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How to deploy the advanced search page using Module in SharePoint 2013

- by ybbest

Today, I’d like to show you how to deploy your custom advanced search page using module in Visual Studio 2012.Using a module is the way how SharePoint deploy all the publishing pages to the search centre. Browse to the template under 15 hive of SharePoint2013, then go to the SearchCenterFiles under Features(as shown below).Then open the Files.xml it shows how SharePoint using module to deploy advanced search.You can download the solution here. Now I am going to show you how to deploy your custom advanced search page.The feature is located in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\SearchCenterFiles . To deploy SharePoint advanced Search pages, you need to do the following: 1. Create SharePoint2013 project and then create a module item. 2. Find how Out of box SharePoint deploy the Advanced Search Page from Files.xml and copy and paste it into the elements.xml <File Url="advanced.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary"> <Property Name="PublishingPageLayout" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/AdvancedSearchLayout.aspx, $Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,SearchCenterAdvancedSearchTitle;" /> <Property Name="Title" Value="$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,Search_Advanced_Page_Title;" /> <Property Name="ContentType" Value="$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,contenttype_welcomepage_name;" /> <AllUsersWebPart WebPartZoneID="MainZone" WebPartOrder="1"> <![CDATA[ <WebPart xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2"> <Assembly>Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c</Assembly> <TypeName>Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.AdvancedSearchBox</TypeName> <Title>$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_Webpart_Title;</Title> <Description>$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_Webpart_Description;</Description> <FrameType>None</FrameType> <AllowMinimize>true</AllowMinimize> <AllowRemove>true</AllowRemove> <IsVisible>true</IsVisible> <SearchResultPageURL xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">results.aspx</SearchResultPageURL> <TextQuerySectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_FindDocsWith_Title;</TextQuerySectionLabelText> <ShowAndQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowAndQueryTextBox> <ShowPhraseQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowPhraseQueryTextBox> <ShowOrQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowOrQueryTextBox> <ShowNotQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowNotQueryTextBox> <ScopeSectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_NarrowSearch_Title;</ScopeSectionLabelText> <ShowLanguageOptions xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowLanguageOptions> <ShowResultTypePicker xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowResultTypePicker> <ShowPropertiesSection xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowPropertiesSection> <PropertiesSectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_AddPropRestrictions_Title;</PropertiesSectionLabelText> </WebPart> ]]> </AllUsersWebPart> </File> 3. Customize your SharePoint advanced Search Page by modifying the Advanced Search Box and Export the webpart and copy the webpart file to the elements under module. 4. Export the web part and copy the content of the web part file to the elements.xml in the module. <File Path="AdvancedSearchPage\advanced.aspx" Url="employeeAdvanced.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary"> <Property Name="PublishingPageLayout" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/AdvancedSearchLayout.aspx, $Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,SearchCenterAdvancedSearchTitle;" /> <Property Name="Title" Value="$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,Search_Advanced_Page_Title;" /> <Property Name="ContentType" Value="$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,contenttype_welcomepage_name;" /> <AllUsersWebPart WebPartZoneID="MainZone" WebPartOrder="1"> <![CDATA[ <WebPart xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2"> <Title>Advanced Search Box</Title> <FrameType>None</FrameType> <Description>Displays parameterized search options based on properties and combinations of words.</Description> <IsIncluded>true</IsIncluded> <ZoneID>MainZone</ZoneID> <PartOrder>1</PartOrder> <FrameState>Normal</FrameState> <Height /> <Width /> <AllowRemove>true</AllowRemove> <AllowZoneChange>true</AllowZoneChange> <AllowMinimize>true</AllowMinimize> <AllowConnect>true</AllowConnect> <AllowEdit>true</AllowEdit> <AllowHide>true</AllowHide> <IsVisible>true</IsVisible> <DetailLink /> <HelpLink /> <HelpMode>Modeless</HelpMode> <Dir>Default</Dir> <PartImageSmall /> <MissingAssembly>Cannot import this Web Part.</MissingAssembly> <PartImageLarge /> <IsIncludedFilter /> <Assembly>Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c</Assembly> <TypeName>Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.AdvancedSearchBox</TypeName> <SearchResultPageURL xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">results.aspx</SearchResultPageURL> <TextQuerySectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">Find documents that have...</TextQuerySectionLabelText> <ShowAndQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowAndQueryTextBox> <AndQueryTextBoxLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowPhraseQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowPhraseQueryTextBox> <PhraseQueryTextBoxLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowOrQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowOrQueryTextBox> <OrQueryTextBoxLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowNotQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowNotQueryTextBox> <NotQueryTextBoxLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ScopeSectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">Narrow the search...</ScopeSectionLabelText> <ShowScopes xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">false</ShowScopes> <ScopeLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <DisplayGroup xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">Advanced Search</DisplayGroup> <ShowLanguageOptions xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">false</ShowLanguageOptions> <LanguagesLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowResultTypePicker xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowResultTypePicker> <ResultTypeLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowPropertiesSection xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowPropertiesSection> <PropertiesSectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">Add property restrictions...</PropertiesSectionLabelText> <Properties xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox"><root xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <LangDefs> <LangDef DisplayName="Arabic" LangID="ar"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Bengali" LangID="bn"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Bulgarian" LangID="bg"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Catalan" LangID="ca"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Simplified Chinese" LangID="zh-cn"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Traditional Chinese" LangID="zh-tw"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Croatian" LangID="hr"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Czech" LangID="cs"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Danish" LangID="da"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Dutch" LangID="nl"/> <LangDef DisplayName="English" LangID="en"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Finnish" LangID="fi"/> <LangDef DisplayName="French" LangID="fr"/> <LangDef DisplayName="German" LangID="de"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Greek" LangID="el"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Gujarati" LangID="gu"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Hebrew" LangID="he"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Hindi" LangID="hi"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Hungarian" LangID="hu"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Icelandic" LangID="is"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Indonesian" LangID="id"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Italian" LangID="it"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Japanese" LangID="ja"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Kannada" LangID="kn"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Korean" LangID="ko"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Latvian" LangID="lv"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Lithuanian" LangID="lt"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Malay" LangID="ms"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Malayalam" LangID="ml"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Marathi" LangID="mr"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Norwegian" LangID="no"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Polish" LangID="pl"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Portuguese" LangID="pt"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Punjabi" LangID="pa"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Romanian" LangID="ro"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Russian" LangID="ru"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Slovak" LangID="sk"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Slovenian" LangID="sl"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Spanish" LangID="es"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Swedish" LangID="sv"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Tamil" LangID="ta"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Telugu" LangID="te"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Thai" LangID="th"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Turkish" LangID="tr"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Ukrainian" LangID="uk"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Urdu" LangID="ur"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Vietnamese" LangID="vi"/> </LangDefs> <Languages> <Language LangRef="en"/> <Language LangRef="fr"/> <Language LangRef="de"/> <Language LangRef="ja"/> <Language LangRef="zh-cn"/> <Language LangRef="es"/> <Language LangRef="zh-tw"/> </Languages> <PropertyDefs> <PropertyDef Name="Path" DataType="url" DisplayName="URL"/> <PropertyDef Name="Size" DataType="integer" DisplayName="Size (bytes)"/> <PropertyDef Name="Write" DataType="datetime" DisplayName="Last Modified Date"/> <PropertyDef Name="FileName" DataType="text" DisplayName="Name"/> <PropertyDef Name="Description" DataType="text" DisplayName="Description"/> <PropertyDef Name="Title" DataType="text" DisplayName="Title"/> <PropertyDef Name="Author" DataType="text" DisplayName="Author"/> <PropertyDef Name="DocSubject" DataType="text" DisplayName="Subject"/> <PropertyDef Name="DocKeywords" DataType="text" DisplayName="Keywords"/> <PropertyDef Name="DocComments" DataType="text" DisplayName="Comments"/> <PropertyDef Name="CreatedBy" DataType="text" DisplayName="Created By"/> <PropertyDef Name="ModifiedBy" DataType="text" DisplayName="Last Modified By"/> <PropertyDef Name="EmployeeNumber" DataType="text" DisplayName="EmployeeNumber"/> <PropertyDef Name="EmployeeId" DataType="text" DisplayName="EmployeeId"/> <PropertyDef Name="EmployeeFirstName" DataType="text" DisplayName="EmployeeFirstName"/> <PropertyDef Name="EmployeeLastName" DataType="text" DisplayName="EmployeeLastName"/> </PropertyDefs> <ResultTypes> <ResultType DisplayName="Employee Document" Name="default"> <KeywordQuery/> <PropertyRef Name="EmployeeNumber" /> <PropertyRef Name="EmployeeId" /> <PropertyRef Name="EmployeeFirstName" /> <PropertyRef Name="EmployeeLastName" /> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="All Results"> <KeywordQuery/> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="Documents" Name="documents"> <KeywordQuery>IsDocument="True"</KeywordQuery> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="Title"/> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="Word Documents" Name="worddocuments"> <KeywordQuery>FileExtension="doc" OR FileExtension="docx" OR FileExtension="dot" OR FileExtension="docm" OR FileExtension="odt"</KeywordQuery> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="Title"/> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="Excel Documents" Name="exceldocuments"> <KeywordQuery>FileExtension="xls" OR FileExtension="xlsx" OR FileExtension="xlsm" OR FileExtension="xlsb" OR FileExtension="ods"</KeywordQuery> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="Title"/> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="PowerPoint Presentations" Name="presentations"> <KeywordQuery>FileExtension="ppt" OR FileExtension="pptx" OR FileExtension="pptm" OR FileExtension="odp"</KeywordQuery> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="Title"/> </ResultType> </ResultTypes></root></Properties> </WebPart> ]]> </AllUsersWebPart> </File> 5.Deploy your custom solution and you will have a custom advanced search page.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 11, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 11, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET Wiki Control: This ASP.NET user control allows you to embed a very useful wiki directly into your already existing ASP.NET website taking advantage of the popula...BabyLog: Log baby daily activity.buddyHome: buddyHome is a project that can make your home smarter. as good as your buddy. Cloud Community: Cloud Community makes it easier for organizations to have a simple to use community platform. Our mission is to create an easy to use community pl...Community Connectors for Microsoft CRM 4.0: Community Connectors for Microsoft CRM 4.0 allows Microsoft CRM 4.0 customers and partners to monitor and analyze customers’ interaction from their...Console Highlighter: Hightlights Microsoft Windows Command prompt (cmd.exe) by outputting ANSI VT100 Control sequences to color the output. These sequences are not hand...Cornell Store: This is IN NO WAY officially affiliated or related to the Cornell University store. Instead, this is a project that I am doing for a class. Ther...DevUtilities: This project is for creating some utility tools, and they will be useful during the development.DotNetNuke® Skin Maple: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by DyNNamite.co.uk. The package includes 4 color variations and sev...HRNet: HRNetIIS Web Site Monitoring: A software for monitor a particular web site on IIS, even if its IP is sharing between different web site.Iowa Code Camp: The source code for the Iowa Code Camp website.Leonidas: Leonidas is a virtual tutorLunch 'n Learn: The Lunch 'n Learn web application is an open source ASP.NET MVC application that allows you to setup lunch 'n learn presentations for your team, c...MNT Cryptography: A very simple cryptography classMooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL Web Databinder: mvc2linq2sql is a databinder for ASP.NET MVC that make able developer to clean bind object from HTML FORMS to Linq entities. Even 1 to N relations ...MoqBot: MoqBot is an auto mocking library for Moq and Ninject.mtExperience1: hoiMvcPager: MvcPager is a free paging component for ASP.NET MVC web application, it exposes a series of extension methods for using in ASP.NET MVC applications...OCal: OCal is based on object calisthenics to identify code smellsPex Custom Arithmetic Solver: Pex Custom Arithmetic Solver contains a collection of meta-heuristic search algorithms. The goal is to improve Pex's code coverage for code involvi...SetControls: Расширеные контролы для ASP.NET приложений. Полная информация ближе к релизу...shadowrage1597: CTC 195 Game Design classSharePoint Team-Mailer: A SharePoint 2007 solution that defines a generic CustomList for sending e-mails to SharePoint Groups.Sql Share: SQL Share is a collaboration tool used within the science to allow database engineers to work tightly with domain scientists.TechCalendar: Tech Events Calendar ASP.NET project.ZLYScript: A very simple script language compiler.New ReleasesALGLIB: ALGLIB 2.4.0: New ALGLIB release contains: improved versions of several linear algebra algorithms: QR decomposition, matrix inversion, condition number estimatio...AmiBroker Plug-Ins with C#: AmiBroker Plug-Ins v0.0.2: Source codes and a binaryAppFabric Caching UI Admin Tool: AppFabric Caching Beta 2 UI Admin Tool: System Requirements:.NET 4.0 RC AppFabric Caching Beta2 Test On:Win 7 (64x)Autodocs - WCF REST Automatic API Documentation Generator: Autodocs.ServiceModel.Web: This archive contains the reference DLL, instructions and license.Compact Plugs & Compact Injection: Compact Injection and Compact Plugs 1.1 Beta: First release of Compact Plugs (CP). The solution includes a simple example project of CP, called "TestCompactPlugs1". Also some fixes where made ...Console Highlighter: Console Highlighter 0.9 (preview release): Preliminary release.Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.3: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.3). It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My Documents. The last one was ...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.0.2: Family Tree Analyzer Version 1.0.2 This early beta version implements loading a gedcom file and displaying some basic reports. These reports inclu...FRC1103 - FRC Dashboard viewer: 2010 Documentation v0.1: This is my current version of the control system documentation for 2010. It isn't complete, but it has the information required for a custom dashbo...jQuery.cssLess: jQuery.cssLess 0.5 (Even less release): NEW - support for nested special CSS classes (like :hover) MAIN RELEASE This release, code "Even less", is the one that will interpret cssLess wit...MooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL Web Databinder: MooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL DataBinder: I didn't try this... I just took it off from my project. Please, tell me any problem implementing in your own development and I'll be pleased to h...MvcPager: MvcPager 1.2 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0: MvcPager 1.2 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0Mytrip.Mvc: Mytrip 1.0 preview 1: Article Manager Blog Manager L2S Membership(.NET Framework 3.5) EF Membership(.NET Framework 4) User Manager File Manager Localization Captcha ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.117: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis version adds ...Pex Custom Arithmetic Solver: PexCustomArithmeticSolver: This is the alpha release containing the Alternating Variable Method and Evolution Strategies to try and solve constraints over floating point vari...Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.44877: What is new in this release? Major performance increase in animations (up to 50 fps from 2 fps) by replacing DropShadow effect with png bitmaps; ...sELedit: sELedit v1.0b: + Added support for empty strings / wstrings + Fixed: critical bug in configuration files (list 53)sPWadmin: pwAdmin v0.9_nightly: + Fixed: XML editor can now open and save character templates + Added: PWI item name database + Added: Plugin SupportTechCalendar: Events Calendar v.1.0: Initial release.The Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: Beta 2: Beta 2.0 Some fixes from Beta 1, and a couple small enhancements. Intensive testing continues, and I will continue to update the code at least ever...ThreadSafe.Caching: 2010.03.10.1: Updates to the scavanging behaviour since last release. Scavenging will now occur every 30 seconds by default and all objects in the cache will be ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30310.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Email Sender (C++): The same Email Sender program that I but made in visual c plus plus 2008 instead of visual basic 2008.Web Forms MVP: Web Forms MVP CTP7: The release can be considered stable, and is in use behind several high traffic, public websites. It has been marked as a CTP release as it is not ...White Tiger: 0.0.3.1: Now you can load or create files with whatever root element you want *check f or sets file permisionsMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NET Ajax LibraryMost Active ProjectsUmbraco CMSRawrSDS: Scientific DataSet library and toolsN2 CMSFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight

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MVC 3 AdditionalMetadata Attribute with ViewBag to Render Dynamic UI

- by Steve Michelotti

A few months ago I blogged about using Model metadata to render a dynamic UI in MVC 2. The scenario in the post was that we might have a view model where the questions are conditionally displayed and therefore a dynamic UI is needed. To recap the previous post, the solution was to use a custom attribute called [QuestionId] in conjunction with an “ApplicableQuestions” collection to identify whether each question should be displayed. This allowed me to have a view model that looked like this: 1: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 2: [DisplayName("First Name")] 3: [QuestionId("NB0021")] 4: public string FirstName { get; set; } 5: 6: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 7: [DisplayName("Last Name")] 8: [QuestionId("NB0022")] 9: public string LastName { get; set; } 10: 11: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 12: [QuestionId("NB0023")] 13: public int Age { get; set; } 14: 15: public IEnumerable<string> ApplicableQuestions { get; set; } At the same time, I was able to avoid repetitive IF statements for every single question in my view: 1: <%: Html.EditorFor(m => m.FirstName, new { applicableQuestions = Model.ApplicableQuestions })%> 2: <%: Html.EditorFor(m => m.LastName, new { applicableQuestions = Model.ApplicableQuestions })%> 3: <%: Html.EditorFor(m => m.Age, new { applicableQuestions = Model.ApplicableQuestions })%> by creating an Editor Template called “ScalarQuestion” that encapsulated the IF statement: 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl" %> 2: <%@ Import Namespace="DynamicQuestions.Models" %> 3: <%@ Import Namespace="System.Linq" %> 4: <% 5: var applicableQuestions = this.ViewData["applicableQuestions"] as IEnumerable<string>; 6: var questionAttr = this.ViewData.ModelMetadata.ContainerType.GetProperty(this.ViewData.ModelMetadata.PropertyName).GetCustomAttributes(typeof(QuestionIdAttribute), true) as QuestionIdAttribute[]; 7: string questionId = null; 8: if (questionAttr.Length > 0) 9: { 10: questionId = questionAttr[0].Id; 11: } 12: if (questionId != null && applicableQuestions.Contains(questionId)) { %> 13: <div> 14: <%: Html.Label("") %> 15: <%: Html.TextBox("", this.Model)%> 16: </div> 17: <% } %> You might want to go back and read the full post in order to get the full context. MVC 3 offers a couple of new features that make this scenario more elegant to implement. The first step is to use the new [AdditionalMetadata] attribute which, so far, appears to be an under appreciated new feature of MVC 3. With this attribute, I don’t need my custom [QuestionId] attribute anymore - now I can just write my view model like this: 1: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 2: [DisplayName("First Name")] 3: [AdditionalMetadata("QuestionId", "NB0021")] 4: public string FirstName { get; set; } 5: 6: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 7: [DisplayName("Last Name")] 8: [AdditionalMetadata("QuestionId", "NB0022")] 9: public string LastName { get; set; } 10: 11: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 12: [AdditionalMetadata("QuestionId", "NB0023")] 13: public int Age { get; set; } Thus far, the documentation seems to be pretty sparse on the AdditionalMetadata attribute. It’s buried in the Other New Features section of the MVC 3 home page and, after showing the attribute on a view model property, it just says, “This metadata is made available to any display or editor template when a product view model is rendered. It is up to you to interpret the metadata information.” But what exactly does it look like for me to “interpret the metadata information”? Well, it turns out it makes the view much easier to work with. Here is the re-implemented ScalarQuestion template updated for MVC 3 and Razor: 1: @{ 2: object questionId; 3: ViewData.ModelMetadata.AdditionalValues.TryGetValue("QuestionId", out questionId); 4: if (ViewBag.applicableQuestions.Contains((string)questionId)) { 5: <div> 6: @Html.LabelFor(m => m) 7: @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m) 8: </div> 9: } 10: } So we’ve gone from 17 lines of code (in the MVC 2 version) to about 7-8 lines of code here. The first thing to notice is that in MVC 3 we now have a property called “AdditionalValues” that hangs off of the ModelMetadata property. This is automatically populated by any [AdditionalMetadata] attributes on the property. There is no more need for me to explicitly write Reflection code to GetCustomAttributes() and then check to see if those attributes were present. I can just call TryGetValue() on the dictionary to see if they were present. Secondly, the “applicableQuestions” anonymous type that I passed in from the calling view – in MVC 3 I now have a dynamic ViewBag property where I can just “dot into” the applicableQuestions with a nicer syntax than dictionary square bracket syntax. And there’s no problems calling the Contains() method on this dynamic object because at runtime the DLR has resolved that it is a generic List<string>. At this point you might be saying that, yes the view got much nicer than the MVC 2 version, but my view model got slightly worse. In the previous version I had a nice [QuestionId] attribute but now, with the [AdditionalMetadata] attribute, I have to type the string “QuestionId” for every single property and hope that I don’t make a typo. Well, the good news is that it’s easy to create your own attributes that can participate in the metadata’s additional values. The key is that the attribute must implement that IMetadataAware interface and populate the AdditionalValues dictionary in the OnMetadataCreated() method: 1: public class QuestionIdAttribute : Attribute, IMetadataAware 2: { 3: public string Id { get; set; } 4: 5: public QuestionIdAttribute(string id) 6: { 7: this.Id = id; 8: } 9: 10: public void OnMetadataCreated(ModelMetadata metadata) 11: { 12: metadata.AdditionalValues["QuestionId"] = this.Id; 13: } 14: } This now allows me to encapuslate my “QuestionId” string in just one place and get back to my original attribute which can be used like this: [QuestionId(“NB0021”)]. The [AdditionalMetadata] attribute is a powerful and under-appreciated new feature of MVC 3. Combined with the dynamic ViewBag property, you can do some really interesting things with your applications with less code and ceremony.

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Developer’s Life – Disaster Lessons – Notes from the Field #039

- by Pinal Dave

[Note from Pinal]: This is a 39th episode of Notes from the Field series. What is the best solution do you have when you encounter a disaster in your organization. Now many of you would answer that in this scenario you would have another standby machine or alternative which you will plug in. Now let me ask second question – What would you do if you as an individual faces disaster? In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Mike Walsh explains a very crucial issue we face in our career, which is not technical but more to relate to human nature. Read on this may be the best blog post you might read in recent times. Howdy! When it was my turn to share the Notes from the Field last time, I took a departure from my normal technical content to talk about Attitude and Communication.(http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2014/05/08/developers-life-attitude-and-communication-they-can-cause-problems-notes-from-the-field-027/) Pinal said it was a popular topic so I hope he won’t mind if I stick with Professional Development for another of my turns at sharing some information here. Like I said last time, the “soft skills” of the IT world are often just as important – sometimes more important – than the technical skills. As a consultant with Linchpin People – I see so many situations where the professional skills I’ve gained and use are more valuable to clients than knowing the best way to tune a query. Today I want to continue talking about professional development and tell you about the way I almost got myself hit by a train – and why that matters in our day jobs. Sometimes we can learn a lot from disasters. Whether we caused them or someone else did. If you are interested in learning about some of my observations in these lessons you can see more where I talk about lessons from disasters on my blog. For now, though, onto how I almost got my vehicle hit by a train… The Train Crash That Almost Was…. My family and I own a little schoolhouse building about a 10 mile drive away from our house. We use it as a free resource for families in the area that homeschool their children – so they can have some class space. I go up there a lot to check in on the property, to take care of the trash and to do work on the property. On the way there, there is a very small Stop Sign controlled railroad intersection. There is only two small freight trains a day passing there. Actually the same train, making a journey south and then back North. That’s it. This road is a small rural road, barely ever a second car driving in the neighborhood there when I am. The stop sign is pretty much there only for the train crossing. When we first bought the building, I was up there a lot doing renovations on the property. Being familiar with the area, I am also familiar with the train schedule and know the tracks are normally free of trains. So I developed a bad habit. You see, I’d approach the stop sign and slow down as I roll through it. Sometimes I’d do a quick look and come to an “almost” stop there but keep on going. I let my impatience and complacency take over. And that is because most of the time I was going there long after the train was done for the day or in between the runs. This habit became pretty well established after a couple years of driving the route. The behavior reinforced a bit by the success ratio. I saw others doing it as well from the neighborhood when I would happen to be there around the time another car was there. Well. You already know where this ends up by the title and backstory here. A few months ago I came to that little crossing, and I started to do the normal routine. I’d pretty much stopped looking in some respects because of the pattern I’d gotten into. For some reason I looked and heard and saw the train slowly approaching and slammed on my brakes and stopped. It was an abrupt stop, and it was close. I probably would have made it okay, but I sat there thinking about lessons for IT professionals from the situation once I started breathing again and watched the cars loaded with sand and propane slowly labored down the tracks… Here are Those Lessons… It’s easy to get stuck into a routine – That isn’t always bad. Except when it’s a bad routine. Momentum and inertia are powerful. Once you have a habit and a routine developed – it’s really hard to break that. Make sure you are setting the right routines and habits TODAY. What almost dangerous things are you doing today? How are you almost messing up your production environment today? Stop doing that. Be Deliberate – (Even when you are the only one) – Like I said – a lot of people roll through that stop sign. Perhaps the neighbors or other drivers think “why is he fully stopping and looking… The train only comes two times a day!” – they can think that all they want. Through deliberate actions and forcing myself to pay attention, I will avoid that oops again. Slow down. Take a deep breath. Be Deliberate in your job. Pay attention to the small stuff and go out of your way to be careful. It will save you later. Be Observant – Keep your eyes open. By looking around, observing the situation and understanding what your servers, databases, users and vendors are doing – you’ll notice when something is out of place. But if you don’t know what is normal, if you don’t look to make sure nothing has changed – that train will come and get you. Where can you be more observant? What warning signs are you ignoring in your environment today? In the IT world – trains are everywhere. Projects move fast. Decisions happen fast. Problems turn from a warning sign to a disaster quickly. If you get stuck in a complacent pattern of “Everything is okay, it always has been and always will be” – that’s the time that you will most likely get stuck in a bad situation. Don’t let yourself get complacent, don’t let your team get complacent. That will lead to being proactive. And a proactive environment spends less money on consultants for troubleshooting problems you should have seen ahead of time. You can spend your money and IT budget on improving for your customers. If you want to get started with performance analytics and triage of virtualized SQL Servers with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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Customize the Five Windows Folder Templates

- by Mark Virtue

Are you’re particular about the way Windows Explorer presents each folder’s contents? Here we show you how to take advantage of Explorer’s built-in templates, which cuts down the time it takes to do customizations. Note: The techniques in this article apply to Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. When opening a folder for the first time in Windows Explorer, we are presented with a standard default view of the files and folders in that folder. It may be that the items are presented are perfectly fine, but on the other hand, we may want to customize the view. The aspects of it that we can customize are the following: The display type (list view, details, tiles, thumbnails, etc) Which columns are displayed, and in which order The widths of the visible columns The order in which the files and folders are sorted Any file groupings Thankfully, Windows offers us a shortcut. A particular folder’s settings can be used as a “template” for other, similar folders. In fact, we can store up to five separate sets of folder presentation configurations. Once we save the settings for a particular template, that template can then be applied to other folders. Customize Your First Folder We’ll start by setting up the first of our templates – the default one. Once we create this template and apply it, the vast majority of the folders in our file system will change to match it, so it’s important that we set it up very carefully. The first step in creating and applying the template is to customize one folder with the settings that all the rest will have. Choose a folder that is typical of the folders that you wish to have this default template. Select it in Windows Explorer. To ensure that it is a suitable candidate, right-click the folder name and select Properties, then go to the Customize tab. Ensure that this folder is marked as General Items. If it is not, either choose a different folder or select General Items from the list. Click OK. Now we’re ready to customize our first folder. Changing the way one single folder is presented is straightforward. We start with the folder’s display type. Click the Change your view button in the top-right corner of every Explorer window. Each time you click the button, the folder’s view cycles to the next view type. Alternatively you can click the little down-arrow next to the button to see all the display types at once, and select the one you want. Click the view you want, or drag the slider next to the one you want. If you have chosen Details, then the next thing you may wish to change is which columns are displayed, and the order of these. To choose which columns are displayed, simply right-click on any column heading. A list of the columns currently being display appears. Simply uncheck a column if you don’t want it displayed, and check the columns that you want displayed. If you want some information displayed about your files that is not listed here, then click the More… button for a full list of file attributes. There’s a lot of them! To change the order of the columns that are currently being displayed, simply click on a column heading and drag it to where you think it should be. To change the width of a column, click the line that represents the right-hand edge of the column and drag it left or right. To sort by a column, click once on that column. To reverse the sort-order, click that same column again. To change the groupings of the files in the folder, right-click in a blank area of the folder, select Group by, and select the appropriate column. Apply This Default Template to All Similar Folders Once you have the folder exactly the way you want it, we now use this folder as our default template for most of the folders in our file system. To do this, ensure that you are still in the folder you just customized, and then, from the Organize menu in Explorer, click on Folder and search options. Then select the View tab and click the Apply to Folders button. After you’ve clicked OK, visit some of the other folders in your file system. You should see that most have taken on these new settings. What we’ve just done, in effect, is we have customized the General Items template. This is one of five templates that Windows Explorer uses to display folder contents. The five templates are called (in Windows 7): General Items Documents Pictures Music Videos When a folder is opened, Windows Explorer examines the contents to see if it can automatically determine which folder template to use to display the folder contents. If it is not obvious that the folder contents falls into any of the last four templates, then Windows Explorer chooses the General Items template. That’s why most of the folders in your file system are shown using the General Items template. Changing the Other Four Templates If you want to adjust the other four templates, the process is very similar to what we’ve just done. If you wanted to change the “Music” template, for example, the steps would be as follows: Select a folder that contains music items Apply the existing Music template to the folder (even if it doesn’t look like you want it to) Customize the folder to your personal preferences Apply the new template to all “Music” folders A fifth step would be: When you open a folder that contains music items but is not automatically displayed using the Music template, you manually select the Music template for that folder. First, select a folder that contains music items. It will probably be displayed using the existing Music template: Next, ensure that it is using the Music template. If it’s not, then manually select the Music template. Next, customize the folder to suit your personal preferences (here we’ve added a couple of columns, and sorted by Artist). Now we can set this view to be our Music template. Choose Organize, then the View tab, and click the Apply to Folders button. Note: The only folders that will inherit these settings are the ones that are currently (or will soon be) using the Music template. Now, if you have any folder that contains music items, and you want it to inherit all of these settings, then right-click the folder name, choose Properties, and select that this folder should use the Music template. You can also cehck the box entitled Also apply this template to all subfolders if you want to save yourself even more time with all the sub-folders. Conclusion It’s neat to be able to set up templates for your folder views like this. It’s a shame that Microsoft didn’t take the concept just a little further and allow you to create as many templates as you want. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fix For When Windows Explorer in Vista Stops Showing File NamesCustomize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuFix for New Contact Group Button Not Displaying in VistaWhy Did Windows Vista’s Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?Make Your Last Minute Holiday Cards with Microsoft Word TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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Blogging tips for SQL Server professionals

- by jamiet

For some time now I have been intending to put some material together relating my blogging experiences since I began blogging in 2004 and that led to me submitting a session for SQLBits recently where I intended to do just that. That didn’t get enough votes to allow me to present however so instead I resolved to write a blog post about it and Simon Sabin’s recent post Blogging – how do you do it? has prompted me to get around to completing it. So, here I present a compendium of tips that I’ve picked up from authoring a fair few blog posts over the past 6 years. Feedburner Feedburner.com is a service that can consume your blog’s default RSS feed and provide another, replacement, feed that has exactly the same content. You can then supply that replacement feed on your blog site for other people to consume in their RSS readers. Why would you want to do this? Well, two reasons actually: It makes your blog portable. If you ever want to move your blog to a different URL you don’t have to tell your subscribers to move to a different feed. The feedburner feed is a pointer to your blog content rather than being a copy of it. Feedburner will collect stats telling you how many people are subscribed to your feed, which RSS readers they use, stuff like that. Here’s a sample screenshot for http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/: It also tells you what your most viewed posts are: Web stats like these are notoriously inaccurate but then again the method of measurement here is not important, what IS important is that it gives you a trustworthy ranking of your blog posts and (in my opinion) knowing which are your most popular posts is more important than knowing exactly how many views each post has had. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Feedburner provides and I recommend every new blogger to try it! Monitor subscribers using Google Reader If for some reason Feedburner is not to your taste or (more likely) you already have an established RSS feed that you do not want to change then Google provide another way in which you can monitor your readership in the shape of their online RSS reader, Google Reader. It provides, for every RSS feed, a collection of stats including the number of Google Reader users that have subscribed to that RSS feed. This is really valuable information and in fact I have been recording this statistic for mine and a number of other blogs for a few years now and as such I can produce the following chart that indicates how readership is trending for those blogs over time: [Good news for my fellow SQLBlog bloggers.] As Stephen Few readily points out, its not the numbers that are important but the trend. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) SEO (or “How do I get my blog to show up in Google”) is a massive area of expertise which I don’t want (and am unable) to cover in much detail here but there are some simple rules of thumb that will help: Tags – If your blog engine offers the ability to add tags to your blog post, use them. Invariably those tags go into the meta section of the page HTML and search engines lap that stuff up. For example, from my recent post Microsoft publish Visual Studio 2010 Database Project Guidance: Title – Search engines take notice of web page titles as well so make them specific and descriptive (e.g. “Configuring dtsConfig connection strings”) rather than esoteric and meaningless in a vain attempt to be humorous (e.g. “Last night a DJ saved my ETL batch”)! Title(2) – Make your title even more search engine friendly by mentioning high level subject areas, not dissimilar to Twitter hashtags. For example, if you look at all of my posts related to SSIS you will notice that nearly all contain the word “SSIS” in the title even if I had to shoehorn it in there by putting it in square brackets or similar. Another tip, if you ARE putting words into your titles in this artificial manner then put them at the end so that they’re not that prominent in search engine results; they’re there for the search engines to consume, not for human beings. Images – Always add titles and alternate text (ALT attribute) to images in your blog post. If you use Windows 7 or Windows Vista then you can use Live Writer (which Simon recommended) makes this easy for you. Headings – If you want to highlight section headings use heading tags (e.g. <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc…) rather than just formatting the text appropriately – again, Live makes this easy. These tags give your blog posts structure that is understood by search engines and RSS readers alike. (I believe it makes them more amenable to CSS as well – though that’s not something I know too much about). If you check the HTML source for the blog post you’re reading right now you’ll be able to scan through and see where I have used heading tags. Microsoft provide a free tool called the SEO Toolkit that will analyse your blog site (for free) and tell you what things you should change to improve SEO. Go read more and download for free at Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Did I mention that it was free? Miscellaneous Tips If you are including code in your blog post then ensure it is formatted correctly. Use SQL Server Central’s T-SQL prettifier for formatting T-SQL code. Use images and videos. Personally speaking there’s nothing I like less when reading a blog than paragraph after paragraph of text. Images make your blog more appealing which means people are more likely to read what you have written. Be original. Don’t plagiarise other people’s content and don’t simply rewrite the contents of Books Online. Every time you publish a blog post tweet a link to it. Include hashtags in your tweet that are more likely to grab people’s attention. That’s probably enough for now - I hope this blog post proves useful to someone out there. If you would appreciate a related session at a forthcoming SQLBits conference then please let me know. This will likely be my last blog post for 2010 so I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has commented on, linked to or read any of my blog posts in that time. 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting for SQL Server observers with the impending release of SQL Server code-named Denali and I promise I’ll have lots more content on that as the year progresses. Happy New Year. @Jamiet

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MSCC: Scripting - Administrator's toolbox of magic...

Finally, we made it to have our April meetup - in May. The most obvious explanation is the increased amount of open source and IT activities that either the MSCC, the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM), or the University of Mauritius Student's Computer Club is organising. It's absolutely incredible to see the recent hype of events here on the island. And I'm loving it! Unfortunately, we also had to deal with arranging for a location this time. It was kind of an odyssey as my requests (and phone calls) haven't been answered, even though I tried it several times - well, kind of disappointing and I have to look into that for future gatherings. In my opinion, it is essential that two parameters of a community meeting are fixed as early as possible: Location, and Date and time You can't just change one or both on the very last minute. Well, this time we had to do it due to unforeseen reasons, and I apologise to any MSCC member which couldn't make it to our April meetup. Okay, lesson learned but now back to the actual meetup report ... Shortly after the meeting I placed the following statement as my first impression: "Spontaneous and improvised :) No, seriously, Ish and Dan had well prepared presentations on shell scripting, mainly focused towards Bourne Again Shell (bash), and the pros and cons of scripting versus actually writing something in a decent programming language. I thought that I could cut myself out of the equation but the demand for information about PowerShell was higher than expected..." Well, it turned out that the interest in Windows PowerShell was high, as I even got a couple of questions on it via social media networks during the evening. I also like to mention that the number of attendees went back to what I would call a "standard" number of participation. This time there were 12 craftsmen, but again a good number of First Timers. Reactions of other attendees Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Enjoyed the bash and powershell (linux / windows) presentations ..." -- Nadim on event comments "He [Daniel] also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code." -- Ish on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting Glad to see a couple of first time attendees, especially students from the university itself. Some details on the presentations MSCC: First time visit at the University of Mauritius - Phase II Engineering Tower, room 2.9 Gimme some love ... bash and other shells Ish gave a great introduction into shell scripting as he spoke about existing shell environments and a little bit about their history. Furthermore, he talked about various built-in commands, the use of coreutils, the ability to daisy-chain multiple commands using pipes, the importance of the standard I/O streams and their file descriptors in advanced scripting techniques. Combined with a couple of sample statements in the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 14.04 machine it was a solid presentation. Have a closer look at his slides - published on his blog on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting. Oddities of scripting After the brief introduction into bash it was Daniel's turn to highlight a good number of oddities when working with shell scripts. First of all, it should be clear that scripting is not supposed for any kind of implementations in terms of software but simply to automate administrative procedures and to simplify routine jobs on a system. One of the cool oddities that he mentioned is that everything (!) in a shell is represented by strings; there are no other types like integer, float, date-time, etc. that you'd like to use in a full-fledged programming language. Let's have a look at his sample: more to come... What's the output? As a conclusion, Daniel suggests that shell scripting should be limited but not restricted to automatic repetitive command stacks and batch jobs, startup wrapper for applications in order to set up the execution environment, and other not too sophisticated jobs. But as soon as it might involve a little bit more logic or you might rely on performance it's better to write an application in Ruby, Python, or Perl (among others of course). This is also enables the possibility to test your code properly. MSCC: Ish talking about Bourne Again Shell (bash) and shell scripting to automate regular tasks MSCC: Daniel gives an overview about the pros and cons of shell scripting versus programming MSCC: PowerShell as your scripting solution on Windows operating systems The path of the Enlightened is long ... and tough. Honestly, even though PowerShell was mentioned without any further details on the meetup's agenda, I didn't expect that there would be demand to give a presentation on Microsoft PowerShell after all. I already took this topic out of the announcement but the audience wanted to have some information. Okay, then let's see what I could do - improvised style. While my machine booted and got hooked up to the projector, I started to talk about the beginnings of PowerShell from back in 2006, and its predecessors MS DOS and Command Prompt. A throwback in history... always good for young people. As usual, Microsoft didn't get it at that time. Instead of listening to their client's needs and demands they ignored the feasibility to administrate Windows server farms without any UI tools. PowerShell is actually a result of this, and seeing that shell scripting is a common, reliable and fast way in an administrator's toolbox for decades, Microsoft had to adapt from their Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to a broader approach. It's not like shell scripting was something new; it is in daily use by alternative operating systems like AIX, HP UX, Solaris, and last but not least Linux. Most interestingly, Microsoft is very good at renovating existing architectures, and over the years PowerShell not only replaced their own combination of Command Prompt and Scripting Hosts (VBScript and CScript) but really turned into a challenging competitor on the market. The shell is easy to extend with cmdlets, and open to other Microsoft products like SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Third-party software applications. Similar to MMC PowerShell also offers the ability to administer other machine remotely - only without a graphical user interface and therefore it's easier to automate and schedule regular tasks. Following is a sample of a PowerShell script file (extension .ps1): $strComputer = "." $colItems = get-wmiobject -class Win32_BIOS -namespace root\CIMV2 -comp $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {write-host "BIOS Characteristics: " $objItem.BiosCharacteristicswrite-host "BIOS Version: " $objItem.BIOSVersionwrite-host "Build Number: " $objItem.BuildNumberwrite-host "Caption: " $objItem.Captionwrite-host "Code Set: " $objItem.CodeSetwrite-host "Current Language: " $objItem.CurrentLanguagewrite-host "Description: " $objItem.Descriptionwrite-host "Identification Code: " $objItem.IdentificationCodewrite-host "Installable Languages: " $objItem.InstallableLanguageswrite-host "Installation Date: " $objItem.InstallDatewrite-host "Language Edition: " $objItem.LanguageEditionwrite-host "List Of Languages: " $objItem.ListOfLanguageswrite-host "Manufacturer: " $objItem.Manufacturerwrite-host "Name: " $objItem.Namewrite-host "Other Target Operating System: " $objItem.OtherTargetOSwrite-host "Primary BIOS: " $objItem.PrimaryBIOSwrite-host "Release Date: " $objItem.ReleaseDatewrite-host "Serial Number: " $objItem.SerialNumberwrite-host "SMBIOS BIOS Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSBIOSVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Major Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMajorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Minor Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMinorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Present: " $objItem.SMBIOSPresentwrite-host "Software Element ID: " $objItem.SoftwareElementIDwrite-host "Software Element State: " $objItem.SoftwareElementStatewrite-host "Status: " $objItem.Statuswrite-host "Target Operating System: " $objItem.TargetOperatingSystemwrite-host "Version: " $objItem.Versionwrite-host} Which gives you information about your BIOS and Windows OS. Then change the computer name to another one on your network (NetBIOS based) and run the script again. There lots of samples and tutorials at the Microsoft Script Center, and I would advise you to pay a visit over there if you are more interested in PowerShell. The Script Center provides the download links, too. Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Hacking Defence (14. May 2014) WebCup Maurice (7. & 8. June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! My resume of the day Spontaneous and improvised :) The new location at the University of Mauritius turned out very well, there is plenty of space, and it could be a good choice for future meetings. Especially, having the ability to get more and more students into our IT community sounds like a great opportunity. Later during the day, I got some promising mails from Nadim regarding future sessions at the local branch of the Middlesex University. Well, we will see in the future... But for now this will be on hold until approximately October when students resume their regular studies. Anyway, it was a good experience at the university, and thanks again to the UoM Student's Computer Club that made the necessary arrangements for the MSCC!

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It's not just “Single Sign-on” by Steve Knott (aurionPro SENA)

- by Greg Jensen

It is true that Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-on (Oracle ESSO) started out as purely an application single sign-on tool but as we have seen in the previous articles in this series the product has matured into a suite of tools that can do more than just automated single sign-on and can also provide rapidly deployed, cost effective solution to many demanding password management problems. In the last article of this series I would like to discuss three cases where customers faced password scenarios that required more than just single sign-on and how some of the less well known tools in the Oracle ESSO suite “kitbag” helped solve these challenges. Case #1 One of the issues often faced by our customers is how to keep their applications compliant. I had a client who liked the idea of automated single sign-on for most of his applications but had a key requirement to actually increase the security for one specific SOX application. For the SOX application he wanted to secure access by using two-factor authentication with a smartcard. The problem was that the application did not support two-factor authentication. The solution was to use a feature from the Oracle ESSO suite called authentication manager. This feature enables you to have multiple authentication methods for the same user which in this case was a smartcard and the Windows password. Within authentication manager each authenticator can be configured with a security grade so we gave the smartcard a high grade and the Windows password a normal grade. Security grading in Oracle ESSO can be configured on a per application basis so we set the SOX application to require the higher grade smartcard authenticator. The end result for the user was that they enjoyed automated single sign-on for most of the applications apart from the SOX application. When the SOX application was launched, the user was required by ESSO to present their smartcard before being given access to the application. Case #2 Another example solving compliance issues was in the case of a large energy company who had a number of core billing applications. New regulations required that users change their password regularly and use a complex password. The problem facing the customer was that the core billing applications did not have any native user password change functionality. The customer could not replace the core applications because of the cost and time required to re-develop them. With a reputation for innovation aurionPro SENA were approached to provide a solution to this problem using Oracle ESSO. Oracle ESSO has a password expiry feature that can be triggered periodically based on the timestamp of the users’ last password creation therefore our strategy here was to leverage this feature to provide the password change experience. The trigger can launch an application change password event however in this scenario there was no native change password feature that could be launched therefore a “dummy” change password screen was created that could imitate the missing change password function and connect to the application database on behalf of the user. Oracle ESSO was configured to trigger a change password event every 60 days. After this period if the user launched the application Oracle ESSO would detect the logon screen and invoke the password expiry feature. Oracle ESSO would trigger the “dummy screen,” detect it automatically as the application change password screen and insert a complex password on behalf of the user. After the password event had completed the user was logged on to the application with their new password. All this was provided at a fraction of the cost of re-developing the core applications. Case #3 Recent popular initiatives such as the BYOD and working from home schemes bring with them many challenges in administering “unmanaged machines” and sometimes “unmanageable users.” In a recent case, a client had a dispersed community of casual contractors who worked for the business using their own laptops to access applications. To improve security the around password management the security goal was to provision the passwords directly to these contractors. In a previous article we saw how Oracle ESSO has the capability to provision passwords through Provisioning Gateway but the challenge in this scenario was how to get the Oracle ESSO agent to the casual contractor on an unmanaged machine. The answer was to use another tool in the suite, Oracle ESSO Anywhere. This component can compile the normal Oracle ESSO functionality into a deployment package that can be made available from a website in a similar way to a streamed application. The ESSO Anywhere agent does not actually install into the registry or program files but runs in a folder within the user’s profile therefore no local administrator rights are required for installation. The ESSO Anywhere package can also be configured to stay persistent or disable itself at the end of the user’s session. In this case the user just needed to be told where the website package was located and download the package. Once the download was complete the agent started automatically and the user was provided with single sign-on to their applications without ever knowing the application passwords. Finally, as we have seen in these series Oracle ESSO not only has great utilities in its own tool box but also has direct integration with Oracle Privileged Account Manager, Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Access Manager. Integrated together with these tools provides a complete and complementary platform to address even the most complex identity and access management requirements. So what next for Oracle ESSO? “Agentless ESSO available in the cloud” – but that will be a subject for a future Oracle ESSO series!

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Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault – Part 2

- by AjarnMark

In Part 1, I started talking about using Red-Gate’s newest version of SQL Source Control and how I really like it as a viable method to source control your database development. It looks like this is going to turn into a little series where I will explain how we have done things in the past, and how life is different with SQL Source Control. I will also explain some of my philosophy and methodology around deployment with these tools. But for now, let’s talk about some of the good and the bad of the tool itself. More Kudos and Features I mentioned previously how impressed I was with the responsiveness of Red-Gate’s team. I have been having an ongoing email conversation with Gyorgy Pocsi, and as I have run into problems or requested things behave a little differently, it has not been more than a day or two before a new Build is ready for me to download and test. Quite impressive! I’m sure much of the requests I put in were already in the plans, so I can’t really take credit for them, but throughout this conversation, Red-Gate has implemented several features that were not in the first Early Access version. Those include: Honoring the Fortress configuration option to require Work Item (Bug) IDs on check-ins. Adding the check-in comment text as a comment to the Work Item. Adding the list of checked-in files, along with the Fortress links for automatic History and DIFF view Updating the status of a Work Item on check-in (e.g. setting the item to Complete or, in our case “Dev-Complete”) Support for the Fortress 2.0 API, and not just the Vault Pro 5.1 API. (See later notes regarding support for Fortress 2.0). These were all features that I felt we really needed to have in-place before I could honestly consider converting my team to using SQL Source Control on a regular basis. Now that I have those, my only excuse is not wanting to switch boats on the team mid-stream. So when we wrap up our current release in a few weeks, we will make the jump. In the meantime, I will continue to bang on it to make sure it is stable. It passed one test for stability when I did a test load of one of our larger database schemas into Fortress with SQL Source Control. That database has about 150 tables, 200 User-Defined Functions and nearly 900 Stored Procedures. The initial load to source control went smoothly and took just a brief amount of time. Warnings Remember that this IS still in pre-release stage and while I have not had any problems after that first hiccup I wrote about last time, you still need to treat it with a healthy respect. As I understand it, the RTM is targeted for February. There are a couple more features that I hope make it into the final release version, but if not, they’ll probably be coming soon thereafter. Those are: A Browse feature to let me lookup the Work Item ID instead of having to remember it or look back in my Item details. This is just a matter of convenience. I normally have my Work Item list open anyway, so I can easily look it up, but hey, why not make it even easier. A multi-line comment area. The current space for writing check-in comments is a single-line text box. I would like to have a multi-line space as I sometimes write lengthy commentary. But I recognize that it is a struggle to get most developers to put in more than the word “fixed” as their comment, so this meets the need of the majority as-is, and it’s not a show-stopper for us. Merge. SQL Source Control currently does not have a Merge feature. If two or more people make changes to the same database object, you will get a warning of the conflict and have to choose which one wins (and then manually edit to include the others’ changes). I think it unlikely you will run into actual conflicts in Stored Procedures and Functions, but you might with Views or Tables. This will be nice to have, but I’m not losing any sleep over it. And I have multiple tools at my disposal to do merges manually, so really not a show-stopper for us. Automation has its limits. As cool as this automation is, it has its limits and there are some changes that you will be better off scripting yourself. For example, if you are refactoring table definitions, and want to change a column name, you can write that as a quick sp_rename command and preserve the data within that column. But because this tool is looking just at a before and after picture, it cannot tell that you just renamed a column. To the tool, it looks like you dropped one column and added another. This is not a knock against Red-Gate. All automated scripting tools have this issue, unless the are actively monitoring your every step to know exactly what you are doing. This means that when you go to Deploy your changes, SQL Compare will script the change as a column drop and add, or will attempt to rebuild the entire table. Unfortunately, neither of these approaches will preserve the existing data in that column the way an sp_rename will, and so you are better off scripting that change yourself. Thankfully, SQL Compare will produce warnings about the potential loss of data before it does the actual synchronization and give you a chance to intercept the script and do it yourself. Also, please note that the current official word is that SQL Source Control supports Vault Professional 5.1 and later. Vault Professional is the new name for what was previously known as Fortress. (You can read about the name change on SourceGear’s site.) The last version of Fortress was 2.x, and the API for Fortress 2.x is different from the API for Vault Pro. At my company, we are currently running Fortress 2.0, with plans to upgrade to Vault Pro early next year. Gyorgy was able to come up with a work-around for me to be able to use SQL Source Control with Fortress 2.0, even though it is not officially supported. If you are using Fortress 2.0 and want to use SQL Source Control, be aware that this is not officially supported, but it is working for us, and you can probably get the work-around instructions from Red-Gate if you’re really, really nice to them. Upcoming Topics Some of the other topics I will likely cover in this series over the next few weeks are: How we used to do source control back in the old days (a few weeks ago) before SQL Source Control was available to Vault users What happens when you restore a database that is linked to source control Handling multiple development branches of source code Concurrent Development practices and handling Conflicts Deployment Tips and Best Practices A recap after using the tool for a while

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How to deploy the advanced search page using Module in SharePoint 2013

- by ybbest

Today, I’d like to show you how to deploy your custom advanced search page using module in Visual Studio 2012.Using a module is the way how SharePoint deploy all the publishing pages to the search centre. Browse to the template under 15 hive of SharePoint2013, then go to the SearchCenterFiles under Features(as shown below).Then open the Files.xml it shows how SharePoint using module to deploy advanced search.You can download the solution here. Now I am going to show you how to deploy your custom advanced search page.The feature is located in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\SearchCenterFiles . To deploy SharePoint advanced Search pages, you need to do the following: 1. Create SharePoint2013 project and then create a module item. 2. Find how Out of box SharePoint deploy the Advanced Search Page from Files.xml and copy and paste it into the elements.xml <File Url="advanced.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary"> <Property Name="PublishingPageLayout" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/AdvancedSearchLayout.aspx, $Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,SearchCenterAdvancedSearchTitle;" /> <Property Name="Title" Value="$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,Search_Advanced_Page_Title;" /> <Property Name="ContentType" Value="$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,contenttype_welcomepage_name;" /> <AllUsersWebPart WebPartZoneID="MainZone" WebPartOrder="1"> <![CDATA[ <WebPart xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2"> <Assembly>Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c</Assembly> <TypeName>Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.AdvancedSearchBox</TypeName> <Title>$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_Webpart_Title;</Title> <Description>$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_Webpart_Description;</Description> <FrameType>None</FrameType> <AllowMinimize>true</AllowMinimize> <AllowRemove>true</AllowRemove> <IsVisible>true</IsVisible> <SearchResultPageURL xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">results.aspx</SearchResultPageURL> <TextQuerySectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_FindDocsWith_Title;</TextQuerySectionLabelText> <ShowAndQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowAndQueryTextBox> <ShowPhraseQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowPhraseQueryTextBox> <ShowOrQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowOrQueryTextBox> <ShowNotQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowNotQueryTextBox> <ScopeSectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_NarrowSearch_Title;</ScopeSectionLabelText> <ShowLanguageOptions xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowLanguageOptions> <ShowResultTypePicker xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowResultTypePicker> <ShowPropertiesSection xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowPropertiesSection> <PropertiesSectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,AdvancedSearch_AddPropRestrictions_Title;</PropertiesSectionLabelText> </WebPart> ]]> </AllUsersWebPart> </File> 3. Customize your SharePoint advanced Search Page by modifying the Advanced Search Box and Export the webpart and copy the webpart file to the elements under module. 4. Export the web part and copy the content of the web part file to the elements.xml in the module. <File Path="AdvancedSearchPage\advanced.aspx" Url="employeeAdvanced.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary"> <Property Name="PublishingPageLayout" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/AdvancedSearchLayout.aspx, $Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,SearchCenterAdvancedSearchTitle;" /> <Property Name="Title" Value="$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,Search_Advanced_Page_Title;" /> <Property Name="ContentType" Value="$Resources:Microsoft.Office.Server.Search,contenttype_welcomepage_name;" /> <AllUsersWebPart WebPartZoneID="MainZone" WebPartOrder="1"> <![CDATA[ <WebPart xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v2"> <Title>Advanced Search Box</Title> <FrameType>None</FrameType> <Description>Displays parameterized search options based on properties and combinations of words.</Description> <IsIncluded>true</IsIncluded> <ZoneID>MainZone</ZoneID> <PartOrder>1</PartOrder> <FrameState>Normal</FrameState> <Height /> <Width /> <AllowRemove>true</AllowRemove> <AllowZoneChange>true</AllowZoneChange> <AllowMinimize>true</AllowMinimize> <AllowConnect>true</AllowConnect> <AllowEdit>true</AllowEdit> <AllowHide>true</AllowHide> <IsVisible>true</IsVisible> <DetailLink /> <HelpLink /> <HelpMode>Modeless</HelpMode> <Dir>Default</Dir> <PartImageSmall /> <MissingAssembly>Cannot import this Web Part.</MissingAssembly> <PartImageLarge /> <IsIncludedFilter /> <Assembly>Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c</Assembly> <TypeName>Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.AdvancedSearchBox</TypeName> <SearchResultPageURL xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">results.aspx</SearchResultPageURL> <TextQuerySectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">Find documents that have...</TextQuerySectionLabelText> <ShowAndQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowAndQueryTextBox> <AndQueryTextBoxLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowPhraseQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowPhraseQueryTextBox> <PhraseQueryTextBoxLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowOrQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowOrQueryTextBox> <OrQueryTextBoxLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowNotQueryTextBox xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowNotQueryTextBox> <NotQueryTextBoxLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ScopeSectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">Narrow the search...</ScopeSectionLabelText> <ShowScopes xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">false</ShowScopes> <ScopeLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <DisplayGroup xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">Advanced Search</DisplayGroup> <ShowLanguageOptions xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">false</ShowLanguageOptions> <LanguagesLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowResultTypePicker xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowResultTypePicker> <ResultTypeLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox" /> <ShowPropertiesSection xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">true</ShowPropertiesSection> <PropertiesSectionLabelText xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox">Add property restrictions...</PropertiesSectionLabelText> <Properties xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:AdvancedSearchBox"><root xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <LangDefs> <LangDef DisplayName="Arabic" LangID="ar"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Bengali" LangID="bn"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Bulgarian" LangID="bg"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Catalan" LangID="ca"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Simplified Chinese" LangID="zh-cn"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Traditional Chinese" LangID="zh-tw"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Croatian" LangID="hr"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Czech" LangID="cs"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Danish" LangID="da"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Dutch" LangID="nl"/> <LangDef DisplayName="English" LangID="en"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Finnish" LangID="fi"/> <LangDef DisplayName="French" LangID="fr"/> <LangDef DisplayName="German" LangID="de"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Greek" LangID="el"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Gujarati" LangID="gu"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Hebrew" LangID="he"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Hindi" LangID="hi"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Hungarian" LangID="hu"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Icelandic" LangID="is"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Indonesian" LangID="id"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Italian" LangID="it"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Japanese" LangID="ja"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Kannada" LangID="kn"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Korean" LangID="ko"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Latvian" LangID="lv"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Lithuanian" LangID="lt"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Malay" LangID="ms"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Malayalam" LangID="ml"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Marathi" LangID="mr"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Norwegian" LangID="no"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Polish" LangID="pl"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Portuguese" LangID="pt"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Punjabi" LangID="pa"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Romanian" LangID="ro"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Russian" LangID="ru"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Slovak" LangID="sk"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Slovenian" LangID="sl"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Spanish" LangID="es"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Swedish" LangID="sv"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Tamil" LangID="ta"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Telugu" LangID="te"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Thai" LangID="th"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Turkish" LangID="tr"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Ukrainian" LangID="uk"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Urdu" LangID="ur"/> <LangDef DisplayName="Vietnamese" LangID="vi"/> </LangDefs> <Languages> <Language LangRef="en"/> <Language LangRef="fr"/> <Language LangRef="de"/> <Language LangRef="ja"/> <Language LangRef="zh-cn"/> <Language LangRef="es"/> <Language LangRef="zh-tw"/> </Languages> <PropertyDefs> <PropertyDef Name="Path" DataType="url" DisplayName="URL"/> <PropertyDef Name="Size" DataType="integer" DisplayName="Size (bytes)"/> <PropertyDef Name="Write" DataType="datetime" DisplayName="Last Modified Date"/> <PropertyDef Name="FileName" DataType="text" DisplayName="Name"/> <PropertyDef Name="Description" DataType="text" DisplayName="Description"/> <PropertyDef Name="Title" DataType="text" DisplayName="Title"/> <PropertyDef Name="Author" DataType="text" DisplayName="Author"/> <PropertyDef Name="DocSubject" DataType="text" DisplayName="Subject"/> <PropertyDef Name="DocKeywords" DataType="text" DisplayName="Keywords"/> <PropertyDef Name="DocComments" DataType="text" DisplayName="Comments"/> <PropertyDef Name="CreatedBy" DataType="text" DisplayName="Created By"/> <PropertyDef Name="ModifiedBy" DataType="text" DisplayName="Last Modified By"/> <PropertyDef Name="EmployeeNumber" DataType="text" DisplayName="EmployeeNumber"/> <PropertyDef Name="EmployeeId" DataType="text" DisplayName="EmployeeId"/> <PropertyDef Name="EmployeeFirstName" DataType="text" DisplayName="EmployeeFirstName"/> <PropertyDef Name="EmployeeLastName" DataType="text" DisplayName="EmployeeLastName"/> </PropertyDefs> <ResultTypes> <ResultType DisplayName="Employee Document" Name="default"> <KeywordQuery/> <PropertyRef Name="EmployeeNumber" /> <PropertyRef Name="EmployeeId" /> <PropertyRef Name="EmployeeFirstName" /> <PropertyRef Name="EmployeeLastName" /> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="All Results"> <KeywordQuery/> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="Documents" Name="documents"> <KeywordQuery>IsDocument="True"</KeywordQuery> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="Title"/> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="Word Documents" Name="worddocuments"> <KeywordQuery>FileExtension="doc" OR FileExtension="docx" OR FileExtension="dot" OR FileExtension="docm" OR FileExtension="odt"</KeywordQuery> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="Title"/> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="Excel Documents" Name="exceldocuments"> <KeywordQuery>FileExtension="xls" OR FileExtension="xlsx" OR FileExtension="xlsm" OR FileExtension="xlsb" OR FileExtension="ods"</KeywordQuery> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="Title"/> </ResultType> <ResultType DisplayName="PowerPoint Presentations" Name="presentations"> <KeywordQuery>FileExtension="ppt" OR FileExtension="pptx" OR FileExtension="pptm" OR FileExtension="odp"</KeywordQuery> <PropertyRef Name="Author" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocComments"/> <PropertyRef Name="Description" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocKeywords"/> <PropertyRef Name="FileName" /> <PropertyRef Name="Size" /> <PropertyRef Name="DocSubject"/> <PropertyRef Name="Path" /> <PropertyRef Name="Write" /> <PropertyRef Name="CreatedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="ModifiedBy" /> <PropertyRef Name="Title"/> </ResultType> </ResultTypes></root></Properties> </WebPart> ]]> </AllUsersWebPart> </File> 5.Deploy your custom solution and you will have a custom advanced search page.

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Exploring the Excel Services REST API

- by jamiet

Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible. Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in. The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet

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Replication Services as ETL extraction tool

- by jorg

In my last blog post I explained the principles of Replication Services and the possibilities it offers in a BI environment. One of the possibilities I described was the use of snapshot replication as an ETL extraction tool: “Snapshot Replication can also be useful in BI environments, if you don’t need a near real-time copy of the database, you can choose to use this form of replication. Next to an alternative for Transactional Replication it can be used to stage data so it can be transformed and moved into the data warehousing environment afterwards. In many solutions I have seen developers create multiple SSIS packages that simply copies data from one or more source systems to a staging database that figures as source for the ETL process. The creation of these packages takes a lot of (boring) time, while Replication Services can do the same in minutes. It is possible to filter out columns and/or records and it can even apply schema changes automatically so I think it offers enough features here. I don’t know how the performance will be and if it really works as good for this purpose as I expect, but I want to try this out soon!” Well I have tried it out and I must say it worked well. I was able to let replication services do work in a fraction of the time it would cost me to do the same in SSIS. What I did was the following: Configure snapshot replication for some Adventure Works tables, this was quite simple and straightforward. Create an SSIS package that executes the snapshot replication on demand and waits for its completion. This is something that you can’t do with out of the box functionality. While configuring the snapshot replication two SQL Agent Jobs are created, one for the creation of the snapshot and one for the distribution of the snapshot. Unfortunately these jobs are asynchronous which means that if you execute them they immediately report back if the job started successfully or not, they do not wait for completion and report its result afterwards. So I had to create an SSIS package that executes the jobs and waits for their completion before the rest of the ETL process continues. Fortunately I was able to create the SSIS package with the desired functionality. I have made a step-by-step guide that will help you configure the snapshot replication and I have uploaded the SSIS package you need to execute it. Configure snapshot replication The first step is to create a publication on the database you want to replicate. Connect to SQL Server Management Studio and right-click Replication, choose for New.. Publication… The New Publication Wizard appears, click Next Choose your “source” database and click Next Choose Snapshot publication and click Next You can now select tables and other objects that you want to publish Expand Tables and select the tables that are needed in your ETL process In the next screen you can add filters on the selected tables which can be very useful. Think about selecting only the last x days of data for example. Its possible to filter out rows and/or columns. In this example I did not apply any filters. Schedule the Snapshot Agent to run at a desired time, by doing this a SQL Agent Job is created which we need to execute from a SSIS package later on. Next you need to set the Security Settings for the Snapshot Agent. Click on the Security Settings button. In this example I ran the Agent under the SQL Server Agent service account. This is not recommended as a security best practice. Fortunately there is an excellent article on TechNet which tells you exactly how to set up the security for replication services. Read it here and make sure you follow the guidelines! On the next screen choose to create the publication at the end of the wizard Give the publication a name (SnapshotTest) and complete the wizard The publication is created and the articles (tables in this case) are added Now the publication is created successfully its time to create a new subscription for this publication. Expand the Replication folder in SSMS and right click Local Subscriptions, choose New Subscriptions The New Subscription Wizard appears Select the publisher on which you just created your publication and select the database and publication (SnapshotTest) You can now choose where the Distribution Agent should run. If it runs at the distributor (push subscriptions) it causes extra processing overhead. If you use a separate server for your ETL process and databases choose to run each agent at its subscriber (pull subscriptions) to reduce the processing overhead at the distributor. Of course we need a database for the subscription and fortunately the Wizard can create it for you. Choose for New database Give the database the desired name, set the desired options and click OK You can now add multiple SQL Server Subscribers which is not necessary in this case but can be very useful. You now need to set the security settings for the Distribution Agent. Click on the …. button Again, in this example I ran the Agent under the SQL Server Agent service account. Read the security best practices here Click Next Make sure you create a synchronization job schedule again. This job is also necessary in the SSIS package later on. Initialize the subscription at first synchronization Select the first box to create the subscription when finishing this wizard Complete the wizard by clicking Finish The subscription will be created In SSMS you see a new database is created, the subscriber. There are no tables or other objects in the database available yet because the replication jobs did not ran yet. Now expand the SQL Server Agent, go to Jobs and search for the job that creates the snapshot: Rename this job to “CreateSnapshot” Now search for the job that distributes the snapshot: Rename this job to “DistributeSnapshot” Create an SSIS package that executes the snapshot replication We now need an SSIS package that will take care of the execution of both jobs. The CreateSnapshot job needs to execute and finish before the DistributeSnapshot job runs. After the DistributeSnapshot job has started the package needs to wait until its finished before the package execution finishes. The Execute SQL Server Agent Job Task is designed to execute SQL Agent Jobs from SSIS. Unfortunately this SSIS task only executes the job and reports back if the job started succesfully or not, it does not report if the job actually completed with success or failure. This is because these jobs are asynchronous. The SSIS package I’ve created does the following: It runs the CreateSnapshot job It checks every 5 seconds if the job is completed with a for loop When the CreateSnapshot job is completed it starts the DistributeSnapshot job And again it waits until the snapshot is delivered before the package will finish successfully Quite simple and the package is ready to use as standalone extract mechanism. After executing the package the replicated tables are added to the subscriber database and are filled with data: Download the SSIS package here (SSIS 2008) Conclusion In this example I only replicated 5 tables, I could create a SSIS package that does the same in approximately the same amount of time. But if I replicated all the 70+ AdventureWorks tables I would save a lot of time and boring work! With replication services you also benefit from the feature that schema changes are applied automatically which means your entire extract phase wont break. Because a snapshot is created using the bcp utility (bulk copy) it’s also quite fast, so the performance will be quite good. Disadvantages of using snapshot replication as extraction tool is the limitation on source systems. You can only choose SQL Server or Oracle databases to act as a publisher. So if you plan to build an extract phase for your ETL process that will invoke a lot of tables think about replication services, it would save you a lot of time and thanks to the Extract SSIS package I’ve created you can perfectly fit it in your usual SSIS ETL process.

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Exploring the Excel Services REST API

- by jamiet

Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible. Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in. The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet

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Physical Directories vs. MVC View Paths

- by Rick Strahl

This post falls into the bucket of operator error on my part, but I want to share this anyway because it describes an issue that has bitten me a few times now and writing it down might keep it a little stronger in my mind. I've been working on an MVC project the last few days, and at the end of a long day I accidentally moved one of my View folders from the MVC Root Folder to the project root. It must have been at the very end of the day before shutting down because tests and manual site navigation worked fine just before I quit for the night. I checked in changes and called it a night. Next day I came back, started running the app and had a lot of breaks with certain views. Oddly custom routes to these controllers/views worked, but stock /{controller}/{action} routes would not. After a bit of spelunking I realized that "Hey one of my View Folders is missing", which made some sense given the error messages I got. I looked in the recycle bin - nothing there, so rather than try to figure out what the hell happened, just restored from my last SVN checkin. At this point the folders are back… but… view access still ends up breaking for this set of views. Specifically I'm getting the Yellow Screen of Death with: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current context Here's the full error: Server Error in '/ClassifiedsWeb' Application. Compilation ErrorDescription: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.Compiler Error Message: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current contextSource Error: Line 1: @model ClassifiedsWeb.EntryViewModel Line 2: @{ Line 3: ViewBag.Title = Model.Entry.Title + " - " + ClassifiedsBusiness.App.Configuration.ApplicationName; Source File: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml Line: 1 Compiler Warning Messages: Show Detailed Compiler Output: Show Complete Compilation Source: Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.272 Here's what's really odd about this error: The views now do exist in the /Views/Classifieds folder of the project, but it appears like MVC is trying to execute the views directly. This is getting pretty weird, man! So I hook up some break points in my controllers to see if my controller actions are getting fired - and sure enough it turns out they are not - but only for those views that were previously 'lost' and then restored from SVN. WTF? At this point I'm thinking that I must have messed up one of the config files, but after some more spelunking and realizing that all the other Controller views work, I give up that idea. Config's gotta be OK if other controllers and views are working. Root Folders and MVC Views don't mix As I mentioned the problem was the fact that I inadvertantly managed to drag my View folder to the root folder of the project. Here's what this looks like in my FUBAR'd project structure after I copied back /Views/Classifieds folder from SVN: There's the actual root folder in the /Views folder and the accidental copy that sits of the root. I of course did not notice the /Classifieds folder at the root because it was excluded and didn't show up in the project. Now, before you call me a complete idiot remember that this happened by accident - an accidental drag probably just before shutting down for the night. :-) So why does this break? MVC should be happy with views in the /Views/Classifieds folder right? While MVC might be happy, IIS is not. The fact that there is a physical folder on disk takes precedence over MVC's routing. In other words if a URL exists that matches a route the pysical path is accessed first. What happens here is that essentially IIS is trying to execute the .cshtml pages directly without ever routing to the Controller methods. In the error page I showed above my clue should have been that the view was served as: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml rather than c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Views\Classifieds\Show.cshtml But of course I didn't notice that right away, just skimming to the end and looking at the file name. The reason that /classifieds/list actually fires that file is that the ASP.NET Web Pages engine looks for physical files on disk that match a path. IOW, when calling Web Pages you drop the .cshtml off the Razor page and IIS will serve that just fine. So: /classifieds/list looks and tries to find /classifieds/list.cshtml and executes that script. And that is exactly what's happening. Web Pages is trying to execute the .cshtml file and it fails because Web Pages knows nothing about the @model tag which is an MVC specific template extension. This is why my breakpoints in the controller methods didn't fire and it also explains why the error mentions that the @model key word is invalid (@model is an MVC provided template enhancement to the Razor Engine). The solution of course is super simple: Delete the accidentally created root folder and the problem is solved. Routing and Physical Paths I've run into problems with this before actually. In the past I've had a number of applications that had a physical /Admin folder which also would conflict with an MVC Admin controller. More than once I ended up wondering why the index route (/Admin/) was not working properly. If a physical /Admin folder exists /Admin will not route to the Index action (or whatever default action you have set up, but instead try to list the directory or show the default document in the folder. The only way to force the index page through MVC is to explicitly use /Admin/Index. Makes perfect sense once you realize the physical folder is there, but that's easy to forget in an MVC application. As you might imagine after a few times of running into this I gave up on the Admin folder and moved everything into MVC views to handle those operations. Still it's one of those things that can easily bite you, because the behavior and error messages seem to point at completely different problems. Moral of the story is: If you see routing problems where routes are not reaching obvious controller methods, always check to make sure there's isn't a physical path being mapped by IIS instead. That way you won't feel stupid like I did after trying a million things for about an hour before discovering my sloppy mousing behavior :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC IIS7 Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Thread placement policies on NUMA systems - update

- by Dave

In a prior blog entry I noted that Solaris used a "maximum dispersal" placement policy to assign nascent threads to their initial processors. The general idea is that threads should be placed as far away from each other as possible in the resource topology in order to reduce resource contention between concurrently running threads. This policy assumes that resource contention -- pipelines, memory channel contention, destructive interference in the shared caches, etc -- will likely outweigh (a) any potential communication benefits we might achieve by packing our threads more densely onto a subset of the NUMA nodes, and (b) benefits of NUMA affinity between memory allocated by one thread and accessed by other threads. We want our threads spread widely over the system and not packed together. Conceptually, when placing a new thread, the kernel picks the least loaded node NUMA node (the node with lowest aggregate load average), and then the least loaded core on that node, etc. Furthermore, the kernel places threads onto resources -- sockets, cores, pipelines, etc -- without regard to the thread's process membership. That is, initial placement is process-agnostic. Keep reading, though. This description is incorrect. On Solaris 10 on a SPARC T5440 with 4 x T2+ NUMA nodes, if the system is otherwise unloaded and we launch a process that creates 20 compute-bound concurrent threads, then typically we'll see a perfect balance with 5 threads on each node. We see similar behavior on an 8-node x86 x4800 system, where each node has 8 cores and each core is 2-way hyperthreaded. So far so good; this behavior seems in agreement with the policy I described in the 1st paragraph. I recently tried the same experiment on a 4-node T4-4 running Solaris 11. Both the T5440 and T4-4 are 4-node systems that expose 256 logical thread contexts. To my surprise, all 20 threads were placed onto just one NUMA node while the other 3 nodes remained completely idle. I checked the usual suspects such as processor sets inadvertently left around by colleagues, processors left offline, and power management policies, but the system was configured normally. I then launched multiple concurrent instances of the process, and, interestingly, all the threads from the 1st process landed on one node, all the threads from the 2nd process landed on another node, and so on. This happened even if I interleaved thread creating between the processes, so I was relatively sure the effect didn't related to thread creation time, but rather that placement was a function of process membership. I this point I consulted the Solaris sources and talked with folks in the Solaris group. The new Solaris 11 behavior is intentional. The kernel is no longer using a simple maximum dispersal policy, and thread placement is process membership-aware. Now, even if other nodes are completely unloaded, the kernel will still try to pack new threads onto the home lgroup (socket) of the primordial thread until the load average of that node reaches 50%, after which it will pick the next least loaded node as the process's new favorite node for placement. On the T4-4 we have 64 logical thread contexts (strands) per socket (lgroup), so if we launch 48 concurrent threads we will find 32 placed on one node and 16 on some other node. If we launch 64 threads we'll find 32 and 32. That means we can end up with our threads clustered on a small subset of the nodes in a way that's quite different that what we've seen on Solaris 10. So we have a policy that allows process-aware packing but reverts to spreading threads onto other nodes if a node becomes too saturated. It turns out this policy was enabled in Solaris 10, but certain bugs suppressed the mixed packing/spreading behavior. There are configuration variables in /etc/system that allow us to dial the affinity between nascent threads and their primordial thread up and down: see lgrp_expand_proc_thresh, specifically. In the OpenSolaris source code the key routine is mpo_update_tunables(). This method reads the /etc/system variables and sets up some global variables that will subsequently be used by the dispatcher, which calls lgrp_choose() in lgrp.c to place nascent threads. Lgrp_expand_proc_thresh controls how loaded an lgroup must be before we'll consider homing a process's threads to another lgroup. Tune this value lower to have it spread your process's threads out more. To recap, the 'new' policy is as follows. Threads from the same process are packed onto a subset of the strands of a socket (50% for T-series). Once that socket reaches the 50% threshold the kernel then picks another preferred socket for that process. Threads from unrelated processes are spread across sockets. More precisely, different processes may have different preferred sockets (lgroups). Beware that I've simplified and elided details for the purposes of explication. The truth is in the code. Remarks: It's worth noting that initial thread placement is just that. If there's a gross imbalance between the load on different nodes then the kernel will migrate threads to achieve a better and more even distribution over the set of available nodes. Once a thread runs and gains some affinity for a node, however, it becomes "stickier" under the assumption that the thread has residual cache residency on that node, and that memory allocated by that thread resides on that node given the default "first-touch" page-level NUMA allocation policy. Exactly how the various policies interact and which have precedence under what circumstances could the topic of a future blog entry. The scheduler is work-conserving. The x4800 mentioned above is an interesting system. Each of the 8 sockets houses an Intel 7500-series processor. Each processor has 3 coherent QPI links and the system is arranged as a glueless 8-socket twisted ladder "mobius" topology. Nodes are either 1 or 2 hops distant over the QPI links. As an aside the mapping of logical CPUIDs to physical resources is rather interesting on Solaris/x4800. On SPARC/Solaris the CPUID layout is strictly geographic, with the highest order bits identifying the socket, the next lower bits identifying the core within that socket, following by the pipeline (if present) and finally the logical thread context ("strand") on the core. But on Solaris on the x4800 the CPUID layout is as follows. [6:6] identifies the hyperthread on a core; bits [5:3] identify the socket, or package in Intel terminology; bits [2:0] identify the core within a socket. Such low-level details should be of interest only if you're binding threads -- a bad idea, the kernel typically handles placement best -- or if you're writing NUMA-aware code that's aware of the ambient placement and makes decisions accordingly. Solaris introduced the so-called critical-threads mechanism, which is expressed by putting a thread into the FX scheduling class at priority 60. The critical-threads mechanism applies to placement on cores, not on sockets, however. That is, it's an intra-socket policy, not an inter-socket policy. Solaris 11 introduces the Power Aware Dispatcher (PAD) which packs threads instead of spreading them out in an attempt to be able to keep sockets or cores at lower power levels. Maximum dispersal may be good for performance but is anathema to power management. PAD is off by default, but power management polices constitute yet another confounding factor with respect to scheduling and dispatching. If your threads communicate heavily -- one thread reads cache lines last written by some other thread -- then the new dense packing policy may improve performance by reducing traffic on the coherent interconnect. On the other hand if your threads in your process communicate rarely, then it's possible the new packing policy might result on contention on shared computing resources. Unfortunately there's no simple litmus test that says whether packing or spreading is optimal in a given situation. The answer varies by system load, application, number of threads, and platform hardware characteristics. Currently we don't have the necessary tools and sensoria to decide at runtime, so we're reduced to an empirical approach where we run trials and try to decide on a placement policy. The situation is quite frustrating. Relatedly, it's often hard to determine just the right level of concurrency to optimize throughput. (Understanding constructive vs destructive interference in the shared caches would be a good start. We could augment the lines with a small tag field indicating which strand last installed or accessed a line. Given that, we could augment the CPU with performance counters for misses where a thread evicts a line it installed vs misses where a thread displaces a line installed by some other thread.)

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CI Deployment Of Azure Web Roles Using TeamCity

- by srkirkland

After recently migrating an important new website to use Windows Azure “Web Roles” I wanted an easier way to deploy new versions to the Azure Staging environment as well as a reliable process to rollback deployments to a certain “known good” source control commit checkpoint. By configuring our JetBrains’ TeamCity CI server to utilize Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets to create new automated deployments, I’ll show you how to take control of your Azure publish process. Step 0: Configuring your Azure Project in Visual Studio Before we can start looking at automating the deployment, we should make sure manual deployments from Visual Studio are working properly. Detailed information for setting up deployments can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683672.aspx#PublishAzure or by doing some quick Googling, but the basics are as follows: Install the prerequisite Windows Azure SDK Create an Azure project by right-clicking on your web project and choosing “Add Windows Azure Cloud Service Project” (or by manually adding that project type) Configure your Role and Service Configuration/Definition as desired Right-click on your azure project and choose “Publish,” create a publish profile, and push to your web role You don’t actually have to do step #4 and create a publish profile, but it’s a good exercise to make sure everything is working properly. Once your Windows Azure project is setup correctly, we are ready to move on to understanding the Azure Publish process. Understanding the Azure Publish Process The actual Windows Azure project is fairly simple at its core—it builds your dependent roles (in our case, a web role) against a specific service and build configuration, and outputs two files: ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg: This is just the file containing your package configuration info, for example Instance Count, OsFamily, ConnectionString and other Setting information. ProjectName.Azure.cspkg: This is the package file that contains the guts of your deployment, including all deployable files. When you package your Azure project, these two files will be created within the directory ./[ProjectName].Azure/bin/[ConfigName]/app.publish/. If you want to build your Azure Project from the command line, it’s as simple as calling MSBuild on the “Publish” target: msbuild.exe /target:Publish Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets The last pieces of the puzzle that make CI automation possible are the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156055.aspx). These cmdlets are what will let us create deployments without Visual Studio or other user intervention. Preparing TeamCity for Azure Deployments Now we are ready to get our TeamCity server setup so it can build and deploy Windows Azure projects, which we now know requires the Azure SDK and the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets. Installing the Azure SDK is easy enough, just go to https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/ and click “Install” Once this SDK is installed, I recommend running a test build to make sure your project is building correctly. You’ll want to setup your build step using MSBuild with the “Publish” target against your solution file. Mine looks like this: Assuming the build was successful, you will now have the two *.cspkg and *cscfg files within your build directory. If the build was red (failed), take a look at the build logs and keep an eye out for “unsupported project type” or other build errors, which will need to be addressed before the CI deployment can be completed. With a successful build we are now ready to install and configure the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets: Follow the instructions at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj554332 to install the Cmdlets and configure PowerShell After installing the Cmdlets, you’ll need to get your Azure Subscription Info using the Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile command. Store the resulting *.publishsettings file somewhere you can get to easily, like C:\TeamCity, because you will need to reference it later from your deploy script. Scripting the CI Deploy Process Now that the cmdlets are installed on our TeamCity server, we are ready to script the actual deployment using a TeamCity “PowerShell” build runner. Before we look at any code, here’s a breakdown of our deployment algorithm: Setup your variables, including the location of the *.cspkg and *cscfg files produced in the earlier MSBuild step (remember, the folder is something like [ProjectName].Azure/bin/[ConfigName]/app.publish/ Import the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets Import and set your Azure Subscription information (this is basically your authentication/authorization step, so protect your settings file Now look for a current deployment, and if you find one Upgrade it, else Create a new deployment Pretty simple and straightforward. Now let’s look at the code (also available as a gist here: https://gist.github.com/3694398): $subscription = "[Your Subscription Name]" $service = "[Your Azure Service Name]" $slot = "staging" #staging or production $package = "[ProjectName]\bin\[BuildConfigName]\app.publish\[ProjectName].cspkg" $configuration = "[ProjectName]\bin\[BuildConfigName]\app.publish\ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg" $timeStampFormat = "g" $deploymentLabel = "ContinuousDeploy to $service v%build.number%" Write-Output "Running Azure Imports" Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\*.psd1" Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile "C:\TeamCity\[PSFileName].publishsettings" Set-AzureSubscription -CurrentStorageAccount $service -SubscriptionName $subscription function Publish(){ $deployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot -ErrorVariable a -ErrorAction silentlycontinue if ($a[0] -ne $null) { Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - No deployment is detected. Creating a new deployment. " } if ($deployment.Name -ne $null) { #Update deployment inplace (usually faster, cheaper, won't destroy VIP) Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Deployment exists in $servicename. Upgrading deployment." UpgradeDeployment } else { CreateNewDeployment } } function CreateNewDeployment() { write-progress -id 3 -activity "Creating New Deployment" -Status "In progress" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Creating New Deployment: In progress" $opstat = New-AzureDeployment -Slot $slot -Package $package -Configuration $configuration -label $deploymentLabel -ServiceName $service $completeDeployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot $completeDeploymentID = $completeDeployment.deploymentid write-progress -id 3 -activity "Creating New Deployment" -completed -Status "Complete" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Creating New Deployment: Complete, Deployment ID: $completeDeploymentID" } function UpgradeDeployment() { write-progress -id 3 -activity "Upgrading Deployment" -Status "In progress" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Upgrading Deployment: In progress" # perform Update-Deployment $setdeployment = Set-AzureDeployment -Upgrade -Slot $slot -Package $package -Configuration $configuration -label $deploymentLabel -ServiceName $service -Force $completeDeployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot $completeDeploymentID = $completeDeployment.deploymentid write-progress -id 3 -activity "Upgrading Deployment" -completed -Status "Complete" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Upgrading Deployment: Complete, Deployment ID: $completeDeploymentID" } Write-Output "Create Azure Deployment" Publish Creating the TeamCity Build Step The only thing left is to create a second build step, after your MSBuild “Publish” step, with the build runner type “PowerShell”. Then set your script to “Source Code,” the script execution mode to “Put script into PowerShell stdin with “-Command” arguments” and then copy/paste in the above script (replacing the placeholder sections with your values). This should look like the following: Wrap Up After combining the MSBuild /target:Publish step (which creates the necessary Windows Azure *.cspkg and *.cscfg files) and a PowerShell script step which utilizes the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets, we have a fully deployable build configuration in TeamCity. You can configure this step to run whenever you’d like using build triggers – for example, you could even deploy whenever a new master branch deploy comes in and passes all required tests. In the script I’ve hardcoded that every deployment goes to the Staging environment on Azure, but you could deploy straight to Production if you want to, or even setup a deployment configuration variable and set it as desired. After your TeamCity Build Configuration is complete, you’ll see something that looks like this: Whenever you click the “Run” button, all of your code will be compiled, published, and deployed to Windows Azure! One additional enormous benefit of automating the process this way is that you can easily deploy any specific source control changeset by clicking the little ellipsis button next to "Run.” This will bring up a dialog like the one below, where you can select the last change to use for your deployment. Since Azure Web Role deployments don’t have any rollback functionality, this is a critical feature. Enjoy!

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Writing Unit Tests for an ASP.NET MVC Action Method that handles Ajax Request and Normal Request

- by shiju

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to write unit tests for an ASP.NET MVC action method, which handles both Ajax request and normal HTTP Request. I will write a unit test for specifying the behavior of an Ajax request and will write another unit test for specifying the behavior of a normal HTTP request. Both Ajax request and normal request will be handled by a single action method. So the ASP.NET MVC action method will be execute HTTP Request object’s IsAjaxRequest method for identifying whether it is an Ajax request or not. So we have to create mock object for Request object and also have to make as a Ajax request from the unit test for verifying the behavior of an Ajax request. I have used NUnit and Moq for writing unit tests. Let me write a unit test for a Ajax request Code Snippet [Test] public void Index_AjaxRequest_Returns_Partial_With_Expense_List() { // Arrange Mock<HttpRequestBase> request = new Mock<HttpRequestBase>(); Mock<HttpResponseBase> response = new Mock<HttpResponseBase>(); Mock<HttpContextBase> context = new Mock<HttpContextBase>(); context.Setup(c => c.Request).Returns(request.Object); context.Setup(c => c.Response).Returns(response.Object); //Add XMLHttpRequest request header request.Setup(req => req["X-Requested-With"]). Returns("XMLHttpRequest"); IEnumerable<Expense> fakeExpenses = GetMockExpenses(); expenseRepository.Setup(x => x.GetMany(It. IsAny<Expression<Func<Expense, bool>>>())). Returns(fakeExpenses); ExpenseController controller = new ExpenseController( commandBus.Object, categoryRepository.Object, expenseRepository.Object); controller.ControllerContext = new ControllerContext( context.Object, new RouteData(), controller); // Act var result = controller.Index(null, null) as PartialViewResult; // Assert Assert.AreEqual("_ExpenseList", result.ViewName); Assert.IsNotNull(result, "View Result is null"); Assert.IsInstanceOf(typeof(IEnumerable<Expense>), result.ViewData.Model, "Wrong View Model"); var expenses = result.ViewData.Model as IEnumerable<Expense>; Assert.AreEqual(3, expenses.Count(), "Got wrong number of Categories"); } In the above unit test, we are calling Index action method of a controller named ExpenseController, which will returns a PartialView named _ExpenseList, if it is an Ajax request. We have created mock object for HTTPContextBase and setup XMLHttpRequest request header for Request object’s X-Requested-With for making it as a Ajax request. We have specified the ControllerContext property of the controller with mocked object HTTPContextBase. Code Snippet controller.ControllerContext = new ControllerContext( context.Object, new RouteData(), controller); Let me write a unit test for a normal HTTP method Code Snippet [Test] public void Index_NormalRequest_Returns_Index_With_Expense_List() { // Arrange Mock<HttpRequestBase> request = new Mock<HttpRequestBase>(); Mock<HttpResponseBase> response = new Mock<HttpResponseBase>(); Mock<HttpContextBase> context = new Mock<HttpContextBase>(); context.Setup(c => c.Request).Returns(request.Object); context.Setup(c => c.Response).Returns(response.Object); IEnumerable<Expense> fakeExpenses = GetMockExpenses(); expenseRepository.Setup(x => x.GetMany(It. IsAny<Expression<Func<Expense, bool>>>())). Returns(fakeExpenses); ExpenseController controller = new ExpenseController( commandBus.Object, categoryRepository.Object, expenseRepository.Object); controller.ControllerContext = new ControllerContext( context.Object, new RouteData(), controller); // Act var result = controller.Index(null, null) as ViewResult; // Assert Assert.AreEqual("Index", result.ViewName); Assert.IsNotNull(result, "View Result is null"); Assert.IsInstanceOf(typeof(IEnumerable<Expense>), result.ViewData.Model, "Wrong View Model"); var expenses = result.ViewData.Model as IEnumerable<Expense>; Assert.AreEqual(3, expenses.Count(), "Got wrong number of Categories"); } In the above unit test, we are not specifying the XMLHttpRequest request header for Request object’s X-Requested-With, so that it will be normal HTTP Request. If this is a normal request, the action method will return a ViewResult with a view template named Index. The below is the implementation of Index action method Code Snippet public ActionResult Index(DateTime? startDate, DateTime? endDate) { //If date is not passed, take current month's first and last date DateTime dtNow; dtNow = DateTime.Today; if (!startDate.HasValue) { startDate = new DateTime(dtNow.Year, dtNow.Month, 1); endDate = startDate.Value.AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1); } //take last date of start date's month, if end date is not passed if (startDate.HasValue && !endDate.HasValue) { endDate = (new DateTime(startDate.Value.Year, startDate.Value.Month, 1)).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1); } var expenses = expenseRepository.GetMany( exp => exp.Date >= startDate && exp.Date <= endDate); //if request is Ajax will return partial view if (Request.IsAjaxRequest()) { return PartialView("_ExpenseList", expenses); } //set start date and end date to ViewBag dictionary ViewBag.StartDate = startDate.Value.ToShortDateString(); ViewBag.EndDate = endDate.Value.ToShortDateString(); //if request is not ajax return View("Index",expenses); } The index action method will returns a PartialView named _ExpenseList, if it is an Ajax request and will returns a View named Index if it is a normal request. Source Code The source code has been taken from my EFMVC app which can download from here

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Creating vCard action result

- by DigiMortal

I added support for vCards to one of my ASP.NET MVC applications. I worked vCard support out as very simple and intelligent solution that fits perfectly to ASP.NET MVC applications. In this posting I will show you how to send vCards out as response to ASP.NET MVC request. We need three things: some vCard class, vCard action result, controller method to test vCard action result. Everything is very simple, let’s get hands on. vCard class As first thing we need vCard class. Last year I introduced vCard class that supports also images. Let’s take this class because it is easy to use and some dirty work is already done for us. NB! Take a look at ASP.NET example in the blog posting referred above. We need it later when we close the topic. Now think about how useful blogging and information sharing with others can be. With this class available at public I saved pretty much time now. :) vCardResult As we have vCard it is now time to write action result that we can use in our controllers. Here’s the code. public class vCardResult : ActionResult { private vCard _card; protected vCardResult() { } public vCardResult(vCard card) { _card = card; } public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { var response = context.HttpContext.Response; response.ContentType = "text/vcard"; response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; fileName=" + _card.FirstName + " " + _card.LastName + ".vcf"); var cardString = _card.ToString(); var inputEncoding = Encoding.Default; var outputEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("windows-1257"); var cardBytes = inputEncoding.GetBytes(cardString); var outputBytes = Encoding.Convert(inputEncoding, outputEncoding, cardBytes); response.OutputStream.Write(outputBytes, 0, outputBytes.Length); } } And we are done. Some notes: vCard is sent to browser as downloadable file (user can save or open it with Outlook or any other e-mail client that supports vCards), File name is made of first and last name of contact. Encoding is important because Outlook may not understand vCards otherwise (don’t know if this problem is solved in Outlook 2010). Using vCardResult in controller Now let’s tale a look at simple controller method that accepts person ID and returns vCardResult. public class ContactsController : Controller { // ... other controller methods ... public vCardResult vCard(int id) { var person = _partyRepository.GetPersonById(id); var card = new vCard { FirstName=person.FirstName, LastName = person.LastName, StreetAddress = person.StreetAddress, City = person.City, CountryName = person.Country.Name, Mobile = person.Mobile, Phone = person.Phone, Email = person.Email, }; return new vCardResult(card); } } Now you can run Visual Studio and check out how your vCard is moving from your web application to your e-mail client. Conclusion We took old code that worked well with ASP.NET Forms and we divided it into action result and controller method that uses vCard as bridge between our controller and action result. All functionality is located where it should be and we did nothing complex. We wrote only couple of lines of very easy code to achieve our goal. Do you understand now why I love ASP.NET MVC? :)

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Microsoft and the open source community

- by Charles Young

For the last decade, I have repeatedly, in my imitable Microsoft fan boy style, offered an alternative view to commonly held beliefs about Microsoft's stance on open source licensing. In earlier times, leading figures in Microsoft were very vocal in resisting the idea that commercial licensing is outmoded or morally reprehensible. Many people interpreted this as all-out corporate opposition to open source licensing. I never read it that way. It is true that I've met individual employees of Microsoft who are antagonistic towards FOSS (free and open source software), but I've met more who are supportive or at least neutral on the subject. In any case, individual attitudes of employees don't necessarily reflect a corporate stance. The strongest opposition I've encountered has actually come from outside the company. It's not a charitable thought, but I sometimes wonder if there are people in the .NET community who are opposed to FOSS simply because they believe, erroneously, that Microsoft is opposed. Here, for what it is worth, are the points I've repeated endlessly over the years and which have often been received with quizzical scepticism. a) A decade ago, Microsoft's big problem was not FOSS per se, or even with copyleft. The thing which really kept them awake at night was the fear that one day, someone might find, deep in the heart of the Windows code base, some code that should not be there and which was published under GPL. The likelihood of this ever happening has long since faded away, but there was a time when MS was running scared. I suspect this is why they held out for a while from making Windows source code open to inspection. Nowadays, as an MVP, I am positively encouraged to ask to see Windows source. b) Microsoft has never opposed the open source community. They have had problems with specific people and organisations in the FOSS community. Back in the 1990s, Richard Stallman gave time and energy to a successful campaign to launch antitrust proceedings against Microsoft. In more recent times, the negative attitude of certain people to Microsoft's submission of two FOSS licences to the OSI (both of which have long since been accepted), and the mad scramble to try to find any argument, however tenuous, to block their submission was not, let us say, edifying. c) Microsoft has never, to my knowledge, written off the FOSS model. They certainly don't agree that more traditional forms of licensing are inappropriate or immoral, and they've always been prepared to say so. One reason why it was so hard to convince people that Microsoft is not rabidly antagonistic towards FOSS licensing is that so many people think they have no involvement in open source. A decade ago, there was virtually no evidence of any such involvement. However, that was a long time ago. Quietly over the years, Microsoft has got on with the job of working out how to make use of FOSS licensing and how to support the FOSS community. For example, as well as making increasingly extensive use of Github, they run an important FOSS forge (CodePlex) on which they, themselves, host many hundreds of distinct projects. The total count may even be in the thousands now. I suspect there is a limit of about 500 records on CodePlex searches because, for the past few years, whenever I search for Microsoft-specific projects on CodePlex, I always get approx. 500 hits. Admittedly, a large volume of the stuff they publish under FOSS licences amounts to code samples, but many of those 'samples' have grown into useful and fully featured frameworks, libraries and tools. All this is leading up to the observation that yesterday's announcement by Scott Guthrie marks a significant milestone and should not go unnoticed. If you missed it, let me summarise. From the first release of .NET, Microsoft has offered a web development framework called ASP.NET. The core libraries are included in the .NET framework which is released free of charge, but which is not open source. However, in recent years, the number of libraries that constitute ASP.NET have grown considerably. Today, most professional ASP.NET web development exploits the ASP.NET MVC framework. This, together with several other important parts of the ASP.NET technology stack, is released on CodePlex under the Apache 2.0 licence. Hence, today, a huge swathe of web development on the .NET/Azure platform relies four-square on the use of FOSS frameworks and libraries. Yesterday, Scott Guthrie announced the next stage of ASP.NET's journey towards FOSS nirvana. This involves extending ASP.NET's FOSS stack to include Web API and the MVC Razor view engine which is rapidly becoming the de facto 'standard' for building web pages in ASP.NET. However, perhaps the more important announcement is that the ASP.NET team will now accept and review contributions from the community. Scott points out that this model is already in place elsewhere in Microsoft, and specifically draws attention to development of the Windows Azure SDKs. These SDKs are central to Azure development. The .NET and Java SDKs are published under Apache 2.0 on Github and Microsoft is open to community contributions. Accepting contributions is a more profound move than simply releasing code under FOSS licensing. It means that Microsoft is wholeheartedly moving towards a full-blooded open source approach for future evolution of some of their central and most widely used .NET and Azure frameworks and libraries. In conjunction with Scott's announcement, Microsoft has also released Git support for CodePlex (at long last!) and, perhaps more importantly, announced significant new investment in their own FOSS forge. Here at Solidsoft we have several reasons to be very interested in Scott's announcement. I'll draw attention to one of them. Earlier this year we wrote the initial version of a new UK Government web application called CloudStore. CloudStore provides a way for local and central government to discover and purchase applications and services. We wrote the web site using ASP.NET MVC which is FOSS. However, this point has been lost on the ladies and gentlemen of the press and, I suspect, on some of the decision makers on the government side. They announced a few weeks ago that future versions of CloudStore will move to a FOSS framework, clearly oblivious of the fact that it is already built on a FOSS framework. We are, it is fair to say, mildly irked by the uninformed and badly out-of-date assumption that “if it is Microsoft, it can't be FOSS”. Old prejudices live on.

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Recap: Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation

- by Harish Gaur

Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Oracle Fusion Middleware & Java took the stage on Tuesday to discuss how Oracle Fusion Middleware helps enable business innovation. Through a series of product demos and customer showcases, Hassan demonstrated how Oracle Fusion Middleware is a complete platform to harness the latest technological innovations (cloud, mobile, social and Fast Data) throughout the application lifecycle. Fig 1: Oracle Fusion Middleware is the foundation of business innovation This Session included 4 demonstrations to illustrate these strategies: 1. Build and deploy native mobile applications using Oracle ADF Mobile 2. Empower business user to model processes, design user interface and have rich mobile experience for process interaction using Oracle BPM Suite PS6. 3. Create collaborative user experience and integrate social sign-on using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle WebCenter Content, Oracle Social Network & Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 4. Deploy and manage business applications on Oracle Exalogic Nike, LA Department of Water & Power and Nintendo joined Hasan on stage to share how their organizations are leveraging Oracle Fusion Middleware to enable business innovation. Managing Performance in the Wrld of Social and Mobile How do you provide predictable scalability and performance for an application that monitors active lifestyle of 8 million users on a daily basis? Nike’s answer is Oracle Coherence, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Exadata. Fig 2: Oracle Coherence enabled data grid improves performance of Nike+ Digital Sports Platform Nicole Otto, Sr. Director of Consumer Digital Technology discussed the vision of the Nike+ platform, a platform which represents a shift for NIKE from a "product" to a "product +" experience. There are currently nearly 8 million users in the Nike+ system who are using digitally-enabled Nike+ devices. Once data from the Nike+ device is transmitted to Nike+ application, users access the Nike+ website or via the Nike mobile applicatoin, seeing metrics around their daily active lifestyle and even engage in socially compelling experiences to compare, compete or collaborate their data with their friends. Nike expects the number of users to grow significantly this year which will drive an explosion of data and potential new experiences. To deal with this challenge, Nike envisioned building a shared platform that would drive a consumer-centric model for the company. Nike built this new platform using Oracle Coherence and Oracle Exadata. Using Coherence, Nike built a data grid tier as a distributed cache, thereby provide low-latency access to most recent and relevant data to consumers. Nicole discussed how Nike+ Digital Sports Platform is unique in the way that it utilizes the Coherence Grid. Nike takes advantage of Coherence as a traditional cache using both cache-aside and cache-through patterns. This new tier has enabled Nike to create a horizontally scalable distributed event-driven processing architecture. Current data grid volume is approximately 150,000 request per minute with about 40 million objects at any given time on the grid. Improving Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels Customer experience is on top of every CIO's mind. Customer Experience needs to be consistent and secure across multiple devices consumers may use. This is the challenge Matt Lampe, CIO of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) was faced with. Despite being the largest utilities company in the country, LADWP had been relying on a 38 year old customer information system for serving its customers. Their prior system had been unable to keep up with growing customer demands. Last year, LADWP embarked on a journey to improve customer experience for 1.6million LA DWP customers using Oracle WebCenter platform. Figure 3: Multi channel & Multi lingual LADWP.com built using Oracle WebCenter & Oracle Identity Management platform Matt shed light on his efforts to drive customer self-service across 3 dimensions – new website, new IVR platform and new bill payment service. LADWP has built a new portal to increase customer self-service while reducing the transactions via IVR. LADWP's website is powered Oracle WebCenter Portal and is accessible by desktop and mobile devices. By leveraging Oracle WebCenter, LADWP eliminated the need to build, format, and maintain individual mobile applications or websites for different devices. Their entire content is managed using Oracle WebCenter Content and secured using Oracle Identity Management. This new portal automated their paper based processes to web based workflows for customers. This includes automation of Self Service implemented through My Account - like Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History and Usage Analysis. LADWP's solution went live in April 2012. Matt indicated that LADWP's Self-Service Portal has greatly improved customer satisfaction. In a JD Power Associates website satisfaction survey, results indicate rankings have climbed by 25+ points, marking a remarkable increase in user experience. Bolstering Performance and Simplifying Manageability of Business Applications Ingvar Petursson, Senior Vice Preisdent of IT at Nintendo America joined Hasan on-stage to discuss their choice of Exalogic. Nintendo had significant new requirements coming their way for business systems, both internal and external, in the years to come, especially with new products like the WiiU on the horizon this holiday season. Nintendo needed a platform that could give them performance, availability and ease of management as they deploy business systems. Ingvar selected Engineered Systems for two reasons: 1. High performance 2. Ease of management Figure 4: Nintendo relies on Oracle Exalogic to run ATG eCommerce, Oracle e-Business Suite and several business applications Nintendo made a decision to run their business applications (ATG eCommerce, E-Business Suite) and several Fusion Middleware components on the Exalogic platform. What impressed Ingvar was the "stress” testing results during evaluation. Oracle Exalogic could handle their 3-year load estimates for many functions, which was better than Nintendo expected without any hardware expansion. Faster Processing of Big Data Middleware plays an increasingly important role in Big Data. Last year, we announced at OpenWorld the introduction of Oracle Data Integrator for Hadoop and Oracle Loader for Hadoop which helps in the ability to move, transform, load data to and from Big Data Appliance to Exadata. This year, we’ve added new capabilities to find, filter, and focus data using Oracle Event Processing. This product can natively integrate with Big Data Appliance or runs standalone. Hasan briefly discussed how NTT Docomo, largest mobile operator in Japan, leverages Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence to process mobile data (from 13 million smartphone users) at a speed of 700K events per second before feeding it Hadoop for distributed processing of big data. Figure 5: Mobile traffic data processing at NTT Docomo with Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence

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New ways for backup, recovery and restore of Essbase Block Storage databases – part 2 by Bernhard Kinkel

- by Alexandra Georgescu

After discussing in the first part of this article new options in Essbase for the general backup and restore, this second part will deal with the also rather new feature of Transaction Logging and Replay, which was released in version 11.1, enhancing existing restore options. Tip: Transaction logging and replay cannot be used for aggregate storage databases. Please refer to the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1). Even if backups are done on a regular, frequent base, subsequent data entries, loads or calculations would not be reflected in a restored database. Activating Transaction Logging could fill that gap and provides you with an option to capture these post-backup transactions for later replay. The following table shows, which are the transactions that could be logged when Transaction Logging is enabled: In order to activate its usage, corresponding statements could be added to the Essbase.cfg file, using the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION command. The complete syntax reads: TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION [ appname [ dbname]] LOGLOCATION NATIVE ?ENABLE | DISABLE Where appname and dbname are optional parameters giving you the chance in combination with the ENABLE or DISABLE command to set Transaction Logging for certain applications or databases or to exclude them from being logged. If only an appname is specified, the setting applies to all databases in that particular application. If appname and dbname are not defined, all applications and databases would be covered. LOGLOCATION specifies the directory to which the log is written, e.g. D:\temp\trlogs. This directory must already exist or needs to be created before using it for log information being written to it. NATIVE is a reserved keyword that shouldn’t be changed. The following example shows how to first enable logging on a more general level for all databases in the application Sample, followed by a disabling statement on a more granular level for only the Basic database in application Sample, hence excluding it from being logged. TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE ENABLE TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Basic Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE DISABLE Tip: After applying changes to the configuration file you must restart the Essbase server in order to initialize the settings. A maybe required replay of logged transactions after restoring a database can be done only by administrators. The following options are available: In Administration Services selecting Replay Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: Here you can select to replay transactions logged after the last replay request was originally executed or after the time of the last restored backup (whichever occurred later) or transactions logged after a specified time. Or you can replay transactions selectively based on a range of sequence IDs, which can be accessed using Display Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: These sequence ID s (0, 1, 2 … 7 in the screenshot below) are assigned to each logged transaction, indicating the order in which the transaction was performed. This helps to ensure the integrity of the restored data after a replay, as the replay of transactions is enforced in the same order in which they were originally performed. So for example a calculation originally run after a data load cannot be replayed before having replayed the data load first. After a transaction is replayed, you can replay only transactions with a greater sequence ID. For example, replaying the transaction with sequence ID of 4 includes all preceding transactions, while afterwards you can only replay transactions with a sequence ID of 5 or greater. Tip: After restoring a database from a backup you should always completely replay all logged transactions, which were executed after the backup, before executing new transactions. But not only the transaction information itself needs to be logged and stored in a specified directory as described above. During transaction logging, Essbase also creates archive copies of data load and rules files in the following default directory: ARBORPATH/app/appname/dbname/Replay These files are then used during the replay of a logged transaction. By default Essbase archives only data load and rules files for client data loads, but in order to specify the type of data to archive when logging transactions you can use the command TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE as an additional entry in the Essbase.cfg file. The syntax for the statement is: TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE [appname [dbname]] [OPTION] While to the [appname [dbname]] argument the same applies like before for TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION, the valid values for the OPTION argument are the following: Make the respective setting for which files copies should be logged, considering from which location transactions are usually taking place. Selecting the NONE option prevents Essbase from saving the respective files and the data load cannot be replayed. In this case you must first manually load the data before you can replay the transactions. Tip: If you use server or SQL data and the data and rules files are not archived in the Replay directory (for example, you did not use the SERVER or SERVER_CLIENT option), Essbase replays the data that is actually in the data source at the moment of the replay, which may or may not be the data that was originally loaded. You can find more detailed information in the following documents: Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1) Oracle Essbase Online Documentation (rel. 11.1.2.1)) Enterprise Performance Management System Documentation (including previous releases) Or on the Oracle Technology Network. If you are also interested in other new features and smart enhancements in Essbase or Hyperion Planning stay tuned for coming articles or check our training courses and web presentations. You can find general information about offerings for the Essbase and Planning curriculum or other Oracle-Hyperion products here; (please make sure to select your country/region at the top of this page) or in the OU Learning paths section, where Planning, Essbase and other Hyperion products can be found under the Fusion Middleware heading (again, please select the right country/region). Or drop me a note directly: [email protected]. About the Author: Bernhard Kinkel started working for Hyperion Solutions as a Presales Consultant and Consultant in 1998 and moved to Hyperion Education Services in 1999. He joined Oracle University in 2007 where he is a Principal Education Consultant. Based on these many years of working with Hyperion products he has detailed product knowledge across several versions. He delivers both classroom and live virtual courses. His areas of expertise are Oracle/Hyperion Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Web Analysis. Disclaimer: All methods and features mentioned in this article must be considered and tested carefully related to your environment, processes and requirements. As guidance please always refer to the available software documentation. This article does not recommend or advise any explicit action or change, hence the author cannot be held responsible for any consequences due to the use or implementation of these features.

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WhatsApp & Tasker for Android – Read & Write messages

- by Shaurya Anand

So, I finally gave up on all my previous the Microsoft Mobile/Phone OS devices and made my switch to Android this year. I am using my Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 with CyanogenMod 9.1.0 (http://get.cm/get/jenkins/7086/cm-9.1.0-n7000.zip) and ClockworkMod 6.0.1.2 (http://download2.clockworkmod.com/recoveries/recovery-clockwork-6.0.1.2-n7000.zip) since August this year and I am so happy with the performance and the flexibility it offers me. As a software developer by profession, I would expect most of my gadget to be highly customizable and programmable (one time or at intervals) to suit my needs as close as it can. I was introduced to Automation for Android – Tasker (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en) via reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/tasker) and the word ‘automation’ was enough for me to dive right into this app. Only automation that I did earlier was switching profiles depending on location on there phones. And now, just imagine a complete set of possibilities that can be automate on the phone or via the phone. I did my research and found a couple of other tools that do the same/as close as what Tasker can do and few of them are even free. There’s one even by Microsoft called on{X} (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.onx.app&hl=en). Microsoft’s on{X} really caught my eye. You can write code for your phone on the web application by them, deploy it on your phone and even trace the flow all using your PC. Really brilliant, I love the fact that it’s all JavaScript. Here comes the but, it is still very very young and it’s policy of accessing my News Feed on Facebook is not something that I can not digest. On{X} is good, but as I said earlier, the API is not very mature and hence, I gave up on it. I bought Tasker, the best 5,00 € I spent in ages and I want to talk about it in this post. I am still a “noob” while operating this tool, but I tried my shot at automating WhatsApp (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatsapp&hl=en), a popular messenger for various platform. The requirement for the automation is that, if I send a WhatsApp ‘wru’ message to the phone, it should respond back giving the location and battery level of my phone. It could be useful, if you like to locate your misplaced phone or automatically reply to your partner/friend, honestly, I don’t know what you will use it - through this post, I am just introducing automating WhatsApp using Tasker. Before we begin, the following script only works when your phone is rooted as we will be accessing the WhatsApp database and type some special characters like ‘:’. Let’s follow the code line by line: Profile: Location request from XYZ. (12) // Name of your profile. Event: Notification [ Owner Application:WhatsApp Title:* ] // When a new notification comes from WhatsApp, this event is fired. Read the end note, if you face problems with Chrome app after enabling Tasker accessibility. Enter: A1: Run Shell [ Command:sqlite3 // We will access the WhatsApp database and check if the message comes from designated phone number or not. We mustn’t reply to every message. /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases/msgstore.db "SELECT _id, data FROM messages WHERE key_from_me='0' AND key_remote_jid LIKE '%XXXXXXXXXXX%' // Replace XXXXXXXXXXX with the phone number of your message sender. ORDER BY _id DESC LIMIT 1;" Timeout (Seconds):10 Use Root:On Store // I made a timeout for 10 seconds, if in case WhatsApp is busy accessing the database. Result In:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ] // Store the read Id and the last message on to the variable %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ A2: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ~R .*[wW][rR][uU].* ] // Check if the pattern of the message is correct and we are all set to send the location. A3: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ !~ %WHATSAPP_LASTREQ ] // Verify that the message is different from the last request. Remember every message has a unique Id. A4: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request... Text:Sending location // Just a notification that the location message is being prepared. to Krati Gupta... Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:On Priority:3 ] // Make a note it is a permanent notification, we will clear it later. A5: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Disabled // I am disabling the pattern lock, that I use using the plugin Secure Settings. Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure // You can download the plugin from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin&hl=en Settings ] A6: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Disabled // Disable the keygaurd, it is useful, when your phone is on lock and you want to automate everything, even the typing. Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A7: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Enabled // Pretty clear, turn on the GPS and get location at A8 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A8: AutoShortcut [ Configuration:WhatsApp: Some One // I am using AutoShortcut plugin (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut) to start WhatsApp with the indented recipient. Package:com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut Name:AutoShortcut ] // Replace Some One, actually choose it from the plugin, the right recipient. A9: Get Location [ Source:Any Timeout (Seconds):30 Continue Task // I am getting the location, timeout is 30 seconds, adjust it accordingly. Immediately:Off Keep Tracking:Off ] A10: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Screen Dim // Now, this extension of the plugin Secure Settings, wakes your device so that you can type out the string on the WhatsApp app. 5 Seconds Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A11: Run Shell [ Command:input text // Now, I am using the shell script to type the text to the window, because the ‘:’ while not be typed from the Type task in Tasker. LOCATION:maps.google.com/maps?q=%LOC Timeout (Seconds):0 Use Root:On // And also, this is way faster, but remember you need root for this, not for the other way of typing. Store Result In: ] A12: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ] // Focus the Send button A13: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ] // And press it. A14: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ] // Get back to the typing box. A15: Run Shell [ Command:input text LOCATION_ACCURACY:%LOCACC Timeout (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ] A16: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ] A17: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ] A18: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ] A19: Run Shell [ Command:input text BATTERY_LEVEL:%BATT% Timeout // I am adding Battery level in my case as well. (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ] A20: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ] A21: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ] A22: Variable Set [ Name:%WHATSAPP_LASTREQ To:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ Do // And now, we say, request is done. Maths:Off Append:Off ] A23: Button [ Button:Back ] // I am exiting the WhatsApp nicely and not killing it. If you are the murderer kind, kill it, just know, you don’t have any place in the heaven. A24: Button [ Button:Back ] A25: Notify Cancel [ Title: Warn Not Exist:Off ] // Remove the permanent notification. A26: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request Text:Location sent // Make a temporary notification, and say, location is sent. successfully. Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:Off Priority:3 ] A27: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Disabled // Disable all the horrible things we turned on earlier. Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A28: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Enabled Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A29: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Enabled Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A30: End If A31: End If Download this Task from here: http://db.tt/9vRmbhyb That’s it in the above small example – you can read/write messages from/to WhatsApp app. I am using n7000-cm9.1-cwr6. Oh yea, and if you are having the Talkback auto enabled for Chrome browser, you need to turn Off the Web scripts to run. Tasker is amazing, I have automated a lot of tasks using this tool. I will share a few none generic ones with you in my coming post here.

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ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: MVC 2 Strongly Typed HTML Helper and Enhanced Validation Sample

- by mbridge

In lue of the off the official release of ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM, I decided I would put together a quick sample of the enhanced HTML.Helpers and validation controls. I am going to use my sample event site where I will have a form so a user can search for information about a certain events. So when the Search page loads the Search action is fired return my strongly typed model. to the view. 1: [HttpGet] 2: public ViewResult Search(): public ViewResult Search() 3: { 4: IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList(); 5: var viewModel = new EventSearchModel 6: { 7: EventList = new SelectList(result, "EventCode","EventName","Select Event") 8: }; 9: return View(viewModel); 10: } Nothing special here, although I did want to show how to load up a strongly typed drop down list because that hung me up for a little bit. So to that, I am going to pass back a SelectList to the view and my HTML helper should no how to load this. So lets take a look at the mark up for the view. 1: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" 2: Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<EventsSample.Models.EventSearchModel>" %> 3: 4: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> 5: Search 6: </asp:Content> 7: 8: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> 9: 10: <h2>Search for Events</h2> 11: 12: <% using (Html.BeginForm("Search","Events")) {%> 13: <%= Html.ValidationSummary(true) %> 14: 15: <fieldset> 16: <legend>Fields</legend> 17: 18: <div class="editor-label"> 19: <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventNumber) %> 20: </div> 21: <div class="editor-field"> 22: <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.EventNumber) %> 23: <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventNumber) %> 24: </div> 25: 26: <div class="editor-label"> 27: <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %> 28: </div> 29: <div class="editor-field"> 30: <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %> 31: <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %> 32: </div> 33: 34: <div class="editor-label"> 35: <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventName) %> 36: </div> 37: <div class="editor-field"> 38: <%= Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.EventName, Model.EventList,"Select Event") %> 39: <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventName) %> 40: </div> 41: 42: <p> 43: <input type="submit" value="Save" /> 44: </p> 45: </fieldset> 46: 47: <% } %> 48: 49: <div> 50: <%= Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") %> 51: </div> 52: 53: </asp:Content> A nice feature is the scaffolding that MVC has to generate code. I simply right clicked inside my Search() action, inside the EventsController and selected “Add View” and then I selected my strongly typed object that I wanted to pass to the view and also selected that I wanted the content type be “Edit”. With that the aspx page was completely generated, although I did have to go back in and change the textbox for the Event Names to a drop down list of the names to select from. The new feature with MVC 2 are the strongly typed HTML helpers. So now, my textboxes, drop down list, and validation helpers are all strongly typed to my model. This features gives you the benefits of intellisense and also makes it easier to debug. “The Gu” has a great post about the feature in case you want more details. The DropDownListFor function to generate the drop down list was a little tricky for me. You first need to use a Lanbda expression to pass in the property you want the selected value assigned to in your model, and then you need to pass in the list directly from the model. Validations To validate the form, you can use the strongly type validation HTML helpers which will inspect your model and return errors if the validation fails. The definitions of these rules are set directly on the Model itself so lets take a look. 1: using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; 2: using System.Web.Mvc; 3: 4: namespace EventsSample.Models 5: { 6: public class EventSearchModel 7: { 8: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the event number.")] 9: [RegularExpression(@"\w{6}", 10: ErrorMessage = "The Event Number must be 6 letters and/or numbers.")] 11: public string EventNumber { get; set; } 12: 13: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the guest's last name.")] 14: [RegularExpression(@"^[A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ1-9 '\-\.]{1,22}$", 15: ErrorMessage = "The gueest's last name must 1 to 20 characters.")] 16: public string GuestLastName { get; set; } 17: 18: public string EventName { get; set; } 19: public SelectList EventList { get; set; } 20: } 21: } Pretty cool! Okay, the only thing left to do is perform the validation in the POST action. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ViewResult Search(EventSearchModel eventSearchModel) 3: { 4: if (ModelState.IsValid) return View("SearchResults"); 5: else 6: { 7: IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList(); 8: eventSearchModel.EventList = new SelectList(result, "EVentCode","EventName"); 9: 10: return View(eventSearchModel); 11: } 12: } 13: } If the form entries are valid, here I am simply displaying the SearchResult, but in a real world sample I would also go out get the results first. You get the idea though. In my case, when the form is not valid, I also had to reload my SelectList with the event names before I loaded the page again. Remember this is MVC, no _VieState here :) So that’s it. Now my form is validating the data and when it fails it looks like this.

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Changing CSS with jQuery syntax in Silverlight using jLight

- by Timmy Kokke

Lately I’ve ran into situations where I had to change elements or had to request a value in the DOM from Silverlight. jLight, which was introduced in an earlier article, can help with that. jQuery offers great ways to change CSS during runtime. Silverlight can access the DOM, but it isn’t as easy as jQuery. All examples shown in this article can be looked at in this online demo. The code can be downloaded here. Part 1: The easy stuff Selecting and changing properties is pretty straight forward. Setting the text color in all <B> </B> elements can be done using the following code: jQuery.Select("b").Css("color", "red"); The Css() method is an extension method on jQueryObject which is return by the jQuery.Select() method. The Css() method takes to parameters. The first is the Css style property. All properties used in Css can be entered in this string. The second parameter is the value you want to give the property. In this case the property is “color” and it is changed to “red”. To specify which element you want to select you can add a :selector parameter to the Select() method as shown in the next example. jQuery.Select("b:first").Css("font-family", "sans-serif"); The “:first” pseudo-class selector selects only the first element. This example changes the “font-family” property of the first <B></B> element to “sans-serif”. To make use of intellisense in Visual Studio I’ve added a extension methods to help with the pseudo-classes. In the example below the “font-weight” of every “Even” <LI></LI> is set to “bold”. jQuery.Select("li".Even()).Css("font-weight", "bold"); Because the Css() extension method returns a jQueryObject it is possible to chain calls to Css(). The following example show setting the “color”, “background-color” and the “font-size” of all headers in one go. jQuery.Select(":header").Css("color", "#12FF70") .Css("background-color", "yellow") .Css("font-size", "25px"); Part 2: More complex stuff In only a few cases you need to change only one style property. More often you want to change an entire set op style properties all in one go. You could chain a lot of Css() methods together. A better way is to add a class to a stylesheet and define all properties in there. With the AddClass() method you can set a style class to a set of elements. This example shows how to add the “demostyle” class to all <B></B> in the document. jQuery.Select("b").AddClass("demostyle"); Removing the class works in the same way: jQuery.Select("b").RemoveClass("demostyle"); jLight is build for interacting with to the DOM from Silverlight using jQuery. A jQueryObjectCss object can be used to define different sets of style properties in Silverlight. The over 60 most common Css style properties are defined in the jQueryObjectCss class. A string indexer can be used to access all style properties ( CssObject1[“background-color”] equals CssObject1.BackgroundColor). In the code below, two jQueryObjectCss objects are defined and instantiated. private jQueryObjectCss CssObject1; private jQueryObjectCss CssObject2; public Demo2() { CssObject1 = new jQueryObjectCss { BackgroundColor = "Lime", Color="Black", FontSize = "12pt", FontFamily = "sans-serif", FontWeight = "bold", MarginLeft = 150, LineHeight = "28px", Border = "Solid 1px #880000" }; CssObject2 = new jQueryObjectCss { FontStyle = "Italic", FontSize = "48", Color = "#225522" }; InitializeComponent(); } Now instead of chaining to set all different properties you can just pass one of the jQueryObjectCss objects to the Css() method. In this case all <LI></LI> elements are set to match this object. jQuery.Select("li").Css(CssObject1); When using the jQueryObjectCss objects chaining is still possible. In the following example all headers are given a blue backgroundcolor and the last is set to match CssObject2. jQuery.Select(":header").Css(new jQueryObjectCss{BackgroundColor = "Blue"}) .Eq(-1).Css(CssObject2); Part 3: The fun stuff Having Silverlight call JavaScript and than having JavaScript to call Silverlight requires a lot of plumbing code. Everything has to be registered and strings are passed back and forth to execute the JavaScript. jLight makes this kind of stuff so easy, it becomes fun to use. In a lot of situations jQuery can call a function to decide what to do, setting a style class based on complex expressions for example. jLight can do the same, but the callback methods are defined in Silverlight. This example calls the function() method for each <LI></LI> element. The callback method has to take a jQueryObject, an integer and a string as parameters. In this case jLight differs a bit from the actual jQuery implementation. jQuery uses only the index and the className parameters. A jQueryObject is added to make it simpler to access the attributes and properties of the element. If the text of the listitem starts with a ‘D’ or an ‘M’ the class is set. Otherwise null is returned and nothing happens. private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { jQuery.Select("li").AddClass(function); } private string function(jQueryObject obj, int index, string className) { if (obj.Text[0] == 'D' || obj.Text[0] == 'M') return "demostyle"; return null; } The last thing I would like to demonstrate uses even more Silverlight and less jLight, but demonstrates the power of the combination. Animating a style property using a Storyboard with easing functions. First a dependency property is defined. In this case it is a double named Intensity. By handling the changed event the color is set using jQuery. public double Intensity { get { return (double)GetValue(IntensityProperty); } set { SetValue(IntensityProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty IntensityProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("Intensity", typeof(double), typeof(Demo3), new PropertyMetadata(0.0, IntensityChanged)); private static void IntensityChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) { var i = (byte)(double)e.NewValue; jQuery.Select("span").Css("color", string.Format("#{0:X2}{0:X2}{0:X2}", i)); } An animation has to be created. This code defines a Storyboard with one keyframe that uses a bounce ease as an easing function. The animation is set to target the Intensity dependency property defined earlier. private Storyboard CreateAnimation(double value) { Storyboard storyboard = new Storyboard(); var da = new DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames(); var d = new EasingDoubleKeyFrame { EasingFunction = new BounceEase(), KeyTime = KeyTime.FromTimeSpan(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.0)), Value = value }; da.KeyFrames.Add(d); Storyboard.SetTarget(da, this); Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(da, new PropertyPath(Demo3.IntensityProperty)); storyboard.Children.Add(da); return storyboard; } Initially the Intensity is set to 128 which results in a gray color. When one of the buttons is pressed, a new animation is created an played. One to animate to black, and one to animate to white. public Demo3() { InitializeComponent(); Intensity = 128; } private void button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CreateAnimation(255).Begin(); } private void button3_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CreateAnimation(0).Begin(); } Conclusion As you can see jLight can make the life of a Silverlight developer a lot easier when accessing the DOM. Almost all jQuery functions that are defined in jLight use the same constructions as described above. I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to the real jQuery. Having JavaScript perform callbacks to Silverlight using jLight will be described in more detail in a future tutorial about AJAX or eventing.

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More Fun with C# Iterators and Generators

- by James Michael Hare

In my last post, I talked quite a bit about iterators and how they can be really powerful tools for filtering a list of items down to a subset of items. This had both pros and cons over returning a full collection, which, in summary, were: Pros: If traversal is only partial, does not have to visit rest of collection. If evaluation method is costly, only incurs that cost on elements visited. Adds little to no garbage collection pressure. Cons: Very slight performance impact if you know caller will always consume all items in collection. And as we saw in the last post, that con for the cost was very, very small and only really became evident on very tight loops consuming very large lists completely. One of the key items to note, though, is the garbage! In the traditional (return a new collection) method, if you have a 1,000,000 element collection, and wish to transform or filter it in some way, you have to allocate space for that copy of the collection. That is, say you have a collection of 1,000,000 items and you want to double every item in the collection. Well, that means you have to allocate a collection to hold those 1,000,000 items to return, which is a lot especially if you are just going to use it once and toss it. Iterators, though, don't have this problem. Each time you visit the node, it would return the doubled value of the node (in this example) and not allocate a second collection of 1,000,000 doubled items. Do you see the distinction? In both cases, we're consuming 1,000,000 items. But in one case we pass back each doubled item which is just an int (for example's sake) on the stack and in the other case, we allocate a list containing 1,000,000 items which then must be garbage collected. So iterators in C# are pretty cool, eh? Well, here's one more thing a C# iterator can do that a traditional "return a new collection" transformation can't! It can return **unbounded** collections! I know, I know, that smells a lot like an infinite loop, eh? Yes and no. Basically, you're relying on the caller to put the bounds on the list, and as long as the caller doesn't you keep going. Consider this example: public static class Fibonacci { // returns the infinite fibonacci sequence public static IEnumerable<int> Sequence() { int iteration = 0; int first = 1; int second = 1; int current = 0; while (true) { if (iteration++ < 2) { current = 1; } else { current = first + second; second = first; first = current; } yield return current; } } } Whoa, you say! Yes, that's an infinite loop! What the heck is going on there? Yes, that was intentional. Would it be better to have a fibonacci sequence that returns only a specific number of items? Perhaps, but that wouldn't give you the power to defer the execution to the caller. The beauty of this function is it is as infinite as the sequence itself! The fibonacci sequence is unbounded, and so is this method. It will continue to return fibonacci numbers for as long as you ask for them. Now that's not something you can do with a traditional method that would return a collection of ints representing each number. In that case you would eventually run out of memory as you got to higher and higher numbers. This method, though, never runs out of memory. Now, that said, you do have to know when you use it that it is an infinite collection and bound it appropriately. Fortunately, Linq provides a lot of these extension methods for you! Let's say you only want the first 10 fibonacci numbers: foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().Take(10)) { Console.WriteLine(fib); } Or let's say you only want the fibonacci numbers that are less than 100: foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().TakeWhile(f => f < 100)) { Console.WriteLine(fib); } So, you see, one of the nice things about iterators is their power to work with virtually any size (even infinite) collections without adding the garbage collection overhead of making new collections. You can also do fun things like this to make a more "fluent" interface for for loops: // A set of integer generator extension methods public static class IntExtensions { // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this. public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start) { // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going // to infinity for as long as values are pulled. for (var i = start; ; ++i) { yield return i; } } // Begins counting to infinity by the given step value, use To() to public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start, int byEvery) { // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going // to infinity for as long as values are pulled. for (var i = start; ; i += byEvery) { yield return i; } } // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this. public static IEnumerable<int> To(this int start, int end) { for (var i = start; i <= end; ++i) { yield return i; } } // Ranges the count by specifying the upper range of the count. public static IEnumerable<int> To(this IEnumerable<int> collection, int end) { return collection.TakeWhile(item => item <= end); } } Note that there are two versions of each method. One that starts with an int and one that starts with an IEnumerable<int>. This is to allow more power in chaining from either an existing collection or from an int. This lets you do things like: // count from 1 to 30 foreach(var i in 1.To(30)) { Console.WriteLine(i); } // count from 1 to 10 by 2s foreach(var i in 0.Every(2).To(10)) { Console.WriteLine(i); } // or, if you want an infinite sequence counting by 5s until something inside breaks you out... foreach(var i in 0.Every(5)) { if (someCondition) { break; } ... } Yes, those are kinda play functions and not particularly useful, but they show some of the power of generators and extension methods to form a fluid interface. So what do you think? What are some of your favorite generators and iterators?

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