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  • Syntax errors on Heroku, but not on local server (postgresql related?)

    - by Phil_Ken_Sebben
    I'm trying to deploy my first app on Heroku (rails 3). It works fine on my local server, but when I pushed it to Heroku and ran it, it crashes, giving a number of syntax errors. These are related to a collection of scopes I use like the one below: scope :scored, lambda { |score = nil| score.nil? ? {} : where('products.votes_count >= ?', score) } it produces errors of this form: "syntax error, unexpected '=', expecting '|' " "syntax error, unexpected '}', expecting kEND" Why is this syntax making Heroku choke and how can I correct it? Thanks! EDIT: I was using sqlite on my local machine and Heroku does not support that. Trying to make sure the db is properly configured for PG. I believe I have done that by specifying in the gemfile that sqlite only be used in development. Yet I still get these syntax errors, that interrupt even the db:migrate. EDIT: So now it seems more likely that my scope syntax doesn't work in postgreSQL. Does anyone know how to convert this properly?

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  • getting active records to display as a plist

    - by phil swenson
    I'm trying to get a list of active record results to display as a plist for being consumed by the iphone. I'm using the plist gem v 3.0. My model is called Post. And I want Post.all (or any array or Posts) to display correctly as a Plist. I have it working fine for one Post instance: [http://pastie.org/580902][1] that is correct, what I would expect. To get that behavior I had to do this: class Post < ActiveRecord::Base def to_plist attributes.to_plist end end However, when I do a Post.all, I can't get it to display what I want. Here is what happens: http://pastie.org/580909 I get marshalling. I want output more like this: [http://pastie.org/580914][2] I suppose I could just iterate the result set and append the plist strings. But seems ugly, I'm sure there is a more elegant way to do this. I am rusty on Ruby right now, so the elegant way isn't obvious to me. Seems like I should be able to override ActiveRecord and make result-sets that pull back more than one record take the ActiveRecord::Base to_plist and make another to_plist implementation. In rails, this would go in environment.rb, right?

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  • fastest public web app framework for quick DB apps?

    - by Steve Eisner
    I'd like to pick up a new tech for my toolbox - something for rapid prototyping of web apps. Brief requirements: public access (not hosted on my machine) - like Google's appengine, etc no tricky configuration necessary to build a simple web app host DB access (small storage provided) including some kind of SQLish query language easy front end HTML templating ability to access as a JSON service C# or Java,PHP or Python - or a fun new language to learn is OK free! An example app, very simple: render an AJAXy editable (add/delete/edit/drag) list of rich-data list items via some template language, so I can quickly mock up a UI for a client. ie. I can do most of the work client-side, but need convenient back end to handle the permanent storage. (In fact I suppose it doesn't even need HTML templating if I can directly access a DB via AJAX calls.) I realize this is a bit vague but am wondering if anyone has recommendations. A Rails host might be best for this (but probably not free) or maybe App Engine, or some other choice I'm not aware of? I've been doing everything with heavyweight servers (ASP.NET etc) for so long that I'm just not up on the latest... Thanks - I'll follow up on comments if this isn't clear enough :)

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  • Sinatra: rendering snippets (partials)

    - by Michael
    I'm following along with an O'Reilly book that's building a twitter clone with Sinatra. As Sinatra doesn't have 'partials' (in the way that Rails does), the author creates his own 'snippets' that work like partials. I understand that this is fairly common in Sinatra. Anyways, inside one of his snippets (see the first one below) he calls another snippet text_limiter_js (which is copied below). Text_limiter_js is basically a javascript function. If you look at the javascript function in text_limiter_js, you'll notice that it takes two parameters. I don't understand where these parameters are coming from because they're not getting passed in when text_limiter_js is rendered inside the other snippet. I'm not sure if I've given enough information/code for someone to help me understand this, but if you can, please explain. =snippet :'/snippets/text_limiter_js' %h2.comic What are you doing? %form{:method => 'post', :action => '/update'} %textarea.update.span-15#update{:name => 'status', :rows => 2, :onKeyDown => "text_limiter($('#update'), $('#counter'))"} .span-6 %span#counter 140 characters left .prepend-12 %input#button{:type => 'submit', :value => 'update'} text_limiter_js.haml :javascript function text_limiter(field,counter_field) { limit = 139; if (field.val().length > limit) field.val(field.val().substring(0, limit)); else counter_field.text(limit - field.val().length); }

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  • Why won't ruby recognize Haml under ubuntu64 while using jekyll static blog generator?

    - by oldmanjoyce
    I have been trying, quite unsuccessfully, to run henrik's fork of the jekyll static blog generator on Ubuntu 64-bit. I just can't seem to figure this out and I've tried a bunch of different things. Originally I posted this over at stackoverflow, but this is probably the better spot for it. The base stats of my machine: Ubuntu 9.04, 64 bit, ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [x86_64-linux], rubygems 1.3.1. When I attempt to build the site, this is what happens: $ jekyll --pygments Configuration from ./_config.yml Using Sass for CSS generation You must have the haml gem installed first Using rdiscount for Markdown Building site: . - ./_site /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/../lib/jekyll/core_ext.rb:27:in `method_missing': undefined method 'header' for #, page=# ..... cut ..... (NoMethodError) from (haml):9:in `render' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/haml-2.2.3/lib/haml/engine.rb:167:in 'render' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/haml-2.2.3/lib/haml/engine.rb:167:in 'instance_eval' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/haml-2.2.3/lib/haml/engine.rb:167:in 'render' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/../lib/jekyll/convertible.rb:72:in 'render_haml_in_context' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/../lib/jekyll/convertible.rb:105:in 'do_layout' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/../lib/jekyll/post.rb:226:in 'render' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/../lib/jekyll/site.rb:172:in 'read_posts' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/../lib/jekyll/site.rb:171:in 'each' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/../lib/jekyll/site.rb:171:in 'read_posts' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/../lib/jekyll/site.rb:210:in 'transform_pages' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/../lib/jekyll/site.rb:126:in 'process' from /home/chris/.gem/gems/henrik-jekyll-0.5.2/bin/jekyll:135 from /home/chris/.gem/bin/jekyll:19:in `load' from /home/chris/.gem/bin/jekyll:19 I added spaces to the left of the ClosedStruct to enable better visibility - sorry that my inline html/formatting isn't perfect. I also cut out some middle text that is just data. $ gem list *** LOCAL GEMS *** actionmailer (2.3.4) actionpack (2.3.4) activerecord (2.3.4) activeresource (2.3.4) activesupport (2.3.4) classifier (1.3.1) directory_watcher (1.2.0) haml (2.2.3) haml-edge (2.3.27) henrik-jekyll (0.5.2) liquid (2.0.0) maruku (0.6.0) open4 (0.9.6) rack (1.0.0) rails (2.3.4) rake (0.8.7) rdiscount (1.3.5) RedCloth (4.2.2) stemmer (1.0.1) syntax (1.0.0) Some showing for path verification: $ echo $PATH /home/chris/.gem/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games $ which haml /home/chris/.gem/bin/haml $ which jekyll /home/chris/.gem/bin/jekyll

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  • nginx reverse proxy subdomain is redirecting

    - by holtkampw
    So I have a frontend nginx server which will proxy to several other nginx servers (running Passenger for Rails apps). Here's the part of the frontend nginx config in question: server { listen 80; server_name git.domain.com; access_log /server/domain/log/nginx.access.log; error_log /server/domain/log/nginx_error.log debug; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8020/; proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_max_temp_file_size 0; client_max_body_size 10m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_connect_timeout 90; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 90; proxy_buffer_size 4k; proxy_buffers 4 32k; proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k; proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k; } } server { listen 80; server_name domain.com; access_log /server/domain/log/nginx.access.log; error_log /server/domain/log/nginx_error.log debug; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000/; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header X_FORWARDED_PROTO https; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; } } Finally here's the backend for git.domain.com: server { listen 8020; #server_name localhost; root /server/gitorious/gitorious/public/; passenger_enabled on; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header X_FORWARDED_PROTO https; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; } So here's the problem. When I type in git.domain.com, my gitorious install will redirect to domain.com. It works perfect there, but it ignores the subdomain. At first I thought it was the server_name construct. I have tried git.domain.com, domain.com, localhost, and currently none. Any ideas?

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  • Postfix: Relay access denied

    - by Joseph Silvashy
    When I telnet to my server thats running postfix and try to send an email: MAIL FROM:<[email protected]> #=> 250 2.1.0 Ok RCPT TO:<[email protected]> #=> 554 5.7.1 <[email protected]>: Relay access denied I couldn't really find the answer on the site or by looking at other users question/answers, I'm not sure where to start. Ideas? Update So basically looking at the docs: http://www.postfix.org/SMTPD_ACCESS_README.html (section: Getting selective with SMTP access restriction lists), I don't seem to have any of those directives in etc/postfix/main.cf like smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, reject or any of the other ones, so I'm quite confused. But really I'm going to have a rails app connect to the server and send the emails, so I'm not sure how to handle it. Here is what my config file looks like: # See /usr/share/postfix/main.cf.dist for a commented, more complete version # Debian specific: Specifying a file name will cause the first # line of that file to be used as the name. The Debian default # is /etc/mailname. #myorigin = /etc/mailname smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name (Ubuntu) biff = no # appending .domain is the MUA's job. append_dot_mydomain = no # Uncomment the next line to generate "delayed mail" warnings #delay_warning_time = 4h readme_directory = no # TLS parameters smtpd_tls_cert_file=/etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem smtpd_tls_key_file=/etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key smtpd_use_tls=yes smtpd_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtpd_scache smtp_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtp_scache # See /usr/share/doc/postfix/TLS_README.gz in the postfix-doc package for # information on enabling SSL in the smtp client. myhostname = rerecipe-utils alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases myorigin = /etc/mailname mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost, mail.rerecipe.com, rerecipe.com relayhost = mailbox_size_limit = 0 recipient_delimiter = + inet_interfaces = all inet_protocols = all mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 204.232.207.0/24 10.177.64.0/19 [::1]/128 [fe80::%eth0]/64 [fe80::%eth1]/64 Something to note is that relayhost is blank, this is the default configuration file that was created when I installed Postfix, when testing to connect with openssl I get this: ~% openssl s_client -connect mail.myhostname.com:25 -starttls smtp CONNECTED(00000003) depth=0 /CN=myhostname verify error:num=18:self signed certificate verify return:1 depth=0 /CN=myhostname verify return:1 --- Certificate chain 0 s:/CN=myhostname i:/CN=myhostname --- Server certificate -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIIBqTCCARICCQDDxVr+420qvjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADAZMRcwFQYDVQQDEw5y ZXJlY2lwZS11dGlsczAeFw0xMDEwMTMwNjU1MTVaFw0yMDEwMTAwNjU1MTVaMBkx FzAVBgNVBAMTDnJlcmVjaXBlLXV0aWxzMIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCB iQKBgQDODh2w4A1k0qiPNPhkrPj8sfkxpKPTk28AuZhgOEBYBLeHacTKNH0jXxPv P3TyhINijvvdDPzyuPJoTTliR2EHR/nL4DLhr5FzhV+PB4PsIFUER7arx+1sMjz6 5l/Ubu1ppMzW9U0IFNbaPm2AiiGBQRCQN8L0bLUjzVzwoSRMOQIDAQABMA0GCSqG SIb3DQEBBQUAA4GBALi2vvk9TGKJubXYJbU0PKmVmsfzFK35yLqr0keiDBhK2Leg 274sWxEH3ds8mUaRftuFlXb7RYAGNlVyTuMTY3CEcnqIsH7F2McCUTpjMzu/o1mZ O/B21CelKetBd1u79Gkrv2vWyN7Csft6uTx5NIGG2+pGi3r0gX2r0Hbu2K94 -----END CERTIFICATE----- subject=/CN=myhostname issuer=/CN=myhostname --- No client certificate CA names sent --- SSL handshake has read 1203 bytes and written 360 bytes --- New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA Server public key is 1024 bit Compression: NONE Expansion: NONE SSL-Session: Protocol : TLSv1 Cipher : DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA Session-ID: 1AA4B8BFAAA85DA9ED4755194C50311670E57C35B8C51F9C2749936DA11918E4 Session-ID-ctx: Master-Key: 9B432F1DE9F3580DCC6208C76F96631DC5A4BC517BDBADD5F514414DCF34AC526C30687B96C5C4742E9583555A118232 Key-Arg : None Start Time: 1292985376 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 18 (self signed certificate) --- 250 DSN Oddly enough when I try to send an email from the machine itself it does work: echo test | mail -s "test subject" [email protected]

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  • Handling site not found and page not found with dynamic mass virtual hosting

    - by Rick Moynihan
    I have recently setup mass virtual hosting in Apache so that all we need to do is create a directory to create a new vhost. We're then also using wildcard DNS to map all subdomains to the server running our Apache instance. This works excellently, however I'm now having trouble configuring it to fail-over to an appropriate default/error-page when the vhost directory does not exist. The problem appears to be conflated between by my desire to handle the two error conditions: vhost not found i.e. there was no directory found matching the host supplied in the HTTP host header. I'd like this to display an appropriate site not found error page. The 404 page not found condition of the vhost. Additionally I have a specialised "api" vhost in its own vhost block. I've tried a number of variations and none seem to exhibit the behaviour I want. Here's what I'm working with right now: NameVirtualHost *:80 <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/site-not-found ServerName sitenotfound.mydomain.org ErrorDocument 500 /500.html ErrorDocument 404 /500.html </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName api.mydomain.org DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/api.mydomain.org/current # other directives, e.g. setting up passenger/rails etc... </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> # get the server name from the Host: header UseCanonicalName Off VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/%0/current # other directives ... e.g proxy passing to api etc... ErrorDocument 404 /404.html </VirtualHost> My understanding is that the first vhost block is used as the default, so I have this here as my catch all site. Next I have my API vhost, and then finally my mass vhost block. So for a domain that doesn't match the first two ServerName's and has no corresponding directory in /var/www/vhosts/ I'd expect it to fall-over to the first vhost, however with this setup, all domains resolve to my default site-not-found. Why is this? By putting the mass-vhost block first, I can get the mass-vhosts to resolve properly, but not my site-not-found vhost... and in this case I can't seem to find a way to distinguish between a page-level 404 in the vhost, and the case where the VirtualDocumentRoot fails to find a vhost directory (this appears to use the 404 also). Any help out of this bind is much appreciated!

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  • 502 Bad Gateway with nginx + apache + subversion + ssl (SVN COPY)

    - by theplatz
    I've asked this on stackoverflow, but it may be better suited for serverfault... I'm having a problem running Apache + Subversion with SSL behind an Nginx proxy and I'm hoping someone might have the answer. I've scoured google for hours looking for the answer to my problem and can't seem to figure it out. What I'm seeing are "502 (Bad Gateway)" errors when trying to MOVE or COPY using subversion; however, checkouts and commits work fine. Here are the relevant parts (I think) of the nginx and apache config files in question: Nginx upstream subversion_hosts { server 127.0.0.1:80; } server { listen x.x.x.x:80; server_name hostname; access_log /srv/log/nginx/http.access_log main; error_log /srv/log/nginx/http.error_log info; # redirect all requests to https rewrite ^/(.*)$ https://hostname/$1 redirect; } # HTTPS server server { listen x.x.x.x:443; server_name hostname; passenger_enabled on; root /path/to/rails/root; access_log /srv/log/nginx/ssl.access_log main; error_log /srv/log/nginx/ssl.error_log info; ssl on; ssl_certificate server.crt; ssl_certificate_key server.key; add_header Front-End-Https on; location /svn { proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; set $fixed_destination $http_destination; if ( $http_destination ~* ^https(.*)$ ) { set $fixed_destination http$1; } proxy_set_header Destination $fixed_destination; proxy_pass http://subversion_hosts; } } Apache Listen 127.0.0.1:80 <VirtualHost *:80> # in order to support COPY and MOVE, etc - over https (443), # ServerName _must_ be the same as the nginx servername # http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracNginxRecipe ServerName hostname UseCanonicalName on <Location /svn> DAV svn SVNParentPath "/srv/svn" Order deny,allow Deny from all Satisfy any # Some config omitted ... </Location> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/subversion_error.log # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. LogLevel warn CustomLog /var/log/apache2/subversion_access.log combined </VirtualHost> From what I could tell while researching this problem, the server name has to match on both the apache server as well as the nginx server, which I've done. Additionally, this problem seems to stick around even if I change the configuration to use http only.

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  • SimpleMembership, Membership Providers, Universal Providers and the new ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 4 templates

    - by Jon Galloway
    The ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template adds some new, very useful features which are built on top of SimpleMembership. These changes add some great features, like a much simpler and extensible membership API and support for OAuth. However, the new account management features require SimpleMembership and won't work against existing ASP.NET Membership Providers. I'll start with a summary of top things you need to know, then dig into a lot more detail. Summary: SimpleMembership has been designed as a replacement for traditional the previous ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system SimpleMembership solves common problems people ran into with the Membership provider system and was designed for modern user / membership / storage needs SimpleMembership integrates with the previous membership system, but you can't use a MembershipProvider with SimpleMembership The new ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template AccountController requires SimpleMembership and is not compatible with previous MembershipProviders You can continue to use existing ASP.NET Role and Membership providers in ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 - just not with the ASP.NET MVC 4 AccountController The existing ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system remains supported as is part of the ASP.NET core ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms does not use SimpleMembership; it implements OAuth on top of ASP.NET Membership The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) is not compatible with SimpleMembership The following is the result of a few conversations with Erik Porter (PM for ASP.NET MVC) to make sure I had some the overall details straight, combined with a lot of time digging around in ILSpy and Visual Studio's assembly browsing tools. SimpleMembership: The future of membership for ASP.NET The ASP.NET Membership system was introduces with ASP.NET 2.0 back in 2005. It was designed to solve common site membership requirements at the time, which generally involved username / password based registration and profile storage in SQL Server. It was designed with a few extensibility mechanisms - notably a provider system (which allowed you override some specifics like backing storage) and the ability to store additional profile information (although the additional  profile information was packed into a single column which usually required access through the API). While it's sometimes frustrating to work with, it's held up for seven years - probably since it handles the main use case (username / password based membership in a SQL Server database) smoothly and can be adapted to most other needs (again, often frustrating, but it can work). The ASP.NET Web Pages and WebMatrix efforts allowed the team an opportunity to take a new look at a lot of things - e.g. the Razor syntax started with ASP.NET Web Pages, not ASP.NET MVC. The ASP.NET Web Pages team designed SimpleMembership to (wait for it) simplify the task of dealing with membership. As Matthew Osborn said in his post Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages: With the introduction of ASP.NET WebPages and the WebMatrix stack our team has really be focusing on making things simpler for the developer. Based on a lot of customer feedback one of the areas that we wanted to improve was the built in security in ASP.NET. So with this release we took that time to create a new built in (and default for ASP.NET WebPages) security provider. I say provider because the new stuff is still built on the existing ASP.NET framework. So what do we call this new hotness that we have created? Well, none other than SimpleMembership. SimpleMembership is an umbrella term for both SimpleMembership and SimpleRoles. Part of simplifying membership involved fixing some common problems with ASP.NET Membership. Problems with ASP.NET Membership ASP.NET Membership was very obviously designed around a set of assumptions: Users and user information would most likely be stored in a full SQL Server database or in Active Directory User and profile information would be optimized around a set of common attributes (UserName, Password, IsApproved, CreationDate, Comment, Role membership...) and other user profile information would be accessed through a profile provider Some problems fall out of these assumptions. Requires Full SQL Server for default cases The default, and most fully featured providers ASP.NET Membership providers (SQL Membership Provider, SQL Role Provider, SQL Profile Provider) require full SQL Server. They depend on stored procedure support, and they rely on SQL Server cache dependencies, they depend on agents for clean up and maintenance. So the main SQL Server based providers don't work well on SQL Server CE, won't work out of the box on SQL Azure, etc. Note: Cory Fowler recently let me know about these Updated ASP.net scripts for use with Microsoft SQL Azure which do support membership, personalization, profile, and roles. But the fact that we need a support page with a set of separate SQL scripts underscores the underlying problem. Aha, you say! Jon's forgetting the Universal Providers, a.k.a. System.Web.Providers! Hold on a bit, we'll get to those... Custom Membership Providers have to work with a SQL-Server-centric API If you want to work with another database or other membership storage system, you need to to inherit from the provider base classes and override a bunch of methods which are tightly focused on storing a MembershipUser in a relational database. It can be done (and you can often find pretty good ones that have already been written), but it's a good amount of work and often leaves you with ugly code that has a bunch of System.NotImplementedException fun since there are a lot of methods that just don't apply. Designed around a specific view of users, roles and profiles The existing providers are focused on traditional membership - a user has a username and a password, some specific roles on the site (e.g. administrator, premium user), and may have some additional "nice to have" optional information that can be accessed via an API in your application. This doesn't fit well with some modern usage patterns: In OAuth and OpenID, the user doesn't have a password Often these kinds of scenarios map better to user claims or rights instead of monolithic user roles For many sites, profile or other non-traditional information is very important and needs to come from somewhere other than an API call that maps to a database blob What would work a lot better here is a system in which you were able to define your users, rights, and other attributes however you wanted and the membership system worked with your model - not the other way around. Requires specific schema, overflow in blob columns I've already mentioned this a few times, but it bears calling out separately - ASP.NET Membership focuses on SQL Server storage, and that storage is based on a very specific database schema. SimpleMembership as a better membership system As you might have guessed, SimpleMembership was designed to address the above problems. Works with your Schema As Matthew Osborn explains in his Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages post, SimpleMembership is designed to integrate with your database schema: All SimpleMembership requires is that there are two columns on your users table so that we can hook up to it – an “ID” column and a “username” column. The important part here is that they can be named whatever you want. For instance username doesn't have to be an alias it could be an email column you just have to tell SimpleMembership to treat that as the “username” used to log in. Matthew's example shows using a very simple user table named Users (it could be named anything) with a UserID and Username column, then a bunch of other columns he wanted in his app. Then we point SimpleMemberhip at that table with a one-liner: WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseFile("SecurityDemo.sdf", "Users", "UserID", "Username", true); No other tables are needed, the table can be named anything we want, and can have pretty much any schema we want as long as we've got an ID and something that we can map to a username. Broaden database support to the whole SQL Server family While SimpleMembership is not database agnostic, it works across the SQL Server family. It continues to support full SQL Server, but it also works with SQL Azure, SQL Server CE, SQL Server Express, and LocalDB. Everything's implemented as SQL calls rather than requiring stored procedures, views, agents, and change notifications. Note that SimpleMembership still requires some flavor of SQL Server - it won't work with MySQL, NoSQL databases, etc. You can take a look at the code in WebMatrix.WebData.dll using a tool like ILSpy if you'd like to see why - there places where SQL Server specific SQL statements are being executed, especially when creating and initializing tables. It seems like you might be able to work with another database if you created the tables separately, but I haven't tried it and it's not supported at this point. Note: I'm thinking it would be possible for SimpleMembership (or something compatible) to run Entity Framework so it would work with any database EF supports. That seems useful to me - thoughts? Note: SimpleMembership has the same database support - anything in the SQL Server family - that Universal Providers brings to the ASP.NET Membership system. Easy to with Entity Framework Code First The problem with with ASP.NET Membership's system for storing additional account information is that it's the gate keeper. That means you're stuck with its schema and accessing profile information through its API. SimpleMembership flips that around by allowing you to use any table as a user store. That means you're in control of the user profile information, and you can access it however you'd like - it's just data. Let's look at a practical based on the AccountModel.cs class in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project. Here I'm adding a Birthday property to the UserProfile class. [Table("UserProfile")] public class UserProfile { [Key] [DatabaseGeneratedAttribute(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] public int UserId { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } public DateTime Birthday { get; set; } } Now if I want to access that information, I can just grab the account by username and read the value. var context = new UsersContext(); var username = User.Identity.Name; var user = context.UserProfiles.SingleOrDefault(u => u.UserName == username); var birthday = user.Birthday; So instead of thinking of SimpleMembership as a big membership API, think of it as something that handles membership based on your user database. In SimpleMembership, everything's keyed off a user row in a table you define rather than a bunch of entries in membership tables that were out of your control. How SimpleMembership integrates with ASP.NET Membership Okay, enough sales pitch (and hopefully background) on why things have changed. How does this affect you? Let's start with a diagram to show the relationship (note: I've simplified by removing a few classes to show the important relationships): So SimpleMembershipProvider is an implementaiton of an ExtendedMembershipProvider, which inherits from MembershipProvider and adds some other account / OAuth related things. Here's what ExtendedMembershipProvider adds to MembershipProvider: The important thing to take away here is that a SimpleMembershipProvider is a MembershipProvider, but a MembershipProvider is not a SimpleMembershipProvider. This distinction is important in practice: you cannot use an existing MembershipProvider (including the Universal Providers found in System.Web.Providers) with an API that requires a SimpleMembershipProvider, including any of the calls in WebMatrix.WebData.WebSecurity or Microsoft.Web.WebPages.OAuth.OAuthWebSecurity. However, that's as far as it goes. Membership Providers still work if you're accessing them through the standard Membership API, and all of the core stuff  - including the AuthorizeAttribute, role enforcement, etc. - will work just fine and without any change. Let's look at how that affects you in terms of the new templates. Membership in the ASP.NET MVC 4 project templates ASP.NET MVC 4 offers six Project Templates: Empty - Really empty, just the assemblies, folder structure and a tiny bit of basic configuration. Basic - Like Empty, but with a bit of UI preconfigured (css / images / bundling). Internet - This has both a Home and Account controller and associated views. The Account Controller supports registration and login via either local accounts and via OAuth / OpenID providers. Intranet - Like the Internet template, but it's preconfigured for Windows Authentication. Mobile - This is preconfigured using jQuery Mobile and is intended for mobile-only sites. Web API - This is preconfigured for a service backend built on ASP.NET Web API. Out of these templates, only one (the Internet template) uses SimpleMembership. ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template The Basic template has configuration in place to use ASP.NET Membership with the Universal Providers. You can see that configuration in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template's web.config: <profile defaultProvider="DefaultProfileProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultProfileProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </profile> <membership defaultProvider="DefaultMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultMembershipProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordAttemptWindow="10" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </membership> <roleManager defaultProvider="DefaultRoleProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultRoleProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </roleManager> <sessionState mode="InProc" customProvider="DefaultSessionProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultSessionProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultSessionStateProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" /> </providers> </sessionState> This means that it's business as usual for the Basic template as far as ASP.NET Membership works. ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template The Internet template has a few things set up to bootstrap SimpleMembership: \Models\AccountModels.cs defines a basic user account and includes data annotations to define keys and such \Filters\InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs creates the membership database using the above model, then calls WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection which verifies that the underlying tables are in place and marks initialization as complete (for the application's lifetime) \Controllers\AccountController.cs makes heavy use of OAuthWebSecurity (for OAuth account registration / login / management) and WebSecurity. WebSecurity provides account management services for ASP.NET MVC (and Web Pages) WebSecurity can work with any ExtendedMembershipProvider. There's one in the box (SimpleMembershipProvider) but you can write your own. Since a standard MembershipProvider is not an ExtendedMembershipProvider, WebSecurity will throw exceptions if the default membership provider is a MembershipProvider rather than an ExtendedMembershipProvider. Practical example: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application using the Internet application template Install the Microsoft ASP.NET Universal Providers for LocalDB NuGet package Run the application, click on Register, add a username and password, and click submit You'll get the following execption in AccountController.cs::Register: To call this method, the "Membership.Provider" property must be an instance of "ExtendedMembershipProvider". This occurs because the ASP.NET Universal Providers packages include a web.config transform that will update your web.config to add the Universal Provider configuration I showed in the Basic template example above. When WebSecurity tries to use the configured ASP.NET Membership Provider, it checks if it can be cast to an ExtendedMembershipProvider before doing anything else. So, what do you do? Options: If you want to use the new AccountController, you'll either need to use the SimpleMembershipProvider or another valid ExtendedMembershipProvider. This is pretty straightforward. If you want to use an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider in ASP.NET MVC 4, you can't use the new AccountController. You can do a few things: Replace  the AccountController.cs and AccountModels.cs in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project with one from an ASP.NET MVC 3 application (you of course won't have OAuth support). Then, if you want, you can go through and remove other things that were built around SimpleMembership - the OAuth partial view, the NuGet packages (e.g. the DotNetOpenAuthAuth package, etc.) Use an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template and add in a Universal Providers NuGet package. Then copy in the AccountController and AccountModel classes. Create an ASP.NET MVC 3 project and upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 using the steps shown in the ASP.NET MVC 4 release notes. None of these are particularly elegant or simple. Maybe we (or just me?) can do something to make this simpler - perhaps a NuGet package. However, this should be an edge case - hopefully the cases where you'd need to create a new ASP.NET but use legacy ASP.NET Membership Providers should be pretty rare. Please let me (or, preferably the team) know if that's an incorrect assumption. Membership in the ASP.NET 4.5 project template ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms took a different approach which builds off ASP.NET Membership. Instead of using the WebMatrix security assemblies, Web Forms uses Microsoft.AspNet.Membership.OpenAuth assembly. I'm no expert on this, but from a bit of time in ILSpy and Visual Studio's (very pretty) dependency graphs, this uses a Membership Adapter to save OAuth data into an EF managed database while still running on top of ASP.NET Membership. Note: There may be a way to use this in ASP.NET MVC 4, although it would probably take some plumbing work to hook it up. How does this fit in with Universal Providers (System.Web.Providers)? Just to summarize: Universal Providers are intended for cases where you have an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider and you want to use it with another SQL Server database backend (other than SQL Server). It doesn't require agents to handle expired session cleanup and other background tasks, it piggybacks these tasks on other calls. Universal Providers are not really, strictly speaking, universal - at least to my way of thinking. They only work with databases in the SQL Server family. Universal Providers do not work with Simple Membership. The Universal Providers packages include some web config transforms which you would normally want when you're using them. What about the Web Site Administration Tool? Visual Studio includes tooling to launch the Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) to configure users and roles in your application. WSAT is built to work with ASP.NET Membership, and is not compatible with Simple Membership. There are two main options there: Use the WebSecurity and OAuthWebSecurity API to manage the users and roles Create a web admin using the above APIs Since SimpleMembership runs on top of your database, you can update your users as you would any other data - via EF or even in direct database edits (in development, of course)

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  • Using Durandal to Create Single Page Apps

    - by Stephen.Walther
    A few days ago, I gave a talk on building Single Page Apps on the Microsoft Stack. In that talk, I recommended that people use Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS to build their presentation layer and use the ASP.NET Web API to expose data from their server. After I gave the talk, several people contacted me and suggested that I investigate a new open-source JavaScript library named Durandal. Durandal stitches together Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS to make it easier to use these technologies together. In this blog entry, I want to provide a brief walkthrough of using Durandal to create a simple Single Page App. I am going to demonstrate how you can create a simple Movies App which contains (virtual) pages for viewing a list of movies, adding new movies, and viewing movie details. The goal of this blog entry is to give you a sense of what it is like to build apps with Durandal. Installing Durandal First things first. How do you get Durandal? The GitHub project for Durandal is located here: https://github.com/BlueSpire/Durandal The Wiki — located at the GitHub project — contains all of the current documentation for Durandal. Currently, the documentation is a little sparse, but it is enough to get you started. Instead of downloading the Durandal source from GitHub, a better option for getting started with Durandal is to install one of the Durandal NuGet packages. I built the Movies App described in this blog entry by first creating a new ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application with the Basic Template. Next, I executed the following command from the Package Manager Console: Install-Package Durandal.StarterKit As you can see from the screenshot of the Package Manager Console above, the Durandal Starter Kit package has several dependencies including: · jQuery · Knockout · Sammy · Twitter Bootstrap The Durandal Starter Kit package includes a sample Durandal application. You can get to the Starter Kit app by navigating to the Durandal controller. Unfortunately, when I first tried to run the Starter Kit app, I got an error because the Starter Kit is hard-coded to use a particular version of jQuery which is already out of date. You can fix this issue by modifying the App_Start\DurandalBundleConfig.cs file so it is jQuery version agnostic like this: bundles.Add( new ScriptBundle("~/scripts/vendor") .Include("~/Scripts/jquery-{version}.js") .Include("~/Scripts/knockout-{version}.js") .Include("~/Scripts/sammy-{version}.js") // .Include("~/Scripts/jquery-1.9.0.min.js") // .Include("~/Scripts/knockout-2.2.1.js") // .Include("~/Scripts/sammy-0.7.4.min.js") .Include("~/Scripts/bootstrap.min.js") ); The recommendation is that you create a Durandal app in a folder off your project root named App. The App folder in the Starter Kit contains the following subfolders and files: · durandal – This folder contains the actual durandal JavaScript library. · viewmodels – This folder contains all of your application’s view models. · views – This folder contains all of your application’s views. · main.js — This file contains all of the JavaScript startup code for your app including the client-side routing configuration. · main-built.js – This file contains an optimized version of your application. You need to build this file by using the RequireJS optimizer (unfortunately, before you can run the optimizer, you must first install NodeJS). For the purpose of this blog entry, I wanted to start from scratch when building the Movies app, so I deleted all of these files and folders except for the durandal folder which contains the durandal library. Creating the ASP.NET MVC Controller and View A Durandal app is built using a single server-side ASP.NET MVC controller and ASP.NET MVC view. A Durandal app is a Single Page App. When you navigate between pages, you are not navigating to new pages on the server. Instead, you are loading new virtual pages into the one-and-only-one server-side view. For the Movies app, I created the following ASP.NET MVC Home controller: public class HomeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } } There is nothing special about the Home controller – it is as basic as it gets. Next, I created the following server-side ASP.NET view. This is the one-and-only server-side view used by the Movies app: @{ Layout = null; } <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Index</title> </head> <body> <div id="applicationHost"> Loading app.... </div> @Scripts.Render("~/scripts/vendor") <script type="text/javascript" src="~/App/durandal/amd/require.js" data-main="/App/main"></script> </body> </html> Notice that I set the Layout property for the view to the value null. If you neglect to do this, then the default ASP.NET MVC layout will be applied to the view and you will get the <!DOCTYPE> and opening and closing <html> tags twice. Next, notice that the view contains a DIV element with the Id applicationHost. This marks the area where virtual pages are loaded. When you navigate from page to page in a Durandal app, HTML page fragments are retrieved from the server and stuck in the applicationHost DIV element. Inside the applicationHost element, you can place any content which you want to display when a Durandal app is starting up. For example, you can create a fancy splash screen. I opted for simply displaying the text “Loading app…”: Next, notice the view above includes a call to the Scripts.Render() helper. This helper renders out all of the JavaScript files required by the Durandal library such as jQuery and Knockout. Remember to fix the App_Start\DurandalBundleConfig.cs as described above or Durandal will attempt to load an old version of jQuery and throw a JavaScript exception and stop working. Your application JavaScript code is not included in the scripts rendered by the Scripts.Render helper. Your application code is loaded dynamically by RequireJS with the help of the following SCRIPT element located at the bottom of the view: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/App/durandal/amd/require.js" data-main="/App/main"></script> The data-main attribute on the SCRIPT element causes RequireJS to load your /app/main.js JavaScript file to kick-off your Durandal app. Creating the Durandal Main.js File The Durandal Main.js JavaScript file, located in your App folder, contains all of the code required to configure the behavior of Durandal. Here’s what the Main.js file looks like in the case of the Movies app: require.config({ paths: { 'text': 'durandal/amd/text' } }); define(function (require) { var app = require('durandal/app'), viewLocator = require('durandal/viewLocator'), system = require('durandal/system'), router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); //>>excludeStart("build", true); system.debug(true); //>>excludeEnd("build"); app.start().then(function () { //Replace 'viewmodels' in the moduleId with 'views' to locate the view. //Look for partial views in a 'views' folder in the root. viewLocator.useConvention(); //configure routing router.useConvention(); router.mapNav("movies/show"); router.mapNav("movies/add"); router.mapNav("movies/details/:id"); app.adaptToDevice(); //Show the app by setting the root view model for our application with a transition. app.setRoot('viewmodels/shell', 'entrance'); }); }); There are three important things to notice about the main.js file above. First, notice that it contains a section which enables debugging which looks like this: //>>excludeStart(“build”, true); system.debug(true); //>>excludeEnd(“build”); This code enables debugging for your Durandal app which is very useful when things go wrong. When you call system.debug(true), Durandal writes out debugging information to your browser JavaScript console. For example, you can use the debugging information to diagnose issues with your client-side routes: (The funny looking //> symbols around the system.debug() call are RequireJS optimizer pragmas). The main.js file is also the place where you configure your client-side routes. In the case of the Movies app, the main.js file is used to configure routes for three page: the movies show, add, and details pages. //configure routing router.useConvention(); router.mapNav("movies/show"); router.mapNav("movies/add"); router.mapNav("movies/details/:id");   The route for movie details includes a route parameter named id. Later, we will use the id parameter to lookup and display the details for the right movie. Finally, the main.js file above contains the following line of code: //Show the app by setting the root view model for our application with a transition. app.setRoot('viewmodels/shell', 'entrance'); This line of code causes Durandal to load up a JavaScript file named shell.js and an HTML fragment named shell.html. I’ll discuss the shell in the next section. Creating the Durandal Shell You can think of the Durandal shell as the layout or master page for a Durandal app. The shell is where you put all of the content which you want to remain constant as a user navigates from virtual page to virtual page. For example, the shell is a great place to put your website logo and navigation links. The Durandal shell is composed from two parts: a JavaScript file and an HTML file. Here’s what the HTML file looks like for the Movies app: <h1>Movies App</h1> <div class="container-fluid page-host"> <!--ko compose: { model: router.activeItem, //wiring the router afterCompose: router.afterCompose, //wiring the router transition:'entrance', //use the 'entrance' transition when switching views cacheViews:true //telling composition to keep views in the dom, and reuse them (only a good idea with singleton view models) }--><!--/ko--> </div> And here is what the JavaScript file looks like: define(function (require) { var router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); return { router: router, activate: function () { return router.activate('movies/show'); } }; }); The JavaScript file contains the view model for the shell. This view model returns the Durandal router so you can access the list of configured routes from your shell. Notice that the JavaScript file includes a function named activate(). This function loads the movies/show page as the first page in the Movies app. If you want to create a different default Durandal page, then pass the name of a different age to the router.activate() method. Creating the Movies Show Page Durandal pages are created out of a view model and a view. The view model contains all of the data and view logic required for the view. The view contains all of the HTML markup for rendering the view model. Let’s start with the movies show page. The movies show page displays a list of movies. The view model for the show page looks like this: define(function (require) { var moviesRepository = require("repositories/moviesRepository"); return { movies: ko.observable(), activate: function() { this.movies(moviesRepository.listMovies()); } }; }); You create a view model by defining a new RequireJS module (see http://requirejs.org). You create a RequireJS module by placing all of your JavaScript code into an anonymous function passed to the RequireJS define() method. A RequireJS module has two parts. You retrieve all of the modules which your module requires at the top of your module. The code above depends on another RequireJS module named repositories/moviesRepository. Next, you return the implementation of your module. The code above returns a JavaScript object which contains a property named movies and a method named activate. The activate() method is a magic method which Durandal calls whenever it activates your view model. Your view model is activated whenever you navigate to a page which uses it. In the code above, the activate() method is used to get the list of movies from the movies repository and assign the list to the view model movies property. The HTML for the movies show page looks like this: <table> <thead> <tr> <th>Title</th><th>Director</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody data-bind="foreach:movies"> <tr> <td data-bind="text:title"></td> <td data-bind="text:director"></td> <td><a data-bind="attr:{href:'#/movies/details/'+id}">Details</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <a href="#/movies/add">Add Movie</a> Notice that this is an HTML fragment. This fragment will be stuffed into the page-host DIV element in the shell.html file which is stuffed, in turn, into the applicationHost DIV element in the server-side MVC view. The HTML markup above contains data-bind attributes used by Knockout to display the list of movies (To learn more about Knockout, visit http://knockoutjs.com). The list of movies from the view model is displayed in an HTML table. Notice that the page includes a link to a page for adding a new movie. The link uses the following URL which starts with a hash: #/movies/add. Because the link starts with a hash, clicking the link does not cause a request back to the server. Instead, you navigate to the movies/add page virtually. Creating the Movies Add Page The movies add page also consists of a view model and view. The add page enables you to add a new movie to the movie database. Here’s the view model for the add page: define(function (require) { var app = require('durandal/app'); var router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); var moviesRepository = require("repositories/moviesRepository"); return { movieToAdd: { title: ko.observable(), director: ko.observable() }, activate: function () { this.movieToAdd.title(""); this.movieToAdd.director(""); this._movieAdded = false; }, canDeactivate: function () { if (this._movieAdded == false) { return app.showMessage('Are you sure you want to leave this page?', 'Navigate', ['Yes', 'No']); } else { return true; } }, addMovie: function () { // Add movie to db moviesRepository.addMovie(ko.toJS(this.movieToAdd)); // flag new movie this._movieAdded = true; // return to list of movies router.navigateTo("#/movies/show"); } }; }); The view model contains one property named movieToAdd which is bound to the add movie form. The view model also has the following three methods: 1. activate() – This method is called by Durandal when you navigate to the add movie page. The activate() method resets the add movie form by clearing out the movie title and director properties. 2. canDeactivate() – This method is called by Durandal when you attempt to navigate away from the add movie page. If you return false then navigation is cancelled. 3. addMovie() – This method executes when the add movie form is submitted. This code adds the new movie to the movie repository. I really like the Durandal canDeactivate() method. In the code above, I use the canDeactivate() method to show a warning to a user if they navigate away from the add movie page – either by clicking the Cancel button or by hitting the browser back button – before submitting the add movie form: The view for the add movie page looks like this: <form data-bind="submit:addMovie"> <fieldset> <legend>Add Movie</legend> <div> <label> Title: <input data-bind="value:movieToAdd.title" required /> </label> </div> <div> <label> Director: <input data-bind="value:movieToAdd.director" required /> </label> </div> <div> <input type="submit" value="Add" /> <a href="#/movies/show">Cancel</a> </div> </fieldset> </form> I am using Knockout to bind the movieToAdd property from the view model to the INPUT elements of the HTML form. Notice that the FORM element includes a data-bind attribute which invokes the addMovie() method from the view model when the HTML form is submitted. Creating the Movies Details Page You navigate to the movies details Page by clicking the Details link which appears next to each movie in the movies show page: The Details links pass the movie ids to the details page: #/movies/details/0 #/movies/details/1 #/movies/details/2 Here’s what the view model for the movies details page looks like: define(function (require) { var router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); var moviesRepository = require("repositories/moviesRepository"); return { movieToShow: { title: ko.observable(), director: ko.observable() }, activate: function (context) { // Grab movie from repository var movie = moviesRepository.getMovie(context.id); // Add to view model this.movieToShow.title(movie.title); this.movieToShow.director(movie.director); } }; }); Notice that the view model activate() method accepts a parameter named context. You can take advantage of the context parameter to retrieve route parameters such as the movie Id. In the code above, the context.id property is used to retrieve the correct movie from the movie repository and the movie is assigned to a property named movieToShow exposed by the view model. The movie details view displays the movieToShow property by taking advantage of Knockout bindings: <div> <h2 data-bind="text:movieToShow.title"></h2> directed by <span data-bind="text:movieToShow.director"></span> </div> Summary The goal of this blog entry was to walkthrough building a simple Single Page App using Durandal and to get a feel for what it is like to use this library. I really like how Durandal stitches together Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS and establishes patterns for using these libraries to build Single Page Apps. Having a standard pattern which developers on a team can use to build new pages is super valuable. Once you get the hang of it, using Durandal to create new virtual pages is dead simple. Just define a new route, view model, and view and you are done. I also appreciate the fact that Durandal did not attempt to re-invent the wheel and that Durandal leverages existing JavaScript libraries such as Knockout, RequireJS, and Sammy. These existing libraries are powerful libraries and I have already invested a considerable amount of time in learning how to use them. Durandal makes it easier to use these libraries together without losing any of their power. Durandal has some additional interesting features which I have not had a chance to play with yet. For example, you can use the RequireJS optimizer to combine and minify all of a Durandal app’s code. Also, Durandal supports a way to create custom widgets (client-side controls) by composing widgets from a controller and view. You can download the code for the Movies app by clicking the following link (this is a Visual Studio 2012 project): Durandal Movie App

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  • Rob Blackwell on interoperability and Azure

    - by Eric Nelson
    At QCon in March we had a sample Azure application implemented in both Java and Ruby to demonstrate that the Windows Azure Platform is not just about .NET. The following is an interesting interview with Rob Blackwell, the R&D director of the partner who implemented the application. UK Interoperability Team Interviews Rob Blackwell, R&D Director at Active Web Solutions. Is Microsoft taking interoperability seriously? Yes. In the past, I think Microsoft has, quite rightly come in for criticism, but architects and developers should look at this again. The Interoperability Bridges site (http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/ ) shows a wide range of projects that allow interoperability from Java, Ruby and PHP for example. The Windows Azure platform has been architected with interoperable APIs in mind. It's straightforward to access the various storage facilities from just about any language or platform. Azure compute is capable of running more than just C# applications! Why is interoperability important to you? My company provides consultancy and bespoke development services. We're a Microsoft Gold Partner, but we live in the real world where companies have a mix of technologies provided by a variety of vendors. When developing an enterprise software solution, you rarely have a completely blank canvas. We often see integration scenarios where we need to exchange data with legacy systems. It's not unusual to see modern Silverlight applications being built on top of Java or Mainframe based back ends. Could you give us some examples of where interoperability has been important for your projects? We developed an innovative Sea Safety system for the RNLI Lifeboats here in the UK. Commercial Fishing is one of the most dangerous professions and we helped developed the MOB Guardian System which uses satellite technology and man overboard devices to raise the alarm when a fisherman gets into trouble. The solution is implemented in .NET running on Windows, but without interoperable standards, it would have been impossible to communicate with the satellite gateway technology. For more information, please see the case study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005892 More recently, we were asked to build a web site to accompany the QCon 2010 conference in London to help demonstrate and promote interoperability. We built the site using Java and Restlet and hosted it in Windows Azure Compute. The site accepts feedback from visitors and all the data is stored in Windows Azure Storage. We also ported the application to Ruby on Rails for demonstration purposes. Visitors to the stand were surprised that this was even possible. Why should Java developers be interested in Windows Azure? Windows Azure Storage consists of Blobs, Queues and Tables. The storage is scalable, durable, secure and cost-effective. Using the WindowsAzure4j library, it's easy to use, and takes just a few lines of code. If you are writing an application with large data storage requirements, or you want an offsite backup, it makes a lot of sense. Running Java applications in Azure Compute is straightforward with tools like the Tomcat Solution Accelerator (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/winazuretomcat )and AzureRunMe (http://azurerunme.codeplex.com/ ). The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus can also be used to connect heterogeneous systems running on different networks and in different data centres. How can The Service Bus be considered an interoperability solution? I think that the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus is one of Microsoft’s best kept secrets. Think of it as “a globally scalable application plumbing kit in the sky”. If you have used Enterprise Service Buses before, you’ll be familiar with the concept. Applications can connect to the service bus to securely exchange data – these can be point to point or multicast links. With the AppFabric Service Bus, the applications can exist anywhere that has access to the Internet and the connections can traverse firewalls. This makes it easy to extend or scale your application or reach out to other networks and technologies. For example, let’s say you have a SQL Server database running on premises and you want to expose the data to a Java application running in the cloud. You could set up a point to point Service Bus connection and use JDBC. Traditionally this would have been difficult or impossible without punching holes in firewalls and compromising security. Rob Blackwell is R&D Director at Active Web Solutions, www.aws.net , a Microsoft Gold Partner specialising in leading edge software solutions. He is an occasional writer and conference speaker and blogs at www.robblackwell.org.uk Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure

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  • Microsoft, jQuery, and Templating

    - by Stephen Walther
    About two months ago, John Resig and I met at Café Algiers in Harvard square to discuss how Microsoft can contribute to the jQuery project. Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his second-day MIX keynote that Microsoft is throwing its weight behind jQuery and making it the primary way to develop client-side Ajax applications using Microsoft technologies. What does this announcement mean? It means that Microsoft is shifting its resources to invest in jQuery. Developers on the ASP.NET team are now working full-time to contribute features to the core jQuery library. Furthermore, we are working with other teams at Microsoft to ensure that our technologies work great with jQuery. We are contributing to the open-source jQuery project in the exact same way that any other company or individual from the community can contribute to jQuery. We are writing proposals, submitting the proposals to the jQuery forums, and revising the proposals in response to community feedback. The jQuery team can decide to reject or accept any feature that we propose. Any feature that Microsoft contributes to jQuery will be platform neutral. In other words, Microsoft contributions will benefit PHP and RAILS developers just as much as they benefit ASP.NET developers. Microsoft contributions to jQuery will improve the web for everyone. Contributing Support for Templates to jQuery Core Our first proposal concerns templating. We want to contribute support for templates to jQuery so that JavaScript developers can use jQuery to easily display a set of database records. You can read our templating proposal here: http://wiki.github.com/nje/jquery/jquery-templates-proposal You can download and play with our prototype for templating here: http://github.com/nje/jquery-tmpl The following code illustrates how you can use a template to display a set of products in a bulleted list: <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery(function(){ var products = [ { name: "Product 1", price: 12.99}, { name: "Product 2", price: 9.99}, { name: "Product 3", price: 35.59} ]; $("ul").append("#template", products); }); </script> <script id="template" type="text/html"> <li>{%= name %} - {%= price %}</li> </script> <ul></ul> The template is contained in a SCRIPT element that has a TYPE=”text/html” attribute. Browsers ignore the contents of a SCRIPT element when they don’t understand the content type. Notice that the placeholder {%=...%} is used within the template to indicate where the name and price of a product should appear. The delimiters {%=…%} are used for expressions and the delimiters {%...%} are used for code. Finally, the products are rendered using the template with the call to $(“ul”).append(“#template”, products). The standard jQuery DOM manipulation methods have been modified to support templates. When the page above is rendered, you get the bulleted list displayed in the following figure. Our goal is to keep our proposal for templates as simple as possible. After support for templating has been added to jQuery, plug-in authors can take advantage of templating when building complex data-driven plug-ins such as a DataGrid plug-in. The Ajax Control Toolkit Over 100,000 developers download the Ajax Control Toolkit every month. That’s a mind-boggling number of downloads. We realize that the Ajax Control Toolkit is extremely popular among ASP.NET Web Forms developers and we want to continue to invest in the Ajax Control Toolkit. If you are adding JavaScript interactivity to an ASP.NET Web Forms application, and you don’t want to write JavaScript, then we recommend that you use the server controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. Using the Ajax Control Toolkit does not require knowledge of JavaScript and the toolkit enables you to build applications with the concepts familiar to ASP.NET Web Forms applications developers. If, however, you are interested in creating client-side interactivity without server controls then we recommend that you use jQuery. We plan to continue to release new versions of the Ajax Control Toolkit every few months. Our goal is to continue to improve the quality of the Ajax Control Toolkit and to make it easier for the community to contribute code, bug fixes, and documentation. The ASP.NET Ajax Library We are moving the ASP.NET Ajax Library into the Ajax Control Toolkit. If you currently use ASP.NET Ajax Library client templates, client data-binding, or the client script loader then you can continue to use these features by downloading the Ajax Control Toolkit. Be aware that our focus with the Ajax Control Toolkit is server-side Ajax.  For client-side Ajax, we are shifting our focus to jQuery. For example, if you have been using ASP.NET Ajax Library client templates then we recommend that you shift to using jQuery instead. Conclusion Our plan is to focus on jQuery as the primary technology for building client-side Ajax applications moving forward. We want to adapt Microsoft technologies to work great with jQuery and we want to contribute features to jQuery that will make the web better for everyone. We are very excited to be working with the jQuery core team.

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  • My Codemash 2011 Retrospective

    - by Greg Malcolm
    I just got back from Codemash yesterday, and still on an adrenaline buzz. Here's my take on this years encounter: The Awesome Nearly everybody in one place Codemash is the ultimate place to catch up with community friends. This is my 3rd year visiting and I've got to know a great number of very cool people through various conferences, Give Camps and other community events. I'm finding more and more that Codemash is the best place to catch up with everybody regardless of technology interest or location. Of course I always make a whole bunch more friends while I'm there! Yay! Open Spaced I found the open spaces didn't work so well last year. This year things went a lot smoother and the topics were engaging and fresh. While I miss Alan Steven's approach of running it like an agile project, it was very cool to see that it evolving. Laptops were often cracked open, not just once but frequently! For example: Jasmine - Paired on a javascript kata using the Jasmine javascript test runner J - Sat in on a J demo from local J enthusiast, Tracy Harms Watir - More pairing, this time using Ruby with the watir-webdriver through cucumber. I'd mostly forgotten that Cucumber runs just fine without Rails. It made a change to do without. The other spaces were engaging too, but I think that's enough for that topic. Javascript Shenanigans I've already mentioned that I attended a Jasmine kata session. Jasmine is close to my heart right now every since I discovered it while on the hunt for a decent Javascript testing framework for a javascript koans project earlier this year. Well, it also got covered in the Java Precompiler and Pillar's vendor session, which was great to see. Node.js was also a reoccurring theme. Node.js in a nutshell? It's an extremely scalable Event based I/O server which runs on Javascript. I'd already encountered through a Startup Weekend project and have been noticing increasing interest of late. After encountering more node.js driven excitement from my peers at codemash I absolutely had to attend the open space on it. At least 20 people turned up and by the end we had some answers, a whole ton of new questions and an impromptu user group in the form of a twitter channel (#nodemash). I have no idea where this is going to go or how big it is going to become, but if it can cross the chasm into the enterprise it could become huge... Scala Koans I'm a bit of a Koans addict, and I really need more exposure to functional languages so I gave the Scala Koans precompiler a try. Great fun! I'm really glad I attended because I found I had a whole ton of questions. Currently the koans are available here, and the answers are here. Opportunities While we're on the subject can we change the subject now? Hai Gregory, You really need to keep the drinking for later in the day. I mean seriously, you're 34 and you still do this every single time! Sure, you made it to Chad Fowler keynote ok, but you looking a rather pale weren't you? Also might have been nice to attend 'Netflicks in the Cloud' instead of 'Sleeping It Off For People Who Should Know Better'. Kthxbye PS: Stop talking to yourself Not that I entirely regret it, I've had some of my greatest insights through late night drunken conversations at the CodeMash bar. Just might be nice to reign it in a little and get something out of the next morning too. Diversity This is something that is in the back of my mind because of conversations at Codemash as well as throughout the year; I'm realizing more and more how discouraging the IT profession is for women. I notice in the community there has been a lot of attention paid to stamping out harrasment, which is good, but there also seems to be a massive PR issue. I really don't have any solutions, but I figure it can't hurt to pay more attention to whats going on... And in Other News I now have a picture of Chad Fowler giving me more cowbell! Sadly I managed to lose the cowbell later on. Hopefully it's gone to a Better Place. The Womack Family Band joined in with the musicians jam this year. There's my cowbell again! Why must you hide from me? I also finally went in the water for the first time in all the I've been coming to codemash. Why did I wait so long?!?

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  • AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

    - by Robz / Fervent Coder
    Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the concept of package management. What comes next? Heroku Instant deployments and instant scaling. Stupid simple API. This is Heroku. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of how fast you can go from an idea to having someone else tinker with it, you can start to see its power. In literally seconds you can be looking at your rails application deployed and online. Then when you are ready to scale, you can do that. This is power. Some may call this “cloud-computing” or PaaS (Platform as a Service). I first ran into Heroku back in July when I met Nick of RubyGems.org. At the time there was no alternative in the .NET-o-sphere. I don’t count Windows Azure, mostly because it is not simple and I don’t believe there is a free version. Heroku itself would not lend itself well to .NET due to the nature of platforms and each language’s specific needs (solution stack).  So I tucked the idea in the back of my head and moved on. AppHarbor Enters The Scene I’m not sure when I first heard about AppHarbor as a possible .NET version of Heroku. It may have been in November, but I didn’t actually try it until January. I was instantly hooked. AppHarbor is awesome! It still has a ways to go to be considered Heroku for .NET, but it already has a growing community. I created a video series (at the bottom of this post) that really highlights how fast you can get a product onto the web and really shows the power and simplicity of AppHarbor. Deploying is as simple as a git/hg push to appharbor. From there they build your code, run any unit tests you have and deploy it if everything succeeds. The screen on the right shows a simple and elegant UI to getting things done. The folks at AppHarbor graciously gave me a limited number of invites to hand out. If you are itching to try AppHarbor then navigate to: https://appharbor.com/account/new?inviteCode=ferventcoder  After playing with it, send feedback if you want more features. Go vote up two features I want that will make it more like Heroku. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with AppHarbor and have not received any funds or favors from anyone at AppHarbor. I just think it is awesome and I want others to know about it. From Zero To Deployed in 15 Minutes (Or Less) Now I have a challenge for you. I created a video series showing how fast I could go from nothing to a deployed application. It could have been from Zero to Deployed in Less than 5 minutes, but I wanted to show you the tools a little more and give you an opportunity to beat my time. And that’s the challenge. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The video series is below (at least one of the videos has to be watched on YouTube). The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 1 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 2 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 3

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  • Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 1 of 3&ndash;Features)

    - by ToStringTheory
    It wasn’t very long ago that I first began to get into CSS precompilers such as SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) and LESS (The Dynamic Stylesheet Language) and I had been hooked on the idea since.  When I finally had a new project come up, I leapt at the opportunity to try out one of these languages. Introduction To be honest, I was hesitant at first to add either framework as I didn’t really know much more than what I had read on their homepages, and I didn’t like the idea of adding too much complexity to a project - I couldn’t guarantee I would be the only person to support it in the future. Thankfully, both of these languages just add things into CSS.  You don’t HAVE to know LESS or SASS to do anything, you can still do your old school CSS, and your output will be the same.  However, when you want to start doing more advanced things such as variables, mixins, and color functions, the functionality is all there for you to utilize. From what I had read, SASS has a few more features than LESS, which is why I initially tried to figure out how to incorporate it into a MVC 4 project. However, through my research, I couldn’t find a way to accomplish this without including some bit of the Ruby on Rails framework on the computer running it, and I hated the fact that I had to do that.  Besides SASS, there is little chance of me getting into the RoR framework, at least in the next couple years.  So in the end, I settled with using LESS. Features So, what can LESS (or SASS) do for you?  There are several reasons I have come to love it in the past few weeks. 1 – Constants Using LESS, you can finally declare a constant and use its value across an entire CSS file. The case that most people would be familiar with is colors.  Wanting to declare one or two color variables that comprise the theme of the site, and not have to retype out their specific hex code each time, but rather a variable name.  What’s great about this is that if you end up having to change it, you only have to change it in one place.  An important thing to note is that you aren’t limited to creating constants just for colors, but for strings and measurements as well. 2 – Inheritance This is a cool feature in my mind for simplicity and organization.  Both LESS and SASS allow you to place selectors within other selectors, and when it is compiled, the languages will break the rules out as necessary and keep the inheritance chain you created in the selectors. Example LESS Code: #header {   h1 {     font-size: 26px;     font-weight: bold;   }   p {     font-size: 12px;     a     {       text-decoration: none;       &:hover {         border-width: 1px       }     }   } } Example Compiled CSS: #header h1 {   font-size: 26px;   font-weight: bold; } #header p {   font-size: 12px; } #header p a {   text-decoration: none; } #header p a:hover {   border-width: 1px; } 3 - Mixins Mixins are where languages like this really shine.  The ability to mixin other definitions setup a parametric mixin.  There is really a lot of content in this area, so I would suggest looking at http://lesscss.org for more information.  One of the things I would suggest if you do begin to use LESS is to also grab the mixins.less file from the Twitter Bootstrap project.  This file already has a bunch of predefined mixins for things like border-radius with all of the browser specific prefixes.  This alone is of great use! 4 – Color Functions This is the last thing I wanted to point out as my final post in this series will be utilizing these functions in a more drawn out manner.  Both LESS and SASS provide functions for getting information from a color (R,G,B,H,S,L).  Using these, it is easy to define a primary color, and then darken or lighten it a little for your needs.  Example: Example LESS Code: @base-color: #111; @red:        #842210; #footer {   color: (@base-color + #003300);   border-left:  2px;   border-right: 2px;   border-color: desaturate(@red, 10%); } Example Compiled CSS: #footer {    color: #114411;    border-left:  2px;    border-right: 2px;    border-color: #7d2717; } I have found that these can be very useful and powerful when constructing a site theme. Conclusion I came across LESS and SASS when looking for the best way to implement some type of CSS variables for colors, because I hated having to do a Find and Replace in all of the files using the colors, and in some instances, you couldn’t just find/replace because of the color choices interfering with other colors (color to replace of #000, yet come colors existed like #0002bc).  So in many cases I would end up having to do a Find and manually check each one. In my next post, I am going to cover how I’ve come to set up these items and the structure for the items in the project, as well as the conventions that I have come to start using.  In the final post in the series, I will cover a neat little side project I built in LESS dealing with colors!

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  • Implementing an async "read all currently available data from stream" operation

    - by Jon
    I recently provided an answer to this question: C# - Realtime console output redirection. As often happens, explaining stuff (here "stuff" was how I tackled a similar problem) leads you to greater understanding and/or, as is the case here, "oops" moments. I realized that my solution, as implemented, has a bug. The bug has little practical importance, but it has an extremely large importance to me as a developer: I can't rest easy knowing that my code has the potential to blow up. Squashing the bug is the purpose of this question. I apologize for the long intro, so let's get dirty. I wanted to build a class that allows me to receive input from a console's standard output Stream. Console output streams are of type FileStream; the implementation can cast to that, if needed. There is also an associated StreamReader already present to leverage. There is only one thing I need to implement in this class to achieve my desired functionality: an async "read all the data available this moment" operation. Reading to the end of the stream is not viable because the stream will not end unless the process closes the console output handle, and it will not do that because it is interactive and expecting input before continuing. I will be using that hypothetical async operation to implement event-based notification, which will be more convenient for my callers. The public interface of the class is this: public class ConsoleAutomator { public event EventHandler<ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs> StandardOutputRead; public void StartSendingEvents(); public void StopSendingEvents(); } StartSendingEvents and StopSendingEvents do what they advertise; for the purposes of this discussion, we can assume that events are always being sent without loss of generality. The class uses these two fields internally: protected readonly StringBuilder inputAccumulator = new StringBuilder(); protected readonly byte[] buffer = new byte[256]; The functionality of the class is implemented in the methods below. To get the ball rolling: public void StartSendingEvents(); { this.stopAutomation = false; this.BeginReadAsync(); } To read data out of the Stream without blocking, and also without requiring a carriage return char, BeginRead is called: protected void BeginReadAsync() { if (!this.stopAutomation) { this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.BeginRead( this.buffer, 0, this.buffer.Length, this.ReadHappened, null); } } The challenging part: BeginRead requires using a buffer. This means that when reading from the stream, it is possible that the bytes available to read ("incoming chunk") are larger than the buffer. Remember that the goal here is to read all of the chunk and call event subscribers exactly once for each chunk. To this end, if the buffer is full after EndRead, we don't send its contents to subscribers immediately but instead append them to a StringBuilder. The contents of the StringBuilder are only sent back whenever there is no more to read from the stream. private void ReadHappened(IAsyncResult asyncResult) { var bytesRead = this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.EndRead(asyncResult); if (bytesRead == 0) { this.OnAutomationStopped(); return; } var input = this.StandardOutput.CurrentEncoding.GetString( this.buffer, 0, bytesRead); this.inputAccumulator.Append(input); if (bytesRead < this.buffer.Length) { this.OnInputRead(); // only send back if we 're sure we got it all } this.BeginReadAsync(); // continue "looping" with BeginRead } After any read which is not enough to fill the buffer (in which case we know that there was no more data to be read during the last read operation), all accumulated data is sent to the subscribers: private void OnInputRead() { var handler = this.StandardOutputRead; if (handler == null) { return; } handler(this, new ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs(this.inputAccumulator.ToString())); this.inputAccumulator.Clear(); } (I know that as long as there are no subscribers the data gets accumulated forever. This is a deliberate decision). The good This scheme works almost perfectly: Async functionality without spawning any threads Very convenient to the calling code (just subscribe to an event) Never more than one event for each time data is available to be read Is almost agnostic to the buffer size The bad That last almost is a very big one. Consider what happens when there is an incoming chunk with length exactly equal to the size of the buffer. The chunk will be read and buffered, but the event will not be triggered. This will be followed up by a BeginRead that expects to find more data belonging to the current chunk in order to send it back all in one piece, but... there will be no more data in the stream. In fact, as long as data is put into the stream in chunks with length exactly equal to the buffer size, the data will be buffered and the event will never be triggered. This scenario may be highly unlikely to occur in practice, especially since we can pick any number for the buffer size, but the problem is there. Solution? Unfortunately, after checking the available methods on FileStream and StreamReader, I can't find anything which lets me peek into the stream while also allowing async methods to be used on it. One "solution" would be to have a thread wait on a ManualResetEvent after the "buffer filled" condition is detected. If the event is not signaled (by the async callback) in a small amount of time, then more data from the stream will not be forthcoming and the data accumulated so far should be sent to subscribers. However, this introduces the need for another thread, requires thread synchronization, and is plain inelegant. Specifying a timeout for BeginRead would also suffice (call back into my code every now and then so I can check if there's data to be sent back; most of the time there will not be anything to do, so I expect the performance hit to be negligible). But it looks like timeouts are not supported in FileStream. Since I imagine that async calls with timeouts are an option in bare Win32, another approach might be to PInvoke the hell out of the problem. But this is also undesirable as it will introduce complexity and simply be a pain to code. Is there an elegant way to get around the problem? Thanks for being patient enough to read all of this. Update: I definitely did not communicate the scenario well in my initial writeup. I have since revised the writeup quite a bit, but to be extra sure: The question is about how to implement an async "read all the data available this moment" operation. My apologies to the people who took the time to read and answer without me making my intent clear enough.

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  • Implementing a robust async stream reader

    - by Jon
    I recently provided an answer to this question: C# - Realtime console output redirection. As often happens, explaining stuff (here "stuff" was how I tackled a similar problem) leads you to greater understanding and/or, as is the case here, "oops" moments. I realized that my solution, as implemented, has a bug. The bug has little practical importance, but it has an extremely large importance to me as a developer: I can't rest easy knowing that my code has the potential to blow up. Squashing the bug is the purpose of this question. I apologize for the long intro, so let's get dirty. I wanted to build a class that allows me to receive input from a Stream in an event-based manner. The stream, in my scenario, is guaranteed to be a FileStream and there is also an associated StreamReader already present to leverage. The public interface of the class is this: public class MyStreamManager { public event EventHandler<ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs> StandardOutputRead; public void StartSendingEvents(); public void StopSendingEvents(); } Obviously this specific scenario has to do with a console's standard output, but that is a detail and does not play an important role. StartSendingEvents and StopSendingEvents do what they advertise; for the purposes of this discussion, we can assume that events are always being sent without loss of generality. The class uses these two fields internally: protected readonly StringBuilder inputAccumulator = new StringBuilder(); protected readonly byte[] buffer = new byte[256]; The functionality of the class is implemented in the methods below. To get the ball rolling: public void StartSendingEvents(); { this.stopAutomation = false; this.BeginReadAsync(); } To read data out of the Stream without blocking, and also without requiring a carriage return char, BeginRead is called: protected void BeginReadAsync() { if (!this.stopAutomation) { this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.BeginRead( this.buffer, 0, this.buffer.Length, this.ReadHappened, null); } } The challenging part: BeginRead requires using a buffer. This means that when reading from the stream, it is possible that the bytes available to read ("incoming chunk") are larger than the buffer. Since we are only handing off data from the stream to a consumer, and that consumer may well have inside knowledge about the size and/or format of these chunks, I want to call event subscribers exactly once for each chunk. Otherwise the abstraction breaks down and the subscribers have to buffer the incoming data and reconstruct the chunks themselves using said knowledge. This is much less convenient to the calling code, and detracts from the usefulness of my class. To this end, if the buffer is full after EndRead, we don't send its contents to subscribers immediately but instead append them to a StringBuilder. The contents of the StringBuilder are only sent back whenever there is no more to read from the stream (thus preserving the chunks). private void ReadHappened(IAsyncResult asyncResult) { var bytesRead = this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.EndRead(asyncResult); if (bytesRead == 0) { this.OnAutomationStopped(); return; } var input = this.StandardOutput.CurrentEncoding.GetString( this.buffer, 0, bytesRead); this.inputAccumulator.Append(input); if (bytesRead < this.buffer.Length) { this.OnInputRead(); // only send back if we 're sure we got it all } this.BeginReadAsync(); // continue "looping" with BeginRead } After any read which is not enough to fill the buffer, all accumulated data is sent to the subscribers: private void OnInputRead() { var handler = this.StandardOutputRead; if (handler == null) { return; } handler(this, new ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs(this.inputAccumulator.ToString())); this.inputAccumulator.Clear(); } (I know that as long as there are no subscribers the data gets accumulated forever. This is a deliberate decision). The good This scheme works almost perfectly: Async functionality without spawning any threads Very convenient to the calling code (just subscribe to an event) Maintains the "chunkiness" of the data; this allows the calling code to use inside knowledge of the data without doing any extra work Is almost agnostic to the buffer size (it will work correctly with any size buffer irrespective of the data being read) The bad That last almost is a very big one. Consider what happens when there is an incoming chunk with length exactly equal to the size of the buffer. The chunk will be read and buffered, but the event will not be triggered. This will be followed up by a BeginRead that expects to find more data belonging to the current chunk in order to send it back all in one piece, but... there will be no more data in the stream. In fact, as long as data is put into the stream in chunks with length exactly equal to the buffer size, the data will be buffered and the event will never be triggered. This scenario may be highly unlikely to occur in practice, especially since we can pick any number for the buffer size, but the problem is there. Solution? Unfortunately, after checking the available methods on FileStream and StreamReader, I can't find anything which lets me peek into the stream while also allowing async methods to be used on it. One "solution" would be to have a thread wait on a ManualResetEvent after the "buffer filled" condition is detected. If the event is not signaled (by the async callback) in a small amount of time, then more data from the stream will not be forthcoming and the data accumulated so far should be sent to subscribers. However, this introduces the need for another thread, requires thread synchronization, and is plain inelegant. Specifying a timeout for BeginRead would also suffice (call back into my code every now and then so I can check if there's data to be sent back; most of the time there will not be anything to do, so I expect the performance hit to be negligible). But it looks like timeouts are not supported in FileStream. Since I imagine that async calls with timeouts are an option in bare Win32, another approach might be to PInvoke the hell out of the problem. But this is also undesirable as it will introduce complexity and simply be a pain to code. Is there an elegant way to get around the problem? Thanks for being patient enough to read all of this.

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  • Implementing a robust async stream reader for a console

    - by Jon
    I recently provided an answer to this question: C# - Realtime console output redirection. As often happens, explaining stuff (here "stuff" was how I tackled a similar problem) leads you to greater understanding and/or, as is the case here, "oops" moments. I realized that my solution, as implemented, has a bug. The bug has little practical importance, but it has an extremely large importance to me as a developer: I can't rest easy knowing that my code has the potential to blow up. Squashing the bug is the purpose of this question. I apologize for the long intro, so let's get dirty. I wanted to build a class that allows me to receive input from a Stream in an event-based manner. The stream, in my scenario, is guaranteed to be a FileStream and there is also an associated StreamReader already present to leverage. The public interface of the class is this: public class MyStreamManager { public event EventHandler<ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs> StandardOutputRead; public void StartSendingEvents(); public void StopSendingEvents(); } Obviously this specific scenario has to do with a console's standard output. StartSendingEvents and StopSendingEvents do what they advertise; for the purposes of this discussion, we can assume that events are always being sent without loss of generality. The class uses these two fields internally: protected readonly StringBuilder inputAccumulator = new StringBuilder(); protected readonly byte[] buffer = new byte[256]; The functionality of the class is implemented in the methods below. To get the ball rolling: public void StartSendingEvents(); { this.stopAutomation = false; this.BeginReadAsync(); } To read data out of the Stream without blocking, and also without requiring a carriage return char, BeginRead is called: protected void BeginReadAsync() { if (!this.stopAutomation) { this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.BeginRead( this.buffer, 0, this.buffer.Length, this.ReadHappened, null); } } The challenging part: BeginRead requires using a buffer. This means that when reading from the stream, it is possible that the bytes available to read ("incoming chunk") are larger than the buffer. Since we are only handing off data from the stream to a consumer, and that consumer may well have inside knowledge about the size and/or format of these chunks, I want to call event subscribers exactly once for each chunk. Otherwise the abstraction breaks down and the subscribers have to buffer the incoming data and reconstruct the chunks themselves using said knowledge. This is much less convenient to the calling code, and detracts from the usefulness of my class. Edit: There are comments below correctly stating that since the data is coming from a stream, there is absolutely nothing that the receiver can infer about the structure of the data unless it is fully prepared to parse it. What I am trying to do here is leverage the "flush the output" "structure" that the owner of the console imparts while writing on it. I am prepared to assume (better: allow my caller to have the option to assume) that the OS will pass me the data written between two flushes of the stream in exactly one piece. To this end, if the buffer is full after EndRead, we don't send its contents to subscribers immediately but instead append them to a StringBuilder. The contents of the StringBuilder are only sent back whenever there is no more to read from the stream (thus preserving the chunks). private void ReadHappened(IAsyncResult asyncResult) { var bytesRead = this.StandardOutput.BaseStream.EndRead(asyncResult); if (bytesRead == 0) { this.OnAutomationStopped(); return; } var input = this.StandardOutput.CurrentEncoding.GetString( this.buffer, 0, bytesRead); this.inputAccumulator.Append(input); if (bytesRead < this.buffer.Length) { this.OnInputRead(); // only send back if we 're sure we got it all } this.BeginReadAsync(); // continue "looping" with BeginRead } After any read which is not enough to fill the buffer, all accumulated data is sent to the subscribers: private void OnInputRead() { var handler = this.StandardOutputRead; if (handler == null) { return; } handler(this, new ConsoleOutputReadEventArgs(this.inputAccumulator.ToString())); this.inputAccumulator.Clear(); } (I know that as long as there are no subscribers the data gets accumulated forever. This is a deliberate decision). The good This scheme works almost perfectly: Async functionality without spawning any threads Very convenient to the calling code (just subscribe to an event) Maintains the "chunkiness" of the data; this allows the calling code to use inside knowledge of the data without doing any extra work Is almost agnostic to the buffer size (it will work correctly with any size buffer irrespective of the data being read) The bad That last almost is a very big one. Consider what happens when there is an incoming chunk with length exactly equal to the size of the buffer. The chunk will be read and buffered, but the event will not be triggered. This will be followed up by a BeginRead that expects to find more data belonging to the current chunk in order to send it back all in one piece, but... there will be no more data in the stream. In fact, as long as data is put into the stream in chunks with length exactly equal to the buffer size, the data will be buffered and the event will never be triggered. This scenario may be highly unlikely to occur in practice, especially since we can pick any number for the buffer size, but the problem is there. Solution? Unfortunately, after checking the available methods on FileStream and StreamReader, I can't find anything which lets me peek into the stream while also allowing async methods to be used on it. One "solution" would be to have a thread wait on a ManualResetEvent after the "buffer filled" condition is detected. If the event is not signaled (by the async callback) in a small amount of time, then more data from the stream will not be forthcoming and the data accumulated so far should be sent to subscribers. However, this introduces the need for another thread, requires thread synchronization, and is plain inelegant. Specifying a timeout for BeginRead would also suffice (call back into my code every now and then so I can check if there's data to be sent back; most of the time there will not be anything to do, so I expect the performance hit to be negligible). But it looks like timeouts are not supported in FileStream. Since I imagine that async calls with timeouts are an option in bare Win32, another approach might be to PInvoke the hell out of the problem. But this is also undesirable as it will introduce complexity and simply be a pain to code. Is there an elegant way to get around the problem? Thanks for being patient enough to read all of this.

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  • /etc/rc.local not being run on Ubuntu Desktop Install

    - by loosecannon
    I have been trying to get sphinx to run at boot, so I added some lines to /etc/rc.local but nothing happens when I start up. If i run it manually it works however. /etc/init.d/rc.local start works fine as does /etc/rc.local It's listed in the default runlevel and is all executable but it does not work. I am considering writing a separate init.d script to do the same thing but that's a lot of work for a simple task dumbledore:/etc/init.d# ls -l rc* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8863 2009-09-07 13:58 rc -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 801 2009-09-07 13:58 rc.local -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 117 2009-09-07 13:58 rcS dumbledore:/etc/init.d# ls /etc/rc.local -l -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 491 2011-05-14 16:13 /etc/rc.local dumbledore:/etc/init.d# runlevel N 2 dumbledore:/etc/init.d# ls /etc/rc2.d/ -l total 4 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2011-04-22 18:53 K08vmware -> /etc/init.d/vmware -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 677 2011-03-28 15:10 README lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2011-04-22 18:53 S19vmware -> /etc/init.d/vmware lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2011-05-15 14:09 S20ddclient -> ../init.d/ddclient lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2011-03-10 18:00 S20fancontrol -> ../init.d/fancontrol lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2011-03-10 18:00 S20kerneloops -> ../init.d/kerneloops lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 2011-03-10 18:00 S20speech-dispatcher -> ../init.d/speech-dispatcher lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 2011-03-10 18:00 S25bluetooth -> ../init.d/bluetooth lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2011-03-10 18:00 S50pulseaudio -> ../init.d/pulseaudio lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2011-03-10 18:00 S50rsync -> ../init.d/rsync lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2011-03-10 18:00 S50saned -> ../init.d/saned lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 2011-03-10 18:00 S70dns-clean -> ../init.d/dns-clean lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2011-03-10 18:00 S70pppd-dns -> ../init.d/pppd-dns lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2011-05-07 11:22 S75sudo -> ../init.d/sudo lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 2011-03-10 18:00 S90binfmt-support -> ../init.d/binfmt-support lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2011-05-12 21:18 S91apache2 -> ../init.d/apache2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2011-03-10 18:00 S99acpi-support -> ../init.d/acpi-support lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2011-03-10 18:00 S99grub-common -> ../init.d/grub-common lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2011-03-10 18:00 S99ondemand -> ../init.d/ondemand lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2011-03-10 18:00 S99rc.local -> ../init.d/rc.local dumbledore:/etc/init.d# cat /etc/rc.local #!/bin/sh -e # # rc.local # # This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel. # Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other # value on error. # # In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution # bits. # # By default this script does nothing. # Start sphinx daemon for rails app on startup # Added 2011-05-13 # Cannon Matthews cd /var/www/extemp /usr/bin/rake ts:config /usr/bin/rake ts:start touch ./tmp/ohyeah cd - exit 0 dumbledore:/etc/init.d# cat /etc/init.d/rc.local #! /bin/sh ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: rc.local # Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog $all # Required-Stop: # Default-Start: 2 3 4 5 # Default-Stop: # Short-Description: Run /etc/rc.local if it exist ### END INIT INFO PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin . /lib/init/vars.sh . /lib/lsb/init-functions do_start() { if [ -x /etc/rc.local ]; then [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_begin_msg "Running local boot scripts (/etc/rc.local)" /etc/rc.local ES=$? [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg $ES return $ES fi } case "$1" in start) do_start ;; restart|reload|force-reload) echo "Error: argument '$1' not supported" >&2 exit 3 ;; stop) ;; *) echo "Usage: $0 start|stop" >&2 exit 3 ;; esac

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  • Squid not caching files (Randomly)

    - by Heinrich
    I want to use an intercepting squid server to cache specific large zip files that users in my network download frequently. I have configured squid on a gateway machine and caching is working for "static" zip files that are served from an Apache web server outside our network. The files that I want to have cached by squid are zip files 100MB which are served from a heroku-hosted Rails application. I set an ETag header (SHA hash of the zip file on the server) and Cache-Control: public header. However, these files are not cached by squid. This, for example, is a request that is not cached: $ curl --no-keepalive -v -o test.zip --header "X-Access-Key: 20767ed397afdea90601fda4513ceb042fe6ab4e51578da63d3bc9b024ed538a" --header "X-Customer: 5" "http://MY_APP.herokuapp.com/api/device/v1/media/download?version=latest" * Adding handle: conn: 0x7ffd4a804400 * Adding handle: send: 0 * Adding handle: recv: 0 ... > GET /api/device/v1/media/download?version=latest HTTP/1.1 > User-Agent: curl/7.30.0 > Host: MY_APP.herokuapp.com > Accept: */* > X-Access-Key: 20767ed397afdea90601fda4513ceb042fe6ab4e51578da63d3bc9b024ed538a > X-Customer: 5 > 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- 0:00:09 --:--:-- 0< HTTP/1.1 200 OK * Server Cowboy is not blacklisted < Server: Cowboy < Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 14:13:27 GMT < Status: 200 OK < X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN < X-Xss-Protection: 1; mode=block < X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff < ETag: "95e888938c0d539b8dd74139beace67f" < Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="e7cce850ae728b81fe3f315d21a560af.zip" < Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary < Content-Length: 125727431 < Content-Type: application/zip < Cache-Control: public < X-Request-Id: 7ce6edb0-013a-4003-a331-94d2b8fae8ad < X-Runtime: 1.244251 < X-Cache: MISS from AAA.fritz.box < Via: 1.1 vegur, 1.1 AAA.fritz.box (squid/3.3.11) < Connection: keep-alive In the logs squid is reporting a TCP_MISS. This is the relevant excerpt from my squid file: # Squid normally listens to port 3128 http_port 3128 http_port 3129 intercept # Uncomment and adjust the following to add a disk cache directory. maximum_object_size 1000 MB maximum_object_size_in_memory 1000 MB cache_dir ufs /usr/local/var/cache/squid 10000 16 256 cache_mem 2000 MB # Leave coredumps in the first cache dir coredump_dir /usr/local/var/cache/squid cache_store_log daemon:/usr/local/var/logs/cache_store.log #refresh_pattern -i (/cgi-bin/|\?) 0 0% 0 refresh_pattern -i .(zip) 525600 100% 525600 override-expire ignore-no-cache ignore-no-store refresh_pattern . 0 20% 4320 ## DNS Configuration dns_nameservers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 After trying around for some time I realized that squid is sometimes deciding that my file is cacheable, sometimes not, depending on whether and when I enable/disable the dns_nameservers directive. What could be wrong here?

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  • Why is Git telling me "Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 11 commits." and how do I get it t

    - by spilth
    I'm a Git newbie. I recently moved a Rails project from Subversion to Git. I followed the tutorial here: http://www.simplisticcomplexity.com/2008/03/05/cleanly-migrate-your-subversion-repository-to-a-git-repository/ I am also using unfuddle.com to store my code. I make changes on my Mac laptop on the train to/from work and then push them to unfuddle when I have a network connection using the following command: git push unfuddle master I use Capistrano for deployments and pull code from the unfuddle repository using the master branch. Lately I've noticed the following message when I run "git status" on my laptop: # On branch master # Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 11 commits. # nothing to commit (working directory clean) And I'm confused as to why. I thought my laptop was the origin... but don't know if either the fact that I originally pulled from Subversion or push to Unfuddle is what's causing the message to show up. How can I: Find out where Git thinks 'origin/master' is? If it's somewhere else, how do I turn my laptop into the 'origin/master'? Get this message to go away. It makes me think Git is unhappy about something. My mac is running Git version 1.6.0.1. When I run git remote show origin as suggested by dbr, I get the following: ~/Projects/GeekFor/geekfor 10:47 AM $ git remote show origin fatal: '/Users/brian/Projects/GeekFor/gf/.git': unable to chdir or not a git archive fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly When I run git remote -v as suggested by Aristotle Pagaltzis, I get the following: ~/Projects/GeekFor/geekfor 10:33 AM $ git remote -v origin /Users/brian/Projects/GeekFor/gf/.git unfuddle [email protected]:spilth/geekfor.git Now, interestingly, I'm working on my project in the geekfor directory but it says my origin is my local machine in the gf directory. I believe gf was the temporary directory I used when converting my project from Subversion to Git and probably where I pushed to unfuddle from. Then I believe I checked out a fresh copy from unfuddle to the geekfor directory. So it looks like I should follow dbr's advice and do: git remote rm origin git remote add origin [email protected]:spilth/geekfor.git

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  • Howto - Running Redmine on mongrel as a service on windows

    - by Achilles
    I use Redmine on Mongrel as a project manager and I use a batch file (start-redmine.bat) to start the redmine in mongrel. There are 2 issues with my setup: 1. I have a running IIS on the server that occupies the HTTP port (80) 2. The start-redmine.bat must be periodically checked to see if it's stopped after a restart that is caused by windows update service. for the first issue, I have no choice but running mongrel on a port like 3000 and for the second issue I have to create a windows service that runs automatically in the background when the windows starts; and here comes the trouble! There are at least 3 ways to run redmine as a service that I'm aware of; none of them can satisfy a performance view on this subject. you may read about them on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/877943/how-to-configure-a-rails-app-redmine-to-run-as-a-service-on-windows I tried them all. The easiest way to setup such a service is using mongrel_service approach; in 3 lines of command you're done. but the performance is significantly lower than running that batch file... Now, I wanna show you my approach: First suppose we have ruby installed into c:\ruby and we have issued the command gem install mongrel to get the mongrel gem installed into c:\ruby\bin Also, suppose we have installed the Redmine into a folder like c:\redmine; and we have ruby's path (i.e. c:\ruby\bin) in our PATH environment variable. Now Download and install the Windows NT Resource Kit Tools from microsoft website. Open the command-line tool that comes with the Resource Kit (from start menu). Use instsrv to install a dummy service called Redmine using the following command: "[path-to-instsrv.exe]\instsrv" Redmine "[path-to-srvany.exe]\srvany.exe" in my case (which is the default case) it was something like this: "C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\instsrv" Redmine "C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\srvany.exe" Now create the batch file. Open a notepad and paste these instructions into it and then save it as "c:\redmine\start-redmine.bat" @echo off cd c:\redmine\ mongrel_rails start -a 0.0.0.0 -p 3000 -e production Now we need to configure that dummy service we had created before. WATCH OUT WHAT YOU'RE DOING FROM HERE ON, OR YOU MAY CORRUPT YOUR WINDOWS. To configure that service, open windows registry editor (Start - Run - regedit) and navigate to this node: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Redmine Right-Click on "Redmine" node and using the context menu, create a new key called Parameters (New - Key) Right-Click on "Parameters" and create a String Value property called Application. Do this again and create another String Value called AppParameters. Now Double-click on "Application" and put cmd.exe into "Value data" section. Then Double-click on "AppParameters" and put /C "C:\redmine\start-redmine.bat" into Value data section. We're done! issue this command to run the redmine on mongrel as a service: net start Redmine

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  • Failing to install activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter gem

    - by Phil Sturgeon
    I am trying to follow the basic "Create a blog in 20 minutes" Rails screencast but have hit a stumbling block already. When I try to rake db:migrate I get errors about the gem activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter not being installed. When I try to install it, I am told it doesn't exist. If I try to simply gem install mysql I get all sorts of madness appearing. I am running this on Mac OS X 10.6.2 and my installation was all done through gem. My basic setup works (Hello world!). Here is the error log: $ rake db:migrate (in /Users/xxxx/Sites/blog) rake aborted! Please install the jdbcmysql adapter: gem install activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter (no such file to load -- active_record/connection_adapters/jdbcmysql_adapter) (See full trace by running task with --trace) $ sudo gem install activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter ERROR: could not find gem activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter locally or in a repository $ sudo gem install mysql Password: Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing mysql: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /opt/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no checking for main() in -lm... yes checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no checking for main() in -lz... yes checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no checking for main() in -lsocket... no checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no checking for main() in -lnsl... no checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no checking for main() in -lmygcc... no checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no * extconf.rb failed * Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more details. You may need configuration options. Provided configuration options: --with-opt-dir --without-opt-dir --with-opt-include --without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include --with-opt-lib --without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib --with-make-prog --without-make-prog --srcdir=. --curdir --ruby=/opt/local/bin/ruby --with-mysql-config --without-mysql-config --with-mysql-dir --without-mysql-dir --with-mysql-include --without-mysql-include=${mysql-dir}/include --with-mysql-lib --without-mysql-lib=${mysql-dir}/lib --with-mysqlclientlib --without-mysqlclientlib --with-mlib --without-mlib --with-mysqlclientlib --without-mysqlclientlib --with-zlib --without-zlib --with-mysqlclientlib --without-mysqlclientlib --with-socketlib --without-socketlib --with-mysqlclientlib --without-mysqlclientlib --with-nsllib --without-nsllib --with-mysqlclientlib --without-mysqlclientlib --with-mygcclib --without-mygcclib --with-mysqlclientlib --without-mysqlclientlib Gem files will remain installed in /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1 for inspection. Results logged to /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1/ext/mysql_api/gem_make.out

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  • Am I "wasting" my time learning C and other low level stuff ?

    - by Andreas Grech
    I have just recently started learning C and the reason I did that was because frankly, I consider myself to be of a "less-developer" than the people who know and work with C. Thus I planned to start learning ASM, C, C++ and bought the K&R book and started pushing myself to learn the C Programming Language and up till now I'm doing great...learning about arrays the low level way (ie the pointer + offset thing), pointers and all that and obviously asking questions on stackoverflow for guidance. My problem is that sometimes I get thinking if instead of learning this low level stuff, maybe I should maybe spend more time learning newer, more widely used technologies...basically, more web stuff. Now I am well versed with both C# and ASP.Net and currently that's what I do for a living, but still there exists Microsoft technologies that I haven't quite touched upon...such as ASP.Net MVC, The Entity Framework etc... And those are only Microsoft Technologies...obviously there are other stuff that I would like to touch upon...stuff like Ruby, which would lead me to Ruby on Rails, or Python for Django or even Java and J2EE, or maybe even PHP; ie, basically mainly Web Stuff. Mind you, I did touch upon some of the stuff I mentioned earlier on, such as PHP and Java but I am still not quite versed in them as I am in C# and ASP.Net...but still, I think that by learning other languages that are used in the web environment will broaden my horizons...both as a developer who loves learning, and also Career wise. My point is, am I really using up my time correctly by learning older, lower level stuff? Stuff that for my current line of work, will most probably never use, but still is interesting to know ? To be frankly honest, I am also learning C so that I could, maybe someday, get into Electronics and Micro-controller programming but that is a whole new world for me and, if I choose to go there, will take some time to get adjusted to. And even then, I don't know if I can get a career in working in that line of work. ...but I still wonder about this question over and over...Am I doing the right thing by learning C instead of something (Web-stuff) that will most probably be more useful for me career-wise? I'm sorry for such asking such a long and most probably a boring question, but I feel as if this is the only place where I can ask such a question and get an honest answer from experts in the field. Thank you for your time.

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