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• C# Can anyone help convert this VB Webservice?

  - by CraigJSte

  I can't figure it out for the life of me.. I'm using SQL DataSet Query to iterate to a Class Object which acts as a Data Model for Flex... Initially I used VB.net but now need to convert to C#.. This conversion is done except for the last section where I create a DataRow arow and then try to add the DataSet Values to the Class (Results Class)... I get an error message.. 'VTResults.Results.Ticker' is inaccessible due to its protection level (this is down at the bottom) using System; using System.Web; using System.Collections; using System.Web.Services; using System.Web.Services.Protocols; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; using System.Configuration; /// <summary> /// Summary description for VTResults /// </summary> [WebService(Namespace = "http://velocitytrading.net/ResultsVT.aspx")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] public class VTResults : System.Web.Services.WebService { public class Results { string Ticker; string BuyDate; decimal Buy; string SellDate; decimal Sell; string Profit; decimal Period; } [WebMethod] public Results[] GetResults() { string conn = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["LocalSqlServer"].ConnectionString; SqlConnection myconn = new SqlConnection(conn); SqlCommand mycomm = new SqlCommand(); SqlDataAdapter myda = new SqlDataAdapter(); DataSet myds = new DataSet(); mycomm.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; mycomm.Connection = myconn; mycomm.CommandText = "dbo.Results"; myconn.Open(); myda.SelectCommand = mycomm; myda.Fill(myds); myconn.Close(); myconn.Dispose(); int i = 0; Results[] dts = new Results[myds.Tables[0].Rows.Count]; foreach(DataRow arow in myds.Tables[0].Rows) { dts[i] = new Results(); dts[i].Ticker = arow["Ticker"]; dts[i].BuyDate = arow["BuyDate"]; dts[1].Buy = arow["Buy"]; dts[i].SellDate = arow["SellDate"]; dts[i].Sell = arow["Sell"]; dts[i].Profit = arow["Profit"]; dts[i].Period = arow["Period"]; i+=1; } return dts; } } The VB.NET WEBSERVICE that runs fine which I am trying to convert to C# is here. Imports System.Web Imports System.Web.Services Imports System.Web.Services.Protocols Imports System.Data Imports System.Data.SqlClient <WebService(Namespace:="http://localhost:2597/Results/ResultsVT.aspx")> _ <WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo:=WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)> _ <Global.Microsoft.VisualBasic.CompilerServices.DesignerGenerated()> _ Public Class VTResults Inherits System.Web.Services.WebService Public Class Results Public Ticker As String Public BuyDate As String Public Buy As Decimal Public SellDate As String Public Sell As Decimal Public Profit As String Public Period As Decimal End Class <WebMethod()> _ Public Function GetResults() As Results() Try Dim conn As String = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings("LocalSqlServer").ConnectionString Dim myconn = New SqlConnection(conn) Dim mycomm As New SqlCommand Dim myda As New SqlDataAdapter Dim myds As New DataSet mycomm.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure mycomm.Connection = myconn mycomm.CommandText = "dbo.Results" myconn.Open() myda.SelectCommand = mycomm myda.Fill(myds) myconn.Close() myconn.Dispose() Dim i As Integer i = 0 Dim dts As Results() = New Results(myds.Tables(0).Rows.Count - 1) {} Dim aRow As DataRow For Each aRow In myds.Tables(0).Rows dts(i) = New Results dts(i).Ticker = aRow("Ticker") dts(i).BuyDate = aRow("BuyDate") dts(i).Buy = aRow("Buy") dts(i).SellDate = aRow("SellDate") dts(i).Sell = aRow("Sell") dts(i).Profit = aRow("Profit") dts(i).Period = aRow("Period") i += 1 Next Return dts Catch ex As DataException Throw ex End Try End Function End Class

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• Inside the DLR – Invoking methods

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, we’ve looked at how a dynamic call is represented in a compiled assembly, and how the dynamic lookup is performed at runtime. The last piece of the puzzle is how the resolved method gets invoked, and that is the subject of this post. Invoking methods As discussed in my previous posts, doing a full lookup and bind at runtime each and every single time the callsite gets invoked would be far too slow to be usable. The results obtained from the callsite binder must to be cached, along with a series of conditions to determine whether the cached result can be reused. So, firstly, how are the conditions represented? These conditions can be anything; they are determined entirely by the semantics of the language the binder is representing. The binder has to be able to return arbitary code that is then executed to determine whether the conditions apply or not. Fortunately, .NET 4 has a neat way of representing arbitary code that can be easily combined with other code – expression trees. All the callsite binder has to return is an expression (called a ‘restriction’) that evaluates to a boolean, returning true when the restriction passes (indicating the corresponding method invocation can be used) and false when it does’t. If the bind result is also represented in an expression tree, these can be combined easily like so: if ([restriction is true]) { [invoke cached method] } Take my example from my previous post: public class ClassA { public static void TestDynamic() { CallDynamic(new ClassA(), 10); CallDynamic(new ClassA(), "foo"); } public static void CallDynamic(dynamic d, object o) { d.Method(o); } public void Method(int i) {} public void Method(string s) {} } When the Method(int) method is first bound, along with an expression representing the result of the bind lookup, the C# binder will return the restrictions under which that bind can be reused. In this case, it can be reused if the types of the parameters are the same: if (thisArg.GetType() == typeof(ClassA) && arg1.GetType() == typeof(int)) { thisClassA.Method(i); } Caching callsite results So, now, it’s up to the callsite to link these expressions returned from the binder together in such a way that it can determine which one from the many it has cached it should use. This caching logic is all located in the System.Dynamic.UpdateDelegates class. It’ll help if you’ve got this type open in a decompiler to have a look yourself. For each callsite, there are 3 layers of caching involved: The last method invoked on the callsite. All methods that have ever been invoked on the callsite. All methods that have ever been invoked on any callsite of the same type. We’ll cover each of these layers in order Level 1 cache: the last method called on the callsite When a CallSite<T> object is first instantiated, the Target delegate field (containing the delegate that is called when the callsite is invoked) is set to one of the UpdateAndExecute generic methods in UpdateDelegates, corresponding to the number of parameters to the callsite, and the existance of any return value. These methods contain most of the caching, invoke, and binding logic for the callsite. The first time this method is invoked, the UpdateAndExecute method finds there aren’t any entries in the caches to reuse, and invokes the binder to resolve a new method. Once the callsite has the result from the binder, along with any restrictions, it stitches some extra expressions in, and replaces the Target field in the callsite with a compiled expression tree similar to this (in this example I’m assuming there’s no return value): if ([restriction is true]) { [invoke cached method] return; } if (callSite._match) { _match = false; return; } else { UpdateAndExecute(callSite, arg0, arg1, ...); } Woah. What’s going on here? Well, this resulting expression tree is actually the first level of caching. The Target field in the callsite, which contains the delegate to call when the callsite is invoked, is set to the above code compiled from the expression tree into IL, and then into native code by the JIT. This code checks whether the restrictions of the last method that was invoked on the callsite (the ‘primary’ method) match, and if so, executes that method straight away. This means that, the next time the callsite is invoked, the first code that executes is the restriction check, executing as native code! This makes this restriction check on the primary cached delegate very fast. But what if the restrictions don’t match? In that case, the second part of the stitched expression tree is executed. What this section should be doing is calling back into the UpdateAndExecute method again to resolve a new method. But it’s slightly more complicated than that. To understand why, we need to understand the second and third level caches. Level 2 cache: all methods that have ever been invoked on the callsite When a binder has returned the result of a lookup, as well as updating the Target field with a compiled expression tree, stitched together as above, the callsite puts the same compiled expression tree in an internal list of delegates, called the rules list. This list acts as the level 2 cache. Why use the same delegate? Stitching together expression trees is an expensive operation. You don’t want to do it every time the callsite is invoked. Ideally, you would create one expression tree from the binder’s result, compile it, and then use the resulting delegate everywhere in the callsite. But, if the same delegate is used to invoke the callsite in the first place, and in the caches, that means each delegate needs two modes of operation. An ‘invoke’ mode, for when the delegate is set as the value of the Target field, and a ‘match’ mode, used when UpdateAndExecute is searching for a method in the callsite’s cache. Only in the invoke mode would the delegate call back into UpdateAndExecute. In match mode, it would simply return without doing anything. This mode is controlled by the _match field in CallSite<T>. The first time the callsite is invoked, _match is false, and so the Target delegate is called in invoke mode. Then, if the initial restriction check fails, the Target delegate calls back into UpdateAndExecute. This method sets _match to true, then calls all the cached delegates in the rules list in match mode to try and find one that passes its restrictions, and invokes it. However, there needs to be some way for each cached delegate to inform UpdateAndExecute whether it passed its restrictions or not. To do this, as you can see above, it simply re-uses _match, and sets it to false if it did not pass the restrictions. This allows the code within each UpdateAndExecute method to check for cache matches like so: foreach (T cachedDelegate in Rules) { callSite._match = true; cachedDelegate(); // sets _match to false if restrictions do not pass if (callSite._match) { // passed restrictions, and the cached method was invoked // set this delegate as the primary target to invoke next time callSite.Target = cachedDelegate; return; } // no luck, try the next one... } Level 3 cache: all methods that have ever been invoked on any callsite with the same signature The reason for this cache should be clear – if a method has been invoked through a callsite in one place, then it is likely to be invoked on other callsites in the codebase with the same signature. Rather than living in the callsite, the ‘global’ cache for callsite delegates lives in the CallSiteBinder class, in the Cache field. This is a dictionary, typed on the callsite delegate signature, providing a RuleCache<T> instance for each delegate signature. This is accessed in the same way as the level 2 callsite cache, by the UpdateAndExecute methods. When a method is matched in the global cache, it is copied into the callsite and Target cache before being executed. Putting it all together So, how does this all fit together? Like so (I’ve omitted some implementation & performance details): That, in essence, is how the DLR performs its dynamic calls nearly as fast as statically compiled IL code. Extensive use of expression trees, compiled to IL and then into native code. Multiple levels of caching, the first of which executes immediately when the dynamic callsite is invoked. And a clever re-use of compiled expression trees that can be used in completely different contexts without being recompiled. All in all, a very fast and very clever reflection caching mechanism.

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• Need a hand understanding this Java code please :-)

  - by Brian

  Hi all, Just wondering if anyone would be able to take a look at this code for implementing the quicksort algorithm and answer me a few questions, please :-) public class Run { /*************************************************************************** * Quicksort code from Sedgewick 7.1, 7.2. **************************************************************************/ public static void quicksort(double[] a) { //shuffle(a); // to guard against worst-case quicksort(a, 0, a.length - 1, 0); } static void quicksort(final double[] a, final int left, final int right, final int tdepth) { if (right <= left) return; final int i = partition(a, left, right); if ((tdepth < 4) && ((i - left) > 1000)) { final Thread t = new Thread() { public void run() { quicksort(a, left, i - 1, tdepth + 1); } }; t.start(); quicksort(a, i + 1, right, tdepth + 1); try { t.join(); } catch (InterruptedException e) { throw new RuntimeException("Cancelled", e); } } else { quicksort(a, left, i - 1, tdepth); quicksort(a, i + 1, right, tdepth); } } // partition a[left] to a[right], assumes left < right private static int partition(double[] a, int left, int right) { int i = left - 1; int j = right; while (true) { while (less(a[++i], a[right])) // find item on left to swap ; // a[right] acts as sentinel while (less(a[right], a[--j])) // find item on right to swap if (j == left) break; // don't go out-of-bounds if (i >= j) break; // check if pointers cross exch(a, i, j); // swap two elements into place } exch(a, i, right); // swap with partition element return i; } // is x < y ? private static boolean less(double x, double y) { return (x < y); } // exchange a[i] and a[j] private static void exch(double[] a, int i, int j) { double swap = a[i]; a[i] = a[j]; a[j] = swap; } // shuffle the array a[] private static void shuffle(double[] a) { int N = a.length; for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) { int r = i + (int) (Math.random() * (N - i)); // between i and N-1 exch(a, i, r); } } // test client public static void main(String[] args) { int N = 5000000; // Integer.parseInt(args[0]); // generate N random real numbers between 0 and 1 long start = System.currentTimeMillis(); double[] a = new double[N]; for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) a[i] = Math.random(); long stop = System.currentTimeMillis(); double elapsed = (stop - start) / 1000.0; System.out.println("Generating input: " + elapsed + " seconds"); // sort them start = System.currentTimeMillis(); quicksort(a); stop = System.currentTimeMillis(); elapsed = (stop - start) / 1000.0; System.out.println("Quicksort: " + elapsed + " seconds"); } } My questions are: What is the purpose of the variable tdepth? Is this considered a "proper" implementation of a parallel quicksort? I ask becuase it doesn't use implements Runnable or extends Thread... If it doesn't already, is it possible to modify this code to use multiple threads? By passing in the number of threads you want to use as a parameter, for example...? Many thanks, Brian

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• MVVM Light V4 preview (BL0014) release notes

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  I just pushed to Codeplex an update to the MVVM Light source code. This is an early preview containing some of the features that I want to release later under the version 4. If you find these features useful for your project, please download the source code and build the assemblies. I will appreciate greatly any issue report. This version is labeled “V4.0.0.0/BL0014”. The “BL” string is an old habit that we used in my days at Siemens Building Technologies, called a “base level”. Somehow I like this way of incrementing the “base level” independently of any other consideration (such as alpha, beta, CTP, RTM etc) and continue to use it to tag my software versions. In Microsoft parlance, you could say that this is an early CTP of MVVM Light V4. Caveat The code is unit tested, but as we all know this does not mean that there are no bugs This code has not yet been used in production. Again, your help in testing this is greatly appreciated, so please report all bugs to me! What’s new? The following features have been implemented: Misc Various “maintenance work”. All WPF assemblies (that is .NET35 and .NET4) now allow partially trusted callers. It means that you can use them in am XBAP in partial trust mode. Testing Various test updates Added Windows Phone 7 unit tests Note: For Windows Phone 7, due to an issue in the unit test framework, not all tests can be executed. I had to isolate those tests for the moment. The error was reported to Microsoft. ViewModelBase The constructor is now public to allow serialization (especially useful on the phone to tombstone the state). ViewModelBase.MessengerInstance now returns Messenger.Default unless it is set explicitly. Previously, MessengerInstance was returning null, which was complicating the code. Two new ways to raise the PropertyChanged event have been added. See below for details. Messenger Updated the IMessenger interface with all public members from the Messenger class. Previously some members were missing. A new Unregister method is now available, allowing to unregister a recipient for a given token. RelayCommand RaiseCanExecuteChanged now acts the same in Windows Presentation Foundation than in Silverlight. In previous versions, I was relying on the CommandManager to raise the CanExecuteChanged event in WPF. However, it was found to be too unreliable, and a more direct way of raising the event was found preferable. See below for details. Raising the PropertyChanged event A very much requested update is now included: the ability to raise the PropertyChanged event in a viewmodel without using “magic strings”. Personally, I don’t see strings as a major issue, thanks to two features of the MVVM Light Toolkit: In the DEBUG configuration, every time that the RaisePropertyChanged method is called, the name of the property is checked against all existing properties of the viewmodel. Should the property name be misspelled (because of a typo or refactoring), an exception is thrown, notifying the developer that something is wrong. To avoid impacting the performance, this check is only made in DEBUG configuration, but that should be enough to warn the developers in case they miss a rename. The property name is defined as a public constant in the “mvvminpc” code snippet. This allows checking the property name from another class (for example if the PropertyChanged event is handled in the view). It also allows changing the property name in one place only. However, these two safeguards didn’t satisfy some of the users, who requested another way to raise the PropertyChanged event. In V4, you can now do the following: Using lambdas private int _myProperty; public int MyProperty { get { return _myProperty; } set { if (_myProperty == value) { return; } _myProperty = value; RaisePropertyChanged(() => MyProperty); } } This raises the property changed event using a lambda expression instead of the property name. Light reflection is used to get the name. This supports Intellisense and can easily be refactored. You can also broadcast a PropertyChangedMessage using the Messenger.Default instance with: private int _myProperty; public int MyProperty { get { return _myProperty; } set { if (_myProperty == value) { return; } var oldValue = _myProperty; _myProperty = value; RaisePropertyChanged(() => MyProperty, oldValue, value, true); } } Using no arguments When the RaisePropertyChanged method is called within a setter, you can also omit the property name altogether. This will fail if executed outside of the setter however. Also, to avoid confusion, there is no way to broadcast the PropertyChangedMessage using this syntax. private int _myProperty; public int MyProperty { get { return _myProperty; } set { if (_myProperty == value) { return; } _myProperty = value; RaisePropertyChanged(); } } The old way Of course the “old” way is still supported, without broadcast: public const string MyPropertyName = "MyProperty"; private int _myProperty; public int MyProperty { get { return _myProperty; } set { if (_myProperty == value) { return; } _myProperty = value; RaisePropertyChanged(MyPropertyName); } } And with broadcast: public const string MyPropertyName = "MyProperty"; private int _myProperty; public int MyProperty { get { return _myProperty; } set { if (_myProperty == value) { return; } var oldValue = _myProperty; _myProperty = value; RaisePropertyChanged(MyPropertyName, oldValue, value, true); } } Performance considerations It is notorious that using reflection takes more time than using a string constant to get the property name. However, after measuring for all platforms, I found the differences to be very small. I will measure more and submit the results to the community for evaluation, because some of the results are actually surprising (for example, using the Messenger to broadcast a PropertyChangedMessage does not significantly increase the time taken to raise the PropertyChanged event and update the bindings). For now, I submit this code to you, and would be delighted to hear about your own results. Raising the CanExecuteChanged event manually In WPF, until now, the CanExecuteChanged event for a RelayCommand was raised automatically. Or rather, it was attempted to be raised, using a feature that is only available in WPF called the CommandManager. This class monitors the UI and when something occurs, it queries the state of the CanExecute delegate for all the commands. However, this proved unreliable for the purpose of MVVM: Since very often the value of the CanExecute delegate changes according to non-UI events (for example something changing in the viewmodel or in the model), raising the CanExecuteChanged event manually is necessary. In Silverlight, the CommandManager does not exist, so we had to raise the event manually from the start. This proved more reliable, and I now changed the WPF implementation of the RaiseCanExecuteChanged method to be the exact same in WPF than in Silverlight. For instance, if a command must be enabled when a string property is set to a value other than null or empty string, you can do: public MainViewModel() { MyTestCommand = new RelayCommand( () => DoSomething(), () => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(MyProperty)); } public const string MyPropertyName = "MyProperty"; private string _myProperty = string.Empty; public string MyProperty { get { return _myProperty; } set { if (_myProperty == value) { return; } _myProperty = value; RaisePropertyChanged(MyPropertyName); MyTestCommand.RaiseCanExecuteChanged(); } } Logo update I made a minor change to the logo: Some people found the lack of the word “light” (as in MVVM Light Toolkit) confusing. I thought it was cool, because the feather suggests the idea of lightness, however I can see the point. So I added the word “light” to the logo. Things should be quite clear now. What’s next? This is only the first of a series of releases that will bring MVVM Light to V4. In the next weeks, I will continue to add some very requested features and correct some issues in the code. I will probably continue this fashion of releasing the changes to the public as source code through Codeplex. I would be very interested to hear what you think of that, and to get feedback about the changes. Cheers, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Sidebar with CSS3 transform

  - by Malcoda

  Goal I'm working on a collapsible sidebar using jQuery for animation. I would like to have vertical text on the sidebar that acts as a label and can swap on the animateOut/animateIn effect. Normally I would use an image of the text that I've simply swapped vertically, and switch it out on animation, but with CSS3 transforms I'd like to get it to work instead. Problem The problem I'm facing is that setting the height on my rotated container makes it expand horizontally (as it's rotated 90deg) so that doesn't work. I then tried to set the width (hoping it would expand vertically, acting as height), but that has an odd effect of causing the width of my parent container to expand as well. Fix? Anyone know why this happens and also what the fix/workaround could be without setting max-widths and overflow: hidden? I've got a fairly good understanding of both html elements behavior and css3, but this is stumping me. Live Example Here's a fiddle that demonstrates my problem: Fiddle The collapse-pane class is what I have rotated and contains the span I have my text inside. You'll notice it has a width set, that widens the border, but also affects the parent container. The code: CSS: .right-panel{ position:fixed; right:0; top:0; bottom:0; border:1px solid #ccc; background-color:#efefef; } .collapse-pane{ margin-top:50px; width:30px; border:1px solid #999; cursor:pointer; /* Safari */ -webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg); /* Firefox */ -moz-transform: rotate(-90deg); /* IE */ -ms-transform: rotate(-90deg); /* Opera */ -o-transform: rotate(-90deg); /* Internet Explorer */ filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3); } .collapse-pane span{ padding:5px; } HTML <div class="right-panel"> <div class="collapse-pane"> <span class="expand">Expand</span> </div> <div style="width:0;" class="panel-body"> <div style="display:none;" class="panel-body-inner"> adsfasdfasdf </div> </div> </div> JavaScript (Thought not really relevant) $(document).ready(function(){ var height = $(".right-panel").height(); $(".collapse-pane").css({marginTop: height/2 - 20}); $('.collapse-pane').click(function(){ if($(".collapse-pane span").html() == "Expand"){ $(".panel-body").animate({width:200}, 400); $(".panel-body-inner").fadeIn(500); $(".collapse-pane span").html("Collapse"); }else{ $(".panel-body").animate({width:00}, 400); $(".panel-body-inner").fadeOut(300); $(".collapse-pane span").html("Expand"); } }); }); I hope this was clear... Thanks for any help!

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• Differences Between NHibernate and Entity Framework

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction NHibernate and Entity Framework are two of the most popular O/RM frameworks on the .NET world. Although they share some functionality, there are some aspects on which they are quite different. This post will describe this differences and will hopefully help you get started with the one you know less. Mind you, this is a personal selection of features to compare, it is by no way an exhaustive list. History First, a bit of history. NHibernate is an open-source project that was first ported from Java’s venerable Hibernate framework, one of the first O/RM frameworks, but nowadays it is not tied to it, for example, it has .NET specific features, and has evolved in different ways from those of its Java counterpart. Current version is 3.3, with 3.4 on the horizon. It currently targets .NET 3.5, but can be used as well in .NET 4, it only makes no use of any of its specific functionality. You can find its home page at NHForge. Entity Framework 1 came out with .NET 3.5 and is now on its second major version, despite being version 4. Code First sits on top of it and but came separately and will also continue to be released out of line with major .NET distributions. It is currently on version 4.3.1 and version 5 will be released together with .NET Framework 4.5. All versions will target the current version of .NET, at the time of their release. Its home location is located at MSDN. Architecture In NHibernate, there is a separation between the Unit of Work and the configuration and model instances. You start off by creating a Configuration object, where you specify all global NHibernate settings such as the database and dialect to use, the batch sizes, the mappings, etc, then you build an ISessionFactory from it. The ISessionFactory holds model and metadata that is tied to a particular database and to the settings that came from the Configuration object, and, there will typically be only one instance of each in a process. Finally, you create instances of ISession from the ISessionFactory, which is the NHibernate representation of the Unit of Work and Identity Map. This is a lightweight object, it basically opens and closes a database connection as required and keeps track of the entities associated with it. ISession objects are cheap to create and dispose, because all of the model complexity is stored in the ISessionFactory and Configuration objects. As for Entity Framework, the ObjectContext/DbContext holds the configuration, model and acts as the Unit of Work, holding references to all of the known entity instances. This class is therefore not lightweight as its NHibernate counterpart and it is not uncommon to see examples where an instance is cached on a field. Mappings Both NHibernate and Entity Framework (Code First) support the use of POCOs to represent entities, no base classes are required (or even possible, in the case of NHibernate). As for mapping to and from the database, NHibernate supports three types of mappings: XML-based, which have the advantage of not tying the entity classes to a particular O/RM; the XML files can be deployed as files on the file system or as embedded resources in an assembly; Attribute-based, for keeping both the entities and database details on the same place at the expense of polluting the entity classes with NHibernate-specific attributes; Strongly-typed code-based, which allows dynamic creation of the model and strongly typing it, so that if, for example, a property name changes, the mapping will also be updated. Entity Framework can use: Attribute-based (although attributes cannot express all of the available possibilities – for example, cascading); Strongly-typed code mappings. Database Support With NHibernate you can use mostly any database you want, including: SQL Server; SQL Server Compact; SQL Server Azure; Oracle; DB2; PostgreSQL; MySQL; Sybase Adaptive Server/SQL Anywhere; Firebird; SQLLite; Informix; Any through OLE DB; Any through ODBC. Out of the box, Entity Framework only supports SQL Server, but a number of providers exist, both free and commercial, for some of the most used databases, such as Oracle and MySQL. See a list here. Inheritance Strategies Both NHibernate and Entity Framework support the three canonical inheritance strategies: Table Per Type Hierarchy (Single Table Inheritance), Table Per Type (Class Table Inheritance) and Table Per Concrete Type (Concrete Table Inheritance). Associations Regarding associations, both support one to one, one to many and many to many. However, NHibernate offers far more collection types: Bags of entities or values: unordered, possibly with duplicates; Lists of entities or values: ordered, indexed by a number column; Maps of entities or values: indexed by either an entity or any value; Sets of entities or values: unordered, no duplicates; Arrays of entities or values: indexed, immutable. Querying NHibernate exposes several querying APIs: LINQ is probably the most used nowadays, and really does not need to be introduced; Hibernate Query Language (HQL) is a database-agnostic, object-oriented SQL-alike language that exists since NHibernate’s creation and still offers the most advanced querying possibilities; well suited for dynamic queries, even if using string concatenation; Criteria API is an implementation of the Query Object pattern where you create a semi-abstract conceptual representation of the query you wish to execute by means of a class model; also a good choice for dynamic querying; Query Over offers a similar API to Criteria, but using strongly-typed LINQ expressions instead of strings; for this, although more refactor-friendlier that Criteria, it is also less suited for dynamic queries; SQL, including stored procedures, can also be used; Integration with Lucene.NET indexer is available. As for Entity Framework: LINQ to Entities is fully supported, and its implementation is considered very complete; it is the API of choice for most developers; Entity-SQL, HQL’s counterpart, is also an object-oriented, database-independent querying language that can be used for dynamic queries; SQL, of course, is also supported. Caching Both NHibernate and Entity Framework, of course, feature first-level cache. NHibernate also supports a second-level cache, that can be used among multiple ISessionFactorys, even in different processes/machines: Hashtable (in-memory); SysCache (uses ASP.NET as the cache provider); SysCache2 (same as above but with support for SQL Server SQL Dependencies); Prevalence; SharedCache; Memcached; Redis; NCache; Appfabric Caching. Out of the box, Entity Framework does not have any second-level cache mechanism, however, there are some public samples that show how we can add this. ID Generators NHibernate supports different ID generation strategies, coming from the database and otherwise: Identity (for SQL Server, MySQL, and databases who support identity columns); Sequence (for Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others who support sequences); Trigger-based; HiLo; Sequence HiLo (for databases that support sequences); Several GUID flavors, both in GUID as well as in string format; Increment (for single-user uses); Assigned (must know what you’re doing); Sequence-style (either uses an actual sequence or a single-column table); Table of ids; Pooled (similar to HiLo but stores high values in a table); Native (uses whatever mechanism the current database supports, identity or sequence). Entity Framework only supports: Identity generation; GUIDs; Assigned values. Properties NHibernate supports properties of entity types (one to one or many to one), collections (one to many or many to many) as well as scalars and enumerations. It offers a mechanism for having complex property types generated from the database, which even include support for querying. It also supports properties originated from SQL formulas. Entity Framework only supports scalars, entity types and collections. Enumerations support will come in the next version. Events and Interception NHibernate has a very rich event model, that exposes more than 20 events, either for synchronous pre-execution or asynchronous post-execution, including: Pre/Post-Load; Pre/Post-Delete; Pre/Post-Insert; Pre/Post-Update; Pre/Post-Flush. It also features interception of class instancing and SQL generation. As for Entity Framework, only two events exist: ObjectMaterialized (after loading an entity from the database); SavingChanges (before saving changes, which include deleting, inserting and updating). Tracking Changes For NHibernate as well as Entity Framework, all changes are tracked by their respective Unit of Work implementation. Entities can be attached and detached to it, Entity Framework does, however, also support self-tracking entities. Optimistic Concurrency Control NHibernate supports all of the imaginable scenarios: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Oracle’s ORA_ROWSCN; A column containing date and time; A column containing a version number; All/dirty columns comparison. Entity Framework is more focused on Entity Framework, so it only supports: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Comparing all/some columns. Batching NHibernate has full support for insertion batching, but only if the ID generator in use is not database-based (for example, it cannot be used with Identity), whereas Entity Framework has no batching at all. Cascading Both support cascading for collections and associations: when an entity is deleted, their conceptual children are also deleted. NHibernate also offers the possibility to set the foreign key column on children to NULL instead of removing them. Flushing Changes NHibernate’s ISession has a FlushMode property that can have the following values: Auto: changes are sent to the database when necessary, for example, if there are dirty instances of an entity type, and a query is performed against this entity type, or if the ISession is being disposed; Commit: changes are sent when committing the current transaction; Never: changes are only sent when explicitly calling Flush(). As for Entity Framework, changes have to be explicitly sent through a call to AcceptAllChanges()/SaveChanges(). Lazy Loading NHibernate supports lazy loading for Associated entities (one to one, many to one); Collections (one to many, many to many); Scalar properties (thing of BLOBs or CLOBs). Entity Framework only supports lazy loading for: Associated entities; Collections. Generating and Updating the Database Both NHibernate and Entity Framework Code First (with the Migrations API) allow creating the database model from the mapping and updating it if the mapping changes. Extensibility As you can guess, NHibernate is far more extensible than Entity Framework. Basically, everything can be extended, from ID generation, to LINQ to SQL transformation, HQL native SQL support, custom column types, custom association collections, SQL generation, supported databases, etc. With Entity Framework your options are more limited, at least, because practically no information exists as to what can be extended/changed. It features a provider model that can be extended to support any database. Integration With Other Microsoft APIs and Tools When it comes to integration with Microsoft technologies, it will come as no surprise that Entity Framework offers the best support. For example, the following technologies are fully supported: ASP.NET (through the EntityDataSource); ASP.NET Dynamic Data; WCF Data Services; WCF RIA Services; Visual Studio (through the integrated designer). Documentation This is another point where Entity Framework is superior: NHibernate lacks, for starters, an up to date API reference synchronized with its current version. It does have a community mailing list, blogs and wikis, although not much used. Entity Framework has a number of resources on MSDN and, of course, several forums and discussion groups exist. Conclusion Like I said, this is a personal list. I may come as a surprise to some that Entity Framework is so behind NHibernate in so many aspects, but it is true that NHibernate is much older and, due to its open-source nature, is not tied to product-specific timeframes and can thus evolve much more rapidly. I do like both, and I chose whichever is best for the job I have at hands. I am looking forward to the changes in EF5 which will add significant value to an already interesting product. So, what do you think? Did I forget anything important or is there anything else worth talking about? Looking forward for your comments!

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

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 3 – Table per Concrete Type (TPC) and Choosing Strategy Guidelines

  - by mortezam

  This is the third (and last) post in a series that explains different approaches to map an inheritance hierarchy with EF Code First. I've described these strategies in previous posts: Part 1 – Table per Hierarchy (TPH) Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)In today’s blog post I am going to discuss Table per Concrete Type (TPC) which completes the inheritance mapping strategies supported by EF Code First. At the end of this post I will provide some guidelines to choose an inheritance strategy mainly based on what we've learned in this series. TPC and Entity Framework in the Past Table per Concrete type is somehow the simplest approach suggested, yet using TPC with EF is one of those concepts that has not been covered very well so far and I've seen in some resources that it was even discouraged. The reason for that is just because Entity Data Model Designer in VS2010 doesn't support TPC (even though the EF runtime does). That basically means if you are following EF's Database-First or Model-First approaches then configuring TPC requires manually writing XML in the EDMX file which is not considered to be a fun practice. Well, no more. You'll see that with Code First, creating TPC is perfectly possible with fluent API just like other strategies and you don't need to avoid TPC due to the lack of designer support as you would probably do in other EF approaches. Table per Concrete Type (TPC)In Table per Concrete type (aka Table per Concrete class) we use exactly one table for each (nonabstract) class. All properties of a class, including inherited properties, can be mapped to columns of this table, as shown in the following figure: As you can see, the SQL schema is not aware of the inheritance; effectively, we’ve mapped two unrelated tables to a more expressive class structure. If the base class was concrete, then an additional table would be needed to hold instances of that class. I have to emphasize that there is no relationship between the database tables, except for the fact that they share some similar columns. TPC Implementation in Code First Just like the TPT implementation, we need to specify a separate table for each of the subclasses. We also need to tell Code First that we want all of the inherited properties to be mapped as part of this table. In CTP5, there is a new helper method on EntityMappingConfiguration class called MapInheritedProperties that exactly does this for us. Here is the complete object model as well as the fluent API to create a TPC mapping: public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } }          public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } }          public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } }      public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; }              protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)     {         modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("BankAccounts");         });         modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("CreditCards");         });                 } } The Importance of EntityMappingConfiguration ClassAs a side note, it worth mentioning that EntityMappingConfiguration class turns out to be a key type for inheritance mapping in Code First. Here is an snapshot of this class: namespace System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.Configuration.Mapping {     public class EntityMappingConfiguration<TEntityType> where TEntityType : class     {         public ValueConditionConfiguration Requires(string discriminator);         public void ToTable(string tableName);         public void MapInheritedProperties();     } } As you have seen so far, we used its Requires method to customize TPH. We also used its ToTable method to create a TPT and now we are using its MapInheritedProperties along with ToTable method to create our TPC mapping. TPC Configuration is Not Done Yet!We are not quite done with our TPC configuration and there is more into this story even though the fluent API we saw perfectly created a TPC mapping for us in the database. To see why, let's start working with our object model. For example, the following code creates two new objects of BankAccount and CreditCard types and tries to add them to the database: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount();     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard() { CardType = 1 };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Running this code throws an InvalidOperationException with this message: The changes to the database were committed successfully, but an error occurred while updating the object context. The ObjectContext might be in an inconsistent state. Inner exception message: AcceptChanges cannot continue because the object's key values conflict with another object in the ObjectStateManager. Make sure that the key values are unique before calling AcceptChanges. The reason we got this exception is because DbContext.SaveChanges() internally invokes SaveChanges method of its internal ObjectContext. ObjectContext's SaveChanges method on its turn by default calls AcceptAllChanges after it has performed the database modifications. AcceptAllChanges method merely iterates over all entries in ObjectStateManager and invokes AcceptChanges on each of them. Since the entities are in Added state, AcceptChanges method replaces their temporary EntityKey with a regular EntityKey based on the primary key values (i.e. BillingDetailId) that come back from the database and that's where the problem occurs since both the entities have been assigned the same value for their primary key by the database (i.e. on both BillingDetailId = 1) and the problem is that ObjectStateManager cannot track objects of the same type (i.e. BillingDetail) with the same EntityKey value hence it throws. If you take a closer look at the TPC's SQL schema above, you'll see why the database generated the same values for the primary keys: the BillingDetailId column in both BankAccounts and CreditCards table has been marked as identity. How to Solve The Identity Problem in TPC As you saw, using SQL Server’s int identity columns doesn't work very well together with TPC since there will be duplicate entity keys when inserting in subclasses tables with all having the same identity seed. Therefore, to solve this, either a spread seed (where each table has its own initial seed value) will be needed, or a mechanism other than SQL Server’s int identity should be used. Some other RDBMSes have other mechanisms allowing a sequence (identity) to be shared by multiple tables, and something similar can be achieved with GUID keys in SQL Server. While using GUID keys, or int identity keys with different starting seeds will solve the problem but yet another solution would be to completely switch off identity on the primary key property. As a result, we need to take the responsibility of providing unique keys when inserting records to the database. We will go with this solution since it works regardless of which database engine is used. Switching Off Identity in Code First We can switch off identity simply by placing DatabaseGenerated attribute on the primary key property and pass DatabaseGenerationOption.None to its constructor. DatabaseGenerated attribute is a new data annotation which has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5: public abstract class BillingDetail {     [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGenerationOption.None)]     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } As always, we can achieve the same result by using fluent API, if you prefer that: modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()             .Property(p => p.BillingDetailId)             .HasDatabaseGenerationOption(DatabaseGenerationOption.None); Working With The Object Model Our TPC mapping is ready and we can try adding new records to the database. But, like I said, now we need to take care of providing unique keys when creating new objects: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount()      {          BillingDetailId = 1                          };     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard()      {          BillingDetailId = 2,         CardType = 1     };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Polymorphic Associations with TPC is Problematic The main problem with this approach is that it doesn’t support Polymorphic Associations very well. After all, in the database, associations are represented as foreign key relationships and in TPC, the subclasses are all mapped to different tables so a polymorphic association to their base class (abstract BillingDetail in our example) cannot be represented as a simple foreign key relationship. For example, consider the the domain model we introduced here where User has a polymorphic association with BillingDetail. This would be problematic in our TPC Schema, because if User has a many-to-one relationship with BillingDetail, the Users table would need a single foreign key column, which would have to refer both concrete subclass tables. This isn’t possible with regular foreign key constraints. Schema Evolution with TPC is Complex A further conceptual problem with this mapping strategy is that several different columns, of different tables, share exactly the same semantics. This makes schema evolution more complex. For example, a change to a base class property results in changes to multiple columns. It also makes it much more difficult to implement database integrity constraints that apply to all subclasses. Generated SQLLet's examine SQL output for polymorphic queries in TPC mapping. For example, consider this polymorphic query for all BillingDetails and the resulting SQL statements that being executed in the database: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; Just like the SQL query generated by TPT mapping, the CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is merely to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type). TPC's SQL Queries are Union Based As you can see in the above screenshot, the first SELECT uses a FROM-clause subquery (which is selected with a red rectangle) to retrieve all instances of BillingDetails from all concrete class tables. The tables are combined with a UNION operator, and a literal (in this case, 0 and 1) is inserted into the intermediate result; (look at the lines highlighted in yellow.) EF reads this to instantiate the correct class given the data from a particular row. A union requires that the queries that are combined, project over the same columns; hence, EF has to pad and fill up nonexistent columns with NULL. This query will really perform well since here we can let the database optimizer find the best execution plan to combine rows from several tables. There is also no Joins involved so it has a better performance than the SQL queries generated by TPT where a Join is required between the base and subclasses tables. Choosing Strategy GuidelinesBefore we get into this discussion, I want to emphasize that there is no one single "best strategy fits all scenarios" exists. As you saw, each of the approaches have their own advantages and drawbacks. Here are some rules of thumb to identify the best strategy in a particular scenario: If you don’t require polymorphic associations or queries, lean toward TPC—in other words, if you never or rarely query for BillingDetails and you have no class that has an association to BillingDetail base class. I recommend TPC (only) for the top level of your class hierarchy, where polymorphism isn’t usually required, and when modification of the base class in the future is unlikely. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare relatively few properties (particularly if the main difference between subclasses is in their behavior), lean toward TPH. Your goal is to minimize the number of nullable columns and to convince yourself (and your DBA) that a denormalized schema won’t create problems in the long run. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare many properties (subclasses differ mainly by the data they hold), lean toward TPT. Or, depending on the width and depth of your inheritance hierarchy and the possible cost of joins versus unions, use TPC. By default, choose TPH only for simple problems. For more complex cases (or when you’re overruled by a data modeler insisting on the importance of nullability constraints and normalization), you should consider the TPT strategy. But at that point, ask yourself whether it may not be better to remodel inheritance as delegation in the object model (delegation is a way of making composition as powerful for reuse as inheritance). Complex inheritance is often best avoided for all sorts of reasons unrelated to persistence or ORM. EF acts as a buffer between the domain and relational models, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore persistence concerns when designing your classes. SummaryIn this series, we focused on one of the main structural aspect of the object/relational paradigm mismatch which is inheritance and discussed how EF solve this problem as an ORM solution. We learned about the three well-known inheritance mapping strategies and their implementations in EF Code First. Hopefully it gives you a better insight about the mapping of inheritance hierarchies as well as choosing the best strategy for your particular scenario. Happy New Year and Happy Code-Firsting! References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { color: #5A99FF; } a:visited { color: #5A99FF; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } .exception { background-color: #f0f0f0; font-style: italic; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px; }

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• Getting Started Building Windows 8 Store Apps with XAML/C#

  - by dwahlin

  Technology is fun isn’t it? As soon as you think you’ve figured out where things are heading a new technology comes onto the scene, changes things up, and offers new opportunities. One of the new technologies I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with lately is Windows 8 store applications. I posted my thoughts about Windows 8 during the BUILD conference in 2011 and still feel excited about the opportunity there. Time will tell how well it ends up being accepted by consumers but I’m hopeful that it’ll take off. I currently have two Windows 8 store application concepts I’m working on with one being built in XAML/C# and another in HTML/JavaScript. I really like that Microsoft supports both options since it caters to a variety of developers and makes it easy to get started regardless if you’re a desktop developer or Web developer. Here’s a quick look at how the technologies are organized in Windows 8: In this post I’ll focus on the basics of Windows 8 store XAML/C# apps by looking at features, files, and code provided by Visual Studio projects. To get started building these types of apps you’ll definitely need to have some knowledge of XAML and C#. Let’s get started by looking at the Windows 8 store project types available in Visual Studio 2012.   Windows 8 Store XAML/C# Project Types When you open Visual Studio 2012 you’ll see a new entry under C# named Windows Store. It includes 6 different project types as shown next.   The Blank App project provides initial starter code and a single page whereas the Grid App and Split App templates provide quite a bit more code as well as multiple pages for your application. The other projects available can be be used to create a class library project that runs in Windows 8 store apps, a WinRT component such as a custom control, and a unit test library project respectively. If you’re building an application that displays data in groups using the “tile” concept then the Grid App or Split App project templates are a good place to start. An example of the initial screens generated by each project is shown next: Grid App Split View App   When a user clicks a tile in a Grid App they can view details about the tile data. With a Split View app groups/categories are shown and when the user clicks on a group they can see a list of all the different items and then drill-down into them:   For the remainder of this post I’ll focus on functionality provided by the Blank App project since it provides a simple way to get started learning the fundamentals of building Windows 8 store apps.   Blank App Project Walkthrough The Blank App project is a great place to start since it’s simple and lets you focus on the basics. In this post I’ll focus on what it provides you out of the box and cover additional details in future posts. Once you have the basics down you can move to the other project types if you need the functionality they provide. The Blank App project template does exactly what it says – you get an empty project with a few starter files added to help get you going. This is a good option if you’ll be building an app that doesn’t fit into the grid layout view that you see a lot of Windows 8 store apps following (such as on the Windows 8 start screen). I ended up starting with the Blank App project template for the app I’m currently working on since I’m not displaying data/image tiles (something the Grid App project does well) or drilling down into lists of data (functionality that the Split App project provides). The Blank App project provides images for the tiles and splash screen (you’ll definitely want to change these), a StandardStyles.xaml resource dictionary that includes a lot of helpful styles such as buttons for the AppBar (a special type of menu in Windows 8 store apps), an App.xaml file, and the app’s main page which is named MainPage.xaml. It also adds a Package.appxmanifest that is used to define functionality that your app requires, app information used in the store, plus more. The App.xaml, App.xaml.cs and StandardStyles.xaml Files The App.xaml file handles loading a resource dictionary named StandardStyles.xaml which has several key styles used throughout the application: <Application x:Class="BlankApp.App" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:local="using:BlankApp"> <Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <!-- Styles that define common aspects of the platform look and feel Required by Visual Studio project and item templates --> <ResourceDictionary Source="Common/StandardStyles.xaml"/> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application>   StandardStyles.xaml has style definitions for different text styles and AppBar buttons. If you scroll down toward the middle of the file you’ll see that many AppBar button styles are included such as one for an edit icon. Button styles like this can be used to quickly and easily add icons/buttons into your application without having to be an expert in design. <Style x:Key="EditAppBarButtonStyle" TargetType="ButtonBase" BasedOn="{StaticResource AppBarButtonStyle}"> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.AutomationId" Value="EditAppBarButton"/> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.Name" Value="Edit"/> <Setter Property="Content" Value="&#xE104;"/> </Style> Switching over to App.xaml.cs, it includes some code to help get you started. An OnLaunched() method is added to handle creating a Frame that child pages such as MainPage.xaml can be loaded into. The Frame has the same overall purpose as the one found in WPF and Silverlight applications - it’s used to navigate between pages in an application. /// <summary> /// Invoked when the application is launched normally by the end user. Other entry points /// will be used when the application is launched to open a specific file, to display /// search results, and so forth. /// </summary> /// <param name="args">Details about the launch request and process.</param> protected override void OnLaunched(LaunchActivatedEventArgs args) { Frame rootFrame = Window.Current.Content as Frame; // Do not repeat app initialization when the Window already has content, // just ensure that the window is active if (rootFrame == null) { // Create a Frame to act as the navigation context and navigate to the first page rootFrame = new Frame(); if (args.PreviousExecutionState == ApplicationExecutionState.Terminated) { //TODO: Load state from previously suspended application } // Place the frame in the current Window Window.Current.Content = rootFrame; } if (rootFrame.Content == null) { // When the navigation stack isn't restored navigate to the first page, // configuring the new page by passing required information as a navigation // parameter if (!rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(MainPage), args.Arguments)) { throw new Exception("Failed to create initial page"); } } // Ensure the current window is active Window.Current.Activate(); }   Notice that in addition to creating a Frame the code also checks to see if the app was previously terminated so that you can load any state/data that the user may need when the app is launched again. If you’re new to the lifecycle of Windows 8 store apps the following image shows how an app can be running, suspended, and terminated.   If the user switches from an app they’re running the app will be suspended in memory. The app may stay suspended or may be terminated depending on how much memory the OS thinks it needs so it’s important to save state in case the application is ultimately terminated and has to be started fresh. Although I won’t cover saving application state here, additional information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh465099.aspx. Another method in App.xaml.cs named OnSuspending() is also included in App.xaml.cs that can be used to store state as the user switches to another application:   /// <summary> /// Invoked when application execution is being suspended. Application state is saved /// without knowing whether the application will be terminated or resumed with the contents /// of memory still intact. /// </summary> /// <param name="sender">The source of the suspend request.</param> /// <param name="e">Details about the suspend request.</param> private void OnSuspending(object sender, SuspendingEventArgs e) { var deferral = e.SuspendingOperation.GetDeferral(); //TODO: Save application state and stop any background activity deferral.Complete(); } The MainPage.xaml and MainPage.xaml.cs Files The Blank App project adds a file named MainPage.xaml that acts as the initial screen for the application. It doesn’t include anything aside from an empty <Grid> XAML element in it. The code-behind class named MainPage.xaml.cs includes a constructor as well as a method named OnNavigatedTo() that is called once the page is displayed in the frame.   /// <summary> /// An empty page that can be used on its own or navigated to within a Frame. /// </summary> public sealed partial class MainPage : Page { public MainPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); } /// <summary> /// Invoked when this page is about to be displayed in a Frame. /// </summary> /// <param name="e">Event data that describes how this page was reached. The Parameter /// property is typically used to configure the page.</param> protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e) { } }   If you’re experienced with XAML you can switch to Design mode and start dragging and dropping XAML controls from the ToolBox in Visual Studio. If you prefer to type XAML you can do that as well in the XAML editor or while in split mode. Many of the controls available in WPF and Silverlight are included such as Canvas, Grid, StackPanel, and Border for layout. Standard input controls are also included such as TextBox, CheckBox, PasswordBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, ListBox, and more. MediaElement is available for rendering video or playing audio files. Some of the “common” XAML controls included out of the box are shown next:   Although XAML/C# Windows 8 store apps don’t include all of the functionality available in Silverlight 5, the core functionality required to build store apps is there with additional functionality available in open source projects such as Callisto (started by Microsoft’s Tim Heuer), Q42.WinRT, and others. Standard XAML data binding can be used to bind C# objects to controls, converters can be used to manipulate data during the data binding process, and custom styles and templates can be applied to controls to modify them. Although Visual Studio 2012 doesn’t support visually creating styles or templates, Expression Blend 5 handles that very well. To get started building the initial screen of a Windows 8 app you can start adding controls as mentioned earlier. Simply place them inside of the <Grid> element that’s included. You can arrange controls in a stacked manner using the StackPanel control, add a border around controls using the Border control, arrange controls in columns and rows using the Grid control, or absolutely position controls using the Canvas control. One of the controls that may be new to you is the AppBar. It can be used to add menu/toolbar functionality into a store app and keep the app clean and focused. You can place an AppBar at the top or bottom of the screen. A user on a touch device can swipe up to display the bottom AppBar or right-click when using a mouse. An example of defining an AppBar that contains an Edit button is shown next. The EditAppBarButtonStyle is available in the StandardStyles.xaml file mentioned earlier. <Page.BottomAppBar> <AppBar x:Name="ApplicationAppBar" Padding="10,0,10,0" AutomationProperties.Name="Bottom App Bar"> <Grid> <StackPanel x:Name="RightPanel" Orientation="Horizontal" Grid.Column="1" HorizontalAlignment="Right"> <Button x:Name="Edit" Style="{StaticResource EditAppBarButtonStyle}" Tag="Edit" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> </AppBar> </Page.BottomAppBar> Like standard XAML controls, the <Button> control in the AppBar can be wired to an event handler method in the MainPage.Xaml.cs file or even bound to a ViewModel object using “commanding” if your app follows the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern (check out the MVVM Light package available through NuGet if you’re using MVVM with Windows 8 store apps). The AppBar can be used to navigate to different screens, show and hide controls, display dialogs, show settings screens, and more.   The Package.appxmanifest File The Package.appxmanifest file contains configuration details about your Windows 8 store app. By double-clicking it in Visual Studio you can define the splash screen image, small and wide logo images used for tiles on the start screen, orientation information, and more. You can also define what capabilities the app has such as if it uses the Internet, supports geolocation functionality, requires a microphone or webcam, etc. App declarations such as background processes, file picker functionality, and sharing can also be defined Finally, information about how the app is packaged for deployment to the store can also be defined. Summary If you already have some experience working with XAML technologies you’ll find that getting started building Windows 8 applications is pretty straightforward. Many of the controls available in Silverlight and WPF are available making it easy to get started without having to relearn a lot of new technologies. In the next post in this series I’ll discuss additional features that can be used in your Windows 8 store apps.

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• Ops Center 12c - Provisioning Solaris Using a Card-Based NIC

  - by scottdickson

  It's been a long time since last I added something here, but having some conversations this last week, I got inspired to update things. I've been spending a lot of time with Ops Center for managing and installing systems these days.  So, I suspect a number of my upcoming posts will be in that area. Today, I want to look at how to provision Solaris using Ops Center when your network is not connected to one of the built-in NICs.  We'll talk about how this can work for both Solaris 10 and Solaris 11, since they are pretty similar.  In both cases, WANboot is a key piece of the story. Here's what I want to do:  I have a Sun Fire T2000 server with a Quad-GbE nxge card installed.  The only network is connected to port 2 on that card rather than the built-in network interfaces.  I want to install Solaris on it across the network, either Solaris 10 or Solaris 11.  I have met with a lot of customers lately who have a similar architecture.  Usually, they have T4-4 servers with the network connected via 10GbE connections. Add to this mix the fact that I use Ops Center to manage the systems in my lab, so I really would like to add this to Ops Center.  If possible, I would like this to be completely hands free.  I can't quite do that yet. Close, but not quite. WANBoot or Old-Style NetBoot? When a system is installed from the network, it needs some help getting the process rolling.  It has to figure out what its network configuration (IP address, gateway, etc.) ought to be.  It needs to figure out what server is going to help it boot and install, and it needs the instructions for the installation.  There are two different ways to bootstrap an installation of Solaris on SPARC across the network.   The old way uses a broadcast of RARP or more recently DHCP to obtain the IP configuration and the rest of the information needed.  The second is to explicitly configure this information in the OBP and use WANBoot for installation WANBoot has a number of benefits over broadcast-based installation: it is not restricted to a single subnet; it does not require special DHCP configuration or DHCP helpers; it uses standard HTTP and HTTPS protocols which traverse firewalls much more easily than NFS-based package installation.  But, WANBoot is not available on really old hardware and WANBoot requires the use o Flash Archives in Solaris 10.  Still, for many people, this is a great approach. As it turns out, WANBoot is necessary if you plan to install using a NIC on a card rather than a built-in NIC. Identifying Which Network Interface to Use One of the trickiest aspects to this process, and the one that actually requires manual intervention to set up, is identifying how the OBP and Solaris refer to the NIC that we want to use to boot.  The OBP already has device aliases configured for the built-in NICs called net, net0, net1, net2, net3.  The device alias net typically points to net0 so that when you issue the command  "boot net -v install", it uses net0 for the boot.  Our task is to figure out the network instance for the NIC we want to use.  We will need to get to the OBP console of the system we want to install in order to figure out what the network should be called.  I will presume you know how to get to the ok prompt.  Once there, we have to see what networks the OBP sees and identify which one is associated with our NIC using the OBP command show-nets. SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0 64-bit Copyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. {4} ok banner Sun Fire T200, No Keyboard Copyright (c) 1998, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.30.4.b, 32640 MB memory available, Serial #69057548. Ethernet address 0:14:4f:1d:bc:c, Host ID: 841dbc0c. {4} ok show-nets a) /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0,1 b) /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0 c) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,3 d) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 e) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,1 f) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0 g) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0,1 h) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 q) NO SELECTION Enter Selection, q to quit: d /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 has been selected. Type ^Y ( Control-Y ) to insert it in the command line. e.g. ok nvalias mydev ^Y for creating devalias mydev for /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok devalias ... net3 /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0,1 net2 /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0 net1 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0,1 net0 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 ... name aliases By looking at the devalias and the show-nets output, we can see that our Quad-GbE card must be the device nodes starting with  /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0.  The cable for our network is plugged into the 3rd slot, so the device address for our network must be /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2. With that, we can create a device alias for our network interface.  Naming the device alias may take a little bit of trial and error, especially in Solaris 11 where the device alias seems to matter more with the new virtualized network stack. So far in my testing, since this is the "next" network interface to be used, I have found success in naming it net4, even though it's a NIC in the middle of a card that might, by rights, be called net6 (assuming the 0th interface on the card is the next interface identified by Solaris and this is the 3rd interface on the card).  So, we will call it net4.  We need to assign a device alias to it: {4} ok nvalias net4 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok devalias net4 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 ... We also may need to have the MAC for this particular interface, so let's get it, too.  To do this, we go to the device and interrogate its properties. {4} ok cd /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok .properties assigned-addresses 82060210 00000000 03000000 00000000 01000000 82060218 00000000 00320000 00000000 00008000 82060220 00000000 00328000 00000000 00008000 82060230 00000000 00600000 00000000 00100000 local-mac-address 00 21 28 20 42 92 phy-type mif ... From this, we can see that the MAC for this interface is  00:21:28:20:42:92.  We will need this later. This is all we need to do at the OBP.  Now, we can configure Ops Center to use this interface. Network Boot in Solaris 10 Solaris 10 turns out to be a little simpler than Solaris 11 for this sort of a network boot.  Since WANBoot in Solaris 10 fetches a specified In order to install the system using Ops Center, it is necessary to create a OS Provisioning profile and its corresponding plan.  I am going to presume that you already know how to do this within Ops Center 12c and I will just cover the differences between a regular profile and a profile that can use an alternate interface. Create a OS Provisioning profile for Solaris 10 as usual.  However, when you specify the network resources for the primary network, click on the name of the NIC, probably GB_0, and rename it to GB_N/netN, where N is the instance number you used previously in creating the device alias.  This is where the trial and error may come into play.  You may need to try a few instance numbers before you, the OBP, and Solaris all agree on the instance number.  Mark this as the boot network. For Solaris 10, you ought to be able to then apply the OS Provisioning profile to the server and it should install using that interface.  And if you put your cards in the same slots and plug the networks into the same NICs, this profile is reusable across multiple servers. Why This Works If you watch the console as Solaris boots during the OSP process, Ops Center is going to look for the device alias netN.  Since WANBoot requires a device alias called just net, Ops Center uses the value of your netN device alias and assigns that device to the net alias.  That means that boot net will automatically use this device.  Very cool!  Here's a trace from the console as Ops Center provisions a server: Sun Sun Fire T200, No KeyboardCopyright (c) 1998, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.OpenBoot 4.30.4.b, 32640 MB memory available, Serial #69057548.Ethernet address 0:14:4f:1d:bc:c, Host ID: 841dbc0c.auto-boot? =            false{0} ok  {0} ok printenv network-boot-argumentsnetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok devalias net net                      /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0{0} ok devalias net4 net4                     /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok devalias net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok setenv network-boot-arguments host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:8004/cgi-bin/wanboot-cginetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:8004/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok boot net - installBoot device: /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2  File and args: - install/pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2: 1000 Mbps link up<time unavailable> wanboot info: WAN boot messages->console<time unavailable> wanboot info: configuring /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 See what happened?  Ops Center looked for the network device alias called net4 that we specified in the profile, took the value from it, and made it the net device alias for the boot.  Pretty cool! WANBoot and Solaris 11 Solaris 11 requires an additional step since the Automated Installer in Solaris 11 uses the MAC address of the network to figure out which manifest to use for system installation.  In order to make sure this is available, we have to take an extra step to associate the MAC of the NIC on the card with the host.  So, in addition to creating the device alias like we did above, we also have to declare to Ops Center that the host has this new MAC. Declaring the NIC Start out by discovering the hardware as usual.  Once you have discovered it, take a look under the Connectivity tab to see what networks it has discovered.  In the case of this system, it shows the 4 built-in networks, but not the networks on the additional cards.  These are not directly visible to the system controller.  In order to add the additional network interface to the hardware asset, it is necessary to Declare it.  We will declare that we have a server with this additional NIC, but we will also  specify the existing GB_0 network so that Ops Center can associate the right resources together.  The GB_0 acts as sort of a key to tie our new declaration to the old system already discovered.  Go to the Assets tab, select All Assets, and then in the Actions tab, select Add Asset.  Rather than going through a discovery this time, we will manually declare a new asset. When we declare it, we will give the hostname, IP address, system model that match those that have already been discovered.  Then, we will declare both GB_0 with its existing MAC and the new GB_4 with its MAC.  Remember that we collected the MAC for GB_4 when we created its device alias. After you declare the asset, you will see the new NIC in the connectivity tab for the asset.  You will notice that only the NICs you listed when you declared it are seen now.  If you want Ops Center to see all of the existing NICs as well as the additional one, declare them as well.  Add the other GB_1, GB_2, GB_3 links and their MACs just as you did GB_0 and GB_4.  Installing the OS  Once you have declared the asset, you can create an OS Provisioning profile for Solaris 11 in the same way that you did for Solaris 10.  The only difference from any other provisioning profile you might have created already is the network to use for installation.  Again, use GB_N/netN where N is the interface number you used for your device alias and in your declaration.  And away you go.  When the system boots from the network, the automated installer (AI) is able to see which system manifest to use, based on the new MAC that was associated, and the system gets installed. {0} ok {0} ok printenv network-boot-argumentsnetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok devalias net net                      /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0{0} ok devalias net4 net4                     /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok devalias net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok setenv network-boot-arguments host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cginetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok boot net - installBoot device: /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2  File and args: - install/pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2: 1000 Mbps link up<time unavailable> wanboot info: WAN boot messages->console<time unavailable> wanboot info: configuring /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2...SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0 64-bitCopyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.Remounting root read/writeProbing for device nodes ...Preparing network image for useDownloading solaris.zlib--2012-02-17 15:10:17--  http://10.140.204.22:5555/var/js/AI/sparc//solaris.zlibConnecting to 10.140.204.22:5555... connected.HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OKLength: 126752256 (121M) [text/plain]Saving to: `/tmp/solaris.zlib'100%[======================================>] 126,752,256 28.6M/s   in 4.4s    2012-02-17 15:10:21 (27.3 MB/s) - `/tmp/solaris.zlib' saved [126752256/126752256] Conclusion So, why go to all of this trouble?  More and more, I find that customers are wiring their data center to only use higher speed networks - 10GbE only to the hosts.  Some customers are moving aggressively toward consolidated networks combining storage and network on CNA NICs.  All of this means that network-based provisioning cannot rely exclusively on the built-in network interfaces.  So, it's important to be able to provision a system using other than the built-in networks.  Turns out, that this is pretty straight-forward for both Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 and fits into the Ops Center deployment process quite nicely. Hopefully, you will be able to use this as you build out your own private cloud solutions with Ops Center.

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• SQL Monitor’s data repository: Alerts

  - by Chris Lambrou

  In my previous post, I introduced the SQL Monitor data repository, and described how the monitored objects are stored in a hierarchy in the data schema, in a series of tables with a _Keys suffix. In this post I had planned to describe how the actual data for the monitored objects is stored in corresponding tables with _StableSamples and _UnstableSamples suffixes. However, I’m going to postpone that until my next post, as I’ve had a request from a SQL Monitor user to explain how alerts are stored. In the SQL Monitor data repository, alerts are stored in tables belonging to the alert schema, which contains the following five tables: alert.Alert alert.Alert_Cleared alert.Alert_Comment alert.Alert_Severity alert.Alert_Type In this post, I’m only going to cover the alert.Alert and alert.Alert_Type tables. I may cover the other three tables in a later post. The most important table in this schema is alert.Alert, as each row in this table corresponds to a single alert. So let’s have a look at it. SELECT TOP 100 AlertId, AlertType, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert ORDER BY AlertId DESC;  AlertIdAlertTypeTargetObjectReadSubType 165550397:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,10 265549387:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,7:Machine,1,4:Name,s0:,10 365548187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 465547157:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 565546147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 665545187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 765544157:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 865543147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 965542187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 1065541147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 11…     So what are we seeing here, then? Well, AlertId is an auto-incrementing identity column, so ORDER BY AlertId DESC ensures that we see the most recent alerts first. AlertType indicates the type of each alert, such as Job failed (6), Backup overdue (14) or Long-running query (12). The TargetObject column indicates which monitored object the alert is associated with. The Read column acts as a flag to indicate whether or not the alert has been read. And finally the SubType column is used in the case of a Custom metric (40) alert, to indicate which custom metric the alert pertains to. Okay, now lets look at some of those columns in more detail. The AlertType column is an easy one to start with, and it brings use nicely to the next table, data.Alert_Type. Let’s have a look at what’s in this table: SELECT AlertType, Event, Monitoring, Name, Description FROM alert.Alert_Type ORDER BY AlertType;  AlertTypeEventMonitoringNameDescription 1100Processor utilizationProcessor utilization (CPU) on a host machine stays above a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration 2210SQL Server error log entryAn error is written to the SQL Server error log with a severity level above a specified value. 3310Cluster failoverThe active cluster node fails, causing the SQL Server instance to switch nodes. 4410DeadlockSQL deadlock occurs. 5500Processor under-utilizationProcessor utilization (CPU) on a host machine remains below a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration 6610Job failedA job does not complete successfully (the job returns an error code). 7700Machine unreachableHost machine (Windows server) cannot be contacted on the network. 8800SQL Server instance unreachableThe SQL Server instance is not running or cannot be contacted on the network. 9900Disk spaceDisk space used on a logical disk drive is above a defined threshold for longer than a specified duration. 101000Physical memoryPhysical memory (RAM) used on the host machine stays above a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration. 111100Blocked processSQL process is blocked for longer than a specified duration. 121200Long-running queryA SQL query runs for longer than a specified duration. 131400Backup overdueNo full backup exists, or the last full backup is older than a specified time. 141500Log backup overdueNo log backup exists, or the last log backup is older than a specified time. 151600Database unavailableDatabase changes from Online to any other state. 161700Page verificationTorn Page Detection or Page Checksum is not enabled for a database. 171800Integrity check overdueNo entry for an integrity check (DBCC DBINFO returns no date for dbi_dbccLastKnownGood field), or the last check is older than a specified time. 181900Fragmented indexesFragmentation level of one or more indexes is above a threshold percentage. 192400Job duration unusualThe duration of a SQL job duration deviates from its baseline duration by more than a threshold percentage. 202501Clock skewSystem clock time on the Base Monitor computer differs from the system clock time on a monitored SQL Server host machine by a specified number of seconds. 212700SQL Server Agent Service statusThe SQL Server Agent Service status matches the status specified. 222800SQL Server Reporting Service statusThe SQL Server Reporting Service status matches the status specified. 232900SQL Server Full Text Search Service statusThe SQL Server Full Text Search Service status matches the status specified. 243000SQL Server Analysis Service statusThe SQL Server Analysis Service status matches the status specified. 253100SQL Server Integration Service statusThe SQL Server Integration Service status matches the status specified. 263300SQL Server Browser Service statusThe SQL Server Browser Service status matches the status specified. 273400SQL Server VSS Writer Service statusThe SQL Server VSS Writer status matches the status specified. 283501Deadlock trace flag disabledThe monitored SQL Server’s trace flag cannot be enabled. 293600Monitoring stopped (host machine credentials)SQL Monitor cannot contact the host machine because authentication failed. 303700Monitoring stopped (SQL Server credentials)SQL Monitor cannot contact the SQL Server instance because authentication failed. 313800Monitoring error (host machine data collection)SQL Monitor cannot collect data from the host machine. 323900Monitoring error (SQL Server data collection)SQL Monitor cannot collect data from the SQL Server instance. 334000Custom metricThe custom metric value has passed an alert threshold. 344100Custom metric collection errorSQL Monitor cannot collect custom metric data from the target object. Basically, alert.Alert_Type is just a big reference table containing information about the 34 different alert types supported by SQL Monitor (note that the largest id is 41, not 34 – some alert types have been retired since SQL Monitor was first developed). The Name and Description columns are self evident, and I’m going to skip over the Event and Monitoring columns as they’re not very interesting. The AlertId column is the primary key, and is referenced by AlertId in the alert.Alert table. As such, we can rewrite our earlier query to join these two tables, in order to provide a more readable view of the alerts: SELECT TOP 100 AlertId, Name, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType ORDER BY AlertId DESC;  AlertIdNameTargetObjectReadSubType 165550Monitoring error (SQL Server data collection)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,00 265549Monitoring error (host machine data collection)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,7:Machine,1,4:Name,s0:,00 365548Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 465547Log backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 565546Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 665545Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 765544Log backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 865543Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 965542Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 1065541Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 Okay, the next column to discuss in the alert.Alert table is TargetObject. Oh boy, this one’s a bit tricky! The TargetObject of an alert is a serialized string representation of the position in the monitored object hierarchy of the object to which the alert pertains. The serialization format is somewhat convenient for parsing in the C# source code of SQL Monitor, and has some helpful characteristics, but it’s probably very awkward to manipulate in T-SQL. I could document the serialization format here, but it would be very dry reading, so perhaps it’s best to consider an example from the table above. Have a look at the alert with an AlertID of 65543. It’s a Backup overdue alert for the SqlMonitorData database running on the default instance of granger, my laptop. Each different alert type is associated with a specific type of monitored object in the object hierarchy (I described the hierarchy in my previous post). The Backup overdue alert is associated with databases, whose position in the object hierarchy is root → Cluster → SqlServer → Database. The TargetObject value identifies the target object by specifying the key properties at each level in the hierarchy, thus: Cluster: Name = "granger" SqlServer: Name = "" (an empty string, denoting the default instance) Database: Name = "SqlMonitorData" Well, look at the actual TargetObject value for this alert: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,". It is indeed composed of three parts, one for each level in the hierarchy: Cluster: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger," SqlServer: "9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:," Database: "8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData," Each part is handled in exactly the same way, so let’s concentrate on the first part, "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,". It comprises the following: "7:Cluster," – This identifies the level in the hierarchy. "1," – This indicates how many different key properties there are to uniquely identify a cluster (we saw in my last post that each cluster is identified by a single property, its Name). "4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData," – This represents the Name property, and its corresponding value, SqlMonitorData. It’s split up like this: "4:Name," – Indicates the name of the key property. "s" – Indicates the type of the key property, in this case, it’s a string. "14:SqlMonitorData," – Indicates the value of the property. At this point, you might be wondering about the format of some of these strings. Why is the string "Cluster" stored as "7:Cluster,"? Well an encoding scheme is used, which consists of the following: "7" – This is the length of the string "Cluster" ":" – This is a delimiter between the length of the string and the actual string’s contents. "Cluster" – This is the string itself. 7 characters. "," – This is a final terminating character that indicates the end of the encoded string. You can see that "4:Name,", "8:Database," and "14:SqlMonitorData," also conform to the same encoding scheme. In the example above, the "s" character is used to indicate that the value of the Name property is a string. If you explore the TargetObject property of alerts in your own SQL Monitor data repository, you might find other characters used for other non-string key property values. The different value types you might possibly encounter are as follows: "I" – Denotes a bigint value. For example, "I65432,". "g" – Denotes a GUID value. For example, "g32116732-63ae-4ab5-bd34-7dfdfb084c18,". "d" – Denotes a datetime value. For example, "d634815384796832438,". The value is stored as a bigint, rather than a native SQL datetime value. I’ll describe how datetime values are handled in the SQL Monitor data repostory in a future post. I suggest you have a look at the alerts in your own SQL Monitor data repository for further examples, so you can see how the TargetObject values are composed for each of the different types of alert. Let me give one further example, though, that represents a Custom metric alert, as this will help in describing the final column of interest in the alert.Alert table, SubType. Let me show you the alert I’m interested in: SELECT AlertId, a.AlertType, Name, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType WHERE AlertId = 65769;  AlertIdAlertTypeNameTargetObjectReadSubType 16576940Custom metric7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master,12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2,02 An AlertType value of 40 corresponds to the Custom metric alert type. The Name taken from the alert.Alert_Type table is simply Custom metric, but this doesn’t tell us anything about the specific custom metric that this alert pertains to. That’s where the SubType value comes in. For custom metric alerts, this provides us with the Id of the specific custom alert definition that can be found in the settings.CustomAlertDefinitions table. I don’t really want to delve into custom alert definitions yet (maybe in a later post), but an extra join in the previous query shows us that this alert pertains to the CPU pressure (avg runnable task count) custom metric alert. SELECT AlertId, a.AlertType, at.Name, cad.Name AS CustomAlertName, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType JOIN settings.CustomAlertDefinitions cad ON a.SubType = cad.Id WHERE AlertId = 65769;  AlertIdAlertTypeNameCustomAlertNameTargetObjectReadSubType 16576940Custom metricCPU pressure (avg runnable task count)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master,12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2,02 The TargetObject value in this case breaks down like this: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger," – Cluster named "granger". "9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:," – SqlServer named "" (the default instance). "8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master," – Database named "master". "12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2," – Custom metric with an Id of 2. Note that the hierarchy for a custom metric is slightly different compared to the earlier Backup overdue alert. It’s root → Cluster → SqlServer → Database → CustomMetric. Also notice that, unlike Cluster, SqlServer and Database, the key property for CustomMetric is called MetricId (not Name), and the value is a bigint (not a string). Finally, delving into the custom metric tables is beyond the scope of this post, but for the sake of avoiding any future confusion, I’d like to point out that whilst the SubType references a custom alert definition, the MetricID value embedded in the TargetObject value references a custom metric definition. Although in this case both the custom metric definition and custom alert definition share the same Id value of 2, this is not generally the case. Okay, that’s enough for now, not least because as I’m typing this, it’s almost 2am, I have to go to work tomorrow, and my alarm is set for 6am – eek! In my next post, I’ll either cover the remaining three tables in the alert schema, or I’ll delve into the way SQL Monitor stores its monitoring data, as I’d originally planned to cover in this post.

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• CLSF & CLK 2013 Trip Report by Jeff Liu

  - by jamesmorris

  This is a contributed post from Jeff Liu, lead XFS developer for the Oracle mainline Linux kernel team. Recently, I attended both the China Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop (CLSF), and the China Linux Kernel conference (CLK), which were held in Shanghai. Here are the highlights for both events. CLSF - 17th October XFS update (led by Jeff Liu) XFS keeps rapid progress with a lot of changes, especially focused on the infrastructure/performance improvements as well as  new feature development.  This can be reflected with a sample statistics among XFS/Ext4+JBD2/Btrfs via: # git diff --stat --minimal -C -M v3.7..v3.12-rc4 -- fs/xfs|fs/ext4+fs/jbd2|fs/btrfs XFS: 141 files changed, 27598 insertions(+), 19113 deletions(-) Ext4+JBD2: 39 files changed, 10487 insertions(+), 5454 deletions(-) Btrfs: 70 files changed, 19875 insertions(+), 8130 deletions(-) What made up those changes in XFS? Self-describing metadata(CRC32c). This is a new feature and it contributed about 70% code changes, it can be enabled via `mkfs.xfs -m crc=1 /dev/xxx` for v5 superblock. Transaction log space reservation improvements. With this change, we can calculate the log space reservation at mount time rather than runtime to reduce the the CPU overhead. User namespace support. So both XFS and USERNS can be enabled on kernel configuration begin from Linux 3.10. Thanks Dwight Engen's efforts for this thing. Split project/group quota inodes. Originally, project quota can not be enabled with group quota at the same time because they were share the same quota file inode, now it works but only for v5 super block. i.e, CRC enabled. CONFIG_XFS_WARN, an new lightweight runtime debugger which can be deployed in production environment. Readahead log object recovery, this change can speed up the log replay progress significantly. Speculative preallocation inode tracking, clearing and throttling. The main purpose is to deal with inodes with post-EOF space due to speculative preallocation, support improved quota management to free up a significant amount of unwritten space when at or near EDQUOT. It support backgroup scanning which occurs on a longish interval(5 mins by default, tunable), and on-demand scanning/trimming via ioctl(2). Bitter arguments ensued from this session, especially for the comparison between Ext4 and Btrfs in different areas, I have to spent a whole morning of the 1st day answering those questions. We basically agreed on XFS is the best choice in Linux nowadays because: Stable, XFS has a good record in stability in the past 10 years. Fengguang Wu who lead the 0-day kernel test project also said that he has observed less error than other filesystems in the past 1+ years, I own it to the XFS upstream code reviewer, they always performing serious code review as well as testing. Good performance for large/small files, XFS does not works very well for small files has already been an old story for years. Best choice (maybe) for distributed PB filesystems. e.g, Ceph recommends delopy OSD daemon on XFS because Ext4 has limited xattr size. Best choice for large storage (>16TB). Ext4 does not support a single file more than around 15.95TB. Scalability, any objection to XFS is best in this point? :) XFS is better to deal with transaction concurrency than Ext4, why? The maximum size of the log in XFS is 2038MB compare to 128MB in Ext4. Misc. Ext4 is widely used and it has been proved fast/stable in various loads and scenarios, XFS just need more customers, and Btrfs is still on the road to be a manhood. Ceph Introduction (Led by Li Wang) This a hot topic.  Li gave us a nice introduction about the design as well as their current works. Actually, Ceph client has been included in Linux kernel since 2.6.34 and supported by Openstack since Folsom but it seems that it has not yet been widely deployment in production environment. Their major work is focus on the inline data support to separate the metadata and data storage, reduce the file access time, i.e, a file access need communication twice, fetch the metadata from MDS and then get data from OSD, and also, the small file access is limited by the network latency. The solution is, for the small files they would like to store the data at metadata so that when accessing a small file, the metadata server can push both metadata and data to the client at the same time. In this way, they can reduce the overhead of calculating the data offset and save the communication to OSD. For this feature, they have only run some small scale testing but really saw noticeable improvements. Test environment: Intel 2 CPU 12 Core, 64GB RAM, Ubuntu 12.04, Ceph 0.56.6 with 200GB SATA disk, 15 OSD, 1 MDS, 1 MON. The sequence read performance for 1K size files improved about 50%. I have asked Li and Zheng Yan (the core developer of Ceph, who also worked on Btrfs) whether Ceph is really stable and can be deployed at production environment for large scale PB level storage, but they can not give a positive answer, looks Ceph even does not spread over Dreamhost (subject to confirmation). From Li, they only deployed Ceph for a small scale storage(32 nodes) although they'd like to try 6000 nodes in the future. Improve Linux swap for Flash storage (led by Shaohua Li) Because of high density, low power and low price, flash storage (SSD) is a good candidate to partially replace DRAM. A quick answer for this is using SSD as swap. But Linux swap is designed for slow hard disk storage, so there are a lot of challenges to efficiently use SSD for swap. SWAPOUT swap_map scan swap_map is the in-memory data structure to track swap disk usage, but it is a slow linear scan. It will become a bottleneck while finding many adjacent pages in the use of SSD. Shaohua Li have changed it to a cluster(128K) list, resulting in O(1) algorithm. However, this apporoach needs restrictive cluster alignment and only enabled for SSD. IO pattern In most cases, the swap io is in interleaved pattern because of mutiple reclaimers or a free cluster is shared by all reclaimers. Even though block layer can merge interleaved IO to some extent, but we cannot count on it completely. Hence the per-cpu cluster is added base on the previous change, it can help reclaimer do sequential IO and the block layer will be easier to merge IO. TLB flush: If we're reclaiming one active page, we should first move the page from active lru list to inactive lru list, and then reclaim the page from inactive lru to swap it out. During the process, we need to clear PTE twice: first is 'A'(ACCESS) bit, second is 'P'(PRESENT) bit. Processors need to send lots of ipi which make the TLB flush really expensive. Some works have been done to improve this, including rework smp_call_functiom_many() or remove the first TLB flush in x86, but there still have some arguments here and only parts of works have been pushed to mainline. SWAPIN: Page fault does iodepth=1 sync io, but it's a little waste if only issue a page size's IO. The obvious solution is doing swap readahead. But the current in-kernel swap readahead is arbitary(always 8 pages), and it always doesn't perform well for both random and sequential access workload. Shaohua introduced a new flag for madvise(MADV_WILLNEED) to do swap prefetch, so the changes happen in userspace API and leave the in-kernel readahead unchanged(but I think some improvement can also be done here). SWAP discard As we know, discard is important for SSD write throughout, but the current swap discard implementation is synchronous. He changed it to async discard which allow discard and write run in the same time. Meanwhile, the unit of discard is also optimized to cluster. Misc: lock contention For many concurrent swapout and swapin , the lock contention such as anon_vma or swap_lock is high, so he changed the swap_lock to a per-swap lock. But there still have some lock contention in very high speed SSD because of swapcache address_space lock. Zproject (led by Bob Liu) Bob gave us a very nice introduction about the current memory compression status. Now there are 3 projects(zswap/zram/zcache) which all aim at smooth swap IO storm and promote performance, but they all have their own pros and cons. ZSWAP It is implemented based on frontswap API and it uses a dynamic allocater named Zbud to allocate free pages. Zbud means pairs of zpages are "buddied" and it can only store at most two compressed pages in one page frame, so the max compress ratio is 50%. Each page frame is lru-linked and can do shink in memory pressure. If the compressed memory pool reach its limitation, shink or reclaim happens. It decompress the page frame into two new allocated pages and then write them to real swap device, but it can fail when allocating the two pages. ZRAM Acts as a compressed ramdisk and used as swap device, and it use zsmalloc as its allocator which has high density but may have fragmentation issues. Besides, page reclaim is hard since it will need more pages to uncompress and free just one page. ZRAM is preferred by embedded system which may not have any real swap device. Now both ZRAM and ZSWAP are in driver/staging tree, and in the mm community there are some disscussions of merging ZRAM into ZSWAP or viceversa, but no agreement yet. ZCACHE Handles file page compression but it is removed out of staging recently. From industry (led by Tang Jie, LSI) An LSI engineer introduced several new produces to us. The first is raid5/6 cards that it use full stripe writes to improve performance. The 2nd one he introduced is SandForce flash controller, who can understand data file types (data entropy) to reduce write amplification (WA) for nearly all writes. It's called DuraWrite and typical WA is 0.5. What's more, if enable its Dynamic Logical Capacity function module, the controller can do data compression which is transparent to upper layer. LSI testing shows that with this virtual capacity enables 1x TB drive can support up to 2x TB capacity, but the application must monitor free flash space to maintain optimal performance and to guard against free flash space exhaustion. He said the most useful application is for datebase. Another thing I think it's worth to mention is that a NV-DRAM memory in NMR/Raptor which is directly exposed to host system. Applications can directly access the NV-DRAM via a memory address - using standard system call mmap(). He said that it is very useful for database logging now. This kind of NVM produces are beginning to appear in recent years, and it is said that Samsung is building a research center in China for related produces. IMHO, NVM will bring an effect to current os layer especially on file system, e.g. its journaling may need to redesign to fully utilize these nonvolatile memory. OCFS2 (led by Canquan Shen) Without a doubt, HuaWei is the biggest contributor to OCFS2 in the past two years. They have posted 46 upstream patches and 39 patches have been merged. Their current project is based on 32/64 nodes cluster, but they also tried 128 nodes at the experimental stage. The major work they are working is to support ATS (atomic test and set), it can be works with DLM at the same time. Looks this idea is inspired by the vmware VMFS locking, i.e, http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/05/vmfs-locking-uncovered.html CLK - 18th October 2013 Improving Linux Development with Better Tools (Andi Kleen) This talk focused on how to find/solve bugs along with the Linux complexity growing. Generally, we can do this with the following kind of tools: Static code checkers tools. e.g, sparse, smatch, coccinelle, clang checker, checkpatch, gcc -W/LTO, stanse. This can help check a lot of things, simple mistakes, complex problems, but the challenges are: some are very slow, false positives, may need a concentrated effort to get false positives down. Especially, no static checker I found can follow indirect calls (“OO in C”, common in kernel): struct foo_ops { int (*do_foo)(struct foo *obj); } foo->do_foo(foo); Dynamic runtime checkers, e.g, thread checkers, kmemcheck, lockdep. Ideally all kernel code would come with a test suite, then someone could run all the dynamic checkers. Fuzzers/test suites. e.g, Trinity is a great tool, it finds many bugs, but needs manual model for each syscall. Modern fuzzers around using automatic feedback, but notfor kernel yet: http://taviso.decsystem.org/making_software_dumber.pdf Debuggers/Tracers to understand code, e.g, ftrace, can dump on events/oops/custom triggers, but still too much overhead in many cases to run always during debug. Tools to read/understand source, e.g, grep/cscope work great for many cases, but do not understand indirect pointers (OO in C model used in kernel), give us all “do_foo” instances: struct foo_ops { int (*do_foo)(struct foo *obj); } = { .do_foo = my_foo }; foo>do_foo(foo); That would be great to have a cscope like tool that understands this based on types/initializers XFS: The High Performance Enterprise File System (Jeff Liu) [slides] I gave a talk for introducing the disk layout, unique features, as well as the recent changes.   The slides include some charts to reflect the performances between XFS/Btrfs/Ext4 for small files. About a dozen users raised their hands when I asking who has experienced with XFS. I remembered that when I asked the same question in LinuxCon/Japan, only 3 people raised their hands, but they are Chris Mason, Ric Wheeler, and another attendee. The attendee questions were mainly focused on stability, and comparison with other file systems. Linux Containers (Feng Gao) The speaker introduced us that the purpose for those kind of namespaces, include mount/UTS/IPC/Network/Pid/User, as well as the system API/ABI. For the userspace tools, He mainly focus on the Libvirt LXC rather than us(LXC). Libvirt LXC is another userspace container management tool, implemented as one type of libvirt driver, it can manage containers, create namespace, create private filesystem layout for container, Create devices for container and setup resources controller via cgroup. In this talk, Feng also mentioned another two possible new namespaces in the future, the 1st is the audit, but not sure if it should be assigned to user namespace or not. Another is about syslog, but the question is do we really need it? In-memory Compression (Bob Liu) Same as CLSF, a nice introduction that I have already mentioned above. Misc There were some other talks related to ACPI based memory hotplug, smart wake-affinity in scheduler etc., but my head is not big enough to record all those things. -- Jeff Liu

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• eBooks on iPad vs. Kindle: More Debate than Smackdown

  - by andrewbrust

  When the iPad was presented at its San Francisco launch event on January 28th, Steve Jobs spent a significant amount of time explaining how well the device would serve as an eBook reader. He showed the iBooks reader application and iBookstore and laid down the gauntlet before Amazon and its beloved Kindle device. Almost immediately afterwards, criticism came rushing forth that the iPad could never beat the Kindle for book reading. The curious part of that criticism is that virtually no one offering it had actually used the iPad yet. A few weeks later, on April 3rd, the iPad was released for sale in the United States. I bought one on that day and in the few additional weeks that have elapsed, I’ve given quite a workout to most of its capabilities, including its eBook features. I’ve also spent some time with the Kindle, albeit a first-generation model, to see how it actually compares to the iPad. I had some expectations going in, but I came away with conclusions about each device that were more scenario-based than absolute. I present my findings to you here.   Vital Statistics Let’s start with an inventory of each device’s underlying technology. The iPad has a color, backlit LCD screen and an on-screen keyboard. It has a battery which, on a full charge, lasts anywhere from 6-10 hours. The Kindle offers a monochrome, reflective E Ink display, a physical keyboard and a battery that on my first gen loaner unit can go up to a week between charges (Amazon claims the battery on the Kindle 2 can last up to 2 weeks on a single charge). The Kindle connects to Amazon’s Kindle Store using a 3G modem (the technology and network vary depending on the model) that incurs no airtime service charges whatsoever. The iPad units that are on-sale today work over WiFi only. 3G-equipped models will be on sale shortly and will command a $130 premium over their WiFi-only counterparts. 3G service on the iPad, in the U.S. from AT&T, will be fee-based, with a 250MB plan at $14.99 per month and an unlimited plan at $29.99. No contract is required for 3G service. All these tech specs aside, I think a more useful observation is that the iPad is a multi-purpose Internet-connected entertainment device, while the Kindle is a dedicated reading device. The question is whether those differences in design and intended use create a clear-cut winner for reading electronic publications. Let’s take a look at each device, in isolation, now.   Kindle To me, what’s most innovative about the Kindle is its E Ink display. E Ink really looks like ink on a sheet of paper. It requires no backlight, it’s fully visible in direct sunlight and it causes almost none of the eyestrain that LCD-based computer display technology (like that used on the iPad) does. It’s really versatile in an all-around way. Forgive me if this sounds precious, but reading on it is really a joy. In fact, it’s a genuinely relaxing experience. Through the Kindle Store, Amazon allows users to download books (including audio books), magazines, newspapers and blog feeds. Books and magazines can be purchased either on a single-issue basis or as an annual subscription. Books, of course, are purchased singly. Oddly, blogs are not free, but instead carry a monthly subscription fee, typically $1.99. To me this is ludicrous, but I suppose the free 3G service is partially to blame. Books and magazine issues download quickly. Magazine and blog subscriptions cause new issues or posts to be pushed to your device on an automated basis. Available blogs include 9000-odd feeds that Amazon offers on the Kindle Store; unless I missed something, arbitrary RSS feeds are not supported (though there are third party workarounds to this limitation). The shopping experience is integrated well, has an huge selection, and offers certain graphical perks. For example, magazine and newspaper logos are displayed in menus, and book cover thumbnails appear as well. A simple search mechanism is provided and text entry through the physical keyboard is relatively painless. It’s very easy and straightforward to enter the store, find something you like and start reading it quickly. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s even faster. Given Kindle’s high portability, very reliable battery, instant-on capability and highly integrated content acquisition, it makes reading on whim, and in random spurts of downtime, very attractive. The Kindle’s home screen lists all of your publications, and easily lets you select one, then start reading it. Once opened, publications display in crisp, attractive text that is adjustable in size. “Turning” pages is achieved through buttons dedicated to the task. Notes can be recorded, bookmarks can be saved and pages can be saved as clippings. I am not an avid book reader, and yet I found the Kindle made it really fun, convenient and soothing to read. There’s something about the easy access to the material and the simplicity of the display that makes the Kindle seduce you into chilling out and reading page after page. On the other hand, the Kindle has an awkward navigation interface. While menus are displayed clearly on the screen, the method of selecting menu items is tricky: alongside the right-hand edge of the main display is a thin column that acts as a second display. It has a white background, and a scrollable silver cursor that is moved up or down through the use of the device’s scrollwheel. Picking a menu item on the main display involves scrolling the silver cursor to a position parallel to that menu item and pushing the scrollwheel in. This navigation technique creates a disconnect, literally. You don’t really click on a selection so much as you gesture toward it. I got used to this technique quickly, but I didn’t love it. It definitely created a kind of anxiety in me, making me feel the need to speed through menus and get to my destination document quickly. Once there, I could calm down and relax. Books are great on the Kindle. Magazines and newspapers much less so. I found the rendering of photographs, and even illustrations, to be unacceptably crude. For this reason, I expect that reading textbooks on the Kindle may leave students wanting. I found that the original flow and layout of any publication was sacrificed on the Kindle. In effect, browsing a magazine or newspaper was almost impossible. Reading the text of individual articles was enjoyable, but having to read this way made the whole experience much more “a la carte” than cohesive and thematic between articles. I imagine that for academic journals this is ideal, but for consumer publications it imposes a stripped-down, low-fidelity experience that evokes a sense of deprivation. In general, the Kindle is great for reading text. For just about anything else, especially activity that involves exploratory browsing, meandering and short-attention-span reading, it presents a real barrier to entry and adoption. Avid book readers will enjoy the Kindle (if they’re not already). It’s a great device for losing oneself in a book over long sittings. Multitaskers who are more interested in periodicals, be they online or off, will like it much less, as they will find compromise, and even sacrifice, to be palpable.   iPad The iPad is a very different device from the Kindle. While the Kindle is oriented to pages of text, the iPad orbits around applications and their interfaces. Be it the pinch and zoom experience in the browser, the rich media features that augment content on news and weather sites, or the ability to interact with social networking services like Twitter, the iPad is versatile. While it shares a slate-like form factor with the Kindle, it’s effectively an elegant personal computer. One of its many features is the iBook application and integration of the iBookstore. But it’s a multi-purpose device. That turns out to be good and bad, depending on what you’re reading. The iBookstore is great for browsing. It’s color, rich animation-laden user interface make it possible to shop for books, rather than merely search and acquire them. Unfortunately, its selection is rather sparse at the moment. If you’re looking for a New York Times bestseller, or other popular titles, you should be OK. If you want to read something more specialized, it’s much harder. Unlike the awkward navigation interface of the Kindle, the iPad offers a nearly flawless touch-screen interface that seduces the user into tinkering and kibitzing every bit as much as the Kindle lulls you into a deep, concentrated read. It’s a dynamic and interactive device, whereas the Kindle is static and passive. The iBook reader is slick and fun. Use the iPad in landscape mode and you can read the book in 2-up (left/right 2-page) display; use it in portrait mode and you can read one page at a time. Rather than clicking a hardware button to turn pages, you simply drag and wipe from right-to-left to flip the single or right-hand page. The page actually travels through an animated path as it would in a physical book. The intuitiveness of the interface is uncanny. The reader also accommodates saving of bookmarks, searching of the text, and the ability to highlight a word and look it up in a dictionary. Pages display brightly and clearly. They’re easy to read. But the backlight and the glare made me less comfortable than I was with the Kindle. The knowledge that completely different applications (including the Web and email and Twitter) were just a few taps away made me antsy and very tempted to task-switch. The knowledge that battery life is an issue created subtle discomfort. If the Kindle makes you feel like you’re in a library reading room, then the iPad makes you feel, at best, like you’re under fluorescent lights at a Barnes and Noble or Borders store. If you’re lucky, you’d be on a couch or at a reading table in the store, but you might also be standing up, in the aisles. Clearly, I didn’t find this conducive to focused and sustained reading. But that may have more to do with my own tendency to read periodicals far more than books, and my neurotic . And, truth be known, the book reading experience, when not explicitly compared to Kindle’s, was still pleasant. It is also important to point out that Kindle Store-sourced books can be read on the iPad through a Kindle reader application, from Amazon, specific to the device. This offered a less rich experience than the iBooks reader, but it was completely adequate. Despite the Kindle brand of the reader, however, it offered little in terms of simulating the reading experience on its namesake device. When it comes to periodicals, the iPad wins hands down. Magazines, even if merely scanned images of their print editions, read on the iPad in a way that felt similar to reading hard copy. The full color display, touch navigation and even the ability to render advertisements in their full glory makes the iPad a great way to read through any piece of work that is measured in pages, rather than chapters. There are many ways to get magazines and newspapers onto the iPad, including the Zinio reader, and publication-specific applications like the Wall Street Journal’s and Popular Science’s. The New York Times’ free Editors’ Choice application offers a Times Reader-like interface to a subset of the Gray Lady’s daily content. The completely Web-based but iPad-optimized Times Skimmer site (at www.nytimes.com/timesskimmer) works well too. Even conventional Web sites themselves can be read much like magazines, given the iPad’s ability to zoom in on the text and crop out advertisements on the margins. While the Kindle does have an experimental Web browser, it reminded me a lot of early mobile phone browsers, only in a larger size. For text-heavy sites with simple layout, it works fine. For just about anything else, it becomes more trouble than it’s worth. And given the way magazine articles make me think of things I want to look up online, I think that’s a real liability for the Kindle.   Summing Up What I came to realize is that the Kindle isn’t so much a computer or even an Internet device as it is a printer. While it doesn’t use physical paper, it still renders its content a page at a time, just like a laser printer does, and its output appears strikingly similar. You can read the rendered text, but you can’t interact with it in any way. That’s why the navigation requires a separate cursor display area. And because of the page-oriented rendering behavior, turning pages causes a flash on the display and requires a sometimes long pause before the next page is rendered. The good side of this is that once the page is generated, no battery power is required to display it. That makes for great battery life, optimal viewing under most lighting conditions (as long as there is some light) and low-eyestrain text-centric display of content. The Kindle is highly portable, has an excellent selection in its store and is refreshingly distraction-free. All of this is ideal for reading books. And iPad doesn’t offer any of it. What iPad does offer is versatility, variety, richness and luxury. It’s flush with accoutrements even if it’s low on focused, sustained text display. That makes it inferior to the Kindle for book reading. But that also makes it better than the Kindle for almost everything else. As such, and given that its book reading experience is still decent (even if not superior), I think the iPad will give Kindle a run for its money. True book lovers, and people on a budget, will want the Kindle. People with a robust amount of discretionary income may want both devices. Everyone else who is interested in a slate form factor e-reading device, especially if they also wish to have leisure-friendly Internet access, will likely choose the iPad exclusively. One thing is for sure: iPad has reduced Kindle’s market, and may have shifted its mass market potential to a mere niche play. If Amazon is smart, it will improve its iPad-based Kindle reader app significantly. It can then leverage the iPad channel as a significant market for the Kindle Store. After all, selling the eBooks themselves is what Amazon should care most about.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 01, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 01, 2012Popular Releasesxyzzy+: April 1, 2012: SHA1: 6a07f0ed8d8006f26936a5bb45cf85405d8de8a4 WarningThis release is not for daily use, just for fun. keymaps are broken. (For example, C-g, #\TAB and #\RET will not work in minibuffer) dialogs are completely broken. Usual xyzzy+class lisp_object; typedef lisp_object *lisp; lsymbol *p = ldata <lsymbol, Tsymbol>::alloc (); Today's xyzzy+ref class lisp_object; typedef lisp_object ^lisp; lsymbol ^p = gcnew lsymbol (Tsymbol); PrerequisitesMicrosoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Pack...VidCoder: 1.3.2: Added option for the minimum title length to scan. Added support to enable or disable LibDVDNav. Added option to prompt to delete source files after clearing successful completed items. Added option to disable remembering recent files and folders. Tweaked number box to only select all on a quick click.MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Light Indexed Deferred Rendering: Implements light indexed deferred using per-tile light lists calculated in a compute shader, as well as a traditional deferred renderer that uses a compute shader for per-tile light culling and per-pixel shading.Extended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.6.0: Want an easier way to install the Extended WPF Toolkit?The Extended WPF Toolkit is available on Nuget. What's in the 1.6.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner Calculator CalculatorUpDown CheckListBox - Breaking Changes CheckComboBox - New Control ChildWindow CollectionEditor CollectionEditorDialog ColorCanvas ColorPicker DateTimePicker DateTimeUpDown DecimalUpDown DoubleUpDown DropDownButton IntegerUpDown Magnifier MaskedTextBox MessageBox MultiLineTex...ScriptIDE: Release 4.4: ...Media Companion: MC 3.434b Release: General This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. If there are no major problems, by the end of the week it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable! The latest mc_com.exe should be included too! TV Bug fix - crash when using XBMC scraper for TV episodes. Bug fix - episode count update when adding new episodes. Bug fix - crash when actors name was missing. Enhanced TV scrape progress text. Enhancements made to missing episodes display. Movies Bug fix - hide "Play Trailer" when multisaev...Better Explorer: Better Explorer 2.0.0.831 Alpha: - A new release with: - many bugfixes - changed icon - added code for more failsafe registry usage on x64 systems - not needed regfix anymore - added ribbon shortcut keys - Other fixes Note: If you have problems opening system libraries, a suggestion was given to copy all of these libraries and then delete the originals. Thanks to Gaugamela for that! (see discussion here: 349015 ) Note2: I was upload again the setup due to missing file!LINQ Extensions Library: 1.0.2.7: Append and Prepend extensions (1.0.2.7) IndexOf extensions (1.0.2.7) New Align/Match extensions (1.0.2.6) Ready to use stable code with comprehensive unit tests and samples New Pivot extensions New Filter ExtensionsMonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5: The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes, implements optimisations and adds key features. MonoGame now has the capability to use OpenGLES 2.0 on Android and iOS devices, meaning it now supports custom shaders across mobile and desktop platforms. Also included in this release are native orientation animations on iOS devices and better Orientation support for Android. There have also been a lot of bug fixes since t...SQL Server Reporting Services MSBuild Tasks: Beta Release 1.1.15427: This update beta release base on feedback from a user. Also a coding error was corrected. The updates are as follows: Remove Redundant task: CreateDataSubscriptions. Updated CreateSubscriptions To handle both Subscriptions and Data-Driven Subscriptions. Also the change how the CreateSubscriptions works. If the report, for wihch if define for the subscription, already has subscription define then by default all the Subscriptions for that report are not deploy. This can be overr...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Alpha 3: New in this release: Added components: Microcontroller Demultiplexer Flip & rotate components Open XML files from older versions of Circuit Diagram Text formatting for components New CDDX syntax Other fixesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.1 CMS (Beta): Beta build for testing - please report issues at issues.umbraco.org (Latest uploaded: 5.1.0.123) What's new in 5.1? The full list of changes is on our http://progress.umbraco.org task tracking page. It shows items complete for 5.1, and 5.1 includes items for 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 listed there too. Here's two headline acts: Members5.1 adds support for backoffice editing of Members. We support the pairing up of our content type system in Hive with regular ASP.NET Membership providers (we ship a def...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.2.11: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to Version 2.1.2.11Code Changes 1. The project is now licenced under the Mozilla Public Licence 2. 2. User interface control and associated data access layer classes have been added to aid developers integrating 51Degrees.mobi into wider projects such as content management systems or web hosting management solutions. Use the following in a web form or user control to access these new UI components. <%@ Register Assembly="FiftyOne.Foundation" Namespace="...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 3.1: slight performance improvement (5% - 10%) new JsonException classPicturethrill: Version 2.3.28.0: Straightforward image selection. New clean UI look. Super stable. Simplified user experience.SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQL Monitor 4.2 alpha 16: 1. finally fixed problem with logic fault checking for temporary table name... I really mean finally ...ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5: A slew of bug-fixes with a few new features sprinkled in. This release also upgrades the SciLexer and SciLexer64 DLLs to version 3.0.4. The official stuff: Issue # Title 32402 32402 27137 27137 31548 31548 30179 30179 24932 24932 29701 29701 31238 31238 26875 26875 30052 30052 Harness: Harness 2.0.2: change to .NET Framework Client Profile bug fix the download dialog auto answer. bug fix setFocus command. add "SendKeys" command. remove "closeAll" command. minor bugs fixed.BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.161: Below is a list of fixes in this release. Bug BGN-2092 - Link in Email "visit your profile" not functional BGN-2083 - Manager of bugnet can not edit project when it is not public BGN-2080 - clicking on a link in the project summary causes error (0.9.152.0) BGN-2070 - Missing Functionality On Feed.aspx BGN-2069 - Calendar View does not work BGN-2068 - Time tracking totals not ok BGN-2067 - Issues List Page Size Bug: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the si...YAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.6.1 RTW: v1.9.6.1 FINAL is .NET v4.0 ONLY v1.9.6.1 has: Performance Improvements .NET v4.0 improvements Improved FaceBook Integration KNOWN ISSUES WITH THIS RELEASE: ON INSTALL PLEASE DON'T CHECK "Upgrade BBCode Extensions...". More complete change list and discussion here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postst14201_v1-9-6-1-RTW-Dated--3-26-2012.aspxNew Projects.NET Micro Framework - String Extensions: String Extension class library for .NET Micro Framework. This includes basic type conversion from 'byte' to 'string'.AGS: AGSAtlas Engine: Atlas is a game object-component engine using XNA 4 for Windows Phone 7.1. It is currently very early in it's development and is very much a work in progress.Cet Open Toolbox: Public repository for open sources projects brought to you by CET Electronics. Featuring .Net, .Net Micro Framework and several related technologies.ClassM: ClassM is an app that uses Metro Style for Windows 8. This application is intended to facilitate the management of classes taught by a teacher.CommandLineHelp: CommandLineHelp is a framework for simplifying the automated execution of command-line programs and saving their output.Conectayas: Conectayas is an open source "Connect Four" alike game but transformable to "Tic-Tac-Toe" and to a lot of similar games that uses mouse. Written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML). Very configurable. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.Crudo: CRUDO - The MCG (Model-Controller-Generator) CGF (Code Generation Framework) Visit The Project HomePage: http://adityayadav.com/CRUDO_The_MCG_Model_Controller_Generator_CGF_Code_Generation_Framework.aspx Licenses: 1) GPL v2 2) Commercial (contact us for information)Desafio Dot.Net: Projeto para o Desafio DotNetFurcadia Heimdall Tester: An application that helps Furcadia technicians test the integrity of the game server. It checks for availability of each heimdall, its connectivity to the rest of the system (horton/tribble) and how often it receives a user compared to the rest of them.GS1: D is a 2D game demo written in C++ and using an API : HAPI for the graphic part and the audio part. All the xml files are handled with tinyXML. It is a vertical scrolling shoot'em up where the player controls a dragon flying in Central Park.GS2: In Zombies, you are a wizard, the most powerful wizard in the world, and two days ago, the Devil forces began to attack our world. The only person capable of stopping them is you, this is why the Devil himself came to you and took your powers. You're now alone, without any weaponHeterogeneous Data Centre: The Heterogeneous Data Centre project supersedes the Materials Data Centre, a JISC-funded initiative to build an infrastructure for materials scientists and engineers to publish their experimental data online. The HDC can support data from any discipline, not just engineering.HJJM Adv. Database Project: Advanced database project for Hughes, Johnson, Johnson, and McShannon.Hundiyas: Hundiyas is an open source "Battleship" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses mouse. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.IpSpy: IpSpy is a Windows Service Application that checks External IP address and if it changed, IpSpy sends Email with new IP to specified email addressMake calculator in asp.net: create calculator in asp.netMarTech SharePoint Sandboxed Solutions: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is missing some key functionalities to make sure SharePoint is easy to use. My Sandbox Solutions adds these missing functionalities and makes it easier for consultants to implement the wanted functionalities. By using sandboxed solutions no farm solution has to be installed and every site can have it own solutions. Sandbox solutions gives flexibility to the site administrator without disturbing the farm administrator and security risks.MDS Administration: Master Data Services Administrator. Compare MDS models from the same or different serversmicrostockUploader: Uploads multiple JPEG images with additional files (RAW, EPS) to multiple microstocks. Supports FTP resume. Supports buggy routers which drop FTP connection after some timeout.Min-Mang: A logical game implementation.Multiverse OS: A Cosmos based O.S.N2F Yverdon Database Helper: A class to aid in performing simple database queries within N2F Yverdon. Also provides the capability to store queries for later use.N2F Yverdon Scryle Manager: This extension will provide a way to manage javascript and stylesheet files for inclusion in your templates. Compression, combination and minification are included.OPSM: OPSM Miner & information projectPatternPro Regular Expression Engine: PatternPro RXE is a Regular Expression Engine coded entirely in C# that has some features not offered in the MS implementation. The PatterProRXE project also contains a multi-state text scanner that makes it easy to create multi-state text scanners and parsers.PinBeiWang: PinBeiWangProgram Options: Parse command line optionsrealestateanalytics: Analytics for real estateRegistrationManagement: registration management of our company using asp.netSchool Project 12: SchoolProject12SelfService: Simple self service projectSMVector3: Vector3 class implemented as float array or with SIMD instructions with the same interface so it is transparant whether you decide to use one version or another. You can also change version during the life cycle of the projects.SVNTAGWC - Tag a SVN working copy: SVNTAGWC will help users and configuration managers tag builds of their projects. It will automatically freeze all external revisions and add all unversioned files to a specified copy (or tag).WeiboImage: a weibo image projectweizhi: sina weibo readerWindows Media Autorization: Windows Media Autorizaton PlugIn for windows media 9 WinRtBehaviors: A project for WinRT Attached behaviorswpfPostgres: Started...ZLib: by zapline 278998871@qq.com???????????: ???????? «???????????», ???????????? ? ?????? ?????????????? ??????????? ???????? ?? C#. ???????? ?? C#.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, April 02, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, April 02, 2012Popular ReleasesDocument.Editor: 2012.2: Whats New for Document.Editor 2012.2: New Save Copy support New Page Setup support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsVidCoder: 1.3.2: Added option for the minimum title length to scan. Added support to enable or disable LibDVDNav. Added option to prompt to delete source files after clearing successful completed items. Added option to disable remembering recent files and folders. Tweaked number box to only select all on a quick click.MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Light Indexed Deferred Rendering: Implements light indexed deferred using per-tile light lists calculated in a compute shader, as well as a traditional deferred renderer that uses a compute shader for per-tile light culling and per-pixel shading.Pcap.Net: Pcap.Net 0.9.0 (66492): Pcap.Net - March 2012 Release Pcap.Net is a .NET wrapper for WinPcap written in C++/CLI and C#. It Features almost all WinPcap features and includes a packet interpretation framework. Version 0.9.0 (Change Set 66492)March 31, 2012 release of the Pcap.Net framework. Follow Pcap.Net on Google+Follow Pcap.Net on Google+ Files Pcap.Net.DevelopersPack.0.9.0.66492.zip - Includes all the tutorial example projects source files, the binaries in a 3rdParty directory and the documentation. It include...Extended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.6.0: Want an easier way to install the Extended WPF Toolkit?The Extended WPF Toolkit is available on Nuget. What's in the 1.6.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner Calculator CalculatorUpDown CheckListBox - Breaking Changes CheckComboBox - New Control ChildWindow CollectionEditor CollectionEditorDialog ColorCanvas ColorPicker DateTimePicker DateTimeUpDown DecimalUpDown DoubleUpDown DropDownButton IntegerUpDown Magnifier MaskedTextBox MessageBox MultiLineTex...ScriptIDE: Release 4.4: ...Media Companion: MC 3.434b Release: General This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. If there are no major problems, by the end of the week it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable! The latest mc_com.exe should be included too! TV Bug fix - crash when using XBMC scraper for TV episodes. Bug fix - episode count update when adding new episodes. Bug fix - crash when actors name was missing. Enhanced TV scrape progress text. Enhancements made to missing episodes display. Movies Bug fix - hide "Play Trailer" when multisaev...Better Explorer: Better Explorer 2.0.0.831 Alpha: - A new release with: - many bugfixes - changed icon - added code for more failsafe registry usage on x64 systems - not needed regfix anymore - added ribbon shortcut keys - Other fixes Note: If you have problems opening system libraries, a suggestion was given to copy all of these libraries and then delete the originals. Thanks to Gaugamela for that! (see discussion here: 349015 ) Note2: I was upload again the setup due to missing file!MonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5: The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes, implements optimisations and adds key features. MonoGame now has the capability to use OpenGLES 2.0 on Android and iOS devices, meaning it now supports custom shaders across mobile and desktop platforms. Also included in this release are native orientation animations on iOS devices and better Orientation support for Android. There have also been a lot of bug fixes since t...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Alpha 3: New in this release: Added components: Microcontroller Demultiplexer Flip & rotate components Open XML files from older versions of Circuit Diagram Text formatting for components New CDDX syntax Other fixesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.1 CMS (Beta): Beta build for testing - please report issues at issues.umbraco.org (Latest uploaded: 5.1.0.123) What's new in 5.1? The full list of changes is on our http://progress.umbraco.org task tracking page. It shows items complete for 5.1, and 5.1 includes items for 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 listed there too. Here's two headline acts: Members5.1 adds support for backoffice editing of Members. We support the pairing up of our content type system in Hive with regular ASP.NET Membership providers (we ship a def...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.2.11: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to Version 2.1.2.11Code Changes 1. The project is now licenced under the Mozilla Public Licence 2. 2. User interface control and associated data access layer classes have been added to aid developers integrating 51Degrees.mobi into wider projects such as content management systems or web hosting management solutions. Use the following in a web form or user control to access these new UI components. <%@ Register Assembly="FiftyOne.Foundation" Namespace="...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 3.1: slight performance improvement (5% - 10%) new JsonException classPicturethrill: Version 2.3.28.0: Straightforward image selection. New clean UI look. Super stable. Simplified user experience.SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQL Monitor 4.2 alpha 16: 1. finally fixed problem with logic fault checking for temporary table name... I really mean finally ...ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5: A slew of bug-fixes with a few new features sprinkled in. This release also upgrades the SciLexer and SciLexer64 DLLs to version 3.0.4. The official stuff: Issue # Title 32402 32402 27137 27137 31548 31548 30179 30179 24932 24932 29701 29701 31238 31238 26875 26875 30052 30052 Vodigi Open Source Interactive Digital Signage: Vodigi Release 5.0: Vodigi Release 5.0 The .ZIP file for this release contains everything you need to setup and install Vodigi 5.0. Setup and intallation documentation is included in the .ZIP file. Vodigi Release 5.0 consists of the following core components: Vodigi Administrator Web Site Vodigi Player Windows Application Vodigi Media Uploader Windows Application Vodigi Databases Refer to the documentation included in the .ZIP file to setup and configure your servers and player devices for this release.Harness: Harness 2.0.2: change to .NET Framework Client Profile bug fix the download dialog auto answer. bug fix setFocus command. add "SendKeys" command. remove "closeAll" command. minor bugs fixed.BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.161: Below is a list of fixes in this release. Bug BGN-2092 - Link in Email "visit your profile" not functional BGN-2083 - Manager of bugnet can not edit project when it is not public BGN-2080 - clicking on a link in the project summary causes error (0.9.152.0) BGN-2070 - Missing Functionality On Feed.aspx BGN-2069 - Calendar View does not work BGN-2068 - Time tracking totals not ok BGN-2067 - Issues List Page Size Bug: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the si...YAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.6.1 RTW: v1.9.6.1 FINAL is .NET v4.0 ONLY v1.9.6.1 has: Performance Improvements .NET v4.0 improvements Improved FaceBook Integration KNOWN ISSUES WITH THIS RELEASE: ON INSTALL PLEASE DON'T CHECK "Upgrade BBCode Extensions...". More complete change list and discussion here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postst14201_v1-9-6-1-RTW-Dated--3-26-2012.aspxNew ProjectsAdvanced JavaScript outlining for Visual Studio 11: This is extension for Visual Studio 11 that adds additional outlining for JavaScript Editorakrypt2: qt-based GUI for libaxel http://axelkenzo.ru/index.php?section=libaxel.downloadaluminium: aluminium calculationAuditDbContext - Entity Framework Auditing Context: AuditDbContext provides entity change auditing for Entity Framework POCO entities.AutoBox: Creates a fresh .Net developer environment from a bare OS utilizing powershell, chocolatey and webpi.Bookregator: Bookregator is a C# application written to aggregate data using Amazon's Advertising API, WorldCat, and GoodReads.Bootstrap.ConfirmModal: There is a situation that we need user to confirm before they proceed their action. You don’t want to accidently delete very important information. So I come up the idea to extend the bootstrap modal popup to create a confirm modal before calling the function to delete some stuffColour Lovers .NET: A .NET library for the Colour Lovers API.Cursos y Causas: Cursos y Causas desarrollado en asp.net MVCDataModels: DataModels is a project which aims to allow for easy reuse of specific data models using a very simple API. easy framework is used to fast work: codingEGM Engine: The engine for the Express Game Maker editor.E-Junkey: Project personalExpress Game Maker: You can use Express Game Maker to makes games without the need to write a single line of code! EGM's source is shared and is constantly improved by developers around the world. Learn Express Game Maker in no time with tutorials, videos and templates. Share what you learn with the community and ask the community for help. Express Game Maker is free, if you paid for it anywhere, we suggest you ask for a refund.Extending Razor Engine: Extending Razor Engine. Nice and clean solution for CMS system, such as Kentico, red dot, etc.FloodWarn: A series of server and client apps for monitoring flood levels on the Snoqualmie River in King County, Washington.GetThatList: With GetThatList people will find an easy way to copy a music playlist and its songs to another location, being another folder or a remote computer. It is designed so that it can be exposed to the final user as an standalone application or a Shell extension for playlist files.HashMapper - Object-Hash Mapper for Redis: Object-Hash Mapper for Redis and BookSleeve.hostedit: small utility to quickly change the host file. toggles a single clickI-Control: SecretIIS Hosts File Manager: Here's an IIS 7.5 and 8.0 module to add host headers to the Hosts file without having to edit it with notepad. Very useful if you create a lot of web sites for testing or demo purposes. Interval Trainer: Inspired by new research* on interval training this application will help you easily transition into interval based workouts. Current Features Two interval cycles that can be individually customized in time length Preloaded ideal workout for aerobic exercise based on suggested research* (high intensity sprints during workout interval, light jogs during rest) Coming Soon Custom interval workouts with as many intervals in a cycle as necessary Persistent workout settings *Links to t...MicroRuntime: The MicroRuntime project is a .NET utility library.MS Office Word Navigation: Navigate forward/backward inside a Word document MvcFlow: Integration between Workflow Foundation 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4NewLineReplacer: Replace letter fast and easy in great textfilesObject-Oriented CAML: Using CAML objectsOpenCover: A code coverage tool for .NET 2 and above, support for 32 and 64 processes (including Silverlight) with both branch and sequence points; now supporting coverage by test feature. This is a mirror of the original github repository to allow codeplex users to contribute. The latest downloads can be found here https://github.com/sawilde/opencover/downloads and is also available using nuget. Pavings.NET: Library for applied interval analysis including intervals, boxes and sub-pavings. Interval analysis is a method of approximating sets with any degree of precision and it has applications from optimization to robotics. Inspired by book "Applied Interval Analysis" by Luc Jaulin et al.proyectoIntegrador3: Proyecto Integrador 3QPAPrintLib: Print every document by its recommended programmsChord: Typing text on the consoles doesn’t have to mean another trauma. Having to navigate to each letter with arrows and analog sticks is really inefficient & lame. In fact you can easily encode each character as a combination of positions of two analog sticksServer DateTime: Server DateTime renders the date and time from the server and make it active using javascript. It is in Military Time Format.SjclHelpers: Helpers for using the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library with .NET.SSAS AMO DB: SSAS AMO DB is a database version of AMO which helps to view the metadata stored in the SSAS cube. The Metadata will be loaded from the SSAS cube using AMO into a SQL Server database using SSIS package. From that database user can generate reports for the SSAS metadata. This database stores the below SSAS objects and their properties Server Databases DataSource DataSourceView DataSourceViewTablecolumns Cube CubeDimension DimensionAttribute AttributeKeyColumns AttributeKeyColum...Stump: A really small BDD framework built on top of nunitSvnbox.org svn sync project (dropbox like): Sync your folder on svn repository work as a teamTextShadowWrapper: TextShadowWrapper is a custom server control for ASP.NET web pages. It inherits from System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label and supports CSS3 text shadows.tjnetSite: Web Site for the Tijuana .Net User groupTönnenKlapps: XNA game where you try to smash a 3D spinning barrel using the correct coloured buttons and the right timing.WP7 Selected Pivot: an example showing how to navigate from one page to desired pivot on another pageXAML Metro Application Isolated Storage Helper: XAMLMetroAppIsolatedStorageHelper helps to Save, Retrieve and Delete structured data in the Isolated Storage. This helper class helps in XAML based Metro application. xsockets: XSockets Test

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• Building a SOA/BPM/BAM Cluster Part I &ndash; Preparing the Environment

  - by antony.reynolds

  An increasing number of customers are using SOA Suite in a cluster configuration, I might hazard to say that the majority of production deployments are now using SOA clusters.  So I thought it may be useful to detail the steps in building an 11g cluster and explain a little about why things are done the way they are. In this series of posts I will explain how to build a SOA/BPM cluster using the Enterprise Deployment Guide. This post will explain the setting required to prepare the cluster for installation and configuration. Software Required The following software is required for an 11.1.1.3 SOA/BPM install. Software Version Notes Oracle Database Certified databases are listed here SOA & BPM Suites require a working database installation. Repository Creation Utility (RCU) 11.1.1.3 If upgrading an 11.1.1.2 repository then a separate script is available. Web Tier Utilities 11.1.1.3 Provides Web Server, 11.1.1.3 is an upgrade to 11.1.1.2, so 11.1.1.2 must be installed first. Web Tier Utilities 11.1.1.3 Web Server, 11.1.1.3 Patch.  You can use the 11.1.1.2 version without problems. Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 10.3.3 This is the host platform for 11.1.1.3 SOA/BPM Suites. SOA Suite 11.1.1.2 SOA Suite 11.1.1.3 is an upgrade to 11.1.1.2, so 11.1.1.2 must be installed first. SOA Suite 11.1.1.3 SOA Suite 11.1.1.3 patch, requires 11.1.12 to have been installed. My installation was performed on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 64-bit. Database I will not cover setting up the database in this series other than to identify the database requirements.  If setting up a SOA cluster then ideally we would also be using a RAC database.  I assume that this is running on separate machines to the SOA cluster.  Section 2.1, “Database”, of the EDG covers the database configuration in detail. Settings The database should have processes set to at least 400 if running SOA/BPM and BAM. alter system set processes=400 scope=spfile Run RCU The Repository Creation Utility creates the necessary database tables for the SOA Suite.  The RCU can be run from any machine that can access the target database.  In 11g the RCU creates a number of pre-defined users and schema with a user defiend prefix.  This allows you to have multiple 11g installations in the same database. After running the RCU you need to grant some additional privileges to the soainfra user.  The soainfra user should have privileges on the transaction tables. grant select on sys.dba_pending_transactions to prefix_soainfra Grant force any transaction to prefix_soainfra Machines The cluster will be built on the following machines. EDG Name is the name used for this machine in the EDG. Notes are a description of the purpose of the machine. EDG Name Notes LB External load balancer to distribute load across and failover between web servers. WEBHOST1 Hosts a web server. WEBHOST2 Hosts a web server. SOAHOST1 Hosts SOA components. SOAHOST2 Hosts SOA components. BAMHOST1 Hosts BAM components. BAMHOST2 Hosts BAM components. Note that it is possible to collapse the BAM servers so that they run on the same machines as the SOA servers. In this case BAMHOST1 and SOAHOST1 would be the same, as would BAMHOST2 and SOAHOST2. The cluster may include more than 2 servers and in this case we add SOAHOST3, SOAHOST4 etc as needed. My cluster has WEBHOST1, SOAHOST1 and BAMHOST1 all running on a single machine. Software Components The cluster will use the following software components. EDG Name is the name used for this machine in the EDG. Type is the type of component, generally a WebLogic component. Notes are a description of the purpose of the component. EDG Name Type Notes AdminServer Admin Server Domain Admin Server WLS_WSM1 Managed Server Web Services Manager Policy Manager Server WLS_WSM2 Managed Server Web Services Manager Policy Manager Server WLS_SOA1 Managed Server SOA/BPM Managed Server WLS_SOA2 Managed Server SOA/BPM Managed Server WLS_BAM1 Managed Server BAM Managed Server running Active Data Cache WLS_BAM2 Managed Server BAM Manager Server without Active Data Cache   Node Manager Will run on all hosts with WLS servers OHS1 Web Server Oracle HTTP Server OHS2 Web Server Oracle HTTP Server LB Load Balancer Load Balancer, not part of SOA Suite The above assumes a 2 node cluster. Network Configuration The SOA cluster requires an extensive amount of network configuration.  I would recommend assigning a private sub-net (internal IP addresses such as 10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x or 172.168.x.x) to the cluster for use by addresses that only need to be accessible to the Load Balancer or other cluster members.  Section 2.2, "Network", of the EDG covers the network configuration in detail. EDG Name is the hostname used in the EDG. IP Name is the IP address name used in the EDG. Type is the type of IP address: Fixed is fixed to a single machine. Floating is assigned to one of several machines to allow for server migration. Virtual is assigned to a load balancer and used to distribute load across several machines. Host is the host where this IP address is active.  Note for floating IP addresses a range of hosts is given. Bound By identifies which software component will use this IP address. Scope shows where this IP address needs to be resolved. Cluster scope addresses only have to be resolvable by machines in the cluster, i.e. the machines listed in the previous section.  These addresses are only used for inter-cluster communication or for access by the load balancer. Internal scope addresses Notes are comments on why that type of IP is used. EDG Name IP Name Type Host Bound By Scope Notes ADMINVHN VIP1 Floating SOAHOST1-SOAHOSTn AdminServer Cluster Admin server, must be able to migrate between SOA server machines. SOAHOST1 IP1 Fixed SOAHOST1 NodeManager, WLS_WSM1 Cluster WSM Server 1 does not require server migration. SOAHOST2 IP2 Fixed SOAHOST1 NodeManager, WLS_WSM2 Cluster WSM Server 2 does not require server migration SOAHOST1VHN VIP2 Floating SOAHOST1-SOAHOSTn WLS_SOA1 Cluster SOA server 1, must be able to migrate between SOA server machines SOAHOST2VHN VIP3 Floating SOAHOST1-SOAHOSTn WLS_SOA2 Cluster SOA server 2, must be able to migrate between SOA server machines BAMHOST1 IP4 Fixed BAMHOST1 NodeManager Cluster   BAMHOST1VHN VIP4 Floating BAMHOST1-BAMHOSTn WLS_BAM1 Cluster BAM server 1, must be able to migrate between BAM server machines BAMHOST2 IP3 Fixed BAMHOST2 NodeManager, WLS_BAM2 Cluster BAM server 2 does not require server migration WEBHOST1 IP5 Fixed WEBHOST1 OHS1 Cluster   WEBHOST2 IP6 Fixed WEBHOST2 OHS2 Cluster   soa.mycompany.com VIP5 Virtual LB LB Public External access point to SOA cluster. admin.mycompany.com VIP6 Virtual LB LB Internal Internal access to WLS console and EM soainternal.mycompany.com VIP7 Virtual LB LB Internal Internal access point to SOA cluster Floating IP addresses are IP addresses that may be re-assigned between machines in the cluster.  For example in the event of failure of SOAHOST1 then WLS_SOA1 will need to be migrated to another server.  In this case VIP2 (SOAHOST1VHN) will need to be activated on the new target machine.  Once set up the node manager will manage registration and removal of the floating IP addresses with the exception of the AdminServer floating IP address. Note that if the BAMHOSTs and SOAHOSTs are the same machine then you can obviously share the hostname and fixed IP addresses, but you still need separate floating IP addresses for the different managed servers.  The hostnames don’t have to be the ones given in the EDG, but they must be distinct in the same way as the ETC names are distinct.  If the type is a fixed IP then if the addresses are the same you can use the same hostname, for example if you collapse the soahost1, bamhost1 and webhost1 onto a single machine then you could refer to them all as HOST1 and give them the same IP address, however SOAHOST1VHN can never be the same as BAMHOST1VHN because these are floating IP addresses. Notes on DNS IP addresses that are of scope “Cluster” just need to be in the hosts file (/etc/hosts on Linux, C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows) of all the machines in the cluster and the load balancer.  IP addresses that are of scope “Internal” need to be available on the internal DNS servers, whilst IP addresses of scope “Public” need to be available on external and internal DNS servers. Shared File System At a minimum the cluster needs shared storage for the domain configuration, XA transaction logs and JMS file stores.  It is also possible to place the software itself on a shared server.  I strongly recommend that all machines have the same file structure for their SOA installation otherwise you will experience pain!  Section 2.3, "Shared Storage and Recommended Directory Structure", of the EDG covers the shared storage recommendations in detail. The following shorthand is used for locations: ORACLE_BASE is the root of the file system used for software and configuration files. MW_HOME is the location used by the installed SOA/BPM Suite installation.  This is also used by the web server installation.  In my installation it is set to <ORACLE_BASE>/SOA11gPS2. ORACLE_HOME is the location of the Oracle SOA components or the Oracle Web components.  This directory is installed under the the MW_HOME but the name is decided by the user at installation, default values are Oracle_SOA1 and Oracle_Web1.  In my installation they are set to <MW_HOME>/Oracle_SOA and <MW_HOME>/Oracle _WEB. ORACLE_COMMON_HOME is the location of the common components and is located under the MW_HOME directory.  This is always <MW_HOME>/oracle_common. ORACLE_INSTANCE is used by the Oracle HTTP Server and/or Oracle Web Cache.  It is recommended to create it under <ORACLE_BASE>/admin.  In my installation they are set to <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/Web1, <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/Web2 and <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/WC1. WL_HOME is the WebLogic server home and is always found at <MW_HOME>/wlserver_10.3. Key file locations are shown below. Directory Notes <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/domain_name/aserver/domain_name Shared location for domain.  Used to allow admin server to manually fail over between machines.  When creating domain_name provide the aserver directory as the location for the domain. In my install this is <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/aserver/soa_domain as I only have one domain on the box. <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/domain_name/aserver/applications Shared location for deployed applications.  Needs to be provided when creating the domain. In my install this is <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/aserver/applications as I only have one domain on the box. <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/domain_name/mserver/domain_name Either unique location for each machine or can be shared between machines to simplify task of packing and unpacking domain.  This acts as the managed server configuration location.  Keeping it separate from Admin server helps to avoid problems with the managed servers messing up the Admin Server. In my install this is <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/mserver/soa_domain as I only have one domain on the box. <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/domain_name/mserver/applications Either unique location for each machine or can be shared between machines.  Holds deployed applications. In my install this is <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/mserver/applications as I only have one domain on the box. <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/domain_name/soa_cluster_name Shared directory to hold the following   dd – deployment descriptors   jms – shared JMS file stores   fadapter – shared file adapter co-ordination files   tlogs – shared transaction log files In my install this is <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/soa_cluster. <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/instance_name Local folder for web server (OHS) instance. In my install this is <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/web1 and <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/web2. I also have <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/wc1 for the Web Cache I use as a load balancer. <ORACLE_BASE>/product/fmw This can be a shared or local folder for the SOA/BPM Suite software.  I used a shared location so I only ran the installer once. In my install this is <ORACLE_BASE>/SOA11gPS2 All the shared files need to be put onto a shared storage media.  I am using NFS, but recommendation for production would be a SAN, with mirrored disks for resilience. Collapsing Environments To reduce the hardware requirements it is possible to collapse the BAMHOST, SOAHOST and WEBHOST machines onto a single physical machine.  This will require more memory but memory is a lot cheaper than additional machines.  For environments that require higher security then stay with a separate WEBHOST tier as per the EDG.  Similarly for high volume environments then keep a separate set of machines for BAM and/or Web tier as per the EDG. Notes on Dev Environments In a dev environment it is acceptable to use a a single node (non-RAC) database, but be aware that the config of the data sources is different (no need to use multi-data source in WLS).  Typically in a dev environment we will collapse the BAMHOST, SOAHOST and WEBHOST onto a single machine and use a software load balancer.  To test a cluster properly we will need at least 2 machines. For my test environment I used Oracle Web Cache as a load balancer.  I ran it on one of the SOA Suite machines and it load balanced across the Web Servers on both machines.  This was easy for me to set up and I could administer it from a web based console.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 29, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 29, 2012Popular ReleasesWouter's SharePoint Demo Land: Custom Views and Forms: Samples showing how to provision custom lists. Custom view rendering with code, XSLT, XSLT + code. Custom forms with database lookups.YouTube API Class & Server Control for ASP.NET 4.0: Binary dll Files with Demo: . You can find binary dll files under :- Demo\bin\ folder Demo url :- http://demo.svinn.com/YouTube/Default.aspx 1 GB Hosting + Free Domain => http://ghosting.in/ .callisto: callisto 2.0.23: Patched Script static class and peak user count bug fix.Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Alpha 3: New in this release: Added components: Microcontroller Demultiplexer Flip & rotate components Open XML files from older versions of Circuit Diagram Text formatting for components New CDDX syntax Other fixesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.1 CMS (Beta): Beta build for testing - please report issues at issues.umbraco.org (Latest uploaded: 5.1.0.123) What's new in 5.1? The full list of changes is on our http://progress.umbraco.org task tracking page. It shows items complete for 5.1, and 5.1 includes items for 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 listed there too. Here's two headline acts: Members5.1 adds support for backoffice editing of Members. We support the pairing up of our content type system in Hive with regular ASP.NET Membership providers (we ship a def...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.2.11: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to Version 2.1.2.11Code Changes 1. The project is now licenced under the Mozilla Public Licence 2. 2. User interface control and associated data access layer classes have been added to aid developers integrating 51Degrees.mobi into wider projects such as content management systems or web hosting management solutions. Use the following in a web form or user control to access these new UI components. <%@ Register Assembly="FiftyOne.Foundation" Namespace="...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 3.1: slight performance improvement (5% - 10%) new JsonException classPicturethrill: Version 2.3.28.0: Straightforward image selection. New clean UI look. Super stable. Simplified user experience.Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v12 (beta 2): Note This beta is likely to be less stable than the previous one. If you have severe troubles using this version, please report them with as much detail as possible (especially other extensions/addins that you may have) and downgrade to the last stable release. Version History Changed since v12 (beta 1): new options dialog with Quick Set selections for behavior restructured settings storage (should be more reliable) asynchronous background document analysis glow effect now appears in p...SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQL Monitor 4.2 alpha 16: 1. finally fixed problem with logic fault checking for temporary table name... I really mean finally ...ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5: A slew of bug-fixes with a few new features sprinkled in. This release also upgrades the SciLexer and SciLexer64 DLLs to version 3.0.4. The official stuff: Issue # Title 32402 32402 27137 27137 31548 31548 30179 30179 24932 24932 29701 29701 31238 31238 26875 26875 30052 30052 Mugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit ver 1.1: Added Design mode support.Multiwfn: Multiwfn 2.3.2: Multiwfn 2.3.2Harness: Harness 2.0.2: change to .NET Framework Client Profile bug fix the download dialog auto answer. bug fix setFocus command. add "SendKeys" command. remove "closeAll" command. minor bugs fixed.BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.161: Below is a list of fixes in this release. Bug BGN-2092 - Link in Email "visit your profile" not functional BGN-2083 - Manager of bugnet can not edit project when it is not public BGN-2080 - clicking on a link in the project summary causes error (0.9.152.0) BGN-2070 - Missing Functionality On Feed.aspx BGN-2069 - Calendar View does not work BGN-2068 - Time tracking totals not ok BGN-2067 - Issues List Page Size Bug: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the si...YAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.6.1 RTW: v1.9.6.1 FINAL is .NET v4.0 ONLY v1.9.6.1 has: Performance Improvements .NET v4.0 improvements Improved FaceBook Integration KNOWN ISSUES WITH THIS RELEASE: ON INSTALL PLEASE DON'T CHECK "Upgrade BBCode Extensions...". More complete change list and discussion here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postst14201_v1-9-6-1-RTW-Dated--3-26-2012.aspxmenu4web: menu4web 0.0.3: menu4web 0.0.3ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.0 Final: This release installs both the ArcGIS Editor for OSM Server Component and/or ArcGIS Editor for OSM Desktop components. The Desktop tools allow you to download data from the OpenStreetMap servers and store it locally in a geodatabase. You can then use the familiar editing environment of ArcGIS Desktop to create, modify, or delete data. Once you are done editing, you can post back the edit changes to OSM to make them available to all OSM users. The Server Component allows you to quickly create...Craig's Utility Library: Craig's Utility Library 3.1: This update adds about 60 new extension methods, a couple of new classes, and a number of fixes including: Additions Added DateSpan class Added GenericDelimited class Random additions Added static thread friendly version of Random.Next called ThreadSafeNext. AOP Manager additions Added Destroy function to AOPManager (clears out all data so system can be recreated. Really only useful for testing...) ORM additions Added PagedCommand and PageCount functions to ObjectBaseClass (same as M...DotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.1: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components are available as NuGet pa...New ProjectsAeroFichierAchats: Program that reworks excel files into PDFArepa: A lightweight non-invasive tool that helps you to implement Behavior Driven Development (BDD) on .NET projects. Arepa produces guidelines of using BDD on your current tests, and customisable and portable test reports integrating XML Documentation Comments. It's developed in C# using Scrum and BDD.Azure User Management Console - AUMC: Azure User Management Console - AUMC is a User Graphic Interface (GUI) that manages the users and logins of an Azure SQL database. The tool is simply converting your action into T-SQL commands and execute them on the Azure SQL Database. BaseProject: BaseProjectCraftBukkit Updater: I don't activly monitor the status of CraftBukkit's updates, but I want to stay on top of the updated versions. This will track the last version in cache then check for updates. Upon update there should be an option to download automaticly to location XYZ or to send an email/sms.Dan Dot Com: Dan's SandboxEjemplos Windows 8 Javascript: Este proyecto pretende recoger todos los ejemplos de aplicaciones metro para Windows 8 en JavaScript que vaya desarrollando para fines didácticos. Todas las colaboraciones son bienvenidas.EntityFramework Generic Patterns: EntityFramework Generic PatternsEpFamvir: EpFamvir is a Visual C++ software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a GPL3.0 license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Famvir was inspired by Apache Hadoop, Google's MapReduce, and Google FS.etdc/etp: ???????????????? ???????? ??????? etest.ru. IndieCiv: IndieCiv - An independent look at how a new game could be made using fan-made graphics from Civ3. You can visit the discussion at www.civfanatics.com http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=421582Libro SQL Server 2012: Databases and examples for my Italian book on "SQL Server 2012"Linq2Rest: Parses OData system query parameters to create a LINQ query that can be used to filter a model set. Also exposes a LINQ provider for web services supporting the OData query parameters. Use extension method Filter (in Linq2Rest namespace) on any IEnumerable source.LittleUmph: It's a little library to help you to alleviate some of the mundane stuff during your development. It has some nifty stuff like a neat database wrapper, conversion utilities, string functions and vast of other mini helpers to improve the efficiency and consistency of your code.LonghornRPG: LonghornRPGMemberManager: Keep track of membersMSU Student Teaching DataBase: A C# application to manage student placements for MSU.MvcContrib4: This is the MvcContrib project to support MVC 4MYFIRSTDEMOPROJECT: Introduction to CSharpOrchard Page Title Override: This Orchard CMS module allows a user to manage the Page Title. You can now have the Site Name show up last in the Page Title or hide the Site Name completely from the Page Title. The module also contains a Content Part allowing a Page Title to be separate from content title.phoenixtree: .net linux sql php python html javascript c exampleProject Explorer for Notepad++: This project mainly aims at providing a functional rich project explorer experience on notepad++. Features include Folder based file browsing, searching, filtering and more.Projeto Exemplo FPU: Projeto Exemplo FPUPureCalendar: simple web calendarrails study: rails studySafe IM: a safe IM software use AES,SHA,RSA.Contain a server and a clientScoreboard: Scoreboard is a simple sports and/or activities scoreboard which can be used for a variety of purposes It was developed for use with a 1024x768 projector and features home and away scores, countdown clock, even a buzzer. It's developed in VB.net.SharePoint System dates and editor fields updater: The SPChangeDate is a utility used to modify some of the system fields in a SharePoint 2010 document library using a datagridview (Excel Like). It allows the modification of the following SharePoint fields: 1. Created 2. Modified 3. Modified By 4. Created By Shi Ji Xiang CRM 2012: Shi Ji XiangSIGECAR: SIGECARStable Dependencies Principle Checker for nDepend: Small console app for parsing nDepend output files and find assemblies that breaks the Stable Dependencies PrincipleStudentsPointManager: StudentsPointManagertclh123test: 4testThai Sign Language Translator: Thai Sign Language Translator with Kinect Sensor.The House FM / My Praise FM Desktop App: An App to play Christian radio on the desktop of windows Vista and Windows 7 computersTradeSea: Uni ProjectVisual Dependency Tracer: This tool will help you understand how an excel formula is derived/calculated. It provides a visual representation (tree) of the formula, including the precendents and dependents.VK Video Player: Video player for russian social network vk.comXrmSvcToolkit: XrmSvcToolkit is a small JavaScript library that helps you access Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 web service interfaces (SOAP and REST).

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 30, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 30, 2012Popular ReleasesSIPSorcery: SIPSorcery Softphone v1.0.0: The SIPSorcery softphone is a demo (note the "demo") application to prototype using .Net as a suitable runtime environment for a SIP softphone application requiring deterministic audio sampling and playback, it's not. And also to prototype placing calls via Google Voice's XMPP gateway, this works well.ScriptIDE: Release 4.4: ...Media Companion: MC 3.434b Release: General This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. If there are no major problems, by the end of the week it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable! The latest mc_com.exe should be included too! TV Bug fix - crash when using XBMC scraper for TV episodes. Bug fix - episode count update when adding new episodes. Bug fix - crash when actors name was missing. Enhanced TV scrape progress text. Enhancements made to missing episodes display. Movies Bug fix - hide "Play Trailer" when multisaev...Better Explorer: Better Explorer 2.0.0.831 Alpha: - A new release with: - many bugfixes - changed icon - added code for more failsafe registry usage on x64 systems - not needed regfix anymore - added ribbon shortcut keys - Other fixes Note: If you have problems opening system libraries, a suggestion was given to copy all of these libraries and then delete the originals. Thanks to Gaugamela for that! (see discussion here: 349015 ) Note2: I was upload again the setup due to missing file!XAML Dialect Comparer Tool: Beta 1: This is a first beta version of this tool (as shown at DevConncetions in Vegas, March 2012). Community participation and suggestions are appreciated.LINQ Extensions Library: 1.0.2.7: Append and Prepend extensions (1.0.2.7) IndexOf extensions (1.0.2.7) New Align/Match extensions (1.0.2.6) Ready to use stable code with comprehensive unit tests and samples New Pivot extensions New Filter ExtensionsStartrinity.com Silverlight realtime multiple face and feature points detector: Version 1.2: *Added public methods to start and stop capturing *Added public access to captured snapshot. Applications can crop faces out of snapshot imageMonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5: The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes, implements optimisations and adds key features. MonoGame now has the capability to use OpenGLES 2.0 on Android and iOS devices, meaning it now supports custom shaders across mobile and desktop platforms. Also included in this release are native orientation animations on iOS devices and better Orientation support for Android. There have also been a lot of bug fixes since t...callisto: callisto 2.0.23: Patched Script static class and peak user count bug fix.Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Alpha 3: New in this release: Added components: Microcontroller Demultiplexer Flip & rotate components Open XML files from older versions of Circuit Diagram Text formatting for components New CDDX syntax Other fixesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.1 CMS (Beta): Beta build for testing - please report issues at issues.umbraco.org (Latest uploaded: 5.1.0.123) What's new in 5.1? The full list of changes is on our http://progress.umbraco.org task tracking page. It shows items complete for 5.1, and 5.1 includes items for 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 listed there too. Here's two headline acts: Members5.1 adds support for backoffice editing of Members. We support the pairing up of our content type system in Hive with regular ASP.NET Membership providers (we ship a def...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.2.11: One Click Install from NuGet Changes to Version 2.1.2.11Code Changes 1. The project is now licenced under the Mozilla Public Licence 2. 2. User interface control and associated data access layer classes have been added to aid developers integrating 51Degrees.mobi into wider projects such as content management systems or web hosting management solutions. Use the following in a web form or user control to access these new UI components. <%@ Register Assembly="FiftyOne.Foundation" Namespace="...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 3.1: slight performance improvement (5% - 10%) new JsonException classPicturethrill: Version 2.3.28.0: Straightforward image selection. New clean UI look. Super stable. Simplified user experience.SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQL Monitor 4.2 alpha 16: 1. finally fixed problem with logic fault checking for temporary table name... I really mean finally ...ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5: A slew of bug-fixes with a few new features sprinkled in. This release also upgrades the SciLexer and SciLexer64 DLLs to version 3.0.4. The official stuff: Issue # Title 32402 32402 27137 27137 31548 31548 30179 30179 24932 24932 29701 29701 31238 31238 26875 26875 30052 30052 Harness: Harness 2.0.2: change to .NET Framework Client Profile bug fix the download dialog auto answer. bug fix setFocus command. add "SendKeys" command. remove "closeAll" command. minor bugs fixed.BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.161: Below is a list of fixes in this release. Bug BGN-2092 - Link in Email "visit your profile" not functional BGN-2083 - Manager of bugnet can not edit project when it is not public BGN-2080 - clicking on a link in the project summary causes error (0.9.152.0) BGN-2070 - Missing Functionality On Feed.aspx BGN-2069 - Calendar View does not work BGN-2068 - Time tracking totals not ok BGN-2067 - Issues List Page Size Bug: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the si...YAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.6.1 RTW: v1.9.6.1 FINAL is .NET v4.0 ONLY v1.9.6.1 has: Performance Improvements .NET v4.0 improvements Improved FaceBook Integration KNOWN ISSUES WITH THIS RELEASE: ON INSTALL PLEASE DON'T CHECK "Upgrade BBCode Extensions...". More complete change list and discussion here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postst14201_v1-9-6-1-RTW-Dated--3-26-2012.aspxCraig's Utility Library: Craig's Utility Library 3.1: This update adds about 60 new extension methods, a couple of new classes, and a number of fixes including: Additions Added DateSpan class Added GenericDelimited class Random additions Added static thread friendly version of Random.Next called ThreadSafeNext. AOP Manager additions Added Destroy function to AOPManager (clears out all data so system can be recreated. Really only useful for testing...) ORM additions Added PagedCommand and PageCount functions to ObjectBaseClass (same as M...New ProjectsBig-Tuto DirectX Site du Zéro: Dépôt de code source pour le big tuto DirectX du site du ZéroBlob Drop: Azure Blob Drop watches a local file folder (or several) and passes on any file changes (creates, updates, deletes) to a blob container in Windows Azure Storage account. Just "dump" files into a folder (such as content for a web site) and they will get uploaded to the cloud.C++ AMP Algorithms Library: C++ AMP Algorithms Library is a library of Parallel Patterns that C++ AMP developers can freely use in their own projects.C++ AMP BLAS Library: C++ AMP BLAS Library is a library of Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines that C++ AMP developers can freely use in their own projects.C++ AMP RNG Library: C++ AMP RNG Library is a library of Random Number Generators that C++ AMP developers can freely use in their own projects.cphobby: This is a project to high performance computing on WindowsCSharp Tesseract OCR GUI UTB Spring 2012: n/aecho test project: echo test projectFacebook Connection Manager: Facebook Application written in Asp.Net. Monitors the list of contacts (for its users), revealing when they or someone they know has lost a contact (e.g. deleted their profile or linkage). Works by storing all the auth tickets, extending them, and using them to regularly poll the facebook API.Fast Excel Spreadsheet Writer: The Fast Excel Spreadsheet Writer makes it easier for developers to write 2007 / 2010 Excel spreadsheets containing large sets of raw data. It can write hundreds of thousands of records in seconds. It is developed in C# and uses the Packaging namespace and Xml writers. fieldGames: Demonstrates wp7 gps featuresfucksmzdm: fuck smzdm projectGeo.LibraryManage: Geo.LibraryManageGraph my Code: Silverlight graph control and tools to visualize .net assembly in human readable way.Iron Server: Control Your PC IUBookStore: Build an online system the supports the process of renting and purchasing books from HCMC International University's Post-graduation Centerkage: how to make a kageLCDSmartie dll to display MediaPortal status: MP.dll allows the display of MediaPortal data on an LCDSmartie driven display. Uses WifiConnect and MPExtended to gain access to the MediaPortal data. Written in C.MaxiService: Controle Integrado de Serviço e ManutençãoNetduinoBot: This project is to have fun and learn more about .Net The plan is to improve a simple netduino based robot (2 powered wheels using stepper engines and a support wheel) Next steps: Adding BT communication Adding interactive driving Adding distance measurement Adding routingNovaUmbracoDemo: This is a demo site for Nova in Umbraco business domain.Orchard Members Only: This is a simple module to protect anonymous users from accessing specified content To utilize the feature, simply add the Members Only content part to any content type to make that content type available to authenticated users only.POC's project around web and azure related development: POC's project around web and azure related developmentPractice: nonepromising: asp.net mvc jqueryeasyui rbac asp.net mvc jqueryeasyui rbac asp.net mvc jqueryeasyui rbac asp.net mvc jqueryeasyui rbac asp.net mvc jqueryeasyui rbac asp.net mvc jqueryeasyui rbac asp.net mvc jqueryeasyui rbac asp.net mvc jqueryeasyui rbac asp.net mvc jqueryeasyui rbac asp.net mvRRPandora for RideRunner: RRPandora is a Pandora plugin for RideRunner front end. Play your pandora stations, create new ones, and love/hate your tracks all from within your car PC front end of choice. Discusion on RRPandora project can be found here: http://www.mp3car.com/rr-plugins/150505-so-have-you-guys-ever-heard-of-this-new-thing-called-pandora.htmlSharepoint & CRM Toolkit: Reusable components and tools to speed up Sharepoint and Dynamics CRM development, e.g. Site Definitions, Web Parts, Event Handlers, Workflows, Management Tools for sharepoint and Plugin, workflow, custom reports for MS CRM. Sharepoint QuotaCheck Webpart: A Sharepoint webpart wich shows a progressbar with the current percent usage from the maximum quota. Also shows the warning, max quota and the current usage in MB. Change color if the warning quota is reached.Silverlight MultiSelectComboBox: A multi-select combobox for Silverlight (hope this gets included in the toolkit at some time)Simple OWL.Api: Simple OWL.Api is a .Net OWL Api wrapper library.Taxi Please!: This is the Taxi Please! windows phone application.testtom03292012hg02: testtom03292012hg02testtom03292012tfs01: testtom03292012tfs01theBrent StartPage: A simple personal start page portalVirtualization Automation via Powershell: Scratch Project to enable Virtualization Automation via PowershellXAML Dialect Comparer Tool: This tool allows for comparison of different XAML dialects and utilized framework namespaces. Want to know if your Silverlight project will translate well to Windows 8 Metro? And whether your Metro assets can be reused in your Windows Phone app? And how about that WPF app? This helpful tool provides some interesting metrics. Note that it only compares types/classes and all their members. It makes no comparison of behavior differences between classes and members of identical names.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, January 28, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, January 28, 2011Popular ReleasesVFPX: VFP2C32 2.0.0.8 Release Candidate: This release includes several bugfixes, new functions and finally a CHM help file for the complete library.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.3 ALPHA: 2.3.3 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added back in a p...DB>doc for Microsoft SQL Server: 1.0.0.0: Initial release Supported output HTML WikiPlex markup Raw XML Supported objects Tables Primary Keys Foreign Keys ViewsmojoPortal: 2.3.6.1: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2361-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Office Web.UI: Alpha preview: This is the first alpha release. Very exciting moment... This download is just the demo application : "Contoso backoffice Web App". No source included for the moment, just the app, for testing purposes and for feedbacks !! This package includes a set of official MS Office icons (143 png 16x16 and 132 png 32x32) to really make a great app ! Please rate and give feedback ThanksParallel Programming with Microsoft Visual C++: Drop 6 - Chapters 4 and 5: This is Drop 6. It includes: Drafts of the Preface, Introduction, Chapters 2-7, Appendix B & C and the glossary Sample code for chapters 2-7 and Appendix A & B. The new material we'd like feedback on is: Chapter 4 - Parallel Aggregation Chapter 5 - Futures The source code requires Visual Studio 2010 in order to run. There is a known bug in the A-Dash sample when the user attempts to cancel a parallel calculation. We are working to fix this.Catel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.1: (+) Styles can now be changed dynamically, see Examples application for a how-to (+) ViewModelBase class now have a constructor that allows services injection (+) ViewModelBase services can now be configured by IoC (via Microsoft.Unity) (+) All ViewModelBase services now have a unit test implementation (+) Added IProcessService to run processes from a viewmodel with directly using the process class (which makes it easier to unit test view models) (*) If the HasErrors property of DataObjec...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.160: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release improves NodeXL's Twitter and Pajek features. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Installation StepsFollow these steps to install and use the template: Download the Zip file. Unzip it into any folder. Use WinZip or a similar program, or just right-click the Zip file in Windows Explorer and select "Extract All." Close Ex...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 CTP: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL, RavenDB and SQLCE. Default is XML based database. To use them, copy the related dlls into web root bin folder and remove old content provider dlls. Content provider has the name like "Kooboo.CMS.Content.Persistence.SQLServer.dll" View_Engines.zip: Supports of Razor, webform and NVelocity view engine. Copy the dlls into web root bin folder to enable...UOB & ME: UOB ME 2.6: UOB ME 2.6????: ???? V1.0: ???? V1.0 ??Password Generator: 2.2: Parallel password generation Password strength calculation ( Same method used by Microsoft here : https://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx ) Minor code refactoringVisual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance: Spanish - Architecture Guidance: Francisco Fagas http://geeks.ms/blogs/ffagas, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), localized the Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance for the Spanish communities, based on http://vsarchitectureguide.codeplex.com/releases/view/47828. Release Notes The guidance is available in a xps-only (default) or complete package. The complete package contains the files in xps, pdf and Office 2007 formats. 2011-01-24 Publish version 1.0 of the Spanish localized bits.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6.2: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager the html generation has been optimized, the html page size is much smaller nowFacebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.6: new Facebook Graph objects: Application, Page, Post, Comment Improved Intellisense documentation new Graph Api connections: albums, photos, posts, feed, home, friends JSON Toolkit upgraded to version 0.9 (beta release) with bug fixes and new features bug fixed: error when handling empty JSON arrays bug fixed: error when handling JSON array with square or large brackets in the message bug fixed: error when handling JSON obejcts with double quotation in the message bug fixed: erro...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2008 Code Samples 2011-01-23: Code samples for Visual Studio 2008MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (3): Instructions for installation: http://www.galasoft.ch/mvvm/installing/manually/ Includes the hotfix templates for Windows Phone 7 development. This is only relevant if you didn't already install the hotfix described at http://blog.galasoft.ch/archive/2010/07/22/mvvm-light-hotfix-for-windows-phone-7-developer-tools-beta.aspx.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V42: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has added some features / bugfixes: Bugfix: Decoding of Subject now also supports multi-line subjects (occurs only if you have very long subjects with non-ASCII characters)Minecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.3: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds automatic block list updates, so MTS will recognize blocks added in game updates properly rather than drawing them in bright pink. New in this version of MTS: Support for all new blocks added since the Halloween update Auto-update of blockcolors.xml to support future game updates A splash screen that shows while the program searches for upd...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14996.000: New Features: ============= This release is just compiled against the latest release of JetBrains ReSharper 5.1.1766.4 Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes...New ProjectsAgilErp: AgilErp is a .NET OpenSource ERP - System developed in C# using WPF, WCF ,Entity Framework, MS-SQL-Server and MVVM. Angel Eye: 3d Game for the new generation AWWWE Browser: AWWWE Browser. (Pronounced "awe".) Aural World Wide Web Everywhere. 1) An aural browser. It talks and listens to you and you talk and listen to it. 2) A VUI for normal HTML web sites. It lets regular web sites talk and listen to you while you talk and listen to them.BitLocker Wrapper Library: The BDE Wrapper library allows .NET Developers to quickly use the WMI BitLocker provider without having to learn the complex methods and operation of the WMI classes.CRM8000: CRM8000????????????????DSM Hub for WP7: Implements a light version of the DSM tools for WP7. Currently, most of the effort is on the audio station.File Downloader: This application checks a Gmail account regularly for mail containing URLs. Once a URL is found, its content is downloaded and sent as a reply message with the file as an attachment. Intended usage: - Download IEEE articles as PDF when you're not in a authenticated network.Folder Space Quota: This component return Quotas Disk Space used for each folders and subfolders in a given directory. Results are returned with a graphic percent bar. Another Tab give access to this directory tree, indicating the size of each file and allows previewing them in a "LightBox" window. IDK: Every other month, IDK asks people to come up with awesome ideas for new programs and webpages. After the end of the month, IDKs developers have another month to create one of the top rated websites or applications. Got a great idea for a new app? Let IDK build it for you.Interop 2: Microformats for Azure Cloud with OData-InterfacejSPoint - JavaScript Library for SharePoint: JavaScript for SharePoint (jSPoint) is a library that help SharePoint developers to create rich,dynamic, & powerfull pages for SharePoint sites.MVVM T4: T4 Templates for generating view models, and views for WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone using T4 Toolbox and MVVM LightNumericUpDown Control for WPF: A basic NumericUpDown Control for WPF that mirrors all the most used functions of the WinForms NumericUpDown Control and looks similar to itOData for IQToolkit: OData for IQToolkit, converts OData expressions into a usable expressions for IQToolkit providers.PLATO: PALTO is micro plate processing pipeline and supports enzymes and metabolites. PLATO was developed at INRA-Bordeaux and is an evolution of the EnzymeLaborTool developed at the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology.Purdue CS 490: Model-based testing of ADO.NET: Five students from Purdue University will develop model-based tests for an aspect of ADO.NET during the Spring 2011 semester. We'll be using C# and Spec Explorer, among other tools.Replace in multiple Office 2010 documents: This program replaces a text string in multiple office 2010 documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). It is developed in VB.NET and new code for additional products is welcome. SearchEngine: A Website Search Engine and Crawler.Set Custom Currency Symbol: This utility enables you to set/register custom currency symbols for the .NET FrameworkSimple C# Email Templates: A really simple, really easy to use class for sending email templates. Reads any file from disk (think ".txt" or ".html") and matches custom tokens with the values you supply, in both the message body and the subject line. Supports multiple CC and BCC addresses.SimpleBasicAuthentication: SimpleBasicAuthentication makes it easier for developers to build a website with basic authentication using the credentials from just a text file. You'll no longer have to create new users on the system just to let them log in to the website or service. It's developed in C# 4.0.SpecsFor - Yet Another BDD Framework For .NET: SpecsFor is another Behavior-Driven Development framework that focuses on ease of use for *developers* by minimizing testing friction. Square: Custom SharePoint MyProfile PageSynchrolist workflow: Sharepoint workflow whitch perform automatic synchronisation between two lists in the same collection. Usefull for automatic translation.TFS Aggregator: This server side plugin for TFS 2010 enables dynamic calculation of field values in TFS. (For example: Dev work + Test Work = Total Work) Supports same work item and parent-child links. Also has support for aggregating string values (ie Children are Done so the parent is Done)Tinchant: My nice projectZebra_Image, a lightweight image manipulation library written in PHP: This is a compact (one-file only), lightweight, object-oriented image manipulation library written in and for PHP, that provides methods for performing several types of image manipulation operations. It doesn’t require any external libraries other than the GD2 extension.Zebra_Pagination, a generic pagination class written in PHP: A generic pagination class that automatically generates navigation links given the total number of items and the number of items per page.Zebra_Session, a wrapper for PHP’s default session handler, using MySQL: Zebra_Session is a PHP class that acts as a wrapper for PHP’s default session handling functions but instead of storing session data in flat files it stores them in a MySQL database, thus providing both better security and better performance.

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• Testing Entity Framework applications, pt. 3: NDbUnit

  - by Thomas Weller

  This is the third of a three part series that deals with the issue of faking test data in the context of a legacy app that was built with Microsoft's Entity Framework (EF) on top of an MS SQL Server database – a scenario that can be found very often. Please read the first part for a description of the sample application, a discussion of some general aspects of unit testing in a database context, and of some more specific aspects of the here discussed EF/MSSQL combination. Lately, I wondered how you would ‘mock’ the data layer of a legacy application, when this data layer is made up of an MS Entity Framework (EF) model in combination with a MS SQL Server database. Originally, this question came up in the context of how you could enable higher-level integration tests (automated UI tests, to be exact) for a legacy application that uses this EF/MSSQL combo as its data store mechanism – a not so uncommon scenario. The question sparked my interest, and I decided to dive into it somewhat deeper. What I've found out is, in short, that it's not very easy and straightforward to do it – but it can be done. The two strategies that are best suited to fit the bill involve using either the (commercial) Typemock Isolator tool or the (free) NDbUnit framework. The use of Typemock was discussed in the previous post, this post now will present the NDbUnit approach... NDbUnit is an Apache 2.0-licensed open-source project, and like so many other Nxxx tools and frameworks, it is basically a C#/.NET port of the corresponding Java version (DbUnit namely). In short, it helps you in flexibly managing the state of a database in that it lets you easily perform basic operations (like e.g. Insert, Delete, Refresh, DeleteAll)  against your database and, most notably, lets you feed it with data from external xml files. Let's have a look at how things can be done with the help of this framework. Preparing the test data Compared to Typemock, using NDbUnit implies a totally different approach to meet our testing needs.  So the here described testing scenario requires an instance of an SQL Server database in operation, and it also means that the Entity Framework model that sits on top of this database is completely unaffected. First things first: For its interactions with the database, NDbUnit relies on a .NET Dataset xsd file. See Step 1 of their Quick Start Guide for a description of how to create one. With this prerequisite in place then, the test fixture's setup code could look something like this: [TestFixture, TestsOn(typeof(PersonRepository))] [Metadata("NDbUnit Quickstart URL",           "http://code.google.com/p/ndbunit/wiki/QuickStartGuide")] [Description("Uses the NDbUnit library to provide test data to a local database.")] public class PersonRepositoryFixture {     #region Constants     private const string XmlSchema = @"..\..\TestData\School.xsd";     #endregion // Constants     #region Fields     private SchoolEntities _schoolContext;     private PersonRepository _personRepository;     private INDbUnitTest _database;     #endregion // Fields     #region Setup/TearDown     [FixtureSetUp]     public void FixtureSetUp()     {         var connectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["School_Test"].ConnectionString;         _database = new SqlDbUnitTest(connectionString);         _database.ReadXmlSchema(XmlSchema);         var entityConnectionStringBuilder = new EntityConnectionStringBuilder         {             Metadata = "res://*/School.csdl|res://*/School.ssdl|res://*/School.msl",             Provider = "System.Data.SqlClient",             ProviderConnectionString = connectionString         };         _schoolContext = new SchoolEntities(entityConnectionStringBuilder.ConnectionString);         _personRepository = new PersonRepository(this._schoolContext);     }     [FixtureTearDown]     public void FixtureTearDown()     {         _database.PerformDbOperation(DbOperationFlag.DeleteAll);         _schoolContext.Dispose();     }     ...  As you can see, there is slightly more fixture setup code involved if your tests are using NDbUnit to provide the test data: Because we're dealing with a physical database instance here, we first need to pick up the test-specific connection string from the test assemblies' App.config, then initialize an NDbUnit helper object with this connection along with the provided xsd file, and also set up the SchoolEntities and the PersonRepository instances accordingly. The _database field (an instance of the INdUnitTest interface) will be our single access point to the underlying database: We use it to perform all the required operations against the data store. To have a flexible mechanism to easily insert data into the database, we can write a helper method like this: private void InsertTestData(params string[] dataFileNames) {     _database.PerformDbOperation(DbOperationFlag.DeleteAll);     if (dataFileNames == null)     {         return;     }     try     {         foreach (string fileName in dataFileNames)         {             if (!File.Exists(fileName))             {                 throw new FileNotFoundException(Path.GetFullPath(fileName));             }             _database.ReadXml(fileName);             _database.PerformDbOperation(DbOperationFlag.InsertIdentity);         }     }     catch     {         _database.PerformDbOperation(DbOperationFlag.DeleteAll);         throw;     } } This lets us easily insert test data from xml files, in any number and in a  controlled order (which is important because we eventually must fulfill referential constraints, or we must account for some other stuff that imposes a specific ordering on data insertion). Again, as with Typemock, I won't go into API details here. - Unfortunately, there isn't too much documentation for NDbUnit anyway, other than the already mentioned Quick Start Guide (and the source code itself, of course) - a not so uncommon problem with smaller Open Source Projects. Last not least, we need to provide the required test data in xml form. A snippet for data from the People table might look like this, for example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <School xmlns="http://tempuri.org/School.xsd">   <Person>     <PersonID>1</PersonID>     <LastName>Abercrombie</LastName>     <FirstName>Kim</FirstName>     <HireDate>1995-03-11T00:00:00</HireDate>   </Person>   <Person>     <PersonID>2</PersonID>     <LastName>Barzdukas</LastName>     <FirstName>Gytis</FirstName>     <EnrollmentDate>2005-09-01T00:00:00</EnrollmentDate>   </Person>   <Person>     ... You can also have data from various tables in one single xml file, if that's appropriate for you (but beware of the already mentioned ordering issues). It's true that your test assembly may end up with dozens of such xml files, each containing quite a big amount of text data. But because the files are of very low complexity, and with the help of a little bit of Copy/Paste and Excel magic, this appears to be well manageable. Executing some basic tests Here are some of the possible tests that can be written with the above preparations in place: private const string People = @"..\..\TestData\School.People.xml"; ... [Test, MultipleAsserts, TestsOn("PersonRepository.GetNameList")] public void GetNameList_ListOrdering_ReturnsTheExpectedFullNames() {     InsertTestData(People);     List<string> names =         _personRepository.GetNameList(NameOrdering.List);     Assert.Count(34, names);     Assert.AreEqual("Abercrombie, Kim", names.First());     Assert.AreEqual("Zheng, Roger", names.Last()); } [Test, MultipleAsserts, TestsOn("PersonRepository.GetNameList")] [DependsOn("RemovePerson_CalledOnce_DecreasesCountByOne")] public void GetNameList_NormalOrdering_ReturnsTheExpectedFullNames() {     InsertTestData(People);     List<string> names =         _personRepository.GetNameList(NameOrdering.Normal);     Assert.Count(34, names);     Assert.AreEqual("Alexandra Walker", names.First());     Assert.AreEqual("Yan Li", names.Last()); } [Test, TestsOn("PersonRepository.AddPerson")] public void AddPerson_CalledOnce_IncreasesCountByOne() {     InsertTestData(People);     int count = _personRepository.Count;     _personRepository.AddPerson(new Person { FirstName = "Thomas", LastName = "Weller" });     Assert.AreEqual(count + 1, _personRepository.Count); } [Test, TestsOn("PersonRepository.RemovePerson")] public void RemovePerson_CalledOnce_DecreasesCountByOne() {     InsertTestData(People);     int count = _personRepository.Count;     _personRepository.RemovePerson(new Person { PersonID = 33 });     Assert.AreEqual(count - 1, _personRepository.Count); } Not much difference here compared to the corresponding Typemock versions, except that we had to do a bit more preparational work (and also it was harder to get the required knowledge). But this picture changes quite dramatically if we look at some more demanding test cases: Ok, and what if things are becoming somewhat more complex? Tests like the above ones represent the 'easy' scenarios. They may account for the biggest portion of real-world use cases of the application, and they are important to make sure that it is generally sound. But usually, all these nasty little bugs originate from the more complex parts of our code, or they occur when something goes wrong. So, for a testing strategy to be of real practical use, it is especially important to see how easy or difficult it is to mimick a scenario which represents a more complex or exceptional case. The following test, for example, deals with the case that there is some sort of invalid input from the caller: [Test, MultipleAsserts, TestsOn("PersonRepository.GetCourseMembers")] [Row(null, typeof(ArgumentNullException))] [Row("", typeof(ArgumentException))] [Row("NotExistingCourse", typeof(ArgumentException))] public void GetCourseMembers_WithGivenVariousInvalidValues_Throws(string courseTitle, Type expectedInnerExceptionType) {     var exception = Assert.Throws<RepositoryException>(() =>                                 _personRepository.GetCourseMembers(courseTitle));     Assert.IsInstanceOfType(expectedInnerExceptionType, exception.InnerException); } Apparently, this test doesn't need an 'Arrange' part at all (see here for the same test with the Typemock tool). It acts just like any other client code, and all the required business logic comes from the database itself. This doesn't always necessarily mean that there is less complexity, but only that the complexity happens in a different part of your test resources (in the xml files namely, where you sometimes have to spend a lot of effort for carefully preparing the required test data). Another example, which relies on an underlying 1-n relationship, might be this: [Test, MultipleAsserts, TestsOn("PersonRepository.GetCourseMembers")] public void GetCourseMembers_WhenGivenAnExistingCourse_ReturnsListOfStudents() {     InsertTestData(People, Course, Department, StudentGrade);     List<Person> persons = _personRepository.GetCourseMembers("Macroeconomics");     Assert.Count(4, persons);     Assert.ForAll(         persons,         @p => new[] { 10, 11, 12, 14 }.Contains(@p.PersonID),         "Person has none of the expected IDs."); } If you compare this test to its corresponding Typemock version, you immediately see that the test itself is much simpler, easier to read, and thus much more intention-revealing. The complexity here lies hidden behind the call to the InsertTestData() helper method and the content of the used xml files with the test data. And also note that you might have to provide additional data which are not even directly relevant to your test, but are required only to fulfill some integrity needs of the underlying database. Conclusion The first thing to notice when comparing the NDbUnit approach to its Typemock counterpart obviously deals with performance: Of course, NDbUnit is much slower than Typemock. Technically,  it doesn't even make sense to compare the two tools. But practically, it may well play a role and could or could not be an issue, depending on how much tests you have of this kind, how often you run them, and what role they play in your development cycle. Also, because the dataset from the required xsd file must fully match the database schema (even in parts that otherwise wouldn't be relevant to you), it can be quite cumbersome to be in a team where different people are working with the database in parallel. My personal experience is – as already said in the first part – that Typemock gives you a better development experience in a 'dynamic' scenario (when you're working in some kind of TDD-style, you're oftentimes executing the tests from your dev box, and your database schema changes frequently), whereas the NDbUnit approach is a good and solid solution in more 'static' development scenarios (when you need to execute the tests less frequently or only on a separate build server, and/or the underlying database schema can be kept relatively stable), for example some variations of higher-level integration or User-Acceptance tests. But in any case, opening Entity Framework based applications for testing requires a fair amount of resources, planning, and preparational work – it's definitely not the kind of stuff that you would call 'easy to test'. Hopefully, future versions of EF will take testing concerns into account. Otherwise, I don't see too much of a future for the framework in the long run, even though it's quite popular at the moment... The sample solution A sample solution (VS 2010) with the code from this article series is available via my Bitbucket account from here (Bitbucket is a hosting site for Mercurial repositories. The repositories may also be accessed with the Git and Subversion SCMs - consult the documentation for details. In addition, it is possible to download the solution simply as a zipped archive – via the 'get source' button on the very right.). The solution contains some more tests against the PersonRepository class, which are not shown here. Also, it contains database scripts to create and fill the School sample database. To compile and run, the solution expects the Gallio/MbUnit framework to be installed (which is free and can be downloaded from here), the NDbUnit framework (which is also free and can be downloaded from here), and the Typemock Isolator tool (a fully functional 30day-trial is available here). Moreover, you will need an instance of the Microsoft SQL Server DBMS, and you will have to adapt the connection strings in the test projects App.config files accordingly.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, January 25, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, January 25, 2011Popular ReleasesKooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 CTP: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL, RavenDB and SQLCE. Default is XML based database. To use them, copy the related dlls into web root bin folder and remove old content provider dlls. Content provider has the name like "Kooboo.CMS.Content.Persistence.SQLServer.dll" View_Engines.zip: Supports of Razor, webform and NVelocity view engine. Copy the dlls into web root bin folder to enable...UOB & ME: UOB ME 2.6: UOB ME 2.6????: ???? V1.0: ???? V1.0 ??Developer Guidance - Onboarding Windows Phone 7: Fuel Tracker Source: Release NotesThis project is almost complete. We'll be making small updates to the code and documentation over the next week or so. We look forward to your feedback. This documentation and accompanying sample application will get you started creating a complete application for Windows Phone 7. You will learn about common developer issues in the context of a simple fuel-tracking application named Fuel Tracker. Some of the tasks that you will learn include the following: Creating a UI that...Password Generator: 2.2: Parallel password generation Password strength calculation ( Same method used by Microsoft here : https://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx ) Minor code refactoringASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6.2: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager the html generation has been optimized, the html page size is much smaller nowFacebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.6: new Facebook Graph objects: Application, Page, Post, Comment Improved Intellisense documentation new Graph Api connections: albums, photos, posts, feed, home, friends JSON Toolkit upgraded to version 0.9 (beta release) with bug fixes and new features bug fixed: error when handling empty JSON arrays bug fixed: error when handling JSON array with square or large brackets in the message bug fixed: error when handling JSON obejcts with double quotation in the message bug fixed: erro...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2008 Code Samples 2011-01-23: Code samples for Visual Studio 2008BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.4.0.0: This version requires an update for WControls.dll. - Removed option to use Old Rune Strike - Fixed an issue that was causing Ratings to not properly update when running Progressive simulations - Ability data is now loaded from an XML file in the BloodSim directory that is user editable. This data will be reloaded each time a fresh simulation is run. - Added toggle for showing Graph window. When unchecked, output data will instead be saved to a text file in the BloodSim directory based on the...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (3): Instructions for installation: http://www.galasoft.ch/mvvm/installing/manually/ Includes the hotfix templates for Windows Phone 7 development. This is only relevant if you didn't already install the hotfix described at http://blog.galasoft.ch/archive/2010/07/22/mvvm-light-hotfix-for-windows-phone-7-developer-tools-beta.aspx.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V42: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has added some features / bugfixes: Bugfix: Decoding of Subject now also supports multi-line subjects (occurs only if you have very long subjects with non-ASCII characters)Minecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.3: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds automatic block list updates, so MTS will recognize blocks added in game updates properly rather than drawing them in bright pink. New in this version of MTS: Support for all new blocks added since the Halloween update Auto-update of blockcolors.xml to support future game updates A splash screen that shows while the program searches for upd...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14996.000: New Features: ============= This release is just compiled against the latest release of JetBrains ReSharper 5.1.1766.4 Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes...jQuery ASP.Net MVC Controls: Version 1.2.0.0: jqGrid 3.8 support jquery 1.4 support New and exciting features Many bugfixes Complete separation from the jquery, & jqgrid codeMediaScout: MediaScout 3.0 Preview 4: Update ReleaseCoding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1MFCMAPI: January 2011 Release: Build: 6.0.0.1024 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the tool, get the executable. If you want to debug it, get the symbol file and the source. The 64 bit build will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit build, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.4: Added champion: Renekton Removed automatic file association Fix: The recent files combobox didn't always open a file when an item was selected Fix: Removing a recently opened file caused an errorDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01: Major Highlights Fixed issue to remove preCondition checks when upgrading to .Net 4.0 Fixed issue where some valid domains were failing email validation checks. Fixed issue where editing Host menu page settings assigns the page to a Portal. Fixed issue which caused XHTML validation problems in 5.6.0 Fixed issue where an aspx page in any subfolder was inaccessible. Fixed issue where Config.Touch method signature had an unintentional breaking change in 5.6.0 Fixed issue which caused...iTracker Asp.Net Starter Kit: Version 3.0.0: This is the inital release of the version 3.0.0 Visual Studio 2010 (.Net 4.0) remake of the ITracker application. I connsider this a working, stable application but since there are still some features missing to make it "complete" I'm leaving it listed as a "beta" release. I am hoping to make it feature complete for v3.1.0 but anything is possible.New Projectsarchicop: Make your .NET Code Clean with ArchiCop! ArchiCop is a Visual Studio tool to manage complex .NET code and achieve high Code Quality. It's very simple to use. With ArchiCop you can validate references, project properties and group your projects in layers.Blitzkrieg Board Game (1965): I'm currently working on making Blitzkrieg using .NET 4 and WPF (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4168/blitzkrieg). The goal of this project is to make the game extremely mod-able, by allowing the end-user to change the sprites, game object types, map cell types, and more.Candy: Candy is modern gene-fishing platform which enables Biologists to find candidate genes with ease. Candy is implemented in C# and uses Silverlight to deliver a rich user experience.CMScreator: Content Management System CreatorDecoratorSharp: DecoratorSharp is a Decorator from python.Dorm (beta) - .Net ORM: It’s a light-weight ORM framework for .Net. The idea is to provide all the productivity of an ORM tool without abstracting entirely the database, therefore giving the developer a finer degree of control on data manipulation.DxStudyPro: DirectX Study ProFRCRobotCode: Lightsabers FRC robot code.grouptalk: grouptalkHeejooShop: Heejoo ShopIC Colorful: The aim of this project is to implement an algorithm allowing color-blind people to distinguish colors that they fail to distinguish in regular circumstances. This project is implemented as a DirectShow filter, thus could be used as a video codec as well as live video stream traItzben: Universally useful XAML behaviors, styles, and value converters. Developed in C# for WPF, Silverlight, and WP7.JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit is a .NET library written in C# used to handle JSON objects, convert string to JSON objects and obtainn values from them.Materials Data Centre: This project is to create aa materials data centre; a repository for experimental data. See www.materialsdatacentre.com It is built on Microsoft SharePoint with functionality exposed through Web Services.OpenCLI: OpenCLI brings a linux style CLI written in .NET. It acts as a portal from linux style commands, to their commands on the windows system. It is useful to Sysadmins, who wish to deny their uses to the power of Command Prompt, yet want them to be able to user a CLI.Pinguim Cook .Net - Automação de Restaurantes: Em CriaçãoPixination: Pixination is a tiny color picker to get any color from the screen. You will have a collection of color patterns to work with. Developed on C# with Framework 2.0Project Acolythe: Project Acolythe is the codename for a new Open Source RPG. Based upon different ideas from currently available RPGs the Game will have an incredible depth in gameplay. The Team behind is currently a bit small, so if you are interessted to help us out, leave a note ;)Propono: Blogging application based on ASP.NET MVCSharePoint 2010 Excel Export Feature: This feature can be used to export SharePoint lists to Excel Files (.xslx). You can upload templates for the excel export.SilverlightMedia JavaScript Library: A JavaScript library making it quick and easy to work with any web-based media player built with Silverlight. You can take control of any Silverlight media player using pure JavaScript. This facilitates useful scenarios e.g. creating HTML controls, displaying player status, etc.Soluciones: El project contiene herramientas de marketing para todo tipo de tama~o de empresas. Estaba basada en el standard definido por el mercado mismo. Estare publicando las descripcion del project en mas detalle.Soluciones Integrales: El projecto ve la necesidad de poder dar soporte al area de Marketing La finalidad de este proyecto es la implementacion de herramientas de marketing para que las empresas puedan ser mas eficientes al momento de procesar tareas de marketing. Les permitira: - enviar correos masivos - actualizacion de websites a distancia - ingreso de nuevos clientes a dasedatosSparkle Engine: Sparkle engine is a library for various types of effects. Currently I'm working on creating some basic text effects. Storyline Toolbox: Storyline Toolbox 2 is a web platform helping visualize the Storyline method. Version 1 of the Storyline Toolbox was developed in Perl by Linpro (now Redpill) in 2003. This project aims to providy a better user experience for students and teachers using the Storyline Toolbox.TFS Workbench Plugins: This project is dedicated to extending the functionality of the greatest Scrum tool, TFS Workbench.Tireguit Nmon Analyzer: An AIX and linux Nmon Analyzer; It uses SQL Compact 3.5 and C#. For more information on Nmon please visit http://nmon.sourceforge.net/pmwiki.php.uglifycs: Uglify.JS (https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS) and jsBeautifier (http://jsbeautifier.org) wrapped using JavaScript.NET (http://javascriptnet.codeplex.com) for use in .NET projects.usea: my study projectWindows Phone Cryptographic Storage: A C# library for easily storing and protecting data with a password on Windows Phone. The data is encrypted and authenticated with keys derived from a user provided password. Yahoo! Decoder: Yahoo! Decoder helps you read Yahoo! messenger chat archives offline with full support of smilies and links.????: “????”?????????????????????WinForm????，??C#????。?????????，????（2??），????！

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• Office 2010: It&rsquo;s not just DOC(X) and XLS(X)

  - by andrewbrust

  Office 2010 has released to manufacturing.  The bits have left the (product team’s) building.  Will you upgrade? This version of Office is officially numbered 14, a designation that correlates with the various releases, through the years, of Microsoft Word.  There were six major versions of Word for DOS, during whose release cycles came three 16-bit Windows versions.  Then, starting with Word 95 and counting through Word 2007, there have been six more versions – all for the 32-bit Windows platform.  Skip version 13 to ward off folksy bad luck (and, perhaps, the bugs that could come with it) and that brings us to version 14, which includes implementations for both 32- and 64-bit Windows platforms.  We’ve come a long way baby.  Or have we? As it does every three years or so, debate will now start to rage on over whether we need a “14th” version the PC platform’s standard word processor, or a “13th” version of the spreadsheet.  If you accept the premise of that question, then you may be on a slippery slope toward answering it in the negative.  Thing is, that premise is valid for certain customers and not others. The Microsoft Office product has morphed from one that offered core word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and email functionality to a suite of applications that provides unique, new value-added features, and even whole applications, in the context of those core services.  The core apps thus grow in mission: Excel is a BI tool.  Word is a collaborative editorial system for the production of publications.  PowerPoint is a media production platform for for live presentations and, increasingly, for delivering more effective presentations online.  Outlook is a time and task management system.  Access is a rich client front-end for data-driven self-service SharePoint applications.  OneNote helps you capture ideas, corral random thoughts in a semi-structured way, and then tie them back to other, more rigidly structured, Office documents. Google Docs and other cloud productivity platforms like Zoho don’t really do these things.  And there is a growing chorus of voices who say that they shouldn’t, because those ancillary capabilities are over-engineered, over-produced and “under-necessary.”  They might say Microsoft is layering on superfluous capabilities to avoid admitting that Office’s core capabilities, the ones people really need, have become commoditized. It’s hard to take sides in that argument, because different people, and the different companies that employ them, have different needs.  For my own needs, it all comes down to three basic questions: will the new version of Office save me time, will it make the mundane parts of my job easier, and will it augment my services to customers?  I need my time back.  I need to spend more of it with my family, and more of it focusing on my own core capabilities rather than the administrative tasks around them.  And I also need my customers to be able to get more value out of the services I provide. Help me triage my inbox, help me get proposals done more quickly and make them easier to read.  Let me get my presentations done faster, make them more effective and make it easier for me to reuse materials from other presentations.  And, since I’m in the BI and data business, help me and my customers manage data and analytics more easily, both on the desktop and online. Those are my criteria.  And, with those in mind, Office 2010 is looking like a worthwhile upgrade.  Perhaps it’s not earth-shattering, but it offers a combination of incremental improvements and a few new major capabilities that I think are quite compelling.  I provide a brief roundup of them here.  It’s admittedly arbitrary and not comprehensive, but I think it tells the Office 2010 story effectively. Across the Suite More than any other, this release of Office aims to give collaboration a real workout.  In certain apps, for the first time, documents can be opened simultaneously by multiple users, with colleagues’ changes appearing in near real-time.  Web-browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will be available to extend collaboration to contributors who are off the corporate network. The ribbon user interface is now more pervasive (for example, it appears in OneNote and in Outlook’s main window).  It’s also customizable, allowing users to add, easily, buttons and options of their choosing, into new tabs, or into new groups within existing tabs. Microsoft has also taken the File menu (which was the “Office Button” menu in the 2007 release) and made it into a full-screen “Backstage” view where document-wide operations, like saving, printing and online publishing are performed. And because, more and more, heavily formatted content is cut and pasted between documents and applications, Office 2010 makes it easier to manage the retention or jettisoning of that formatting right as the paste operation is performed.  That’s much nicer than stripping it off, or adding it back, afterwards. And, speaking of pasting, a number of Office apps now make it especially easy to insert screenshots within their documents.  I know that’s useful to me, because I often document or critique applications and need to show them in action.  For the vast majority of users, I expect that this feature will be more useful for capturing snapshots of Web pages, but we’ll have to see whether this feature becomes popular.   Excel At first glance, Excel 2010 looks and acts nearly identically to the 2007 version.  But additional glances are necessary.  It’s important to understand that lots of people in the working world use Excel as more of a database, analytics and mathematical modeling tool than merely as a spreadsheet.  And it’s also important to understand that Excel wasn’t designed to handle such workloads past a certain scale.  That all changes with this release. The first reason things change is that Excel has been tuned for performance.  It’s been optimized for multi-threaded operation; previously lengthy processes have been shortened, especially for large data sets; more rows and columns are allowed and, for the first time, Excel (and the rest of Office) is available in a 64-bit version.  For Excel, this means users can take advantage of more than the 2GB of memory that the 32-bit version is limited to. On the analysis side, Excel 2010 adds Sparklines (tiny charts that fit into a single cell and can therefore be presented down an entire column or across a row) and Slicers (a more user-friendly filter mechanism for PivotTables and charts, which visually indicates what the filtered state of a given data member is).  But most important, Excel 2010 supports the new PowerPIvot add-in which brings true self-service BI to Office.  PowerPivot allows users to import data from almost anywhere, model it, and then analyze it.  Rather than forcing users to build “spreadmarts” or use corporate-built data warehouses, PowerPivot models function as true columnar, in-memory OLAP cubes that can accommodate millions of rows of data and deliver fast drill-down performance. And speaking of OLAP, Excel 2010 now supports an important Analysis Services OLAP feature called write-back.  Write-back is especially useful in financial forecasting scenarios for which Excel is the natural home.  Support for write-back is long overdue, but I’m still glad it’s there, because I had almost given up on it.   PowerPoint This version of PowerPoint marks its progression from a presentation tool to a video and photo editing and production tool.  Whether or not it’s successful in this pursuit, and if offering this is even a sensible goal, is another question. Regardless, the new capabilities are kind of interesting.  A greatly enhanced set of slide transitions with 3D effects; in-product photo and video editing; accommodation of embedded videos from services such as YouTube; and the ability to save a presentation as a video each lay testimony to PowerPoint’s transformation into a media tool and away from a pure presentation tool. These capabilities also recognize the importance of the Web as both a source for materials and a channel for disseminating PowerPoint output. Congruent with that is PowerPoint’s new ability to broadcast a slide presentation, using a quickly-generated public URL, without involving the hassle or expense of a Web meeting service like GoToMeeting or Microsoft’s own LiveMeeting.  Slides presented through this broadcast feature retain full color fidelity and transitions and animations are preserved as well.   Outlook Microsoft’s ubiquitous email/calendar/contact/task management tool gains long overdue speed improvements, especially against POP3 email accounts.  Outlook 2010 also supports multiple Exchange accounts, rather than just one; tighter integration with OneNote; and a new Social Connector providing integration with, and presence information from, online social network services like LinkedIn and Facebook (not to mention Windows Live).  A revamped conversation view now includes messages that are part of a given thread regardless of which folder they may be stored in. I don’t know yet how well the Social Connector will work or whether it will keep Outlook relevant to those who live on Facebook and LinkedIn.  But among the other features, there’s very little not to like.   OneNote To me, OneNote is the part of Office that just keeps getting better.  There is one major caveat to this, which I’ll cover in a moment, but let’s first catalog what new stuff OneNote 2010 brings.  The best part of OneNote, is the way each of its versions have managed hierarchy: Notebooks have sections, sections have pages, pages have sub pages, multiple notes can be contained in either, and each note supports infinite levels of indentation.  None of that is new to 2010, but the new version does make creation of pages and subpages easier and also makes simple work out of promoting and demoting pages from sub page to full page status.  And relationships between pages are quite easy to create now: much like a Wiki, simply typing a page’s name in double-square-brackets (“[[…]]”) creates a link to it. OneNote is also great at integrating content outside of its notebooks.  With a new Dock to Desktop feature, OneNote becomes aware of what window is displayed in the rest of the screen and, if it’s an Office document or a Web page, links the notes you’re typing, at the time, to it.  A single click from your notes later on will bring that same document or Web page back on-screen.  Embedding content from Web pages and elsewhere is also easier.  Using OneNote’s Windows Key+S combination to grab part of the screen now allows you to specify the destination of that bitmap instead of automatically creating a new note in the Unfiled Notes area.  Using the Send to OneNote buttons in Internet Explorer and Outlook result in the same choice. Collaboration gets better too.  Real-time multi-author editing is better accommodated and determining author lineage of particular changes is easily carried out. My one pet peeve with OneNote is the difficulty using it when I’m not one a Windows PC.  OneNote’s main competitor, Evernote, while I believe inferior in terms of features, has client versions for PC, Mac, Windows Mobile, Android, iPhone, iPad and Web browsers.  Since I have an Android phone and an iPad, I am practically forced to use it.  However, the OneNote Web app should help here, as should a forthcoming version of OneNote for Windows Phone 7.  In the mean time, it turns out that using OneNote’s Email Page ribbon button lets you move a OneNote page easily into EverNote (since every EverNote account gets a unique email address for adding notes) and that Evernote’s Email function combined with Outlook’s Send to OneNote button (in the Move group of the ribbon’s Home tab) can achieve the reverse.   Access To me, the big change in Access 2007 was its tight integration with SharePoint lists.  Access 2010 and SharePoint 2010 continue this integration with the introduction of SharePoint’s Access Services.  Much as Excel Services provides a SharePoint-hosted experience for viewing (and now editing) Excel spreadsheet, PivotTable and chart content, Access Services allows for SharePoint browser-hosted editing of Access data within the forms that are built in the Access client itself. To me this makes all kinds of sense.  Although it does beg the question of where to draw the line between Access, InfoPath, SharePoint list maintenance and SharePoint 2010’s new Business Connectivity Services.  Each of these tools provide overlapping data entry and data maintenance functionality. But if you do prefer Access, then you’ll like  things like templates and application parts that make it easier to get off the blank page.  These features help you quickly get tables, forms and reports built out.  To make things look nice, Access even gets its own version of Excel’s Conditional Formatting feature, letting you add data bars and data-driven text formatting.   Word As I said at the beginning of this post, upgrades to Office are about much more than enhancing the suite’s flagship word processing application. So are there any enhancements in Word worth mentioning?  I think so.  The most important one has to be the collaboration features.  Essentially, when a user opens a Word document that is in a SharePoint document library (or Windows Live SkyDrive folder), rather than the whole document being locked, Word has the ability to observe more granular locks on the individual paragraphs being edited.  Word also shows you who’s editing what and its Save function morphs into a sync feature that both saves your changes and loads those made by anyone editing the document concurrently. There’s also a new navigation pane that lets you manage sections in your document in much the same way as you manage slides in a PowerPoint deck.  Using the navigation pane, you can reorder sections, insert new ones, or promote and demote sections in the outline hierarchy.  Not earth shattering, but nice.   Other Apps and Summarized Findings What about InfoPath, Publisher, Visio and Project?  I haven’t looked at them yet.  And for this post, I think that’s fine.  While those apps (and, arguably, Access) cater to specific tasks, I think the apps we’ve looked at in this post service the general purpose needs of most users.  And the theme in those 2010 apps is clear: collaboration is key, the Web and productivity are indivisible, and making data and analytics into a self-service amenity is the way to go.  But perhaps most of all, features are still important, as long as they get you through your day faster, rather than adding complexity for its own sake.  I would argue that this is true for just about every product Microsoft makes: users want utility, not complexity.

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• Backing up my data causes my server to crash using Symantec Backup Exec 12, or How I Came to Loathe

  - by Kyle Noland

  I have a Dell PowerEdge 2850 running Windows Server 2003. It is the primary file server for one of my clients. I have another server also running Windows Server 2003 that acts as the core media server for Symantec Backup Exec 12. I recently upgraded from Backup Exec 11d to 12. This upgrade was necessary because we also just upgraded from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. After the upgrade I had to push-install the new version 12 Backup Exec Remote Agents to each of the servers I am backing up (about 6 total). 5 of my servers are doing just fine, faithfully completing backups every night. My file server routinely crashes. Observations: When the server crashes, it does not blue screen, it just locks up completely. Even the mouse is unresponsive. If you leave the server locked up long enough, it will eventually reboot itself and hang on the Windows splash screen. There is absolutely zero useful Event Viewer evidence of a problem. The logs go from routine logging to an Unexplained Shutdown Event the next morning when I have to hard reset the server to get it to boot. 90% of the time the server does not boot cleanly, it hangs on the Windows splash screen. I don't have any light to shed here. When the server hangs all I can do is hard reset it and try again. Even after a successful boot and chkdsk /r operation, if you reboot the machine, you have a 90% chance it won't back up again cleanly. The back story: This server started crashing during nightly backups about a month ago. I tried everything I could think of to troubleshoot the problem and eventually had to give up because I could not keep coming to the office at 4 AM to try to get the server back online. One Friday I got lucky and the server stayed up for its entire full backup. I took this opportunity to restore the full backup to a temporary server I set up and switched all my users to the temporary. Then I reloaded the ailing file server. I kept all my users on the temporary file server for about 3 weeks. I installed the same Backup Exec Remote Agent and Trend Micro A/V client on the temporary server that I was using on the regular file server. During this time, I had absolutely no problems backing up the temporary server. I tested the reloaded file server extensively. I rebooted the server once an hour every day for 3 weeks trying to make it fail. It never did. I felt confident that the reload was the answer to my problems. I moved all of the data from the temporary server back to the regular server. I got 3 nightly backups out of it before it locked up again and started the familiar failure to boot cleanly behavior. This weekend I decided to monitor the file server through the entire backup job. I RDPd into the file server and also into the server running Backup Exec. On the file server I opened the Task Manager so I could view the processes and watch CPU and memory usage. Everything was running smoothly for about 60GB worth of backup. Then I noticed that the byte count of the backup job in Backup Exec had stopped progressing. I looked back over at my RDP session into the file server, and I was getting real time updates about CPU and memory usage still - both nearly 0%, which is unusual. Backups usually hover around 40% usage for the duration of the backup job. Let me reiterate this point: The screen was refreshing and I was getting real time Task Manager updates - until I clicked on the Start menu. The screen went black and the server locked up. In truth, I think the server had already locked up, the video card just hadn't figured it out yet. I went back into my bag of trick: driving to the office and hard reseting the server over and over again when it hangs up at the Windows splash screen. I did this for 2 hours without getting a successful boot. I started panicking because I did not have a decent backup to use to get everything back onto the working temporary file server. Once I exhausted everything I knew to do, I took a deep breath, booted to the Windows Server 2003 CD and performed a repair installation of Windows. The server came back up fine, with all of my data intact. I can now reboot the server at will and it will come back up cleanly. The problem is that I'm afraid as soon as I try to back that data up again I will back at square one. So let me sum things up: Here is what I've done so far to troubleshoot this server: Deleted and recreated the RAID 5 sets. Initialized the drives. Reloaded the server with a fresh Server 2003 install. Confirmed with Dell that I have installed the latest, Dell approved BIOS and NIC drivers. Uninstalled / reinstalled the Backup Exec Remote Agent. Uninstalled the Trend Micro A/V client. Configured the server not to reboot itself after a blue screen so I can see any stop error. I used to think the server was blue screening, but since I enabled this setting I now know that the server just completely locks up. Run chkdsk /r from the Windows Recovery Console. Several errors were found and corrected, but did not help my problem. Help confirm or deny the following assumptions: There are two problems at work here. Why the server is locking up in the first place, and why the server won't boot cleanly after a lockup. This is ultimately a software problem. The server works fine and can be rebooted cleanly all day long - until the first lockup - following a fresh OS load or even a Repair installation. This is not a problem with Backup Exec in general. All of my other servers back up just fine. For the record, all of the other servers run Server 2003, and some of them house more data than the file server in question here. Any help is appreciated. The irony is almost too much to bear. Backing up my data is what is jeopardizing it.

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• Backing up my data causes my server to crash using Symantec Backup Exec 12, or How I Came to Loathe Irony

  - by Kyle Noland

  I have a Dell PowerEdge 2850 running Windows Server 2003. It is the primary file server for one of my clients. I have another server also running Windows Server 2003 that acts as the core media server for Symantec Backup Exec 12. I recently upgraded from Backup Exec 11d to 12. This upgrade was necessary because we also just upgraded from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. After the upgrade I had to push-install the new version 12 Backup Exec Remote Agents to each of the servers I am backing up (about 6 total). 5 of my servers are doing just fine, faithfully completing backups every night. My file server routinely crashes. Observations: When the server crashes, it does not blue screen, it just locks up completely. Even the mouse is unresponsive. If you leave the server locked up long enough, it will eventually reboot itself and hang on the Windows splash screen. There is absolutely zero useful Event Viewer evidence of a problem. The logs go from routine logging to an Unexplained Shutdown Event the next morning when I have to hard reset the server to get it to boot. 90% of the time the server does not boot cleanly, it hangs on the Windows splash screen. I don't have any light to shed here. When the server hangs all I can do is hard reset it and try again. Even after a successful boot and chkdsk /r operation, if you reboot the machine, you have a 90% chance it won't back up again cleanly. The back story: This server started crashing during nightly backups about a month ago. I tried everything I could think of to troubleshoot the problem and eventually had to give up because I could not keep coming to the office at 4 AM to try to get the server back online. One Friday I got lucky and the server stayed up for its entire full backup. I took this opportunity to restore the full backup to a temporary server I set up and switched all my users to the temporary. Then I reloaded the ailing file server. I kept all my users on the temporary file server for about 3 weeks. I installed the same Backup Exec Remote Agent and Trend Micro A/V client on the temporary server that I was using on the regular file server. During this time, I had absolutely no problems backing up the temporary server. I tested the reloaded file server extensively. I rebooted the server once an hour every day for 3 weeks trying to make it fail. It never did. I felt confident that the reload was the answer to my problems. I moved all of the data from the temporary server back to the regular server. I got 3 nightly backups out of it before it locked up again and started the familiar failure to boot cleanly behavior. This weekend I decided to monitor the file server through the entire backup job. I RDPd into the file server and also into the server running Backup Exec. On the file server I opened the Task Manager so I could view the processes and watch CPU and memory usage. Everything was running smoothly for about 60GB worth of backup. Then I noticed that the byte count of the backup job in Backup Exec had stopped progressing. I looked back over at my RDP session into the file server, and I was getting real time updates about CPU and memory usage still - both nearly 0%, which is unusual. Backups usually hover around 40% usage for the duration of the backup job. Let me reiterate this point: The screen was refreshing and I was getting real time Task Manager updates - until I clicked on the Start menu. The screen went black and the server locked up. In truth, I think the server had already locked up, the video card just hadn't figured it out yet. I went back into my bag of trick: driving to the office and hard reseting the server over and over again when it hangs up at the Windows splash screen. I did this for 2 hours without getting a successful boot. I started panicking because I did not have a decent backup to use to get everything back onto the working temporary file server. Once I exhausted everything I knew to do, I took a deep breath, booted to the Windows Server 2003 CD and performed a repair installation of Windows. The server came back up fine, with all of my data intact. I can now reboot the server at will and it will come back up cleanly. The problem is that I'm afraid as soon as I try to back that data up again I will back at square one. So let me sum things up: Here is what I've done so far to troubleshoot this server: Deleted and recreated the RAID 5 sets. Initialized the drives. Reloaded the server with a fresh Server 2003 install. Confirmed with Dell that I have installed the latest, Dell approved BIOS and NIC drivers. Uninstalled / reinstalled the Backup Exec Remote Agent. Uninstalled the Trend Micro A/V client. Configured the server not to reboot itself after a blue screen so I can see any stop error. I used to think the server was blue screening, but since I enabled this setting I now know that the server just completely locks up. Run chkdsk /r from the Windows Recovery Console. Several errors were found and corrected, but did not help my problem. Help confirm or deny the following assumptions: There are two problems at work here. Why the server is locking up in the first place, and why the server won't boot cleanly after a lockup. This is ultimately a software problem. The server works fine and can be rebooted cleanly all day long - until the first lockup - following a fresh OS load or even a Repair installation. This is not a problem with Backup Exec in general. All of my other servers back up just fine. For the record, all of the other servers run Server 2003, and some of them house more data than the file server in question here. Any help is appreciated. The irony is almost too much to bear. Backing up my data is what is jeopardizing it.

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• java runtime 6 with socks v5 proxy - Possible?

  - by rwired

  I have written an application that (amongst other things) runs a local service in windows that acts as a SOCKS v5 proxy for Firefox. I'm in the debugging phase right now and have found certain websites that don't work correctly. For example the Java Applet for Picture Uploading on Facebook.com fails because is is unable to lookup domains. My app overrides a hidden FF config setting network.proxy.socks__remote__dns setting it to true. The whole purpose of the app is to allow access to websites when behind a firewall (e.g. if the user is in China), so this setting is essential to ensure domains are resolved remotely also (and not just HTTP requests). In the JRE6 settings (documented here) there isn't an equivalent setting, and since remote DNS resolution is a feature of SOCKS v5 and not v4 as the documentation seems to imply I'm worried that it's just not possible. How can I programmatically make sure the JRE uses a SOCKS v5 proxy for all requests (including DNS)? UPDATE: Steps to reproduce this problem: Make sure you are behind a firewall that blocks (or redirects) internet access including DNS Install PuTTY and add a dynamic SSH tunnel on some port number of your choice (e.g. 9870). Then login to a remote server that has full access to the internet Launch Firefox and you will not be able to browse the web In FF network settings set the SOCKS v5 proxy to localhost:9870 In FF go to about:config, change network.proxy.socks__remote__dns to true You will now be able to browse the web. Go to facebook.com, login, go to your profile and attempt to use the picture uploader java applet to add some pictures It will fail with a series of class not found errors looking similar to: load: class com.facebook.facebookphotouploader5.FacebookPhotoUploader5.class not found. I believe this is failing because the JRE is unable to resolve the domain that the class resides on. I'm basing this belief on the fact that the documentation (http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/deployment/deployment-guide/properties.html) talks only about SOCKS v4 (which as far as I know does not support remote DNS). My deployment.properties file is located in %APPDATA%\Sun\Java\Deployment. I can confirm that modifications I make in the Java Control Panel get written into that file. If instead of "Use browser setting" the network settings for Java I override and attempt to use the SOCKS proxy settings manually, I still have the issue. There does not seem to be an easy way to force the JRE to do DNS remotely through the Proxy. UPDATE 2: Without the SOCKS proxy, from my local client www.facebook.com resolves to 203.161.230.171 upload.facebook.com resolves to 64.33.88.161 Neither host is reachable (because of the firewall) If I login to the remote server, I get: www.facebook.com 69.63.187.17 upload.facebook.com 69.63.178.32 Both these IPs change after a few minutes, as it seems Facebook uses round-robin DNS and other load-balancing. With the Proxy settings set in Firefox, I can navigate to www.facebook.com without any difficulty (since DNS is being resolved remotely on the Proxy). Whey I go to the page with the Java applet it fails with the stacktrace messages I've already reported. However if I edit Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts, adding the correct IP for upload.facebook.com I can get the applet to load and work correctly (restart of FF is sometimes necessary). This evidence seems to support my theory that the Java Runtime is not resolving DNS on the Proxy, but instead just routing traffic though it. My application is for mass-deployment, and needs to work with java applets on other sites (not just facebook). I really need a work-around for this problem. UPDATE 3 Stacktrace dump a requested by ZZ Coder: load: class com.facebook.facebookphotouploader5.FacebookPhotoUploader5.class not found. java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.facebook.facebookphotouploader5.FacebookPhotoUploader5.class at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2ClassLoader.loadCode(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager.createApplet(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager$AppletExecutionRunnable.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Caused by: java.net.SocketException: Connection reset at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(Unknown Source) at java.io.BufferedInputStream.fill(Unknown Source) at java.io.BufferedInputStream.read1(Unknown Source) at java.io.BufferedInputStream.read(Unknown Source) at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.parseHTTPHeader(Unknown Source) at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.parseHTTP(Unknown Source) at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.parseHTTP(Unknown Source) at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(Unknown Source) at java.net.HttpURLConnection.getResponseCode(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader.getBytes(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader.access$000(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) ... 7 more Exception: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.facebook.facebookphotouploader5.FacebookPhotoUploader5.class Dumping class loader cache... Live entry: key=http://upload.facebook.com/controls/2008.10.10_v5.5.8/,FacebookPhotoUploader5.jar,FacebookPhotoUploader5.jar, refCount=1, threadGroup=sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ThreadGroup[name=http://upload.facebook.com/controls/2008.10.10_v5.5.8/-threadGroup,maxpri=4] Done.

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