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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 10, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 10, 2014Popular ReleasesBell Open Imaging package: 1.0: First release at Codeplex.Australia Income and Tax Calculator: Australia Income and Tax Calculator 1.4: 1. added 2014 financial year 2. refactored the codeCS-Script Source: Release v3.8.1: Improved ConfigConsole AdvancedShell extensions support cs-script.7z - CS-Script Suite (binaries, documentation, samples) cs-script.ExtensionPack.7z - CS-Script Extension Pack (additional binaries and samples) cs-scriptDocs.7z - CS-Script DocumentationPapercut: Papercut v3.0.0.0: Papercut has switched to semantic versioning! That means you will have to uninstall old "clickonce" versions to get the latest as it will see it as an older version. Latest Has Tons of New Features: Modern UI MVVM Architecture Watch Directories for New Messages Optional Backend Papercut Service Load on Windows Startup Attachments/Mime SectionsExperfwiz (Exchange Performance Data Collection tool): Experfwiz 1.3.8: List of updates in 1.3.8 Added support for Windows 2012 & 2012 R2 (for future use) Added support for Exchange 2013 Full is now enabled by default. To disable full mode, use 'nofull'. Exchange 2013 requires full. Added "\Processor Information()\" counters to Exchange 2010 full Blocked Exmon execution on Exchange 2013BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 1.6: Version 1.6 is a major upgrade to the latest frameworks and components by Microsoft. It includes a major UI overhaul using the bootstrap framework to have a modern, mobile friendly and easily customized layout. Upgrade to .NET 4.5 ASP.NET social auth Add script bundling and optimization Improvements for mobile devices Bootstrap (UI overhaul) Rewritten / friendly URL's Please read our release notes for BugNET 1.6: http://blog.bugnetproject.com/2014/06/08/bugnet-1-6-and-bugnet-pro-1...NDataTable: NDataTable Source Code: Source codeWindows System API in Visual Basic: DataTools Merged Beta 2.4: Added FileSystemWatcher and demonstration to this release..NET Memory Tools: DataTools Merged Beta 2.4: Added FileSystemWatcher and demonstration to this release.freeasyExplorer: 3. Alpha: This is the 3th alpha release. Please inform me if you find some issues or problems. Fixes: - add assembly informations - set list view to list mode and add custom icon - add settings window - update Mahapp.Metro Framework - add drag&drop functionality - change target .net versionkbvault-mysql: V0.16a: Additions for SEO friendly pages,printer friendly view option and tag cloud on landing pageSFDL.NET: SFDL.NET (2.2.9.3): Changelog: Retry Bugfix (Error Counter wurde nicht korrekt zurückgesetzt) Neue Einstellung: Retry Wartezeit ist nun Einstellbarbabelua: 1.5.7.0: V1.5.7.0 - 2014.6.6Stability improvement: use "lua scripts folder" as lua search path when debugging;SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.033.007 Release 1: Fixed breaking changes in Space Engineers in latest update. Installation of this version will replace older version.Virto Commerce Enterprise Open Source eCommerce Platform (asp.net mvc): Virto Commerce 1.10: Virto Commerce Community Edition version 1.10. To install the SDK package, please refer to SDK getting started documentation To configure source code package, please refer to Source code getting started documentation This release includes bug fixes and improvements (including Commerce Manager localization and https support). More details about this release can be found on our blog at http://blog.virtocommerce.com.NPOI: NPOI 2.1: Assembly Version: 2.1.0 New Features a. XSSFSheet.CopySheet b. Excel2Html for XSSF c. insert picture in word 2007 d. Implement IfError function in formula engine Bug Fixes a. fix conditional formatting issue b. fix ctFont order issue c. fix vertical alignment issue in XSSF d. add IndexedColors to NPOI.SS.UserModel e. fix decimal point issue in non-English culture f. fix SetMargin issue in XSSF g.fix multiple images insert issue in XSSF h.fix rich text style missing issue in XSSF i. fix cell...51Degrees - Device Detection and Redirection: 3.1.2.3: Version 3.1 HighlightsDevice detection algorithm is over 100 times faster. Regular expressions and levenshtein distance calculations are no longer used. The device detection algorithm performance is no longer limited by the number of device combinations contained in the dataset. Two modes of operation are available: Memory – the detection data set is loaded into memory and there is no continuous connection to the source data file. Slower initialisation time but faster detection performanc...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.27.0: CodeMap now indicates the type name for all members Implemented running scripts 'as administrator'. Just add '//css_npp asadmin' to the script and run it as usual. 'Prepare script for distribution' now aggregates script dependency assemblies. Various improvements in CodeSnipptet, Autcompletion and MethodInfo interactions with each other. Added printing line number for the entries in CodeMap (subject of configuration value) Improved debugging step indication for classless scripts ...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.72.3: 70426e13c415 ClosedXML for .Net 4.0 now uses Open XML SDK 2.5 b9ef53a6654f Merge branch 'master' of https://git01.codeplex.com/forks/vbjay/closedxml 727714e86416 Fix range.Merge(Boolean) for .Net 3.5 eb1ed478e50e Make public range.Merge(Boolean checkIntersects) 6284cf3c3991 More performance improvements when saving.DNN Blog: 06.00.07: Highlights: Enhancement: Option to show management panel on child modules Fix: Changed SPROC and code to ensure the right people are notified of pending comments. (CP-24018) Fix: Fix to have notification actions authentication assume the right module id so these will work from the messaging center (CP-24019) Fix: Fix to issue in categories in a post that will not save when no categories and no tags selectedNew ProjectsATC FSX Console: Flight Simulator CodeCRM 2011 Duplicate Detection Sample: CRM 2011 Duplicate Detection Plug-in SampleCustomisation tool for Visual Studio projects: This tool is used to speedup the setting up of a Visual Studio projects and suppress any repetitive manual tasks.D3 Focus: A basic tool for people with trouble deciding what to do with their time in Diablo 3.EPS - PowerShell templating: EPS (Embedded PowerShell), inspired by erb, is a templating system that embeds PowerShell code into a text document such as HTML files. Export Bugs: Export Bugs is an application using the TFS API. Killer Bytes Pack: project of class visual studioMagickViewer: An application that uses the Magick.NET library to display images.Mario Card: https://drive.google.com/?authuser=0#folders/0B0VMM5klwOkwLXptMVV6b3NhRVEOZone: OZonePlexApp PowerShell Module: PoSH4PlexApp is an in-development PowerShell module for querying and managing PlexApp libraries via Plex Media Server's HTTP listener. Contributions welcomeProduct Usage Tracker: This project is about creating a tool/mechanism to capture and record the usage volume and usage patterns of any application.Project C²: A simple lightweight C-style programming language for near-hardware system development using GNU GAS as a back-end.Random Execute: Random Execute is a command wrapper that randomizes the start time of a processes execution.RuLaw.NET: .NET library for official Russian State Duma API web service for querying and searching information of laws, deputies, authorities, sessions, votings, etcTest_DB_Name_Check: Latestweb_gioman_proyecto: proyecto de lucas gioiaWPF Globalization and Multi-language Application: Multilingual User Interfaces providing support for switching UIs from one language to another. ??????-??????【??】: ????????,??????:?????,?????,??????,??????????,????????。????????!??????-??????【??】: ?????????????????????????????,??????????,????,????,?????????、??????,??????。?????-?????【??】: ???????????????????,??????????,????????、????,??????????,??????????。?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????、????,??100%????,??????,????????????,???????????!?????-?????【??】: ??????????????????????:????、????、??????????????,????????。????????!??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????????,????,????,??????????。???????????????,??,??,??????????,????????????-??????【??】: ???????????????????,?????????????,????,?????????,?????????????,?????,?????!??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????,???????????,??????????????,??????????，??????????????！?????-?????【??】: ????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???????????????,???,??????????、???????????????????。??????,????、????，??????！ ?????-?????【??】: ???????????????,?????????????? ??。????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。?????-?????【??】: ????????????????,???????????????。???????????,??????:????、????、????????????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????????????,????,????“???、???、???”?????,?????,?????????????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ?????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】,???????????,??????????,????:??,????,???????? ??????????,????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ?????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】????:?????,??????!???????????????,???????、?????、??????“??”????,????,????!?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???????,??????,??????,??????、??????,??????、??，????，????????????-??????【??】: ?????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】????????????????????,???????????,??????,??????????????...????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????、?????????,??????、??????????????????,???????.??????????,????????。??????-??????【??】: ?????????????????,??????????、??????,??????????、????、????、???????。??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????,???????????????,???????,?????,?????,????? !!!?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】????????,????,?????、???、?????,???????,?????,???????????100%。??????！????-????【??】: ???????????、??????????????????,????????,?????,??????,????,????,????!?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????????,???????????????,????????????????????!?????-?????【??】: ?????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???2005?,????????????????????,??????????,??????。?????,???????????????????，??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???????:??????!?????!???:????、????、????、????。??,??????????!??????.?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】??????????,????????????,????????,???,???????????,????,????。?????,??????. ?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????:??????!?????!???:????、????、????、????。??,??????????!??????.?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】 ?????????????????,????,????“???、???、???”?????,?????,?????????????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????????,??????,???????????,????????????????,????????.??????.?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???1992?,????????????????。??????????????????????。????????????,????，????????！?????-?????【??】: ?????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】??????:?????,??????!???????????????,???????、?????、??????“??”????,????,????! ?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】????????,????,?????、???、?????,???????,?????,???????????100%。??????！??????-??????【??】: ????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????、?????????,??????、??????????????????,???????.??????????,????????。?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???1992?,????????????????。??????????????????????。????????????,????，????????！ ?????-?????【??】: ?????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???2005?,????????????????????,??????????,??????。?????,???????????????????，??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】??????????????????,???????????,??????,??????????????...????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ?????????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????????,??????,???????????,????????????????,????????.??????.??????-??????【??】: ???????????,?????,???????????,???????,????,????,????,?????。??????-??????【??】: ????????????????8?，????????,????????,??????????,?????,????? ,????????!??????-??????【??】: ????????????????6?,???????????????????????????,??????????????,?????????！?????-?????【??】: ?????????????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】???????,??????,??????,??????、??????,??????、??，????，??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????????、???、??、??????????????????????????????,????????????????!?????-?????【??】: ????????????????????????????、????、????、???????????,????,????!?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】?????????????????,????,????“???、???、???”?????,?????,?????????????????。??????！?????-?????【??】: ???????【??:13406937288 ??? QQ:798761615】??????????,????????????,????????,???,???????????,????,????。?????,??????.

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• Small-scale database options for .NET

  - by raney

  I have a .NET 4.0/WPF based application I've developed and maintain for my company that acts as a friendly GUI central-point-of-information, combining information pulled from a couple of SQL databases, as well as CSV exports from a few other applications. I would like to build out my own database to support the entirety of the information that the application accesses, so that I could have a service running on my server that would read in necessary remote SQL info and file exports, to provide the user's application with a single database to connect to, as well as to remove all of the file handling currently involved in the program (copying new CSV resources from network location, reading them into memory each launch.) I have complete control and flexibility here as long as the user's experience isn't affected, and this is as much a learning experience as it is tidying up. Caveat being, I don't have much in the way of a budget. Right now I recognize my options to be: SQL Express - I'm comfortable with the server setup, I like ADO.NET and LINQ to SQL. I feel that I have the least to learn here, but it would let me focus on SQL in a familiar environment. Perhaps in conjunction with Entity Framework? MongoDB - I don't know a whole lot about, but I've heard the name enough to make me curious. Brief research seems friendly enough, and there is .NET support. I like working with open source projects. My questions are: What's popular and extensible right now? I'm not far from starting to job-hunt, and I'd like this project to be relevant going forward. What am I missing? Pros, cons? Other options? What plays well with .NET? What are the things I should be considering, the questions I should be asking, when making a decision like this? Thanks for your time.

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• .html extension or no for SEO purposes

  - by Scott Schluer

  I know this question has been asked before on Stack Overflow, but what I have not been able to find in the posts I've read are concrete references as to WHY one is better than the other (something I can take to my boss). So I'm working on an MVC 3 application that is basically a rewrite of the existing production application (web forms) using MVC. The current site uses a URL rewriter to rewrite "friendly" urls with HTML extensions to their ASPX counterpart. i.e. http://www.site.com/products/18554-widget.html gets rewritten to http://www.site.com/products.aspx?id=18554 We're moving away from this with the MVC site, but the powers that be still want the HTML extension on the URLs. As a developer, that just feels wrong on an MVC site. I've written a quick and dirty HttpModule that will perform a 301 redirect from the .html URL to the same URL without the .html extension and it works fine, but I need to convince management that removing the .html extension is not going to hurt SEO. I'd prefer to have this sort of friendly URL: http://www.site.com/products/18554-widget Can anyone provide information to back up my position or am I actually trying to do something that WOULD hurt SEO, in which case can you provide references on that?

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• How to make it so units don't stack up in one location?

  - by Daggio

  So I'm making a game in AS3, it's a strategy DotA-like game (for flash game equivalent, there's UDE) so far so good, I have the A* pathfinding algorithm all sorted out and the minion units move to the desired location as I want them to be. The problem a rise when a unit stops in a node that has already occupied by another friendly unit. Both (or more than two) of them stacks up in one location, it looks like they're one unit. I want to add collision detection so when they collide they don't stack up together. But now they stop when they collide on they way to a node. This isn't good because they won't move at all midway (they won't respond to enemy attacks like that). I've added a deltatime so they only stopped for 2 seconds before they move again to their designated designation. This moves them again but they flicker. Not how I want it. So, like the title said. How to make more than one units don't stack up in a node? And if possible, how to make them not flicker while moving (it's good if they can tell other friendly units on the way and avoid them accordingly)?

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• How to target just one search engine and optimise for that

  - by mickburkejnr

  I've been dabbling with SEO a lot in the last 6 months, and one thing that has surprised me is the disparity between Google and Bing in the way they deliver results. A website ranked for a specific keyword/phrase on Google may rank 3rd on the first page, but using the same keyword/phrase on Bing will display the same website but ranked 15th for the exact same keyword/phrase. I came up with the idea to increase traffic to my website by targetting Bing instead of Google for several reasons. The biggest one is that while it's not the biggest search provider, people still use it, and I feel that if other websites have been "neglected" and not optimised for Bing my website would stand a better chance of getting near the top of their search rankings. The question is though how would I do this? A lot of the SEO advice on the internet is generic, but I can't help feeling it's Google orientated for obvious reasons. How could I optimise my website to be Bing friendly, rather than Google friendly? I know it sounds like suicide as I'm taking myself out of the Google mindset, but I feel it could work wonders for traffic to the site.

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• how to make a continuous machine gun sound-effect

  - by Jan

  I am trying to make an entity fire one or more machine-guns. For each gun I store the time between shots (1.0 / firing rate) and the time since the last shot. Also I've loaded ~10 different gun-shot sound-effects. Now, for each gun I do the following: function update(deltatime): timeSinceLastShot += deltatime if timeSinceLastShot >= timeBetweenShots + verySmallRandomValue(): timeSinceLastShot -= timeBetweenShots if gunIsFiring: displayMuzzleFlash() spawnBullet() selectRandomSound().play() But now I often get a crackling noise (which I assume is when two or more guns are firing at the same time and confuse the sound-device). My question is whether A) This a common problem and there is a well-known solution, maybe to do with the channels or something, or B) I am using a completely wrong approach to the task. I had a look at some sound-assets for other games and they used complete burst with multiple shots. I suppose I could try that, but I would like to have organic little hickups in the gun-fire (that's what the random value is for) to make the game more gritty and dirty. I am using Panda3D, but I had the exact same problem in PyGame and SDL. [edit] Thanks a lot for the answers so far! One more problem with faking it though: Now how do I stop the sound? Let's say I have an effect with 5 bangs... *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* And I magically manage to loop it so that there's no gap or overlap if the player fires more than 5 shots. Now, what do I do if the player stops firing halfway through the third bang? How do I know how long to keep playing the sample so that the third bang is completed and I can start playing the rumbling echo of the last shot? Of course I can look up the shot/pause timing of that sound-sample and code accordingly, but it feels extremely hacky.

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• How to shift a vector based on the rotation of another vector?

  - by bpierre

  I’m learning 2D programming, so excuse my approximations, and please, don’t hesitate to correct me. I am just trying to fire a bullet from a player. I’m using HTML canvas (top left origin). Here is a representation of my problem: The black vector represent the position of the player (the grey square). The green vector represent its direction. The red disc represents the target. The red vector represents the direction of a bullet, which will move in the direction of the target (red and dotted line). The blue cross represents the point from where I really want to fire the bullet (and the blue and dotted line represents its movement). This is how I draw the player (this is the player object. Position, direction and dimensions are 2D vectors): ctx.save(); ctx.translate(this.position.x, this.position.y); ctx.rotate(this.direction.getAngle()); ctx.drawImage(this.image, Math.round(-this.dimensions.x/2), Math.round(-this.dimensions.y/2), this.dimensions.x, this.dimensions.y); ctx.restore(); This is how I instanciate a new bullet: var bulletPosition = playerPosition.clone(); // Copy of the player position var bulletDirection = Vector2D.substract(targetPosition, playerPosition).normalize(); // Difference between the player and the target, normalized new Bullet(bulletPosition, bulletDirection); This is how I move the bullet (this is the bullet object): var speed = 5; this.position.add(Vector2D.multiply(this.direction, speed)); And this is how I draw the bullet (this is the bullet object): ctx.save(); ctx.translate(this.position.x, this.position.y); ctx.rotate(this.direction.getAngle()); ctx.fillRect(0, 0, 3, 3); ctx.restore(); How can I change the direction and position vectors of the bullet to ensure it is on the blue dotted line? I think I should represent the shift with a vector, but I can’t see how to use it.

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• Dual-Boot Problem

  - by user171379

  I have a HP laptop that originally had Windows 7 OS on it, I partioned the drive and allocated 100gb (est.) for the ubuntu install. the install went fine i have ubuntu and windows 7 still on the computer. But I can not get the OS boot screen to show ubuntu as an OS. I can while start up pull up the start menu screen via ESC. Key and press F9 for Boot Device Options and get the boot manager screen and it lists... OS boot manager, Ubuntu (Hitachi HTS 543232A7A384), boot from EFI file, and Notebook Hard Drive... I can boot Ubuntu from this screen by selecting Ubuntu. But i would like to make it easier to access. The computer boot is not for myself otherwise it would not be a problem i would remove windows altogether. I would like to make it basically "User Friendly" if that's at all possible and make the OS boot screen show Ubuntu as a bootable OS as well as Windows 7. on the boot selection screen. Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated, I've looked to see if i could find the answer and maybe i've overlooked something so here I am. Like i said i need it to be as user friendly as possible and force the user to choose windows 7 or ubuntu not send them into one or the other without them being allowed to choose. I can get any information you might need if necessary but i dont know exactly what you'll need other than what i've given. Ubuntu version is the 13.04 just so you know.

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• Want Google to index redirect urls

  - by Dave Goten

  I'm having issues with users who think that Google Search is the address bar. Some of the sites that link to my site use user friendly addresses with 301 redirects to pages that have less friendly URLs. So, for example if I enter www.foo.com/bar it goes to www.bar.com/page.php?some-parameters-and-utm-codes-etc usually this is done by a 301 redirect in order to keep the SEO from foo.com on bar.com and so on, which I believe is standard practice. However, lately there have been more and more people searching www.foo.com/bar instead of going to www.foo.com/bar directly and because the page /bar is nothing more than a redirect it has no SEO that I know of. Things I've thought of but haven't been able to test, because Google takes forever to update :) (and I'm lazy like that), include using Google sitemaps and having them enter their redirects as entries there. (I could see this working if they were the top search entry all the time, and it might appear as a sitelink, but I don't know if that'll make the url itself show up in searches) Using Canonical tags on my pages to the redirects they set up. Which is a nightmare in itself because of the nature of my pages. One week the www.foo.com/bar might go to www.bar.com/pageA.php the next it might goto www.bar.com/pageB.php and having to remember to take the canonical tag off of pageA, so that it doesn't get confused with pageB would be a pain. Using 302 redirects -.- So I guess the question here is, does anyone have any experience or knowledge about this? What should I do to make www.foo.com/bar show up when someone 'searches' for this redirect url?

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• WCF REST Error Handler

  - by Elton Stoneman

  I’ve put up on GitHub a sample WCF error handler for REST services, which returns proper HTTP status codes in response to service errors.   The code is very simple – a ServiceBehavior implementation which can be specified in config to tag the RestErrorHandler to a service. Any uncaught exceptions will be routed to the error handler, which sets the HTTP status code and description in the response, based on the type of exception.   The sample defines a ClientException which can be thrown in code to indicate a problem with the client’s request, and the response will be a status 400 with a friendly error message:       throw new ClientException("Invalid userId. Must be provided as a positive integer");   - responds:   Request URL http://localhost/Sixeyed.WcfRestErrorHandler.Sample/ErrorProneService.svc/lastLogin?userId=xyz   Error Status Code: 400, Description: Invalid userId. Must be provided as a positive integer   Any other uncaught exceptions are hidden from the client. The full details are logged with a GUID to identify the error, and the response to the client is a status 500 with a generic message giving them the GUID to follow up on:       var iUserId = 0;     var dbz = 1 / iUserId;   - logs the divide-by-zero error and responds:   Request URL http://localhost/Sixeyed.WcfRestErrorHandler.Sample/ErrorProneService.svc/dbz     Error Status Code: 500, Description: Something has gone wrong. Please contact our support team with helpdesk ID: C9C5A968-4AEA-48C7-B90A-DEC986F80DA5   The sample demonstrates two techniques for building the response. For client exceptions, a friendly HTML response is sent in the body as well as the status code and description. Personally I prefer not to do that – it doesn’t make sense to get a 400 error and find text/html when you’re expecting application/json, but it’s easy to do if that’s the functionality you want. The other option is to send an empty response, which the sample does with server exceptions.   The obvious extension is to have multiple exceptions representing all the status codes you want to provide, then your code is as simple as throwing the relevant exception – UnauthorizedException, ForbiddenExeption, NotImplementedException etc – anywhere in the stack, and it will be handled nicely.

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• Weekend Project: Build a Fireball Launcher

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  What’s more fun than playing with fire? Shooting it from your hands. Put on your robe and wizard hat, make a stop at the hardware store, and spend the weekend trying to convince your friends you’ve acquired supernatural powers. Over at MAKE Magazine, Joel Johnson explains the impetus for his project: A stalwart of close-quarter magicians for years, the electronic flash gun is a simple device: a battery-powered, hand-held ignitor that uses a “glo-plug” to light a bit of flash paper and cotton, shooting a fireball a few feet into the air. You can buy one from most magic shops for around $50, but if you build one on your own, you’ll not only save a few bucks, you’ll also learn how easy it is to add fire effects to almost any electronics project. (And what gadget couldn’t stand a little more spurting flame?) The parts list is minimal but the end effect is pretty fantastic. Hit up the link below for the full build guide, plenty of warnings, and a weekend project that’s sure to impress. How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 3 How to Sync Your Media Across Your Entire House with XBMC How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 2

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• Multiplayer approach for tablets on wi-fi (FPS/TPS)? Server authority, etc

  - by Fraggle

  Looking for some guidance or what has worked well for others in implementing a multiplayer FPS/TPS type game on tablets (probably just 2-6 players at a time). The main issue being that tablets/phones are typically "less" connected than say a console or pc might be. And therefore, my thought is that to have complete Server authority of everything is not going to work. But maybe I'm off base on that. So I guess I'm struggling with what (if anything) should happen on a central server and what should happen locally. Or is centralized approach even needed? Some approaches I might do: Player movement : my thought is to control this locally (player-owner) and update server with positon (which then sends out to other clients). Use client side prediction for opponent players so that connection loss will not show a plane for example stop in mid air. Server will send update and try to smoothly correct an opponent player position to server updated one.But don't update owners position on owners device from server. Powerups (health kit/ammo/coins/etc) : need to see them disappear immediately, so do it locally. Add the health locally, but perhaps allow for server correction. If server doesn't see player near that powerup, reject the powerup and adjust server health for player. Fire weapons: Have to see it happen right away, so fire locally, create local bullet and send on its way. Send rpc to server so that this player on other clients also fires. Hit detection: Get's trickier. Make bullet/projectile disappear locally, and perhaps perform local hit animations (shaking, whatever). non-authoritative approach= take the damage locally and send rpc to server or others to update health and inform of hit. Authoritative approach-Don't take the damage, or adjust health. Server will do that if it detects a hit. Anyway that's my current thought stream. Let me know what you think of the above or what has worked for you.

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• Windows 8.1 - unfixable grub

  - by Nick

  I have a Gigabyte laptop that came with secure boot and windows 8. After a bit of battling, I managed to get my dual boot with Ubuntu 13.10.. Anyway, I upgraded zindows to 8.1, now grub is gone. I restarted from a live CD and chrooted to my drive. I used boot-repair multiple times (with successful output) both in default and with some advanced options; also reinstalled grub manually... Each time it tries once to boot to grub but gives a message for a very short amount of time. I recorded it and it is a regular bios message "Rebbot and Select proper Boot device of Insert Boot media in selected boot device and press a key" I even tried something called EasyBCD under winblows, it shows the correct boot options, but same there, it is unable to make the linux partition fire up. Anyway, no way to boot my linux box. Does anyone have an idea how to fix this? No need to redirect me to another post with grub reinstall or boot-repair, seen them all... I am thinking of trying this other boot loader, refind, to see if it works http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/index.html Also re-reading this bios message, I'm thinking my partition might not have a boot flag anymore... I'll try that too with parted. Although both grub and win 8 are supposed to fire up from the same boot partition (the EFI one) Please help! thx

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• Latest (5 June 14) Updates t0 10.04 Causing Multiple Problems

  - by user291780

  Apologies, the questions are very short, but the bkg isn't. I rec'd a routine notification from the update mgr a few days ago (I believe, June 5th). I took a look and there was lots of linux stuff, headers, etc., nothing obviously unusual. I'd rec'd and updated w/a more extensive pkg set, kernel and all a few weeks ago, no problem. On June 6, I pushed the upgrade button on the June 5th batch, nothing usual, needed a reboot, which I did after a full power down, it came up fine. Gedit worked, the calculator worked, started up firefox, it came up, selected the BookMarks menu, and blam, it hesitated and then greyed out, when I tried to close it, got the "process not responding" msg. Undaunted, I tried to fire up Google Chrome....nothing on the screen or process bar. I fired up the system monitor and indeed there were some "sleeping" chrome processes "running". Powered down several times, but the same problems persist. Similar but worse story when I tried to fire up one of my virtual machines, VirtualBox came up fine, but when I tried to start one of my virtual machines I got a progress popup that I'd never seen before which showed that we were making no progress past 20%. Uninstalled Oracle VirtualBox, reinstalled the latest and greatest, same result. Also, unable to logout, or shutdown once the virtual machine exhibited this behavior. Powered down manually, end of story. Never saw such a bad result after an update. I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) as I have been for a number of years. Please don't reply with why don't you run some other version of Ubuntu, that doesn't answer the questions below. Questions: Will their be a subsequent update that fixes this, and if so, when? If not, is there a way for me to get back to where I was before this disaster?

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• Formal Languages, Inductive Proofs &amp; Regular Expressions

  - by MarkPearl

  So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for me but still a good one to ask – a formal language is a language that is defined in a precise mathematical way. Does that mean that the English language is a formal language? I would say no – and my main motivation for this is that one can have an English sentence that is correct grammatically that is also ambiguous. For example the ambiguous sentence: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas.” For this and possibly many other reasons that I am unaware of, English is termed a “Natural Language”. So why the importance of formal languages in computer science? Again a no duh question in my mind… If we want computers to be effective and useful tools then we need them to be able to evaluate a series of commands in some form of language that when interpreted by the device no confusion will exist as to what we were requesting. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if a computer misinterpreted a command to print a document and instead decided to delete it. So what is a Formal Language made up of… For my study purposes a language is made up of a finite alphabet. For a formal language to exist there needs to be a specification on the language that will describe whether a string of characters has membership in the language or not. There are two basic ways to do this: By a “machine” that will recognize strings of the language (e.g. Finite Automata). By a rule that describes how strings of a language can be formed (e.g. Regular Expressions). When we use the phrase “string of characters”, we can also be referring to a “word”. What is an Inductive Proof? So I am not to far into my textbook and of course it starts referring to proofs and different types. I have had to go through several different approaches of proofs in the past, but I can never remember their formal names , so when I saw “inductive proof” I thought to myself – what the heck is that? Google to the rescue… An inductive proof is like a normal proof but it employs a neat trick which allows you to prove a statement about an arbitrary number n by first proving it is true when n is 1 and then assuming it is true for n=k and showing it is true for n=k+1. The idea is that if you want to show that someone can climb to the nth floor of a fire escape, you need only show that you can climb the ladder up to the fire escape (n=1) and then show that you know how to climb the stairs from any level of the fire escape (n=k) to the next level (n=k+1). Does this sound like a form of recursion? No surprise then that in the same chapter they deal with recursive definitions. An example of a recursive definition for the language EVEN would the 3 rules below: 2 is in EVEN If x is in EVEN then so is x+2 The only elements in the set EVEN are those that be produced by the rules above. Nothing to exciting… So if a definition for a language is done recursively, then it makes sense that the language can be proved using induction. Regular Expressions So I am wondering to myself what use is this all – in fact – I find this the biggest challenge to any university material is that it is quite hard to find the immediate practical applications of some theory in real life stuff. How great was my joy when I suddenly saw the word regular expression being introduced. I had been introduced to regular expressions on Stack Overflow where I was trying to recognize if some text measurement put in by a user was in a valid form or not. For instance, the imperial system of measurement where you have feet and inches can be represented in so many different ways. I had eventually turned to regular expressions as an easy way to check if my parser could correctly parse the text or not and convert it to a normalize measurement. So some rules about languages and regular expressions… Any finite language can be represented by at least one if not more regular expressions A regular expressions is almost a rule syntax for expressing how regular languages can be formed regular expressions are cool For a regular expression to be valid for a language it must be able to generate all the words in the language and no other words. This is important. It doesn’t help me if my regular expression parses 100% of my measurement texts but also lets one or two invalid texts to pass as well. Okay, so this posting jumps around a bit – but introduces some very basic fundamentals for the subject which will be built on in later postings… Time to go and do some practical examples now…

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• AWS: setting up auto-scale for EC2 instances

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/16/aws-setting-up-auto-scale-for-ec2-instances.aspxWith Amazon Web Services, there’s no direct equivalent to Azure Worker Roles – no Elastic Beanstalk-style application for .NET background workers. But you can get the auto-scale part by configuring an auto-scaling group for your EC2 instance. This is a step-by-step guide, that shows you how to create the auto-scaling configuration, which for EC2 you need to do with the command line, and then link your scaling policies to CloudWatch alarms in the Web console. I’m using queue size as my metric for CloudWatch,  which is a good fit if your background workers are pulling messages from a queue and processing them.  If the queue is getting too big, the “high” alarm will fire and spin up a new instance to share the workload. If the queue is draining down, the “low” alarm will fire and shut down one of the instances. To start with, you need to manually set up your app in an EC2 VM, for a background worker that would mean hosting your code in a Windows Service (I always use Topshelf). If you’re dual-running Azure and AWS, then you can isolate your logic in one library, with a generic entry point that has Start() and Stop()  functions, so your Worker Role and Windows Service are essentially using the same code. When you have your instance set up with the Windows Service running automatically, and you’ve tested it starts up and works properly from a reboot, shut the machine down and take an image of the VM, using Create Image (EBS AMI) from the Web Console: When that completes, you’ll have your own AMI which you can use to spin up new instances, and you’re ready to create your auto-scaling group. You need to dip into the command-line tools for this, so follow this guide to set up the AWS autoscale command line tool. Now we’re ready to go. 1. Create a launch configuration This launch configuration tells AWS what to do when a new instance needs to be spun up. You create it with the as-create-launch-config command, which looks like this: as-create-launch-config sc-xyz-launcher # name of the launch config --image-id ami-7b9e9f12 # id of the AMI you extracted from your VM --region eu-west-1 # which region the new instance gets created in --instance-type t1.micro # size of the instance to create --group quicklaunch-1 #security group for the new instance 2. Create an auto-scaling group The auto-scaling group links to the launch config, and defines the overall configuration of the collection of instances: as-create-auto-scaling-group sc-xyz-asg # auto-scaling group name --region eu-west-1 # region to create in --launch-configuration sc-xyz-launcher # name of the launch config to invoke for new instances --min-size 1 # minimum number of nodes in the group --max-size 5 # maximum number of nodes in the group --default-cooldown 300 # period to wait (in seconds) after each scaling event, before checking if another scaling event is required --availability-zones eu-west-1a eu-west-1b eu-west-1c # which availability zones you want your instances to be allocated in – multiple entries means EC@ will use any of them 3. Create a scale-up policy The policy dictates what will happen in response to a scaling event being triggered from a “high” alarm being breached. It links to the auto-scaling group; this sample results in one additional node being spun up: as-put-scaling-policy scale-up-policy # policy name -g sc-psod-woker-asg # auto-scaling group the policy works with --adjustment 1 # size of the adjustment --region eu-west-1 # region --type ChangeInCapacity # type of adjustment, this specifies a fixed number of nodes, but you can use PercentChangeInCapacity to make an adjustment relative to the current number of nodes, e.g. increasing by 50% 4. Create a scale-down policy The policy dictates what will happen in response to a scaling event being triggered from a “low” alarm being breached. It links to the auto-scaling group; this sample results in one node from the group being taken offline: as-put-scaling-policy scale-down-policy -g sc-psod-woker-asg "--adjustment=-1" # in Windows, use double-quotes to surround a negative adjustment value –-type ChangeInCapacity --region eu-west-1 5. Create a “high” CloudWatch alarm We’re done with the command line now. In the Web Console, open up the CloudWatch view and create a new alarm. This alarm will monitor your metrics and invoke the scale-up policy from your auto-scaling group, when the group is working too hard. Configure your metric – this example will fire the alarm if there are more than 10 messages in my queue for over a minute: Then link the alarm to the scale-up policy in your group: 6. Create a “low” CloudWatch alarm The opposite of step 4, this alarm will trigger when the instances in your group don’t have enough work to do (e.g fewer than 2 messages in the queue for 1 minute), and will invoke the scale-down policy. And that’s it. You don’t need your original VM as the auto-scale group has a minimum number of nodes connected. You can test out the scaling by flexing your CloudWatch metric – in this example, filling up a queue from a  stub publisher – and watching AWS create new nodes as required, then stopping the publisher and watch AWS kill off the spare nodes.

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• Identity R2 - Experts Podcast Series

  - by Tanu Sood

  To follow up on the Identity Management R2 launch, a series of podcasts were recorded with subject matter experts from customer organizations, our partners and Oracle’s PM team to discuss key trends, R2 capabilities, implementation best practices and more. Below is a roll-up of the podcast series that is available on Fusion Middleware radio. R2 Podcasts:   ·         Designing the Next-Generation Identity Platform Vadim Lander, Oracle Highlights: Common architecture model, integration, interoperability and the driving factors behind R2 innovation IT Departments are shifting their Identity Management strategy to be able to support mobile, cloud and social applications. Oracle has anticipated this shift and has built a product roadmap to take advantage of this focus. Join Vadim as he discusses the design strategy behind the latest 11gR2 release and talks about how IDM services have to evolve to meet this new challenge.   ·         BETA Customer Perspective on R2 Ravi Meduri, Kaiser Permanente Highlights: R2 scalability and high availability In this podcast Ravi discusses the new features in 11gR2 that he is most interested in, including High Availability options for Access Management, multi-datacenter architecture, and what it was like working with the Oracle product team during the BETA program.   ·         Partner Perspective on R2 Rex Thexton, PricewaterhouseCoopers Highlights: Usability Enhancements for Users and Administrators A lot of new usability features went into the 11gR2 release making this the most business friendly IDM release to date. In this podcast Rex Thexton, Managing Director from PwC, talks about some of the new UI changes for both end users and administrators, and also about the new connector creation framework.   Access Request Updates in R2 Marc Boroditsky, Oracle Highlights: Access request User Interface innovations A lot of changes have been made to the Access Request user interface in the latest version of Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. A real focus has been put on making the request process more business user friendly, and a lot of new customization capability has been added for the IT administrators. Hear Marc discuss the updated UI, and explain how administrators will be able to customize OIM to meet their company's requirements   ·         Oracle Optimized System for Oracle Unified Directory (OOS4OUD) Nick Kloski, Oracle Highlights: New Optimized System configuration for Unified Directory One of the new features in 11gR2 is the availability of an Optimized System configuration for Oracle Unified Directory. Oracle engineers installed the OUD software onto off the shelf hardware and then created a performance tuned configuration. Join us as we talk to Nick Kloski, Infrastructure Solutions Manager, all about the testing process and the resulting performance metrics.   Privileged Account Management Mark Wilcox, Oracle Highlights: Oracle Privileged Account Manager key capabilities, use cases The new release of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 includes the capability to manage privileged accounts. Privileged accounts, if compromised, create a risk for fraud in the enterprise and as a result controlling access to privileged accounts is critical. Hear what Mark Wilcox, Principal Product Manager of Oracle Privileged Account Manager has to say about the capabilities of the offering in this podcast.   ·         Browser-based User Interface (UI) Customization Clayton Donley, Oracle Highlights: Benefits of Durable UI Configuration framework Business users need user interfaces that are not only friendly but also easily customizable. However the downside of any customization project is the cost and complexity involved in developing, testing, deploying and managing custom code. In this podcast, we examine how a new capability in Oracle Identity Management around browser based UI customization can reduce costs and complexity of customization while simplifying self service integration with corporate portal strategies.   ·         Simplifying Mobile and Social Sign-On Dan Killmer, Oracle Highlights: Secure mobile sign-on and consumption of social identities with Oracle Access Management The proliferation of mobile devices has spurred a new trend where employees tend to bring their own mobile devices to work and access corporate applications the same way they would access from a desktop or laptop. In this podcast, we examine how Oracle's latest innovation in Identity Management around Mobile and Social Sign On can simplify security and access management challenges posed by the widespread adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise. ·         Enabling Your Business with IDM R2 Scott Bonnell, Oracle Highlights: Self service, mobile access, personalization Gone are the days when Identity Management was just about stopping unauthorized users in their tracks. Identity Management if done right, can also enable your business. Join Scott Bonnell as he discusses how the IDM 11gR2 release enables the enterprise by providing self service, personalization and mobile access to corporate resources.

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• Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• A jQuery Plug-in to monitor Html Element CSS Changes

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's a scenario I've run into on a few occasions: I need to be able to monitor certain CSS properties on an HTML element and know when that CSS element changes. The need for this arose out of wanting to build generic components that could 'attach' themselves to other objects and monitor changes on the ‘parent’ object so the dependent object can adjust itself accordingly. What I wanted to create is a jQuery plug-in that allows me to specify a list of CSS properties to monitor and have a function fire in response to any change to any of those CSS properties. The result are the .watch() and .unwatch() jQuery plug-ins. Here’s a simple example page of this plug-in that demonstrates tracking changes to an element being moved with draggable and closable behavior: http://www.west-wind.com/WestWindWebToolkit/samples/Ajax/jQueryPluginSamples/WatcherPlugin.htm Try it with different browsers – IE and FireFox use the DOM event handlers and Chrome, Safari and Opera use setInterval handlers to manage this behavior. It should work in all of them but all but IE and FireFox will show a bit of lag between the changes in the main element and the shadow. The relevant HTML for this example is this fragment of a main <div> (#notebox) and an element that is to mimic a shadow (#shadow). <div class="containercontent"> <div id="notebox" style="width: 200px; height: 150px;position: absolute; z-index: 20; padding: 20px; background-color: lightsteelblue;"> Go ahead drag me around and close me! </div> <div id="shadow" style="background-color: Gray; z-index: 19;position:absolute;display: none;"> </div> </div> The watcher plug in is then applied to the main <div> and shadow in sync with the following plug-in code: <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { var counter = 0; $("#notebox").watch("top,left,height,width,display,opacity", function (data, i) { var el = $(this); var sh = $("#shadow"); var propChanged = data.props[i]; var valChanged = data.vals[i]; counter++; showStatus("Prop: " + propChanged + " value: " + valChanged + " " + counter); var pos = el.position(); var w = el.outerWidth(); var h = el.outerHeight(); sh.css({ width: w, height: h, left: pos.left + 5, top: pos.top + 5, display: el.css("display"), opacity: el.css("opacity") }); }) .draggable() .closable() .css("left", 10); }); </script> When you run this page as you drag the #notebox element the #shadow element will maintain and stay pinned underneath the #notebox element effectively keeping the shadow attached to the main element. Likewise, if you hide or fadeOut() the #notebox element the shadow will also go away – show the #notebox element and the shadow also re-appears because we are assigning the display property from the parent on the shadow. Note we’re attaching the .watch() plug-in to the #notebox element and have it fire whenever top,left,height,width,opacity or display CSS properties are changed. The passed data element contains a props[] and vals[] array that holds the properties monitored and their current values. An index passed as the second parm tells you which property has changed and what its current value is (propChanged/valChanged in the code above). The rest of the watcher handler code then deals with figuring out the main element’s position and recalculating and setting the shadow’s position using the jQuery .css() function. Note that this is just an example to demonstrate the watch() behavior here – this is not the best way to create a shadow. If you’re interested in a more efficient and cleaner way to handle shadows with a plug-in check out the .shadow() plug-in in ww.jquery.js (code search for fn.shadow) which uses native CSS features when available but falls back to a tracked shadow element on browsers that don’t support it, which is how this watch() plug-in came about in the first place :-) How does it work? The plug-in works by letting the user specify a list of properties to monitor as a comma delimited string and a handler function: el.watch("top,left,height,width,display,opacity", function (data, i) {}, 100, id) You can also specify an interval (if no DOM event monitoring isn’t available in the browser) and an ID that identifies the event handler uniquely. The watch plug-in works by hooking up to DOMAttrModified in FireFox, to onPropertyChanged in Internet Explorer, or by using a timer with setInterval to handle the detection of changes for other browsers. Unfortunately WebKit doesn’t support DOMAttrModified consistently at the moment so Safari and Chrome currently have to use the slower setInterval mechanism. In response to a changed property (or a setInterval timer hit) a JavaScript handler is fired which then runs through all the properties monitored and determines if and which one has changed. The DOM events fire on all property/style changes so the intermediate plug-in handler filters only those hits we’re interested in. If one of our monitored properties has changed the specified event handler function is called along with a data object and an index that identifies the property that’s changed in the data.props/data.vals arrays. The jQuery plugin to implement this functionality looks like this: (function($){ $.fn.watch = function (props, func, interval, id) { /// <summary> /// Allows you to monitor changes in a specific /// CSS property of an element by polling the value. /// when the value changes a function is called. /// The function called is called in the context /// of the selected element (ie. this) /// </summary> /// <param name="prop" type="String">CSS Properties to watch sep. by commas</param> /// <param name="func" type="Function"> /// Function called when the value has changed. /// </param> /// <param name="interval" type="Number"> /// Optional interval for browsers that don't support DOMAttrModified or propertychange events. /// Determines the interval used for setInterval calls. /// </param> /// <param name="id" type="String">A unique ID that identifies this watch instance on this element</param> /// <returns type="jQuery" /> if (!interval) interval = 100; if (!id) id = "_watcher"; return this.each(function () { var _t = this; var el$ = $(this); var fnc = function () { __watcher.call(_t, id) }; var data = { id: id, props: props.split(","), vals: [props.split(",").length], func: func, fnc: fnc, origProps: props, interval: interval, intervalId: null }; // store initial props and values $.each(data.props, function (i) { data.vals[i] = el$.css(data.props[i]); }); el$.data(id, data); hookChange(el$, id, data); }); function hookChange(el$, id, data) { el$.each(function () { var el = $(this); if (typeof (el.get(0).onpropertychange) == "object") el.bind("propertychange." + id, data.fnc); else if ($.browser.mozilla) el.bind("DOMAttrModified." + id, data.fnc); else data.intervalId = setInterval(data.fnc, interval); }); } function __watcher(id) { var el$ = $(this); var w = el$.data(id); if (!w) return; var _t = this; if (!w.func) return; // must unbind or else unwanted recursion may occur el$.unwatch(id); var changed = false; var i = 0; for (i; i < w.props.length; i++) { var newVal = el$.css(w.props[i]); if (w.vals[i] != newVal) { w.vals[i] = newVal; changed = true; break; } } if (changed) w.func.call(_t, w, i); // rebind event hookChange(el$, id, w); } } $.fn.unwatch = function (id) { this.each(function () { var el = $(this); var data = el.data(id); try { if (typeof (this.onpropertychange) == "object") el.unbind("propertychange." + id, data.fnc); else if ($.browser.mozilla) el.unbind("DOMAttrModified." + id, data.fnc); else clearInterval(data.intervalId); } // ignore if element was already unbound catch (e) { } }); return this; } })(jQuery); Note that there’s a corresponding .unwatch() plug-in that can be used to stop monitoring properties. The ID parameter is optional both on watch() and unwatch() – a standard name is used if you don’t specify one, but it’s a good idea to use unique names for each element watched to avoid overlap in event ids especially if you’re monitoring many elements. The syntax is: $.fn.watch = function(props, func, interval, id) props A comma delimited list of CSS style properties that are to be watched for changes. If any of the specified properties changes the function specified in the second parameter is fired. func The function fired in response to a changed styles. Receives this as the element changed and an object parameter that represents the watched properties and their respective values. The first parameter is passed in this structure: { id: watcherId, props: [], vals: [], func: thisFunc, fnc: internalHandler, origProps: strPropertyListOnWatcher }; A second parameter is the index of the changed property so data.props[i] or data.vals[i] gets the property and changed value. interval The interval for setInterval() for those browsers that don't support property watching in the DOM. In milliseconds. id An optional id that identifies this watcher. Required only if multiple watchers might be hooked up to the same element. The default is _watcher if not specified. It’s been a Journey I started building this plug-in about two years ago and had to make many modifications to it in response to changes in jQuery and also in browser behaviors. I think the latest round of changes made should make this plug-in fairly future proof going forward (although I hope there will be better cross-browser change event notifications in the future). One of the big problems I ran into had to do with recursive change notifications – it looks like starting with jQuery 1.44 and later, jQuery internally modifies element properties on some calls to some .css()  property retrievals and things like outerHeight/Width(). In IE this would cause nasty lock up issues at times. In response to this I changed the code to unbind the events when the handler function is called and then rebind when it exits. This also makes user code less prone to stack overflow recursion as you can actually change properties on the base element. It also means though that if you change one of the monitors properties in the handler the watch() handler won’t fire in response – you need to resort to a setTimeout() call instead to force the code to run outside of the handler: $("#notebox") el.watch("top,left,height,width,display,opacity", function (data, i) { var el = $(this); … // this makes el changes work setTimeout(function () { el.css("top", 10) },10); }) Since I’ve built this component I’ve had a lot of good uses for it. The .shadow() fallback functionality is one of them. Resources The watch() plug-in is part of ww.jquery.js and the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. You’re free to use this code here or the code from the toolkit. West Wind Web Toolkit Latest version of ww.jquery.js (search for fn.watch) watch plug-in documentation © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  JavaScript  jQuery  

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• Communication between Outlook addin and Program Automating Outlook

  - by Chris Kinsman

  I have an application that uses the automation interfaces to Microsoft Outlook to create a mail message and then after it is sent save an archive of that email message in my application. I am hitting issues with a number of the third party encryption addins because by the time the Sent event fires what is passed to me is the already encrypted message. I would like to somehow have them fire the event directly without sending a message to pass me the unencrypted version or I would like them to be able to somehow fire an event to me that passes the unencrypted message in a loosely coupled fashion. I can't seem to find a way to define new events on the Outlook application object so I am looking for other ideas. Thanks!

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• java gis library

  - by Mark Fish

  What is the best/user friendly GIS/arcGIS Java library for basic academic assignment?

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• dataannotation metadatatype register dll in global.aspx (linq to sql)

  - by mazhar

  I am trying to use dataannotation validation(I am not able to Fire the annotations as yet) in my mvc application. with reference to this article I want to confirm http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/validation-with-the-data-annotation-validators-cs I am using vs 2008 professional edition . Do I really need to download Microsoft.web.mvc.dataannotation dll (The other dll is already present in the vs). to use(fire) datannotation on the page.? I am using partial views as well on the pages with dataviewmodel class(I will be using formviewmodel class for validation?)

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• Setting the position within a spinner

  - by eric

  Good Afternoon, I have a spinner array containing 3 spinners. Each spinner is populated via a res string array. Each array contains the numbers 1-100. When the activity starts each spinner contains a string array of 1-100 and when you click on a spinner the first choice is 1. Say a user picks 25 on the first spinner. I'd like the 2nd spinner to show 25 as the starting point for scrolling when the spinner is clicked but not fire the spinner. The 2nd spinner would still contain the array 1-100 though so a user could scroll down to a lessor number if the wanted to. I've tried using setSelection but that causes the 2nd spinner to fire causing undesirable effects (an edit box is populated with the 2nd number even though the user hasn't clicked the 2nd spinner). I would like the 2nd spinner to just show 25 as the starting point. How do I do this?

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• MSSQL2008: DTC Transaction - Internal abort

  - by Teutales

  Hi all, I write a small own replication - a trigger which fires an DTC INSERT to another server (one reason for my own "replication": while trigger is running it calculates some data, another: it works from an express version to an express version). When I do the initial insert from the same Host with the windows authentification it works fine. But there is a webserver on another host, which uses the sqlserver login (for testing sa). When this Host do the initial insert I get a Internal abort after the entlisting and creating phase in the DTCTransaction EventClass (Profiler). The magic is: When I first fire it from the same Host with the windows authentification, I can fire it from the webserver and it works fine. But I just have to wait some minutes and it won't work. Where is my error in reasoning... Thanks! Greetz Teutales Here is my initial server script: EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedserver @server = @Servername, @srvproduct=N'SQL Server' EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedsrvlogin @rmtsrvname = @Servername, @locallogin = NULL , @useself = N'False', @rmtuser = @Serverlogin, @rmtpassword = @Serverpwd

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• Best reverse proxy for IIS 6?

  - by Chris

  I want to set up a reverse proxy from one of our intranet IIS sites to point to another tomcat server. Eg, i want the user to browse to 'http://our-iis-server/friendly-url' and for it to reverse proxy to 'http://our-tomcat-server/ugly-url'. What would be the best solution for this? I've narrowed it down to three options: http://www.managedfusion.com/products/url-rewriter/documentation.aspx http://www.isapirewrite.com/ http://www.codeplex.com/IIRF Also, can these tools rewrite the links in the html? Eg, if the tomcat server's html has something like 'a href = http://our-tomcat-server/ugly-url/product/widget' i would need it to change to 'a href = http://our-iis-server/friendly-url/product/widget' Thanks in advance. All good answers will be voted for!!!

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