message) 17: { 18: using (Stream file = File.OpenWrite(this.Filename)) 19: { 20: Byte[] data = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(message); 21: 22: file.Write(data, 0, data.Length); 23: } 24: } 25:  26: #endregion 27: } Usage Just do: 1: ILogger logger = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<ILogger>("File"); And off you go! A simple way do avoid hardcoded values in component registrations. Of course, this same concept can be applied to registry keys, environment values, XML attributes, etc, etc, just change the implementation of the AppSettingsParameterValueElement class. Next stop: custom lifetime managers.

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