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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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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked CompareExchange()

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Two posts ago, I discussed the Interlocked Add(), Increment(), and Decrement() methods (here) for adding and subtracting values in a thread-safe, lightweight manner.  Then, last post I talked about the Interlocked Read() and Exchange() methods (here) for safely and efficiently reading and setting 32 or 64 bit values (or references).  This week, we’ll round out the discussion by talking about the Interlocked CompareExchange() method and how it can be put to use to exchange a value if the current value is what you expected it to be. Dirty reads can lead to bad results Many of the uses of Interlocked that we’ve explored so far have centered around either reading, setting, or adding values.  But what happens if you want to do something more complex such as setting a value based on the previous value in some manner? Perhaps you were creating an application that reads a current balance, applies a deposit, and then saves the new modified balance, where of course you’d want that to happen atomically.  If you read the balance, then go to save the new balance and between that time the previous balance has already changed, you’ll have an issue!  Think about it, if we read the current balance as $400, and we are applying a new deposit of $50.75, but meanwhile someone else deposits $200 and sets the total to $600, but then we write a total of $450.75 we’ve lost $200! Now, certainly for int and long values we can use Interlocked.Add() to handles these cases, and it works well for that.  But what if we want to work with doubles, for example?  Let’s say we wanted to add the numbers from 0 to 99,999 in parallel.  We could do this by spawning several parallel tasks to continuously add to a total: 1: double total = 0; 2:  3: Parallel.For(0, 10000, next => 4: { 5: total += next; 6: }); Were this run on one thread using a standard for loop, we’d expect an answer of 4,999,950,000 (the sum of all numbers from 0 to 99,999).  But when we run this in parallel as written above, we’ll likely get something far off.  The result of one of my runs, for example, was 1,281,880,740.  That is way off!  If this were banking software we’d be in big trouble with our clients.  So what happened?  The += operator is not atomic, it will read in the current value, add the result, then store it back into the total.  At any point in all of this another thread could read a “dirty” current total and accidentally “skip” our add.   So, to clean this up, we could use a lock to guarantee concurrency: 1: double total = 0.0; 2: object locker = new object(); 3:  4: Parallel.For(0, count, next => 5: { 6: lock (locker) 7: { 8: total += next; 9: } 10: }); Which will give us the correct result of 4,999,950,000.  One thing to note is that locking can be heavy, especially if the operation being locked over is trivial, or the life of the lock is a high percentage of the work being performed concurrently.  In the case above, the lock consumes pretty much all of the time of each parallel task – and the task being locked on is relatively trivial. Now, let me put in a disclaimer here before we go further: For most uses, lock is more than sufficient for your needs, and is often the simplest solution!    So, if lock is sufficient for most needs, why would we ever consider another solution?  The problem with locking is that it can suspend execution of your thread while it waits for the signal that the lock is free.  Moreover, if the operation being locked over is trivial, the lock can add a very high level of overhead.  This is why things like Interlocked.Increment() perform so well, instead of locking just to perform an increment, we perform the increment with an atomic, lockless method. As with all things performance related, it’s important to profile before jumping to the conclusion that you should optimize everything in your path.  If your profiling shows that locking is causing a high level of waiting in your application, then it’s time to consider lighter alternatives such as Interlocked. CompareExchange() – Exchange existing value if equal some value So let’s look at how we could use CompareExchange() to solve our problem above.  The general syntax of CompareExchange() is: T CompareExchange<T>(ref T location, T newValue, T expectedValue) If the value in location == expectedValue, then newValue is exchanged.  Either way, the value in location (before exchange) is returned. Actually, CompareExchange() is not one method, but a family of overloaded methods that can take int, long, float, double, pointers, or references.  It cannot take other value types (that is, can’t CompareExchange() two DateTime instances directly).  Also keep in mind that the version that takes any reference type (the generic overload) only checks for reference equality, it does not call any overridden Equals(). So how does this help us?  Well, we can grab the current total, and exchange the new value if total hasn’t changed.  This would look like this: 1: // grab the snapshot 2: double current = total; 3:  4: // if the total hasn’t changed since I grabbed the snapshot, then 5: // set it to the new total 6: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current); So what the code above says is: if the amount in total (1st arg) is the same as the amount in current (3rd arg), then set total to current + next (2nd arg).  This check and exchange pair is atomic (and thus thread-safe). This works if total is the same as our snapshot in current, but the problem, is what happens if they aren’t the same?  Well, we know that in either case we will get the previous value of total (before the exchange), back as a result.  Thus, we can test this against our snapshot to see if it was the value we expected: 1: // if the value returned is != current, then our snapshot must be out of date 2: // which means we didn't (and shouldn't) apply current + next 3: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + next, current) != current) 4: { 5: // ooops, total was not equal to our snapshot in current, what should we do??? 6: } So what do we do if we fail?  That’s up to you and the problem you are trying to solve.  It’s possible you would decide to abort the whole transaction, or perhaps do a lightweight spin and try again.  Let’s try that: 1: double current = total; 2:  3: // make first attempt... 4: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current) 5: { 6: // if we fail, go into a spin wait, spin, and try again until succeed 7: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 8:  9: do 10: { 11: spinner.SpinOnce(); 12: current = total; 13: } 14: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref total, current + i, current) != current); 15: } 16:  This is not trivial code, but it illustrates a possible use of CompareExchange().  What we are doing is first checking to see if we succeed on the first try, and if so great!  If not, we create a SpinWait and then repeat the process of SpinOnce(), grab a fresh snapshot, and repeat until CompareExchnage() succeeds.  You may wonder why not a simple do-while here, and the reason it’s more efficient to only create the SpinWait until we absolutely know we need one, for optimal efficiency. Though not as simple (or maintainable) as a simple lock, this will perform better in many situations.  Comparing an unlocked (and wrong) version, a version using lock, and the Interlocked of the code, we get the following average times for multiple iterations of adding the sum of 100,000 numbers: 1: Unlocked money average time: 2.1 ms 2: Locked money average time: 5.1 ms 3: Interlocked money average time: 3 ms So the Interlocked.CompareExchange(), while heavier to code, came in lighter than the lock, offering a good compromise of safety and performance when we need to reduce contention. CompareExchange() - it’s not just for adding stuff… So that was one simple use of CompareExchange() in the context of adding double values -- which meant we couldn’t have used the simpler Interlocked.Add() -- but it has other uses as well. If you think about it, this really works anytime you want to create something new based on a current value without using a full lock.  For example, you could use it to create a simple lazy instantiation implementation.  In this case, we want to set the lazy instance only if the previous value was null: 1: public static class Lazy<T> where T : class, new() 2: { 3: private static T _instance; 4:  5: public static T Instance 6: { 7: get 8: { 9: // if current is null, we need to create new instance 10: if (_instance == null) 11: { 12: // attempt create, it will only set if previous was null 13: Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _instance, new T(), (T)null); 14: } 15:  16: return _instance; 17: } 18: } 19: } So, if _instance == null, this will create a new T() and attempt to exchange it with _instance.  If _instance is not null, then it does nothing and we discard the new T() we created. This is a way to create lazy instances of a type where we are more concerned about locking overhead than creating an accidental duplicate which is not used.  In fact, the BCL implementation of Lazy<T> offers a similar thread-safety choice for Publication thread safety, where it will not guarantee only one instance was created, but it will guarantee that all readers get the same instance.  Another possible use would be in concurrent collections.  Let’s say, for example, that you are creating your own brand new super stack that uses a linked list paradigm and is “lock free”.  We could use Interlocked.CompareExchange() to be able to do a lockless Push() which could be more efficient in multi-threaded applications where several threads are pushing and popping on the stack concurrently. Yes, there are already concurrent collections in the BCL (in .NET 4.0 as part of the TPL), but it’s a fun exercise!  So let’s assume we have a node like this: 1: public sealed class Node<T> 2: { 3: // the data for this node 4: public T Data { get; set; } 5:  6: // the link to the next instance 7: internal Node<T> Next { get; set; } 8: } Then, perhaps, our stack’s Push() operation might look something like: 1: public sealed class SuperStack<T> 2: { 3: private volatile T _head; 4:  5: public void Push(T value) 6: { 7: var newNode = new Node<int> { Data = value, Next = _head }; 8:  9: if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next) 10: { 11: var spinner = new SpinWait(); 12:  13: do 14: { 15: spinner.SpinOnce(); 16: newNode.Next = _head; 17: } 18: while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref _head, newNode, newNode.Next) != newNode.Next); 19: } 20: } 21:  22: // ... 23: } Notice a similar paradigm here as with adding our doubles before.  What we are doing is creating the new Node with the data to push, and with a Next value being the original node referenced by _head.  This will create our stack behavior (LIFO – Last In, First Out).  Now, we have to set _head to now refer to the newNode, but we must first make sure it hasn’t changed! So we check to see if _head has the same value we saved in our snapshot as newNode.Next, and if so, we set _head to newNode.  This is all done atomically, and the result is _head’s original value, as long as the original value was what we assumed it was with newNode.Next, then we are good and we set it without a lock!  If not, we SpinWait and try again. Once again, this is much lighter than locking in highly parallelized code with lots of contention.  If I compare the method above with a similar class using lock, I get the following results for pushing 100,000 items: 1: Locked SuperStack average time: 6 ms 2: Interlocked SuperStack average time: 4.5 ms So, once again, we can get more efficient than a lock, though there is the cost of added code complexity.  Fortunately for you, most of the concurrent collection you’d ever need are already created for you in the System.Collections.Concurrent (here) namespace – for more information, see my Little Wonders – The Concurent Collections Part 1 (here), Part 2 (here), and Part 3 (here). Summary We’ve seen before how the Interlocked class can be used to safely and efficiently add, increment, decrement, read, and exchange values in a multi-threaded environment.  In addition to these, Interlocked CompareExchange() can be used to perform more complex logic without the need of a lock when lock contention is a concern. The added efficiency, though, comes at the cost of more complex code.  As such, the standard lock is often sufficient for most thread-safety needs.  But if profiling indicates you spend a lot of time waiting for locks, or if you just need a lock for something simple such as an increment, decrement, read, exchange, etc., then consider using the Interlocked class’s methods to reduce wait. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Interlocked,CompareExchange,threading,concurrency

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• Bind can only work for the DNS server inside zone

  - by Bob

  I got a big problem when I added a new zone to my current Bind configuration. ===============/etc/named.conf=============== include "/etc/rndc.key"; controls { inet 127.0.0.1 port 953 allow { 127.0.0.1; } keys { "rndckey"; }; }; acl "trusted" { 127.0.0.1; 208.43.81.157; 69.4.236.88; }; options { directory "/var/named"; allow-query { any; }; recursion yes; allow-recursion { trusted; }; }; zone "." { type hint; file "root.hints"; }; zone "2comu.com" { type master; file "2comu.com.db"; allow-update { none; }; }; zone "usa-diamond.com" { type master; file "usa-diamond.com.db"; allow-update { none; }; }; ===============/var/named/2comu.com.db=============== $TTL 86400 @ IN SOA ns1.2comu.com. root.2comu.com. ( 2011011101 3600 300 3600000 3600 ) IN NS ns1.2comu.com. IN NS ns2.2comu.com. IN MX 10 email.2comu.com. ns1.2comu.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 ns2.2comu.com. IN A 69.4.236.88 www.2comu.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 ftp.2comu.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 email.2comu.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 ===============/var/named/usa-diamond.com=============== $TTL 86400 @ IN SOA ns1.2comu.com. root.usa-diamond.com. ( 2011011115 3600 300 3600000 3600 ) IN NS ns1.2comu.com. IN NS ns2.2comu.com. www.usa-diamond.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 ================================================================ All of the configurations inside domain 2comu.com work well. But when www.usa-diamond.com doesn't work at all. When I tried "dig +trace www.usa-diamond.com", I got the following message ================================================================ ; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_4.2 <<>> +trace usa-diamond.com ;; global options: printcmd . 517603 IN NS c.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS d.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS e.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS f.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS g.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS h.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS i.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS j.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS k.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS l.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS m.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS a.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS b.root-servers.net. ;; Received 500 bytes from 208.43.81.157#53(208.43.81.157) in 0 ms com. 172800 IN NS j.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS d.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS e.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS i.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS f.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS m.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS b.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS k.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS l.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS c.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS h.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS a.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS g.gtld-servers.net. ;; Received 505 bytes from 192.33.4.12#53(c.root-servers.net) in 3 ms usa-diamond.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.2comu.com. usa-diamond.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.2comu.com. ;; Received 107 bytes from 192.48.79.30#53(j.gtld-servers.net) in 177 ms ;; Received 33 bytes from 208.43.81.157#53(ns1.2comu.com) in 0 ms ========================================================================= It seems I can't get any answer from ns1.2comu.com. Can anyone give some suggestions? Thanks a lot. Bob

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• Network throughput issue (ARP-related)

  - by Joel Coel

  The small college where I work is having some very strange network issues. I'm looking for any advice or ideas here. We were fine over the summer, but the trouble began few days after students returned to campus in force for the fall term. Symptoms The main symptom is that internet access will work, but it's very slow... often to the point of timeouts. As an example, a typical result from Speedtest.net will return .4Mbps download, but allow 3 to 8 Mbps upload speed. Lesser symptoms may include severely limited performance transferring data to and from our file server, or even in some cases the inability to log in to the computer (cannot reach the domain controller). The issue crosses multiple vlans, and has effected devices on nearly every vlan we operate. The issue does not impact all machines on the network. An unaffected machine will typically see at least 11Mbps download from speedtest.net, and perhaps much more depending on larger campus traffic patterns at the time. There is one variation on the larger issue. We have one vlan where users were unable to log into nearly all of the machines at all. IT staff would log in using a local administrator account (or in some cases cached credentials), and from there a release/renew or pinging the gateway would allow the machine to work... for a while. Complicating this issue is that this vlan covers our computer labs, which use software called Deep Freeze to completely reset the hard drives after a reboot. It could just the same issue manifesting differently because of stale data on machines that have not permanently altered low-level info for weeks. We were able to solve this, however, by creating a new vlan and moving the labs over to the new vlan wholesale. Instigations Eventually we noticed that the effected machines all had recent dhcp leases. We can predict when a machine will become "slow" by watching when a dhcp lease comes up for renewal. We played with setting the lease time very short for a test vlan, but all that did was remove our ability to predict when the machine would become slow. Machines with static IPs have pretty much always worked normally. Manually releasing/renewing an address will never cause a machine to become slow. In fact, in some cases this process has fixed a machine in that state. Most of the time, though, it doesn't help. We also noticed that mobile machines like laptops are likely to become slow when they cross to new vlans. Wireless on campus is divided up into "zones", where each zone maps to a small set of buildings. Moving to a new building can place you in a zone, thereby causing you to get a new address. A machine resuming from sleep mode is also very likely to be slow. Mitigations Sometimes, but not always, clearing the arp cache on an effected machine will allow it to work normally again. As already mentioned, releasing/renewing a local machine's IP address can fix that machine, but it's not guaranteed. Pinging the default gateway can also sometimes help with a slow machine. What seems to help most to mitigate the issue is clearing the arp cache on our core layer-3 switch. This switch is used for our dhcp system as the default gateway on all vlans, and it handles inter-vlan routing. The model is a 3Com 4900SX. To try to mitigate the issue, we have the cache timeout set on the switch all the way down to the lowest possible time, but it hasn't helped. I also put together a script that runs every few minutes to automatically connect to the switch and reset the cache. Unfortunately, this does not always work, and can even cause some machines to end up in the slow state for a short time (though these seem to correct themselves after a few minutes). We currently have a scheduled job that runs every 10 minutes to force the core switch to clear it's ARP cache, but this is far from perfect or desirable. Reproduction We now have a test machine that we can force into the slow state at will. It is connected to a switch with ports set up for each of our vlans. We make the machine slow by connecting to different vlans, and after a new connection or two it will be slow. It's also worth noting in this section that this has happened before at the start of prior terms, but in the past the problem has gone away on it's own after a few days. It solved itself before we had a chance to do much diagnostic work... hence why we've allowed it to drag so long into the term this time 'round; the expectation was this would be a short-lived situation. Other Factors It's worth mentioning that we have had about half a dozen switches just outright fail over the last year. These are mainly 2003/2004-era 3Coms (mostly 4200's) that were all put in at about the same time. They should still be covered under warranty, buy HP has made getting service somewhat difficult. Mostly in power supplies that have failed, but in a couple cases we have used a power supply from a switch with a failed mainboard to bring a switch with a failed power supply back to life. We do have UPS devices on all but three of four switches now, but that was not the case when I started two and a half years ago. Severe budget constraints (we were on the Dept. of Ed's financially challenged institutions list a couple years back) have forced me to look to the likes of Netgear and TrendNet for replacements, but so far these low-end models seem to be holding their own. It's also worth mentioning that the big change on our network this summer was migrating from a single cross-campus wireless SSID to the zoned approach mentioned earlier. I don't think this is the source of the issue, as like I've said: we've seen this before. However, it's possible this is exacerbating the issue, and may be much of the reason it's been so hard to isolate. Diagnosis At first it seemed clear to us, given the timing and persistent nature of the problem, that the source of the issue was an infected (or malicious) student machine doing ARP cache poisoning. However, repeated attempts to isolate the source have failed. Those attempts include numerous wireshark packet traces, and even taking entire buildings offline for brief periods. We have not been able even to find a smoking gun bad ARP entry. My current best guess is an overloaded or failing core switch, but I'm not sure on how to test for this, and the cost of replacing it blindly is steep. Again, any ideas appreciated.

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• apache eats up too much ram per child

  - by mrc4r7m4n

  Hello to everyone. I've got fallowing problem: Apache eat to many ram per child. The fallowing comments shows: cat /etc/redhat-release -- Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) free -m: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3566 3136 429 0 339 1907 -/+ buffers/cache: 889 2676 Swap: 4322 0 4322 I know that you will say that there is nothing to worry about because swap is not use, but i think it's not use for now. 3.httpd -v: Server version: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) 4.httpd -l: Compiled in modules: core.c mod_authn_file.c mod_authn_default.c mod_authz_host.c mod_authz_groupfile.c mod_authz_user.c mod_authz_default.c mod_auth_basic.c mod_include.c mod_filter.c mod_log_config.c mod_env.c mod_setenvif.c mod_version.c mod_ssl.c prefork.c http_core.c mod_mime.c mod_status.c mod_autoindex.c mod_asis.c mod_cgi.c mod_negotiation.c mod_dir.c mod_actions.c mod_userdir.c mod_alias.c mod_rewrite.c mod_so.c 5.List of loaded dynamic modules: LoadModule authz_host_module modules/mod_authz_host.so LoadModule include_module modules/mod_include.so LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so LoadModule autoindex_module modules/mod_autoindex.so LoadModule vhost_alias_module modules/mod_vhost_alias.so LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule cgi_module modules/mod_cgi.so 6.My prefrok directive <IfModule prefork.c> StartServers 8 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 25 ServerLimit 80 MaxClients 80 MaxRequestsPerChild 4000 </IfModule> KeepAliveTimeout 6 MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAlive On 7.top -u apache: ctrl+ M top - 09:19:42 up 2 days, 19 min, 2 users, load average: 0.85, 0.87, 0.80 Tasks: 113 total, 1 running, 112 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 7.3%us, 15.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 75.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.7%hi, 0.7%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3652120k total, 3149964k used, 502156k free, 348048k buffers Swap: 4425896k total, 0k used, 4425896k free, 1944952k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 16956 apache 20 0 700m 135m 100m S 0.0 3.8 2:16.78 httpd 16953 apache 20 0 565m 130m 96m S 0.0 3.7 1:57.26 httpd 16957 apache 20 0 587m 129m 102m S 0.0 3.6 1:47.41 httpd 16955 apache 20 0 567m 126m 93m S 0.0 3.6 1:43.60 httpd 17494 apache 20 0 626m 125m 96m S 0.0 3.5 1:58.77 httpd 17515 apache 20 0 540m 120m 88m S 0.0 3.4 1:45.57 httpd 17516 apache 20 0 573m 120m 88m S 0.0 3.4 1:50.51 httpd 16954 apache 20 0 551m 120m 88m S 0.0 3.4 1:52.47 httpd 17493 apache 20 0 586m 120m 94m S 0.0 3.4 1:51.02 httpd 17279 apache 20 0 568m 117m 87m S 16.0 3.3 1:51.87 httpd 17302 apache 20 0 560m 116m 90m S 0.3 3.3 1:59.06 httpd 17495 apache 20 0 551m 116m 89m S 0.0 3.3 1:47.51 httpd 17277 apache 20 0 476m 114m 81m S 0.0 3.2 1:37.14 httpd 30097 apache 20 0 536m 113m 83m S 0.0 3.2 1:47.38 httpd 30112 apache 20 0 530m 112m 81m S 0.0 3.2 1:40.15 httpd 17513 apache 20 0 516m 112m 85m S 0.0 3.1 1:43.92 httpd 16958 apache 20 0 554m 111m 82m S 0.0 3.1 1:44.18 httpd 1617 apache 20 0 487m 111m 85m S 0.0 3.1 1:31.67 httpd 16952 apache 20 0 461m 107m 75m S 0.0 3.0 1:13.71 httpd 16951 apache 20 0 462m 103m 76m S 0.0 2.9 1:28.05 httpd 17278 apache 20 0 497m 103m 76m S 0.0 2.9 1:31.25 httpd 17403 apache 20 0 537m 102m 79m S 0.0 2.9 1:52.24 httpd 25081 apache 20 0 412m 101m 70m S 0.0 2.8 1:01.74 httpd I guess thats all information needed to help me solve this problem. I think the virt memory is to big, the same res. The consumption of ram is increasing all the time. Maybe it's memory leak because i see there is so many static modules compiled. Could someone help me with this issue? Thank you in advance. 8.ldd /usr/sbin/httpd linux-gate.so.1 => (0x0012d000) libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x0012e000) libpcre.so.0 => /lib/libpcre.so.0 (0x00157000) libselinux.so.1 => /lib/libselinux.so.1 (0x0017f000) libaprutil-1.so.0 => /usr/lib/libaprutil-1.so.0 (0x0019a000) libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x001b4000) libldap-2.3.so.0 => /usr/lib/libldap-2.3.so.0 (0x001e6000) liblber-2.3.so.0 => /usr/lib/liblber-2.3.so.0 (0x00220000) libdb-4.6.so => /lib/libdb-4.6.so (0x0022e000) libexpat.so.1 => /lib/libexpat.so.1 (0x00370000) libapr-1.so.0 => /usr/lib/libapr-1.so.0 (0x00391000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x003b9000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x003d2000) libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x003d7000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00110000) libuuid.so.1 => /lib/libuuid.so.1 (0x00530000) libresolv.so.2 => /lib/libresolv.so.2 (0x00534000) libsasl2.so.2 => /usr/lib/libsasl2.so.2 (0x00548000) libssl.so.6 => /lib/libssl.so.6 (0x00561000) libcrypto.so.6 => /lib/libcrypto.so.6 (0x005a6000) libgssapi_krb5.so.2 => /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.so.2 (0x006d9000) libkrb5.so.3 => /usr/lib/libkrb5.so.3 (0x00707000) libcom_err.so.2 => /lib/libcom_err.so.2 (0x0079a000) libk5crypto.so.3 => /usr/lib/libk5crypto.so.3 (0x0079d000) libz.so.1 => /lib/libz.so.1 (0x007c3000) libkrb5support.so.0 => /usr/lib/libkrb5support.so.0 (0x007d6000) libkeyutils.so.1 => /lib/libkeyutils.so.1 (0x007df000) Currently i cant restart the apache. I work in a company and now there is rush hours. I will do that about 5 pm. Current top -u apache: shift + M top - 12:31:33 up 2 days, 3:30, 1 user, load average: 0.73, 0.80, 0.79 Tasks: 114 total, 1 running, 113 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 3.3%us, 4.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 90.0%id, 1.3%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3652120k total, 3169720k used, 482400k free, 353372k buffers Swap: 4425896k total, 0k used, 4425896k free, 1978688k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 16957 apache 20 0 708m 145m 117m S 0.0 4.1 2:11.32 httpd 16956 apache 20 0 754m 142m 107m S 0.0 4.0 2:33.94 httpd 16955 apache 20 0 641m 136m 103m S 5.3 3.8 1:58.37 httpd 17515 apache 20 0 624m 131m 99m S 0.0 3.7 2:03.90 httpd 16954 apache 20 0 627m 130m 98m S 0.0 3.6 2:13.87 httpd 17302 apache 20 0 625m 124m 97m S 0.0 3.5 2:10.80 httpd 17403 apache 20 0 624m 114m 91m S 0.0 3.2 2:08.85 httpd 16952 apache 20 0 502m 114m 81m S 0.0 3.2 1:23.78 httpd 16186 apache 20 0 138m 61m 35m S 0.0 1.7 0:15.54 httpd 16169 apache 20 0 111m 49m 17m S 0.0 1.4 0:06.00 httpd 16190 apache 20 0 126m 48m 24m S 0.0 1.4 0:11.44 httpd 16191 apache 20 0 109m 48m 19m S 0.0 1.4 0:04.62 httpd 16163 apache 20 0 114m 48m 21m S 0.0 1.4 0:09.60 httpd 16183 apache 20 0 127m 48m 23m S 0.0 1.3 0:11.23 httpd 16189 apache 20 0 109m 47m 17m S 0.0 1.3 0:04.55 httpd 16201 apache 20 0 106m 47m 17m S 0.0 1.3 0:03.90 httpd 16193 apache 20 0 103m 46m 20m S 0.0 1.3 0:10.76 httpd 16188 apache 20 0 107m 45m 18m S 0.0 1.3 0:04.85 httpd 16168 apache 20 0 103m 44m 17m S 0.0 1.2 0:05.61 httpd 16187 apache 20 0 118m 41m 21m S 0.0 1.2 0:08.50 httpd 16184 apache 20 0 111m 41m 19m S 0.0 1.2 0:09.28 httpd 16206 apache 20 0 110m 41m 20m S 0.0 1.2 0:11.69 httpd 16199 apache 20 0 108m 40m 17m S 0.0 1.1 0:07.76 httpd 16166 apache 20 0 104m 37m 18m S 0.0 1.0 0:04.31 httpd 16185 apache 20 0 99.3m 36m 16m S 0.0 1.0 0:04.16 httpd as you can see the memory usage growing up from e.g. res( 135 to 145)m and it will be growing up till memory ends. Are you sure that this option i set up: <IfModule prefork.c> StartServers 8 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 25 ServerLimit 80 MaxClients 80 MaxRequestsPerChild 4000 </IfModule> KeepAliveTimeout 6 MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAlive On are correct? Maybe i should decrease some of them? Another questions that bother me: I got e.g. static module mod_negotiation.c compiled into apache and the same module loaded as dynamic. Is this normal that i've loaded duplicated module. But when i want to remove dynamic module(mod_negotiation.c) from httpd.conf and then restart apache error appears. Now I cant tell this error message because i cant restart apache :( Hello again:) This is memory usage just after restart apache: top - 16:19:12 up 2 days, 7:18, 3 users, load average: 1.08, 0.91, 0.91 Tasks: 109 total, 2 running, 107 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 17.0%us, 25.7%sy, 51.0%ni, 4.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.3%hi, 1.3%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3652120k total, 2762516k used, 889604k free, 361552k buffers Swap: 4425896k total, 0k used, 4425896k free, 2020980k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 13569 apache 20 0 93416 43m 15m S 0.0 1.2 0:02.55 httpd 13575 apache 20 0 98356 38m 16m S 32.3 1.1 0:02.55 httpd 13571 apache 20 0 86808 33m 12m S 0.0 0.9 0:02.60 httpd 13568 apache 20 0 86760 33m 12m S 0.0 0.9 0:00.81 httpd 13570 apache 20 0 83480 33m 12m S 0.0 0.9 0:00.51 httpd 13572 apache 20 0 63520 5916 1548 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.02 httpd 13573 apache 20 0 63520 5916 1548 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.02 httpd 13574 apache 20 0 63520 5916 1548 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.02 httpd 13761 apache 20 0 63388 5128 860 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.01 httpd 13762 apache 20 0 63388 5128 860 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.01 httpd 13763 apache 20 0 63388 5128 860 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 httpd I will try to compile apache from source to newest version. Thx for help guys.

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• FreeBSD performance tuning. Sysctls, loader.conf, kernel.

  - by SaveTheRbtz

  I wanted to share knowledge of tuning FreeBSD via sysctls, so i'm posting them with comments. Based on Igor Sysoev (author of nginx) presentation about FreeBSD tuning up to 100,000-200,000 active connections. Sysctls are for 7.x FreeBSD. Since 7.2 amd64 some of them are tuned well by default. Prior 7.0 some of them are boot only (set via /boot/loader.conf) or does not exist at all. Highload web server sysctls: # Max. backlog size kern.ipc.somaxconn=4096 # Shared memory // 7.2+ can use shared memory > 2Gb kern.ipc.shmmax=2147483648 # Sockets kern.ipc.maxsockets=204800 # Do not use lager sockbufs on 8.0 # ( http://old.nabble.com/Significant-performance-regression-for-increased-maxsockbuf-on-8.0-RELEASE-tt26745981.html#a26745981 ) kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=262144 # Recive clusters (on amd64 7.2+ 65k is default) # For such high value vm.kmem_size must be increased to 3G #kern.ipc.nmbclusters=229376 # Jumbo pagesize(4k/8k) clusters # Used as general packet storage for jumbo frames # can be monitored via `netstat -m` #kern.ipc.nmbjumbop=192000 # Jumbo 9k/16k clusters # If you are using them #kern.ipc.nmbjumbo9=24000 #kern.ipc.nmbjumbo16=10240 # Every socket is a file, so increase them kern.maxfiles=204800 kern.maxfilesperproc=200000 kern.maxvnodes=200000 # Turn off receive autotuning #net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_auto=0 # Small receive space, only usable on http-server, on file server this # should be increased to 65535 or even more #net.inet.tcp.recvspace=8192 # Small send space is useful for http servers that serve small files # Autotuned since 7.x net.inet.tcp.sendspace=16384 # This should be enabled if you going to use big spaces (>64k) #net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1 # Turn this off on highspeed, lossless connections (LAN 1Gbit+) #net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 # This feature is useful if you are serving data over modems, Gigabit Ethernet, # or even high speed WAN links (or any other link with a high bandwidth delay product), # especially if you are also using window scaling or have configured a large send window. # You can try setting it to 0 on fileserver with 1GBit+ interfaces # Automatically disables on small RTT ( http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/netinet/tcp_subr.c?#rev1.237 ) #net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable=0 # Disable randomizing of ports to avoid false RST # Before usage check SA here www.bsdcan.org/2006/papers/ImprovingTCPIP.pdf # (it's also says that port randomization auto-disables at some conn.rates, but I didn't tested it thou) #net.inet.ip.portrange.randomized=0 # Increase portrange # For outgoing connections only. Good for seed-boxes and ftp servers. net.inet.ip.portrange.first=1024 net.inet.ip.portrange.last=65535 # Security net.inet.ip.redirect=0 net.inet.ip.sourceroute=0 net.inet.ip.accept_sourceroute=0 net.inet.icmp.maskrepl=0 net.inet.icmp.log_redirect=0 net.inet.icmp.drop_redirect=1 net.inet.tcp.drop_synfin=1 # Security net.inet.udp.blackhole=1 net.inet.tcp.blackhole=2 # Increases default TTL, sometimes useful # Default is 64 net.inet.ip.ttl=128 # Lessen max segment life to conserve resources # ACK waiting time in miliseconds (default: 30000 from RFC) net.inet.tcp.msl=5000 # Max bumber of timewait sockets net.inet.tcp.maxtcptw=40960 # Don't use tw on local connections # As of 15 Apr 2009. Igor Sysoev says that nolocaltimewait has some buggy realization. # So disable it or now till get fixed #net.inet.tcp.nolocaltimewait=1 # FIN_WAIT_2 state fast recycle net.inet.tcp.fast_finwait2_recycle=1 # Time before tcp keepalive probe is sent # default is 2 hours (7200000) #net.inet.tcp.keepidle=60000 # Should be increased until net.inet.ip.intr_queue_drops is zero net.inet.ip.intr_queue_maxlen=4096 # Interrupt handling via multiple CPU, but with context switch. # You can play with it. Default is 1; #net.isr.direct=0 # This is for routers only #net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 #net.inet.ip.fastforwarding=1 # This speed ups dummynet when channel isn't saturated net.inet.ip.dummynet.io_fast=1 # Increase dummynet(4) hash #net.inet.ip.dummynet.hash_size=2048 #net.inet.ip.dummynet.max_chain_len # Should be increased when you have A LOT of files on server # (Increase until vfs.ufs.dirhash_mem becames lower) vfs.ufs.dirhash_maxmem=67108864 # Explicit Congestion Notification (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_Congestion_Notification) net.inet.tcp.ecn.enable=1 # Flowtable - flow caching mechanism # Useful for routers #net.inet.flowtable.enable=1 #net.inet.flowtable.nmbflows=65535 # Extreme polling tuning #kern.polling.burst_max=1000 #kern.polling.each_burst=1000 #kern.polling.reg_frac=100 #kern.polling.user_frac=1 #kern.polling.idle_poll=0 # IPFW dynamic rules and timeouts tuning # Increase dyn_buckets till net.inet.ip.fw.curr_dyn_buckets is lower net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_buckets=65536 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_max=65536 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_ack_lifetime=120 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_syn_lifetime=10 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_fin_lifetime=2 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_short_lifetime=10 # Make packets pass firewall only once when using dummynet # i.e. packets going thru pipe are passing out from firewall with accept #net.inet.ip.fw.one_pass=1 # shm_use_phys Wires all shared pages, making them unswappable # Use this to lessen Virtual Memory Manager's work when using Shared Mem. # Useful for databases #kern.ipc.shm_use_phys=1 /boot/loader.conf: # Accept filters for data, http and DNS requests # Usefull when your software uses select() instead of kevent/kqueue or when you under DDoS # DNS accf available on 8.0+ accf_data_load="YES" accf_http_load="YES" accf_dns_load="YES" # Async IO system calls aio_load="YES" # Adds NCQ support in FreeBSD # WARNING! all ad[0-9]+ devices will be renamed to ada[0-9]+ # 8.0+ only #ahci_load= #siis_load= # Increase kernel memory size to 3G. # # Use ONLY if you have KVA_PAGES in kernel configuration, and you have more than 3G RAM # Otherwise panic will happen on next reboot! # # It's required for high buffer sizes: kern.ipc.nmbjumbop, kern.ipc.nmbclusters, etc # Useful on highload stateful firewalls, proxies or ZFS fileservers # (FreeBSD 7.2+ amd64 users: Check that current value is lower!) #vm.kmem_size="3G" # Older versions of FreeBSD can't tune maxfiles on the fly #kern.maxfiles="200000" # Useful for databases # Sets maximum data size to 1G # (FreeBSD 7.2+ amd64 users: Check that current value is lower!) #kern.maxdsiz="1G" # Maximum buffer size(vfs.maxbufspace) # You can check current one via vfs.bufspace # Should be lowered/upped depending on server's load-type # Usually decreased to preserve kmem # (default is 200M) #kern.maxbcache="512M" # Sendfile buffers # For i386 only #kern.ipc.nsfbufs=10240 # syncache Hash table tuning net.inet.tcp.syncache.hashsize=1024 net.inet.tcp.syncache.bucketlimit=100 # Incresed hostcache net.inet.tcp.hostcache.hashsize="16384" net.inet.tcp.hostcache.bucketlimit="100" # TCP control-block Hash table tuning net.inet.tcp.tcbhashsize=4096 # Enable superpages, for 7.2+ only # Also read http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2009-November/030094.html vm.pmap.pg_ps_enabled=1 # Usefull if you are using Intel-Gigabit NIC #hw.em.rxd=4096 #hw.em.txd=4096 #hw.em.rx_process_limit="-1" # Also if you have ALOT interrupts on NIC - play with following parameters # NOTE: You should set them for every NIC #dev.em.0.rx_int_delay: 250 #dev.em.0.tx_int_delay: 250 #dev.em.0.rx_abs_int_delay: 250 #dev.em.0.tx_abs_int_delay: 250 # There is also multithreaded version of em drivers can be found here: # http://people.yandex-team.ru/~wawa/ # # for additional em monitoring and statistics use # `sysctl dev.em.0.stats=1 ; dmesg` # #Same tunings for igb #hw.igb.rxd=4096 #hw.igb.txd=4096 #hw.igb.rx_process_limit=100 # Some useful netisr tunables. See sysctl net.isr #net.isr.defaultqlimit=4096 #net.isr.maxqlimit: 10240 # Bind netisr threads to CPUs #net.isr.bindthreads=1 # Nicer boot logo =) loader_logo="beastie" And finally here is my additions to GENERIC kernel # Just some of them, see also # cat /sys/{i386,amd64,}/conf/NOTES # This one useful only on i386 #options KVA_PAGES=512 # You can play with HZ in environments with high interrupt rate (default is 1000) # 100 is for my notebook to prolong it's battery life #options HZ=100 # Polling is goot on network loads with high packet rates and low-end NICs # NB! Do not enable it if you want more than one netisr thread #options DEVICE_POLLING # Eliminate datacopy on socket read-write # To take advantage with zero copy sockets you should have an MTU of 8K(amd64) # (4k for i386). This req. is only for receiving data. # Read more in man zero_copy_sockets #options ZERO_COPY_SOCKETS # Support TCP sign. Used for IPSec options TCP_SIGNATURE options IPSEC # This ones can be loaded as modules. They described in loader.conf section #options ACCEPT_FILTER_DATA #options ACCEPT_FILTER_HTTP # Adding ipfw, also can be loaded as modules options IPFIREWALL options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE_LIMIT=10 options IPFIREWALL_DEFAULT_TO_ACCEPT options IPFIREWALL_FORWARD # Adding kernel NAT options IPFIREWALL_NAT options LIBALIAS # Traffic shaping options DUMMYNET # Divert, i.e. for userspace NAT options IPDIVERT # This is for OpenBSD's pf firewall device pf device pflog # pf's QoS - ALTQ options ALTQ options ALTQ_CBQ # Class Bases Queuing (CBQ) options ALTQ_RED # Random Early Detection (RED) options ALTQ_RIO # RED In/Out options ALTQ_HFSC # Hierarchical Packet Scheduler (HFSC) options ALTQ_PRIQ # Priority Queuing (PRIQ) options ALTQ_NOPCC # Required for SMP build # Pretty console # Manual can be found here http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=6134 #options VESA #options SC_PIXEL_MODE # Disable reboot on Ctrl Alt Del #options SC_DISABLE_REBOOT # Change normal|kernel messages color options SC_NORM_ATTR=(FG_GREEN|BG_BLACK) options SC_KERNEL_CONS_ATTR=(FG_YELLOW|BG_BLACK) # More scroll space options SC_HISTORY_SIZE=8192 # Adding hardware crypto device device crypto device cryptodev # Useful network interfaces device vlan device tap #Virtual Ethernet driver device gre #IP over IP tunneling device if_bridge #Bridge interface device pfsync #synchronization interface for PF device carp #Common Address Redundancy Protocol device enc #IPsec interface device lagg #Link aggregation interface device stf #IPv4-IPv6 port # Also for my notebook, but may be used with Opteron #device amdtemp # Support for ECMP. More than one route for destination # Works even with default route so one can use it as LB for two ISP # For now code is unstable and panics (panic: rtfree 2) on route deletions. #options RADIX_MPATH # Multicast routing #options MROUTING #options PIM # DTrace options KDTRACE_HOOKS # all architectures - enable general DTrace hooks options DDB_CTF # all architectures - kernel ELF linker loads CTF data #options KDTRACE_FRAME # amd64-only # Adaptive spining in lockmgr (8.x+) # See http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg10782.html options ADAPTIVE_LOCKMGRS # UTF-8 in console (9.x+) #options TEKEN_UTF8 #options TEKEN_XTERM # NCQ support # WARNING! all ad[0-9]+ devices will be renamed to ada[0-9]+ #options ATA_CAM # FreeBSD 9+ # Deadlock resolver thread # For additional information see http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg18124.html #options DEADLKRES PS. Also most of FreeBSD's limits can be monitored by # vmstat -z and # limits PPS. variety of network counters can be monitored via # netstat -s In FreeBSD-9 netstat's -Q option appeared, try following command to display netisr stats # netstat -Q PPPS. also see # man 7 tuning PPPPS. I wanted to thank FreeBSD community, especially author of nginx - Igor Sysoev, nginx-ru@ and FreeBSD-performance@ mailing lists for providing useful information about FreeBSD tuning. So here is the question: What tunings are you using on yours FreeBSD servers? You can also post your /etc/sysctl.conf, /boot/loader.conf, kernel options, etc with description of its' meaning (do not copy-paste from sysctl -d). Don't forget to specify server type (web, smb, gateway, etc) Let's share experience!

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• Problem using a public key when connecting to a SSH server running on Cygwin

  - by binary255

  We have installed Cygwin on a Windows Server 2008 Standard server and it working pretty well. Unfortunately we still have a big problem. We want to connect using a public key through SSH which doesn't work. It always falls back to using password login. We have appended our public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server and we have our private and public key in ~/.ssh/id_dsa respective ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub on the client. When debugging the SSH login session we see that the key is offered by the server apparently rejects it by some unknown reason. The SSH output when connecting from an Ubuntu 9.10 desktop with debug information enabled: $ ssh -v 192.168.10.11 OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-6ubuntu2, OpenSSL 0.9.8g 19 Oct 2007 debug1: Reading configuration data /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/config debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config debug1: Applying options for debug1: Connecting to 192.168.10.11 [192.168.10.11] port 22. debug1: Connection established. debug1: identity file /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/identity type -1 debug1: identity file /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/id_rsa type -1 debug1: identity file /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/id_dsa type 2 debug1: Checking blacklist file /usr/share/ssh/blacklist.DSA-1024 debug1: Checking blacklist file /etc/ssh/blacklist.DSA-1024 debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version OpenSSH_5.3 debug1: match: OpenSSH_5.3 pat OpenSSH debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0 debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-6ubuntu2 debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received debug1: kex: server->client aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none debug1: kex: client->server aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REQUEST(1024<1024<8192) sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_GROUP debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_INIT sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REPLY debug1: Host '192.168.10.11' is known and matches the RSA host key. debug1: Found key in /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/known_hosts:12 debug1: ssh_rsa_verify: signature correct debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_REQUEST sent debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive debug1: Next authentication method: publickey debug1: Offering public key: /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/id_dsa debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive debug1: Trying private key: /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/identity debug1: Trying private key: /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/id_rsa debug1: Next authentication method: keyboard-interactive debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive debug1: Next authentication method: password [email protected]'s password: The version of Cygwin: $ uname -a CYGWIN_NT-6.0 servername 1.7.1(0.218/5/3) 2009-12-07 11:48 i686 Cygwin The installed packages: $ cygcheck -c Cygwin Package Information Package Version Status _update-info-dir 00871-1 OK alternatives 1.3.30c-10 OK arj 3.10.22-1 OK aspell 0.60.5-1 OK aspell-en 6.0.0-1 OK aspell-sv 0.50.2-2 OK autossh 1.4b-1 OK base-cygwin 2.1-1 OK base-files 3.9-3 OK base-passwd 3.1-1 OK bash 3.2.49-23 OK bash-completion 1.1-2 OK bc 1.06-2 OK bzip2 1.0.5-10 OK cabextract 1.1-1 OK compface 1.5.2-1 OK coreutils 7.0-2 OK cron 4.1-59 OK crypt 1.1-1 OK csih 0.9.1-1 OK curl 7.19.6-1 OK cvs 1.12.13-10 OK cvsutils 0.2.5-1 OK cygrunsrv 1.34-1 OK cygutils 1.4.2-1 OK cygwin 1.7.1-1 OK cygwin-doc 1.5-1 OK cygwin-x-doc 1.1.0-1 OK dash 0.5.5.1-2 OK diffutils 2.8.7-2 OK doxygen 1.6.1-2 OK e2fsprogs 1.35-3 OK editrights 1.01-2 OK emacs 23.1-10 OK emacs-X11 23.1-10 OK file 5.04-1 OK findutils 4.5.5-1 OK flip 1.19-1 OK font-adobe-dpi75 1.0.1-1 OK font-alias 1.0.2-1 OK font-encodings 1.0.3-1 OK font-misc-misc 1.1.0-1 OK fontconfig 2.8.0-1 OK gamin 0.1.10-10 OK gawk 3.1.7-1 OK gettext 0.17-11 OK gnome-icon-theme 2.28.0-1 OK grep 2.5.4-2 OK groff 1.19.2-2 OK gvim 7.2.264-1 OK gzip 1.3.12-2 OK hicolor-icon-theme 0.11-1 OK inetutils 1.5-6 OK ipc-utils 1.0-1 OK keychain 2.6.8-1 OK less 429-1 OK libaspell15 0.60.5-1 OK libatk1.0_0 1.28.0-1 OK libaudio2 1.9.2-1 OK libbz2_1 1.0.5-10 OK libcairo2 1.8.8-1 OK libcurl4 7.19.6-1 OK libdb4.2 4.2.52.5-2 OK libdb4.5 4.5.20.2-2 OK libexpat1 2.0.1-1 OK libfam0 0.1.10-10 OK libfontconfig1 2.8.0-1 OK libfontenc1 1.0.5-1 OK libfreetype6 2.3.12-1 OK libgcc1 4.3.4-3 OK libgdbm4 1.8.3-20 OK libgdk_pixbuf2.0_0 2.18.6-1 OK libgif4 4.1.6-10 OK libGL1 7.6.1-1 OK libglib2.0_0 2.22.4-2 OK libglitz1 0.5.6-10 OK libgmp3 4.3.1-3 OK libgtk2.0_0 2.18.6-1 OK libICE6 1.0.6-1 OK libiconv2 1.13.1-1 OK libidn11 1.16-1 OK libintl3 0.14.5-1 OK libintl8 0.17-11 OK libjasper1 1.900.1-1 OK libjbig2 2.0-11 OK libjpeg62 6b-21 OK libjpeg7 7-10 OK liblzma1 4.999.9beta-10 OK libncurses10 5.7-18 OK libncurses8 5.5-10 OK libncurses9 5.7-16 OK libopenldap2_3_0 2.3.43-1 OK libpango1.0_0 1.26.2-1 OK libpcre0 8.00-1 OK libpixman1_0 0.16.6-1 OK libpng12 1.2.35-10 OK libpopt0 1.6.4-4 OK libpq5 8.2.11-1 OK libreadline6 5.2.14-12 OK libreadline7 6.0.3-2 OK libsasl2 2.1.19-3 OK libSM6 1.1.1-1 OK libssh2_1 1.2.2-1 OK libssp0 4.3.4-3 OK libstdc++6 4.3.4-3 OK libtiff5 3.9.2-1 OK libwrap0 7.6-20 OK libX11_6 1.3.3-1 OK libXau6 1.0.5-1 OK libXaw3d7 1.5D-8 OK libXaw7 1.0.7-1 OK libxcb-render-util0 0.3.6-1 OK libxcb-render0 1.5-1 OK libxcb1 1.5-1 OK libXcomposite1 0.4.1-1 OK libXcursor1 1.1.10-1 OK libXdamage1 1.1.2-1 OK libXdmcp6 1.0.3-1 OK libXext6 1.1.1-1 OK libXfixes3 4.0.4-1 OK libXft2 2.1.14-1 OK libXi6 1.3-1 OK libXinerama1 1.1-1 OK libxkbfile1 1.0.6-1 OK libxml2 2.7.6-1 OK libXmu6 1.0.5-1 OK libXmuu1 1.0.5-1 OK libXpm4 3.5.8-1 OK libXrandr2 1.3.0-10 OK libXrender1 0.9.5-1 OK libXt6 1.0.7-1 OK links 1.00pre20-1 OK login 1.10-10 OK luit 1.0.5-1 OK lynx 2.8.5-4 OK man 1.6e-1 OK minires 1.02-1 OK mkfontdir 1.0.5-1 OK mkfontscale 1.0.7-1 OK openssh 5.4p1-1 OK openssl 0.9.8m-1 OK patch 2.5.8-9 OK patchutils 0.3.1-1 OK perl 5.10.1-3 OK rebase 3.0.1-1 OK run 1.1.12-11 OK screen 4.0.3-5 OK sed 4.1.5-2 OK shared-mime-info 0.70-1 OK tar 1.22.90-1 OK terminfo 5.7_20091114-13 OK terminfo0 5.5_20061104-11 OK texinfo 4.13-3 OK tidy 041206-1 OK time 1.7-2 OK tzcode 2009k-1 OK unzip 6.0-10 OK util-linux 2.14.1-1 OK vim 7.2.264-2 OK wget 1.11.4-4 OK which 2.20-2 OK wput 0.6.1-2 OK xauth 1.0.4-1 OK xclipboard 1.1.0-1 OK xcursor-themes 1.0.2-1 OK xemacs 21.4.22-1 OK xemacs-emacs-common 21.4.22-1 OK xemacs-sumo 2007-04-27-1 OK xemacs-tags 21.4.22-1 OK xeyes 1.1.0-1 OK xinit 1.2.1-1 OK xinput 1.5.0-1 OK xkbcomp 1.1.1-1 OK xkeyboard-config 1.8-1 OK xkill 1.0.2-1 OK xmodmap 1.0.4-1 OK xorg-docs 1.5-1 OK xorg-server 1.7.6-2 OK xrdb 1.0.6-1 OK xset 1.1.0-1 OK xterm 255-1 OK xz 4.999.9beta-10 OK zip 3.0-11 OK zlib 1.2.3-10 OK zlib-devel 1.2.3-10 OK zlib0 1.2.3-10 OK The ssh deamon configuration file: $ cat /etc/sshd_config # $OpenBSD: sshd_config,v 1.80 2008/07/02 02:24:18 djm Exp $ # This is the sshd server system-wide configuration file. See # sshd_config(5) for more information. # This sshd was compiled with PATH=/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/bin # The strategy used for options in the default sshd_config shipped with # OpenSSH is to specify options with their default value where # possible, but leave them commented. Uncommented options change a # default value. Port 22 #AddressFamily any #ListenAddress 0.0.0.0 #ListenAddress :: # Disable legacy (protocol version 1) support in the server for new # installations. In future the default will change to require explicit # activation of protocol 1 Protocol 2 # HostKey for protocol version 1 #HostKey /etc/ssh_host_key # HostKeys for protocol version 2 #HostKey /etc/ssh_host_rsa_key #HostKey /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key # Lifetime and size of ephemeral version 1 server key #KeyRegenerationInterval 1h #ServerKeyBits 1024 # Logging # obsoletes QuietMode and FascistLogging #SyslogFacility AUTH #LogLevel INFO # Authentication: #LoginGraceTime 2m #PermitRootLogin yes StrictModes no #MaxAuthTries 6 #MaxSessions 10 RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys # For this to work you will also need host keys in /etc/ssh_known_hosts #RhostsRSAAuthentication no # similar for protocol version 2 #HostbasedAuthentication no # Change to yes if you don't trust ~/.ssh/known_hosts for # RhostsRSAAuthentication and HostbasedAuthentication #IgnoreUserKnownHosts no # Don't read the user's ~/.rhosts and ~/.shosts files #IgnoreRhosts yes # To disable tunneled clear text passwords, change to no here! #PasswordAuthentication yes #PermitEmptyPasswords no # Change to no to disable s/key passwords #ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes # Kerberos options #KerberosAuthentication no #KerberosOrLocalPasswd yes #KerberosTicketCleanup yes #KerberosGetAFSToken no # GSSAPI options #GSSAPIAuthentication no #GSSAPICleanupCredentials yes # Set this to 'yes' to enable PAM authentication, account processing, # and session processing. If this is enabled, PAM authentication will # be allowed through the ChallengeResponseAuthentication and # PasswordAuthentication. Depending on your PAM configuration, # PAM authentication via ChallengeResponseAuthentication may bypass # the setting of "PermitRootLogin without-password". # If you just want the PAM account and session checks to run without # PAM authentication, then enable this but set PasswordAuthentication # and ChallengeResponseAuthentication to 'no'. #UsePAM no AllowAgentForwarding yes AllowTcpForwarding yes GatewayPorts yes X11Forwarding yes X11DisplayOffset 10 X11UseLocalhost no #PrintMotd yes #PrintLastLog yes TCPKeepAlive yes #UseLogin no UsePrivilegeSeparation yes #PermitUserEnvironment no #Compression delayed #ClientAliveInterval 0 #ClientAliveCountMax 3 #UseDNS yes #PidFile /var/run/sshd.pid #MaxStartups 10 #PermitTunnel no #ChrootDirectory none # no default banner path #Banner none # override default of no subsystems Subsystem sftp /usr/sbin/sftp-server # Example of overriding settings on a per-user basis #Match User anoncvs #X11Forwarding yes #AllowTcpForwarding yes #ForceCommand cvs server I hope this information is enough to solve the problem. In case any more is needed please comment and I'll add it. Thank you for reading!

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• Problem using a public key when connecting to a SSH server running on Cygwin

  - by Deleted

  We have installed Cygwin on a Windows Server 2008 Standard server and it working pretty well. Unfortunately we still have a big problem. We want to connect using a public key through SSH which doesn't work. It always falls back to using password login. We have appended our public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server and we have our private and public key in ~/.ssh/id_dsa respective ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub on the client. When debugging the SSH login session we see that the key is offered by the server apparently rejects it by some unknown reason. The SSH output when connecting from an Ubuntu 9.10 desktop with debug information enabled: $ ssh -v 192.168.10.11 OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-6ubuntu2, OpenSSL 0.9.8g 19 Oct 2007 debug1: Reading configuration data /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/config debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config debug1: Applying options for debug1: Connecting to 192.168.10.11 [192.168.10.11] port 22. debug1: Connection established. debug1: identity file /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/identity type -1 debug1: identity file /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/id_rsa type -1 debug1: identity file /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/id_dsa type 2 debug1: Checking blacklist file /usr/share/ssh/blacklist.DSA-1024 debug1: Checking blacklist file /etc/ssh/blacklist.DSA-1024 debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version OpenSSH_5.3 debug1: match: OpenSSH_5.3 pat OpenSSH debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0 debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-6ubuntu2 debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received debug1: kex: server->client aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none debug1: kex: client->server aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REQUEST(1024<1024<8192) sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_GROUP debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_INIT sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REPLY debug1: Host '192.168.10.11' is known and matches the RSA host key. debug1: Found key in /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/known_hosts:12 debug1: ssh_rsa_verify: signature correct debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_REQUEST sent debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive debug1: Next authentication method: publickey debug1: Offering public key: /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/id_dsa debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive debug1: Trying private key: /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/identity debug1: Trying private key: /home/myuseraccount/.ssh/id_rsa debug1: Next authentication method: keyboard-interactive debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive debug1: Next authentication method: password [email protected]'s password: The version of Cygwin: $ uname -a CYGWIN_NT-6.0 servername 1.7.1(0.218/5/3) 2009-12-07 11:48 i686 Cygwin The installed packages: $ cygcheck -c Cygwin Package Information Package Version Status _update-info-dir 00871-1 OK alternatives 1.3.30c-10 OK arj 3.10.22-1 OK aspell 0.60.5-1 OK aspell-en 6.0.0-1 OK aspell-sv 0.50.2-2 OK autossh 1.4b-1 OK base-cygwin 2.1-1 OK base-files 3.9-3 OK base-passwd 3.1-1 OK bash 3.2.49-23 OK bash-completion 1.1-2 OK bc 1.06-2 OK bzip2 1.0.5-10 OK cabextract 1.1-1 OK compface 1.5.2-1 OK coreutils 7.0-2 OK cron 4.1-59 OK crypt 1.1-1 OK csih 0.9.1-1 OK curl 7.19.6-1 OK cvs 1.12.13-10 OK cvsutils 0.2.5-1 OK cygrunsrv 1.34-1 OK cygutils 1.4.2-1 OK cygwin 1.7.1-1 OK cygwin-doc 1.5-1 OK cygwin-x-doc 1.1.0-1 OK dash 0.5.5.1-2 OK diffutils 2.8.7-2 OK doxygen 1.6.1-2 OK e2fsprogs 1.35-3 OK editrights 1.01-2 OK emacs 23.1-10 OK emacs-X11 23.1-10 OK file 5.04-1 OK findutils 4.5.5-1 OK flip 1.19-1 OK font-adobe-dpi75 1.0.1-1 OK font-alias 1.0.2-1 OK font-encodings 1.0.3-1 OK font-misc-misc 1.1.0-1 OK fontconfig 2.8.0-1 OK gamin 0.1.10-10 OK gawk 3.1.7-1 OK gettext 0.17-11 OK gnome-icon-theme 2.28.0-1 OK grep 2.5.4-2 OK groff 1.19.2-2 OK gvim 7.2.264-1 OK gzip 1.3.12-2 OK hicolor-icon-theme 0.11-1 OK inetutils 1.5-6 OK ipc-utils 1.0-1 OK keychain 2.6.8-1 OK less 429-1 OK libaspell15 0.60.5-1 OK libatk1.0_0 1.28.0-1 OK libaudio2 1.9.2-1 OK libbz2_1 1.0.5-10 OK libcairo2 1.8.8-1 OK libcurl4 7.19.6-1 OK libdb4.2 4.2.52.5-2 OK libdb4.5 4.5.20.2-2 OK libexpat1 2.0.1-1 OK libfam0 0.1.10-10 OK libfontconfig1 2.8.0-1 OK libfontenc1 1.0.5-1 OK libfreetype6 2.3.12-1 OK libgcc1 4.3.4-3 OK libgdbm4 1.8.3-20 OK libgdk_pixbuf2.0_0 2.18.6-1 OK libgif4 4.1.6-10 OK libGL1 7.6.1-1 OK libglib2.0_0 2.22.4-2 OK libglitz1 0.5.6-10 OK libgmp3 4.3.1-3 OK libgtk2.0_0 2.18.6-1 OK libICE6 1.0.6-1 OK libiconv2 1.13.1-1 OK libidn11 1.16-1 OK libintl3 0.14.5-1 OK libintl8 0.17-11 OK libjasper1 1.900.1-1 OK libjbig2 2.0-11 OK libjpeg62 6b-21 OK libjpeg7 7-10 OK liblzma1 4.999.9beta-10 OK libncurses10 5.7-18 OK libncurses8 5.5-10 OK libncurses9 5.7-16 OK libopenldap2_3_0 2.3.43-1 OK libpango1.0_0 1.26.2-1 OK libpcre0 8.00-1 OK libpixman1_0 0.16.6-1 OK libpng12 1.2.35-10 OK libpopt0 1.6.4-4 OK libpq5 8.2.11-1 OK libreadline6 5.2.14-12 OK libreadline7 6.0.3-2 OK libsasl2 2.1.19-3 OK libSM6 1.1.1-1 OK libssh2_1 1.2.2-1 OK libssp0 4.3.4-3 OK libstdc++6 4.3.4-3 OK libtiff5 3.9.2-1 OK libwrap0 7.6-20 OK libX11_6 1.3.3-1 OK libXau6 1.0.5-1 OK libXaw3d7 1.5D-8 OK libXaw7 1.0.7-1 OK libxcb-render-util0 0.3.6-1 OK libxcb-render0 1.5-1 OK libxcb1 1.5-1 OK libXcomposite1 0.4.1-1 OK libXcursor1 1.1.10-1 OK libXdamage1 1.1.2-1 OK libXdmcp6 1.0.3-1 OK libXext6 1.1.1-1 OK libXfixes3 4.0.4-1 OK libXft2 2.1.14-1 OK libXi6 1.3-1 OK libXinerama1 1.1-1 OK libxkbfile1 1.0.6-1 OK libxml2 2.7.6-1 OK libXmu6 1.0.5-1 OK libXmuu1 1.0.5-1 OK libXpm4 3.5.8-1 OK libXrandr2 1.3.0-10 OK libXrender1 0.9.5-1 OK libXt6 1.0.7-1 OK links 1.00pre20-1 OK login 1.10-10 OK luit 1.0.5-1 OK lynx 2.8.5-4 OK man 1.6e-1 OK minires 1.02-1 OK mkfontdir 1.0.5-1 OK mkfontscale 1.0.7-1 OK openssh 5.4p1-1 OK openssl 0.9.8m-1 OK patch 2.5.8-9 OK patchutils 0.3.1-1 OK perl 5.10.1-3 OK rebase 3.0.1-1 OK run 1.1.12-11 OK screen 4.0.3-5 OK sed 4.1.5-2 OK shared-mime-info 0.70-1 OK tar 1.22.90-1 OK terminfo 5.7_20091114-13 OK terminfo0 5.5_20061104-11 OK texinfo 4.13-3 OK tidy 041206-1 OK time 1.7-2 OK tzcode 2009k-1 OK unzip 6.0-10 OK util-linux 2.14.1-1 OK vim 7.2.264-2 OK wget 1.11.4-4 OK which 2.20-2 OK wput 0.6.1-2 OK xauth 1.0.4-1 OK xclipboard 1.1.0-1 OK xcursor-themes 1.0.2-1 OK xemacs 21.4.22-1 OK xemacs-emacs-common 21.4.22-1 OK xemacs-sumo 2007-04-27-1 OK xemacs-tags 21.4.22-1 OK xeyes 1.1.0-1 OK xinit 1.2.1-1 OK xinput 1.5.0-1 OK xkbcomp 1.1.1-1 OK xkeyboard-config 1.8-1 OK xkill 1.0.2-1 OK xmodmap 1.0.4-1 OK xorg-docs 1.5-1 OK xorg-server 1.7.6-2 OK xrdb 1.0.6-1 OK xset 1.1.0-1 OK xterm 255-1 OK xz 4.999.9beta-10 OK zip 3.0-11 OK zlib 1.2.3-10 OK zlib-devel 1.2.3-10 OK zlib0 1.2.3-10 OK The ssh deamon configuration file: $ cat /etc/sshd_config # $OpenBSD: sshd_config,v 1.80 2008/07/02 02:24:18 djm Exp $ # This is the sshd server system-wide configuration file. See # sshd_config(5) for more information. # This sshd was compiled with PATH=/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/bin # The strategy used for options in the default sshd_config shipped with # OpenSSH is to specify options with their default value where # possible, but leave them commented. Uncommented options change a # default value. Port 22 #AddressFamily any #ListenAddress 0.0.0.0 #ListenAddress :: # Disable legacy (protocol version 1) support in the server for new # installations. In future the default will change to require explicit # activation of protocol 1 Protocol 2 # HostKey for protocol version 1 #HostKey /etc/ssh_host_key # HostKeys for protocol version 2 #HostKey /etc/ssh_host_rsa_key #HostKey /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key # Lifetime and size of ephemeral version 1 server key #KeyRegenerationInterval 1h #ServerKeyBits 1024 # Logging # obsoletes QuietMode and FascistLogging #SyslogFacility AUTH #LogLevel INFO # Authentication: #LoginGraceTime 2m #PermitRootLogin yes StrictModes no #MaxAuthTries 6 #MaxSessions 10 RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys # For this to work you will also need host keys in /etc/ssh_known_hosts #RhostsRSAAuthentication no # similar for protocol version 2 #HostbasedAuthentication no # Change to yes if you don't trust ~/.ssh/known_hosts for # RhostsRSAAuthentication and HostbasedAuthentication #IgnoreUserKnownHosts no # Don't read the user's ~/.rhosts and ~/.shosts files #IgnoreRhosts yes # To disable tunneled clear text passwords, change to no here! #PasswordAuthentication yes #PermitEmptyPasswords no # Change to no to disable s/key passwords #ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes # Kerberos options #KerberosAuthentication no #KerberosOrLocalPasswd yes #KerberosTicketCleanup yes #KerberosGetAFSToken no # GSSAPI options #GSSAPIAuthentication no #GSSAPICleanupCredentials yes # Set this to 'yes' to enable PAM authentication, account processing, # and session processing. If this is enabled, PAM authentication will # be allowed through the ChallengeResponseAuthentication and # PasswordAuthentication. Depending on your PAM configuration, # PAM authentication via ChallengeResponseAuthentication may bypass # the setting of "PermitRootLogin without-password". # If you just want the PAM account and session checks to run without # PAM authentication, then enable this but set PasswordAuthentication # and ChallengeResponseAuthentication to 'no'. #UsePAM no AllowAgentForwarding yes AllowTcpForwarding yes GatewayPorts yes X11Forwarding yes X11DisplayOffset 10 X11UseLocalhost no #PrintMotd yes #PrintLastLog yes TCPKeepAlive yes #UseLogin no UsePrivilegeSeparation yes #PermitUserEnvironment no #Compression delayed #ClientAliveInterval 0 #ClientAliveCountMax 3 #UseDNS yes #PidFile /var/run/sshd.pid #MaxStartups 10 #PermitTunnel no #ChrootDirectory none # no default banner path #Banner none # override default of no subsystems Subsystem sftp /usr/sbin/sftp-server # Example of overriding settings on a per-user basis #Match User anoncvs #X11Forwarding yes #AllowTcpForwarding yes #ForceCommand cvs server I hope this information is enough to solve the problem. In case any more is needed please comment and I'll add it. Thank you for reading!

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• FreeBSD 8.1 unstable network connection

  - by frankcheong

  I have three FreeBSD 8.1 running on three different hardware and therefore consist of different network adapter as well (bce, bge and igb). I found that the network connection is kind of unstable which I have tried to scp some 10MB file and found that I cannot always get the files completed successfully. I have further checked with my network admin and he claim that the problem is being caused by the network driver which cannot support the load whereby he tried to ping using huge packet size (around 15k) and my server will drop packet consistently at a regular interval. I found that this statement may not be valid since the three server is using three different network drive and it would be quite impossible that the same problem is being caused by three different network adapter and thus different network driver. Since then I have tried to tune up the performance by playing around with the /etc/sysctl.conf figures with no luck. kern.ipc.somaxconn=1024 kern.ipc.shmall=3276800 kern.ipc.shmmax=1638400000 # Security net.inet.ip.redirect=0 net.inet.ip.sourceroute=0 net.inet.ip.accept_sourceroute=0 net.inet.icmp.maskrepl=0 net.inet.icmp.log_redirect=0 net.inet.icmp.drop_redirect=1 net.inet.tcp.drop_synfin=1 # Security net.inet.udp.blackhole=1 net.inet.tcp.blackhole=2 # Required by pf net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 #Network Performance Tuning kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=16777216 net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1 net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max=16777216 net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max=16777216 # Setting specifically for 1 or even 10Gbps network net.local.stream.sendspace=262144 net.local.stream.recvspace=262144 net.inet.tcp.local_slowstart_flightsize=10 net.inet.tcp.nolocaltimewait=1 net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1460 net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_auto=1 net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_inc=16384 net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_auto=1 net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_inc=524288 net.inet.tcp.sendspace=262144 net.inet.tcp.recvspace=262144 net.inet.udp.recvspace=262144 kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=16777216 kern.ipc.nmbclusters=32768 net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=1 net.inet.tcp.delacktime=100 net.inet.tcp.slowstart_flightsize=179 net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable=1 net.inet.tcp.inflight.min=6144 # Reduce the cache size of slow start connection net.inet.tcp.hostcache.expire=1 Our network admin also claim that they see quite a lot of network up and down from their cisco switch log while I cannot find any up down message inside the dmesg. Have further checked the netstat -s but dont have concrete idea. tcp: 133695291 packets sent 39408539 data packets (3358837321 bytes) 61868 data packets (89472844 bytes) retransmitted 24 data packets unnecessarily retransmitted 0 resends initiated by MTU discovery 50756141 ack-only packets (2148 delayed) 0 URG only packets 0 window probe packets 4372385 window update packets 39781869 control packets 134898031 packets received 72339403 acks (for 3357601899 bytes) 190712 duplicate acks 0 acks for unsent data 59339201 packets (3647021974 bytes) received in-sequence 114 completely duplicate packets (135202 bytes) 27 old duplicate packets 0 packets with some dup. data (0 bytes duped) 42090 out-of-order packets (60817889 bytes) 0 packets (0 bytes) of data after window 0 window probes 3953896 window update packets 64181 packets received after close 0 discarded for bad checksums 0 discarded for bad header offset fields 0 discarded because packet too short 45192 discarded due to memory problems 19945391 connection requests 1323420 connection accepts 0 bad connection attempts 0 listen queue overflows 0 ignored RSTs in the windows 21133581 connections established (including accepts) 21268724 connections closed (including 32737 drops) 207874 connections updated cached RTT on close 207874 connections updated cached RTT variance on close 132439 connections updated cached ssthresh on close 42392 embryonic connections dropped 72339338 segments updated rtt (of 69477829 attempts) 390871 retransmit timeouts 0 connections dropped by rexmit timeout 0 persist timeouts 0 connections dropped by persist timeout 0 Connections (fin_wait_2) dropped because of timeout 13990 keepalive timeouts 2 keepalive probes sent 13988 connections dropped by keepalive 173044 correct ACK header predictions 36947371 correct data packet header predictions 1323420 syncache entries added 0 retransmitted 0 dupsyn 0 dropped 1323420 completed 0 bucket overflow 0 cache overflow 0 reset 0 stale 0 aborted 0 badack 0 unreach 0 zone failures 1323420 cookies sent 0 cookies received 1864 SACK recovery episodes 18005 segment rexmits in SACK recovery episodes 26066896 byte rexmits in SACK recovery episodes 147327 SACK options (SACK blocks) received 87473 SACK options (SACK blocks) sent 0 SACK scoreboard overflow 0 packets with ECN CE bit set 0 packets with ECN ECT(0) bit set 0 packets with ECN ECT(1) bit set 0 successful ECN handshakes 0 times ECN reduced the congestion window udp: 5141258 datagrams received 0 with incomplete header 0 with bad data length field 0 with bad checksum 1 with no checksum 0 dropped due to no socket 129616 broadcast/multicast datagrams undelivered 0 dropped due to full socket buffers 0 not for hashed pcb 5011642 delivered 5016050 datagrams output 0 times multicast source filter matched sctp: 0 input packets 0 datagrams 0 packets that had data 0 input SACK chunks 0 input DATA chunks 0 duplicate DATA chunks 0 input HB chunks 0 HB-ACK chunks 0 input ECNE chunks 0 input AUTH chunks 0 chunks missing AUTH 0 invalid HMAC ids received 0 invalid secret ids received 0 auth failed 0 fast path receives all one chunk 0 fast path multi-part data 0 output packets 0 output SACKs 0 output DATA chunks 0 retransmitted DATA chunks 0 fast retransmitted DATA chunks 0 FR's that happened more than once to same chunk 0 intput HB chunks 0 output ECNE chunks 0 output AUTH chunks 0 ip_output error counter Packet drop statistics: 0 from middle box 0 from end host 0 with data 0 non-data, non-endhost 0 non-endhost, bandwidth rep only 0 not enough for chunk header 0 not enough data to confirm 0 where process_chunk_drop said break 0 failed to find TSN 0 attempt reverse TSN lookup 0 e-host confirms zero-rwnd 0 midbox confirms no space 0 data did not match TSN 0 TSN's marked for Fast Retran Timeouts: 0 iterator timers fired 0 T3 data time outs 0 window probe (T3) timers fired 0 INIT timers fired 0 sack timers fired 0 shutdown timers fired 0 heartbeat timers fired 0 a cookie timeout fired 0 an endpoint changed its cookiesecret 0 PMTU timers fired 0 shutdown ack timers fired 0 shutdown guard timers fired 0 stream reset timers fired 0 early FR timers fired 0 an asconf timer fired 0 auto close timer fired 0 asoc free timers expired 0 inp free timers expired 0 packet shorter than header 0 checksum error 0 no endpoint for port 0 bad v-tag 0 bad SID 0 no memory 0 number of multiple FR in a RTT window 0 RFC813 allowed sending 0 RFC813 does not allow sending 0 times max burst prohibited sending 0 look ahead tells us no memory in interface 0 numbers of window probes sent 0 times an output error to clamp down on next user send 0 times sctp_senderrors were caused from a user 0 number of in data drops due to chunk limit reached 0 number of in data drops due to rwnd limit reached 0 times a ECN reduced the cwnd 0 used express lookup via vtag 0 collision in express lookup 0 times the sender ran dry of user data on primary 0 same for above 0 sacks the slow way 0 window update only sacks sent 0 sends with sinfo_flags !=0 0 unordered sends 0 sends with EOF flag set 0 sends with ABORT flag set 0 times protocol drain called 0 times we did a protocol drain 0 times recv was called with peek 0 cached chunks used 0 cached stream oq's used 0 unread messages abandonded by close 0 send burst avoidance, already max burst inflight to net 0 send cwnd full avoidance, already max burst inflight to net 0 number of map array over-runs via fwd-tsn's ip: 137814085 total packets received 0 bad header checksums 0 with size smaller than minimum 0 with data size < data length 0 with ip length > max ip packet size 0 with header length < data size 0 with data length < header length 0 with bad options 0 with incorrect version number 1200 fragments received 0 fragments dropped (dup or out of space) 0 fragments dropped after timeout 300 packets reassembled ok 137813009 packets for this host 530 packets for unknown/unsupported protocol 0 packets forwarded (0 packets fast forwarded) 61 packets not forwardable 0 packets received for unknown multicast group 0 redirects sent 137234598 packets sent from this host 0 packets sent with fabricated ip header 685307 output packets dropped due to no bufs, etc. 52 output packets discarded due to no route 300 output datagrams fragmented 1200 fragments created 0 datagrams that can't be fragmented 0 tunneling packets that can't find gif 0 datagrams with bad address in header icmp: 0 calls to icmp_error 0 errors not generated in response to an icmp message Output histogram: echo reply: 305 0 messages with bad code fields 0 messages less than the minimum length 0 messages with bad checksum 0 messages with bad length 0 multicast echo requests ignored 0 multicast timestamp requests ignored Input histogram: destination unreachable: 530 echo: 305 305 message responses generated 0 invalid return addresses 0 no return routes ICMP address mask responses are disabled igmp: 0 messages received 0 messages received with too few bytes 0 messages received with wrong TTL 0 messages received with bad checksum 0 V1/V2 membership queries received 0 V3 membership queries received 0 membership queries received with invalid field(s) 0 general queries received 0 group queries received 0 group-source queries received 0 group-source queries dropped 0 membership reports received 0 membership reports received with invalid field(s) 0 membership reports received for groups to which we belong 0 V3 reports received without Router Alert 0 membership reports sent arp: 376748 ARP requests sent 3207 ARP replies sent 245245 ARP requests received 80845 ARP replies received 326090 ARP packets received 267712 total packets dropped due to no ARP entry 108876 ARP entrys timed out 0 Duplicate IPs seen ip6: 2226633 total packets received 0 with size smaller than minimum 0 with data size < data length 0 with bad options 0 with incorrect version number 0 fragments received 0 fragments dropped (dup or out of space) 0 fragments dropped after timeout 0 fragments that exceeded limit 0 packets reassembled ok 2226633 packets for this host 0 packets forwarded 0 packets not forwardable 0 redirects sent 2226633 packets sent from this host 0 packets sent with fabricated ip header 0 output packets dropped due to no bufs, etc. 8 output packets discarded due to no route 0 output datagrams fragmented 0 fragments created 0 datagrams that can't be fragmented 0 packets that violated scope rules 0 multicast packets which we don't join Input histogram: UDP: 2226633 Mbuf statistics: 962679 one mbuf 1263954 one ext mbuf 0 two or more ext mbuf 0 packets whose headers are not continuous 0 tunneling packets that can't find gif 0 packets discarded because of too many headers 0 failures of source address selection Source addresses selection rule applied: icmp6: 0 calls to icmp6_error 0 errors not generated in response to an icmp6 message 0 errors not generated because of rate limitation 0 messages with bad code fields 0 messages < minimum length 0 bad checksums 0 messages with bad length Histogram of error messages to be generated: 0 no route 0 administratively prohibited 0 beyond scope 0 address unreachable 0 port unreachable 0 packet too big 0 time exceed transit 0 time exceed reassembly 0 erroneous header field 0 unrecognized next header 0 unrecognized option 0 redirect 0 unknown 0 message responses generated 0 messages with too many ND options 0 messages with bad ND options 0 bad neighbor solicitation messages 0 bad neighbor advertisement messages 0 bad router solicitation messages 0 bad router advertisement messages 0 bad redirect messages 0 path MTU changes rip6: 0 messages received 0 checksum calculations on inbound 0 messages with bad checksum 0 messages dropped due to no socket 0 multicast messages dropped due to no socket 0 messages dropped due to full socket buffers 0 delivered 0 datagrams output netstat -m 516/5124/5640 mbufs in use (current/cache/total) 512/1634/2146/32768 mbuf clusters in use (current/cache/total/max) 512/1536 mbuf+clusters out of packet secondary zone in use (current/cache) 0/1303/1303/12800 4k (page size) jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max) 0/0/0/6400 9k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max) 0/0/0/3200 16k jumbo clusters in use (current/cache/total/max) 1153K/9761K/10914K bytes allocated to network (current/cache/total) 0/0/0 requests for mbufs denied (mbufs/clusters/mbuf+clusters) 0/0/0 requests for jumbo clusters denied (4k/9k/16k) 0/8/6656 sfbufs in use (current/peak/max) 0 requests for sfbufs denied 0 requests for sfbufs delayed 0 requests for I/O initiated by sendfile 0 calls to protocol drain routines Anyone got an idea what might be the possible cause?

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• Issues with Apache redirect to www-prefixed URL

  - by lamp_scaler

  I have a website with domain mysite.com. I would like to have it so that if a user types in "mysite.com" it will redirect to "www.mysite.com". Additionally, "mysite.com/subdir" will also redirect to "www.mysite.com/subdir". I've looked and made changes with vhosts and also rewrites, but it's not working for the "mysite.com/subdir"-"www.mysite.com/subdir" case. Every time I type in "mysite.com/subdir", it will redirect to "www.mysite.com". Only "www.mysite.com/subdir" works. Not sure how to troubleshoot this. I turned on rewrite logs and didn't see anything obvious, yet. This is my config files so far. Please let me know what I'm missing. Thanks! FYI: I'm using CentOS 5.4, nginx 1.2.0 on top of Apache 2.2.3. The site itself is built with CodeIgniter framework. http.conf: ServerTokens Prod ServerRoot "/etc/httpd" PidFile run/httpd.pid Timeout 120 KeepAlive Off MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAliveTimeout 15 <IfModule prefork.c> StartServers 8 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 10 ServerLimit 256 MaxClients 60 MaxRequestsPerChild 10000 #StartServers 8 #MinSpareServers 5 #MaxSpareServers 20 #ServerLimit 256 #MaxClients 256 #MaxRequestsPerChild 4000 </IfModule> <IfModule worker.c> StartServers 2 MaxClients 150 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 ThreadsPerChild 25 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> Listen 69 LoadModule auth_basic_module modules/mod_auth_basic.so LoadModule auth_digest_module modules/mod_auth_digest.so LoadModule authn_file_module modules/mod_authn_file.so LoadModule authn_alias_module modules/mod_authn_alias.so LoadModule authn_anon_module modules/mod_authn_anon.so LoadModule authn_dbm_module modules/mod_authn_dbm.so LoadModule authn_default_module modules/mod_authn_default.so LoadModule authz_host_module modules/mod_authz_host.so LoadModule authz_user_module modules/mod_authz_user.so LoadModule authz_owner_module modules/mod_authz_owner.so LoadModule authz_groupfile_module modules/mod_authz_groupfile.so LoadModule authz_dbm_module modules/mod_authz_dbm.so LoadModule authz_default_module modules/mod_authz_default.so LoadModule ldap_module modules/mod_ldap.so LoadModule authnz_ldap_module modules/mod_authnz_ldap.so LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so LoadModule logio_module modules/mod_logio.so LoadModule env_module modules/mod_env.so LoadModule ext_filter_module modules/mod_ext_filter.so LoadModule mime_magic_module modules/mod_mime_magic.so LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so LoadModule usertrack_module modules/mod_usertrack.so LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so LoadModule autoindex_module modules/mod_autoindex.so LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so LoadModule vhost_alias_module modules/mod_vhost_alias.so LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so LoadModule actions_module modules/mod_actions.so LoadModule speling_module modules/mod_speling.so LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule proxy_balancer_module modules/mod_proxy_balancer.so LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so LoadModule cache_module modules/mod_cache.so LoadModule suexec_module modules/mod_suexec.so LoadModule disk_cache_module modules/mod_disk_cache.so LoadModule file_cache_module modules/mod_file_cache.so LoadModule mem_cache_module modules/mod_mem_cache.so LoadModule cgi_module modules/mod_cgi.so LoadModule version_module modules/mod_version.so #rpaf settings LoadModule rpaf_module modules/mod_rpaf-2.0.so RPAFenable On RPAFproxy_ips 127.0.0.1 RPAFsethostname On # The header where the real client IP address is stored. RPAFheader X-Forwarded-For Include conf.d/*.conf User apache Group apache ServerAdmin root@localhost ServerName www.mysite.com:80 UseCanonicalName Off DocumentRoot "/var/www/html" <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All </Directory> <Directory "/var/www/html"> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> <IfModule mod_userdir.c> UserDir disable </IfModule> DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var AccessFileName .htaccess <Files ~ "^\.ht"> Order allow,deny Deny from all </Files> <DirectoryMatch "^/.*/\.svn/"> Order deny,allow Deny from all </DirectoryMatch> TypesConfig /etc/mime.types DefaultType text/plain <IfModule mod_mime_magic.c> MIMEMagicFile conf/magic </IfModule> HostnameLookups Off ErrorLog logs/error_log LogLevel warn LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common LogFormat "%{Referer}i -> %U" referer LogFormat "%{User-agent}i" agent CustomLog logs/access_log combined ServerSignature Off Alias /icons/ "/var/www/icons/" <Directory "/var/www/icons"> Options Indexes MultiViews AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> <IfModule mod_dav_fs.c> DAVLockDB /var/lib/dav/lockdb </IfModule> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/" <Directory "/var/www/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options None Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> IndexOptions FancyIndexing VersionSort NameWidth=* HTMLTable AddIconByEncoding (CMP,/icons/compressed.gif) x-compress x-gzip AddIconByType (TXT,/icons/text.gif) text/* AddIconByType (IMG,/icons/image2.gif) image/* AddIconByType (SND,/icons/sound2.gif) audio/* AddIconByType (VID,/icons/movie.gif) video/* AddIcon /icons/binary.gif .bin .exe AddIcon /icons/binhex.gif .hqx AddIcon /icons/tar.gif .tar AddIcon /icons/world2.gif .wrl .wrl.gz .vrml .vrm .iv AddIcon /icons/compressed.gif .Z .z .tgz .gz .zip AddIcon /icons/a.gif .ps .ai .eps AddIcon /icons/layout.gif .html .shtml .htm .pdf AddIcon /icons/text.gif .txt AddIcon /icons/c.gif .c AddIcon /icons/p.gif .pl .py AddIcon /icons/f.gif .for AddIcon /icons/dvi.gif .dvi AddIcon /icons/uuencoded.gif .uu AddIcon /icons/script.gif .conf .sh .shar .csh .ksh .tcl AddIcon /icons/tex.gif .tex AddIcon /icons/bomb.gif core AddIcon /icons/back.gif .. AddIcon /icons/hand.right.gif README AddIcon /icons/folder.gif ^^DIRECTORY^^ AddIcon /icons/blank.gif ^^BLANKICON^^ DefaultIcon /icons/unknown.gif #AddDescription "GZIP compressed document" .gz #AddDescription "tar archive" .tar #AddDescription "GZIP compressed tar archive" .tgz ReadmeName README.html HeaderName HEADER.html IndexIgnore .??* *~ *# HEADER* README* RCS CVS *,v *,t AddLanguage ca .ca AddLanguage cs .cz .cs AddLanguage da .dk AddLanguage de .de AddLanguage el .el AddLanguage en .en AddLanguage eo .eo AddLanguage es .es AddLanguage et .et AddLanguage fr .fr AddLanguage he .he AddLanguage hr .hr AddLanguage it .it AddLanguage ja .ja AddLanguage ko .ko AddLanguage ltz .ltz AddLanguage nl .nl AddLanguage nn .nn AddLanguage no .no AddLanguage pl .po AddLanguage pt .pt AddLanguage pt-BR .pt-br AddLanguage ru .ru AddLanguage sv .sv AddLanguage zh-CN .zh-cn AddLanguage zh-TW .zh-tw LanguagePriority en zh-CN zh-TW ca cs da de el eo es et fr he hr it ja ko ltz nl nn no pl pt pt-BR ru sv ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 AddType text/x-component .htc AddType application/x-compress .Z AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz AddHandler type-map var AddType text/html .shtml AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml Alias /error/ "/var/www/error/" <IfModule mod_negotiation.c> <IfModule mod_include.c> <Directory "/var/www/error"> AllowOverride None Options IncludesNoExec AddOutputFilter Includes html AddHandler type-map var Order allow,deny Allow from all LanguagePriority en es de fr ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback </Directory> </IfModule> </IfModule> BrowserMatch "Mozilla/2" nokeepalive BrowserMatch "MSIE 4\.0b2;" nokeepalive downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "RealPlayer 4\.0" force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "Java/1\.0" force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "JDK/1\.0" force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "MS FrontPage" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^WebDrive" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS/1.[0123]" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^gnome-vfs/1.0" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^XML Spy" redirect-carefully BrowserMatch "^Dreamweaver-WebDAV-SCM1" redirect-carefully vhost.conf: NameVirtualHost *:69 <VirtualHost *:69> ServerName mysite.com ServerAlias vip.mysite.com Redirect / http://www.mysite.com/ </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:69> DocumentRoot /home/mysite/mysite/www ServerName www.mysite.com </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:69> DocumentRoot /home/mysite/mysite/www/assets ServerName static.mysite.com </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:69> DocumentRoot /home/mysite/admin/www ServerName admin.mysite.com </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:69> DocumentRoot /home/other/trunk/www ServerName othersite.com ServerAlias www.othersite.com </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:69> DocumentRoot /var/www/html ServerName test.mysite.com ServerAlias test2.mysite.com </VirtualHost> /home/mysite/mysite/www/.htaccess: RewriteEngine on # In my case all CI files are outside this web root, so we can # allow any files or directories that exist to be displayed directly RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d # hide index.php RewriteRule .* index.php/$0 [L] # BEGIN Compress text files <ifModule mod_deflate.c> <filesMatch "\.(css|js|x?html?|php)$"> SetOutputFilter DEFLATE </filesMatch> </ifModule> # END Compress text files # BEGIN Expire headers <ifModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 2592000 seconds" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 2592000 seconds" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds" ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 604800 seconds" ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 604800 seconds" ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 604800 seconds" ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access plus 600 seconds" </ifModule> # END Expire headers # BEGIN Cache-Control Headers <ifModule mod_headers.c> <filesMatch "\.(ico|jpe?g|png|gif|swf)$"> Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public" </filesMatch> <filesMatch "\.(css)$"> Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public" </filesMatch> <filesMatch "\.(js)$"> Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, private" </filesMatch> </ifModule> # END Cache-Control Headers # BEGIN Turn ETags Off <ifModule mod_headers.c> Header unset ETag </ifModule> FileETag None # END Turn ETags Off /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf: server { listen 80; server_name static.mysite.com; location / { root /home/mysite/mysite/www/assets; index index.html index.htm; expires max; } } server { listen 80; server_name *.mysite.com www.mysite.com vip.mysite.com; #Set this larger if uploading big files client_max_body_size 5m; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:69; proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_connect_timeout 90; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 90; #client_max_body_size 10m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_buffer_size 4k; proxy_buffers 4 32k; } }

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• A free standing ASP.NET Pager Web Control

  - by Rick Strahl

  Paging in ASP.NET has been relatively easy with stock controls supporting basic paging functionality. However, recently I built an MVC application and one of the things I ran into was that I HAD TO build manual paging support into a few of my pages. Dealing with list controls and rendering markup is easy enough, but doing paging is a little more involved. I ended up with a small but flexible component that can be dropped anywhere. As it turns out the task of creating a semi-generic Pager control for MVC was fairly easily. Now I’m back to working in Web Forms and thought to myself that the way I created the pager in MVC actually would also work in ASP.NET – in fact quite a bit easier since the whole thing can be conveniently wrapped up into an easily reusable control. A standalone pager would provider easier reuse in various pages and a more consistent pager display regardless of what kind of 'control’ the pager is associated with. Why a Pager Control? At first blush it might sound silly to create a new pager control – after all Web Forms has pretty decent paging support, doesn’t it? Well, sort of. Yes the GridView control has automatic paging built in and the ListView control has the related DataPager control. The built in ASP.NET paging has several issues though: Postback and JavaScript requirements If you look at paging links in ASP.NET they are always postback links with javascript:__doPostback() calls that go back to the server. While that works fine and actually has some benefit like the fact that paging saves changes to the page and post them back, it’s not very SEO friendly. Basically if you use javascript based navigation nosearch engine will follow the paging links which effectively cuts off list content on the first page. The DataPager control does support GET based links via the QueryStringParameter property, but the control is effectively tied to the ListView control (which is the only control that implements IPageableItemContainer). DataSource Controls required for Efficient Data Paging Retrieval The only way you can get paging to work efficiently where only the few records you display on the page are queried for and retrieved from the database you have to use a DataSource control - only the Linq and Entity DataSource controls  support this natively. While you can retrieve this data yourself manually, there’s no way to just assign the page number and render the pager based on this custom subset. Other than that default paging requires a full resultset for ASP.NET to filter the data and display only a subset which can be very resource intensive and wasteful if you’re dealing with largish resultsets (although I’m a firm believer in returning actually usable sets :-}). If you use your own business layer that doesn’t fit an ObjectDataSource you’re SOL. That’s a real shame too because with LINQ based querying it’s real easy to retrieve a subset of data that is just the data you want to display but the native Pager functionality doesn’t support just setting properties to display just the subset AFAIK. DataPager is not Free Standing The DataPager control is the closest thing to a decent Pager implementation that ASP.NET has, but alas it’s not a free standing component – it works off a related control and the only one that it effectively supports from the stock ASP.NET controls is the ListView control. This means you can’t use the same data pager formatting for a grid and a list view or vice versa and you’re always tied to the control. Paging Events In order to handle paging you have to deal with paging events. The events fire at specific time instances in the page pipeline and because of this you often have to handle data binding in a way to work around the paging events or else end up double binding your data sources based on paging. Yuk. Styling The GridView pager is a royal pain to beat into submission for styled rendering. The DataPager control has many more options and template layout and it renders somewhat cleaner, but it too is not exactly easy to get a decent display for. Not a Generic Solution The problem with the ASP.NET controls too is that it’s not generic. GridView, DataGrid use their own internal paging, ListView can use a DataPager and if you want to manually create data layout – well you’re on your own. IOW, depending on what you use you likely have very different looking Paging experiences. So, I figured I’ve struggled with this once too many and finally sat down and built a Pager control. The Pager Control My goal was to create a totally free standing control that has no dependencies on other controls and certainly no requirements for using DataSource controls. The idea is that you should be able to use this pager control without any sort of data requirements at all – you should just be able to set properties and be able to display a pager. The Pager control I ended up with has the following features: Completely free standing Pager control – no control or data dependencies Complete manual control – Pager can render without any data dependency Easy to use: Only need to set PageSize, ActivePage and TotalItems Supports optional filtering of IQueryable for efficient queries and Pager rendering Supports optional full set filtering of IEnumerable<T> and DataTable Page links are plain HTTP GET href Links Control automatically picks up Page links on the URL and assigns them (automatic page detection no page index changing events to hookup) Full CSS Styling support On the downside there’s no templating support for the control so the layout of the pager is relatively fixed. All elements however are stylable and there are options to control the text, and layout options such as whether to display first and last pages and the previous/next buttons and so on. To give you an idea what the pager looks like, here are two differently styled examples (all via CSS):   The markup for these two pagers looks like this: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager" PageSize="5" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PagesTextCssClass="gridpagertext" CssClass="gridpager" RenderContainerDiv="true" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" PagesText="Item Pages:" NextText="next" PreviousText="previous" /> <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager2" PageSize="5" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> The latter example uses default style settings so it there’s not much to set. The first example on the other hand explicitly assigns custom styles and overrides a few of the formatting options. Styling The styling is based on a number of CSS classes of which the the main pager, pagerbutton and pagerbutton-selected classes are the important ones. Other styles like pagerbutton-next/prev/first/last are based on the pagerbutton style. The default styling shown for the red outlined pager looks like this: .pagercontainer { margin: 20px 0; background: whitesmoke; padding: 5px; } .pager { float: right; font-size: 10pt; text-align: left; } .pagerbutton,.pagerbutton-selected,.pagertext { display: block; float: left; text-align: center; border: solid 2px maroon; min-width: 18px; margin-left: 3px; text-decoration: none; padding: 4px; } .pagerbutton-selected { font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold; color: maroon; border-width: 0px; background: khaki; } .pagerbutton-first { margin-right: 12px; } .pagerbutton-last,.pagerbutton-prev { margin-left: 12px; } .pagertext { border: none; margin-left: 30px; font-weight: bold; } .pagerbutton a { text-decoration: none; } .pagerbutton:hover { background-color: maroon; color: cornsilk; } .pagerbutton-prev { background-image: url(images/prev.png); background-position: 2px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-left: 20px; } .pagerbutton-next { background-image: url(images/next.png); background-position: 40px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-right: 20px; margin-right: 0px; } Yup that’s a lot of styling settings although not all of them are required. The key ones are pagerbutton, pager and pager selection. The others (which are implicitly created by the control based on the pagerbutton style) are for custom markup of the ‘special’ buttons. In my apps I tend to have two kinds of pages: Those that are associated with typical ‘grid’ displays that display purely tabular data and those that have a more looser list like layout. The two pagers shown above represent these two views and the pager and gridpager styles in my standard style sheet reflect these two styles. Configuring the Pager with Code Finally lets look at what it takes to hook up the pager. As mentioned in the highlights the Pager control is completely independent of other controls so if you just want to display a pager on its own it’s as simple as dropping the control and assigning the PageSize, ActivePage and either TotalPages or TotalItems. So for this markup: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPagerManual" PageSize="5" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> I can use code as simple as: ItemPagerManual.PageSize = 3; ItemPagerManual.ActivePage = 4;ItemPagerManual.TotalItems = 20; Note that ActivePage is not required - it will automatically use any Page=x query string value and assign it, although you can override it as I did above. TotalItems can be any value that you retrieve from a result set or manually assign as I did above. A more realistic scenario based on a LINQ to SQL IQueryable result is even easier. In this example, I have a UserControl that contains a ListView control that renders IQueryable data. I use a User Control here because there are different views the user can choose from with each view being a different user control. This incidentally also highlights one of the nice features of the pager: Because the pager is independent of the control I can put the pager on the host page instead of into each of the user controls. IOW, there’s only one Pager control, but there are potentially many user controls/listviews that hold the actual display data. The following code demonstrates how to use the Pager with an IQueryable that loads only the records it displays: protected voidPage_Load(objectsender, EventArgs e) {     Category = Request.Params["Category"] ?? string.Empty;     IQueryable<wws_Item> ItemList = ItemRepository.GetItemsByCategory(Category);     // Update the page and filter the list down     ItemList = ItemPager.FilterIQueryable<wws_Item>(ItemList); // Render user control with a list view Control ulItemList = LoadControl("~/usercontrols/" + App.Configuration.ItemListType + ".ascx"); ((IInventoryItemListControl)ulItemList).InventoryItemList = ItemList; phItemList.Controls.Add(ulItemList); // placeholder } The code uses a business object to retrieve Items by category as an IQueryable which means that the result is only an expression tree that hasn’t execute SQL yet and can be further filtered. I then pass this IQueryable to the FilterIQueryable() helper method of the control which does two main things: Filters the IQueryable to retrieve only the data displayed on the active page Sets the Totaltems property and calculates TotalPages on the Pager and that’s it! When the Pager renders it uses those values, plus the PageSize and ActivePage properties to render the Pager. In addition to IQueryable there are also filter methods for IEnumerable<T> and DataTable, but these versions just filter the data by removing rows/items from the entire already retrieved data. Output Generated and Paging Links The output generated creates pager links as plain href links. Here’s what the output looks like: <div id="ItemPager" class="pagercontainer"> <div class="pager"> <span class="pagertext">Pages: </span><a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=1" class="pagerbutton" />1</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=2" class="pagerbutton" />2</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton" />3</a> <span class="pagerbutton-selected">4</span> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton" />5</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=6" class="pagerbutton" />6</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=20" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-last" />20</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-prev" />Prev</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-next" />Next</a></div> <br clear="all" /> </div> </div> The links point back to the current page and simply append a Page= page link into the page. When the page gets reloaded with the new page number the pager automatically detects the page number and automatically assigns the ActivePage property which results in the appropriate page to be displayed. The code shown in the previous section is all that’s needed to handle paging. Note that HTTP GET based paging is different than the Postback paging ASP.NET uses by default. Postback paging preserves modified page content when clicking on pager buttons, but this control will simply load a new page – no page preservation at this time. The advantage of not using Postback paging is that the URLs generated are plain HTML links that a search engine can follow where __doPostback() links are not. Pager with a Grid The pager also works in combination with grid controls so it’s easy to bypass the grid control’s paging features if desired. In the following example I use a gridView control and binds it to a DataTable result which is also filterable by the Pager control. The very basic plain vanilla ASP.NET grid markup looks like this: <div style="width: 600px; margin: 0 auto;padding: 20px; "> <asp:DataGrid runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="True" ID="gdItems" CssClass="blackborder" style="width: 600px;"> <AlternatingItemStyle CssClass="gridalternate" /> <HeaderStyle CssClass="gridheader" /> </asp:DataGrid> <ww:Pager runat="server" ID="Pager" CssClass="gridpager" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PageSize="8" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> </div> and looks like this when rendered: using custom set of CSS styles. The code behind for this code is also very simple: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string category = Request.Params["category"] ?? ""; busItem itemRep = WebStoreFactory.GetItem(); var items = itemRep.GetItemsByCategory(category) .Select(itm => new {Sku = itm.Sku, Description = itm.Description}); // run query into a DataTable for demonstration DataTable dt = itemRep.Converter.ToDataTable(items,"TItems"); // Remove all items not on the current page dt = Pager.FilterDataTable(dt,0); // bind and display gdItems.DataSource = dt; gdItems.DataBind(); } A little contrived I suppose since the list could already be bound from the list of elements, but this is to demonstrate that you can also bind against a DataTable if your business layer returns those. Unfortunately there’s no way to filter a DataReader as it’s a one way forward only reader and the reader is required by the DataSource to perform the bindings.  However, you can still use a DataReader as long as your business logic filters the data prior to rendering and provides a total item count (most likely as a second query). Control Creation The control itself is a pretty brute force ASP.NET control. Nothing clever about this other than some basic rendering logic and some simple calculations and update routines to determine which buttons need to be shown. You can take a look at the full code from the West Wind Web Toolkit’s Repository (note there are a few dependencies). To give you an idea how the control works here is the Render() method: /// <summary> /// overridden to handle custom pager rendering for runtime and design time /// </summary> /// <param name="writer"></param> protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) { base.Render(writer); if (TotalPages == 0 && TotalItems > 0) TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); if (DesignMode) TotalPages = 10; // don't render pager if there's only one page if (TotalPages < 2) return; if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ContainerDivCssClass)) writer.AddAttribute("class", ContainerDivCssClass); writer.RenderBeginTag("div"); } // main pager wrapper writer.WriteBeginTag("div"); writer.AddAttribute("id", this.ClientID); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", this.CssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar + "\r\n"); // Pages Text writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PagesTextCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PagesTextCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(this.PagesText); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); // if the base url is empty use the current URL FixupBaseUrl(); // set _startPage and _endPage ConfigurePagesToRender(); // write out first page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _startPage != 1) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-first"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write("1"); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); writer.Write("&nbsp;"); } // write out all the page links for (int i = _startPage; i < _endPage + 1; i++) { if (i == ActivePage) { writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(SelectedPageCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", SelectedPageCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); } else { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, i.ToString()).TrimEnd('&'); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.Write("\r\n"); } // write out last page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _endPage < TotalPages) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-last"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Previous link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(PreviousText) && ActivePage > 1) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage - 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-prev"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(PreviousText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Next link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(NextText) && ActivePage < TotalPages) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage + 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-next"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(NextText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.WriteEndTag("div"); if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (RenderContainerDivBreak) writer.Write("<br clear=\"all\" />\r\n"); writer.WriteEndTag("div"); } } As I said pretty much brute force rendering based on the control’s property settings of which there are quite a few: You can also see the pager in the designer above. unfortunately the VS designer (both 2010 and 2008) fails to render the float: left CSS styles properly and starts wrapping after margins are applied in the special buttons. Not a big deal since VS does at least respect the spacing (the floated elements overlay). Then again I’m not using the designer anyway :-}. Filtering Data What makes the Pager easy to use is the filter methods built into the control. While this functionality is clearly not the most politically correct design choice as it violates separation of concerns, it’s very useful for typical pager operation. While I actually have filter methods that do something similar in my business layer, having it exposed on the control makes the control a lot more useful for typical databinding scenarios. Of course these methods are optional – if you have a business layer that can provide filtered page queries for you can use that instead and assign the TotalItems property manually. There are three filter method types available for IQueryable, IEnumerable and for DataTable which tend to be the most common use cases in my apps old and new. The IQueryable version is pretty simple as it can simply rely on on .Skip() and .Take() with LINQ: /// <summary> /// <summary> /// Queries the database for the ActivePage applied manually /// or from the Request["page"] variable. This routine /// figures out and sets TotalPages, ActivePage and /// returns a filtered subset IQueryable that contains /// only the items from the ActivePage. /// </summary> /// <param name="query"></param> /// <param name="activePage"> /// The page you want to display. Sets the ActivePage property when passed. /// Pass 0 or smaller to use ActivePage setting. /// </param> /// <returns></returns> public IQueryable<T> FilterIQueryable<T>(IQueryable<T> query, int activePage) where T : class, new() { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = query.Count(); if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return query; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) query = query.Skip(skip * PageSize); _TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); return query.Take(PageSize); } The IEnumerable<T> version simply  converts the IEnumerable to an IQuerable and calls back into this method for filtering. The DataTable version requires a little more work to manually parse and filter records (I didn’t want to add the Linq DataSetExtensions assembly just for this): /// <summary> /// Filters a data table for an ActivePage. /// /// Note: Modifies the data set permanently by remove DataRows /// </summary> /// <param name="dt">Full result DataTable</param> /// <param name="activePage">Page to display. 0 to use ActivePage property </param> /// <returns></returns> public DataTable FilterDataTable(DataTable dt, int activePage) { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = dt.Rows.Count; if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return dt; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) { for (int i = 0; i < skip * PageSize; i++ ) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(0); } while(dt.Rows.Count > PageSize) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(PageSize); return dt; } Using the Pager Control The pager as it is is a first cut I built a couple of weeks ago and since then have been tweaking a little as part of an internal project I’m working on. I’ve replaced a bunch of pagers on various older pages with this pager without any issues and have what now feels like a more consistent user interface where paging looks and feels the same across different controls. As a bonus I’m only loading the data from the database that I need to display a single page. With the preset class tags applied too adding a pager is now as easy as dropping the control and adding the style sheet for styling to be consistent – no fuss, no muss. Schweet. Hopefully some of you may find this as useful as I have or at least as a baseline to build ontop of… Resources The Pager is part of the West Wind Web & Ajax Toolkit Pager.cs Source Code (some toolkit dependencies) Westwind.css base stylesheet with .pager and .gridpager styles Pager Example Page © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER JULY 2012

  - by mseika

  SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER JULY 2012 Dear SOA partner community member To provide our community members the best of our knowledge, we want your feedback on our SOA Partner community. Thus we are organizing SOA Partner Community Survey 2012. We request you to participate in the survey and give your valuable feedback on various areas of marketing, sales and education. To continue our successful BPM Suite, Oracle is launching together with you Process Accelerators initiative. It’s your opportunity to co-develop and market predefined processes. Oracle Fusion Applications Design Patterns are a great tool to develop your SOA or BPM solution or process accelerators. To promote your SOA & BPM Specialization we continue to offer several benefits. This month we would like to highlight our Specialization Plaques - make sure you request one for your office! Our Fusion Middleware Summer Camps are booked out, if could not get a seat you can attend the SOA & BPM track @ Virtual Developer Day: Oracle Fusion Development Oracle demo systems offer´s two new demos: Business Driven Development based on BPM Suite & SOA Lifecycle Management. Jürgen KressOracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA NEW CONTENT Community SurveyProcess Accelerators KitPlaques SOA & BPM SpecializedSOA & BPM at Virtual Developer Day News from our Partners & CommunityOverview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6 Business driven development(BDD) demo now available! SOA Lifecycle Management Oracle Fusion applications design patterns Updated material by Oracle Connect and Network SOA Blogs SOA on Facebook SOA on LinkedIn SOA on Twitter Mix SOA Forum COMMUNITY SURVEY Like every year we would like to get your feedback in our SOA Partner Community Survey 2012. Make sure that You attend to further develop our community and support our planning! It is key for us to get your feedback to prepare for the next fiscal year. Back to top PROCESS ACCELERATORS KIT Oracle is very interested to co-develop and market with you, our partners, pre-defined processes for BPM Suite.I am very happy to announce a new program called “Oracle BPM Partner Solution Catalog”. This program will provide a one-stop shop for our customers looking for Oracle BPM partner solutions available in the market today.The Oracle BPM Solution Catalog will be hosted on our very popular Oracle Technology Network (OTN). To give you an idea of the scale of customer visibility, OTN today receives over 1Million hits per day from our business and developer community. We would like to invite you to list your Oracle BPM 11g solutions available today.In order to participate in this program, you need to do the following: Fill in the attached slide templates - #3 and #4 for each Oracle BPM 11g solution you would like to list on OTN.Please add links to whitepapers , videos, references to the specific solution in the template slide. We recommend that you create a landing page on your website for these linked artifacts and just point to the same from within the PowerPoint template. This will give you the flexibility to update the information as frequently as needed. If you have the particular solution in production or a reference available, please list them as well. Send the PowerPoint template slides (1 set of slides for each Oracle BPM solution) to [email protected]. In addition to having the opportunity to list your solutions on OTN for Oracle customers, you will have the chance to advertise your new wins/implementations/solutions in an Oracle Sponsored PM Webinar held every quarter. This program is targeted to go live by the end of summer 2012. At this point, we are targeting a soft launch in July end 2012 so send on your BPM solutions information as soon as possible. We would love to have your solution(s) listed in the “Oracle BPM Partner Solution Catalog” at the time of the launch. This will be a live repository so you can keep adding more solutions as they become available. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us [email protected], Product Strategy Director, Oracle BPM , Phone +1 650.506.5486.Thank you and look forward to hearing from you. Oracle BPM team Process Accelerators Overview.pdf ProcessAcceleratorsDataSheet.pdf Demos draUPK.zip & trmUPK.zip BPM Solution repository slides.ppt Additional BPM material BPM Process Development Lifecycle Document that describes recommended approach to collaborative process modeling across business and IT tools ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) by Andrejus Baranovskis BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 by Mark Nelson BPM – Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View by Mark Nelson For the complete kit please visit the BPM folder at our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). For the complete presentation please visit our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). Information is Oracle and Partner confidential! Back to top PLAQUES SOA & BPM SPECIALIZED We continue to offer you a nice SOA & BPM Specialization plaque with your logo to proof your success. If you are a SOA or BPM Specialized partner and would like to request the plaque please send Brigitte an e-mail with the following information: Partner Name Partner logo (preferred eps file) Partner Status gold or platinum Your shipping address Your Specialization: SOA or BPM We recommend to mount the plaque at your office reception in addition you can use the SOA Specialization logos at your website download Logo: Gold & Platinum or the BPM logos Gold & Platinum Back to top SOA & BPM AT VIRTUAL DEVELOPER DAY Register now for this FREE hands-on online workshop Get up to date and learn everything you wanted to know about Oracle ADF & Fusion Development plus live Q&A chats with Oracle technical staffOracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is the standards based, strategic framework for Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle ADF’s integration with the Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BI creates a complete productive development platform for your custom applications.Join us at this FREE virtual event and learn the latest in Fusion Development including: Is Oracle ADF development faster and simpler than Forms, Apex or .Net? Mobile Application Development with ADF Mobile Oracle ADF development with Eclipse Oracle WebCenter Portal and ADF Development Application Lifecycle Management with ADF Building Process Centric Applications with ADF and BPM Oracle Business Intelligence and ADF Integration Live Q&A chats with Oracle technical staff Developer lead, manager or architect - this event has something for everyone. Don’t miss this opportunity.Tuesday, July 10, 2012. 9:00 a.m. PT -1:00 p.m. PT 11:00 a.m. CT - 3:00 p.m. CT 12:00 p.m. ET - 4:00 p.m. ET 1:00 p.m. BRT - 5:00 p.m. BRT Register online now! for this FREE event. Agenda: 09:00 am Opening 09:30 am Keynote: Oracle Fusion Development Track1Introduction to Fusion Development Track2What's New in Fusion Development Track3Fusion Development in the Enterprise 10:00 am Is Oracle ADF Development Faster and Simpler than Oracle Forms, APEX or .Net? Mobile Application Development with ADF Mobile Oracle WebCenter Portal and ADF Development 11:00 am Rich Web UI made simple - an ADF Faces Overview Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse - ADF Development Building Process Centric Applications with ADF and BPM 12:00 noon Next Generation Controller for JSF Application Lifecycle Management for ADF Oracle Business Intelligence and ADF Integration *Hands On Lab – WebCenter and ADF Lab w/ JDeveloper - Lab materials will be provided ahead of the event to give you ample time to work through the lab and increase the productivity of the live chat sessions the day of the event. Sessions abstractsRegister online now! for this FREE event Read more on Community Events and post your comment here. Back to top NEWS FROM OUR PARTNERS AND COMMUNITY Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity JDeveloper & ADF?Troubleshooting BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6http://dlvr.it/1p0FfS SOA Community?SOA & BPM @ Virtual Developer Day: Oracle Fusion Development - July 10th 2012https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/soa-bpm-virtual-developer-day- oracle-fusion-developmentjuly-10th-2012/#soacommunity #soa #bom #education orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: BAM design pointers - In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discove.http://ow.ly/1kYqES SOA CommunitySOA Community Newsletter June 2012http://wp.me/p10C8u-qw SOA CommunityBPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 by Mark Nelsonhttp://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/ bpmn-process-editor-problems-in-11-1-1-6 #soacommunity #bpm OTNArchBeat ?SOA Learning Library: free short, topic-focused training on Oracle SOA & BPM products | @SOACommunity http://pub.vitrue.com/NE1G Andrejus Baranovskis ?ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization)http://fb.me/1coX4r1X1 SOA CommunitySOA Learning Library provides a comprehensive curriculum for the SOA and BPM product suites https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/soa-learning-library #soacommunity #soa #bpm OTNArchBeat ?A Universal JMX Client for Weblogic - Part 1: Monitoring BPEL Thread Pools in SOA 11g | Stefan Koserhttp://pub.vitrue.com/mQVZ OTNArchBeat ?BPM - Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View | Mark Nelson http://pub.vitrue.com/3PR0Oracle SOA ?Learn how Choice Hotels Implements Innovative Google Maps Solution with #OracleSOA http://bit.ly/MTwIJ3 SOA Communitytop Tweets SOA Partner Community - June 2012 Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/top-tweets-soa-partner-community-june-2012 Torsten Winterberg#OPITZ is pushing Oracle commitment to the next level: New Specializations done: ADF, BPM, WLS, Exadatahttp://bit.ly/KX1WVS ServiceTechSymposium ?Only 8 more days left until Super Early Bird Registration Discount expires! http://www.servicetechsymposium.com OracleBlogsSOA Management in 3 minutes - Video explainerhttp://ow.ly/1kN5pn SOA Community ?SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium 2012 London - Enter Promo Code: Djmxz370https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/soa-cloud-service-technology-symposium-2012-london #soasymposium #soacommunity #soa Heidi BuelowGreat course! w David Read RT @soacommunity: product management ADF for BPM training 5 seats left https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/fusion-middleware-summer-campsadvanced-partner-trainings/ #bpm #soacommunity SOA Community ?product management ADF for BPM training 5 seats lefthttps://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/fusion-middleware-summer-campsadvanced-partner-trainings/ #bpm #soacommunity OTNArchBeat ?Oacle Fusion Applications Design Patterns Now Available For Developers | Ultan O'Broinhttp://pub.vitrue.com/UEiF OTNArchBeat ?SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium 2012London - Special Oracle Discounthttp://pub.vitrue.com/8E0J SOA CommunityBecome a facebook fan of soacommunity http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity SOA Community ?SOA Suite HealthCare Integration Architecture https://blogs.oracle.com/SOAForHealthcare/entry/soa_suite_healthcare_integration_architecture #soacommunity #soa Andrejus Baranovskis ?Running Pre-built Virtual Machine for SOA Suite and BPM Suite 11g PS5 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6http://fb.me/vB8nO0Vg OracleBlogsPrinciples of Service-Oriented Architecture by Douwe P. van den Bos http://ow.ly/1kIcOP OTNArchBeatOracle Public Cloud Architecture | @TylerJewell http://ow.ly/bHAcL The SOA Network ?Business Process Management, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Web 2.0: Business Transformation or.http://bit.ly/LBgREL #ITNews #SOA OracleBlogs ?Oracle SOA Foundation Practitioner Certificationhttp://ow.ly/1kGYYg Frank Nimphius ?Learn Advanced ADF. ORACLE Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in Lisbon - July 9th - 13thhttp://bit.ly/KGCl3i SOA CommunityTransform Your Application Integration with Best Practices from Oracle Customershttps://blogs.oracle.com/SOA/entry/transform_your_application_integration_with #soacommunity #soa #bpm Simone GeibWhat you always wanted to know about #oraclesoa diagnostics: Shawn Bailey, Overview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6,http://ow.ly/bxK0M Oracle SOA ?Save the date: Jun 21 10AM, SOA & BPM Customer Insight Series. Hear how Choice Hotels went from legacy to #oraclesoa http://bit.ly/LsNDGl OTNArchBeat ?New VirtualBox images for Oracle SOA Suite & Oracle BPM Suite 11.1.1.6.0http://ow.ly/bwDAl OracleBlogs ?Process development lifecycle in Oracle BPM 11g http://ow.ly/1ktesY Daniel AmadeiNew post: Oracle BPEL 11g Message Delivery & Recovery.http://amadei.com.br/blog/index.php /oracle-bpel-11g-message-delivery SOA Community ?Sending out the June edition of the #soacommunity newsletter - read it or become a member http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa!#soa #bpm Arun Pareek ?For the past six months Ahmed Aboulnaga and me have been working on Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook.http://lnkd.in/CAvpUQ SOA CommunitySun shine all day no clouds - solar eclipse is over... #sunshine #cloud http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Swarm-Computing Michel SchildmeijerWatch my blog Oracle Service Bus 11g: listing projects and services with WLST - part 1 http://lnkd.in/B7f3GQ @TITAN_GS @wlscommunity OTNArchBeatBook Review: Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Foundation Pack 11gR1: Essentials | Rajesh Rahejahttp://ow.ly/bn2cc OTNArchBeat ?Driving from Business Architecture to Business Process Services | @vghariharan http://ow.ly/bn5UB OTNArchBeat ?SOA Analysis within the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) 2.0 - Part II | Dawit Lessanu http://ow.ly/bn6sX Simone Geib ?Contact me directly for ideas how to improvehttp://bit.ly/advancedsoasuite and additional posts, presentations, white papers, ... #soasuite Simone Geib ?#soasuite advanced OTN page has become too cluttered. Broke it into separate pages to start with. http://bit.ly/advancedsoasuite OracleBlogs ?June Webcast: SOA Gateway Implementation and Troubleshooting (2 sessions) http://ow.ly/1kbRFA ServiceTechSymposium ?New session just posted to calendar: "NoSQL for Data Services, Data Virtualization & Big Data" by Guido Schmutz, Trivadis AG ://ow.ly/bjjOeDebra Lilley ?looks good - real proof people are using the apps ! RT @fteter: Very cool Fusion Applications Help site: http://bit.ly/L3nvOR #FusionApps demed ?rapid proliferation of cloud computing will drive convergence of SOA and cloud paradigms" http://ovum.com/2012/05/18/soa-paves-the-way-for-cloud/ SOA CommunityMiddleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012-HAPPY NEW YEAR! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/middleware-oracle-excellence-awards-2012happy-new-year/ #soacommunity #opn #opnaward #specialization #oracle SOA CommunityHappy New Year #soacommunity thanks for the business! Time for a drink http://pic.twitter.com/zkK08KWB OTNArchBeat ?Who should ‘own’ the Enterprise Architecture? | Michael Glas http://bit.ly/K0ge0Q SOA Communitytop Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; May 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pP ServiceTechSymposiumNew session just posted to Symposium calendar: "Elastic SOA in the Cloud" by Steve Millidge, C2B2 Consulting http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/agenda2012.php #elastic_soa_in_the_cloud orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: How to Set JVM Parameters in Oracle SOA 11Ghttp://ow.ly/1k2cnl ServiceTechSymposium ?New session just posted to Symposium calendar: "SOA Governance at EDP: A Global Energy Company" by Manuel Rosa, Linkhttp://www.servicetechsymposium.com/agenda2012.php#soa_governance_at_edp SOA Community ?VirtualBox image SOA Suite & BPM Suite 11.1.1.6.0&ndash;Your feedback?http://wp.me/p10C8u-qh Oracle MiddlewareSave the date: Jun 21 10AM, SOA & BPM Customer Insight Series. Hear how Choice Hotels went from legacy to#oraclesoa http://bit.ly/LU1y5N OTNArchBeat ?Goodbye, Silos. Hello SOA. | @stephanieoverbyhttp://pub.vitrue.com/NJJO SOA CommunityBPM Standard Edition - to start your BPM project http://wp.me/p10C8u-qj Please feel free to send us your news! And add your blog to our SOA blog wiki. Back to top OVERVIEW OF SOA DIAGNOSTICS IN 11.1.1.6 What tools are available for diagnosing SOA Suite issues? There are a variety of tools available to help you and Support diagnose SOA Suite issues in 11g but it can be confusing as to which tool is appropriate for a particular situation and what their relationships are. This blog post will introduce the various tools and attempt to clarify what each is for and how they are related. Let's first list the tools we'll be addressing: RDA: Remote Diagnostic Agent DFW: Diagnostic Framework Selective Tracing DMS: Dynamic Monitoring Service ODL: Oracle Diagnostic Logging ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository ADRCI: Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter WLDF: WebLogic Diagnostic Framework This overview is not mean to be a comprehensive guide on using all of these tools, however, extensive reference materials are included that will provide many more details on their execution. Another point to note is that all of these tools are applicable for Fusion Middleware as a whole but specific products may or may not have implemented features to leverage them. A couple of the tools have a WebLogic Scripting Tool or 'WLST' interface. WLST is a command interface for executing pre-built functions and custom scripts against a domain. A detailed WLST tutorial is beyond the scope of this post but you can find general information here. There are more specific resources in the below sections.In this post when we refer to 'Enterprise Manager' or 'EM' we are referring to Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. read the full blog post here. Read more on Oracle and post your comment here. Back to top BUSINESS DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT (BDD) DEMO NOW AVAILABLE! For access to the Oracle demo systems please visit OPN and talk to your Partner Expert DSS is pleased to announce the availability of the demo “Business Driven Development“. This innovative demonstration uses a case-study approach to show business users how they can easily streamline their Business Processes - delivering greater efficiency, agility, visibility and collaboration with Oracle BPM and WebCenter. The BDD demonstration uses a case study-based approach to highlight a business problem at a fictional company, Avitek Corporation, and uses Oracle BPM and Oracle WebCenter to solve the business problem. This holistic approach has specifically been used to appeal to a non-technical business analyst user. This demo is NOT focused on product features, but aims to guide users through a complete BPM lifecycle. The scenario is based on improving a simple order process (scenario details are in the demo script). Avitek Corporation is sufferinng from a manual email-driven ordering process. Sales reps don’t know where the customer orders are stuck (no visibility) and finance users are unable to manually approve every order (no automation). There are several areas where this process can be improved with Business Process Management technology. This demo shows how improving following areas will ignificantly help resolve the business problems Avitek Corporation is facing. Areas for improvement include: Utilizing BPM for process management, rather than an unregulated, email-based process. Utilizing automated services, rather than requiring a human to key into a system. For example, Finance checking the customer’s credit rating is something that could be automated. Centralizing business rules that can be integrated into a business process, rather than requiring a human to process them. For example, Finance must determine when orders can be automatically approved. Provide insight and visibility into the process. For example, Sales Rep needs to know the status of their customer’s orders. The BDD Demo uses the following products. Oracle BPM Suite 11g PS4FP Oracle WebCenter 11g PS4FP (for Process Spaces) Oracle Business Activity Monitoring 11g Oracle Database 11g Back to top SOA LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT For access to the Oracle demo systems please visit OPN and talk to your Partner Expert We are pleased to announce the availability of the SOA Management demo that showcases some of the key provisioning and lifecycle management capabilities of SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition (EE). This demo specifically focuses on some of the lifecycle management solutions for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Service Bus (OSB). Demo Highlights The demo showcases the following capabilities. Provisioning of SOA Composites Provisioning of OSB Projects Provision SOA and OSB artifacts in a future maintenance window Back to top ORACLE FUSION APPLICATIONS DESIGN PATTERNS The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns are published! These new, reusable usability solutions and best-practices, which will join the Oracle dashboard patterns and guidelines that are already available online, are used by Oracle to artfully bring to life a new standard in the user experience, or UX, of enterprise applications. Now, the Oracle applications development community can benefit from the science behind the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience, too. These Oracle Fusion Applications UX Design Patterns, or blueprints, enable Oracle applications developers and system implementers everywhere to leverage professional usability insight when: tailoring an Oracle Fusion application, creating coexistence solutions that existing users will be delighted with, thus enabling graceful user transitions to Oracle Fusion Applications down the road, or designing exciting, new, highly usable applications in the cloud or on-premise. Based on the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) components, the Oracle Fusion Applications patterns and guidelines are proven with real users and in the Applications UX usability labs, so you can get right to work coding productivity-enhancing designs that provide an advantage for your entire business. What’s the best way to get started? We’ve made that easy, too. The Design Filter Tool (DeFT) selects the best pattern for your user type and task. Simply adapt your selection for your own task flow and content, and you’re on your way to a really great applications user experience. More Oracle applications design patterns and training are coming your way in the future. To provide feedback on the sets that are currently available, let me know in the comments! Read more on Fusionapps and post your comment here. Back to top UPDATED ORACLE MATERIAL Integrated SOA Gateway Documentation - Implementation Guide | Developer’s Guide Webcast Series: Oracle’s SOA and Oracle Business Process Management Solutions (Choice Hotels, Eaton, Farmers Insurance) BAM design pointers By Kavitha Srinivasan Seeking Oracle Fusion Middleware Go Live StoriesOracle Fusion Middleware product management is looking for recent go live stories to share with the Oracle sales team, sales consulting, product management and other internal groups. Customer contact details may remain anonymous. Your successful implementation will be featured in a quarterly report. The chance to present on an internal webcast is also available. Contact Maria Forney ([email protected]) if you have a noteworthy implementation success story. This is a good opportunity for partners interested in showcasing Oracle Fusion Middleware implementations, and gaining more exposure within Oracle. Performance tuning resources. All in one: docs, blogs, WPs, ppts: http://bit.ly/soa_resources Back to top HAVE YOU MISSED OUR LAST SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY WEBCASTS? UPK Webcast Business Driven Application Management & BPM11g & Application Grid & GoldenGate & Fusion Middleware Pricing & OC4J to WebLogic & Next Generation SOA & Fusion Middleware in Utility & Fusion Middleware in Communications & Fusion Middleware in Public Services & Fusion Middleware in Financial Services Please check your local OPN trainings calendar for additional training dates and locations. Back to top SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY CALENDAR On-Demand Trainings Event Name Language Type SOA Virtual Developers Day English Tech In-Class Trainings Date Event name Location / Country Contact person Type 09-13.07.2012 BPM Suite 11g advanced training by David Read Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 09-13.07.2012 ADF 11g advanced training by Grant Ronald and Frank Nimphius Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 09-13.07.2012 WebCenter Portal advanced training by Stefan Krantz and Angelo Santagata Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 10.07.2012 Fusion Middleware Virtual Developer Day Online OTN Tech 10- 12.07.2012 WebLogic 12c training by Cosmin Tudor Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 16-18.07.2012 SOA Suite 11g advanced training by Niall Commiskey Munich, Germany Jürgen Kress Tech 16-18.07.2012 ADF for BPM Suite 11g advanced training by David Read Munich, Germany Jürgen Kress Tech 16-18.07.2012 WebCenter Sites 11g advanced training by Product Management Munich, Germany Jürgen Kress Tech 17-20.07.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 23-26.07.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 29-31.08.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 02-05.10.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 15-18.10.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 28-30.11.2012 Oracle AIA 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 11-14.12.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 20-22.2.2013 Oracle AIA 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 14-17.1.2013 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 15-18.3.2013 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech Please check your local OPN Training Calendar for additional training and locations here. Back to top SOASCHOOL.COM - SOA CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL(SOACP) PROGRAM The SOASchool.com - SOA Certified Professional (SOACP) program is dedicated to excellence in the field of SOA and service-oriented computing. Through a series of seasoned course modules and exams, IT professionals have the opportunity to obtain a number of different certifications to recognize their accomplishment of gaining "project ready" SOA proficiency. This comprehensive and strictly vendor-neutral program was developed in cooperation with best-selling SOA author Thomas Erl and several major SOA organizations and academic institutions. Through the involvement of the SOA Education Committee, course contents and certification requirements are constantly reviewed and revised to stay current with developments in the service-oriented computing industry. The program is currently comprised of 12 course modules and 5 certifications and is expanding to 18 course modules and 8 certifications throughout 2009. For more information, visit www.soaschool.com and www.soacp.com. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Back to top YOUR CONTENT ON THE NEWSLETTER AND ON THE SOA COMMUNITY PORTAL Publishing Your StoriesWe would like to invite our partners to publish information in the newsletter or on our SOA Community portal. Especially we are looking for your real life experience with our SOA technology. Please send your documents to Jürgen Kress. We look forward to getting your suggestions! Back to top SOA DISCUSSION FORUM BECOMES INTERACTIVE AT THE SOA COMMUNITY! Do you want to chat to experts, including partners and Oracle SOA Product Development? Do you want to get the latest information about our SOA solutions and events?Attend our private online SOA Discussion Forum at OTN. Please send your OTN forums user name to Brigitte Felisaz. You must be a registered user to access the SOA Discussion Forum. Back to top INVITE YOUR COLLEAGUES TO JOIN THE SOA COMMUNITY Please feel free to invite your colleagues to join the SOA Community and to participate in the SOA Assessment tests. For registration please login the Oracle PartnerNetwork and go to: www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa For any questions on the above or concerning SOA and Oracle in general please contact the Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels SOA Team. Best regardsOracle EMEA SOA TeamJürgen Kress Jürgen KressSOA Partner Adoption EMEATel. +49 89 1430 1479E-Mail: [email protected]

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• Node.js Adventure - When Node Flying in Wind

  - by Shaun

  In the first post of this series I mentioned some popular modules in the community, such as underscore, async, etc.. I also listed a module named “Wind (zh-CN)”, which is created by one of my friend, Jeff Zhao (zh-CN). Now I would like to use a separated post to introduce this module since I feel it brings a new async programming style in not only Node.js but JavaScript world. If you know or heard about the new feature in C# 5.0 called “async and await”, or you learnt F#, you will find the “Wind” brings the similar async programming experience in JavaScript. By using “Wind”, we can write async code that looks like the sync code. The callbacks, async stats and exceptions will be handled by “Wind” automatically and transparently.   What’s the Problem: Dense “Callback” Phobia Let’s firstly back to my second post in this series. As I mentioned in that post, when we wanted to read some records from SQL Server we need to open the database connection, and then execute the query. In Node.js all IO operation are designed as async callback pattern which means when the operation was done, it will invoke a function which was taken from the last parameter. For example the database connection opening code would be like this. 1: sql.open(connectionString, function(error, conn) { 2: if(error) { 3: // some error handling code 4: } 5: else { 6: // connection opened successfully 7: } 8: }); And then if we need to query the database the code would be like this. It nested in the previous function. 1: sql.open(connectionString, function(error, conn) { 2: if(error) { 3: // some error handling code 4: } 5: else { 6: // connection opened successfully 7: conn.queryRaw(command, function(error, results) { 8: if(error) { 9: // failed to execute this command 10: } 11: else { 12: // records retrieved successfully 13: } 14: }; 15: } 16: }); Assuming if we need to copy some data from this database to another then we need to open another connection and execute the command within the function under the query function. 1: sql.open(connectionString, function(error, conn) { 2: if(error) { 3: // some error handling code 4: } 5: else { 6: // connection opened successfully 7: conn.queryRaw(command, function(error, results) { 8: if(error) { 9: // failed to execute this command 10: } 11: else { 12: // records retrieved successfully 13: target.open(targetConnectionString, function(error, t_conn) { 14: if(error) { 15: // connect failed 16: } 17: else { 18: t_conn.queryRaw(copy_command, function(error, results) { 19: if(error) { 20: // copy failed 21: } 22: else { 23: // and then, what do you want to do now... 24: } 25: }; 26: } 27: }; 28: } 29: }; 30: } 31: }); This is just an example. In the real project the logic would be more complicated. This means our application might be messed up and the business process will be fragged by many callback functions. I would like call this “Dense Callback Phobia”. This might be a challenge how to make code straightforward and easy to read, something like below. 1: try 2: { 3: // open source connection 4: var s_conn = sqlConnect(s_connectionString); 5: // retrieve data 6: var results = sqlExecuteCommand(s_conn, s_command); 7: 8: // open target connection 9: var t_conn = sqlConnect(t_connectionString); 10: // prepare the copy command 11: var t_command = getCopyCommand(results); 12: // execute the copy command 13: sqlExecuteCommand(s_conn, t_command); 14: } 15: catch (ex) 16: { 17: // error handling 18: }   What’s the Problem: Sync-styled Async Programming Similar as the previous problem, the callback-styled async programming model makes the upcoming operation as a part of the current operation, and mixed with the error handling code. So it’s very hard to understand what on earth this code will do. And since Node.js utilizes non-blocking IO mode, we cannot invoke those operations one by one, as they will be executed concurrently. For example, in this post when I tried to copy the records from Windows Azure SQL Database (a.k.a. WASD) to Windows Azure Table Storage, if I just insert the data into table storage one by one and then print the “Finished” message, I will see the message shown before the data had been copied. This is because all operations were executed at the same time. In order to make the copy operation and print operation executed synchronously I introduced a module named “async” and the code was changed as below. 1: async.forEach(results.rows, 2: function (row, callback) { 3: var resource = { 4: "PartitionKey": row[1], 5: "RowKey": row[0], 6: "Value": row[2] 7: }; 8: client.insertEntity(tableName, resource, function (error) { 9: if (error) { 10: callback(error); 11: } 12: else { 13: console.log("entity inserted."); 14: callback(null); 15: } 16: }); 17: }, 18: function (error) { 19: if (error) { 20: error["target"] = "insertEntity"; 21: res.send(500, error); 22: } 23: else { 24: console.log("all done."); 25: res.send(200, "Done!"); 26: } 27: }); It ensured that the “Finished” message will be printed when all table entities had been inserted. But it cannot promise that the records will be inserted in sequence. It might be another challenge to make the code looks like in sync-style? 1: try 2: { 3: forEach(row in rows) { 4: var entity = { /* ... */ }; 5: tableClient.insert(tableName, entity); 6: } 7:  8: console.log("Finished"); 9: } 10: catch (ex) { 11: console.log(ex); 12: }   How “Wind” Helps “Wind” is a JavaScript library which provides the control flow with plain JavaScript for asynchronous programming (and more) without additional pre-compiling steps. It’s available in NPM so that we can install it through “npm install wind”. Now let’s create a very simple Node.js application as the example. This application will take some website URLs from the command arguments and tried to retrieve the body length and print them in console. Then at the end print “Finish”. I’m going to use “request” module to make the HTTP call simple so I also need to install by the command “npm install request”. The code would be like this. 1: var request = require("request"); 2:  3: // get the urls from arguments, the first two arguments are `node.exe` and `fetch.js` 4: var args = process.argv.splice(2); 5:  6: // main function 7: var main = function() { 8: for(var i = 0; i < args.length; i++) { 9: // get the url 10: var url = args[i]; 11: // send the http request and try to get the response and body 12: request(url, function(error, response, body) { 13: if(!error && response.statusCode == 200) { 14: // log the url and the body length 15: console.log( 16: "%s: %d.", 17: response.request.uri.href, 18: body.length); 19: } 20: else { 21: // log error 22: console.log(error); 23: } 24: }); 25: } 26: 27: // finished 28: console.log("Finished"); 29: }; 30:  31: // execute the main function 32: main(); Let’s execute this application. (I made them in multi-lines for better reading.) 1: node fetch.js 2: "http://www.igt.com/us-en.aspx" 3: "http://www.igt.com/us-en/games.aspx" 4: "http://www.igt.com/us-en/cabinets.aspx" 5: "http://www.igt.com/us-en/systems.aspx" 6: "http://www.igt.com/us-en/interactive.aspx" 7: "http://www.igt.com/us-en/social-gaming.aspx" 8: "http://www.igt.com/support.aspx" Below is the output. As you can see the finish message was printed at the beginning, and the pages’ length retrieved in a different order than we specified. This is because in this code the request command, console logging command are executed asynchronously and concurrently. Now let’s introduce “Wind” to make them executed in order, which means it will request the websites one by one, and print the message at the end.   First of all we need to import the “Wind” package and make sure the there’s only one global variant named “Wind”, and ensure it’s “Wind” instead of “wind”. 1: var Wind = require("wind");   Next, we need to tell “Wind” which code will be executed asynchronously so that “Wind” can control the execution process. In this case the “request” operation executed asynchronously so we will create a “Task” by using a build-in helps function in “Wind” named Wind.Async.Task.create. 1: var requestBodyLengthAsync = function(url) { 2: return Wind.Async.Task.create(function(t) { 3: request(url, function(error, response, body) { 4: if(error || response.statusCode != 200) { 5: t.complete("failure", error); 6: } 7: else { 8: var data = 9: { 10: uri: response.request.uri.href, 11: length: body.length 12: }; 13: t.complete("success", data); 14: } 15: }); 16: }); 17: }; The code above created a “Task” from the original request calling code. In “Wind” a “Task” means an operation will be finished in some time in the future. A “Task” can be started by invoke its start() method, but no one knows when it actually will be finished. The Wind.Async.Task.create helped us to create a task. The only parameter is a function where we can put the actual operation in, and then notify the task object it’s finished successfully or failed by using the complete() method. In the code above I invoked the request method. If it retrieved the response successfully I set the status of this task as “success” with the URL and body length. If it failed I set this task as “failure” and pass the error out.   Next, we will change the main() function. In “Wind” if we want a function can be controlled by Wind we need to mark it as “async”. This should be done by using the code below. 1: var main = eval(Wind.compile("async", function() { 2: })); When the application is running, Wind will detect “eval(Wind.compile(“async”, function” and generate an anonymous code from the body of this original function. Then the application will run the anonymous code instead of the original one. In our example the main function will be like this. 1: var main = eval(Wind.compile("async", function() { 2: for(var i = 0; i < args.length; i++) { 3: try 4: { 5: var result = $await(requestBodyLengthAsync(args[i])); 6: console.log( 7: "%s: %d.", 8: result.uri, 9: result.length); 10: } 11: catch (ex) { 12: console.log(ex); 13: } 14: } 15: 16: console.log("Finished"); 17: })); As you can see, when I tried to request the URL I use a new command named “$await”. It tells Wind, the operation next to $await will be executed asynchronously, and the main thread should be paused until it finished (or failed). So in this case, my application will be pause when the first response was received, and then print its body length, then try the next one. At the end, print the finish message.   Finally, execute the main function. The full code would be like this. 1: var request = require("request"); 2: var Wind = require("wind"); 3:  4: var args = process.argv.splice(2); 5:  6: var requestBodyLengthAsync = function(url) { 7: return Wind.Async.Task.create(function(t) { 8: request(url, function(error, response, body) { 9: if(error || response.statusCode != 200) { 10: t.complete("failure", error); 11: } 12: else { 13: var data = 14: { 15: uri: response.request.uri.href, 16: length: body.length 17: }; 18: t.complete("success", data); 19: } 20: }); 21: }); 22: }; 23:  24: var main = eval(Wind.compile("async", function() { 25: for(var i = 0; i < args.length; i++) { 26: try 27: { 28: var result = $await(requestBodyLengthAsync(args[i])); 29: console.log( 30: "%s: %d.", 31: result.uri, 32: result.length); 33: } 34: catch (ex) { 35: console.log(ex); 36: } 37: } 38: 39: console.log("Finished"); 40: })); 41:  42: main().start();   Run our new application. At the beginning we will see the compiled and generated code by Wind. Then we can see the pages were requested one by one, and at the end the finish message was printed. Below is the code Wind generated for us. As you can see the original code, the output code were shown. 1: // Original: 2: function () { 3: for(var i = 0; i < args.length; i++) { 4: try 5: { 6: var result = $await(requestBodyLengthAsync(args[i])); 7: console.log( 8: "%s: %d.", 9: result.uri, 10: result.length); 11: } 12: catch (ex) { 13: console.log(ex); 14: } 15: } 16: 17: console.log("Finished"); 18: } 19:  20: // Compiled: 21: /* async << function () { */ (function () { 22: var _builder_$0 = Wind.builders["async"]; 23: return _builder_$0.Start(this, 24: _builder_$0.Combine( 25: _builder_$0.Delay(function () { 26: /* var i = 0; */ var i = 0; 27: /* for ( */ return _builder_$0.For(function () { 28: /* ; i < args.length */ return i < args.length; 29: }, function () { 30: /* ; i ++) { */ i ++; 31: }, 32: /* try { */ _builder_$0.Try( 33: _builder_$0.Delay(function () { 34: /* var result = $await(requestBodyLengthAsync(args[i])); */ return _builder_$0.Bind(requestBodyLengthAsync(args[i]), function (result) { 35: /* console.log("%s: %d.", result.uri, result.length); */ console.log("%s: %d.", result.uri, result.length); 36: return _builder_$0.Normal(); 37: }); 38: }), 39: /* } catch (ex) { */ function (ex) { 40: /* console.log(ex); */ console.log(ex); 41: return _builder_$0.Normal(); 42: /* } */ }, 43: null 44: ) 45: /* } */ ); 46: }), 47: _builder_$0.Delay(function () { 48: /* console.log("Finished"); */ console.log("Finished"); 49: return _builder_$0.Normal(); 50: }) 51: ) 52: ); 53: /* } */ })   How Wind Works Someone may raise a big concern when you find I utilized “eval” in my code. Someone may assume that Wind utilizes “eval” to execute some code dynamically while “eval” is very low performance. But I would say, Wind does NOT use “eval” to run the code. It only use “eval” as a flag to know which code should be compiled at runtime. When the code was firstly been executed, Wind will check and find “eval(Wind.compile(“async”, function”. So that it knows this function should be compiled. Then it utilized parse-js to analyze the inner JavaScript and generated the anonymous code in memory. Then it rewrite the original code so that when the application was running it will use the anonymous one instead of the original one. Since the code generation was done at the beginning of the application was started, in the future no matter how long our application runs and how many times the async function was invoked, it will use the generated code, no need to generate again. So there’s no significant performance hurt when using Wind.   Wind in My Previous Demo Let’s adopt Wind into one of my previous demonstration and to see how it helps us to make our code simple, straightforward and easy to read and understand. In this post when I implemented the functionality that copied the records from my WASD to table storage, the logic would be like this. 1, Open database connection. 2, Execute a query to select all records from the table. 3, Recreate the table in Windows Azure table storage. 4, Create entities from each of the records retrieved previously, and then insert them into table storage. 5, Finally, show message as the HTTP response. But as the image below, since there are so many callbacks and async operations, it’s very hard to understand my logic from the code. Now let’s use Wind to rewrite our code. First of all, of course, we need the Wind package. Then we need to include the package files into project and mark them as “Copy always”. Add the Wind package into the source code. Pay attention to the variant name, you must use “Wind” instead of “wind”. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var async = require("async"); 3: var sql = require("node-sqlserver"); 4: var azure = require("azure"); 5: var Wind = require("wind"); Now we need to create some async functions by using Wind. All async functions should be wrapped so that it can be controlled by Wind which are open database, retrieve records, recreate table (delete and create) and insert entity in table. Below are these new functions. All of them are created by using Wind.Async.Task.create. 1: sql.openAsync = function (connectionString) { 2: return Wind.Async.Task.create(function (t) { 3: sql.open(connectionString, function (error, conn) { 4: if (error) { 5: t.complete("failure", error); 6: } 7: else { 8: t.complete("success", conn); 9: } 10: }); 11: }); 12: }; 13:  14: sql.queryAsync = function (conn, query) { 15: return Wind.Async.Task.create(function (t) { 16: conn.queryRaw(query, function (error, results) { 17: if (error) { 18: t.complete("failure", error); 19: } 20: else { 21: t.complete("success", results); 22: } 23: }); 24: }); 25: }; 26:  27: azure.recreateTableAsync = function (tableName) { 28: return Wind.Async.Task.create(function (t) { 29: client.deleteTable(tableName, function (error, successful, response) { 30: console.log("delete table finished"); 31: client.createTableIfNotExists(tableName, function (error, successful, response) { 32: console.log("create table finished"); 33: if (error) { 34: t.complete("failure", error); 35: } 36: else { 37: t.complete("success", null); 38: } 39: }); 40: }); 41: }); 42: }; 43:  44: azure.insertEntityAsync = function (tableName, entity) { 45: return Wind.Async.Task.create(function (t) { 46: client.insertEntity(tableName, entity, function (error, entity, response) { 47: if (error) { 48: t.complete("failure", error); 49: } 50: else { 51: t.complete("success", null); 52: } 53: }); 54: }); 55: }; Then in order to use these functions we will create a new function which contains all steps for data copying. 1: var copyRecords = eval(Wind.compile("async", function (req, res) { 2: try { 3: } 4: catch (ex) { 5: console.log(ex); 6: res.send(500, "Internal error."); 7: } 8: })); Let’s execute steps one by one with the “$await” keyword introduced by Wind so that it will be invoked in sequence. First is to open the database connection. 1: var copyRecords = eval(Wind.compile("async", function (req, res) { 2: try { 3: // connect to the windows azure sql database 4: var conn = $await(sql.openAsync(connectionString)); 5: console.log("connection opened"); 6: } 7: catch (ex) { 8: console.log(ex); 9: res.send(500, "Internal error."); 10: } 11: })); Then retrieve all records from the database connection. 1: var copyRecords = eval(Wind.compile("async", function (req, res) { 2: try { 3: // connect to the windows azure sql database 4: var conn = $await(sql.openAsync(connectionString)); 5: console.log("connection opened"); 6: // retrieve all records from database 7: var results = $await(sql.queryAsync(conn, "SELECT * FROM [Resource]")); 8: console.log("records selected. count = %d", results.rows.length); 9: } 10: catch (ex) { 11: console.log(ex); 12: res.send(500, "Internal error."); 13: } 14: })); After recreated the table, we need to create the entities and insert them into table storage. 1: var copyRecords = eval(Wind.compile("async", function (req, res) { 2: try { 3: // connect to the windows azure sql database 4: var conn = $await(sql.openAsync(connectionString)); 5: console.log("connection opened"); 6: // retrieve all records from database 7: var results = $await(sql.queryAsync(conn, "SELECT * FROM [Resource]")); 8: console.log("records selected. count = %d", results.rows.length); 9: if (results.rows.length > 0) { 10: // recreate the table 11: $await(azure.recreateTableAsync(tableName)); 12: console.log("table created"); 13: // insert records in table storage one by one 14: for (var i = 0; i < results.rows.length; i++) { 15: var entity = { 16: "PartitionKey": results.rows[i][1], 17: "RowKey": results.rows[i][0], 18: "Value": results.rows[i][2] 19: }; 20: $await(azure.insertEntityAsync(tableName, entity)); 21: console.log("entity inserted"); 22: } 23: } 24: } 25: catch (ex) { 26: console.log(ex); 27: res.send(500, "Internal error."); 28: } 29: })); Finally, send response back to the browser. 1: var copyRecords = eval(Wind.compile("async", function (req, res) { 2: try { 3: // connect to the windows azure sql database 4: var conn = $await(sql.openAsync(connectionString)); 5: console.log("connection opened"); 6: // retrieve all records from database 7: var results = $await(sql.queryAsync(conn, "SELECT * FROM [Resource]")); 8: console.log("records selected. count = %d", results.rows.length); 9: if (results.rows.length > 0) { 10: // recreate the table 11: $await(azure.recreateTableAsync(tableName)); 12: console.log("table created"); 13: // insert records in table storage one by one 14: for (var i = 0; i < results.rows.length; i++) { 15: var entity = { 16: "PartitionKey": results.rows[i][1], 17: "RowKey": results.rows[i][0], 18: "Value": results.rows[i][2] 19: }; 20: $await(azure.insertEntityAsync(tableName, entity)); 21: console.log("entity inserted"); 22: } 23: // send response 24: console.log("all done"); 25: res.send(200, "All done!"); 26: } 27: } 28: catch (ex) { 29: console.log(ex); 30: res.send(500, "Internal error."); 31: } 32: })); If we compared with the previous code we will find now it became more readable and much easy to understand. It’s very easy to know what this function does even though without any comments. When user go to URL “/was/copyRecords” we will execute the function above. The code would be like this. 1: app.get("/was/copyRecords", function (req, res) { 2: copyRecords(req, res).start(); 3: }); And below is the logs printed in local compute emulator console. As we can see the functions executed one by one and then finally the response back to me browser.   Scaffold Functions in Wind Wind provides not only the async flow control and compile functions, but many scaffold methods as well. We can build our async code more easily by using them. I’m going to introduce some basic scaffold functions here. In the code above I created some functions which wrapped from the original async function such as open database, create table, etc.. All of them are very similar, created a task by using Wind.Async.Task.create, return error or result object through Task.complete function. In fact, Wind provides some functions for us to create task object from the original async functions. If the original async function only has a callback parameter, we can use Wind.Async.Binding.fromCallback method to get the task object directly. For example the code below returned the task object which wrapped the file exist check function. 1: var Wind = require("wind"); 2: var fs = require("fs"); 3:  4: fs.existsAsync = Wind.Async.Binding.fromCallback(fs.exists); In Node.js a very popular async function pattern is that, the first parameter in the callback function represent the error object, and the other parameters is the return values. In this case we can use another build-in function in Wind named Wind.Async.Binding.fromStandard. For example, the open database function can be created from the code below. 1: sql.openAsync = Wind.Async.Binding.fromStandard(sql.open); 2:  3: /* 4: sql.openAsync = function (connectionString) { 5: return Wind.Async.Task.create(function (t) { 6: sql.open(connectionString, function (error, conn) { 7: if (error) { 8: t.complete("failure", error); 9: } 10: else { 11: t.complete("success", conn); 12: } 13: }); 14: }); 15: }; 16: */ When I was testing the scaffold functions under Wind.Async.Binding I found for some functions, such as the Azure SDK insert entity function, cannot be processed correctly. So I personally suggest writing the wrapped method manually.   Another scaffold method in Wind is the parallel tasks coordination. In this example, the steps of open database, retrieve records and recreated table should be invoked one by one, but it can be executed in parallel when copying data from database to table storage. In Wind there’s a scaffold function named Task.whenAll which can be used here. Task.whenAll accepts a list of tasks and creates a new task. It will be returned only when all tasks had been completed, or any errors occurred. For example in the code below I used the Task.whenAll to make all copy operation executed at the same time. 1: var copyRecordsInParallel = eval(Wind.compile("async", function (req, res) { 2: try { 3: // connect to the windows azure sql database 4: var conn = $await(sql.openAsync(connectionString)); 5: console.log("connection opened"); 6: // retrieve all records from database 7: var results = $await(sql.queryAsync(conn, "SELECT * FROM [Resource]")); 8: console.log("records selected. count = %d", results.rows.length); 9: if (results.rows.length > 0) { 10: // recreate the table 11: $await(azure.recreateTableAsync(tableName)); 12: console.log("table created"); 13: // insert records in table storage in parallal 14: var tasks = new Array(results.rows.length); 15: for (var i = 0; i < results.rows.length; i++) { 16: var entity = { 17: "PartitionKey": results.rows[i][1], 18: "RowKey": results.rows[i][0], 19: "Value": results.rows[i][2] 20: }; 21: tasks[i] = azure.insertEntityAsync(tableName, entity); 22: } 23: $await(Wind.Async.Task.whenAll(tasks)); 24: // send response 25: console.log("all done"); 26: res.send(200, "All done!"); 27: } 28: } 29: catch (ex) { 30: console.log(ex); 31: res.send(500, "Internal error."); 32: } 33: })); 34:  35: app.get("/was/copyRecordsInParallel", function (req, res) { 36: copyRecordsInParallel(req, res).start(); 37: });   Besides the task creation and coordination, Wind supports the cancellation solution so that we can send the cancellation signal to the tasks. It also includes exception solution which means any exceptions will be reported to the caller function.   Summary In this post I introduced a Node.js module named Wind, which created by my friend Jeff Zhao. As you can see, different from other async library and framework, adopted the idea from F# and C#, Wind utilizes runtime code generation technology to make it more easily to write async, callback-based functions in a sync-style way. By using Wind there will be almost no callback, and the code will be very easy to understand. Currently Wind is still under developed and improved. There might be some problems but the author, Jeff, should be very happy and enthusiastic to learn your problems, feedback, suggestion and comments. You can contact Jeff by - Email: [email protected] - Group: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/windjs - GitHub: https://github.com/JeffreyZhao/wind/issues   Source code can be download here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• CSS IE Hover Effect - Overlapping Elements, Display:Block, and Crashes

  - by Emtucifor

  In a fairly simple page, I have some text appear on hover over some links, like a tooltip. To start with here's my test page I'm working with: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <title>Tooltip Test Page</title> <style type="text/css"> html, body, form, table, tr, td, div, p, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 { border:0; margin:0; padding:0; } body { margin:10px; } html, body, table { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:12px; } h1 { font-weight:bold; font-size:16px; } table {border-collapse:collapse;} td {padding:0 8px 0 0;} a.tooltip { z-index:24; text-decoration:none; cursor:default; position:relative; color:#000; display:block; width:100px; } a.tooltip span {display:none;} a.tooltip:hover, a.tooltip:active { z-index:25; color:; background:; /* the color and background actually don't matter for their values, it's just that these have to change for IE to apply this style properly. Leaving out the color or the background makes this fail in different ways. */ } a.tooltip:hover span, a.tooltip:active span { display:block; position:absolute; color:black; background-color:#FFFFCC; border:1px solid black; padding:1px; text-align:left; top:0; left:0; margin-top:-1px; } td span.s5 {color:#ff0000} td span.s6 {color:#0000ff} </style> <script type="text/javascript"> function labelSubmit(label) { document.getElementById('o').value=label; document.BackAt.submit(); } </script> </head> <body> <h1>tooltip Test Page</h1> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td><span class="s6">&#x25a0;</span> Name 3</td> <td class="status"><a class="tooltip" href="" onclick="return false;">Status 6<span>Some very long tooltip text to demonstrate the problem by overlapping the cells below.</span></a></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="s6">&#x25a0;</span> Name 1</td> <td class="status"><a class="tooltip" href="" onclick="return false;">Status 6</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="s6">&#x25a0;</span> Name 2</td> <td class="status"><a class="tooltip" href="" onclick="return false;">Status 6<span>Some tooltip text</span></a></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="s6">&#x25a0;</span> Name 4</td> <td class="status"><a class="tooltip" href="" onclick="return false;">Status 6</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="s5">&#x25a0;</span> Name 5</td> <td class="status"><a class="tooltip" href="" onclick="return false;">Status 5<span>More Notes</span></a></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span class="s6">&#x25a0;</span> Name 6</td> <td class="status"><a class="tooltip" href="" onclick="return false;">Status 6<span>Yet more notes</span></a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </body> </html> The problem I'm experiencing is that text from other values shows through the tooltip text. Hover over the first row, second column to see the effect. There are a couple of things I'm trying to accomplish: Make the activation area for the hover wider, so hovering over some space to the right of "Status 6" calls up the tooltip (say, 100-150px total width of target). At first, when I was adding "display:block" to a.tooltip, IE was terminating on hover. I resolved that by removing width:14em from a.tooltip:hover. Styling the width of the hover event + display.block on the a element does BAD things. Change the width of the tooltip without changing the width of the column/parent element (so the tooltip can be wider than itso it takes up less vertical space). Options for making the tooltips change width with its contents up to a max width, at which point the lines wrap would be awesome, but probably impossible in IE. As soon as I put a width in place on a.tooltip, the portion of the tooltip that is above other rows than the hover source let text show through from those cells. Remove the width and you'll see that the text doesn't show through any more. The hover effect applies to the entire tooltip, so if the tooltip covers 3 rows, while moving the mouse downward, the next 2 rows won't activate because the cursor hasn't left the tooltip. Can the hover effect apply only to the initial element hovered over and not the tooltip itself so moving the mouse downward will show each tooltip in each row? It would be nice if the links could never be activated (they can't take the focus). I don't know if that's possible. Too bad IE doesn't support hover on any elements but links. Note: soon IE6 will be abandoned in favor of IE8. If it makes a big difference, then IE8 can be the target browser instead. Thanks for your help.

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• Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks.  2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"?  5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools.  - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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• What&rsquo;s New in ASP.NET 4.0 Part Two: WebForms and Visual Studio Enhancements

  - by Rick Strahl

  In the last installment I talked about the core changes in the ASP.NET runtime that I’ve been taking advantage of. In this column, I’ll cover the changes to the Web Forms engine and some of the cool improvements in Visual Studio that make Web and general development easier. WebForms The WebForms engine is the area that has received most significant changes in ASP.NET 4.0. Probably the most widely anticipated features are related to managing page client ids and of ViewState on WebForm pages. Take Control of Your ClientIDs Unique ClientID generation in ASP.NET has been one of the most complained about “features” in ASP.NET. Although there’s a very good technical reason for these unique generated ids - they guarantee unique ids for each and every server control on a page - these unique and generated ids often get in the way of client-side JavaScript development and CSS styling as it’s often inconvenient and fragile to work with the long, generated ClientIDs. In ASP.NET 4.0 you can now specify an explicit client id mode on each control or each naming container parent control to control how client ids are generated. By default, ASP.NET generates mangled client ids for any control contained in a naming container (like a Master Page, or a User Control for example). The key to ClientID management in ASP.NET 4.0 are the new ClientIDMode and ClientIDRowSuffix properties. ClientIDMode supports four different ClientID generation settings shown below. For the following examples, imagine that you have a Textbox control named txtName inside of a master page control container on a WebForms page. <%@Page Language="C#"      MasterPageFile="~/Site.Master"     CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="WebApplication1.WebForm2"  %> <asp:Content ID="content"  ContentPlaceHolderID="content"               runat="server"               ClientIDMode="Static" >       <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName" /> </asp:Content> The four available ClientIDMode values are: AutoID This is the existing behavior in ASP.NET 1.x-3.x where full naming container munging takes place. <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"        id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> This should be familiar to any ASP.NET developer and results in fairly unpredictable client ids that can easily change if the containership hierarchy changes. For example, removing the master page changes the name in this case, so if you were to move a block of script code that works against the control to a non-Master page, the script code immediately breaks. Static This option is the most deterministic setting that forces the control’s ClientID to use its ID value directly. No naming container naming at all is applied and you end up with clean client ids: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName"         type="text" id="txtName" /> Note that the name property which is used for postback variables to the server still is munged, but the ClientID property is displayed simply as the ID value that you have assigned to the control. This option is what most of us want to use, but you have to be clear on that because it can potentially cause conflicts with other controls on the page. If there are several instances of the same naming container (several instances of the same user control for example) there can easily be a client id naming conflict. Note that if you assign Static to a data-bound control, like a list child control in templates, you do not get unique ids either, so for list controls where you rely on unique id for child controls, you’ll probably want to use Predictable rather than Static. I’ll write more on this a little later when I discuss ClientIDRowSuffix. Predictable The previous two values are pretty self-explanatory. Predictable however, requires some explanation. To me at least it’s not in the least bit predictable. MSDN defines this value as follows: This algorithm is used for controls that are in data-bound controls. The ClientID value is generated by concatenating the ClientID value of the parent naming container with the ID value of the control. If the control is a data-bound control that generates multiple rows, the value of the data field specified in the ClientIDRowSuffix property is added at the end. For the GridView control, multiple data fields can be specified. If the ClientIDRowSuffix property is blank, a sequential number is added at the end instead of a data-field value. Each segment is separated by an underscore character (_). The key that makes this value a bit confusing is that it relies on the parent NamingContainer’s ClientID to build its own ClientID value. This effectively means that the value is not predictable at all but rather very tightly coupled to the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For my simple textbox example, if the ClientIDMode property of the parent naming container (Page in this case) is set to “Predictable” you’ll get this: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"         id="content_txtName" /> which gives an id that based on walking up to the currently active naming container (the MasterPage content container) and starting the id formatting from there downward. Think of this as a semi unique name that’s guaranteed unique only for the naming container. If, on the other hand, the Page is set to “AutoID” you get the following with Predictable on txtName: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"         id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> The latter is effectively the same as if you specified AutoID because it inherits the AutoID naming from the Page and Content Master Page control of the page. But again - predictable behavior always depends on the parent naming container and how it generates its id, so the id may not always be exactly the same as the AutoID generated value because somewhere in the NamingContainer chain the ClientIDMode setting may be set to a different value. For example, if you had another naming container in the middle that was set to Static you’d end up effectively with an id that starts with the NamingContainers id rather than the whole ctl000_content munging. The most common use for Predictable is likely to be for data-bound controls, which results in each data bound item getting a unique ClientID. Unfortunately, even here the behavior can be very unpredictable depending on which data-bound control you use - I found significant differences in how template controls in a GridView behave from those that are used in a ListView control. For example, GridView creates clean child ClientIDs, while ListView still has a naming container in the ClientID, presumably because of the template container on which you can’t set ClientIDMode. Predictable is useful, but only if all naming containers down the chain use this setting. Otherwise you’re right back to the munged ids that are pretty unpredictable. Another property, ClientIDRowSuffix, can be used in combination with ClientIDMode of Predictable to force a suffix onto list client controls. For example: <asp:GridView runat="server" ID="gvItems"              AutoGenerateColumns="false"             ClientIDMode="Static"              ClientIDRowSuffix="Id">     <Columns>     <asp:TemplateField>         <ItemTemplate>             <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtName"                        Text='<%# Eval("Name") %>'                   ClientIDMode="Predictable"/>         </ItemTemplate>     </asp:TemplateField>     <asp:TemplateField>         <ItemTemplate>         <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtId"                     Text='<%# Eval("Id") %>'                     ClientIDMode="Predictable" />         </ItemTemplate>     </asp:TemplateField>     </Columns>  </asp:GridView> generates client Ids inside of a column in the master page described earlier: <td>     <span id="txtName_0">Rick</span> </td> where the value after the underscore is the ClientIDRowSuffix field - in this case “Id” of the item data bound to the control. Note that all of the child controls require ClientIDMode=”Predictable” in order for the ClientIDRowSuffix to be applied, and the parent GridView controls need to be set to Static either explicitly or via Naming Container inheritance to give these simple names. It’s a bummer that ClientIDRowSuffix doesn’t work with Static to produce this automatically. Another real problem is that other controls process the ClientIDMode differently. For example, a ListView control processes the Predictable ClientIDMode differently and produces the following with the Static ListView and Predictable child controls: <span id="ctrl0_txtName_0">Rick</span> I couldn’t even figure out a way using ClientIDMode to get a simple ID that also uses a suffix short of falling back to manually generated ids using <%= %> expressions instead. Given the inconsistencies inside of list controls using <%= %>, ids for the ListView might not be a bad idea anyway. Inherit The final setting is Inherit, which is the default for all controls except Page. This means that controls by default inherit the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For more detailed information on ClientID behavior and different scenarios you can check out a blog post of mine on this subject: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/54760.aspx. ClientID Enhancements Summary The ClientIDMode property is a welcome addition to ASP.NET 4.0. To me this is probably the most useful WebForms feature as it allows me to generate clean IDs simply by setting ClientIDMode="Static" on either the page or inside of Web.config (in the Pages section) which applies the setting down to the entire page which is my 95% scenario. For the few cases when it matters - for list controls and inside of multi-use user controls or custom server controls) - I can use Predictable or even AutoID to force controls to unique names. For application-level page development, this is easy to accomplish and provides maximum usability for working with client script code against page controls. ViewStateMode Another area of large criticism for WebForms is ViewState. ViewState is used internally by ASP.NET to persist page-level changes to non-postback properties on controls as pages post back to the server. It’s a useful mechanism that works great for the overall mechanics of WebForms, but it can also cause all sorts of overhead for page operation as ViewState can very quickly get out of control and consume huge amounts of bandwidth in your page content. ViewState can also wreak havoc with client-side scripting applications that modify control properties that are tracked by ViewState, which can produce very unpredictable results on a Postback after client-side updates. Over the years in my own development, I’ve often turned off ViewState on pages to reduce overhead. Yes, you lose some functionality, but you can easily implement most of the common functionality in non-ViewState workarounds. Relying less on heavy ViewState controls and sticking with simpler controls or raw HTML constructs avoids getting around ViewState problems. In ASP.NET 3.x and prior, it wasn’t easy to control ViewState - you could turn it on or off and if you turned it off at the page or web.config level, you couldn’t turn it back on for specific controls. In short, it was an all or nothing approach. With ASP.NET 4.0, the new ViewStateMode property gives you more control. It allows you to disable ViewState globally either on the page or web.config level and then turn it back on for specific controls that might need it. ViewStateMode only works when EnableViewState="true" on the page or web.config level (which is the default). You can then use ViewStateMode of Disabled, Enabled or Inherit to control the ViewState settings on the page. If you’re shooting for minimal ViewState usage, the ideal situation is to set ViewStateMode to disabled on the Page or web.config level and only turn it back on particular controls: <%@Page Language="C#"      CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2"        ClientIDMode="Static"                ViewStateMode="Disabled"     EnableViewState="true"  %> <!-- this control has viewstate  --> <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName"  ViewStateMode="Enabled" />       <!-- this control has no viewstate - it inherits  from parent container --> <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtAddress" /> Note that the EnableViewState="true" at the Page level isn’t required since it’s the default, but it’s important that the value is true. ViewStateMode has no effect if EnableViewState="false" at the page level. The main benefit of ViewStateMode is that it allows you to more easily turn off ViewState for most of the page and enable only a few key controls that might need it. For me personally, this is a perfect combination as most of my WebForm apps can get away without any ViewState at all. But some controls - especially third party controls - often don’t work well without ViewState enabled, and now it’s much easier to selectively enable controls rather than the old way, which required you to pretty much turn off ViewState for all controls that you didn’t want ViewState on. Inline HTML Encoding HTML encoding is an important feature to prevent cross-site scripting attacks in data entered by users on your site. In order to make it easier to create HTML encoded content, ASP.NET 4.0 introduces a new Expression syntax using <%: %> to encode string values. The encoding expression syntax looks like this: <%: "<script type='text/javascript'>" +     "alert('Really?');</script>" %> which produces properly encoded HTML: &lt;script type=&#39;text/javascript&#39; &gt;alert(&#39;Really?&#39;);&lt;/script&gt; Effectively this is a shortcut to: <%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode( "<script type='text/javascript'>" + "alert('Really?');</script>") %> Of course the <%: %> syntax can also evaluate expressions just like <%= %> so the more common scenario applies this expression syntax against data your application is displaying. Here’s an example displaying some data model values: <%: Model.Address.Street %> This snippet shows displaying data from your application’s data store or more importantly, from data entered by users. Anything that makes it easier and less verbose to HtmlEncode text is a welcome addition to avoid potential cross-site scripting attacks. Although I listed Inline HTML Encoding here under WebForms, anything that uses the WebForms rendering engine including ASP.NET MVC, benefits from this feature. ScriptManager Enhancements The ASP.NET ScriptManager control in the past has introduced some nice ways to take programmatic and markup control over script loading, but there were a number of shortcomings in this control. The ASP.NET 4.0 ScriptManager has a number of improvements that make it easier to control script loading and addresses a few of the shortcomings that have often kept me from using the control in favor of manual script loading. The first is the AjaxFrameworkMode property which finally lets you suppress loading the ASP.NET AJAX runtime. Disabled doesn’t load any ASP.NET AJAX libraries, but there’s also an Explicit mode that lets you pick and choose the library pieces individually and reduce the footprint of ASP.NET AJAX script included if you are using the library. There’s also a new EnableCdn property that forces any script that has a new WebResource attribute CdnPath property set to a CDN supplied URL. If the script has this Attribute property set to a non-null/empty value and EnableCdn is enabled on the ScriptManager, that script will be served from the specified CdnPath. [assembly: WebResource(    "Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js",    "application/x-javascript",    CdnPath =  "http://mysite.com/scripts/ww.jquery.min.js")] Cool, but a little too static for my taste since this value can’t be changed at runtime to point at a debug script as needed, for example. Assembly names for loading scripts from resources can now be simple names rather than fully qualified assembly names, which make it less verbose to reference scripts from assemblies loaded from your bin folder or the assembly reference area in web.config: <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id"          EnableCdn="true"         AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled">     <Scripts>         <asp:ScriptReference          Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js"         Assembly="Westwind.Web" />     </Scripts>        </asp:ScriptManager> The ScriptManager in 4.0 also supports script combining via the CompositeScript tag, which allows you to very easily combine scripts into a single script resource served via ASP.NET. Even nicer: You can specify the URL that the combined script is served with. Check out the following script manager markup that combines several static file scripts and a script resource into a single ASP.NET served resource from a static URL (allscripts.js): <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id"          EnableCdn="true"         AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled">     <CompositeScript          Path="~/scripts/allscripts.js">         <Scripts>             <asp:ScriptReference                    Path="~/scripts/jquery.js" />             <asp:ScriptReference                    Path="~/scripts/ww.jquery.js" />             <asp:ScriptReference            Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.editors.js"                 Assembly="Westwind.Web" />         </Scripts>     </CompositeScript> </asp:ScriptManager> When you render this into HTML, you’ll see a single script reference in the page: <script src="scripts/allscripts.debug.js"          type="text/javascript"></script> All you need to do to make this work is ensure that allscripts.js and allscripts.debug.js exist in the scripts folder of your application - they can be empty but the file has to be there. This is pretty cool, but you want to be real careful that you use unique URLs for each combination of scripts you combine or else browser and server caching will easily screw you up royally. The script manager also allows you to override native ASP.NET AJAX scripts now as any script references defined in the Scripts section of the ScriptManager trump internal references. So if you want custom behavior or you want to fix a possible bug in the core libraries that normally are loaded from resources, you can now do this simply by referencing the script resource name in the Name property and pointing at System.Web for the assembly. Not a common scenario, but when you need it, it can come in real handy. Still, there are a number of shortcomings in this control. For one, the ScriptManager and ClientScript APIs still have no common entry point so control developers are still faced with having to check and support both APIs to load scripts so that controls can work on pages that do or don’t have a ScriptManager on the page. The CdnUrl is static and compiled in, which is very restrictive. And finally, there’s still no control over where scripts get loaded on the page - ScriptManager still injects scripts into the middle of the HTML markup rather than in the header or optionally the footer. This, in turn, means there is little control over script loading order, which can be problematic for control developers. MetaDescription, MetaKeywords Page Properties There are also a number of additional Page properties that correspond to some of the other features discussed in this column: ClientIDMode, ClientTarget and ViewStateMode. Another minor but useful feature is that you can now directly access the MetaDescription and MetaKeywords properties on the Page object to set the corresponding meta tags programmatically. Updating these values programmatically previously required either <%= %> expressions in the page markup or dynamic insertion of literal controls into the page. You can now just set these properties programmatically on the Page object in any Control derived class on the page or the Page itself: Page.MetaKeywords = "ASP.NET,4.0,New Features"; Page.MetaDescription = "This article discusses the new features in ASP.NET 4.0"; Note, that there’s no corresponding ASP.NET tag for the HTML Meta element, so the only way to specify these values in markup and access them is via the @Page tag: <%@Page Language="C#"      CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2"      ClientIDMode="Static"                MetaDescription="Article that discusses what's                      new in ASP.NET 4.0"     MetaKeywords="ASP.NET,4.0,New Features" %> Nothing earth shattering but quite convenient. Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements for Web Development For Web development there are also a host of editor enhancements in Visual Studio 2010. Some of these are not Web specific but they are useful for Web developers in general. Text Editors Throughout Visual Studio 2010, the text editors have all been updated to a new core engine based on WPF which provides some interesting new features for various code editors including the nice ability to zoom in and out with Ctrl-MouseWheel to quickly change the size of text. There are many more API options to control the editor and although Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t yet use many of these features, we can look forward to enhancements in add-ins and future editor updates from the various language teams that take advantage of the visual richness that WPF provides to editing. On the negative side, I’ve noticed that occasionally the code editor and especially the HTML and JavaScript editors will lose the ability to use various navigation keys like arrows, back and delete keys, which requires closing and reopening the documents at times. This issue seems to be well documented so I suspect this will be addressed soon with a hotfix or within the first service pack. Overall though, the code editors work very well, especially given that they were re-written completely using WPF, which was one of my big worries when I first heard about the complete redesign of the editors. Multi-Targeting Visual Studio now targets all versions of the .NET framework from 2.0 forward. You can use Visual Studio 2010 to work on your ASP.NET 2, 3.0 and 3.5 applications which is a nice way to get your feet wet with the new development environment without having to make changes to existing applications. It’s nice to have one tool to work in for all the different versions. Multi-Monitor Support One cool feature of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to drag windows out of the Visual Studio environment and out onto the desktop including onto another monitor easily. Since Web development often involves working with a host of designers at the same time - visual designer, HTML markup window, code behind and JavaScript editor - it’s really nice to be able to have a little more screen real estate to work on each of these editors. Microsoft made a welcome change in the environment. IntelliSense Snippets for HTML and JavaScript Editors The HTML and JavaScript editors now finally support IntelliSense scripts to create macro-based template expansions that have been in the core C# and Visual Basic code editors since Visual Studio 2005. Snippets allow you to create short XML-based template definitions that can act as static macros or real templates that can have replaceable values that can be embedded into the expanded text. The XML syntax for these snippets is straight forward and it’s pretty easy to create custom snippets manually. You can easily create snippets using XML and store them in your custom snippets folder (C:\Users\rstrahl\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Code Snippets\Visual Web Developer\My HTML Snippets and My JScript Snippets), but it helps to use one of the third-party tools that exist to simplify the process for you. I use SnippetEditor, by Bill McCarthy, which makes short work of creating snippets interactively (http://snippeteditor.codeplex.com/). Note: You may have to manually add the Visual Studio 2010 User specific Snippet folders to this tool to see existing ones you’ve created. Code snippets are some of the biggest time savers and HTML editing more than anything deals with lots of repetitive tasks that lend themselves to text expansion. Visual Studio 2010 includes a slew of built-in snippets (that you can also customize!) and you can create your own very easily. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to spend a little time examining your coding patterns and find the repetitive code that you write and convert it into snippets. I’ve been using CodeRush for this for years, but now you can do much of the basic expansion natively for HTML and JavaScript snippets. jQuery Integration Is Now Native jQuery is a popular JavaScript library and recently Microsoft has recently stated that it will become the primary client-side scripting technology to drive higher level script functionality in various ASP.NET Web projects that Microsoft provides. In Visual Studio 2010, the default full project template includes jQuery as part of a new project including the support files that provide IntelliSense (-vsdoc files). IntelliSense support for jQuery is now also baked into Visual Studio 2010, so unlike Visual Studio 2008 which required a separate download, no further installs are required for a rich IntelliSense experience with jQuery. Summary ASP.NET 4.0 brings many useful improvements to the platform, but thankfully most of the changes are incremental changes that don’t compromise backwards compatibility and they allow developers to ease into the new features one feature at a time. None of the changes in ASP.NET 4.0 or Visual Studio 2010 are monumental or game changers. The bigger features are language and .NET Framework changes that are also optional. This ASP.NET and tools release feels more like fine tuning and getting some long-standing kinks worked out of the platform. It shows that the ASP.NET team is dedicated to paying attention to community feedback and responding with changes to the platform and development environment based on this feedback. If you haven’t gotten your feet wet with ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, there’s no reason not to give it a shot now - the ASP.NET 4.0 platform is solid and Visual Studio 2010 works very well for a brand new release. Check it out. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Silverlight 4 + WCF RIA - Data Service Design Best Practices

  - by Chadd Nervig

  Hey all. I realize this is a rather long question, but I'd really appreciate any help from anyone experienced with RIA services. Thanks! I'm working on a Silverlight 4 app that views data from the server. I'm relatively inexperienced with RIA Services, so have been working through the tasks of getting the data I need down to the client, but every new piece I add to the puzzle seems to be more and more problematic. I feel like I'm missing some basic concepts here, and it seems like I'm just 'hacking' pieces on, in time-consuming ways, each one breaking the previous ones as I try to add them. I'd love to get the feedback of developers experienced with RIA services, to figure out the intended way to do what I'm trying to do. Let me lay out what I'm trying to do: First, the data. The source of this data is a variety of sources, primarily created by a shared library which reads data from our database, and exposes it as POCOs (Plain Old CLR Objects). I'm creating my own POCOs to represent the different types of data I need to pass between server and client. DataA - This app is for viewing a certain type of data, lets call DataA, in near-realtime. Every 3 minutes, the client should pull data down from the server, of all the new DataA since the last time it requested data. DataB - Users can view the DataA objects in the app, and may select one of them from the list, which displays additional details about that DataA. I'm bringing these extra details down from the server as DataB. DataC - One of the things that DataB contains is a history of a couple important values over time. I'm calling each data point of this history a DataC object, and each DataB object contains many DataCs. The Data Model - On the server side, I have a single DomainService: [EnableClientAccess] public class MyDomainService : DomainService { public IEnumerable<DataA> GetDataA(DateTime? startDate) { /*Pieces together the DataAs that have been created since startDate, and returns them*/ } public DataB GetDataB(int dataAID) { /*Looks up the extended info for that dataAID, constructs a new DataB with that DataA's data, plus the extended info (with multiple DataCs in a List<DataC> property on the DataB), and returns it*/ } //Not exactly sure why these are here, but I think it //wouldn't compile without them for some reason? The data //is entirely read-only, so I don't need to update. public void UpdateDataA(DataA dataA) { throw new NotSupportedException(); } public void UpdateDataB(DataB dataB) { throw new NotSupportedException(); } } The classes for DataA/B/C look like this: [KnownType(typeof(DataB))] public partial class DataA { [Key] [DataMember] public int DataAID { get; set; } [DataMember] public decimal MyDecimalA { get; set; } [DataMember] public string MyStringA { get; set; } [DataMember] public DataTime MyDateTimeA { get; set; } } public partial class DataB : DataA { [Key] [DataMember] public int DataAID { get; set; } [DataMember] public decimal MyDecimalB { get; set; } [DataMember] public string MyStringB { get; set; } [Include] //I don't know which of these, if any, I need? [Composition] [Association("DataAToC","DataAID","DataAID")] public List<DataC> DataCs { get; set; } } public partial class DataC { [Key] [DataMember] public int DataAID { get; set; } [Key] [DataMember] public DateTime Timestamp { get; set; } [DataMember] public decimal MyHistoricDecimal { get; set; } } I guess a big question I have here is... Should I be using Entities instead of POCOs? Are my classes constructed correctly to be able to pass the data down correctly? Should I be using Invoke methods instead of Query (Get) methods on the DomainService? On the client side, I'm having a number of issues. Surprisingly, one of my biggest ones has been threading. I didn't expect there to be so many threading issues with MyDomainContext. What I've learned is that you only seem to be able to create MyDomainContextObjects on the UI thread, all of the queries you can make are done asynchronously only, and that if you try to fake doing it synchronously by blocking the calling thread until the LoadOperation finishes, you have to do so on a background thread, since it uses the UI thread to make the query. So here's what I've got so far. The app should display a stream of the DataA objects, spreading each 3min chunk of them over the next 3min (so they end up displayed 3min after the occurred, looking like a continuous stream, but only have to be downloaded in 3min bursts). To do this, the main form initializes, creates a private MyDomainContext, and starts up a background worker, which continuously loops in a while(true). On each loop, it checks if it has any DataAs left over to display. If so, it displays that Data, and Thread.Sleep()s until the next DataA is scheduled to be displayed. If it's out of data, it queries for more, using the following methods: public DataA[] GetDataAs(DateTime? startDate) { _loadOperationGetDataACompletion = new AutoResetEvent(false); LoadOperation<DataA> loadOperationGetDataA = null; loadOperationGetDataA = _context.Load(_context.GetDataAQuery(startDate), System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Client.LoadBehavior.RefreshCurrent, false); loadOperationGetDataA.Completed += new EventHandler(loadOperationGetDataA_Completed); _loadOperationGetDataACompletion.WaitOne(); List<DataA> dataAs = new List<DataA>(); foreach (var dataA in loadOperationGetDataA.Entities) dataAs.Add(dataA); return dataAs.ToArray(); } private static AutoResetEvent _loadOperationGetDataACompletion; private static void loadOperationGetDataA_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) { _loadOperationGetDataACompletion.Set(); } Seems kind of clunky trying to force it into being synchronous, but since this already is on a background thread, I think this is OK? So far, everything actually works, as much of a hack as it seems like it may be. It's important to note that if I try to run that code on the UI thread, it locks, because it waits on the WaitOne() forever, locking the thread, so it can't make the Load request to the server. So once the data is displayed, users can click on one as it goes by to fill a details pane with the full DataB data about that object. To do that, I have the the details pane user control subscribing to a selection event I have setup, which gets fired when the selection changes (on the UI thread). I use a similar technique there, to get the DataB object: void SelectionService_SelectedDataAChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { DataA dataA = /*Get the selected DataA*/; MyDomainContext context = new MyDomainContext(); var loadOperationGetDataB = context.Load(context.GetDataBQuery(dataA.DataAID), System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Client.LoadBehavior.RefreshCurrent, false); loadOperationGetDataB.Completed += new EventHandler(loadOperationGetDataB_Completed); } private void loadOperationGetDataB_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) { this.DataContext = ((LoadOperation<DataB>)sender).Entities.SingleOrDefault(); } Again, it seems kinda hacky, but it works... except on the DataB that it loads, the DataCs list is empty. I've tried all kinds of things there, and I don't see what I'm doing wrong to allow the DataCs to come down with the DataB. I'm about ready to make a 3rd query for the DataCs, but that's screaming even more hackiness to me. It really feels like I'm fighting against the grain here, like I'm doing this in an entirely unintended way. If anyone could offer any assistance, and point out what I'm doing wrong here, I'd very much appreciate it! Thanks!

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• Using HTML 5 SessionState to save rendered Page Content

  - by Rick Strahl

  HTML 5 SessionState and LocalStorage are very useful and super easy to use to manage client side state. For building rich client side or SPA style applications it's a vital feature to be able to cache user data as well as HTML content in order to swap pages in and out of the browser's DOM. What might not be so obvious is that you can also use the sessionState and localStorage objects even in classic server rendered HTML applications to provide caching features between pages. These APIs have been around for a long time and are supported by most relatively modern browsers and even all the way back to IE8, so you can use them safely in your Web applications. SessionState and LocalStorage are easy The APIs that make up sessionState and localStorage are very simple. Both object feature the same API interface which  is a simple, string based key value store that has getItem, setItem, removeitem, clear and  key methods. The objects are also pseudo array objects and so can be iterated like an array with  a length property and you have array indexers to set and get values with. Basic usage  for storing and retrieval looks like this (using sessionStorage, but the syntax is the same for localStorage - just switch the objects):// set var lastAccess = new Date().getTime(); if (sessionStorage) sessionStorage.setItem("myapp_time", lastAccess.toString()); // retrieve in another page or on a refresh var time = null; if (sessionStorage) time = sessionStorage.getItem("myapp_time"); if (time) time = new Date(time * 1); else time = new Date(); sessionState stores data that is browser session specific and that has a liftetime of the active browser session or window. Shut down the browser or tab and the storage goes away. localStorage uses the same API interface, but the lifetime of the data is permanently stored in the browsers storage area until deleted via code or by clearing out browser cookies (not the cache). Both sessionStorage and localStorage space is limited. The spec is ambiguous about this - supposedly sessionStorage should allow for unlimited size, but it appears that most WebKit browsers support only 2.5mb for either object. This means you have to be careful what you store especially since other applications might be running on the same domain and also use the storage mechanisms. That said 2.5mb worth of character data is quite a bit and would go a long way. The easiest way to get a feel for how sessionState and localStorage work is to look at a simple example. You can go check out the following example online in Plunker: http://plnkr.co/edit/0ICotzkoPjHaWa70GlRZ?p=preview which looks like this: Plunker is an online HTML/JavaScript editor that lets you write and run Javascript code and similar to JsFiddle, but a bit cleaner to work in IMHO (thanks to John Papa for turning me on to it). The sample has two text boxes with counts that update session/local storage every time you click the related button. The counts are 'cached' in Session and Local storage. The point of these examples is that both counters survive full page reloads, and the LocalStorage counter survives a complete browser shutdown and restart. Go ahead and try it out by clicking the Reload button after updating both counters and then shutting down the browser completely and going back to the same URL (with the same browser). What you should see is that reloads leave both counters intact at the counted values, while a browser restart will leave only the local storage counter intact. The code to deal with the SessionStorage (and LocalStorage not shown here) in the example is isolated into a couple of wrapper methods to simplify the code: function getSessionCount() { var count = 0; if (sessionStorage) { var count = sessionStorage.getItem("ss_count"); count = !count ? 0 : count * 1; } $("#txtSession").val(count); return count; } function setSessionCount(count) { if (sessionStorage) sessionStorage.setItem("ss_count", count.toString()); } These two functions essentially load and store a session counter value. The two key methods used here are: sessionStorage.getItem(key); sessionStorage.setItem(key,stringVal); Note that the value given to setItem and return by getItem has to be a string. If you pass another type you get an error. Don't let that limit you though - you can easily enough store JSON data in a variable so it's quite possible to pass complex objects and store them into a single sessionStorage value:var user = { name: "Rick", id="ricks", level=8 } sessionStorage.setItem("app_user",JSON.stringify(user)); to retrieve it:var user = sessionStorage.getItem("app_user"); if (user) user = JSON.parse(user); Simple! If you're using the Chrome Developer Tools (F12) you can also check out the session and local storage state on the Resource tab:   You can also use this tool to refresh or remove entries from storage. What we just looked at is a purely client side implementation where a couple of counters are stored. For rich client centric AJAX applications sessionStorage and localStorage provide a very nice and simple API to store application state while the application is running. But you can also use these storage mechanisms to manage server centric HTML applications when you combine server rendering with some JavaScript to perform client side data caching. You can both store some state information and data on the client (ie. store a JSON object and carry it forth between server rendered HTML requests) or you can use it for good old HTTP based caching where some rendered HTML is saved and then restored later. Let's look at the latter with a real life example. Why do I need Client-side Page Caching for Server Rendered HTML? I don't know about you, but in a lot of my existing server driven applications I have lists that display a fair amount of data. Typically these lists contain links to then drill down into more specific data either for viewing or editing. You can then click on a link and go off to a detail page that provides more concise content. So far so good. But now you're done with the detail page and need to get back to the list, so you click on a 'bread crumbs trail' or an application level 'back to list' button and… …you end up back at the top of the list - the scroll position, the current selection in some cases even filters conditions - all gone with the wind. You've left behind the state of the list and are starting from scratch in your browsing of the list from the top. Not cool! Sound familiar? This a pretty common scenario with server rendered HTML content where it's so common to display lists to drill into, only to lose state in the process of returning back to the original list. Look at just about any traditional forums application, or even StackOverFlow to see what I mean here. Scroll down a bit to look at a post or entry, drill in then use the bread crumbs or tab to go back… In some cases returning to the top of a list is not a big deal. On StackOverFlow that sort of works because content is turning around so quickly you probably want to actually look at the top posts. Not always though - if you're browsing through a list of search topics you're interested in and drill in there's no way back to that position. Essentially anytime you're actively browsing the items in the list, that's when state becomes important and if it's not handled the user experience can be really disrupting. Content Caching If you're building client centric SPA style applications this is a fairly easy to solve problem - you tend to render the list once and then update the page content to overlay the detail content, only hiding the list temporarily until it's used again later. It's relatively easy to accomplish this simply by hiding content on the page and later making it visible again. But if you use server rendered content, hanging on to all the detail like filters, selections and scroll position is not quite as easy. Or is it??? This is where sessionStorage comes in handy. What if we just save the rendered content of a previous page, and then restore it when we return to this page based on a special flag that tells us to use the cached version? Let's see how we can do this. A real World Use Case Recently my local ISP asked me to help out with updating an ancient classifieds application. They had a very busy, local classifieds app that was originally an ASP classic application. The old app was - wait for it: frames based - and even though I lobbied against it, the decision was made to keep the frames based layout to allow rapid browsing of the hundreds of posts that are made on a daily basis. The primary reason they wanted this was precisely for the ability to quickly browse content item by item. While I personally hate working with Frames, I have to admit that the UI actually works well with the frames layout as long as you're running on a large desktop screen. You can check out the frames based desktop site here: http://classifieds.gorge.net/ However when I rebuilt the app I also added a secondary view that doesn't use frames. The main reason for this of course was for mobile displays which work horribly with frames. So there's a somewhat mobile friendly interface to the interface, which ditches the frames and uses some responsive design tweaking for mobile capable operation: http://classifeds.gorge.net/mobile  (or browse the base url with your browser width under 800px)   Here's what the mobile, non-frames view looks like:   As you can see this means that the list of classifieds posts now is a list and there's a separate page for drilling down into the item. And of course… originally we ran into that usability issue I mentioned earlier where the browse, view detail, go back to the list cycle resulted in lost list state. Originally in mobile mode you scrolled through the list, found an item to look at and drilled in to display the item detail. Then you clicked back to the list and BAM - you've lost your place. Because there are so many items added on a daily basis the full list is never fully loaded, but rather there's a "Load Additional Listings"  entry at the button. Not only did we originally lose our place when coming back to the list, but any 'additionally loaded' items are no longer there because the list was now rendering  as if it was the first page hit. The additional listings, and any filters, the selection of an item all were lost. Major Suckage! Using Client SessionStorage to cache Server Rendered Content To work around this problem I decided to cache the rendered page content from the list in SessionStorage. Anytime the list renders or is updated with Load Additional Listings, the page HTML is cached and stored in Session Storage. Any back links from the detail page or the login or write entry forms then point back to the list page with a back=true query string parameter. If the server side sees this parameter it doesn't render the part of the page that is cached. Instead the client side code retrieves the data from the sessionState cache and simply inserts it into the page. It sounds pretty simple, and the overall the process is really easy, but there are a few gotchas that I'll discuss in a minute. But first let's look at the implementation. Let's start with the server side here because that'll give a quick idea of the doc structure. As I mentioned the server renders data from an ASP.NET MVC view. On the list page when returning to the list page from the display page (or a host of other pages) looks like this: https://classifieds.gorge.net/list?back=True The query string value is a flag, that indicates whether the server should render the HTML. Here's what the top level MVC Razor view for the list page looks like:@model MessageListViewModel @{ ViewBag.Title = "Classified Listing"; bool isBack = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.QueryString["back"]); } <form method="post" action="@Url.Action("list")"> <div id="SizingContainer"> @if (!isBack) { @Html.Partial("List_CommandBar_Partial", Model) <div id="PostItemContainer" class="scrollbox" xstyle="-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;"> @Html.Partial("List_Items_Partial", Model) @if (Model.RequireLoadEntry) { <div class="postitem loadpostitems" style="padding: 15px;"> <div id="LoadProgress" class="smallprogressright"></div> <div class="control-progress"> Load additional listings... </div> </div> } </div> } </div> </form> As you can see the query string triggers a conditional block that if set is simply not rendered. The content inside of #SizingContainer basically holds  the entire page's HTML sans the headers and scripts, but including the filter options and menu at the top. In this case this makes good sense - in other situations the fact that the menu or filter options might be dynamically updated might make you only cache the list rather than essentially the entire page. In this particular instance all of the content works and produces the proper result as both the list along with any filter conditions in the form inputs are restored. Ok, let's move on to the client. On the client there are two page level functions that deal with saving and restoring state. Like the counter example I showed earlier, I like to wrap the logic to save and restore values from sessionState into a separate function because they are almost always used in several places.page.saveData = function(id) { if (!sessionStorage) return; var data = { id: id, scroll: $("#PostItemContainer").scrollTop(), html: $("#SizingContainer").html() }; sessionStorage.setItem("list_html",JSON.stringify(data)); }; page.restoreData = function() { if (!sessionStorage) return; var data = sessionStorage.getItem("list_html"); if (!data) return null; return JSON.parse(data); }; The data that is saved is an object which contains an ID which is the selected element when the user clicks and a scroll position. These two values are used to reset the scroll position when the data is used from the cache. Finally the html from the #SizingContainer element is stored, which makes for the bulk of the document's HTML. In this application the HTML captured could be a substantial bit of data. If you recall, I mentioned that the server side code renders a small chunk of data initially and then gets more data if the user reads through the first 50 or so items. The rest of the items retrieved can be rather sizable. Other than the JSON deserialization that's Ok. Since I'm using SessionStorage the storage space has no immediate limits. Next is the core logic to handle saving and restoring the page state. At first though this would seem pretty simple, and in some cases it might be, but as the following code demonstrates there are a few gotchas to watch out for. Here's the relevant code I use to save and restore:$( function() { … var isBack = getUrlEncodedKey("back", location.href); if (isBack) { // remove the back key from URL setUrlEncodedKey("back", "", location.href); var data = page.restoreData(); // restore from sessionState if (!data) { // no data - force redisplay of the server side default list window.location = "list"; return; } $("#SizingContainer").html(data.html); var el = $(".postitem[data-id=" + data.id + "]"); $(".postitem").removeClass("highlight"); el.addClass("highlight"); $("#PostItemContainer").scrollTop(data.scroll); setTimeout(function() { el.removeClass("highlight"); }, 2500); } else if (window.noFrames) page.saveData(null); // save when page loads $("#SizingContainer").on("click", ".postitem", function() { var id = $(this).attr("data-id"); if (!id) return true; if (window.noFrames) page.saveData(id); var contentFrame = window.parent.frames["Content"]; if (contentFrame) contentFrame.location.href = "show/" + id; else window.location.href = "show/" + id; return false; }); … The code starts out by checking for the back query string flag which triggers restoring from the client cache. If cached the cached data structure is read from sessionStorage. It's important here to check if data was returned. If the user had back=true on the querystring but there is no cached data, he likely bookmarked this page or otherwise shut down the browser and came back to this URL. In that case the server didn't render any detail and we have no cached data, so all we can do is redirect to the original default list view using window.location. If we continued the page would render no data - so make sure to always check the cache retrieval result. Always! If there is data the it's loaded and the data.html data is restored back into the document by simply injecting the HTML back into the document's #SizingContainer element:$("#SizingContainer").html(data.html); It's that simple and it's quite quick even with a fully loaded list of additional items and on a phone. The actual HTML data is stored to the cache on every page load initially and then again when the user clicks on an element to navigate to a particular listing. The former ensures that the client cache always has something in it, and the latter updates with additional information for the selected element. For the click handling I use a data-id attribute on the list item (.postitem) in the list and retrieve the id from that. That id is then used to navigate to the actual entry as well as storing that Id value in the saved cached data. The id is used to reset the selection by searching for the data-id value in the restored elements. The overall process of this save/restore process is pretty straight forward and it doesn't require a bunch of code, yet it yields a huge improvement in the usability of the site on mobile devices (or anybody who uses the non-frames view). Some things to watch out for As easy as it conceptually seems to simply store and retrieve cached content, you have to be quite aware what type of content you are caching. The code above is all that's specific to cache/restore cycle and it works, but it took a few tweaks to the rest of the script code and server code to make it all work. There were a few gotchas that weren't immediately obvious. Here are a few things to pay attention to: Event Handling Logic Timing of manipulating DOM events Inline Script Code Bookmarking to the Cache Url when no cache exists Do you have inline script code in your HTML? That script code isn't going to run if you restore from cache and simply assign or it may not run at the time you think it would normally in the DOM rendering cycle. JavaScript Event Hookups The biggest issue I ran into with this approach almost immediately is that originally I had various static event handlers hooked up to various UI elements that are now cached. If you have an event handler like:$("#btnSearch").click( function() {…}); that works fine when the page loads with server rendered HTML, but that code breaks when you now load the HTML from cache. Why? Because the elements you're trying to hook those events to may not actually be there - yet. Luckily there's an easy workaround for this by using deferred events. With jQuery you can use the .on() event handler instead:$("#SelectionContainer").on("click","#btnSearch", function() {…}); which monitors a parent element for the events and checks for the inner selector elements to handle events on. This effectively defers to runtime event binding, so as more items are added to the document bindings still work. For any cached content use deferred events. Timing of manipulating DOM Elements Along the same lines make sure that your DOM manipulation code follows the code that loads the cached content into the page so that you don't manipulate DOM elements that don't exist just yet. Ideally you'll want to check for the condition to restore cached content towards the top of your script code, but that can be tricky if you have components or other logic that might not all run in a straight line. Inline Script Code Here's another small problem I ran into: I use a DateTime Picker widget I built a while back that relies on the jQuery date time picker. I also created a helper function that allows keyboard date navigation into it that uses JavaScript logic. Because MVC's limited 'object model' the only way to embed widget content into the page is through inline script. This code broken when I inserted the cached HTML into the page because the script code was not available when the component actually got injected into the page. As the last bullet - it's a matter of timing. There's no good work around for this - in my case I pulled out the jQuery date picker and relied on native <input type="date" /> logic instead - a better choice these days anyway, especially since this view is meant to be primarily to serve mobile devices which actually support date input through the browser (unlike desktop browsers of which only WebKit seems to support it). Bookmarking Cached Urls When you cache HTML content you have to make a decision whether you cache on the client and also not render that same content on the server. In the Classifieds app I didn't render server side content so if the user comes to the page with back=True and there is no cached content I have to a have a Plan B. Typically this happens when somebody ends up bookmarking the back URL. The easiest and safest solution for this scenario is to ALWAYS check the cache result to make sure it exists and if not have a safe URL to go back to - in this case to the plain uncached list URL which amounts to effectively redirecting. This seems really obvious in hindsight, but it's easy to overlook and not see a problem until much later, when it's not obvious at all why the page is not rendering anything. Don't use <body> to replace Content Since we're practically replacing all the HTML in the page it may seem tempting to simply replace the HTML content of the <body> tag. Don't. The body tag usually contains key things that should stay in the page and be there when it loads. Specifically script tags and elements and possibly other embedded content. It's best to create a top level DOM element specifically as a placeholder container for your cached content and wrap just around the actual content you want to replace. In the app above the #SizingContainer is that container. Other Approaches The approach I've used for this application is kind of specific to the existing server rendered application we're running and so it's just one approach you can take with caching. However for server rendered content caching this is a pattern I've used in a few apps to retrofit some client caching into list displays. In this application I took the path of least resistance to the existing server rendering logic. Here are a few other ways that come to mind: Using Partial HTML Rendering via AJAXInstead of rendering the page initially on the server, the page would load empty and the client would render the UI by retrieving the respective HTML and embedding it into the page from a Partial View. This effectively makes the initial rendering and the cached rendering logic identical and removes the server having to decide whether this request needs to be rendered or not (ie. not checking for a back=true switch). All the logic related to caching is made on the client in this case. Using JSON Data and Client RenderingThe hardcore client option is to do the whole UI SPA style and pull data from the server and then use client rendering or databinding to pull the data down and render using templates or client side databinding with knockout/angular et al. As with the Partial Rendering approach the advantage is that there's no difference in the logic between pulling the data from cache or rendering from scratch other than the initial check for the cache request. Of course if the app is a  full on SPA app, then caching may not be required even - the list could just stay in memory and be hidden and reactivated. I'm sure there are a number of other ways this can be handled as well especially using  AJAX. AJAX rendering might simplify the logic, but it also complicates search engine optimization since there's no content loaded initially. So there are always tradeoffs and it's important to look at all angles before deciding on any sort of caching solution in general. State of the Session SessionState and LocalStorage are easy to use in client code and can be integrated even with server centric applications to provide nice caching features of content and data. In this post I've shown a very specific scenario of storing HTML content for the purpose of remembering list view data and state and making the browsing experience for lists a bit more friendly, especially if there's dynamically loaded content involved. If you haven't played with sessionStorage or localStorage I encourage you to give it a try. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with this beyond the specific scenario I've covered here… Resources Overview of localStorage (also applies to sessionStorage) Web Storage Compatibility Modernizr Test Suite© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in JavaScript  HTML5  ASP.NET  MVC   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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• Implementing an async "read all currently available data from stream" operation

  - by Jon

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

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• iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

  In this series, I will be taking sample applications from the iPhone SDK and implementing them on Windows Phone 7 Series.  My goal is to do as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as I can.  This series will be written to not only compare and contrast how easy or difficult it is to complete tasks on either platform, how many lines of code, etc., but Id also like it to be a way for iPhone developers to either get started on Windows Phone 7 Series development, or for developers in general to learn the platform. Heres my methodology: Run the iPhone SDK app in the iPhone Simulator to get a feel for what it does and how it works, without looking at the implementation Implement the equivalent functionality on Windows Phone 7 Series using Silverlight. Compare the two implementations based on complexity, functionality, lines of code, number of files, etc. Add some functionality to the Windows Phone 7 Series app that shows off a way to make the scenario more interesting or leverages an aspect of the platform, or uses a better design pattern to implement the functionality. You can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP here, and the Expression Blend 4 Beta here. Hello World! Of course no first post would be allowed if it didnt focus on the hello world scenario.  The iPhone SDK follows that tradition with the Your First iPhone Application walkthrough.  I will say that the developer documentation for iPhone is pretty good.  There are plenty of walkthoughs and they break things down into nicely sized steps and do a good job of bringing the user along.  As expected, this application is quite simple.  It comprises of a text box, a label, and a button.  When you push the button, the label changes to Hello plus the  word you typed into the text box.  Makes perfect sense for a starter application.  Theres not much to this but it covers a few basic elements: Laying out basic UI Handling user input Hooking up events Formatting text     So, lets get started building a similar app for Windows Phone 7 Series! Implementing the UI: UI in Silverlight (and therefore Windows Phone 7) is defined in XAML, which is a declarative XML language also used by WPF on the desktop.  For anyone thats familiar with similar types of markup, its relatively straightforward to learn, but has a lot of power in it once you get it figured out.  Well talk more about that. This UI is very simple.  When I look at this, I note a couple of things: Elements are arranged vertically They are all centered So, lets create our Application and then start with the UI.  Once you have the the VS 2010 Express for Windows Phone tool running, create a new Windows Phone Project, and call it Hello World: Once created, youll see the designer on one side and your XAML on the other: Now, we can create our UI in one of three ways: Use the designer in Visual Studio to drag and drop the components Use the designer in Expression Blend 4 to drag and drop the components Enter the XAML by hand in either of the above Well start with (1), then kind of move to (3) just for instructional value. To develop this UI in the designer: First, delete all of the markup between inside of the Grid element (LayoutRoot).  You should be left with just this XAML for your MainPage.xaml (i shortened all the xmlns declarations below for brevity): 1: <phoneNavigation:PhoneApplicationPage 2: x:Class="HelloWorld.MainPage" 3: xmlns="...[snip]" 4: FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}" 5: FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}" 6: Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}"> 7:   8: <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> 9:   10: </Grid> 11:   12: </phoneNavigation:PhoneApplicationPage> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Well be adding XAML at line 9, so thats the important part. Now, Click on the center area of the phone surface Open the Toolbox and double click StackPanel Double click TextBox Double click TextBlock Double click Button That will create the necessary UI elements but they wont be arranged quite right.  Well fix it in a second.    Heres the XAML that we end up with: 1: <StackPanel Height="100" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="10,10,0,0" Name="stackPanel1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="200"> 2: <TextBox Height="32" Name="textBox1" Text="TextBox" Width="100" /> 3: <TextBlock Height="23" Name="textBlock1" Text="TextBlock" /> 4: <Button Content="Button" Height="70" Name="button1" Width="160" /> 5: </StackPanel> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The designer does its best at guessing what we want, but in this case we want things to be a bit simpler. So well just clean it up a bit.  We want the items to be centered and we want them to have a little bit of a margin on either side, so heres what we end up with.  Ive also made it match the values and style from the iPhone app: 1: <StackPanel Margin="10"> 2: <TextBox Name="textBox1" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Text="You" TextAlignment="Center"/> 3: <TextBlock Name="textBlock1" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,100,0,0" Text="Hello You!" /> 4: <Button Name="button1" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,150,0,0" Content="Hello"/> 5: </StackPanel> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now lets take a look at what weve done there. Line 1: We removed all of the formatting from the StackPanel, except for Margin, as thats all we need.  Since our parent element is a Grid, by default the StackPanel will be sized to fit in that space.  The Margin says that we want to reserve 10 pixels on each side of the StackPanel. Line 2: Weve set the HorizontalAlignment of the TextBox to Stretch, which says that it should fill its parents size horizontally.  We want to do this so the TextBox is always full-width.  We also set TextAlignment to Center, to center the text. Line 3: In contrast to the TextBox above, we dont care how wide the TextBlock is, just so long as it is big enough for its text.  Thatll happen automatically, so we just set its Horizontal alignment to Center.  We also set a Margin above the TextBlock of 100 pixels to bump it down a bit, per the iPhone UI. Line 4: We do the same things here as in Line 3. Heres how the UI looks in the designer: Believe it or not, were almost done! Implementing the App Logic Now, we want the TextBlock to change its text when the Button is clicked.  In the designer, double click the Button to be taken to the Event Handler for the Buttons Click event.  In that event handler, we take the Text property from the TextBox, and format it into a string, then set it into the TextBlock.  Thats it! 1: private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: string name = textBox1.Text; 4:   5: // if there isn't a name set, just use "World" 6: if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(name)) 7: { 8: name = "World"; 9: } 10:   11: // set the value into the TextBlock 12: textBlock1.Text = String.Format("Hello {0}!", name); 13:   14: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } We use the String.Format() method to handle the formatting for us.    Now all thats left is to test the app in the Windows Phone Emulator and verify it does what we think it does! And it does! Comparing against the iPhone Looking at the iPhone example, there are basically three things that you have to touch as the developer: 1) The UI in the Nib file 2) The app delegate 3) The view controller Counting lines is a bit tricky here, but to try to keep this even, Im going to only count lines of code that I could not have (or would not have) generated with the tooling.  Meaning, Im not counting XAML and Im not counting operations that happen in the Nib file with the XCode designer tool.  So in the case of the above, even though I modified the XAML, I could have done all of those operations using the visual designer tool.  And normally I would have, but the XAML is more instructive (and less steps!).  Im interested in things that I, as the developer have to figure out in code.  Im also not counting lines that just have a curly brace on them, or lines that are generated for me (e.g. method names that are generated for me when I make a connection, etc.) So, by that count, heres what I get from the code listing for the iPhone app found here: HelloWorldAppDelegate.h: 6 HelloWorldAppDelegate.m: 12 MyViewController.h: 8 MyViewController.m: 18 Which gives me a grand total of about 44 lines of code on iPhone.  I really do recommend looking at the iPhone code for a comparison to the above. Now, for the Windows Phone 7 Series application, the only code I typed was in the event handler above Main.Xaml.cs: 4 So a total of 4 lines of code on Windows Phone 7.  And more importantly, the process is just A LOT simpler.  For example, I was surprised that the User Interface Designer in XCode doesnt automatically create instance variables for me and wire them up to the corresponding elements.  I assumed I wouldnt have to write this code myself (and risk getting it wrong!).  I dont need to worry about view controllers or anything.  I just write my code.  This blog post up to this point has covered almost every aspect of this apps development in a few pages.  The iPhone tutorial has 5 top level steps with 2-3 sub sections of each. Now, its worth pointing out that the iPhone development model uses the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern, which is a very flexible and powerful pattern that enforces proper separation of concerns.  But its fairly complex and difficult to understand when you first walk up to it.  Here at Microsoft weve dabbled in MVC a bit, with frameworks like MFC on Visual C++ and with the ASP.NET MVC framework now.  Both are very powerful frameworks.  But one of the reasons weve stayed away from MVC with client UI frameworks is that its difficult to tool.  We havent seen the type of value that beats double click, write code! for the broad set of scenarios. Another thing to think about is how many of those lines of code were focused on my apps functionality?.  Or, the converse of How many lines of code were boilerplate plumbing?  In both examples, the actual number of functional code lines is similar.  I count most of them in MyViewController.m, in the changeGreeting method.  Its about 7 lines of code that do the work of taking the value from the TextBox and putting it into the label.  Versus 4 on the Windows Phone 7 side.  But, unfortunately, on iPhone I still have to write that other 37 lines of code, just to get there. 10% of the code, 1 file instead of 4, its just much simpler. Making Some Tweaks It turns out, I can actually do this application with ZERO  lines of code, if Im willing to change the spec a bit. The data binding functionality in Silverlight is incredibly powerful.  And what I can do is databind the TextBoxs value directly to the TextBlock.  Take some time looking at this XAML below.  Youll see that I have added another nested StackPanel and two more TextBlocks.  Why?  Because thats how I build that string, and the nested StackPanel will lay things out Horizontally for me, as specified by the Orientation property. 1: <StackPanel Margin="10"> 2: <TextBox Name="textBox1" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Text="You" TextAlignment="Center"/> 3: <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,100,0,0" > 4: <TextBlock Text="Hello " /> 5: <TextBlock Name="textBlock1" Text="{Binding ElementName=textBox1, Path=Text}" /> 6: <TextBlock Text="!" /> 7: </StackPanel> 8: <Button Name="button1" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,150,0,0" Content="Hello" Click="button1_Click" /> 9: </StackPanel> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now, the real action is there in the bolded TextBlock.Text property: Text="{Binding ElementName=textBox1, Path=Text}" .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } That does all the heavy lifting.  It sets up a databinding between the TextBox.Text property on textBox1 and the TextBlock.Text property on textBlock1. As I change the text of the TextBox, the label updates automatically. In fact, I dont even need the button any more, so I could get rid of that altogether.  And no button means no event handler.  No event handler means no C# code at all.  Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Building applications with WCF - Intro

  - by skjagini

  I am going to write series of articles using Windows Communication Framework (WCF) to develop client and server applications and this is the first part of that series. What is WCF As Juwal puts in his Programming WCF book, WCF provides an SDK for developing and deploying services on Windows, provides runtime environment to expose CLR types as services and consume services as CLR types. Building services with WCF is incredibly easy and it’s implementation provides a set of industry standards and off the shelf plumbing including service hosting, instance management, reliability, transaction management, security etc such that it greatly increases productivity Scenario: Lets consider a typical bank customer trying to create an account, deposit amount and transfer funds between accounts, i.e. checking and savings. To make it interesting, we are going to divide the functionality into multiple services and each of them working with database directly. We will run test cases with and without transactional support across services. In this post we will build contracts, services, data access layer, unit tests to verify end to end communication etc, nothing big stuff here and we dig into other features of the WCF in subsequent posts with incremental changes. In any distributed architecture we have two pieces i.e. services and clients. Services as the name implies provide functionality to execute various pieces of business logic on the server, and clients providing interaction to the end user. Services can be built with Web Services or with WCF. Service built on WCF have the advantage of binding independent, i.e. can run against TCP and HTTP protocol without any significant changes to the code. Solution Services Profile: For creating a new bank customer, getting details about existing customer ProfileContract ProfileService Checking Account: To get checking account balance, deposit or withdraw amount CheckingAccountContract CheckingAccountService Savings Account: To get savings account balance, deposit or withdraw amount SavingsAccountContract SavingsAccountService ServiceHost: To host services, i.e. running the services at particular address, binding and contract where client can connect to Client: Helps end user to use services like creating account and amount transfer between the accounts BankDAL: Data access layer to work with database     BankDAL It’s no brainer not to use an ORM as many matured products are available currently in market including Linq2Sql, Entity Framework (EF), LLblGenPro etc. For this exercise I am going to use Entity Framework 4.0, CTP 5 with code first approach. There are two approaches when working with data, data driven and code driven. In data driven we start by designing tables and their constrains in database and generate entities in code while in code driven (code first) approach entities are defined in code and the metadata generated from the entities is used by the EF to create tables and table constrains. In previous versions the entity classes had  to derive from EF specific base classes. In EF 4 it  is not required to derive from any EF classes, the entities are not only persistence ignorant but also enable full test driven development using mock frameworks.  Application consists of 3 entities, Customer entity which contains Customer details; CheckingAccount and SavingsAccount to hold the respective account balance. We could have introduced an Account base class for CheckingAccount and SavingsAccount which is certainly possible with EF mappings but to keep it simple we are just going to follow 1 –1 mapping between entity and table mappings. Lets start out by defining a class called Customer which will be mapped to Customer table, observe that the class is simply a plain old clr object (POCO) and has no reference to EF at all. using System;   namespace BankDAL.Model { public class Customer { public int Id { get; set; } public string FullName { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } public DateTime DateOfBirth { get; set; } } }   In order to inform EF about the Customer entity we have to define a database context with properties of type DbSet<> for every POCO which needs to be mapped to a table in database. EF uses convention over configuration to generate the metadata resulting in much less configuration. using System.Data.Entity;   namespace BankDAL.Model { public class BankDbContext: DbContext { public DbSet<Customer> Customers { get; set; } } }   Entity constrains can be defined through attributes on Customer class or using fluent syntax (no need to muscle with xml files), CustomerConfiguration class. By defining constrains in a separate class we can maintain clean POCOs without corrupting entity classes with database specific information.   using System; using System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration;   namespace BankDAL.Model { public class CustomerConfiguration: EntityTypeConfiguration<Customer> { public CustomerConfiguration() { Initialize(); }   private void Initialize() { //Setting the Primary Key this.HasKey(e => e.Id);   //Setting required fields this.HasRequired(e => e.FullName); this.HasRequired(e => e.Address); //Todo: Can't create required constraint as DateOfBirth is not reference type, research it //this.HasRequired(e => e.DateOfBirth); } } }   Any queries executed against Customers property in BankDbContext are executed against Cusomers table. By convention EF looks for connection string with key of BankDbContext when working with the context.   We are going to define a helper class to work with Customer entity with methods for querying, adding new entity etc and these are known as repository classes, i.e., CustomerRepository   using System; using System.Data.Entity; using System.Linq; using BankDAL.Model;   namespace BankDAL.Repositories { public class CustomerRepository { private readonly IDbSet<Customer> _customers;   public CustomerRepository(BankDbContext bankDbContext) { if (bankDbContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException(); _customers = bankDbContext.Customers; }   public IQueryable<Customer> Query() { return _customers; }   public void Add(Customer customer) { _customers.Add(customer); } } }   From the above code it is observable that the Query methods returns customers as IQueryable i.e. customers are retrieved only when actually used i.e. iterated. Returning as IQueryable also allows to execute filtering and joining statements from business logic using lamba expressions without cluttering the data access layer with tens of methods.   Our CheckingAccountRepository and SavingsAccountRepository look very similar to each other using System; using System.Data.Entity; using System.Linq; using BankDAL.Model;   namespace BankDAL.Repositories { public class CheckingAccountRepository { private readonly IDbSet<CheckingAccount> _checkingAccounts;   public CheckingAccountRepository(BankDbContext bankDbContext) { if (bankDbContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException(); _checkingAccounts = bankDbContext.CheckingAccounts; }   public IQueryable<CheckingAccount> Query() { return _checkingAccounts; }   public void Add(CheckingAccount account) { _checkingAccounts.Add(account); }   public IQueryable<CheckingAccount> GetAccount(int customerId) { return (from act in _checkingAccounts where act.CustomerId == customerId select act); }   } } The repository classes look very similar to each other for Query and Add methods, with the help of C# generics and implementing repository pattern (Martin Fowler) we can reduce the repeated code. Jarod from ElegantCode has posted an article on how to use repository pattern with EF which we will implement in the subsequent articles along with WCF Unity life time managers by Drew Contracts It is very easy to follow contract first approach with WCF, define the interface and append ServiceContract, OperationContract attributes. IProfile contract exposes functionality for creating customer and getting customer details.   using System; using System.ServiceModel; using BankDAL.Model;   namespace ProfileContract { [ServiceContract] public interface IProfile { [OperationContract] Customer CreateCustomer(string customerName, string address, DateTime dateOfBirth);   [OperationContract] Customer GetCustomer(int id);   } }   ICheckingAccount contract exposes functionality for working with checking account, i.e., getting balance, deposit and withdraw of amount. ISavingsAccount contract looks the same as checking account.   using System.ServiceModel;   namespace CheckingAccountContract { [ServiceContract] public interface ICheckingAccount { [OperationContract] decimal? GetCheckingAccountBalance(int customerId);   [OperationContract] void DepositAmount(int customerId,decimal amount);   [OperationContract] void WithdrawAmount(int customerId, decimal amount);   } }   Services   Having covered the data access layer and contracts so far and here comes the core of the business logic, i.e. services.   .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } ProfileService implements the IProfile contract for creating customer and getting customer detail using CustomerRepository. using System; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel; using BankDAL; using BankDAL.Model; using BankDAL.Repositories; using ProfileContract;   namespace ProfileService { [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)] public class Profile: IProfile { public Customer CreateAccount( string customerName, string address, DateTime dateOfBirth) { Customer cust = new Customer { FullName = customerName, Address = address, DateOfBirth = dateOfBirth };   using (var bankDbContext = new BankDbContext()) { new CustomerRepository(bankDbContext).Add(cust); bankDbContext.SaveChanges(); } return cust; }   public Customer CreateCustomer(string customerName, string address, DateTime dateOfBirth) { return CreateAccount(customerName, address, dateOfBirth); } public Customer GetCustomer(int id) { return new CustomerRepository(new BankDbContext()).Query() .Where(i => i.Id == id).FirstOrDefault(); }   } } From the above code you shall observe that we are calling bankDBContext’s SaveChanges method and there is no save method specific to customer entity because EF manages all the changes centralized at the context level and all the pending changes so far are submitted in a batch and it is represented as Unit of Work. Similarly Checking service implements ICheckingAccount contract using CheckingAccountRepository, notice that we are throwing overdraft exception if the balance falls by zero. WCF has it’s own way of raising exceptions using fault contracts which will be explained in the subsequent articles. SavingsAccountService is similar to CheckingAccountService. using System; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel; using BankDAL.Model; using BankDAL.Repositories; using CheckingAccountContract;   namespace CheckingAccountService { [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)] public class Checking:ICheckingAccount { public decimal? GetCheckingAccountBalance(int customerId) { using (var bankDbContext = new BankDbContext()) { CheckingAccount account = (new CheckingAccountRepository(bankDbContext) .GetAccount(customerId)).FirstOrDefault();   if (account != null) return account.Balance;   return null; } }   public void DepositAmount(int customerId, decimal amount) { using(var bankDbContext = new BankDbContext()) { var checkingAccountRepository = new CheckingAccountRepository(bankDbContext); CheckingAccount account = (checkingAccountRepository.GetAccount(customerId)) .FirstOrDefault();   if (account == null) { account = new CheckingAccount() { CustomerId = customerId }; checkingAccountRepository.Add(account); }   account.Balance = account.Balance + amount; if (account.Balance < 0) throw new ApplicationException("Overdraft not accepted");   bankDbContext.SaveChanges(); } } public void WithdrawAmount(int customerId, decimal amount) { DepositAmount(customerId, -1*amount); } } }   BankServiceHost The host acts as a glue binding contracts with it’s services, exposing the endpoints. The services can be exposed either through the code or configuration file, configuration file is preferred as it allows run time changes to service behavior even after deployment. We have 3 services and for each of the service you need to define name (the class that implements the service with fully qualified namespace) and endpoint known as ABC, i.e. address, binding and contract. We are using netTcpBinding and have defined the base address with for each of the contracts .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } <system.serviceModel> <services> <service name="ProfileService.Profile"> <endpoint binding="netTcpBinding" contract="ProfileContract.IProfile"/> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Profile"/> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> <service name="CheckingAccountService.Checking"> <endpoint binding="netTcpBinding" contract="CheckingAccountContract.ICheckingAccount"/> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Checking"/> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> <service name="SavingsAccountService.Savings"> <endpoint binding="netTcpBinding" contract="SavingsAccountContract.ISavingsAccount"/> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Savings"/> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> </services> </system.serviceModel> Have to open the services by creating service host which will handle the incoming requests from clients.   using System;   namespace ServiceHost { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { CreateHosts(); Console.ReadLine(); }   private static void CreateHosts() { CreateHost(typeof(ProfileService.Profile),"Profile Service"); CreateHost(typeof(SavingsAccountService.Savings), "Savings Account Service"); CreateHost(typeof(CheckingAccountService.Checking), "Checking Account Service"); }   private static void CreateHost(Type type, string hostDescription) { System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost host = new System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost(type); host.Open();   if (host.ChannelDispatchers != null && host.ChannelDispatchers.Count != 0 && host.ChannelDispatchers[0].Listener != null) Console.WriteLine("Started: " + host.ChannelDispatchers[0].Listener.Uri); else Console.WriteLine("Failed to start:" + hostDescription); } } } BankClient    The client has no knowledge about service business logic other than the functionality it exposes through the contract, end points and a proxy to work against. The endpoint data and server proxy can be generated by right clicking on the project reference and choosing ‘Add Service Reference’ and entering the service end point address. Or if you have access to source, you can manually reference contract dlls and update clients configuration file to point to the service end point if the server and client happens to be being built using .Net framework. One of the pros with the manual approach is you don’t have to work against messy code generated files.   <system.serviceModel> <client> <endpoint name="tcpProfile" address="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Profile" binding="netTcpBinding" contract="ProfileContract.IProfile"/> <endpoint name="tcpCheckingAccount" address="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Checking" binding="netTcpBinding" contract="CheckingAccountContract.ICheckingAccount"/> <endpoint name="tcpSavingsAccount" address="net.tcp://localhost:1000/Savings" binding="netTcpBinding" contract="SavingsAccountContract.ISavingsAccount"/>   </client> </system.serviceModel> The client uses a façade to connect to the services   using System.ServiceModel; using CheckingAccountContract; using ProfileContract; using SavingsAccountContract;   namespace Client { public class ProxyFacade { public static IProfile ProfileProxy() { return (new ChannelFactory<IProfile>("tcpProfile")).CreateChannel(); }   public static ICheckingAccount CheckingAccountProxy() { return (new ChannelFactory<ICheckingAccount>("tcpCheckingAccount")) .CreateChannel(); }   public static ISavingsAccount SavingsAccountProxy() { return (new ChannelFactory<ISavingsAccount>("tcpSavingsAccount")) .CreateChannel(); }   } }   With that in place, lets get our unit tests going   using System; using System.Diagnostics; using BankDAL.Model; using NUnit.Framework; using ProfileContract;   namespace Client { [TestFixture] public class Tests { private void TransferFundsFromSavingsToCheckingAccount(int customerId, decimal amount) { ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customerId, amount); ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().WithdrawAmount(customerId, amount); }   private void TransferFundsFromCheckingToSavingsAccount(int customerId, decimal amount) { ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customerId, amount); ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().WithdrawAmount(customerId, amount); }     [Test] public void CreateAndGetProfileTest() { IProfile profile = ProxyFacade.ProfileProxy(); const string customerName = "Tom"; int customerId = profile.CreateCustomer(customerName, "NJ", new DateTime(1982, 1, 1)).Id; Customer customer = profile.GetCustomer(customerId); Assert.AreEqual(customerName,customer.FullName); }   [Test] public void DepositWithDrawAndTransferAmountTest() { IProfile profile = ProxyFacade.ProfileProxy(); string customerName = "Smith" + DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); var customer = profile.CreateCustomer(customerName, "NJ", new DateTime(1982, 1, 1)); // Deposit to Savings ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customer.Id, 100); ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customer.Id, 25); Assert.AreEqual(125, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customer.Id)); // Withdraw ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().WithdrawAmount(customer.Id, 30); Assert.AreEqual(95, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customer.Id));   // Deposit to Checking ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customer.Id, 60); ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customer.Id, 40); Assert.AreEqual(100, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customer.Id)); // Withdraw ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().WithdrawAmount(customer.Id, 30); Assert.AreEqual(70, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customer.Id));   // Transfer from Savings to Checking TransferFundsFromSavingsToCheckingAccount(customer.Id,10); Assert.AreEqual(85, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customer.Id)); Assert.AreEqual(80, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customer.Id));   // Transfer from Checking to Savings TransferFundsFromCheckingToSavingsAccount(customer.Id, 50); Assert.AreEqual(135, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customer.Id)); Assert.AreEqual(30, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customer.Id)); }   [Test] public void FundTransfersWithOverDraftTest() { IProfile profile = ProxyFacade.ProfileProxy(); string customerName = "Angelina" + DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss");   var customerId = profile.CreateCustomer(customerName, "NJ", new DateTime(1972, 1, 1)).Id;   ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().DepositAmount(customerId, 100); TransferFundsFromSavingsToCheckingAccount(customerId,80); Assert.AreEqual(20, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customerId)); Assert.AreEqual(80, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customerId));   try { TransferFundsFromSavingsToCheckingAccount(customerId,30); } catch (Exception e) { Debug.WriteLine(e.Message); }   Assert.AreEqual(110, ProxyFacade.CheckingAccountProxy().GetCheckingAccountBalance(customerId)); Assert.AreEqual(20, ProxyFacade.SavingsAccountProxy().GetSavingsAccountBalance(customerId)); } } }   We are creating a new instance of the channel for every operation, we will look into instance management and how creating a new instance of channel affects it in subsequent articles. The first two test cases deals with creation of Customer, deposit and withdraw of month between accounts. The last case, FundTransferWithOverDraftTest() is interesting. Customer starts with depositing $100 in SavingsAccount followed by transfer of $80 in to checking account resulting in $20 in savings account.  Customer then initiates $30 transfer from Savings to Checking resulting in overdraft exception on Savings with $30 being deposited to Checking. As we are not running both the requests in transactions the customer ends up with more amount than what he started with $100. In subsequent posts we will look into transactions handling.  Make sure the ServiceHost project is set as start up project and start the solution. Run the test cases either from NUnit client or TestDriven.Net/Resharper which ever is your favorite tool. Make sure you have updated the data base connection string in the ServiceHost config file to point to your local database

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• Python regex to parse text file, get the items in list and count the list

  - by Nemo

  I have a text file which contains some data. I m particularly interested in finding the count of the number of items in v_dims v_dims pattern in my text file looks like this : v_dims={ "Sales", "Product Family", "Sales Organization", "Region", "Sales Area", "Sales office", "Sales Division", "Sales Person", "Sales Channel", "Sales Order Type", "Sales Number", "Sales Person", "Sales Quantity", "Sales Amount" } So I m thinking of getting all the elements in v_dims and dumping them out in a Python list. Then compute the len(mylist) to get the count of the items. The challenge is in getting all the elements of v_dims from my text file and putting them in an empty list. I m particularly interested in items in v_dims in my text file. The text file has data in the form of v_dims pattern i showed in my original post. Some data has nested patterns of v_dims. Thanks. Here's what I have tried and failed. Any help is appreciated. TIA. import re fname = "C:\Users\XXXX\Test.mrk" with open(fname, "r") as fo: content_as_string = fo.read() match = re.findall(r'v_dims={\"(.+?)\"}',content_as_string) Though I have a big text file, Here's a snippet of what's the structure of my text file version "1"; // Computer generated object language file object 'MRKR' "Main" { Data_Type=2, HeaderBlock={ Version_String="6.3 (25)" }, Printer_Info={ Orientation=0, Page_Width=8.50000000, Page_Height=11.00000000, Page_Header="", Page_Footer="", Margin_type=0, Top_Margin=0.50000000, Left_Margin=0.50000000, Bottom_Margin=0.50000000, Right_Margin=0.50000000 }, Marker_Options={ Close_All="TRUE", Hide_Console="FALSE", Console_Left="FALSE", Console_Width=217, Main_Style="Maximized", MDI_Rect={ 0, 0, 892, 1063 } }, Dives={ { Dive="A", Windows={ { View_Index=0, Window_Info={ Window_Rect={ 0, -288, 400, 1008 }, Window_Style="Maximized Front", Window_Name="Theater [Previous Qtr Diveplan-Dive A]" }, Dependent_bool="FALSE", Colset={ Dive_Type="Normal", Dimension_Name="Theater", Action_List={ Actions={ { Action_Type="Select", select_type=5 }, { Action_Type="Select", select_type=0, Key_Names={ "Theater" }, Key_Indexes={ { "AMERICAS" } } }, { Action_Type="Focus", Focus_Rows="True" }, { Action_Type="Dimensions", v_dims={ "Theater", "Product Family", "Division", "Region", "Install at Country Name", "Connect Home Type", "Connect In Type", "SymmConnect Enabled", "Connect Home Refusal Reason", "Sales Order Channel Type", "Maintained By Group", "PS Flag", "Avalanche Flag", "Product Item Family" }, Xtab_Bool="False", Xtab_Flip="False" }, { Action_Type="Select", select_type=5 }, { Action_Type="Select", select_type=0, Key_Names={ "Theater", "Product Family", "Division", "Region", "Install at Country Name", "Connect Home Type", "Connect In Type", "SymmConnect Enabled", "Connect Home Refusal Reason", "Sales Order Channel Type", "Maintained By Group", "PS Flag", "Avalanche Flag" }, Key_Indexes={ { "AMERICAS", "ATMOS", "Latin America CS Division", "37000 CS Region", "Mexico", "", "", "", "", "DIRECT", "EMC", "N", "0" } } } } }, Num_Palette_cols=0, Num_Palette_rows=0 }, Format={ Window_Type="Tabular", Tabular={ Num_row_labels=8 } } } } } }, Widget_Set={ Widget_Layout="Vertical", Go_Button=1, Picklist_Width=0, Sort_Subset_Dimensions="TRUE", Order={ } }, Views={ { Data_Type=1, dbname="Previous Qtr Diveplan", diveline_dbname="Current Qtr Diveplan", logical_name="Current Qtr Diveplan", cols={ { name="Total TSS installs", column_type="Calc[Total TSS installs]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="TSS Valid Connectivity Records", column_type="Calc[TSS Valid Connectivity Records]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="% TSS Connectivity Record", column_type="Calc[% TSS Connectivity Record]", output_type="Number" }, { name="TSS Not Applicable", column_type="Calc[TSS Not Applicable]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="TSS Customer Refusals", column_type="Calc[TSS Customer Refusals]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="% TSS Refusals", column_type="Calc[% TSS Refusals]", output_type="Number" }, { name="TSS Eligible for Physical Connectivity", column_type="Calc[TSS Eligible for Physical Connectivity]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="TSS Boxes with Physical Connectivty", column_type="Calc[TSS Boxes with Physical Connectivty]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="% TSS Physical Connectivity", column_type="Calc[% TSS Physical Connectivity]", output_type="Number" } }, dim_cols={ { name="Model", column_type="Dimension[Model]", output_type="None" }, { name="Model", column_type="Dimension[Model]", output_type="None" }, { name="Connect In Type", column_type="Dimension[Connect In Type]", output_type="None" }, { name="Connect Home Type", column_type="Dimension[Connect Home Type]", output_type="None" }, { name="SymmConnect Enabled", column_type="Dimension[SymmConnect Enabled]", output_type="None" }, { name="Theater", column_type="Dimension[Theater]", output_type="None" }, { name="Division", column_type="Dimension[Division]", output_type="None" }, { name="Region", column_type="Dimension[Region]", output_type="None" }, { name="Sales Order Number", column_type="Dimension[Sales Order Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Product Item Family", column_type="Dimension[Product Item Family]", output_type="None" }, { name="Item Serial Number", column_type="Dimension[Item Serial Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Sales Order Deal Number", column_type="Dimension[Sales Order Deal Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Item Install Date", column_type="Dimension[Item Install Date]", output_type="None" }, { name="SYR Last Dial Home Date", column_type="Dimension[SYR Last Dial Home Date]", output_type="None" }, { name="Maintained By Group", column_type="Dimension[Maintained By Group]", output_type="None" }, { name="PS Flag", column_type="Dimension[PS Flag]", output_type="None" }, { name="Connect Home Refusal Reason", column_type="Dimension[Connect Home Refusal Reason]", output_type="None", col_width=177 }, { name="Cust Name", column_type="Dimension[Cust Name]", output_type="None" }, { name="Sales Order Channel Type", column_type="Dimension[Sales Order Channel Type]", output_type="None" }, { name="Sales Order Type", column_type="Dimension[Sales Order Type]", output_type="None" }, { name="Part Model Key", column_type="Dimension[Part Model Key]", output_type="None" }, { name="Ship Date", column_type="Dimension[Ship Date]", output_type="None" }, { name="Model Number", column_type="Dimension[Model Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Item Description", column_type="Dimension[Item Description]", output_type="None" }, { name="Customer Classification", column_type="Dimension[Customer Classification]", output_type="None" }, { name="CS Customer Name", column_type="Dimension[CS Customer Name]", output_type="None" }, { name="Install At Customer Number", column_type="Dimension[Install At Customer Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Install at Country Name", column_type="Dimension[Install at Country Name]", output_type="None" }, { name="TLA Serial Number", column_type="Dimension[TLA Serial Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Product Version", column_type="Dimension[Product Version]", output_type="None" }, { name="Avalanche Flag", column_type="Dimension[Avalanche Flag]", output_type="None" }, { name="Product Family", column_type="Dimension[Product Family]", output_type="None" }, { name="Project Number", column_type="Dimension[Project Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="PROJECT_STATUS", column_type="Dimension[PROJECT_STATUS]", output_type="None" } }, Available_Columns={ "Total TSS installs", "TSS Valid Connectivity Records", "% TSS Connectivity Record", "TSS Not Applicable", "TSS Customer Refusals", "% TSS Refusals", "TSS Eligible for Physical Connectivity", "TSS Boxes with Physical Connectivty", "% TSS Physical Connectivity", "Total Installs", "All Boxes with Valid Connectivty Record", "% All Connectivity Record", "Overall Refusals", "Overall Refusals %", "All Eligible for Physical Connectivty", "Boxes with Physical Connectivity", "% All with Physical Conectivity" }, Remaining_columns={ { name="Total Installs", column_type="Calc[Total Installs]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="All Boxes with Valid Connectivty Record", column_type="Calc[All Boxes with Valid Connectivty Record]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="% All Connectivity Record", column_type="Calc[% All Connectivity Record]", output_type="Number" }, { name="Overall Refusals", column_type="Calc[Overall Refusals]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="Overall Refusals %", column_type="Calc[Overall Refusals %]", output_type="Number" }, { name="All Eligible for Physical Connectivty", column_type="Calc[All Eligible for Physical Connectivty]", output_type="Number" }, { name="Boxes with Physical Connectivity", column_type="Calc[Boxes with Physical Connectivity]", output_type="Number" }, { name="% All with Physical Conectivity", column_type="Calc[% All with Physical Conectivity]", output_type="Number" } }, calcs={ { name="Total TSS installs", definition="Total[Total TSS installs]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Valid Connectivity Records", definition="Total[PS Boxes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% TSS Connectivity Record", definition="Total[PS Boxes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)] /Total[Total TSS installs]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Not Applicable", definition="Total[Bozes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]-Total[Boxes Eligible (1=yes)]-Total[TSS Refusals]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Customer Refusals", definition="Total[TSS Refusals]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% TSS Refusals", definition="Total[TSS Refusals]/Total[PS Boxes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Eligible for Physical Connectivity", definition="Total[TSS Eligible]-Total[Exception]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Boxes with Physical Connectivty", definition="Total[PS Physical Connectivity] - Total[PS Physical Connectivity, SymmConnect Enabled=\"Capable not enabled\"]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% TSS Physical Connectivity", definition="Total[Boxes w/ phys conn]/Total[Boxes Eligible (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="Total Installs", definition="Total[Total Installs]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="All Boxes with Valid Connectivty Record", definition="Total[Bozes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% All Connectivity Record", definition="Total[Bozes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]/Total[Total Installs]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="Overall Refusals", definition="Total[Overall Refusals]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="Overall Refusals %", definition="Total[Overall Refusals]/Total[Bozes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="All Eligible for Physical Connectivty", definition="Total[Boxes Eligible (1=yes)]-Total[Exception]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="Boxes with Physical Connectivity", definition="Total[Boxes w/ phys conn]-Total[Boxes w/ phys conn,SymmConnect Enabled=\"Capable not enabled\"]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% All with Physical Conectivity", definition="Total[Boxes w/ phys conn]/Total[Boxes Eligible (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" } }, merge_type="consolidate", merge_dbs={ { dbname="connectivityallproducts.mdl", diveline_dbname="/DI_PSREPORTING/connectivityallproducts.mdl" } }, skip_constant_columns="FALSE", categories={ { name="Geography", dimensions={ "Theater", "Division", "Region", "Install at Country Name" } }, { name="Mappings and Flags", dimensions={ "Connect Home Type", "Connect In Type", "SymmConnect Enabled", "Connect Home Refusal Reason", "Sales Order Channel Type", "Maintained By Group", "Customer Installable", "PS Flag", "Top Level Flag", "Avalanche Flag" } }, { name="Product Information", dimensions={ "Product Family", "Product Item Family", "Product Version", "Item Description" } }, { name="Sales Order Info", dimensions={ "Sales Order Deal Number", "Sales Order Number", "Sales Order Type" } }, { name="Dates", dimensions={ "Item Install Date", "Ship Date", "SYR Last Dial Home Date" } }, { name="Details", dimensions={ "Item Serial Number", "TLA Serial Number", "Part Model Key", "Model Number" } }, { name="Customer Infor", dimensions={ "CS Customer Name", "Install At Customer Number", "Customer Classification", "Cust Name" } }, { name="Other Dimensions", dimensions={ "Model" } } }, Maintain_Category_Order="FALSE", popup_info="false" } } };

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• IText can't keep rows together, second row spans multiple pages but won't stick with first row.

  - by J2SE31

  I am having trouble keeping my first and second rows of my main PDFPTable together using IText. My first row consists of a PDFPTable with some basic search criteria. My second row consists of a PdfPTable that contains all of the tabulated results. Everytime the tabulated results becomes too big and spans multiple pages, it is kicked to the second page automatically rather than showing up directly below the search criteria and then paging to the next page. How can I avoid this problem? I have tried using setSplitRows(false), but I simply get a blank document (see commented lines 117 and 170). How can I keep my tabulated data (second row) up on the first page? An example of my code is shown below (you should be able to just copy/paste). public class TestHelper{ private TestEventHelper helper; public TestHelper(){ super(); helper = new TestEventHelper(); } public TestEventHelper getHelper() { return helper; } public void setHelper(TestEventHelper helper) { this.helper = helper; } public static void main(String[] args){ TestHelper test = new TestHelper(); TestEventHelper helper = test.getHelper(); FileOutputStream file = null; Document document = null; PdfWriter writer = null; try { file = new FileOutputStream(new File("C://Documents and Settings//All Users//Desktop//pdffile2.pdf")); document = new Document(PageSize.A4.rotate(), 36, 36, 36, 36); writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document, file); // writer.setPageEvent(templateHelper); writer.setPdfVersion(PdfWriter.PDF_VERSION_1_7); writer.setUserunit(1f); document.open(); List<Element> pages = null; try { pages = helper.createTemplate(); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } Iterator<Element> iterator = pages.iterator(); while (iterator.hasNext()) { Element element = iterator.next(); if (element instanceof Phrase) { document.newPage(); } else { document.add(element); } } } catch (Exception de) { de.printStackTrace(); // log.debug("Exception " + de + " " + de.getMessage()); } finally { if (document != null) { document.close(); } if (writer != null) { writer.close(); } } System.out.println("Done!"); } private class TestEventHelper extends PdfPageEventHelper{ // The PdfTemplate that contains the total number of pages. protected PdfTemplate total; protected BaseFont helv; private static final float SMALL_MARGIN = 20f; private static final float MARGIN = 36f; private final Font font = new Font(Font.HELVETICA, 12, Font.BOLD); private final Font font2 = new Font(Font.HELVETICA, 10, Font.BOLD); private final Font smallFont = new Font(Font.HELVETICA, 10, Font.NORMAL); private String[] datatableHeaderFields = new String[]{"Header1", "Header2", "Header3", "Header4", "Header5", "Header6", "Header7", "Header8", "Header9"}; public TestEventHelper(){ super(); } public List<Element> createTemplate() throws Exception { List<Element> elementList = new ArrayList<Element>(); float[] tableWidths = new float[]{1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.25f, 1.25f, 1.25f, 1.25f}; // logger.debug("entering create reports template..."); PdfPTable splitTable = new PdfPTable(1); splitTable.setSplitRows(false); splitTable.setWidthPercentage(100f); PdfPTable pageTable = new PdfPTable(1); pageTable.setKeepTogether(true); pageTable.setWidthPercentage(100f); PdfPTable searchTable = generateSearchFields(); if(searchTable != null){ searchTable.setSpacingAfter(25f); } PdfPTable outlineTable = new PdfPTable(1); outlineTable.setKeepTogether(true); outlineTable.setWidthPercentage(100f); PdfPTable datatable = new PdfPTable(datatableHeaderFields.length); datatable.setKeepTogether(false); datatable.setWidths(tableWidths); generateDatatableHeader(datatable); for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++){ addCell(datatable, String.valueOf(i), 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, smallFont, true); addCell(datatable, String.valueOf(i+1), 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, smallFont, true); addCell(datatable, String.valueOf(i+2), 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, smallFont, true); addCell(datatable, String.valueOf(i+3), 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, smallFont, true); addCell(datatable, String.valueOf(i+4), 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, smallFont, true); addCell(datatable, String.valueOf(i+5), 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, smallFont, true); addCell(datatable, String.valueOf(i+6), 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, smallFont, true); addCell(datatable, String.valueOf(i+7), 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, smallFont, true); addCell(datatable, String.valueOf(i+8), 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_RIGHT, smallFont, true); } PdfPCell dataCell = new PdfPCell(datatable); dataCell.setBorder(Rectangle.BOX); outlineTable.addCell(dataCell); PdfPCell searchCell = new PdfPCell(searchTable); searchCell.setVerticalAlignment(Element.ALIGN_TOP); PdfPCell outlineCell = new PdfPCell(outlineTable); outlineCell.setVerticalAlignment(Element.ALIGN_TOP); addCell(pageTable, searchCell, 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_LEFT, null, null); addCell(pageTable, outlineCell, 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, null, null); PdfPCell pageCell = new PdfPCell(pageTable); pageCell.setVerticalAlignment(Element.ALIGN_TOP); addCell(splitTable, pageCell, 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, null, null); elementList.add(pageTable); // elementList.add(splitTable); return elementList; } public void onOpenDocument(PdfWriter writer, Document document) { total = writer.getDirectContent().createTemplate(100, 100); total.setBoundingBox(new Rectangle(-20, -20, 100, 100)); try { helv = BaseFont.createFont(BaseFont.HELVETICA, BaseFont.WINANSI, BaseFont.NOT_EMBEDDED); } catch (Exception e) { throw new ExceptionConverter(e); } } public void onEndPage(PdfWriter writer, Document document) { //TODO } public void onCloseDocument(PdfWriter writer, Document document) { total.beginText(); total.setFontAndSize(helv, 10); total.setTextMatrix(0, 0); total.showText(String.valueOf(writer.getPageNumber() - 1)); total.endText(); } private PdfPTable generateSearchFields(){ PdfPTable searchTable = new PdfPTable(2); for(int i = 0; i < 6; i++){ addCell(searchTable, "Search Key" +i, 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_RIGHT, font2, MARGIN, true); addCell(searchTable, "Search Value +i", 1, Rectangle.NO_BORDER, Element.ALIGN_LEFT, smallFont, null, true); } return searchTable; } private void generateDatatableHeader(PdfPTable datatable) { if (datatableHeaderFields != null && datatableHeaderFields.length != 0) { for (int i = 0; i < datatableHeaderFields.length; i++) { addCell(datatable, datatableHeaderFields[i], 1, Rectangle.BOX, Element.ALIGN_CENTER, font2); } } } private PdfPCell addCell(PdfPTable table, String cellContent, int colspan, int cellBorder, int horizontalAlignment, Font font) { return addCell(table, cellContent, colspan, cellBorder, horizontalAlignment, font, null, null); } private PdfPCell addCell(PdfPTable table, String cellContent, int colspan, int cellBorder, int horizontalAlignment, Font font, Boolean noWrap) { return addCell(table, cellContent, colspan, cellBorder, horizontalAlignment, font, null, noWrap); } private PdfPCell addCell(PdfPTable table, String cellContent, Integer colspan, Integer cellBorder, Integer horizontalAlignment, Font font, Float paddingLeft, Boolean noWrap) { PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase(cellContent, font)); return addCell(table, cell, colspan, cellBorder, horizontalAlignment, paddingLeft, noWrap); } private PdfPCell addCell(PdfPTable table, PdfPCell cell, int colspan, int cellBorder, int horizontalAlignment, Float paddingLeft, Boolean noWrap) { cell.setColspan(colspan); cell.setBorder(cellBorder); cell.setHorizontalAlignment(horizontalAlignment); if(paddingLeft != null){ cell.setPaddingLeft(paddingLeft); } if(noWrap != null){ cell.setNoWrap(noWrap); } table.addCell(cell); return cell; } } }

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• urgent help needed to convert arabic html to pdf

  - by Mariam

  <div> <table border="1" width="500px"> <tr> <td colspan="2"> aspdotnetcodebook ????? ???????</td> </tr> <tr> <td> cell1 </td> <td> cell2 </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"> <asp:Label ID="lblLabel" runat="server" Text=""></asp:Label> <img alt="" src="logo.gif" style="width: 174px; height: 40px" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" dir="rtl"> <h1> <img alt="" height="168" src="http://a.cksource.com/c/1/inc/img/demo-little-red.jpg" style="margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;" width="120" />????? ????? ??? ??? ?? ?? ??</h1> <p> &quot;<b>Little Red Riding Hood</b>&quot; is a famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_tale" title="Fairy tale">fairy tale</a> about a young girl&#39;s encounter with a wolf. The story has been changed considerably in its history and subject to numerous modern adaptations and readings.</p> <table align="right" border="1" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" style="width: 200px;"> <caption> <strong>International Names</strong></caption> <tr> <td> ????? ???????</td> <td> &nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> Italian</td> <td> <i>Cappuccetto Rosso</i></td> </tr> <tr> <td> Spanish</td> <td> <i>Caperucita Roja</i></td> </tr> </table> <p> The version most widely known today is based on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm" title="Brothers Grimm"> Brothers Grimm</a> variant. It is about a girl called Little Red Riding Hood, after the red <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hood_(headgear%2529" title="Hood (headgear)">hooded</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape" title="Cape">cape</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloak" title="Cloak">cloak</a> she wears. The girl walks through the woods to deliver food to her sick grandmother.</p> <p> A wolf wants to eat the girl but is afraid to do so in public. He approaches the girl, and she naïvely tells him where she is going. He suggests the girl pick some flowers, which she does. In the meantime, he goes to the grandmother&#39;s house and gains entry by pretending to be the girl. He swallows the grandmother whole, and waits for the girl, disguised as the grandmother.</p> <p> When the girl arrives, she notices he looks very strange to be her grandma. In most retellings, this eventually culminates with Little Red Riding Hood saying, &quot;My, what big teeth you have!&quot;<br /> To which the wolf replies, &quot;The better to eat you with,&quot; and swallows her whole, too.</p> <p> A <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter" title="Hunter">hunter</a>, however, comes to the rescue and cuts the wolf open. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother emerge unharmed. They fill the wolf&#39;s body with heavy stones, which drown him when he falls into a well. Other versions of the story have had the grandmother shut in the closet instead of eaten, and some have Little Red Riding Hood saved by the hunter as the wolf advances on her rather than after she is eaten.</p> <p> The tale makes the clearest contrast between the safe world of the village and the dangers of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchanted_forest" title="Enchanted forest">forest</a>, conventional antitheses that are essentially medieval, though no written versions are as old as that.</p> </td> </tr> </table> </div> i use itextsharp to convert this content which is stored in DB to pdf file to be downloaded to the user i cant achieve this

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