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• Windows Azure Evolution - Web Sites (aka Antares) Part 1

  - by Shaun

  This is the 3rd post of my Windows Azure Evolution series, focus on the new features and enhancement which was alone with the Windows Azure Platform Upgrade June 2012, announced at the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June. In the first post I introduced the new preview developer portal and how to works for the existing features such as cloud services, storages and SQL databases. In the second one I talked about the Windows Azure .NET SDK 1.7 on the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC on Windows 8. From this one I will begin to introduce some new features. Now let’s have a look on the first one of them, Windows Azure Web Sites.   Overview Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), as known as Antares, was a new feature still in preview stage in this upgrade. It allows people to quickly and easily deploy websites to a highly scalable cloud environment, uses the languages and open source apps of the choice then deploy such as FTP, Git and TFS. It also can be integrated with Windows Azure services like SQL Database, Caching, CDN and Storage easily. After read its introduction we may have a question: since we can deploy a website from both cloud service web role and web site, what’s the different between them? So, let’s have a quick compare.   CLOUD SERVICE WEB SITE OS Windows Server Windows Server Virtualization Windows Azure Virtual Machine Windows Azure Virtual Machine Host IIS IIS Platform ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, WCF ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, PHP Language C#, VB.NET C#, VB.NET, PHP Database SQL Database SQL Database, MySQL Architecture Multi layered, background worker, message queuing, etc.. Simple website with backend database. VS Project Windows Azure Cloud Service ASP.NET Web Form, ASP.NET MVC, etc.. Out-of-box Gallery (none) Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress, etc.. Deployment Package upload, Visual Studio publish FTP, Git, TFS, WebMatrix Compute Mode Dedicate VM Shared Across VMs, Dedicate VM Scale Scale up, scale out Scale up, scale out As you can see, there are many difference between the cloud service and web site, but the main point is that, the cloud service focus on those complex architecture web application. For example, if you want to build a website with frontend layer, middle business layer and data access layer, with some background worker process connected through the message queue, then you should better use cloud service, since it provides full control of your code and application. But if you just want to build a personal blog or a  business portal, then you can use the web site. Since the web site have many galleries, you can create them even without any coding and configuration. David Pallmann have an awesome figure explains the benefits between the could service, web site and virtual machine.   Create a Personal Blog in Web Site from Gallery As I mentioned above, one of the big feature in WAWS is to build a website from an existing gallery, which means we don’t need to coding and configure. What we need to do is open the windows azure developer portal and click the NEW button, select WEB SITE and FROM GALLERY. In the popping up windows there are many websites we can choose to use. For example, for personal blog there are Orchard CMS, WordPress; for CMS there are DotNetNuke, Drupal 7, mojoPortal. Let’s select WordPress and click the next button. The next step is to configure the web site. We will need to specify the DNS name and select the subscription and region. Since the WordPress uses MySQL as its backend database, we also need to create a MySQL database as well. Windows Azure Web Sites utilize ClearDB to host the MySQL databases. You cannot create a MySQL database directly from SQL Databases section. Finally, since we selected to create a new MySQL database we need to specify the database name and region in the last step. Also we need to accept the ClearDB’s terms as well. Then windows azure platform will download the WordPress codes and deploy the MySQL database and website. Then it will be ready to use. Select the website and click the BROWSE button, the WordPress administration page will be shown. After configured the WordPress here is my personal web blog on the cloud. It took me no more than 10 minutes to establish without any coding.   Monitor, Configure, Scale and Linked Resources Let’s click into the website I had just created in the portal and have a look on what we can do. In the website details page where are five sections. - Dashboard The overall information about this website, such as the basic usage status, public URL, compute mode, FTP address, subscription and links that we can specify the deployment credentials, TFS and Git publish setting, etc.. - Monitor Some status information such as the CPU usage, memory usage etc., errors, etc.. We can add more metrics by clicking the ADD METRICS button and the bottom as well. - Configure Here we can set the configurations of our website such as the .NET and PHP runtime version, diagnostics settings, application settings and the IIS default documents. - Scale This is something interesting. In WAWS there are two compute mode or called web site mode. One is “shared”, which means our website will be shared with other web sites in a group of windows azure virtual machines. Each web site have its own process (w3wp.exe) with some sandbox technology to isolate from others. When we need to scaling-out our web site in shared mode, we actually increased the working process count. Hence in shared mode we cannot specify the virtual machine size since they are shared across all web sites. This is a little bit different than the scaling mode of the cloud service (hosted service web role and worker role). The other mode called “dedicate”, which means our web site will use the whole windows azure virtual machine. This is the same hosting behavior as cloud service web role. In web role it will be deployed on the virtual machines we specified and all of them are only used by us. In web sites dedicate mode, it’s the same. In this mode when we scaling-out our web site we will use more virtual machines, and each of them will only host our own website. And we can specify the virtual machine size in this mode. In the developer portal we can select which mode we are using from the scale section. In shared mode we can only specify the instance count, but in dedicate mode we can specify the instance size as well as the instance count. - Linked Resource The MySQL database created alone with the creation of our WordPress web site is a linked resource. We can add more linked resources in this section.   Pricing For the web site itself, since this feature is in preview period if you are using shared mode, then you will get free up to 10 web sites. But if you are using dedicate mode, the price would be the virtual machines you are using. For example, if you are using dedicate and configured two middle size virtual machines then you will pay $230.40 per month. If there is SQL Database linked to your web site then they will be charged separately based on the Pay-As-You-Go price. For example a 1GB web edition database costs $9.99 per month. And the bandwidth will be charged as well. For example 10GB outbound data transfer costs $1.20 per month. For more information about the pricing please have a look at the windows azure pricing page.   Summary Windows Azure Web Sites gives us easier and quicker way to create, develop and deploy website to window azure platform. Comparing with the cloud service web role, the WAWS have many out-of-box gallery we can use directly. So if you just want to build a blog, CMS or business portal you don’t need to learn ASP.NET, you don’t need to learn how to configure DotNetNuke, you don’t need to learn how to prepare PHP and MySQL. By using WAWS gallery you can establish a website within 10 minutes without any lines of code. But in some cases we do need to code by ourselves. We may need to tweak the layout of our pages, or we may have a traditional ASP.NET or PHP web application which needed to migrated to the cloud. Besides the gallery WAWS also provides many features to download, upload code. It also provides the feature to integrate with some version control services such as TFS and Git. And it also provides the deploy approaches through FTP and Web Deploy. In the next post I will demonstrate how to use WebMatrix to download and modify the website, and how to use TFS and Git to deploy automatically one our code changes committed.   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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• HTML5-MVC application using VS2010 SP1

  - by nmarun

  This is my first attempt at creating HTML5 pages. VS 2010 allows working with HTML5 now (you just need to make a small change after installing SP1). So my Razor view is now a HTML5 page. I call this application - 5Commerce – (an over-simplified) HTML5 ECommerce site. So here’s the flow of the application: home page renders user enters first and last name, chooses a product and the quantity can enter additional instructions for the order place the order user is then taken to another page showing the order details Off to the details. This is what my page looks in Google Chrome 10 beta (or later) soon after it renders. Here are some of the things to observe on this. Look a little closer and you’ll see a border around the first name textbox – this is ‘autofocus’ in action. I’ve set the autofocus attribute on this textbox. So as soon as the page loads, this control gets focus. 1: <input type="text" autofocus id="firstName" class="inputWidth" data_minlength="" 2: data_maxlength="" placeholder="first name" /> See a partially grayed out ‘last name’ text in the second textbox. This is set using a placeholder attribute (see above). It gets wiped out on-focus and improves the UI visuals in general. The quantity textbox is actually a numerical-only textbox. 1: <input type="number" id="quantity" data_mincount="" class="inputWidth" /> The last line is for additional instructions. This looks like a label but it’s content is editable. Just adding the ‘contenteditable’ attribute to the span allow the user to edit the text inside. 1: <span contenteditable id="additionalInstructions" data_texttype="" class="editableContent">select text and edit </span> All of the above is just plain HTML (no lurking javascript acting in here). Makes it real clean and simple. Going more into the HTML, I see that the _Layout.cshtml already is using some HTML5 content. I created my project before installing SP1, so that was the reason for my surprise. 1: <!DOCTYPE html> This is the doctype declaration in HTML5 and this is supported even by IE6 (just take my word on IE6 now, don’t go install it to test it, especially when MS is doing an IE6 countdown). That’s just amazing and extremely easy to read remember and talk about a few less bytes on every call! I modified the rest of my _Layout.cshtml to the below: 1: <!DOCTYPE html> 2: <html> 3: <head> 4: <title>5Commerce - HTML 5 Ecommerce site</title> 5: <link href="@Url.Content("~/Content/Site.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> 6: <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> 7: <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/CustomScripts.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> 8: <script type="text/javascript"> 9: $(document).ready(function () { 10: WireupEvents(); 11: }); 12:</script> 13:  14: </head> 15:  16: <body role="document" class="bodybackground"> 17: <header role="heading"> 18: <h2>5Commerce - HTML 5 Ecommerce site!</h2> 19: </header> 20: <section id="mainForm"> 21: @RenderBody() 22: </section> 23: <footer id="page_footer" role="siteBaseInfo"> 24: <p>&copy; 2011 5Commerce Inc!</p> 25: </footer> 26: </body> 27: </html> I’m sure you’re seeing some of the new tags here. To give a brief intro about them: <header>, <footer>: Marks the header/footer region of a page or section. <section>: A logical grouping of content role attribute: Identifies the responsibility of an element. This attribute can be used by screen readers and can also be filtered through jQuery. SP1 also allows for some intellisense in HTML5. You see the other types of input fields – email, date, datetime, month, url and there are others as well. So once my page loads, i.e., ‘on document ready’, I’m wiring up the events following the principles of unobtrusive javascript. In the snippet below, I’m controlling the behavior of the input controls for specific events. 1: $("#productList").bind('change blur', function () { 2: IsSelectedProductValid(); 3: }); 4:  5: $("#quantity").bind('blur', function () { 6: IsQuantityValid(); 7: }); 8:  9: $("#placeOrderButton").click( 10: function () { 11: if (IsPageValid()) { 12: LoadProducts(); 13: } 14: }); This enables some client-side validation to occur before the data is sent to the server. These validation constraints are obtained through a JSON call to the WCF service and are set to the ‘data_’ attributes of the input controls. Have a look at the ‘GetValidators()’ function below: 1: function GetValidators() { 2: // the post to your webservice or page 3: $.ajax({ 4: type: "GET", //GET or POST or PUT or DELETE verb 5: url: "http://localhost:14805/OrderService.svc/GetValidators", // Location of the service 6: data: "{}", //Data sent to server 7: contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", // content type sent to server 8: dataType: "json", //Expected data format from server 9: processdata: true, //True or False 10: success: function (result) {//On Successfull service call 11: if (result.length > 0) { 12: for (i = 0; i < result.length; i++) { 13: if (result[i].PropertyName == "FirstName") { 14: if (result[i].MinLength > 0) { 15: $("#firstName").attr("data_minLength", result[i].MinLength); 16: } 17: if (result[i].MaxLength > 0) { 18: $("#firstName").attr("data_maxLength", result[i].MaxLength); 19: } 20: } 21: else if (result[i].PropertyName == "LastName") { 22: if (result[i].MinLength > 0) { 23: $("#lastName").attr("data_minLength", result[i].MinLength); 24: } 25: if (result[i].MaxLength > 0) { 26: $("#lastName").attr("data_maxLength", result[i].MaxLength); 27: } 28: } 29: else if (result[i].PropertyName == "Quantity") { 30: if (result[i].MinCount > 0) { 31: $("#quantity").attr("data_minCount", result[i].MinCount); 32: } 33: } 34: else if (result[i].PropertyName == "AdditionalInstructions") { 35: if (result[i].TextType.length > 0) { 36: $("#additionalInstructions").attr("data_textType", result[i].TextType); 37: } 38: } 39: } 40: } 41: }, 42: error: function (result) {// When Service call fails 43: alert('Service call failed: ' + result.status + ' ' + result.statusText); 44: } 45: }); 46:  47: //.... 48: } Just before the GetValidators() function runs and sets the validation constraints, this is what the html looks like (seen through the Dev tools of Chrome): After the function executes, you see the values in the ‘data_’  attributes. As and when we enter valid data into these fields, the error messages disappear, since the validation is bound to the blur event of the control. There you see… no error messages (well, the catch here is that once you enter THAT name, all errors disappear automatically). Clicking on ‘Place Order!’ runs the SaveOrder function. You can see the JSON for the order object that is getting constructed and passed to the WCF Service. 1: function SaveOrder() { 2: var addlInstructionsDefaultText = "select text and edit"; 3: var addlInstructions = $("span:first").text(); 4: if(addlInstructions == addlInstructionsDefaultText) 5: { 6: addlInstructions = ''; 7: } 8: var orderJson = { 9: AdditionalInstructions: addlInstructions, 10: Customer: { 11: FirstName: $("#firstName").val(), 12: LastName: $("#lastName").val() 13: }, 14: OrderedProduct: { 15: Id: $("#productList").val(), 16: Quantity: $("#quantity").val() 17: } 18: }; 19:  20: // the post to your webservice or page 21: $.ajax({ 22: type: "POST", //GET or POST or PUT or DELETE verb 23: url: "http://localhost:14805/OrderService.svc/SaveOrder", // Location of the service 24: data: JSON.stringify(orderJson), //Data sent to server 25: contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", // content type sent to server 26: dataType: "json", //Expected data format from server 27: processdata: false, //True or False 28: success: function (result) {//On Successfull service call 29: window.location.href = "http://localhost:14805/home/ShowOrderDetail/" + result; 30: }, 31: error: function (request, error) {// When Service call fails 32: alert('Service call failed: ' + request.status + ' ' + request.statusText); 33: } 34: }); 35: } The service saves this order into an XML file and returns the order id (a guid). On success, I redirect to the ShowOrderDetail action method passing the guid. This page will show all the details of the order. Although the back-end weightlifting is done by WCF, I did not show any of that plumbing-work as I wanted to concentrate more on the HTML5 and its associates. However, you can see it all in the source here. I do have one issue with HTML5 and this is an existing issue with HTML4 as well. If you see the snippet above where I’ve declared a textbox for first name, you’ll see the autofocus attribute just dangling by itself. It doesn’t follow the xml syntax of ‘key="value"’ allowing users to continue writing badly-formatted html even in the new version. You’ll see the same issue with the ‘contenteditable’ attribute as well. The work-around is that you can do ‘autofocus=”true”’ and it’ll work fine plus make it well-formatted. But unless the standards enforce this, there will be people (me included) who’ll get by, by just typing the bare minimum! Hoping this will get fixed in the coming version-updates. Source code here. Verdict: I think it’s time for us to embrace the new HTML5. Thank you HTML4 and Welcome HTML5.

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• WPF: Timers

  - by Ilya Verbitskiy

  I believe, once your WPF application will need to execute something periodically, and today I would like to discuss how to do that. There are two possible solutions. You can use classical System.Threading.Timer class or System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer class, which is the part of WPF. I have created an application to show you how to use the API.     Let’s take a look how you can implement timer using System.Threading.Timer class. First of all, it has to be initialized.   1: private Timer timer; 2:   3: public MainWindow() 4: { 5: // Form initialization code 6: 7: timer = new Timer(OnTimer, null, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan); 8: }   Timer’s constructor accepts four parameters. The first one is the callback method which is executed when timer ticks. I will show it to you soon. The second parameter is a state which is passed to the callback. It is null because there is nothing to pass this time. The third parameter is the amount of time to delay before the callback parameter invokes its methods. I use System.Threading.Timeout helper class to represent infinite timeout which simply means the timer is not going to start at the moment. And the final fourth parameter represents the time interval between invocations of the methods referenced by callback. Infinite timeout timespan means the callback method will be executed just once. Well, the timer has been created. Let’s take a look how you can start the timer.   1: private void StartTimer(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: timer.Change(TimeSpan.Zero, new TimeSpan(0, 0, 1)); 4:   5: // Disable the start buttons and enable the reset button. 6: }   The timer is started by calling its Change method. It accepts two arguments: the amount of time to delay before the invoking the callback method and the time interval between invocations of the callback. TimeSpan.Zero means we start the timer immediately and TimeSpan(0, 0, 1) tells the timer to tick every second. There is one method hasn’t been shown yet. This is the callback method OnTimer which does a simple task: it shows current time in the center of the screen. Unfortunately you cannot simple write something like this:   1: clock.Content = DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss");   The reason is Timer runs callback method on a separate thread, and it is not possible to access GUI controls from a non-GUI thread. You can avoid the problem using System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher class.   1: private void OnTimer(object state) 2: { 3: Dispatcher.Invoke(() => ShowTime()); 4: } 5:   6: private void ShowTime() 7: { 8: clock.Content = DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss"); 9: }   You can build similar application using System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer class. The class represents a timer which is integrated into the Dispatcher queue. It means that your callback method is executed on GUI thread and you can write a code which updates your GUI components directly.   1: private DispatcherTimer dispatcherTimer; 2:   3: public MainWindow() 4: { 5: // Form initialization code 6:   7: dispatcherTimer = new DispatcherTimer { Interval = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 1) }; 8: dispatcherTimer.Tick += OnDispatcherTimer; 9: } Dispatcher timer has nicer and cleaner API. All you need is to specify tick interval and Tick event handler. The you just call Start method to start the timer.   private void StartDispatcher(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { dispatcherTimer.Start(); // Disable the start buttons and enable the reset button. } And, since the Tick event handler is executed on GUI thread, the code which sets the actual time is straightforward.   1: private void OnDispatcherTimer(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: ShowTime(); 4: } We’re almost done. Let’s take a look how to stop the timers. It is easy with the Dispatcher Timer.   1: dispatcherTimer.Stop(); And slightly more complicated with the Timer. You should use Change method again.   1: timer.Change(Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan, Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan); What is the best way to add timer into an application? The Dispatcher Timer has simple interface, but its advantages are disadvantages at the same time. You should not use it if your Tick event handler executes time-consuming operations. It freezes your window which it is executing the event handler method. You should think about using System.Threading.Timer in this case. The code is available on GitHub.

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• People, Process & Engagement: WebCenter Partner Keste

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Within the WebCenter group here at Oracle, discussions about people, process and engagement cross over many vertical industries and products. Amidst our growing partner ecosystem, the community provides us insight into great customer use cases every day. Such is the case with our partner, Keste, who provides us a guest post on our blog today with an overview of their innovative solution for a customer in the transportation industry. Keste is an Oracle software solutions and development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. As a Platinum member of the Oracle® PartnerNetwork, Keste designs, develops and deploys custom solutions that automate complex business processes. Seamless Customer Self-Service Experience in the Trucking Industry with Oracle WebCenter Portal  Keste, Oracle Platinum Partner Customer Overview Omnitracs, Inc., a Qualcomm company provides mobility solutions for trucking fleets to companies in the transportation industry. Omnitracs’ mobility services include basic communications such as text as well as advanced monitoring services such as GPS tracking, temperature tracking of perishable goods, load tracking and weighting distribution, and many others. Customer Business Needs Already the leading provider of mobility solutions for large trucking fleets, they chose to target smaller trucking fleets as new customers. However their existing high-touch customer support method would not be a cost effective or scalable method to manage and service these smaller customers. Omnitracs needed to provide several self-service features to make customer support more scalable while keeping customer satisfaction levels high and the costs manageable. The solution also had to be very intuitive and easy to use. The systems that Omnitracs sells to these trucking customers require professional installation and smaller customers need to track and schedule the installation. Information captured in Oracle eBusiness Suite needed to be readily available for new customers to track these purchases and delivery details. Omnitracs wanted a high impact User Interface to significantly improve customer experience with the ability to integrate with EBS, provisioning systems as well as CRM systems that were already implemented. Omnitracs also wanted to build an architecture platform that could potentially be extended to other Portals. Omnitracs’ stated goal was to deliver an “eBay-like” or “Amazon-like” experience for all of their customers so that they could reach a much broader market beyond their large company customer base. Solution Overview In order to manage the increased complexity, the growing support needs of global customers and improve overall product time-to-market in a cost-effective manner, IT began to deliver a self-service model. This self service model not only transformed numerous business processes but is also allowing the business to keep up with the growing demands of the (internal and external) customers. This solution was a customer service Portal that provided self service capabilities for large and small customers alike for Activation of mobility products, managing add-on applications for the devices (much like the Apple App Store), transferring services when trucks are sold to other companies as well as deactivation all without the involvement of a call service agent or sending multiple emails to different Omnitracs contacts. This is a conceptual view of the Customer Portal showing the details of the components that make up the solution. 12.00 The portal application for transactions was entirely built using ADF 11g R2. Omnitracs’ business had a pressing requirement to have a portal available 24/7 for its customers. Since there were interactions with EBS in the back-end, the downtimes on the EBS would negate this availability. Omnitracs devised a decoupling strategy at the database side for the EBS data. The decoupling of the database was done using Oracle Data Guard and completely insulated the solution from any eBusiness Suite down time. The customer has no knowledge whether eBS is running or not. Here are two sample screenshots of the portal application built in Oracle ADF. Customer Benefits The Customer Portal not only provided the scalability to grow the business but also provided the seamless integration with other disparate applications. Some of the key benefits are: Improved Customer Experience: With a modern look and feel and a Portal that has the aspects of an App Store, the customer experience was significantly improved. Page response times went from several seconds to sub-second for all of the pages. Enabled new product launches: After successfully dominating the large fleet market, Omnitracs now has a scalable solution to sell and manage smaller fleet customers giving them a huge advantage over their nearest competitors. Dozens of new customers have been acquired via this portal through an onboarding process that now takes minutes Seamless Integrations Improves Customer Support: ADF 11gR2 allowed Omnitracs to bring a diverse list of applications into one integrated solution. This provided a seamless experience for customers to route them from Marketing focused application to a customer-oriented portal. Internally, it also allowed Sales Representatives to have an integrated flow for taking a prospect through the various steps to onboard them as a customer. Key integrations included: Unity Core Salesforce.com Merchant e-Solution for credit card Custom Omnitracs Applications like CUPS and AUTO Security utilizing OID and OVD Back end integration with EBS (Data Guard) and iQ Database Business Impact Significant business impacts were realized through the launch of customer portal. It not only allows the business to push through in underserved segments, but also reduces the time it needs to spend on customer support—allowing the business to focus more on sales and identifying the market for new products. Some of the Immediate Benefits are The entire onboarding process is now completely automated and now completes in minutes. This represents an 85% productivity improvement over their previous processes. And it was 160 times faster! With the success of this self-service solution, the business is now targeting about 3X customer growth in the next five years. This represents a tripling of their overall customer base and significant downstream revenue for the ongoing services. 90%+ improvement of customer onboarding and management process by utilizing, single sign on integration using OID/OAM solution, performance improvements and new self-service functionality Unified login for all Customers, Partners and Internal Users enables login to a common portal and seamless access to all other integrated applications targeted at the respective audience Significantly improved customer experience with a better look and feel with a more user experience focused Portal screens. Helped sales of the new product by having an easy way of ordering and activating the product. Data Guard helped increase availability of the Portal to 99%+ and make it independent of EBS downtime. This gave customers the feel of high availability of the portal application. Some of the anticipated longer term Benefits are: Platform that can be leveraged to launch any new product introduction and enable all product teams to reach new customers and new markets Easy integration with content management to allow business owners more control of the product catalog Overall reduced TCO with standardization of the Oracle platform Managed IT support cost savings through optimization of technology skills needed to support and modify this solution ------------------------------------------------------------ 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}

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• BizTalk: History of one project architecture

  - by Leonid Ganeline

  "In the beginning God made heaven and earth. Then he started to integrate." At the very start was the requirement: integrate two working systems. Small digging up: It was one system. It was good but IT guys want to change it to the new one, much better, chipper, more flexible, and more progressive in technologies, more suitable for the future, for the faster world and hungry competitors. One thing. One small, little thing. We cannot turn off the old system (call it A, because it was the first), turn on the new one (call it B, because it is second but not the last one). The A has a hundreds users all across a country, they must study B. A still has a lot nice custom features, home-made features that cannot disappear. These features have to be moved to the B and it is a long process, months and months of redevelopment. So, the decision was simple. Let’s move not jump, let’s both systems working side-by-side several months. In this time we could teach the users and move all custom A’s special functionality to B. That automatically means both systems should work side-by-side all these months and use the same data. Data in A and B must be in sync. That’s how the integration projects get birth. Moreover, the specific of the user tasks requires the both systems must be in sync in real-time. Nightly synchronization is not working, absolutely.   First draft The first draft seems simple. Both systems keep data in SQL databases. When data changes, the Create, Update, Delete operations performed on the data, and the sync process could be started. The obvious decision is to use triggers on tables. When we are talking about data, we are talking about several entities. For example, Orders and Items [in Orders]. We decided to use the BizTalk Server to synchronize systems. Why it was chosen is another story. Second draft   Let’s take an example how it works in more details. 1.       User creates a new entity in the A system. This fires an insert trigger on the entity table. Trigger has to pass the message “Entity created”. This message includes all attributes of the new entity, but I focused on the Id of this entity in the A system. Notation for this message is id.A. System A sends id.A to the BizTalk Server. 2.       BizTalk transforms id.A to the format of the system B. This is easiest part and I will not focus on this kind of transformations in the following text. The message on the picture is still id.A but it is in slightly different format, that’s why it is changing in color. BizTalk sends id.A to the system B. 3.       The system B creates the entity on its side. But it uses different id-s for entities, these id-s are id.B. System B saves id.A+id.B. System B sends the message id.A+id.B back to the BizTalk. 4.       BizTalk sends the message id.A+id.B to the system A. 5.       System A saves id.A+id.B. Why both id-s should be saved on both systems? It was one of the next requirements. Users of both systems have to know the systems are in sync or not in sync. Users working with the entity on the system A can see the id.B and use it to switch to the system B and work there with the copy of the same entity. The decision was to store the pairs of entity id-s on both sides. If there is only one id, the entities are not in sync yet (for the Create operation). Third draft Next problem was the reliability of the synchronization. The synchronizing process can be interrupted on each step, when message goes through the wires. It can be communication problem, timeout, temporary shutdown one of the systems, the second system cannot be synchronized by some internal reason. There were several potential problems that prevented from enclosing the whole synchronization process in one transaction. Decision was to restart the whole sync process if it was not finished (in case of the error). For this purpose was created an additional service. Let’s call it the Resync service. We still keep the id pairs in both systems, but only for the fast access not for the synchronization process. For the synchronizing these id-s now are kept in one main place, in the Resync service database. The Resync service keeps record as: ·       Id.A ·       Id.B ·       Entity.Type ·       Operation (Create, Update, Delete) ·       IsSyncStarted (true/false) ·       IsSyncFinished (true/false0 The example now looks like: 1.       System A creates id.A. id.A is saved on the A. Id.A is sent to the BizTalk. 2.       BizTalk sends id.A to the Resync and to the B. id.A is saved on the Resync. 3.       System B creates id.B. id.A+id.B are saved on the B. id.A+id.B are sent to the BizTalk. 4.       BizTalk sends id.A+id.B to the Resync and to the A. id.A+id.B are saved on the Resync. 5.       id.A+id.B are saved on the B. Resync changes the IsSyncStarted and IsSyncFinished flags accordingly. The Resync service implements three main methods: ·       Save (id.A, Entity.Type, Operation) ·       Save (id.A, id.B, Entity.Type, Operation) ·       Resync () Two Save() are used to save id-s to the service storage. See in the above example, in 2 and 4 steps. What about the Resync()? It is the method that finishes the interrupted synchronization processes. If Save() is started by the trigger event, the Resync() is working as an independent process. It periodically scans the Resync storage to find out “unfinished” records. Then it restarts the synchronization processes. It tries to synchronize them several times then gives up.     One more thing, both systems A and B must tolerate duplicates of one synchronizing process. Say on the step 3 the system B was not able to send id.A+id.B back. The Resync service must restart the synchronization process that will send the id.A to B second time. In this case system B must just send back again also created id.A+id.B pair without errors. That means “tolerate duplicates”. Fourth draft Next draft was created only because of the aesthetics. As it always happens, aesthetics gave significant performance gain to the whole system. First was the stupid question. Why do we need this additional service with special database? Can we just master the BizTalk to do something like this Resync() does? So the Resync orchestration is doing the same thing as the Resync service. It is started by the Id.A and finished by the id.A+id.B message. The first works as a Start message, the second works as a Finish message.     Here is a diagram the whole process without errors. It is pretty straightforward. The Resync orchestration is waiting for the Finish message specific period of time then resubmits the Id.A message. It resubmits the Id.A message specific number of times then gives up and gets suspended. It can be resubmitted then it starts the whole process again: waiting [, resubmitting [, get suspended]], finishing. Tuning up The Resync orchestration resubmits the id.A message with special “Resubmitted” flag. The subscription filter on the Resync orchestration includes predicate as (Resubmit_Flag != “Resubmitted”). That means only the first Sync orchestration starts the Resync orchestration. Other Sync orchestration instantiated by the resubmitting can finish this Resync orchestration but cannot start another instance of the Resync   Here is a diagram where system B was inaccessible for some period of time. The Resync orchestration resubmitted the id.A two times. Then system B got the response the id.A+id.B and this finished the Resync service execution. What is interesting about this, there were submitted several identical id.A messages and only one id.A+id.B message. Because of this, the system B and the Resync must tolerate the duplicate messages. We also told about this requirement for the system B. Now the same requirement is for the Resunc. Let’s assume the system B was very slow in the first response and the Resync service had time to resubmit two id.A messages. System B responded not, as it was in previous case, with one id.A+id.B but with two id.A+id.B messages. First of them finished the Resync execution for the id.A. What about the second id.A+id.B? Where it goes? So, we have to add one more internal requirement. The whole solution must tolerate many identical id.A+id.B messages. It is easy task with the BizTalk. I added the “SinkExtraMessages” subscriber (orchestration with one receive shape), that just get these messages and do nothing. Real design Real architecture is much more complex and interesting. In reality each system can submit several id.A almost simultaneously and completely unordered. There are not only the “Create entity” operation but the Update and Delete operations. And these operations relate each other. Say the Update operation after Delete means not the same as Update after Create. In reality there are entities related each other. Say the Order and Order Items. Change on one of it could start the series of the operations on another. Moreover, the system internals are the “black boxes” and we cannot predict the exact content and order of the operation series. It worth to say, I had to spend a time to manage the zombie message problems. The zombies are still here, but this is not a problem now. And this is another story. What is interesting in the last design? One orchestration works to help another to be more reliable. Why two orchestration design is more reliable, isn’t it something strange? The Synch orchestration takes all the message exchange between systems, here is the area where most of the errors could happen. The Resync orchestration sends and receives messages only within the BizTalk server. Is there another design? Sure. All Resync functionality could be implemented inside the Sync orchestration. Hey guys, some other ideas?

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• A Basic Thread

  - by Joe Mayo

  Most of the programs written are single-threaded, meaning that they run on the main execution thread. For various reasons such as performance, scalability, and/or responsiveness additional threads can be useful. .NET has extensive threading support, from the basic threads introduced in v1.0 to the Task Parallel Library (TPL) introduced in v4.0. To get started with threads, it's helpful to begin with the basics; starting a Thread. Why Do I Care? The scenario I'll use for needing to use a thread is writing to a file.  Sometimes, writing to a file takes a while and you don't want your user interface to lock up until the file write is done. In other words, you want the application to be responsive to the user. How Would I Go About It? The solution is to launch a new thread that performs the file write, allowing the main thread to return to the user right away.  Whenever the file writing thread completes, it will let the user know.  In the meantime, the user is free to interact with the program for other tasks. The following examples demonstrate how to do this. Show Me the Code? The code we'll use to work with threads is in the System.Threading namespace, so you'll need the following using directive at the top of the file: using System.Threading; When you run code on a thread, the code is specified via a method.  Here's the code that will execute on the thread: private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written."); } The call to Thread.Sleep(1000) delays thread execution. The parameter is specified in milliseconds, and 1000 means that this will cause the program to sleep for approximately 1 second.  This method happens to be static, but that's just part of this example, which you'll see is launched from the static Main method.  A thread could be instance or static.  Notice that the method does not have parameters and does not have a return type. As you know, the way to refer to a method is via a delegate.  There is a delegate named ThreadStart in System.Threading that refers to a method without parameters or return type, shown below: ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); I'll show you the whole program below, but the ThreadStart instance above goes in the Main method. The thread uses the ThreadStart instance, fileWriterHandlerDelegate, to specify the method to execute on the thread: Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); As shown above, the argument type for the Thread constructor is the ThreadStart delegate type. The fileWriterHandlerDelegate argument is an instance of the ThreadStart delegate type. This creates an instance of a thread and what code will execute, but the new thread instance, fileWriter, isn't running yet. You have to explicitly start it, like this: fileWriter.Start(); Now, the code in the WriteFile method is executing on a separate thread. Meanwhile, the main thread that started the fileWriter thread continues on it's own.  You have two threads running at the same time. Okay, I'm Starting to Get Glassy Eyed. How Does it All Fit Together? The example below is the whole program, pulling all the previous bits together. It's followed by its output and an explanation. using System; using System.Threading; namespace BasicThread { class Program { static void Main() { ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); Console.WriteLine("Starting FileWriter"); fileWriter.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Called FileWriter"); Console.ReadKey(); } private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written"); } } } And here's the output: Starting FileWriter Called FileWriter File Written So, Why are the Printouts Backwards? The output above corresponds to Console.Writeline statements in the program, with the second and third seemingly reversed. In a single-threaded program, "File Written" would print before "Called FileWriter". However, this is a multi-threaded (2 or more threads) program.  In multi-threading, you can't make any assumptions about when a given thread will run.  In this case, I added the Sleep statement to the WriteFile method to greatly increase the chances that the message from the main thread will print first. Without the Thread.Sleep, you could run this on a system with multiple cores and/or multiple processors and potentially get different results each time. Interesting Tangent but What Should I Get Out of All This? Going back to the main point, launching the WriteFile method on a separate thread made the program more responsive.  The file writing logic ran for a while, but the main thread returned to the user, as demonstrated by the print out of "Called FileWriter".  When the file write finished, it let the user know via another print statement. This was a very efficient use of CPU resources that made for a more pleasant user experience. Joe

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• Azure Task Scheduling Options

  - by charlie.mott

  Currently, the Azure PaaS does not offer a distributed\resilient task scheduling service.  If you do want to host a task scheduling product\solution off-premise (and ideally use Azure), what are your options? PaaS Option 1: Worker Roles Use a worker role to schedule and execute actions at specific time periods.  There are a few frameworks available to assist with this: http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com https://github.com/Lokad/lokad-cloud/wiki/TaskScheduler http://blog.smarx.com/posts/building-a-task-scheduler-in-windows-azure - This addresses a slightly different set of requirements. It’s a more dynamic approach for queuing up tasks, but not repeatable tasks (e.g. daily). I found the Azure Toolkit option the most simple to implement.  Step 1 : Create a domain entity implementing IJob for each job to schedule.  In this sample, I asynchronously call a WCF service method. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole.Jobs 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit; 4: using ScheduledTasksService; 5: 6: public class UploadEmployeesJob : IJob 7: { 8: public void Run() 9: { 10: // Call Tasks Service 11: var client = new ScheduledTasksServiceClient("BasicHttpBinding_IScheduledTasksService"); 12: client.UploadEmployees(); 13: client.Close(); 14: } 15: } 16: } Step 2 : In the worker role run method, add the jobs to the toolkit engine. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit.Engine; 4: using Jobs; 5:   6: public class WorkerRole : WorkerRoleEntryPoint 7: { 8: public override void Run() 9: { 10: var engine = new CloudEngine(); 11:   12: // Add Scheduled Jobs (using CronJob syntax - see http://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference). 13:   14: // 1. Upload Employee job - 8.00 PM every weekday (Mon-Fri) 15: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<UploadEmployeesJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 20 * * 1-5"; }); 16: // 2. Purge Data job - 10 AM every Saturday 17: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<PurgeDataJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 10 * * 6"; }); 18: // 3. Process Exceptions job - Every 5 minutes 19: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<ProcessExceptionsJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "*/5 * * * *"; }); 20:   21: engine.Run(); 22: base.Run(); 23: } 24: } 25: } Pros Cons Azure Toolkit option is simple to implement. For the AzureToolkit option, you are limited to a single worker role.  Otherwise, the jobs will be executed multiple times, once for each worker role instance.   Paying for a continuously running worker role, even if it just processes a single job once a week.  If you only have a few scheduled tasks to run calling asynchronous services hosted in different web roles, an extra small worker role likely to be sufficient.  However, for an extra small worker role this still costs $14.40/month (03/09/2012). Option 2: Use Scheduled Task on Azure Web Role calling a console app Setup a Windows Scheduled Task on the Azure Web Role. This calls a console application that calls the WCF service methods that run the task actions. This design is described here: http://www.ronaldwidha.net/2011/02/23/cron-job-on-azure-using-scheduled-task-on-a-web-role-to-replace-azure-worker-role-for-background-job/ http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/index.php/2011/07/windows-azure-task-scheduler/ http://devlicio.us/blogs/vinull/archive/2011/10/23/moving-to-azure-worker-roles-for-nothing-and-tasks-for-free.aspx Pros Cons Fairly easy to implement. Supportability - I RDC’ed onto the Azure server and stopped the scheduled task. I then rebooted the machine and the task was re-started. I also tried deleting the task and rebooting, the same thing occurred. The only way to permanently guarantee that a task is disabled is to do a fresh deployment. I think this is a major supportability concern.   Saleability - multiple instances would trigger multiple tasks. You can only have one instance for the scheduled task web role. The guidance implements setup of the scheduled task as part of a web role instance. But if you have more than one instance in a web role, the task will be triggered multiple times for each scheduled action (once per machine). Workaround: If we wanted to use scheduled tasks for another client with a saleable WCF service, then we could include the console & tasks scripts in a separate web role (e.g. a empty WCF service with no real purpose to it). SaaS Option 3: Azure Marketplace I thought that someone might be offering this type of service via the Azure marketplace. At the point of writing this blog post, I did not find anyone doing so. https://datamarket.azure.com/ Pros Cons   Nobody currently offers this on the Azure Marketplace. Option 4: Online Job Scheduling Service Provider There are plenty of online providers that offer this type of service on a pay-as-you-go approach.  Some of these are free for small usage.   Many of these providers are listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcron Pros Cons No bespoke development for scheduler. Reliance on third party. IaaS Option 5: Setup Scheduling Software on Azure IaaS VM’s One of job scheduling software offerings could be installed and configured on Azure VM’s.  A list of software options is listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_job_scheduler_software Pros Cons Enterprise distributed\resilient task scheduling service VM Setup and maintenance   Software Licence Costs Option 6: VM Gallery A the time of writing this blog post, I did not spot a VM in the gallery that included pre-installation of any of the above software options. Pros Cons   No current VM template. Summary For my current project that had a small handful of tasks to schedule with a limited project budget I chose option 1 (a worker role using the Azure Toolkit to schedule tasks).  If I was building an enterprise scale solution for the future, options 4 and 5 are currently worthy of consideration. Hopefully, Microsoft will include tasks scheduling in the future as part of their PaaS offerings.

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• What's up with LDoms: Part 5 - A few Words about Consoles

  - by Stefan Hinker

  Back again to look at a detail of LDom configuration that is often forgotten - the virtual console server. Remember, LDoms are SPARC systems.  As such, each guest will have it's own OBP running.  And to connect to that OBP, the administrator will need a console connection.  Since it's OBP, and not some x86 BIOS, this console will be very serial in nature ;-)  It's really very much like in the good old days, where we had a terminal concentrator where all those serial cables ended up in.  Just like with other components in LDoms, the virtualized solution looks very similar. Every LDom guest requires exactly one console connection.  Envision this similar to the RS-232 port on older SPARC systems.  The LDom framework provides one or more console services that provide access to these connections.  This would be the virtual equivalent of a network terminal server (NTS), where all those serial cables are plugged in.  In the physical world, we'd have a list somewhere, that would tell us which TCP-Port of the NTS was connected to which server.  "ldm list" does just that: root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 0.4% 27d 8h 22m jupiter bound ------ 5002 20 8G mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.5% 55d 14h 10m venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.5% 56d 40m pluto inactive ------ 4 4G The column marked "CONS" tells us, where to reach the console of each domain. In the case of the primary domain, this is actually a (more) physical connection - it's the console connection of the physical system, which is either reachable via the ILOM of that system, or directly via the serial console port on the chassis. All the other guests are reachable through the console service which we created during the inital setup of the system.  Note that pluto does not have a port assigned.  This is because pluto is not yet bound.  (Binding can be viewed very much as the assembly of computer parts - CPU, Memory, disks, network adapters and a serial console cable are all put together when binding the domain.)  Unless we set the port number explicitly, LDoms Manager will do this on a first come, first serve basis.  For just a few domains, this is fine.  For larger deployments, it might be a good idea to assign these port numbers manually using the "ldm set-vcons" command.  However, there is even better magic associated with virtual consoles. You can group several domains into one console group, reachable through one TCP port of the console service.  This can be useful when several groups of administrators are to be given access to different domains, or for other grouping reasons.  Here's an example: root@sun # ldm set-vcons group=planets service=console jupiter root@sun # ldm set-vcons group=planets service=console pluto root@sun # ldm bind jupiter root@sun # ldm bind pluto root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 6.1% 27d 8h 24m jupiter bound ------ 5002 200 8G mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.6% 55d 14h 12m pluto bound ------ 5002 4 4G venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.5% 56d 42m root@sun # telnet localhost 5002 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. sun-vnts-planets: h, l, c{id}, n{name}, q:l DOMAIN ID DOMAIN NAME DOMAIN STATE 2 jupiter online 3 pluto online sun-vnts-planets: h, l, c{id}, n{name}, q:npluto Connecting to console "pluto" in group "planets" .... Press ~? for control options .. What I did here was add the two domains pluto and jupiter to a new console group called "planets" on the service "console" running in the primary domain.  Simply using a group name will create such a group, if it doesn't already exist.  By default, each domain has its own group, using the domain name as the group name.  The group will be available on port 5002, chosen by LDoms Manager because I didn't specify it.  If I connect to that console group, I will now first be prompted to choose the domain I want to connect to from a little menu. Finally, here's an example how to assign port numbers explicitly: root@sun # ldm set-vcons port=5044 group=pluto service=console pluto root@sun # ldm bind pluto root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 3.8% 27d 8h 54m jupiter active -t---- 5002 200 8G 0.5% 30m mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.6% 55d 14h 43m pluto bound ------ 5044 4 4G venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.4% 56d 1h 13m With this, pluto would always be reachable on port 5044 in its own exclusive console group, no matter in which order other domains are bound. Now, you might be wondering why we always have to mention the console service name, "console" in all the examples here.  The simple answer is because there could be more than one such console service.  For all "normal" use, a single console service is absolutely sufficient.  But the system is flexible enough to allow more than that single one, should you need them.  In fact, you could even configure such a console service on a domain other than the primary (or control domain), which would make that domain a real console server.  I actually have a customer who does just that - they want to separate console access from the control domain functionality.  But this is definately a rather sophisticated setup. Something I don't want to go into in this post is access control.  vntsd, which is the daemon providing all these console services, is fully RBAC-aware, and you can configure authorizations for individual users to connect to console groups or individual domain's consoles.  If you can't wait until I get around to security, check out the man page of vntsd. Further reading: The Admin Guide is rather reserved on this subject.  I do recommend to check out the Reference Manual. The manpage for vntsd will discuss all the control sequences as well as the grouping and authorizations mentioned here.

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• WCF .svc Accessible Over HTTP But Accessing WSDL Causes "Connection Was Reset"

  - by Wolfwyrd

  I have a WCF service which is hosted on IIS6 on a Win2003 SP2 machine. The WCF service is hosting correctly and is visible over HTTP giving the usual "To test this service, you will need to create a client and use it to call the service" message. However accessing the .svc?WSDL link causes the connection to be reset. The server itself is returning a 200 in the logs for the WSDL request, an example of which is shown here, the first call gets a connection reset, the second is a successful call for the .svc file. 2010-04-09 11:00:21 W3SVC6 MACHINENAME 10.79.42.115 GET /IntegrationService.svc wsdl 80 - 10.75.33.71 HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+7.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;+.NET+CLR+2.0.50727;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322;+.NET+CLR+1.0.3705;+InfoPath.1;+.NET+CLR+3.0.04506.30;+MS-RTC+LM+8;+.NET+CLR+3.0.4506.2152;+.NET+CLR+3.5.30729;) - - devsitename.mydevdomain.com 200 0 0 0 696 3827 2010-04-09 11:04:10 W3SVC6 MACHINENAME 10.79.42.115 GET /IntegrationService.svc - 80 - 10.75.33.71 HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+5.1;+en-GB;+rv:1.9.1.9)+Gecko/20100315+Firefox/3.5.9+(.NET+CLR+3.5.30729) - - devsitename.mydevdomain.com 200 0 0 3144 457 265 My Web.Config looks like: <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment > <baseAddressPrefixFilters> <add prefix="http://devsitename.mydevdomain.com" /> </baseAddressPrefixFilters> </serviceHostingEnvironment> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="My.Service.IntegrationServiceBehavior"> <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" /> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> <services> <service behaviorConfiguration="My.Service.IntegrationServiceBehavior" name="My.Service.IntegrationService"> <endpoint address="" binding="wsHttpBinding" contract="My.Service.Interfaces.IIntegrationService" bindingConfiguration="NoSecurityConfig" /> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> </service> </services> <bindings> <wsHttpBinding> <binding name="NoSecurityConfig"> <security mode="None" /> </binding> </wsHttpBinding> </bindings> </system.serviceModel> I'm pretty much stumped by this one. It works fine through the local dev server in VS2008 but fails after deployment. For further information, the targeted machine does not have a firewall (it's on the internal network) and the logs show the site thinks it's fine with 200 OK responses. I've also tried updating the endpoint with the full URL to my service however it still makes no difference. I have looked into some of the other options - creating a separate WSDL manually and exposing it through the metadata properties (really don't want to do that due to the maintenance issues). If anyone can offer any thoughts on this or any other workarounds it would be greatly appreciated.

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• How to do validation on both client and server side for a service which is a store procedure(return a complex type)

  - by Tai

  Hi I am doing Silverlight 4 In my database, I have a store procedure(having two parameters) which returns rows (with extra fields). So i have to make a complex type for those rows on my Models. And Making a service to call that function import store procedure. The RIA will automatically create a matching Entity(to the complex type) and an operation for me. However, I don't know how to validation the parameters of the operation on both client and server side. For example, the parameter must be an integer only (and greater than 10) or datetime only. below is my xaml code. I am using DomainDataSource control and don't know how to validate the two field parameter.It has two TextBox to let the user types in the value of parameters. Plz help me, thank you <riaControls:DomainDataSource AutoLoad="False" d:DesignData="{d:DesignInstance my1:USPFinancialAccountHistory, CreateList=true}" Height="0" LoadedData="uSPFinancialAccountHistoryDomainDataSource_LoadedData" Name="uSPFinancialAccountHistoryDomainDataSource" QueryName="GetFinancialAccountHistoryQuery" Width="0" Margin="0,0,705,32"> <riaControls:DomainDataSource.DomainContext> <my:USPFinancialAccountHistoryContext /> </riaControls:DomainDataSource.DomainContext> <riaControls:DomainDataSource.QueryParameters> <riaControls:Parameter ParameterName="fiscalYear" Value="{Binding ElementName=fiscalYearTextBox, Path=Text}" /> <riaControls:Parameter ParameterName="fiscalPeriod" Value="{Binding ElementName=fiscalPeriodTextBox, Path=Text}" /> </riaControls:DomainDataSource.QueryParameters> </riaControls:DomainDataSource> <StackPanel Height="30" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Orientation="Horizontal" VerticalAlignment="Top"> <sdk:Label Content="Fiscal Year:" Margin="3" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> <TextBox Name="fiscalYearTextBox" Width="60" /> <sdk:Label Content="Fiscal Period:" Margin="3" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> <TextBox Name="fiscalPeriodTextBox" Width="60" /> <Button Command="{Binding Path=LoadCommand, ElementName=uSPFinancialAccountHistoryDomainDataSource}" Content="Load" Margin="3" Name="uSPFinancialAccountHistoryDomainDataSourceLoadButton" /> </StackPanel> <telerik:RadGridView ItemsSource="{Binding ElementName=uSPFinancialAccountHistoryDomainDataSource, Path=Data}" Name="uSPFinancialAccountHistoryRadGridView" Grid.Row="1" IsReadOnly="True" DataLoadMode="Asynchronous" AutoGenerateColumns="False" ShowGroupPanel="False"> <telerik:RadGridView.Columns> <telerik:GridViewDataColumn Header="Account Number" DataMemberBinding="{Binding AccountNumber}"/> <telerik:GridViewDataColumn Header="Department Number" DataMemberBinding="{Binding DepartmentNumber}"/> <telerik:GridViewDataColumn Header="Period code" DataMemberBinding="{Binding PeriodCode}" /> <telerik:GridViewDataColumn Header="Total Debit" DataMemberBinding="{Binding TotalDebit}" DataFormatString="{}{0:C2}"/> <telerik:GridViewDataColumn Header="Total Credit" DataMemberBinding="{Binding TotalCredit}" DataFormatString="{}{0:C2}"/> <telerik:GridViewDataColumn Header="Period Total" DataMemberBinding="{Binding PeriodTotal}" DataFormatString="{}{0:C2}"/> <telerik:GridViewDataColumn Header="Year To Date" DataMemberBinding="{Binding YearToDate}" DataFormatString="{}{0:C2}"/> </telerik:RadGridView.Columns> </telerik:RadGridView>

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• WCF REST Question, Binding, Configuration

  - by Ethan McGee

  I am working on a WCF rest interface using json. I have wrapped the service in a windows service to host the service but I am now having trouble getting the service to be callable. I am not sure exactly what is wrong. The basic idea is that I want to host the service on a remote server so I want the service mapped to port localhost:7600 so that it can be invoked by posting data to [server_ip]:7600. The problem is most likely in the configuration file, since I am new to WCF and Rest I wasn't really sure what to type for the configuration so sorry if it's a total mess. I removed several chunks of code and comments to make it a little easier to read. These functions should have no bearing on the service since they call only C# functions. WCF Service Code using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.ServiceModel.Web; using System.Text; namespace PCMiler_Connect { public class ZIP_List_Container { public string[] ZIP_List { get; set; } public string Optimized { get; set; } public string Calc_Type { get; set; } public string Cross_International_Borders { get; set; } public string Use_Kilometers { get; set; } public string Hazard_Level { get; set; } public string OK_To_Change_Destination { get; set; } } [ServiceContract] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.PerCall)] public class PCMiler_Webservice { [WebInvoke(Method = "POST", UriTemplate = "", ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, RequestFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json), OperationContract] public List<string> Calculate_Distance(ZIP_List_Container container) { return new List<string>(){ distance.ToString(), time.ToString() }; } } } XML Config File <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <services> <service name="PCMiler_Connect.PCMiler_Webservice"> <endpoint address="" behaviorConfiguration="jsonBehavior" binding="webHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="" contract="PCMiler_Connect.PCMiler_Webservice" /> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="http://localhost:7600/" /> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> </services> <behaviors> <endpointBehaviors> <behavior name="jsonBehavior"> <enableWebScript/> </behavior> </endpointBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> Service Wrapper using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceProcess; using System.ServiceModel; using System.Text; using System.Threading; namespace PCMiler_WIN_Service { public partial class Service1 : ServiceBase { ServiceHost host; public Service1() { InitializeComponent(); } protected override void OnStart(string[] args) { host = new ServiceHost(typeof(PCMiler_Connect.PCMiler_Webservice)); Thread thread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(host.Open)); } protected override void OnStop() { if (host != null) { host.Close(); host = null; } } } }

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• How to send a array as a parameter to a web service using SOAP and objective C.

  - by Alejandra Meraz

  I'm working in a iPhone app that needs to send a array as a parameter using SOAP. this is the current request and connection: NSString *soapMessage = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>\n" "<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\" xmlns:soap=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\">\n" "<soap:Body>\n" "<function xmlns=\"http://tempuri.org/\" />\n" "</soap:Body>\n" "</soap:Envelope>\n"]; NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://myHost.com/myWebService/service.asmx"]; //the url to the WSDL NsMutableURLRequest theRequest = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:url]; NSString *msgLength = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d",[soapMessage length]]; [theRequest addValue:@"text/xml; charset=utf-8" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Type"]; [theRequest addValue:msgLength forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Lenght"]; [theRequest setHTTPMethod:@"POST"]; [theRequest addValue:@"myhost.com" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Host"]; [theRequest addValue:@"http://tempuri.org/function" forHTTPHeaderField:@"SOAPAction"]; [theRequest setHTTPBody:[soapMessage dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]]; theConnection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:theRequest delegate:self]; Now, to send parameters I looked at the WSDL of the function description for the input is like this: <s:complexType name="ArrayOfDictionaryEntry"> <s:sequence> <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" name="DictionaryEntry" type="tns:DictionaryEntry" /> </s:sequence> </s:complexType> <s:complexType name="DictionaryEntry"> <s:sequence> <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="Key" /> <s:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="Value" /> </s:sequence> </s:complexType> <s:element name="functionInput"> <s:complexType /> </s:element> I guess then that I need to make a array of dictionary entries. what I would like to send is something like this [ location => USA, module => DEVELOPMENT] But I'm kind of confused. the array is created outside the SOAP, like an NSArray or inside the SoapMessage? if so... How is it done? and the DictionaryEntry, should I make a class? thanks for your time n.n

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• How to deploy custom MBean to Tomcat?

  - by Christian

  Hi, I'm trying to deploy a custom mbean to a tomcat. This mbean is not part of a webapp. It should be instantiated when tomcat starts. My problem is, I can't find any complete documentation about how to deploy such a mbean. I'm getting different exceptions, depending on my configuration. Has anyone hints, a complete documentation or has implemented a mbean by himself and can post an example? I configured tomcat to read a configuration from his conf directory: <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" mbeansFile="${catalina.base}/conf/mbeans-descriptors.xml"> The content is as follows: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!-- <!DOCTYPE mbeans-descriptors PUBLIC "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Model MBeans Configuration File" "http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/dtds/mbeans-descriptors.dtd"> --> <!-- Descriptions of JMX MBeans --> <mbeans-descriptors> <mbean name="Performance" description="Caculate JVM throughput" type="Performance"> <attribute name="throughput" description="calculated throughput (ratio between gc times and uptime of JVM)" type="double" writeable="false"/> </mbean> </mbeans-descriptors> When name in the xml file and class name match, I get this excption: SEVERE: Error creating mbean Performance javax.management.MalformedObjectNameException: Key properties cannot be empty at javax.management.ObjectName.construct(ObjectName.java:467) at javax.management.ObjectName.<init>(ObjectName.java:1403) at org.apache.tomcat.util.modeler.modules.MbeansSource.execute(MbeansSource.java:202) at org.apache.tomcat.util.modeler.modules.MbeansSource.load(MbeansSource.java:137) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.readEngineMbeans(StandardEngine.java:517) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.init(StandardEngine.java:321) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.start(StandardEngine.java:411) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService.start(StandardService.java:519) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.start(StandardServer.java:710) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:581) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:289) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.apache.commons.daemon.support.DaemonLoader.start(DaemonLoader.java:177) When changing the name attribute in the xml file to test.example:type=Performance, I get this exception: SEVERE: Error creating mbean test.example:type=Performance javax.management.NotCompliantMBeanException: MBean class must have public constructor at com.sun.jmx.mbeanserver.Introspector.testCreation(Introspector.java:127) at com.sun.jmx.interceptor.DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.createMBean(DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.java:284) at com.sun.jmx.interceptor.DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.createMBean(DefaultMBeanServerInterceptor.java:199) at com.sun.jmx.mbeanserver.JmxMBeanServer.createMBean(JmxMBeanServer.java:393) at org.apache.tomcat.util.modeler.modules.MbeansSource.execute(MbeansSource.java:207) at org.apache.tomcat.util.modeler.modules.MbeansSource.load(MbeansSource.java:137) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.readEngineMbeans(StandardEngine.java:517) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.init(StandardEngine.java:321) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.start(StandardEngine.java:411) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService.start(StandardService.java:519) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.start(StandardServer.java:710) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:581) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:289) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.apache.commons.daemon.support.DaemonLoader.start(DaemonLoader.java:177) The documentation from apache is not really helpful, as it just explains a small part. I'm aware of this question but it doesn't help me. The answer I gave worked just for a short time, after that I got some other exceptions. For additional info, the java interface public interface PerformanceMBean { public double getThroughput(); } and implementing class /* some import statements */ public class Performance implements PerformanceMBean { public double getThroughput() { ... } }

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• Include weather information in ASP.Net site from weather.com services

  - by sreejukg

  In this article, I am going to demonstrate how you can use the XMLOAP services (referred as XOAP from here onwards) provided by weather.com to display the weather information in your website. The XOAP services are available to be used for free of charge, provided you are comply with requirements from weather.com. I am writing this article from a technical point of view. If you are planning to use weather.com XOAP services in your application, please refer to the terms and conditions from weather.com website. In order to start using the XOAP services, you need to sign up the XOAP datafeed. The signing process is simple, you simply browse the url http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html. The URL looks similar to the following. Click on the sign up button, you will reach the registration page. Here you need to specify the site name you need to use this feed for. The form looks similar to the following. Once you fill all the mandatory information, click on save and continue button. That’s it. The registration is over. You will receive an email that contains your partner id, license key and SDK. The SDK available in a zipped format, contains the terms of use and documentation about the services available. Other than this the SDK includes the logos and icons required to display the weather information. As per the SDK, currently there are 2 types of information available through XOAP. These services are Current Conditions for over 30,000 U.S. and over 7,900 international Location IDs Updated at least Hourly Five-Day Forecast (today + 4 additional forecast days in consecutive order beginning with tomorrow) for over 30,000 U.S. and over 7,900 international Location IDs Updated at least Three Times Daily The SDK provides detailed information about the fields included in response of each service. Additionally there is a refresh rate that you need to comply with. As per the SDK, the refresh rate means the following “Refresh Rate” shall mean the maximum frequency with which you may call the XML Feed for a given LocID requesting a data set for that LocID. During the time period in between refresh periods the data must be cached by you either in the memory on your servers or in Your Desktop Application. About the Services Weather.com will provide you with access to the XML Feed over the Internet through the hostname xoap.weather.com. The weather data from the XML feed must be requested for a specific location. So you need a location ID (LOC ID). The XML feed work with 2 types of location IDs. First one is with City Identifiers and second one is using 5 Digit US postal codes. If you do not know your location ID, don’t worry, there is a location id search service available for you to retrieve the location id from city name. Since I am a resident in the Kingdom of Bahrain, I am going to retrieve the weather information for Manama(the capital of Bahrain) . In order to get the location ID for Manama, type the following URL in your address bar. http://xoap.weather.com/search/search?where=manama I got the following XML output. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- This document is intended only for use by authorized licensees of The –> <!-- Weather Channel. Unauthorized use is prohibited. Copyright 1995-2011, –> <!-- The Weather Channel Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved. –> <search ver="3.0">       <loc id="BAXX0001" type="1">Al Manama, Bahrain</loc> </search> You can try this with any city name, if the city is available, it will return the location id, and otherwise, it will return nothing. In order to get the weather information, from XOAP,  you need to pass certain parameters to the XOAP service. A brief about the parameters are as follows. Please refer SDK for more details. Parameter name Possible Value cc Optional, if you include this, the current condition will be returned. Value can be anything, as it will be ignored e.g. cc=* dayf If you want the forecast for 5 days, specify dayf=5 This is optional iink Value should be XOAP par Your partner id. You can find this in your registration email from weather.com prod Value should be XOAP key The license key assigned to you. This will be available in the registration email unit s or m (standard or matric or you can think of Celsius/Fahrenheit) this is optional field, if not specified the unit will be standard(s) The URL host for the XOAP service is http://xoap.weather.com. So for my purpose, I need the following request to be made to access the XOAP services. http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/BAXX0001?cc=*&link=xoap&prod=xoap&par=*********&key=************** (The ***** to be replaced with the corresponding alternatives) The response XML have a root element “weather”. Under the root element, it has the following sections <head> - the meta data information about the weather results returned. <loc> - the location data block that provides, the information about the location for which the wheather data is retrieved. <lnks> - the 4 promotional links you need to place along with the weather display. Additional to these 4 links, there should be another link with weather channel logo to the home page of weather.com. <cc> - the current condition data. This element will be there only if you specify the cc element in the request. <dayf> - the forcast data as you specified. This element will be there only if you specify the dayf in the request. In this walkthrough, I am going to capture the weather information for Manama (Location ID: BAXX0001). You need 2 applications to display weather information in your website. A Console application that retrieves data from the XMLOAP and store in the SQL Server database (or any data store as you prefer).This application will be scheduled to execute in every 25 minutes using windows task scheduler, so that we can comply with the refresh rate. A web application that display data from the SQL Server database Retrieve the Weather from XOAP I have created a console application named, Weather Service. I created a SQL server database, with the following columns. I named the table as tblweather. You are free to choose any name. Column name Description lastUpdated Datetime, this is the last time when the weather data is updated. This is the time of the service running TemparatureDateTime The date and time returned by XML feed Temparature The temperature returned by the XML feed. TemparatureUnit The unit of the temperature returned by the XML feed iconId The id of the icon to be used. Currently 48 icons from 0 to 47 are available. WeatherDescription The Weather Description Phrase returned by the feed. Link1url The url to the first promo link Link1Text The text for the first promo link Link2url The url to the second promo link Link2Text The text for the second promo link Link3url The url to the third promo link Link3Text The text for the third promo link Link4url The url to the fourth promo link Link4Text The text for the fourth promo link Every time when the service runs, the application will update the database columns from the XOAP data feed. When the application starts, It is going to get the data as XML from the url. This demonstration uses LINQ to extract the necessary data from the fetched XML. The following are the code segment for extracting data from the weather XML using LINQ. // first, create an instance of the XDocument class with the XOAP URL. replace **** with the corresponding values. XDocument weather = XDocument.Load("http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/BAXX0001?cc=*&link=xoap&prod=xoap&par=***********&key=c*********"); // construct a query using LINQ var feedResult = from item in weather.Descendants() select new { unit = item.Element("head").Element("ut").Value, temp = item.Element("cc").Element("tmp").Value, tempDate = item.Element("cc").Element("lsup").Value, iconId = item.Element("cc").Element("icon").Value, description = item.Element("cc").Element("t").Value, links = from link in item.Elements("lnks").Elements("link") select new { url = link.Element("l").Value, text = link.Element("t").Value } }; // Load the root node to a variable, you may use foreach construct instead. var item1 = feedResult.First(); *If you want to learn more about LINQ and XML, read this nice blog from Scott GU. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/08/07/using-linq-to-xml-and-how-to-build-a-custom-rss-feed-reader-with-it.aspx Now you have all the required values in item1. For e.g. if you want to get the temperature, use item1.temp; Now I just need to execute an SQL query against the database. See the connection part. using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"Data Source=sreeju\sqlexpress;Initial Catalog=Sample;Integrated Security=True")) { string strSql = @"update tblweather set lastupdated=getdate(), temparatureDateTime = @temparatureDateTime, temparature=@temparature, temparatureUnit=@temparatureUnit, iconId = @iconId, description=@description, link1url=@link1url, link1text=@link1text, link2url=@link2url, link2text=@link2text,link3url=@link3url, link3text=@link3text,link4url=@link4url, link4text=@link4text"; SqlCommand comm = new SqlCommand(strSql, conn); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("temparatureDateTime", item1.tempDate); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("temparature", item1.temp); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("temparatureUnit", item1.unit); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("description", item1.description); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("iconId", item1.iconId); var lstLinks = item1.links; comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link1url", lstLinks.ElementAt(0).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link1text", lstLinks.ElementAt(0).text); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link2url", lstLinks.ElementAt(1).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link2text", lstLinks.ElementAt(1).text); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link3url", lstLinks.ElementAt(2).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link3text", lstLinks.ElementAt(2).text); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link4url", lstLinks.ElementAt(3).url); comm.Parameters.AddWithValue("link4text", lstLinks.ElementAt(3).text); conn.Open(); comm.ExecuteNonQuery(); conn.Close(); Console.WriteLine("database updated"); } Now click ctrl + f5 to run the service. I got the following output Check your database and make sure, the data is updated with the latest information from the service. (Make sure you inserted one row in the database by entering some values before executing the service. Otherwise you need to modify your application code to count the rows and conditionally perform insert/update query) Display the Weather information in ASP.Net page Now you got all the data in the database. You just need to create a web application and display the data from the database. I created a new ASP.Net web application with a default.aspx page. In order to comply with the terms of weather.com, You need to use Weather.com logo along with the weather display. You can find the necessary logos to use under the folder “logos” in the SDK. Additionally copy any of the icon set from the folder “icons” to your web application. I used the 93x93 icon set. You are free to use any other sizes available. The design view of the page in VS2010 looks similar to the following. The page contains a heading, an image control (for displaying the weather icon), 2 label controls (for displaying temperature and weather description), 4 hyperlinks (for displaying the 4 promo links returned by the XOAP service) and weather.com logo with hyperlink to the weather.com home page. I am going to write code that will update the values of these controls from the values stored in the database by the service application as mentioned in the previous step. Go to the code behind file for the webpage, enter the following code under Page_Load event handler. using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"Data Source=sreeju\sqlexpress;Initial Catalog=Sample;Integrated Security=True")) { SqlCommand comm = new SqlCommand("select top 1 * from tblweather", conn); conn.Open(); SqlDataReader reader = comm.ExecuteReader(); if (reader.Read()) { lblTemparature.Text = reader["temparature"].ToString() + "&deg;" + reader["temparatureUnit"].ToString(); lblWeatherDescription.Text = reader["description"].ToString(); imgWeather.ImageUrl = "icons/" + reader["iconId"].ToString() + ".png"; lnk1.Text = reader["link1text"].ToString(); lnk1.NavigateUrl = reader["link1url"].ToString(); lnk2.Text = reader["link2text"].ToString(); lnk2.NavigateUrl = reader["link2url"].ToString(); lnk3.Text = reader["link3text"].ToString(); lnk3.NavigateUrl = reader["link3url"].ToString(); lnk4.Text = reader["link4text"].ToString(); lnk4.NavigateUrl = reader["link4url"].ToString(); } conn.Close(); } Press ctrl + f5 to run the page. You will see the following output. That’s it. You need to configure the console application to run every 25 minutes so that the database is updated. Also you can fetch the forecast information and store those in the database, and then retrieve it later in your web page. Since the data resides in your database, you have the full control over your display. You need to make sure your website comply with weather.com license requirements. If you want to get the source code of this walkthrough through the application, post your email address below. Hope you enjoy the reading.

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• From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

  - by thatjeffsmith

  This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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• Why in this example (got from msdn), in GetEnumerator method , new PeopleEnum returns IEnumerator?

  - by odiseh

  Hi guys, Why in this example (got from msdn), in GetEnumerator method , PeopleEnum returns IEnumerator? public class Person { public Person(string fName, string lName) { this.firstName = fName; this.lastName = lName; } public string firstName; public string lastName; } public class People : IEnumerable { private Person[] _people; public People(Person[] pArray) { _people = new Person[pArray.Length]; for (int i = 0; i < pArray.Length; i++) { _people[i] = pArray[i]; } } //why??? IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() { return (IEnumerator) GetEnumerator(); } public PeopleEnum GetEnumerator() { return new PeopleEnum(_people); } } public class PeopleEnum : IEnumerator { public Person[] _people; // Enumerators are positioned before the first element // until the first MoveNext() call. int position = -1; public PeopleEnum(Person[] list) { _people = list; } public bool MoveNext() { position++; return (position < _people.Length); } public void Reset() { position = -1; } object IEnumerator.Current { get { return Current; } } public Person Current { get { try { return _people[position]; } catch (IndexOutOfRangeException) { throw new InvalidOperationException(); } } } }

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• LinqKit System.InvalidCastException When Invoking method-provided expression on member property.

  - by mdworkin

  Given a simple parent/child class structure. I want to use linqkit to apply a child lambda expression on the parent. I also want the Lambda expression to be provided by a utility method. public class Foo { public Bar Bar { get; set; } } public class Bar { public string Value { get; set; } public static Expression<Func<Bar, bool>> GetLambdaX() { return c => c.Value == "A"; } } ... Expression<Func<Foo, bool>> lx = c => Bar.GetLambdaX().Invoke(c.Bar); Console.WriteLine(lx.Expand()); The above code throws System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type 'System.Linq.Expressions.MethodCallExpression' to type 'System.Linq.Expressions.LambdaExpression'. at LinqKit.ExpressionExpander.VisitMethodCall(MethodCallExpression m) at LinqKit.ExpressionVisitor.Visit(Expression exp) at LinqKit.ExpressionVisitor.VisitLambda(LambdaExpression lambda) at LinqKit.ExpressionVisitor.Visit(Expression exp) at LinqKit.Extensions.Expand<TDelegate>(Expression`1 expr) .... Please help!

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• How to get principal name from HTTPRequest in CXF JAX-RS webservice method called from android app.

  - by johnrock

  How can I get the principal name, session and ideally check if the principal is authenticated with the Spring Security context inside a CXF JAX-RS webservice method receiving a call from an Android client? This is the code I am currently working with. I have commented where and what I am trying to get. Android code to call webservice: httpclient.getCredentialsProvider().setCredentials( new AuthScope("192.168.1.101", 80), new UsernamePasswordCredentials("joesmith", "mypasswd")); HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(WEBSERVICE_URL+"/makePayload"); httpget.setHeader("User-Agent", userAgent); httpget.setHeader("Content-Type", "application/xml"); HttpResponse response; try { response = httpclient.execute(httpget); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); ... parse xml from response } CXF, Spring webservice code: @GET @Path("/getPayload") @Produces("application/XML") public Response makePayload(@Context Request request){ //Get user principal name //Get session? //Get Spring security context? Payload payload = new Payload(); payload.setUsersOnline(new Long(200)); return Response.ok().entity(payload).build(); }

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• jQuery - Not sure which method to use, closest() and parent() don't work.

  - by Nike

  Hello, again. :) God i feel like i'm spamming stackoverflow, this is my 3rd post for today. Sorry, heh. I even posted a question regarding this before, kind of, but i've changed the code a bit since so i thought it was better to post a new question. $('.pmlist ul li h4 .toggle').click(function() { $(this).closest('.meddel').toggle(250); }); That's what i've got now. The reason why the closest() method isn't working is because the div .meddel is just next to the h4 element. And closest() only crawls right up the DOM tree, ignoring other child elements. Right? parent() works almost the same and doesn't work either. And as i only want to toggle the closest .meddel div in the element, i need something that, yeah justs grabs the nearest one, and not all of them. To clear it up a bit, here's the HTML for one list item: <li class="item"> <h4><a class="toggle">ämne</a><small>2010-04-17 kl 12:54 by <u>nike1</u></small></h4> <div class="meddel"> <span> <img style="max-width: 70%; min-height: 70%;" src="profile-images/nike1.jpg" alt="" /> <a href="account.php?usr=47">nike1</a> </span> <p>text</p> </div> </li> I have several items like that, and if i click one toggle link, i just want the nearest .meddel to be toggled, as mentioned before. Thanks. -Nike

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• How can I enable PHP5 for a site? Having problems with every single method.

  - by user347662

  I'm working on a client site that is hosted on someone's DIY Debian Linux server [Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux)], and I'm trying to install a script that requires PHP5. By default, the server parses .php files with PHP 4.3.10-22, which is configured at /etc/php4/apache/php.ini, according to phpinfo(). On the server I can see a config directory for PHP5 adjacent to the PHP4 directory: /etc/php5.0/apache2/php.ini. I have tried multiple methods to enable PHP5 for the document root where the site's files are hosted, including all available methods mentioned here. By far, the most common suggestion I've found is to add one or both of the following lines to the site's .htaccess file: AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php Trouble is, when either or both of those lines are present, the site forces my browser to download any .php files requested, without parsing the PHP at all. All of the other methods mentioned in the above article cause a 500 Internal Server Error. There is no hosting control panel I can access in a browser to enable PHP5 for the site, but I do have shell access. When I asked the server administrator about this issue, he encouraged me to search for the answer on Google. Where could I begin to troubleshoot this issue? Are there ways to test or verify the server's specific PHP5 installation and configuration, using the command line or some other method? Do you have other suggestions to enable PHP5?

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• undefined method `content_type' for nil:NilClass /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2

  - by Y Kamesh Rao

  Strange error in diagnostics.erb file about _set_controller_content_type. Please help. NoMethodError in Timelines#public_timeline Showing /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/templates/rescues/diagnostics.erb where line # raised: undefined method `content_type' for nil:NilClass Extracted source (around line #): RAILS_ROOT: /Volumes/DATA/Source/Rails/tvider Application Trace | Framework Trace | Full Trace /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/whiny_nil.rb:52:in method_missing' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_view/base.rb:331:in_set_controller_content_type' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_view/renderable.rb:32:in block in render' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_view/base.rb:306:inwith_template' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_view/renderable.rb:30:in render' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_view/template.rb:205:inrender_template' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_view/base.rb:265:in render' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/rescue.rb:134:inrescue_action_locally' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/rescue.rb:152:in rescue_action_without_handler' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/rescue.rb:74:inrescue_action' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/rescue.rb:162:in rescue in perform_action_with_rescue' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/rescue.rb:160:inperform_action_with_rescue' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/flash.rb:146:in perform_action_with_flash' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/base.rb:532:inprocess' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/filters.rb:606:in process_with_filters' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/base.rb:391:inprocess' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/base.rb:386:in call' /opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-2.3.5/lib/action_controller/routing/route_set.rb:437:incall' Request Parameters: None Show session dump Response Headers: {"Cache-Control"="no-cache", "Content-Type"=""}

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• Why do I get "undefined method `destroy'" when including 'svn/repos'?

  - by Chad Johnson

  I get the following when running script/server require 'svn/repos' script/console Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.5) require 'svn/repos' /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/svn/core.rb:88: warning: already initialized constant Stream /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/svn/core.rb:138: warning: already initialized constant AuthBaton NoMethodError: undefined method destroy' for #<Svn::Ext::Core::Apr_pool_wrapper_t:0x10150ae68> from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/svn/util.rb:60:insvn_fs_initialize' from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/svn/util.rb:60:in call' from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/svn/util.rb:60:ininitialize' from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/svn/fs.rb:14 from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in gem_original_require' from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:inrequire' from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:156:in require' from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:521:innew_constants_in' from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:156:in require' from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/svn/repos.rb:5 from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:ingem_original_require' from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in require' from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:156:inrequire' from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:521:in new_constants_in' from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:156:inrequire' from (irb):1 Any idea why?

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• [C#] Improving method to read signed 8-bit integers from hexadecimal.

  - by JYelton

  Scenario: I have a string of hexadecimal characters which encode 8-bit signed integers. Each two characters represent a byte which employ the leftmost (MSB) bit as the sign (rather than two's complement). I am converting these to signed ints within a loop and wondered if there's a better way to do it. There are too many conversions and I am sure there's a more efficient method that I am missing. Current Code: string strData = "FFC000407F"; // example input data, encodes: -127, -64, 0, 64, 127 int v; for (int x = 0; x < strData.Length/2; x++) { v = HexToInt(strData.Substring(x * 2, 2)); Console.WriteLine(v); // do stuff with v } private int HexToInt(string _hexData) { string strBinary = Convert.ToString(Convert.ToInt32(_hexData, 16), 2).PadLeft(_hexData.Length * 4, '0'); int i = Convert.ToInt32(strBinary.Substring(1, 7), 2); i = (strBinary.Substring(0, 1) == "0" ? i : -i); return i; } Question: Is there a more streamlined and direct approach to reading two hex characters and converting them to an int when they represent a signed int (-127 to 127) using the leftmost bit as the sign?

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• How to create static method that evaluates local static variable once?

  - by Viet

  I have a class with static method which has a local static variable. I want that variable to be computed/evaluated once (the 1st time I call the function) and for any subsequent invocation, it is not evaluated anymore. How to do that? Here's my class: template< typename T1 = int, unsigned N1 = 1, typename T2 = int, unsigned N2 = 0, typename T3 = int, unsigned N3 = 0, typename T4 = int, unsigned N4 = 0, typename T5 = int, unsigned N5 = 0, typename T6 = int, unsigned N6 = 0, typename T7 = int, unsigned N7 = 0, typename T8 = int, unsigned N8 = 0, typename T9 = int, unsigned N9 = 0, typename T10 = int, unsigned N10 = 0, typename T11 = int, unsigned N11 = 0, typename T12 = int, unsigned N12 = 0, typename T13 = int, unsigned N13 = 0, typename T14 = int, unsigned N14 = 0, typename T15 = int, unsigned N15 = 0, typename T16 = int, unsigned N16 = 0> struct GroupAlloc { static const uint32_t sizeClass; static uint32_t getSize() { static uint32_t totalSize = 0; totalSize += sizeof(T1)*N1; totalSize += sizeof(T2)*N2; totalSize += sizeof(T3)*N3; totalSize += sizeof(T4)*N4; totalSize += sizeof(T5)*N5; totalSize += sizeof(T6)*N6; totalSize += sizeof(T7)*N7; totalSize += sizeof(T8)*N8; totalSize += sizeof(T9)*N9; totalSize += sizeof(T10)*N10; totalSize += sizeof(T11)*N11; totalSize += sizeof(T12)*N12; totalSize += sizeof(T13)*N13; totalSize += sizeof(T14)*N14; totalSize += sizeof(T15)*N15; totalSize += sizeof(T16)*N16; totalSize = 8*((totalSize + 7)/8); return totalSize; } };

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• Improving method to read signed 8-bit integers from hexadecimal.

  - by JYelton

  Scenario: I have a string of hexadecimal characters which encode 8-bit signed integers. Each two characters represent a byte which employ the leftmost (MSB) bit as the sign (rather than two's complement). I am converting these to signed ints within a loop and wondered if there's a better way to do it. There are too many conversions and I am sure there's a more efficient method that I am missing. Current Code: string strData = "FFC000407F"; // example input data, encodes: -127, -64, 0, 64, 127 int v; for (int x = 0; x < strData.Length/2; x++) { v = HexToInt(strData.Substring(x * 2, 2)); Console.WriteLine(v); // do stuff with v } private int HexToInt(string _hexData) { string strBinary = Convert.ToString(Convert.ToInt32(_hexData, 16), 2).PadLeft(_hexData.Length * 4, '0'); int i = Convert.ToInt32(strBinary.Substring(1, 7), 2); i = (strBinary.Substring(0, 1) == "0" ? i : -i); return i; } Question: Is there a more streamlined and direct approach to reading two hex characters and converting them to an int when they represent a signed int (-127 to 127) using the leftmost bit as the sign?

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