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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 17, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 17, 2010New ProjectsAcademic Success Accounting System: The system is intended to use by school teacher to set marks to students and estimate their academic success and possibilities. The client applicat...Access.PowerTools: Access PowerTools is currently a sample MS Access add-in project to try & test features of Add-in Express™ 2009 for Microsoft® Office and .net (ht...AntoonCms: AntoonCms makes it easy to maintain a simple website with it's builtin administration pages. It's developed in C# on target Framework 2.0 The CMS...ASP.NET MVC Mehr Lib: Mehr Lib makes it easier for ASP.NET MVC developers to do develop projects. It's developed in C#. This version currently include Ajax master detail...BCryptTool: Developer tool that calculates BCrypt hash codes for strings. BCrypt is an implementation of the Blowfish cipher and a computationally-expensive ha...Coronasoft Cryostasis scripting engine: A scripting engine that allows you to dynamically load plugins from just about any supported .NET language. Its written in C#. Languages supported ...Critical Point Search: Critical Point Searchcritical points: critical pointsFont Family Name Retrieval: This library helps developer to retrieve the font family name from the TTF, OTF and TTC font files, so that developer can display the font without ...jQuery Form Input Hints Plugin: Automatically display hints on input textboxes in your forms using this jQuery plugin. I wrote this code to be as simple and as easy to use as pos...Kojax: kojax projectKronRetro: KronRetro! Making a Habbo Retro just got easier! Powered by PHP & MySQL you can make a Habbo Retro site fast!MVVM Wrapper Kit: MVVM Wrapper Kit makes it easier for View Model programmers to wrap their business objects and collections while preserving change notification and...ObjectCartographer: ObjectCartographer is an object to object mapper and object factory. It's developed in C#.PE-file Reader Writer API (PERWAPI): PERWAPI is a reader writer module for .NET program executables. It has been used as back-end for progamming language compilers such as Gardens Poi...Pinger: A simple Pinger, pings an address until you press a buttonQPV: 0.1: QPV aka Que pelicula es una aplicacion que consiste crear una base de datos potente de peliculas, criticas e informacion para poder filtrar pelicul...SIMD Detector: This SIMD class helps developers to detect the types of SIMD instruction available on users' processor. It supports Intel and AMD CPUs. It is writt...StackOverflow Test Project: Following Andrew Siemer's StackOverflow Knowledge Exchange Project.WeBlog: A blogging platform built on the MVC framework The project will showcase current technologies such as MVC 2, Silverlight 4 and jQuery 1.4. Data pro...Webmedia: this is my webmedia projectWindows Azure RSS Reader: This is and online RSS reader based on the Windows Azure platformWordEditor. A Word Editor for Windows, and an extended RichTextBox control.: This is a word editor that can be used as a stand alone word processor, or added to an existing project.Домашняя Бухгалтерия: Программа для ведения домашнего бухгалтерского учета финансов. New ReleasesAccess.PowerTools: Access PowerTools Add-In Community Edition v.0.0.1: Access PowerTools Add-In Community Edition v.0.0.1 is a sample MS Access add-in project to try & test Add-in Express™ 2009 for Microsoft® Office an...Active CSS: ActiveCSS-0.1.1: revision for version 0.1ASP.NET: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.0: The Microsoft Ajax Minifier enables you to improve the performance of your Ajax applications by reducing the size of your Cascading Style Sheet and...ASP.NET MVC Mehr Lib: V1.0: Mehr Lib V1.0 This version currently include ajax master detail combo facilities.ASP.net Ribbon: Version 1.2: New controls : Expandable gallery Color Picker Multi color File Menu Some JS modifications. Some CSS modifications. Includes some functionna...ASP.NET Web Forms Model-View-Presenter (MVP) Contrib: WebForms MVP Contrib CTP6: This is a release of the WebForms MVP Contrib project for WebForms MVP CTP6. Release includes: WebForms MVP Contrib framework Ninject IoC containerAwesomiumDotNet: AwesomiumDotNet 1.2.1: - Added Awesomium 1.5 features: URL filtering, header rewrite rules, SetOpensExternalLinksInCallingFrame. - Numerous fixes and improvements.BCryptTool: BCryptTool v0.1: The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (SP1) is needed to run this program.Buzz Dot Net: Buzz Dot Net v.1.10216: Features Parse Google Buzz feed to Objects Partial MVVM Implementation Partial OptimizationsCanvas VSDOC Intellisense: v1.0.0.0a: canvas-vsdoc.js and canvas-utils.js JavaScript intellisense for HTML5 Canvas element.CheckHeader: CheckHeader v0.8.5: The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (SP1) is needed to run this program.Claymore MVP: Claymore 1.0.2.0: Changelog Added ASP.NET WebForm support via ClaymoreHttpModule class. Added xsd schema for Visual Studio Intellisense within App.config and Web....Dam Gd - URL Shortner: Dam.gd Version 1.1: This is the latest instalment in our URL shortner. It uses The Easy API http://theeasyapi.com to access data that is used for the back-end analyti...D-AMPS: D-AMPS 0.9.1: Initial version.easySMS: easySMS 1.0 Source code: easySMS 1.0 Source codeFont Family Name Retrieval: 1st Release: Version 1.0.0Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire Now Supports DataBinding: Hi, Today we are releasing the much awaited DataBinding feature in Visifire 3.0.3 beta 3. Now you can Bind any DataSource at the Series level so t...GenerateTypedBamApi: Version 2.0: Changes in this release: NEW: Export functionality no longer requires Excel to be installed (uses OLE DB vs. Excel Automation; also enables usage i...Gmail Notifier 2: GmailNotifier2 1.2.1: Fixes issues #9652, #9653iTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.1.3699: This includes the first pass of the iTuner Librarian including management of dead tracks, duplicates, and empty directories... While I promised a ...jQuery Form Input Hints Plugin: jQuery.InputHints v1.0: jQuery.InputHints v1.0 Includes Standard & minified source Demo HTML file VS2008 SolutionLibWowArmory: LibWowArmory 0.2.3 beta: LibWowArmory 0.2.3 betaThis release of the LibWowArmory source code matches the WoW Armory as of version 3.3.2. Changes since version 0.2.2:Update...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF Preview 9: We have merged the .net 3.5 and Silverlight 3 into a single zip. The bin folder contains the binaries for .net 3.5 whereas bin\SL contains the bina...MDX Parser,Builder,DOM and OLAP visual controls with Writeback for Silverlight: Ranet.UILibrary.Olap-1.3.3.0-6571.msi: February 16, 2010 * MdxDesigner: Fix for the issue where when an element is clicked, the mouse wheel stops working until the cursor leaves and r...MEFGeneric: MEFGeneric Preview 9: MEFGeneric Preview 9 release.Mesopotamia Experiment: Mesopotamia 1.2.26: Bug Fixes - mud map - progress window - recycle app domains on robotics engine crashes( in command prompt and visual, major work) - fixed rooomba h...Microsoft Solution Framework for Business Intelligence in Media: Release 1.0: This is the public release of the Microsoft Solution Framework for Business Intelligence in Media (Release 1.0).MVVM Wrapper Kit: MVVM Wrapper Beta: A simple test project is included to get you up and running, and wrapping those business objects.nBayes - Bayesian Filtering in C#: nBayes v0.2: nBayes' indexing system is factored in such a way that you can easily replace the index with a custom implementation. This release introduces an ad...NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.5: 3.6.0.5 16-February-2010 - Fix: SqlAzManSid Class. "Equals" matches object signiture instead of IAzManSid signiture. When a real null object is pas...ObjectCartographer: ObjectCartographer Code 1.0: This is the first release and contains code to help with object to object mapping (including mapping from one object to multiple objects), object f...Office Apps: 0.8.6: Bug fix's, added Calendar.OI - Open Internet: OI HTML and .XAP files (OI offline): this is the HTML code and the XAP file. please right-click the app at http://bit.ly/openinternet and select "install openinternet application to th...PE-file Reader Writer API (PERWAPI): PERWAPI-1.1.3: Perwapi version 1.1.3 is the complete distribution package. It contains Binary files, pdb files and xml files for the PERWAPI and SymbolRW compone...Pinger: Pinger 1.0.0.0 Binary: The Latest BinaryRNA Comparative Analysis Software Tools: RNA Comparative Analysis Software Tools 2.0: RNA Comparative Analysis Software Tools Version 2.0 Note: The RNA Comparative Analysis Software Tools are provided as is, without any warranty. No...SAL- Self Artificial Learning: Artificial Learning working proof of concept: This is a working proof of concept. It includes the Dev version (in .zip format) and the consumer version (in .exe format)SharePoint Management PowerShell scripts: SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Scripts: All the SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Scripts The first file is an Excel 2010 file allowing to find quiclky and easily the new cmdlets available wi...SIMD Detector: 1st Release: Version 1.3 Supports MMX/MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, SSE4a, SSE5, 3DNow.Terminals: Terminals 1.9 Beta Release: This is a beta release so the new features being added to terminals can be tested properly. The major change in this release is that Terminals has...Text Designer Outline Text Library: 9th minor release: Added the ability to select brush, such as gradient brush or texture brush for the text body. Added CSharp library, TextDesignerCSLibrary. Manage...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.0.2: This release has several updated modules. See the Support Forums for more details. Since we update modules very often, we will be changing how we d...WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.6.00: changes CKEditor Upgrade to Version 3.2 SVN 5132 File Browser: After File Upload, File will be Auto Selected File Browser: Icons are corrected ...WordEditor. A Word Editor for Windows, and an extended RichTextBox control.: WordEditor Source Code: This contains the latest solution file, with all project files included.Домашняя Бухгалтерия: Alapha Realease: Принимаются ваши предложения по дизайну и функциональности программы.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for WindowsMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETLiveUpload to FacebookMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrBlogEngine.NETSimple SavantNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelSharpyjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesFluent Validation for .NET

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• West Wind WebSurge - an easy way to Load Test Web Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few months ago on a project the subject of load testing came up. We were having some serious issues with a Web application that would start spewing SQL lock errors under somewhat heavy load. These sort of errors can be tough to catch, precisely because they only occur under load and not during typical development testing. To replicate this error more reliably we needed to put a load on the application and run it for a while before these SQL errors would flare up. It’s been a while since I’d looked at load testing tools, so I spent a bit of time looking at different tools and frankly didn’t really find anything that was a good fit. A lot of tools were either a pain to use, didn’t have the basic features I needed, or are extravagantly expensive. In  the end I got frustrated enough to build an initially small custom load test solution that then morphed into a more generic library, then gained a console front end and eventually turned into a full blown Web load testing tool that is now called West Wind WebSurge. I got seriously frustrated looking for tools every time I needed some quick and dirty load testing for an application. If my aim is to just put an application under heavy enough load to find a scalability problem in code, or to simply try and push an application to its limits on the hardware it’s running I shouldn’t have to have to struggle to set up tests. It should be easy enough to get going in a few minutes, so that the testing can be set up quickly so that it can be done on a regular basis without a lot of hassle. And that was the goal when I started to build out my initial custom load tester into a more widely usable tool. If you’re in a hurry and you want to check it out, you can find more information and download links here: West Wind WebSurge Product Page Walk through Video Download link (zip) Install from Chocolatey Source on GitHub For a more detailed discussion of the why’s and how’s and some background continue reading. How did I get here? When I started out on this path, I wasn’t planning on building a tool like this myself – but I got frustrated enough looking at what’s out there to think that I can do better than what’s available for the most common simple load testing scenarios. When we ran into the SQL lock problems I mentioned, I started looking around what’s available for Web load testing solutions that would work for our whole team which consisted of a few developers and a couple of IT guys both of which needed to be able to run the tests. It had been a while since I looked at tools and I figured that by now there should be some good solutions out there, but as it turns out I didn’t really find anything that fit our relatively simple needs without costing an arm and a leg… I spent the better part of a day installing and trying various load testing tools and to be frank most of them were either terrible at what they do, incredibly unfriendly to use, used some terminology I couldn’t even parse, or were extremely expensive (and I mean in the ‘sell your liver’ range of expensive). Pick your poison. There are also a number of online solutions for load testing and they actually looked more promising, but those wouldn’t work well for our scenario as the application is running inside of a private VPN with no outside access into the VPN. Most of those online solutions also ended up being very pricey as well – presumably because of the bandwidth required to test over the open Web can be enormous. When I asked around on Twitter what people were using– I got mostly… crickets. Several people mentioned Visual Studio Load Test, and most other suggestions pointed to online solutions. I did get a bunch of responses though with people asking to let them know what I found – apparently I’m not alone when it comes to finding load testing tools that are effective and easy to use. As to Visual Studio, the higher end skus of Visual Studio and the test edition include a Web load testing tool, which is quite powerful, but there are a number of issues with that: First it’s tied to Visual Studio so it’s not very portable – you need a VS install. I also find the test setup and terminology used by the VS test runner extremely confusing. Heck, it’s complicated enough that there’s even a Pluralsight course on using the Visual Studio Web test from Steve Smith. And of course you need to have one of the high end Visual Studio Skus, and those are mucho Dinero ($$$) – just for the load testing that’s rarely an option. Some of the tools are ultra extensive and let you run analysis tools on the target serves which is useful, but in most cases – just plain overkill and only distracts from what I tend to be ultimately interested in: Reproducing problems that occur at high load, and finding the upper limits and ‘what if’ scenarios as load is ramped up increasingly against a site. Yes it’s useful to have Web app instrumentation, but often that’s not what you’re interested in. I still fondly remember early days of Web testing when Microsoft had the WAST (Web Application Stress Tool) tool, which was rather simple – and also somewhat limited – but easily allowed you to create stress tests very quickly. It had some serious limitations (mainly that it didn’t work with SSL),  but the idea behind it was excellent: Create tests quickly and easily and provide a decent engine to run it locally with minimal setup. You could get set up and run tests within a few minutes. Unfortunately, that tool died a quiet death as so many of Microsoft’s tools that probably were built by an intern and then abandoned, even though there was a lot of potential and it was actually fairly widely used. Eventually the tools was no longer downloadable and now it simply doesn’t work anymore on higher end hardware. West Wind Web Surge – Making Load Testing Quick and Easy So I ended up creating West Wind WebSurge out of rebellious frustration… The goal of WebSurge is to make it drop dead simple to create load tests. It’s super easy to capture sessions either using the built in capture tool (big props to Eric Lawrence, Telerik and FiddlerCore which made that piece a snap), using the full version of Fiddler and exporting sessions, or by manually or programmatically creating text files based on plain HTTP headers to create requests. I’ve been using this tool for 4 months now on a regular basis on various projects as a reality check for performance and scalability and it’s worked extremely well for finding small performance issues. I also use it regularly as a simple URL tester, as it allows me to quickly enter a URL plus headers and content and test that URL and its results along with the ability to easily save one or more of those URLs. A few weeks back I made a walk through video that goes over most of the features of WebSurge in some detail: Note that the UI has slightly changed since then, so there are some UI improvements. Most notably the test results screen has been updated recently to a different layout and to provide more information about each URL in a session at a glance. The video and the main WebSurge site has a lot of info of basic operations. For the rest of this post I’ll talk about a few deeper aspects that may be of interest while also giving a glance at how WebSurge works. Session Capturing As you would expect, WebSurge works with Sessions of Urls that are played back under load. Here’s what the main Session View looks like: You can create session entries manually by individually adding URLs to test (on the Request tab on the right) and saving them, or you can capture output from Web Browsers, Windows Desktop applications that call services, your own applications using the built in Capture tool. With this tool you can capture anything HTTP -SSL requests and content from Web pages, AJAX calls, SOAP or REST services – again anything that uses Windows or .NET HTTP APIs. Behind the scenes the capture tool uses FiddlerCore so basically anything you can capture with Fiddler you can also capture with Web Surge Session capture tool. Alternately you can actually use Fiddler as well, and then export the captured Fiddler trace to a file, which can then be imported into WebSurge. This is a nice way to let somebody capture session without having to actually install WebSurge or for your customers to provide an exact playback scenario for a given set of URLs that cause a problem perhaps. Note that not all applications work with Fiddler’s proxy unless you configure a proxy. For example, .NET Web applications that make HTTP calls usually don’t show up in Fiddler by default. For those .NET applications you can explicitly override proxy settings to capture those requests to service calls. The capture tool also has handy optional filters that allow you to filter by domain, to help block out noise that you typically don’t want to include in your requests. For example, if your pages include links to CDNs, or Google Analytics or social links you typically don’t want to include those in your load test, so by capturing just from a specific domain you are guaranteed content from only that one domain. Additionally you can provide url filters in the configuration file – filters allow to provide filter strings that if contained in a url will cause requests to be ignored. Again this is useful if you don’t filter by domain but you want to filter out things like static image, css and script files etc. Often you’re not interested in the load characteristics of these static and usually cached resources as they just add noise to tests and often skew the overall url performance results. In my testing I tend to care only about my dynamic requests. SSL Captures require Fiddler Note, that in order to capture SSL requests you’ll have to install the Fiddler’s SSL certificate. The easiest way to do this is to install Fiddler and use its SSL configuration options to get the certificate into the local certificate store. There’s a document on the Telerik site that provides the exact steps to get SSL captures to work with Fiddler and therefore with WebSurge. Session Storage A group of URLs entered or captured make up a Session. Sessions can be saved and restored easily as they use a very simple text format that simply stored on disk. The format is slightly customized HTTP header traces separated by a separator line. The headers are standard HTTP headers except that the full URL instead of just the domain relative path is stored as part of the 1st HTTP header line for easier parsing. Because it’s just text and uses the same format that Fiddler uses for exports, it’s super easy to create Sessions by hand manually or under program control writing out to a simple text file. You can see what this format looks like in the Capture window figure above – the raw captured format is also what’s stored to disk and what WebSurge parses from. The only ‘custom’ part of these headers is that 1st line contains the full URL instead of the domain relative path and Host: header. The rest of each header are just plain standard HTTP headers with each individual URL isolated by a separator line. The format used here also uses what Fiddler produces for exports, so it’s easy to exchange or view data either in Fiddler or WebSurge. Urls can also be edited interactively so you can modify the headers easily as well: Again – it’s just plain HTTP headers so anything you can do with HTTP can be added here. Use it for single URL Testing Incidentally I’ve also found this form as an excellent way to test and replay individual URLs for simple non-load testing purposes. Because you can capture a single or many URLs and store them on disk, this also provides a nice HTTP playground where you can record URLs with their headers, and fire them one at a time or as a session and see results immediately. It’s actually an easy way for REST presentations and I find the simple UI flow actually easier than using Fiddler natively. Finally you can save one or more URLs as a session for later retrieval. I’m using this more and more for simple URL checks. Overriding Cookies and Domains Speaking of HTTP headers – you can also overwrite cookies used as part of the options. One thing that happens with modern Web applications is that you have session cookies in use for authorization. These cookies tend to expire at some point which would invalidate a test. Using the Options dialog you can actually override the cookie: which replaces the cookie for all requests with the cookie value specified here. You can capture a valid cookie from a manual HTTP request in your browser and then paste into the cookie field, to replace the existing Cookie with the new one that is now valid. Likewise you can easily replace the domain so if you captured urls on west-wind.com and now you want to test on localhost you can do that easily easily as well. You could even do something like capture on store.west-wind.com and then test on localhost/store which would also work. Running Load Tests Once you’ve created a Session you can specify the length of the test in seconds, and specify the number of simultaneous threads to run each session on. Sessions run through each of the URLs in the session sequentially by default. One option in the options list above is that you can also randomize the URLs so each thread runs requests in a different order. This avoids bunching up URLs initially when tests start as all threads run the same requests simultaneously which can sometimes skew the results of the first few minutes of a test. While sessions run some progress information is displayed: By default there’s a live view of requests displayed in a Console-like window. On the bottom of the window there’s a running total summary that displays where you’re at in the test, how many requests have been processed and what the requests per second count is currently for all requests. Note that for tests that run over a thousand requests a second it’s a good idea to turn off the console display. While the console display is nice to see that something is happening and also gives you slight idea what’s happening with actual requests, once a lot of requests are processed, this UI updating actually adds a lot of CPU overhead to the application which may cause the actual load generated to be reduced. If you are running a 1000 requests a second there’s not much to see anyway as requests roll by way too fast to see individual lines anyway. If you look on the options panel, there is a NoProgressEvents option that disables the console display. Note that the summary display is still updated approximately once a second so you can always tell that the test is still running. Test Results When the test is done you get a simple Results display: On the right you get an overall summary as well as breakdown by each URL in the session. Both success and failures are highlighted so it’s easy to see what’s breaking in your load test. The report can be printed or you can also open the HTML document in your default Web Browser for printing to PDF or saving the HTML document to disk. The list on the right shows you a partial list of the URLs that were fired so you can look in detail at the request and response data. The list can be filtered by success and failure requests. Each list is partial only (at the moment) and limited to a max of 1000 items in order to render reasonably quickly. Each item in the list can be clicked to see the full request and response data: This particularly useful for errors so you can quickly see and copy what request data was used and in the case of a GET request you can also just click the link to quickly jump to the page. For non-GET requests you can find the URL in the Session list, and use the context menu to Test the URL as configured including any HTTP content data to send. You get to see the full HTTP request and response as well as a link in the Request header to go visit the actual page. Not so useful for a POST as above, but definitely useful for GET requests. Finally you can also get a few charts. The most useful one is probably the Request per Second chart which can be accessed from the Charts menu or shortcut. Here’s what it looks like:   Results can also be exported to JSON, XML and HTML. Keep in mind that these files can get very large rather quickly though, so exports can end up taking a while to complete. Command Line Interface WebSurge runs with a small core load engine and this engine is plugged into the front end application I’ve shown so far. There’s also a command line interface available to run WebSurge from the Windows command prompt. Using the command line you can run tests for either an individual URL (similar to AB.exe for example) or a full Session file. By default when it runs WebSurgeCli shows progress every second showing total request count, failures and the requests per second for the entire test. A silent option can turn off this progress display and display only the results. The command line interface can be useful for build integration which allows checking for failures perhaps or hitting a specific requests per second count etc. It’s also nice to use this as quick and dirty URL test facility similar to the way you’d use Apache Bench (ab.exe). Unlike ab.exe though, WebSurgeCli supports SSL and makes it much easier to create multi-URL tests using either manual editing or the WebSurge UI. Current Status Currently West Wind WebSurge is still in Beta status. I’m still adding small new features and tweaking the UI in an attempt to make it as easy and self-explanatory as possible to run. Documentation for the UI and specialty features is also still a work in progress. I plan on open-sourcing this product, but it won’t be free. There’s a free version available that provides a limited number of threads and request URLs to run. A relatively low cost license  removes the thread and request limitations. Pricing info can be found on the Web site – there’s an introductory price which is $99 at the moment which I think is reasonable compared to most other for pay solutions out there that are exorbitant by comparison… The reason code is not available yet is – well, the UI portion of the app is a bit embarrassing in its current monolithic state. The UI started as a very simple interface originally that later got a lot more complex – yeah, that never happens, right? Unless there’s a lot of interest I don’t foresee re-writing the UI entirely (which would be ideal), but in the meantime at least some cleanup is required before I dare to publish it :-). The code will likely be released with version 1.0. I’m very interested in feedback. Do you think this could be useful to you and provide value over other tools you may or may not have used before? I hope so – it already has provided a ton of value for me and the work I do that made the development worthwhile at this point. You can leave a comment below, or for more extensive discussions you can post a message on the West Wind Message Board in the WebSurge section Microsoft MVPs and Insiders get a free License If you’re a Microsoft MVP or a Microsoft Insider you can get a full license for free. Send me a link to your current, official Microsoft profile and I’ll send you a not-for resale license. Send any messages to [email protected]. Resources For more info on WebSurge and to download it to try it out, use the following links. West Wind WebSurge Home Download West Wind WebSurge Getting Started with West Wind WebSurge Video© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in ASP.NET   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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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 13, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 13, 2010New Projects[Experiment] vczh DBUI: EXPERIMENT. Auto UI adaptor for a specified data base[SAMPLE PROJECT] Branch and Patch with GIT: I'll paste more here later...BlogPress: This web application provides a content management system. Coot: Facebook Photos Screensaver.DotNetNuke® JDMenu: dnnJDMenu makes it easy to use the open source JDMenu component in your DotNetNuke skin.DotNetNuke® RadRotator: dnnRadRotator makes it easy to add telerik RadRotator functionality to your site or custom module. Licensing permits anyone to use the components ...DotNetNuke® RadTabStrip: DNNRadTabStrip makes it easy to add telerik RadTabStrip functionality to your module or skin. Licensing permits anyone to use the components (incl...DotNetNuke® RadTreeView: DNNRadTreeView makes it easy to add telerik RadTreeView functionality to your module or skin. Licensing permits anyone to use the components (incl...DotNetNuke® Skin Garden: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by Mark Allan of DnnGarden. Concise and semantic HTML 5 stru...ElmasFC: Elmas Facebook CheckerFront Callback Protocol: Front Callback Protocol make it easier for developers to create a network application in the .Net Language. It provide the flexibility of using TCP...Glass UI: A Windows Forms Control Library built specifically for Aero Glass. This will consist of existing controls, modified to render on glass, as well as ...Guitarist Tools: Some tools for guitarists.HomeUX: HomeUX is home control software featuring a Silverlight-based touch screen user interface.Homework Helper: Homework Helper help students to train simpler homework like "What's the name of the capital of France?" - Question - Answear based. It's made i...IGNOU Mini Project Allocation: A mini project allocation system.Images Compiler: Images Compiler is pretty small wpf application for users who want to resize, rename, disable colors... for too much images in very short time. It...InstitutionManagementSystem: Institution Management System prototypeManagedCv: ManagedCv is the library for C#/VB/ to use the OpenCV librarymanagement joint ownership: Application pour la gestion des actions réalisées au sein d’une copropriété. Application for management actions within a joint ownershipMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 is an open source geographic information system (GIS) and library of geospatial software development tools for .NET, written in C#. T...Morris Auto: Morris Auto is a social application build templateMouse control with finger detection: The aim of this project is to design an application for recognition of the movement of a finger through a webcam and then control the mouse. The pr...ORAYLIS BI.Quality: ORAYLIS BI.Quality makes it easier to develop BI Solutions in an agile environment. It adapts Unit Tests to BI Development. Propositional Framework: Different sales propositions are presented to the user using data collected from marketing intelligence, browser history or user behaviour as they ...ServStop: ServStop is a .NET application that makes it easy to stop several system services at once. Now you don't have to change startup types or stop them ...shatkotha web portal: source code of web portal shatkothaSurvey and Registration tools: Two Silverlight tools for add Survey and Registration in your websiteTable Storage Backup & Restore for Windows Azure: Allows various backup & restore options for Windows Azure Table Storage accounts: - Backup from one storage account to another - Backup a storag...Topsy Lib: This project provides wrapper methods to call Topsy's web services from C#.twNowplaying: twNowplaying is a small and handy utility that allows you to tweet your currently playing track from Spotify to Twitter. Followed by the #twNowplay...XOM: XOM: Xml Object Mapper Automatically populate your objects with data from XML via an XML map. 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In order to get your objects to work, you need to create an XML file to define your objects. Here is a ...Xpress - ASP.NET MVC 个人博客程序: xpress2.1.1.0312.beta: 最新beta版，注意：此版本和2.1.0不兼容 更改内容： 将主题文件发放在 Views 文件夹下 主题文件支持强类型Model 主题资源文件放在Resouces目录下YS Utils: V 1.0.0.0: This is first release. The YSUtils library contains first set of classes. ZIP files contains documentation.Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NET Ajax LibraryASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrN2 CMSBlogEngine.NETFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryFarseer Physics EngineSharePoint Team-MailerCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightCalcium: A modular application toolset leveraging PrismjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services

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• Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework

  - by ScottGu

  Today we released VS 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. These releases include a ton of great improvements, and include some fantastic enhancements to ASP.NET and the Entity Framework.  You can download and start using them now. Below are details on a few of the great ASP.NET, Web Development, and Entity Framework improvements you can take advantage of with this release.  Please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext for additional release notes, documentation, and tutorials. One ASP.NET With the release of Visual Studio 2013, we have taken a step towards unifying the experience of using the different ASP.NET sub-frameworks (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR, etc), and you can now easily mix and match the different ASP.NET technologies you want to use within a single application. When you do a File-New Project with VS 2013 you’ll now see a single ASP.NET Project option: Selecting this project will bring up an additional dialog that allows you to start with a base project template, and then optionally add/remove the technologies you want to use in it.  For example, you could start with a Web Forms template and add Web API or Web Forms support for it, or create a MVC project and also enable Web Forms pages within it: This makes it easy for you to use any ASP.NET technology you want within your apps, and take advantage of any feature across the entire ASP.NET technology span. Richer Authentication Support The new “One ASP.NET” project dialog also includes a new Change Authentication button that, when pushed, enables you to easily change the authentication approach used by your applications – and makes it much easier to build secure applications that enable SSO from a variety of identity providers.  For example, when you start with the ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC templates you can easily add any of the following authentication options to the application: No Authentication Individual User Accounts (Single Sign-On support with FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft ID – or Forms Auth with ASP.NET Membership) Organizational Accounts (Single Sign-On support with Windows Azure Active Directory ) Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application) The Windows Azure Active Directory support is particularly cool.  Last month we updated Windows Azure Active Directory so that developers can now easily create any number of Directories using it (for free and deployed within seconds).  It now takes only a few moments to enable single-sign-on support within your ASP.NET applications against these Windows Azure Active Directories.  Simply choose the “Organizational Accounts” radio button within the Change Authentication dialog and enter the name of your Windows Azure Active Directory to do this: This will automatically configure your ASP.NET application to use Windows Azure Active Directory and register the application with it.  Now when you run the app your users can easily and securely sign-in using their Active Directory credentials within it – regardless of where the application is hosted on the Internet. For more information about the new process for creating web projects, see Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013. Responsive Project Templates with Bootstrap The new default project templates for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SPA are built using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework that helps you build responsive websites which look great on different form factors such as mobile phones, tables and desktops. For example in a browser window the home page created by the MVC template looks like the following: When you resize the browser to a narrow window to see how it would like on a phone, you can notice how the contents gracefully wrap around and the horizontal top menu turns into an icon: When you click the menu-icon above it expands into a vertical menu – which enables a good navigation experience for small screen real-estate devices: We think Bootstrap will enable developers to build web applications that work even better on phones, tablets and other mobile devices – and enable you to easily build applications that can leverage the rich ecosystem of Bootstrap CSS templates already out there.  You can learn more about Bootstrap here. Visual Studio Web Tooling Improvements Visual Studio 2013 includes a new, much richer, HTML editor for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The new HTML editor provides a single unified schema based on HTML5. It has automatic brace completion, jQuery UI and AngularJS attribute IntelliSense, attribute IntelliSense Grouping, and other great improvements. For example, typing “ng-“ on an HTML element will show the intellisense for AngularJS: This support for AngularJS, Knockout.js, Handlebars and other SPA technologies in this release of ASP.NET and VS 2013 makes it even easier to build rich client web applications: The screen shot below demonstrates how the HTML editor can also now inspect your page at design-time to determine all of the CSS classes that are available. In this case, the auto-completion list contains classes from Bootstrap’s CSS file. No more guessing at which Bootstrap element names you need to use: Visual Studio 2013 also comes with built-in support for both CoffeeScript and LESS editing support. The LESS editor comes with all the cool features from the CSS editor and has specific Intellisense for variables and mixins across all the LESS documents in the @import chain. Browser Link – SignalR channel between browser and Visual Studio The new Browser Link feature in VS 2013 lets you run your app within multiple browsers on your dev machine, connect them to Visual Studio, and simultaneously refresh all of them just by clicking a button in the toolbar. You can connect multiple browsers (including IE, FireFox, Chrome) to your development site, including mobile emulators, and click refresh to refresh all the browsers all at the same time.  This makes it much easier to easily develop/test against multiple browsers in parallel. Browser Link also exposes an API to enable developers to write Browser Link extensions.  By enabling developers to take advantage of the Browser Link API, it becomes possible to create very advanced scenarios that crosses boundaries between Visual Studio and any browser that’s connected to it. Web Essentials takes advantage of the API to create an integrated experience between Visual Studio and the browser’s developer tools, remote controlling mobile emulators and a lot more. You will see us take advantage of this support even more to enable really cool scenarios going forward. ASP.NET Scaffolding ASP.NET Scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.NET Web applications. It makes it easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. When using scaffolding, we ensure that all required dependencies are automatically installed for you in the project. For example, if you start with an ASP.NET Web Forms project and then use scaffolding to add a Web API Controller, the required NuGet packages and references to enable Web API are added to your project automatically.  To do this, just choose the Add->New Scaffold Item context menu: Support for scaffolding async controllers uses the new async features from Entity Framework 6. ASP.NET Identity ASP.NET Identity is a new membership system for ASP.NET applications that we are introducing with this release. ASP.NET Identity makes it easy to integrate user-specific profile data with application data. ASP.NET Identity also allows you to choose the persistence model for user profiles in your application. You can store the data in a SQL Server database or another data store, including NoSQL data stores such as Windows Azure Storage Tables. ASP.NET Identity also supports Claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. Users can login by creating an account on the website using username and password, or they can login using social identity providers (such as Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or using organizational accounts through Windows Azure Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). To learn more about how to use ASP.NET Identity visit http://www.asp.net/identity.  ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 has a bunch of great improvements including: Attribute routing ASP.NET Web API now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your Web API routes by annotating your actions and controllers like this: OAuth 2.0 support The Web API and Single Page Application project templates now support authorization using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a framework for authorizing client access to protected resources. It works for a variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API also now provides support for OData endpoints and enables support for both ATOM and JSON-light formats. With OData you get support for rich query semantics, paging, $metadata, CRUD operations, and custom actions over any data source. Below are some of the specific enhancements in ASP.NET Web API 2 OData. Support for $select, $expand, $batch, and $value Improved extensibility Type-less support Reuse an existing model OWIN Integration ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API. More Web API Improvements In addition to the features above there have been a host of other features in ASP.NET Web API, including CORS support Authentication Filters Filter Overrides Improved Unit Testability Portable ASP.NET Web API Client To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/web-api/ ASP.NET SignalR 2 ASP.NET SignalR is library for ASP.NET developers that dramatically simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to your applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server-side code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR 2.0 introduces a ton of great improvements. We’ve added support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to SignalR 2.0. iOS and Android support for SignalR have also been added using the MonoTouch and MonoDroid components from the Xamarin library (for more information on how to use these additions, see the article Using Xamarin Components from the SignalR wiki). We’ve also added support for the Portable .NET Client in SignalR 2.0 and created a new self-hosting package. This change makes the setup process for SignalR much more consistent between web-hosted and self-hosted SignalR applications. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/signalr. ASP.NET MVC 5 The ASP.NET MVC project templates integrate seamlessly with the new One ASP.NET experience and enable you to integrate all of the above ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Identity improvements. You can also customize your MVC project and configure authentication using the One ASP.NET project creation wizard. The MVC templates have also been updated to use ASP.NET Identity and Bootstrap as well. An introductory tutorial to ASP.NET MVC 5 can be found at Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 5. This release of ASP.NET MVC also supports several nice new MVC-specific features including: Authentication filters: These filters allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller or globally for all controllers. Attribute Routing: Attribute Routing allows you to define your routes on actions or controllers. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/mvc Entity Framework 6 Improvements Visual Studio 2013 ships with Entity Framework 6, which bring a lot of great new features to the data access space: Async and Task<T> Support EF6’s new Async Query and Save support enables you to perform asynchronous data access and take advantage of the Task<T> support introduced in .NET 4.5 within data access scenarios.  This allows you to free up threads that might otherwise by blocked on data access requests, and enable them to be used to process other requests whilst you wait for the database engine to process operations. When the database server responds the thread will be re-queued within your ASP.NET application and execution will continue.  This enables you to easily write significantly more scalable server code. Here is an example ASP.NET WebAPI action that makes use of the new EF6 async query methods: Interception and Logging Interception and SQL logging allows you to view – or even change – every command that is sent to the database by Entity Framework. This includes a simple, human readable log – which is great for debugging – as well as some lower level building blocks that give you access to the command and results. Here is an example of wiring up the simple log to Debug in the constructor of an MVC controller: Custom Code-First Conventions The new Custom Code-First Conventions enable bulk configuration of a Code First model – reducing the amount of code you need to write and maintain. Conventions are great when your domain classes don’t match the Code First conventions. For example, the following convention configures all properties that are called ‘Key’ to be the primary key of the entity they belong to. This is different than the default Code First convention that expects Id or <type name>Id. Connection Resiliency The new Connection Resiliency feature in EF6 enables you to register an execution strategy to handle – and potentially retry – failed database operations. This is especially useful when deploying to cloud environments where dropped connections become more common as you traverse load balancers and distributed networks. EF6 includes a built-in execution strategy for SQL Azure that knows about retryable exception types and has some sensible – but overridable – defaults for the number of retries and time between retries when errors occur. Registering it is simple using the new Code-Based Configuration support: These are just some of the new features in EF6. You can visit the release notes section of the Entity Framework site for a complete list of new features. Microsoft OWIN Components Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) defines an open abstraction between .NET web servers and web applications, and the ASP.NET “Katana” project brings this abstraction to ASP.NET. OWIN decouples the web application from the server, making web applications host-agnostic. For example, you can host an OWIN-based web application in IIS or self-host it in a custom process. For more information about OWIN and Katana, see What's new in OWIN and Katana. Summary Today’s Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET and Entity Framework release delivers some fantastic new features that streamline your web development lifecycle. These feature span from server framework to data access to tooling to client-side HTML development.  They also integrate some great open-source technology and contributions from our developer community. Download and start using them today! 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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• Guide to reduce TFS database growth using the Test Attachment Cleaner

  - by terje

  Recently there has been several reports on TFS databases growing too fast and growing too big.  Notable this has been observed when one has started to use more features of the Testing system.  Also, the TFS 2010 handles test results differently from TFS 2008, and this leads to more data stored in the TFS databases. As a consequence of this there has been released some tools to remove unneeded data in the database, and also some fixes to correct for bugs which has been found and corrected during this process.  Further some preventive practices and maintenance rules should be adopted. A lot of people have blogged about this, among these are: Anu’s very important blog post here describes both the problem and solutions to handle it.  She describes both the Test Attachment Cleaner tool, and also some QFE/CU releases to fix some underlying bugs which prevented the tool from being fully effective. Brian Harry’s blog post here describes the problem too This forum thread describes the problem with some solution hints. Ravi Shanker’s blog post here describes best practices on solving this (TBP) Grant Holidays blogpost here describes strategies to use the Test Attachment Cleaner both to detect space problems and how to rectify them.   The problem can be divided into the following areas: Publishing of test results from builds Publishing of manual test results and their attachments in particular Publishing of deployment binaries for use during a test run Bugs in SQL server preventing total cleanup of data (All the published data above is published into the TFS database as attachments.) The test results will include all data being collected during the run.  Some of this data can grow rather large, like IntelliTrace logs and video recordings.   Also the pushing of binaries which happen for automated test runs, including tests run during a build using code coverage which will include all the files in the deployment folder, contributes a lot to the size of the attached data.   In order to handle this systematically, I have set up a 3-stage process: Find out if you have a database space issue Set up your TFS server to minimize potential database issues If you have the “problem”, clean up the database and otherwise keep it clean   Analyze the data Are your database( s) growing ?  Are unused test results growing out of proportion ? To find out about this you need to query your TFS database for some of the information, and use the Test Attachment Cleaner (TAC) to obtain some  more detailed information. If you don’t have too many databases you can use the SQL Server reports from within the Management Studio to analyze the database and table sizes. Or, you can use a set of queries . I find queries often faster to use because I can tweak them the way I want them.  But be aware that these queries are non-documented and non-supported and may change when the product team wants to change them. If you have multiple Project Collections, find out which might have problems: (Disclaimer: The queries below work on TFS 2010. They will not work on Dev-11, since the table structure have been changed.  I will try to update them for Dev-11 when it is released.) Open a SQL Management Studio session onto the SQL Server where you have your TFS Databases. Use the query below to find the Project Collection databases and their sizes, in descending size order.  use master select DB_NAME(database_id) AS DBName, (size/128) SizeInMB FROM sys.master_files where type=0 and substring(db_name(database_id),1,4)='Tfs_' and DB_NAME(database_id)<>'Tfs_Configuration' order by size desc Doing this on one of our SQL servers gives the following results: It is pretty easy to see on which collection to start the work   Find out which tables are possibly too large Keep a special watch out for the Tfs_Attachment table. Use the script at the bottom of Grant’s blog to find the table sizes in descending size order. In our case we got this result: From Grant’s blog we learnt that the tbl_Content is in the Version Control category, so the major only big issue we have here is the tbl_AttachmentContent.   Find out which team projects have possibly too large attachments In order to use the TAC to find and eventually delete attachment data we need to find out which team projects have these attachments. The team project is a required parameter to the TAC. Use the following query to find this, replace the collection database name with whatever applies in your case:   use Tfs_DefaultCollection select p.projectname, sum(a.compressedlength)/1024/1024 as sizeInMB from dbo.tbl_Attachment as a inner join tbl_testrun as tr on a.testrunid=tr.testrunid inner join tbl_project as p on p.projectid=tr.projectid group by p.projectname order by sum(a.compressedlength) desc In our case we got this result (had to remove some names), out of more than 100 team projects accumulated over quite some years: As can be seen here it is pretty obvious the “Byggtjeneste – Projects” are the main team project to take care of, with the ones on lines 2-4 as the next ones.  Check which attachment types takes up the most space It can be nice to know which attachment types takes up the space, so run the following query: use Tfs_DefaultCollection select a.attachmenttype, sum(a.compressedlength)/1024/1024 as sizeInMB from dbo.tbl_Attachment as a inner join tbl_testrun as tr on a.testrunid=tr.testrunid inner join tbl_project as p on p.projectid=tr.projectid group by a.attachmenttype order by sum(a.compressedlength) desc We then got this result: From this it is pretty obvious that the problem here is the binary files, as also mentioned in Anu’s blog. Check which file types, by their extension, takes up the most space Run the following query use Tfs_DefaultCollection select SUBSTRING(filename,len(filename)-CHARINDEX('.',REVERSE(filename))+2,999)as Extension, sum(compressedlength)/1024 as SizeInKB from tbl_Attachment group by SUBSTRING(filename,len(filename)-CHARINDEX('.',REVERSE(filename))+2,999) order by sum(compressedlength) desc This gives a result like this:   Now you should have collected enough information to tell you what to do – if you got to do something, and some of the information you need in order to set up your TAC settings file, both for a cleanup and for scheduled maintenance later.    Get your TFS server and environment properly set up Even if you have got the problem or if have yet not got the problem, you should ensure the TFS server is set up so that the risk of getting into this problem is minimized.  To ensure this you should install the following set of updates and components. The assumption is that your TFS Server is at SP1 level. Install the QFE for KB2608743 – which also contains detailed instructions on its use, download from here. The QFE changes the default settings to not upload deployed binaries, which are used in automated test runs. Binaries will still be uploaded if: Code coverage is enabled in the test settings. You change the UploadDeploymentItem to true in the testsettings file. Be aware that this might be reset back to false by another user which haven't installed this QFE. The hotfix should be installed to The build servers (the build agents) The machine hosting the Test Controller Local development computers (Visual Studio) Local test computers (MTM) It is not required to install it to the TFS Server, test agents or the build controller – it has no effect on these programs. If you use the SQL Server 2008 R2 you should also install the CU 10 (or later).  This CU fixes a potential problem of hanging “ghost” files.  This seems to happen only in certain trigger situations, but to ensure it doesn’t bite you, it is better to make sure this CU is installed. There is no such CU for SQL Server 2008 pre-R2 Work around:  If you suspect hanging ghost files, they can be – with some mental effort, deduced from the ghost counters using the following SQL query: use master SELECT DB_NAME(database_id) as 'database',OBJECT_NAME(object_id) as 'objectname', index_type_desc,ghost_record_count,version_ghost_record_count,record_count,avg_record_size_in_bytes FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(N'<DatabaseName>'), OBJECT_ID(N'<TableName>'), NULL, NULL , 'DETAILED') The problem is a stalled ghost cleanup process.  Restarting the SQL server after having stopped all components that depends on it, like the TFS Server and SPS services – that is all applications that connect to the SQL server. Then restart the SQL server, and finally start up all dependent processes again.  (I would guess a complete server reboot would do the trick too.) After this the ghost cleanup process will run properly again. The fix will come in the next CU cycle for SQL Server R2 SP1.  The R2 pre-SP1 and R2 SP1 have separate maintenance cycles, and are maintained individually. Each have its own set of CU’s. When it comes I will add the link here to that CU. The "hanging ghost file” issue came up after one have run the TAC, and deleted enourmes amount of data.  The SQL Server can get into this hanging state (without the QFE) in certain cases due to this. And of course, install and set up the Test Attachment Cleaner command line power tool.  This should be done following some guidelines from Ravi Shanker: “When you run TAC, ensure that you are deleting small chunks of data at regular intervals (say run TAC every night at 3AM to delete data that is between age 730 to 731 days) – this will ensure that small amounts of data are being deleted and SQL ghosted record cleanup can catch up with the number of deletes performed. “ This rule minimizes the risk of the ghosted hang problem to occur, and further makes it easier for the SQL server ghosting process to work smoothly. “Run DBCC SHRINKDB post the ghosted records are cleaned up to physically reclaim the space on the file system” This is the last step in a 3 step process of removing SQL server data. First they are logically deleted. Then they are cleaned out by the ghosting process, and finally removed using the shrinkdb command. Cleaning out the attachments The TAC is run from the command line using a set of parameters and controlled by a settingsfile.  The parameters point out a server uri including the team project collection and also point at a specific team project. So in order to run this for multiple team projects regularly one has to set up a script to run the TAC multiple times, once for each team project.  When you install the TAC there is a very useful readme file in the same directory. When the deployment binaries are published to the TFS server, ALL items are published up from the deployment folder. That often means much more files than you would assume are necessary. This is a brute force technique. It works, but you need to take care when cleaning up. Grant has shown how their settings file looks in his blog post, removing all attachments older than 180 days , as long as there are no active workitems connected to them. This setting can be useful to clean out all items, both in a clean-up once operation, and in a general There are two scenarios we need to consider: Cleaning up an existing overgrown database Maintaining a server to avoid an overgrown database using scheduled TAC   1. Cleaning up a database which has grown too big due to these attachments. This job is a “Once” job.  We do this once and then move on to make sure it won’t happen again, by taking the actions in 2) below.  In this scenario you should only consider the large files. Your goal should be to simply reduce the size, and don’t bother about  the smaller stuff. That can be left a scheduled TAC cleanup ( 2 below). Here you can use a very general settings file, and just remove the large attachments, or you can choose to remove any old items.  Grant’s settings file is an example of the last one.  A settings file to remove only large attachments could look like this: <!-- Scenario : Remove large files --> <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun /> <Attachment> <SizeInMB GreaterThan="10" /> </Attachment> </DeletionCriteria> Or like this: If you want only to remove dll’s and pdb’s about that size, add an Extensions-section.  Without that section, all extensions will be deleted. <!-- Scenario : Remove large files of type dll's and pdb's --> <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun /> <Attachment> <SizeInMB GreaterThan="10" /> <Extensions> <Include value="dll" /> <Include value="pdb" /> </Extensions> </Attachment> </DeletionCriteria> Before you start up your scheduled maintenance, you should clear out all older items. 2. Scheduled maintenance using the TAC If you run a schedule every night, and remove old items, and also remove them in small batches.  It is important to run this often, like every night, in order to keep the number of deleted items low. That way the SQL ghost process works better. One approach could be to delete all items older than some number of days, let’s say 180 days. This could be combined with restricting it to keep attachments with active or resolved bugs.  Doing this every night ensures that only small amounts of data is deleted. <!-- Scenario : Remove old items except if they have active or resolved bugs --> <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun> <AgeInDays OlderThan="180" /> </TestRun> <Attachment /> <LinkedBugs> <Exclude state="Active" /> <Exclude state="Resolved"/> </LinkedBugs> </DeletionCriteria> In my experience there are projects which are left with active or resolved workitems, akthough no further work is done.  It can be wise to have a cleanup process with no restrictions on linked bugs at all. Note that you then have to remove the whole LinkedBugs section. A approach which could work better here is to do a two step approach, use the schedule above to with no LinkedBugs as a sweeper cleaning task taking away all data older than you could care about.  Then have another scheduled TAC task to take out more specifically attachments that you are not likely to use. This task could be much more specific, and based on your analysis clean out what you know is troublesome data. <!-- Scenario : Remove specific files early --> <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun > <AgeInDays OlderThan="30" /> </TestRun> <Attachment> <SizeInMB GreaterThan="10" /> <Extensions> <Include value="iTrace"/> <Include value="dll"/> <Include value="pdb"/> <Include value="wmv"/> </Extensions> </Attachment> <LinkedBugs> <Exclude state="Active" /> <Exclude state="Resolved" /> </LinkedBugs> </DeletionCriteria> The readme document for the TAC says that it recognizes “internal” extensions, but it does recognize any extension. To run the tool do the following command: tcmpt attachmentcleanup /collection:your_tfs_collection_url /teamproject:your_team_project /settingsfile:path_to_settingsfile /outputfile:%temp%/teamproject.tcmpt.log /mode:delete   Shrinking the database You could run a shrink database command after the TAC has run in cases where there are a lot of data being deleted.  In this case you SHOULD do it, to free up all that space.  But, after the shrink operation you should do a rebuild indexes, since the shrink operation will leave the database in a very fragmented state, which will reduce performance. Note that you need to rebuild indexes, reorganizing is not enough. For smaller amounts of data you should NOT shrink the database, since the data will be reused by the SQL server when it need to add more records.  In fact, it is regarded as a bad practice to shrink the database regularly.  So on a daily maintenance schedule you should NOT shrink the database. To shrink the database you do a DBCC SHRINKDATABASE command, and then follow up with a DBCC INDEXDEFRAG afterwards.  I find the easiest way to do this is to create a SQL Maintenance plan including the Shrink Database Task and the Rebuild Index Task and just execute it when you need to do this.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 01, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 01, 2012Popular ReleasesMetodología General Ajustada - MGA: 01.09.08: Cambios John: Cambios en el MDI: Habilitación del menú e ícono de Imprimir. Deshabilitación de menú Ayuda y opciones de Importar y Exportar del menú Proyectos temporalmente. Integración con código de Crystal Report. Validaciones con Try-Catch al generar los reportes, personalización de los formularios en estilos y botones y validación de selección de tipo de reporte. Creación de instalador con TODOS los cambios y la creación de las carpetas asociadas a los RPT.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke®: CKEditor Provider 1.14.01: Whats NewAdded New Plugin "Ventrian News Articles Link Selector" to select an Article Link from the News Article Module (This Plugin is not visible by default in your Toolbar, you need to manually add the 'newsarticleslinks' to your toolbarset) http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/CKEditorNewsArticlesLinks.png File-Browser: Added Paging to the Files List. You can define the Page Size in the Options (Default Value: 20) http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/CKEdito...MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0 (Beta): A friendlier User Interface. A logger file to catch exceptions so you may send it to use to improve and fix any bugs that may occur. A feedback form because we always love hearing what you guy's think of MyRouter. Check for update menu item for you to stay up to date will the latest changes. Facebook fan page so you may spread the word and share MyRouter with friends and family And Many other exciting features were sure your going to love!WPF Sound Visualization Library: WPF SVL 0.3 (Source, Binaries, Examples, Help): Version 0.3 of WPFSVL. This includes three new controls: an equalizer, a digital clock, and a time editor.Thai Flood Watch: Thai Flood Watch - Source: non commercial use only ** This project supported by Department of Computer Science KhonKaen University Thailand.ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.4.0.0: sync with rev. 2196 of the java version important fix for RGBLuminanceSource generating barcode bitmaps Windows Phone demo client (only tested with emulator, because I don't have a Windows Phone) Barcode generation support for Windows Forms demo client Webcam support for Windows Forms demo clientOrchard Project: Orchard 1.4: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-Notes.NET Assembly Information: Assembly Information 2.1.0.1: - Fixed the issue in which AnyCPU binaries were shown as 32bit - Added support to show the errors in-case if some dlls failed to load.FluentData -Micro ORM with a fluent API that makes it simple to query a database: FluentData version 1.2: New features: - QueryValues method - Added support for automapping to enumerations (both int and string are supported). Fixed 2 reported issues.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.15: 3.6.0.15 28-Feb-2012 • Fix: The communication object, System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, cannot be used for communication because it is in the Faulted state. Work Item 10435: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10435 • Fix: Made StorageCache thread safe. Thanks to tangrl. • Fix: Members property of SqlAzManApplicationGroup is not functioning. Thanks to tangrl. Work Item 10267: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10267 • Fix: Indexer are making database calls. Thanks to t...SCCM Client Actions Tool: Client Actions Tool v1.1: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.1 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added stop button to stop the ongoing process. Added action "Query update status". Added option "saveOnlineComputers" in config.ini to enable saving list of online computers from last session. Default value for "LatestClientVersion" set to SP2 R3 (4.00.6487.2157). Wuauserv service manual startup mode is considered healthy on Windows 7. Errors are now suppressed in checkReleases...Kinect PowerPoint Control: Kinect PowerPoint Control v1.1: Updated for Kinect SDK 1.0.SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8: API Updates: SOLID Extract Method for Archives (7Zip and RAR). ExtractAllEntries method on Archive classes will extract archives as a streaming file. This can offer better 7Zip extraction performance if any of the entries are solid. The IsSolid method on 7Zip archives will return true if any are solid. Removed IExtractionListener was removed in favor of events. Unit tests show example. Bug fixes: PPMd passes tests plus other fixes (Thanks Pavel) Zip used to always write a Post Descri...Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.3): This new version includes: - Download new networks for Facebook fan pages. - New options for downloading more posts - Bug fixes To use the new graph data provider, do the following: Unzip the Zip file into the "PlugIns" folder that can be found in the NodeXL installation folder (i.e "C:\Program Files\Social Media Research Foundation\NodeXL Excel Template\PlugIns") Open NodeXL template and you can access the new importer from the "Import" menuASP.NET REST Services Framework: Release 1.1 - Standard version: Beginning from v1.1 the REST-services Framework is compatible with ASP.NET Routing model as well with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) principle. These two are often important when building REST API functionality within your application. It also includes ability to apply Filters to a class to target all WebRest methods, as well as some performance enhancements. New version includes Metadata Explorer providing ability exploring the existing services that becomes essential as the number ...SQL Live Monitor: SQL Live Monitor 1.31: A quick fix to make it this version work with SQL 2012. Version 2 already has 2012 working, but am still developing the UI in version 2, so this is just an interim fix to allow user to monitor SQL 2012.Content Slider Module for DotNetNuke: 01.02.00: This release has the following updates and new features: Feature: One-Click Enabling of Pager Setting Feature: Cache Sliders for Performance Feature: Configurable Cache Setting Enhancement: Transitions can be Selected Bug: Secure Folder Images not Viewable Bug: Sliders Disappear on Postback Bug: Remote Images Cause Error Bug: Deleted Images Cause Error System Requirements DotNetNuke v06.00.00 or newer .Net Framework v3.5 SP1 or newer SQL Server 2005 or newerImage Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 3: Here is yet another iteration toward what will eventually become Image Resizer 3. This release is stable. However, I'm calling it a preview since there are still many features I'd still like to add before calling it complete. Updated on February 28 to fix an issue with installing on multi-user machines. As usual, here is my progress report. Done Preview 3 Fix: 3206 3076 3077 5688 Fix: 7420 Fix: 7527 Fix: 7576 7612 Preview 2 6308 6309 Fix: 7339 Fix: 7357 Preview 1 UI...Finestra Virtual Desktops: 2.5.4500: This is a bug fix release for version 2.5. It fixes several things and adds a couple of minor features. See the 2.5 release notes for more information on the major new features in that version. Important - If Finestra crashes on startup for you, you must install the Visual C++ 2010 runtime from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5555. Fixes a bug with window animations not refreshing the screen on XP and with DWM off Fixes a bug with with crashing on XP due to a bug in t...Media Companion: MC 3.432b Release: General Now remembers window location. Catching a few more exceptions when an image is blank TV A couple of UI tweaks Movies Fixed the actor name displaying HTML Fixed crash when using Save files as "movie.nfo", "movie.tbn", & "fanart.jpg" New CSV template for HTML output function Added <createdate> tag for HTML output A couple of UI tweaks Known Issues Multiepisodes are not handled correctly in MC. The created nfo is valid, but they are not displayed in MC correctly & saving the...New Projectsabac: abac cn websiteAION Launcher: simple aion launcher...just edit the background image of your choosing inside the code and other things such as the links for the buttons and the ip adress and port of the serverAXTFSTool: Dynamics AX tool that connects to your project's TFS and lists the objects your colleagues have changed. Written in C#, still under development and improvements. Useful for team leaders, deployment managers, etc.cookieTopo: Topo map viewerCrmFetchKit.js: Simple Library at allows the execution of fetchxml queries via JavaScript for Dynamics CRM 2011 (using the new WCF endpoints). Like the CrmRestKit this framework uses the promise/A capacities of jQuery. The code and the idea for this framework bases on the CrmServiceToolkit (http://crmtoolkit.codeplex.com/) developed by Daniel Cai. cy univerX engine: ????????DNSAPI.NET: A common API for managing DNS servers on Windows. This project is based on the work I started back in 2002 when I needed to create a web front-end for Windows' DNS server using the .Net framework. The plan is to expand on the project and include support for the BIND server on Windows too. ego.net: ego.netfdTFS: Team Foundation Server Source Control Plugin for FlashDevelopGeoWPS: GeoWPS is an implementation of the OGC WPS. It will be developed in C#. IThink: A new project.King Garden: Boy King's .net practical projects.King Garret: Boy King's .net learning projects.LottoCheck: Follow LottoNot-Terraria: This is a like terraria game but NOT terrariaPassword Protector: Password Protector SharePoint 2010 BlobCache Manager: Manage your web application's blobcache settings directly in the central administration.SharePoint 2010 SilverLight Multiple File Uploader: SharePoint 2010 SilverLight Multiple File Uploader for Documents Libraries with MetaData.Sharepoint Tool Collection: I want to Integrate Various Utilities of Sharepoint at one place. It is for easy working of user or developer. Ex-1. A utility which takes some params & csv file and upload 100s of items on the sharepoint list easily. Ex-2 A utility to upload documents in a library. etc.SQLCLR Cmd Exec Framework Example: For users of MS SQL Server, xp_cmdshell is a utility that we usually want to have disabled. However there are still cases where calling a command line is needed. This project provides an framework/example to make command line calls. It is not meant as an xp_cmdshell replacement but as a workaround.Symmetric Designs Python 3.2: Symmetric Designs for Python 3.2 helps graphical artists to design and develop their own designs freestyle. It uses the pygame module for Python 3.2. It can also be analysed in order to get a grasp of graphics programming in Python.Terminsoft open CLR libraries: Terminsoft open CLR libraries. The first is Terminsoft.Intervals, intended for modeling the sets of intervals with elements, the comparison operation is defined for. The second is Terminsoft.Syntax, intended for text parsing and transformation and built upon regular expressions.Thai Flood Watch: Thai Flood Watch provides useful information, up-to-date and visual access to the major canal in Bangkok, Thailand using data from department of drainage and sewerage. Easily monitor river and canal flow information in Bangkok area, right from your hand.TheNerd: Sample video game source code. Using Sunburn.Unity.WebAPI: A library that allows simple Integration of Microsoft's Unity IoC container with ASP.NET's WebAPI. This project includes a bespoke DependencyResolver that creates a child container per HTTP request and disposes of all registered IDisposable instances at the end of the request.Wholemy.RemoteTouch: The project is a remote touch-sensitive keyboard with a customizable interface which allows to supplement control of another computer, regardless of the wires. For example, if you have not so fast Tablet PC - a client and a fast desktop computer - the server using the network.WindowPlace: WindowPlace makes it possible to save Window positions and sizes to a profile. Switching between profiles will effortlessly move and resize your windows. Help improve productivity - especially for multi-monitor systems. Developed in C# using WPF and a few Windows API calls in the background. WP Error Manager (Devv.Core.WPErrorManager): Library to log, handle and report errors on Windows Phone 7 apps. Fully customizable and extremely easy to implement. Works with any WP7 app. Tested with the emulator, Nokia Lumia 800 and Samsung Focus Flash.WPMatic: Windows Phone7 App to manage Homematic (eQ-3) Devices. The App is like the Homematic Central Configuration Unit (CCU) in German.www.Nabaza.com Freeware and Ebooks: www.Nabaza.com Freeware and Ebooks by William R. NabazaZap: Zap is a light weight .NET communication framework. It is designed for programs running in local area network. Zap provides code generation tool that enables user to call remote methods, add/remote event listener to remote objects, while hides the lower details.

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• Using jQuery to POST Form Data to an ASP.NET ASMX AJAX Web Service

  - by Rick Strahl

  The other day I got a question about how to call an ASP.NET ASMX Web Service or PageMethods with the POST data from a Web Form (or any HTML form for that matter). The idea is that you should be able to call an endpoint URL, send it regular urlencoded POST data and then use Request.Form[] to retrieve the posted data as needed. My first reaction was that you can’t do it, because ASP.NET ASMX AJAX services (as well as Page Methods and WCF REST AJAX Services) require that the content POSTed to the server is posted as JSON and sent with an application/json or application/x-javascript content type. IOW, you can’t directly call an ASP.NET AJAX service with regular urlencoded data. Note that there are other ways to accomplish this. You can use ASP.NET MVC and a custom route, an HTTP Handler or separate ASPX page, or even a WCF REST service that’s configured to use non-JSON inputs. However if you want to use an ASP.NET AJAX service (or Page Methods) with a little bit of setup work it’s actually quite easy to capture all the form variables on the client and ship them up to the server. The basic steps needed to make this happen are: Capture form variables into an array on the client with jQuery’s .serializeArray() function Use $.ajax() or my ServiceProxy class to make an AJAX call to the server to send this array On the server create a custom type that matches the .serializeArray() name/value structure Create extension methods on NameValue[] to easily extract form variables Create a [WebMethod] that accepts this name/value type as an array (NameValue[]) This seems like a lot of work but realize that steps 3 and 4 are a one time setup step that can be reused in your entire site or multiple applications. Let’s look at a short example that looks like this as a base form of fields to ship to the server: The HTML for this form looks something like this: <div id="divMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display: none"> </div> <div> <div class="label">Name:</div> <div><asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName" /></div> </div> <div> <div class="label">Company:</div> <div><asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtCompany"/></div> </div> <div> <div class="label" ></div> <div> <asp:DropDownList runat="server" ID="lstAttending"> <asp:ListItem Text="Attending" Value="Attending"/> <asp:ListItem Text="Not Attending" Value="NotAttending" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Maybe Attending" Value="MaybeAttending" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Not Sure Yet" Value="NotSureYet" /> </asp:DropDownList> </div> </div> <div> <div class="label">Special Needs:<br /> <small>(check all that apply)</small></div> <div> <asp:ListBox runat="server" ID="lstSpecialNeeds" SelectionMode="Multiple"> <asp:ListItem Text="Vegitarian" Value="Vegitarian" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Vegan" Value="Vegan" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Kosher" Value="Kosher" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Special Access" Value="SpecialAccess" /> <asp:ListItem Text="No Binder" Value="NoBinder" /> </asp:ListBox> </div> </div> <div> <div class="label"></div> <div> <asp:CheckBox ID="chkAdditionalGuests" Text="Additional Guests" runat="server" /> </div> </div> <hr /> <input type="button" id="btnSubmit" value="Send Registration" /> The form includes a few different kinds of form fields including a multi-selection listbox to demonstrate retrieving multiple values. Setting up the Server Side [WebMethod] The [WebMethod] on the server we’re going to call is going to be very simple and just capture the content of these values and echo then back as a formatted HTML string. Obviously this is overly simplistic but it serves to demonstrate the simple point of capturing the POST data on the server in an AJAX callback. public class PageMethodsService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string SendRegistration(NameValue[] formVars) { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.AppendFormat("Thank you {0}, <br/><br/>", HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(formVars.Form("txtName"))); sb.AppendLine("You've entered the following: <hr/>"); foreach (NameValue nv in formVars) { // strip out ASP.NET form vars like _ViewState/_EventValidation if (!nv.name.StartsWith("__")) { if (nv.name.StartsWith("txt") || nv.name.StartsWith("lst") || nv.name.StartsWith("chk")) sb.Append(nv.name.Substring(3)); else sb.Append(nv.name); sb.AppendLine(": " + HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(nv.value) + "<br/>"); } } sb.AppendLine("<hr/>"); string[] needs = formVars.FormMultiple("lstSpecialNeeds"); if (needs == null) sb.AppendLine("No Special Needs"); else { sb.AppendLine("Special Needs: <br/>"); foreach (string need in needs) { sb.AppendLine("&nbsp;&nbsp;" + need + "<br/>"); } } return sb.ToString(); } } The key feature of this method is that it receives a custom type called NameValue[] which is an array of NameValue objects that map the structure that the jQuery .serializeArray() function generates. There are two custom types involved in this: The actual NameValue type and a NameValueExtensions class that defines a couple of extension methods for the NameValue[] array type to allow for single (.Form()) and multiple (.FormMultiple()) value retrieval by name. The NameValue class is as simple as this and simply maps the structure of the array elements of .serializeArray(): public class NameValue { public string name { get; set; } public string value { get; set; } } The extension method class defines the .Form() and .FormMultiple() methods to allow easy retrieval of form variables from the returned array: /// <summary> /// Simple NameValue class that maps name and value /// properties that can be used with jQuery's /// $.serializeArray() function and JSON requests /// </summary> public static class NameValueExtensionMethods { /// <summary> /// Retrieves a single form variable from the list of /// form variables stored /// </summary> /// <param name="formVars"></param> /// <param name="name">formvar to retrieve</param> /// <returns>value or string.Empty if not found</returns> public static string Form(this NameValue[] formVars, string name) { var matches = formVars.Where(nv => nv.name.ToLower() == name.ToLower()).FirstOrDefault(); if (matches != null) return matches.value; return string.Empty; } /// <summary> /// Retrieves multiple selection form variables from the list of /// form variables stored. /// </summary> /// <param name="formVars"></param> /// <param name="name">The name of the form var to retrieve</param> /// <returns>values as string[] or null if no match is found</returns> public static string[] FormMultiple(this NameValue[] formVars, string name) { var matches = formVars.Where(nv => nv.name.ToLower() == name.ToLower()).Select(nv => nv.value).ToArray(); if (matches.Length == 0) return null; return matches; } } Using these extension methods it’s easy to retrieve individual values from the array: string name = formVars.Form("txtName"); or multiple values: string[] needs = formVars.FormMultiple("lstSpecialNeeds"); if (needs != null) { // do something with matches } Using these functions in the SendRegistration method it’s easy to retrieve a few form variables directly (txtName and the multiple selections of lstSpecialNeeds) or to iterate over the whole list of values. Of course this is an overly simple example – in typical app you’d probably want to validate the input data and save it to the database and then return some sort of confirmation or possibly an updated data list back to the client. Since this is a full AJAX service callback realize that you don’t have to return simple string values – you can return any of the supported result types (which are most serializable types) including complex hierarchical objects and arrays that make sense to your client code. POSTing Form Variables from the Client to the AJAX Service To call the AJAX service method on the client is straight forward and requires only use of little native jQuery plus JSON serialization functionality. To start add jQuery and the json2.js library to your page: <script src="Scripts/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> json2.js can be found here (be sure to remove the first line from the file): http://www.json.org/json2.js It’s required to handle JSON serialization for those browsers that don’t support it natively. With those script references in the document let’s hookup the button click handler and call the service: $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSubmit").click(sendRegistration); }); function sendRegistration() { var arForm = $("#form1").serializeArray(); $.ajax({ url: "PageMethodsService.asmx/SendRegistration", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ formVars: arForm }), dataType: "json", success: function (result) { var jEl = $("#divMessage"); jEl.html(result.d).fadeIn(1000); setTimeout(function () { jEl.fadeOut(1000) }, 5000); }, error: function (xhr, status) { alert("An error occurred: " + status); } }); } The key feature in this code is the $("#form1").serializeArray();  call which serializes all the form fields of form1 into an array. Each form var is represented as an object with a name/value property. This array is then serialized into JSON with: JSON.stringify({ formVars: arForm }) The format for the parameter list in AJAX service calls is an object with one property for each parameter of the method. In this case its a single parameter called formVars and we’re assigning the array of form variables to it. The URL to call on the server is the name of the Service (or ASPX Page for Page Methods) plus the name of the method to call. On return the success callback receives the result from the AJAX callback which in this case is the formatted string which is simply assigned to an element in the form and displayed. Remember the result type is whatever the method returns – it doesn’t have to be a string. Note that ASP.NET AJAX and WCF REST return JSON data as a wrapped object so the result has a ‘d’ property that holds the actual response: jEl.html(result.d).fadeIn(1000); Slightly simpler: Using ServiceProxy.js If you want things slightly cleaner you can use the ServiceProxy.js class I’ve mentioned here before. The ServiceProxy class handles a few things for calling ASP.NET and WCF services more cleanly: Automatic JSON encoding Automatic fix up of ‘d’ wrapper property Automatic Date conversion on the client Simplified error handling Reusable and abstracted To add the service proxy add: <script src="Scripts/ServiceProxy.js" type="text/javascript"></script> and then change the code to this slightly simpler version: <script type="text/javascript"> proxy = new ServiceProxy("PageMethodsService.asmx/"); $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSubmit").click(sendRegistration); }); function sendRegistration() { var arForm = $("#form1").serializeArray(); proxy.invoke("SendRegistration", { formVars: arForm }, function (result) { var jEl = $("#divMessage"); jEl.html(result).fadeIn(1000); setTimeout(function () { jEl.fadeOut(1000) }, 5000); }, function (error) { alert(error.message); } ); } The code is not very different but it makes the call as simple as specifying the method to call, the parameters to pass and the actions to take on success and error. No more remembering which content type and data types to use and manually serializing to JSON. This code also removes the “d” property processing in the response and provides more consistent error handling in that the call always returns an error object regardless of a server error or a communication error unlike the native $.ajax() call. Either approach works and both are pretty easy. The ServiceProxy really pays off if you use lots of service calls and especially if you need to deal with date values returned from the server  on the client. Summary Making Web Service calls and getting POST data to the server is not always the best option – ASP.NET and WCF AJAX services are meant to work with data in objects. However, in some situations it’s simply easier to POST all the captured form data to the server instead of mapping all properties from the input fields to some sort of message object first. For this approach the above POST mechanism is useful as it puts the parsing of the data on the server and leaves the client code lean and mean. It’s even easy to build a custom model binder on the server that can map the array values to properties on an object generically with some relatively simple Reflection code and without having to manually map form vars to properties and do string conversions. Keep in mind though that other approaches also abound. ASP.NET MVC makes it pretty easy to create custom routes to data and the built in model binder makes it very easy to deal with inbound form POST data in its original urlencoded format. The West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit also includes functionality for AJAX callbacks using plain POST values. All that’s needed is a Method parameter to query/form value to specify the method to be called on the server. After that the content type is completely optional and up to the consumer. It’d be nice if the ASP.NET AJAX Service and WCF AJAX Services weren’t so tightly bound to the content type so that you could more easily create open access service endpoints that can take advantage of urlencoded data that is everywhere in existing pages. It would make it much easier to create basic REST endpoints without complicated service configuration. Ah one can dream! In the meantime I hope this article has given you some ideas on how you can transfer POST data from the client to the server using JSON – it might be useful in other scenarios beyond ASP.NET AJAX services as well. Additional Resources ServiceProxy.js A small JavaScript library that wraps $.ajax() to call ASP.NET AJAX and WCF AJAX Services. Includes date parsing extensions to the JSON object, a global dataFilter for processing dates on all jQuery JSON requests, provides cleanup for the .NET wrapped message format and handles errors in a consistent fashion. Making jQuery Calls to WCF/ASMX with a ServiceProxy Client More information on calling ASMX and WCF AJAX services with jQuery and some more background on ServiceProxy.js. Note the implementation has slightly changed since the article was written. ww.jquery.js The West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit also includes ServiceProxy.js in the West Wind jQuery extension library. This version is slightly different and includes embedded json encoding/decoding based on json2.js.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  ASP.NET  AJAX  

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• Mobile Friendly Websites with CSS Media Queries

  - by dwahlin

  In a previous post the concept of CSS media queries was introduced and I discussed the fundamentals of how they can be used to target different screen sizes. I showed how they could be used to convert a 3-column wide page into a more vertical view of data that displays better on devices such as an iPhone:     In this post I'll provide an additional look at how CSS media queries can be used to mobile-enable a sample site called "Widget Masters" without having to change any server-side code or HTML code. The site that will be discussed is shown next:     This site has some of the standard items shown in most websites today including a title area, menu bar, and sections where data is displayed. Without including CSS media queries the site is readable but has to be zoomed out to see everything on a mobile device, cuts-off some of the menu items, and requires horizontal scrolling to get to additional content. The following image shows what the site looks like on an iPhone. While the site works on mobile devices it's definitely not optimized for mobile.     Let's take a look at how CSS media queries can be used to override existing styles in the site based on different screen widths. Adding CSS Media Queries into a Site The Widget Masters Website relies on standard CSS combined with HTML5 elements to provide the layout shown earlier. For example, to layout the menu bar shown at the top of the page the nav element is used as shown next. A standard div element could certainly be used as well if desired.   <nav> <ul class="clearfix"> <li><a href="#home">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#products">Products</a></li> <li><a href="#aboutus">About Us</a></li> <li><a href="#contactus">Contact Us</a></li> <li><a href="#store">Store</a></li> </ul> </nav>   This HTML is combined with the CSS shown next to add a CSS3 gradient, handle the horizontal orientation, and add some general hover effects.   nav { width: 100%; } nav ul { border-radius: 6px; height: 40px; width: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0; background: rgb(125,126,125); /* Old browsers */ background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* FF3.6+ */ background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,rgba(125,126,125,1)), color-stop(100%,rgba(14,14,14,1))); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */ background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */ background: -o-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* Opera 11.10+ */ background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* IE10+ */ background: linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* W3C */ filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#7d7e7d', endColorstr='#0e0e0e',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */ } nav ul > li { list-style: none; float: left; margin: 0; padding: 0; } nav ul > li:first-child { margin-left: 8px; } nav ul > li > a { color: #ccc; text-decoration: none; line-height: 2.8em; font-size: 0.95em; font-weight: bold; padding: 8px 25px 7px 25px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } nav ul > li a:hover { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); color: #fff; }   When mobile devices hit the site the layout of the menu items needs to be adjusted so that they're all visible without having to swipe left or right to get to them. This type of modification can be accomplished using CSS media queries by targeting specific screen sizes. To start, a media query can be added into the site's CSS file as shown next: @media screen and (max-width:320px) { /* CSS style overrides for this screen width go here */ } This media query targets screens that have a maximum width of 320 pixels. Additional types of queries can also be added – refer to my previous post for more details as well as resources that can be used to test media queries in different devices. In that post I emphasize (and I'll emphasize again) that CSS media queries only modify the overall layout and look and feel of a site. They don't optimize the site as far as the size of the images or content sent to the device which is important to keep in mind. To make the navigation menu more accessible on devices such as an iPhone or Android the CSS shown next can be used. This code changes the height of the menu from 40 pixels to 100%, takes off the li element floats, changes the line-height, and changes the margins.   @media screen and (max-width:320px) { nav ul { height: 100%; } nav ul > li { float: none; } nav ul > li a { line-height: 1.5em; } nav ul > li:first-child { margin-left: 0px; } /* Additional CSS overrides go here */ }   The following image shows an example of what the menu look like when run on a device with a width of 320 pixels:   Mobile devices with a maximum width of 480 pixels need different CSS styles applied since they have 160 additional pixels of width. This can be done by adding a new CSS media query into the stylesheet as shown next. Looking through the CSS you'll see that only a minimal override is added to adjust the padding of anchor tags since the menu fits by default in this screen width.   @media screen and (max-width: 480px) { nav ul > li > a { padding: 8px 10px 7px 10px; } }   Running the site on a device with 480 pixels results in the menu shown next being rendered. Notice that the space between the menu items is much smaller compared to what was shown when the main site loads in a standard browser.     In addition to modifying the menu, the 3 horizontal content sections shown earlier can be changed from a horizontal layout to a vertical layout so that they look good on a variety of smaller mobile devices and are easier to navigate by end users. The HTML5 article and section elements are used as containers for the 3 sections in the site as shown next:   <article class="clearfix"> <section id="info"> <header>Why Choose Us?</header> <br /> <img id="mainImage" src="Images/ArticleImage.png" title="Article Image" /> <p> Post emensos insuperabilis expeditionis eventus languentibus partium animis, quas periculorum varietas fregerat et laborum, nondum tubarum cessante clangore vel milite locato per stationes hibernas. </p> </section> <section id="products"> <header>Products</header> <br /> <img id="gearsImage" src="Images/Gears.png" title="Article Image" /> <p> <ul> <li>Widget 1</li> <li>Widget 2</li> <li>Widget 3</li> <li>Widget 4</li> <li>Widget 5</li> </ul> </p> </section> <section id="FAQ"> <header>FAQ</header> <br /> <img id="faqImage" src="Images/faq.png" title="Article Image" /> <p> <ul> <li>FAQ 1</li> <li>FAQ 2</li> <li>FAQ 3</li> <li>FAQ 4</li> <li>FAQ 5</li> </ul> </p> </section> </article>   To force the sections into a vertical layout for smaller mobile devices the CSS styles shown next can be added into the media queries targeting 320 pixel and 480 pixel widths. Styles to target the display size of the images in each section are also included. It's important to note that the original image is still being downloaded from the server and isn't being optimized in any way for the mobile device. It's certainly possible for the CSS to include URL information for a mobile-optimized image if desired. @media screen and (max-width:320px) { section { float: none; width: 97%; margin: 0px; padding: 5px; } #wrapper { padding: 5px; width: 96%; } #mainImage, #gearsImage, #faqImage { width: 100%; height: 100px; } } @media screen and (max-width: 480px) { section { float: none; width: 98%; margin: 0px 0px 10px 0px; padding: 5px; } article > section:last-child { margin-right: 0px; float: none; } #bottomSection { width: 99%; } #wrapper { padding: 5px; width: 96%; } #mainImage, #gearsImage, #faqImage { width: 100%; height: 100px; } }   The following images show the site rendered on an iPhone with the CSS media queries in place. Each of the sections now displays vertically making it much easier for the user to access them. Images inside of each section also scale appropriately to fit properly.     CSS media queries provide a great way to override default styles in a website and target devices with different resolutions. In this post you've seen how CSS media queries can be used to convert a standard browser-based site into a site that is more accessible to mobile users. Although much more can be done to optimize sites for mobile, CSS media queries provide a nice starting point if you don't have the time or resources to create mobile-specific versions of sites.

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• jQuery and Windows Azure

  - by Stephen Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can host a simple Ajax application created with jQuery in the Windows Azure cloud. In this blog entry, I make no assumptions. I assume that you have never used Windows Azure and I am going to walk through the steps required to host the application in the cloud in agonizing detail. Our application will consist of a single HTML page and a single service. The HTML page will contain jQuery code that invokes the service to retrieve and display set of records. There are five steps that you must complete to host the jQuery application: Sign up for Windows Azure Create a Hosted Service Install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio Create a Windows Azure Cloud Service Deploy the Cloud Service Sign Up for Windows Azure Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ and click the Sign up Now button. Select one of the offers. I selected the Introductory Special offer because it is free and I just wanted to experiment with Windows Azure for the purposes of this blog entry.     To sign up, you will need a Windows Live ID and you will need to enter a credit card number. After you finish the sign up process, you will receive an email that explains how to activate your account. Accessing the Developer Portal After you create your account and your account is activated, you can access the Windows Azure developer portal by visiting the following URL: http://windows.azure.com/ When you first visit the developer portal, you will see the one project that you created when you set up your Windows Azure account (In a fit of creativity, I named my project StephenWalther).     Creating a New Windows Azure Hosted Service Before you can host an application in the cloud, you must first add a hosted service to your project. Click your project on the summary page and click the New Service link. You are presented with the option of creating either a new Storage Account or a new Hosted Services.     Because we have code that we want to run in the cloud – the WCF Service -- we want to select the Hosted Services option. After you select this option, you must provide a name and description for your service. This information is used on the developer portal so you can distinguish your services.     When you create a new hosted service, you must enter a unique name for your service (I selected jQueryApp) and you must select a region for this service (I selected Anywhere US). Click the Create button to create the new hosted service.   Install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio We’ll use Visual Studio to create our jQuery project. Before you can use Visual Studio with Windows Azure, you must first install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ and click the Get Tools and SDK button. The Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio works with both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010.   Installation of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio is painless. You just need to check some agreement checkboxes and click the Next button a few times and installation will begin:   Creating a Windows Azure Application After you install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, you can choose to create a Windows Azure Cloud Service by selecting the menu option File, New Project and selecting the Windows Azure Cloud Service project template. I named my new Cloud Service with the name jQueryApp.     Next, you need to select the type of Cloud Service project that you want to create from the New Cloud Service Project dialog.   I selected the C# ASP.NET Web Role option. Alternatively, I could have picked the ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Role option if I wanted to use jQuery with ASP.NET MVC or even the CGI Web Role option if I wanted to use jQuery with PHP. After you complete these steps, you end up with two projects in your Visual Studio solution. The project named WebRole1 represents your ASP.NET application and we will use this project to create our jQuery application. Creating the jQuery Application in the Cloud We are now ready to create the jQuery application. We’ll create a super simple application that displays a list of records retrieved from a WCF service (hosted in the cloud). Create a new page in the WebRole1 project named Default.htm and add the following code: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Products</title> <style type="text/css"> #productContainer div { border:solid 1px black; padding:5px; margin:5px; } </style> </head> <body> <h1>Product Catalog</h1> <div id="productContainer"></div> <script id="productTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> Name: {{= name }} <br /> Price: {{= price }} </div> </script> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var products = [ {name:"Milk", price:4.55}, {name:"Yogurt", price:2.99}, {name:"Steak", price:23.44} ]; $("#productTemplate").render(products).appendTo("#productContainer"); </script> </body> </html> The jQuery code in this page simply displays a list of products by using a template. I am using a jQuery template to format each product. You can learn more about using jQuery templates by reading the following blog entry by Scott Guthrie: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/05/07/jquery-templates-and-data-linking-and-microsoft-contributing-to-jquery.aspx You can test whether the Default.htm page is working correctly by running your application (hit the F5 key). The first time that you run your application, a database is set up on your local machine to simulate cloud storage. You will see the following dialog: If the Default.htm page works as expected, you should see the list of three products: Adding an Ajax-Enabled WCF Service In the previous section, we created a simple jQuery application that displays an array by using a template. The application is a little too simple because the data is static. In this section, we’ll modify the page so that the data is retrieved from a WCF service instead of an array. First, we need to add a new Ajax-enabled WCF Service to the WebRole1 project. Select the menu option Project, Add New Item and select the Ajax-enabled WCF Service project item. Name the new service ProductService.svc. Modify the service so that it returns a static collection of products. The final code for the ProductService.svc should look like this: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; namespace WebRole1 { public class Product { public string name { get; set; } public decimal price { get; set; } } [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class ProductService { [OperationContract] public IList<Product> SelectProducts() { var products = new List<Product>(); products.Add(new Product {name="Milk", price=4.55m} ); products.Add(new Product { name = "Yogurt", price = 2.99m }); products.Add(new Product { name = "Steak", price = 23.44m }); return products; } } }   In real life, you would want to retrieve the list of products from storage instead of a static array. We are being lazy here. Next you need to modify the Default.htm page to use the ProductService.svc. The jQuery script in the following updated Default.htm page makes an Ajax call to the WCF service. The data retrieved from the ProductService.svc is displayed in the client template. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Products</title> <style type="text/css"> #productContainer div { border:solid 1px black; padding:5px; margin:5px; } </style> </head> <body> <h1>Product Catalog</h1> <div id="productContainer"></div> <script id="productTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> Name: {{= name }} <br /> Price: {{= price }} </div> </script> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $.post("ProductService.svc/SelectProducts", function (results) { var products = results["d"]; $("#productTemplate").render(products).appendTo("#productContainer"); }); </script> </body> </html>   Deploying the jQuery Application to the Cloud Now that we have created our jQuery application, we are ready to deploy our application to the cloud so that the whole world can use it. Right-click your jQueryApp project in the Solution Explorer window and select the Publish menu option. When you select publish, your application and your application configuration information is packaged up into two files named jQueryApp.cspkg and ServiceConfiguration.cscfg. Visual Studio opens the directory that contains the two files. In order to deploy these files to the Windows Azure cloud, you must upload these files yourself. Return to the Windows Azure Developers Portal at the following address: http://windows.azure.com/ Select your project and select the jQueryApp service. You will see a mysterious cube. Click the Deploy button to upload your application.   Next, you need to browse to the location on your hard drive where the jQueryApp project was published and select both the packaged application and the packaged application configuration file. Supply the deployment with a name and click the Deploy button.     While your application is in the process of being deployed, you can view a progress bar.     Running the jQuery Application in the Cloud Finally, you can run your jQuery application in the cloud by clicking the Run button.   It might take several minutes for your application to initialize (go grab a coffee). After WebRole1 finishes initializing, you can navigate to the following URL to view your live jQuery application in the cloud: http://jqueryapp.cloudapp.net/default.htm The page is hosted on the Windows Azure cloud and the WCF service executes every time that you request the page to retrieve the list of products. Summary Because we started from scratch, we needed to complete several steps to create and deploy our jQuery application to the Windows Azure cloud. We needed to create a Windows Azure account, create a hosted service, install the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, create the jQuery application, and deploy it to the cloud. Now that we have finished this process once, modifying our existing cloud application or creating a new cloud application is easy. jQuery and Windows Azure work nicely together. We can take advantage of jQuery to build applications that run in the browser and we can take advantage of Windows Azure to host the backend services required by our jQuery application. The big benefit of Windows Azure is that it enables us to scale. If, all of the sudden, our jQuery application explodes in popularity, Windows Azure enables us to easily scale up to meet the demand. We can handle anything that the Internet might throw at us.

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• The Execute SQL Task

  In this article we are going to take you through the Execute SQL Task in SQL Server Integration Services for SQL Server 2005 (although it appies just as well to SQL Server 2008).  We will be covering all the essentials that you will need to know to effectively use this task and make it as flexible as possible. The things we will be looking at are as follows: A tour of the Task. The properties of the Task. After looking at these introductory topics we will then get into some examples. The examples will show different types of usage for the task: Returning a single value from a SQL query with two input parameters. Returning a rowset from a SQL query. Executing a stored procedure and retrieveing a rowset, a return value, an output parameter value and passing in an input parameter. Passing in the SQL Statement from a variable. Passing in the SQL Statement from a file. Tour Of The Task Before we can start to use the Execute SQL Task in our packages we are going to need to locate it in the toolbox. Let's do that now. Whilst in the Control Flow section of the package expand your toolbox and locate the Execute SQL Task. Below is how we found ours. Now drag the task onto the designer. As you can see from the following image we have a validation error appear telling us that no connection manager has been assigned to the task. This can be easily remedied by creating a connection manager. There are certain types of connection manager that are compatable with this task so we cannot just create any connection manager and these are detailed in a few graphics time. Double click on the task itself to take a look at the custom user interface provided to us for this task. The task will open on the general tab as shown below. Take a bit of time to have a look around here as throughout this article we will be revisting this page many times. Whilst on the general tab, drop down the combobox next to the ConnectionType property. In here you will see the types of connection manager which this task will accept. As with SQL Server 2000 DTS, SSIS allows you to output values from this task in a number of formats. Have a look at the combobox next to the Resultset property. The major difference here is the ability to output into XML. If you drop down the combobox next to the SQLSourceType property you will see the ways in which you can pass a SQL Statement into the task itself. We will have examples of each of these later on but certainly when we saw these for the first time we were very excited. Next to the SQLStatement property if you click in the empty box next to it you will see ellipses appear. Click on them and you will see the very basic query editor that becomes available to you. Alternatively after you have specified a connection manager for the task you can click on the Build Query button to bring up a completely different query editor. This is slightly inconsistent. Once you've finished looking around the general tab, move on to the next tab which is the parameter mapping tab. We shall, again, be visiting this tab throughout the article but to give you an initial heads up this is where you define the input, output and return values from your task. Note this is not where you specify the resultset. If however you now move on to the ResultSet tab this is where you define what variable will receive the output from your SQL Statement in whatever form that is. Property Expressions are one of the most amazing things to happen in SSIS and they will not be covered here as they deserve a whole article to themselves. Watch out for this as their usefulness will astound you. For a more detailed discussion of what should be the parameter markers in the SQL Statements on the General tab and how to map them to variables on the Parameter Mapping tab see Working with Parameters and Return Codes in the Execute SQL Task. Task Properties There are two places where you can specify the properties for your task. One is in the task UI itself and the other is in the property pane which will appear if you right click on your task and select Properties from the context menu. We will be doing plenty of property setting in the UI later so let's take a moment to have a look at the property pane. Below is a graphic showing our properties pane. Now we shall take you through all the properties and tell you exactly what they mean. A lot of these properties you will see across all tasks as well as the package because of everything's base structure The Container. BypassPrepare Should the statement be prepared before sending to the connection manager destination (True/False) Connection This is simply the name of the connection manager that the task will use. We can get this from the connection manager tray at the bottom of the package. DelayValidation Really interesting property and it tells the task to not validate until it actually executes. A usage for this may be that you are operating on table yet to be created but at runtime you know the table will be there. Description Very simply the description of your Task. Disable Should the task be enabled or not? You can also set this through a context menu by right clicking on the task itself. DisableEventHandlers As a result of events that happen in the task, should the event handlers for the container fire? ExecValueVariable The variable assigned here will get or set the execution value of the task. Expressions Expressions as we mentioned earlier are a really powerful tool in SSIS and this graphic below shows us a small peek of what you can do. We select a property on the left and assign an expression to the value of that property on the right causing the value to be dynamically changed at runtime. One of the most obvious uses of this is that the property value can be built dynamically from within the package allowing you a great deal of flexibility FailPackageOnFailure If this task fails does the package? FailParentOnFailure If this task fails does the parent container? A task can he hosted inside another container i.e. the For Each Loop Container and this would then be the parent. ForcedExecutionValue This property allows you to hard code an execution value for the task. ForcedExecutionValueType What is the datatype of the ForcedExecutionValue? ForceExecutionResult Force the task to return a certain execution result. This could then be used by the workflow constraints. Possible values are None, Success, Failure and Completion. ForceExecutionValue Should we force the execution result? IsolationLevel This is the transaction isolation level of the task. IsStoredProcedure Certain optimisations are made by the task if it knows that the query is a Stored Procedure invocation. The docs say this will always be false unless the connection is an ADO connection. LocaleID Gets or sets the LocaleID of the container. LoggingMode Should we log for this container and what settings should we use? The value choices are UseParentSetting, Enabled and Disabled. MaximumErrorCount How many times can the task fail before we call it a day? Name Very simply the name of the task. ResultSetType How do you want the results of your query returned? The choices are ResultSetType_None, ResultSetType_SingleRow, ResultSetType_Rowset and ResultSetType_XML. SqlStatementSource Your Query/SQL Statement. SqlStatementSourceType The method of specifying the query. Your choices here are DirectInput, FileConnection and Variables TimeOut How long should the task wait to receive results? TransactionOption How should the task handle being asked to join a transaction? Usage Examples As we move through the examples we will only cover in them what we think you must know and what we think you should see. This means that some of the more elementary steps like setting up variables will be covered in the early examples but skipped and simply referred to in later ones. All these examples used the AventureWorks database that comes with SQL Server 2005. Returning a Single Value, Passing in Two Input Parameters So the first thing we are going to do is add some variables to our package. The graphic below shows us those variables having been defined. Here the CountOfEmployees variable will be used as the output from the query and EndDate and StartDate will be used as input parameters. As you can see all these variables have been scoped to the package. Scoping allows us to have domains for variables. Each container has a scope and remember a package is a container as well. Variable values of the parent container can be seen in child containers but cannot be passed back up to the parent from a child. Our following graphic has had a number of changes made. The first of those changes is that we have created and assigned an OLEDB connection manager to this Task ExecuteSQL Task Connection. The next thing is we have made sure that the SQLSourceType property is set to Direct Input as we will be writing in our statement ourselves. We have also specified that only a single row will be returned from this query. The expressions we typed in was: SELECT COUNT(*) AS CountOfEmployees FROM HumanResources.Employee WHERE (HireDate BETWEEN ? AND ?) Moving on now to the Parameter Mapping tab this is where we are going to tell the task about our input paramaters. We Add them to the window specifying their direction and datatype. A quick word here about the structure of the variable name. As you can see SSIS has preceeded the variable with the word user. This is a default namespace for variables but you can create your own. When defining your variables if you look at the variables window title bar you will see some icons. If you hover over the last one on the right you will see it says "Choose Variable Columns". If you click the button you will see a list of checkbox options and one of them is namespace. after checking this you will see now where you can define your own namespace. The next tab, result set, is where we need to get back the value(s) returned from our statement and assign to a variable which in our case is CountOfEmployees so we can use it later perhaps. Because we are only returning a single value then if you remember from earlier we are allowed to assign a name to the resultset but it must be the name of the column (or alias) from the query. A really cool feature of Business Intelligence Studio being hosted by Visual Studio is that we get breakpoint support for free. In our package we set a Breakpoint so we can break the package and have a look in a watch window at the variable values as they appear to our task and what the variable value of our resultset is after the task has done the assignment. Here's that window now. As you can see the count of employess that matched the data range was 2. Returning a Rowset In this example we are going to return a resultset back to a variable after the task has executed not just a single row single value. There are no input parameters required so the variables window is nice and straight forward. One variable of type object. Here is the statement that will form the soure for our Resultset. select p.ProductNumber, p.name, pc.Name as ProductCategoryNameFROM Production.ProductCategory pcJOIN Production.ProductSubCategory pscON pc.ProductCategoryID = psc.ProductCategoryIDJOIN Production.Product pON psc.ProductSubCategoryID = p.ProductSubCategoryID We need to make sure that we have selected Full result set as the ResultSet as shown below on the task's General tab. Because there are no input parameters we can skip the parameter mapping tab and move straight to the Result Set tab. Here we need to Add our variable defined earlier and map it to the result name of 0 (remember we covered this earlier) Once we run the task we can again set a breakpoint and have a look at the values coming back from the task. In the following graphic you can see the result set returned to us as a COM object. We can do some pretty interesting things with this COM object and in later articles that is exactly what we shall be doing. Return Values, Input/Output Parameters and Returning a Rowset from a Stored Procedure This example is pretty much going to give us a taste of everything. We have already covered in the previous example how to specify the ResultSet to be a Full result set so we will not cover it again here. For this example we are going to need 4 variables. One for the return value, one for the input parameter, one for the output parameter and one for the result set. Here is the statement we want to execute. Note how much cleaner it is than if you wanted to do it using the current version of DTS. In the Parameter Mapping tab we are going to Add our variables and specify their direction and datatypes. In the Result Set tab we can now map our final variable to the rowset returned from the stored procedure. It really is as simple as that and we were amazed at how much easier it is than in DTS 2000. Passing in the SQL Statement from a Variable SSIS as we have mentioned is hugely more flexible than its predecessor and one of the things you will notice when moving around the tasks and the adapters is that a lot of them accept a variable as an input for something they need. The ExecuteSQL task is no different. It will allow us to pass in a string variable as the SQL Statement. This variable value could have been set earlier on from inside the package or it could have been populated from outside using a configuration. The ResultSet property is set to single row and we'll show you why in a second when we look at the variables. Note also the SQLSourceType property. Here's the General Tab again. Looking at the variable we have in this package you can see we have only two. One for the return value from the statement and one which is obviously for the statement itself. Again we need to map the Result name to our variable and this can be a named Result Name (The column name or alias returned by the query) and not 0. The expected result into our variable should be the amount of rows in the Person.Contact table and if we look in the watch window we see that it is.   Passing in the SQL Statement from a File The final example we are going to show is a really interesting one. We are going to pass in the SQL statement to the task by using a file connection manager. The file itself contains the statement to run. The first thing we are going to need to do is create our file connection mananger to point to our file. Click in the connections tray at the bottom of the designer, right click and choose "New File Connection" As you can see in the graphic below we have chosen to use an existing file and have passed in the name as well. Have a look around at the other "Usage Type" values available whilst you are here. Having set that up we can now see in the connection manager tray our file connection manager sitting alongside our OLE-DB connection we have been using for the rest of these examples. Now we can go back to the familiar General Tab to set up how the task will accept our file connection as the source. All the other properties in this task are set up exactly as we have been doing for other examples depending on the options chosen so we will not cover them again here.   We hope you will agree that the Execute SQL Task has changed considerably in this release from its DTS predecessor. It has a lot of options available but once you have configured it a few times you get to learn what needs to go where. We hope you have found this article useful.

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• Entity Framework Code-First, OData & Windows Phone Client

  - by Jon Galloway

  Entity Framework Code-First is the coolest thing since sliced bread, Windows  Phone is the hottest thing since Tickle-Me-Elmo and OData is just too great to ignore. As part of the Full Stack project, we wanted to put them together, which turns out to be pretty easy… once you know how.   EF Code-First CTP5 is available now and there should be very few breaking changes in the release edition, which is due early in 2011.  Note: EF Code-First evolved rapidly and many of the existing documents and blog posts which were written with earlier versions, may now be obsolete or at least misleading.   Code-First? With traditional Entity Framework you start with a database and from that you generate “entities” – classes that bridge between the relational database and your object oriented program. With Code-First (Magic-Unicorn) (see Hanselman’s write up and this later write up by Scott Guthrie) the Entity Framework looks at classes you created and says “if I had created these classes, the database would have to have looked like this…” and creates the database for you! By deriving your entity collections from DbSet and exposing them via a class that derives from DbContext, you "turn on" database backing for your POCO with a minimum of code and no hidden designer or configuration files. POCO == Plain Old CLR Objects Your entity objects can be used throughout your applications - in web applications, console applications, Silverlight and Windows Phone applications, etc. In our case, we'll want to read and update data from a Windows Phone client application, so we'll expose the entities through a DataService and hook the Windows Phone client application to that data via proxies.  Piece of Pie.  Easy as cake. The Demo Architecture To see this at work, we’ll create an ASP.NET/MVC application which will act as the host for our Data Service.  We’ll create an incredibly simple data layer using EF Code-First on top of SQLCE4 and we’ll expose the data in a WCF Data Service using the oData protocol.  Our Windows Phone 7 client will instantiate  the data context via a URI and load the data asynchronously. Setting up the Server project with MVC 3, EF Code First, and SQL CE 4 Create a new application of type ASP.NET MVC 3 and name it DeadSimpleServer.  We need to add the latest SQLCE4 and Entity Framework Code First CTP's to our project. Fortunately, NuGet makes that really easy. Open the Package Manager Console (View / Other Windows / Package Manager Console) and type in "Install-Package EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact" at the PM> command prompt. Since NuGet handles dependencies for you, you'll see that it installs everything you need to use Entity Framework Code First in your project. PM> install-package EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 'SQLCE (= 4.0.8435.1)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done 'EFCodeFirst (= 0.8)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done 'WebActivator (= 1.0.0.0)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done You are downloading SQLCE from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://173.203.67.148/licenses/SQLCE/EULA_ENU.rtf. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'SQLCE 4.0.8435.1' You are downloading EFCodeFirst from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206497. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'EFCodeFirst 0.8' Successfully installed 'WebActivator 1.0.0.0' You are downloading EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://173.203.67.148/licenses/SQLCE/EULA_ENU.rtf. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 0.8' Successfully added 'SQLCE 4.0.8435.1' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'EFCodeFirst 0.8' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'WebActivator 1.0.0.0' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 0.8' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Note: We're using SQLCE 4 with Entity Framework here because they work really well together from a development scenario, but you can of course use Entity Framework Code First with other databases supported by Entity framework. Creating The Model using EF Code First Now we can create our model class. Right-click the Models folder and select Add/Class. Name the Class Person.cs and add the following code: using System.Data.Entity; namespace DeadSimpleServer.Models { public class Person { public int ID { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } public class PersonContext : DbContext { public DbSet<Person> People { get; set; } } } Notice that the entity class Person has no special interfaces or base class. There's nothing special needed to make it work - it's just a POCO. The context we'll use to access the entities in the application is called PersonContext, but you could name it anything you wanted. The important thing is that it inherits DbContext and contains one or more DbSet which holds our entity collections. Adding Seed Data We need some testing data to expose from our service. The simplest way to get that into our database is to modify the CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists class in AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework.cs by adding some seed data to the Seed method: protected virtual void Seed( TContext context ) { var personContext = context as PersonContext; personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 1, Name = "George Washington" } ); personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 2, Name = "John Adams" } ); personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 3, Name = "Thomas Jefferson" } ); personContext.SaveChanges(); } The CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists class name is pretty self-explanatory - when our DbContext is accessed and the database isn't found, a new one will be created and populated with the data in the Seed method. There's one more step to make that work - we need to uncomment a line in the Start method at the top of of the AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework class and set the context name, as shown here, public static class AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework { public static void Start() { DbDatabase.DefaultConnectionFactory = new SqlCeConnectionFactory("System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0"); // Sets the default database initialization code for working with Sql Server Compact databases // Uncomment this line and replace CONTEXT_NAME with the name of your DbContext if you are // using your DbContext to create and manage your database DbDatabase.SetInitializer(new CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists<PersonContext>()); } } Now our database and entity framework are set up, so we can expose data via WCF Data Services. Note: This is a bare-bones implementation with no administration screens. If you'd like to see how those are added, check out The Full Stack screencast series. Creating the oData Service using WCF Data Services Add a new WCF Data Service to the project (right-click the project / Add New Item / Web / WCF Data Service). We’ll be exposing all the data as read/write.  Remember to reconfigure to control and minimize access as appropriate for your own application. Open the code behind for your service. In our case, the service was called PersonTestDataService.svc so the code behind class file is PersonTestDataService.svc.cs. using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.ServiceModel; using DeadSimpleServer.Models; namespace DeadSimpleServer { [ServiceBehavior( IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true )] public class PersonTestDataService : DataService<PersonContext> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService( DataServiceConfiguration config ) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule( "*", EntitySetRights.All ); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; config.UseVerboseErrors = true; } } } We're enabling a few additional settings to make it easier to debug if you run into trouble. The ServiceBehavior attribute is set to include exception details in faults, and we're using verbose errors. You can remove both of these when your service is working, as your public production service shouldn't be revealing exception information. You can view the output of the service by running the application and browsing to http://localhost:[portnumber]/PersonTestDataService.svc/: <service xml:base="http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:app="http://www.w3.org/2007/app" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/app"> <workspace> <atom:title>Default</atom:title> <collection href="People"> <atom:title>People</atom:title> </collection> </workspace> </service> This indicates that the service exposes one collection, which is accessible by browsing to http://localhost:[portnumber]/PersonTestDataService.svc/People <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" standalone="yes"?> <feed xml:base=http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/ xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <title type="text">People</title> <id>http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People</id> <updated>2010-12-29T01:01:50Z</updated> <link rel="self" title="People" href="People" /> <entry> <id>http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People(1)</id> <title type="text"></title> <updated>2010-12-29T01:01:50Z</updated> <author> <name /> </author> <link rel="edit" title="Person" href="People(1)" /> <category term="DeadSimpleServer.Models.Person" scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" /> <content type="application/xml"> <m:properties> <d:ID m:type="Edm.Int32">1</d:ID> <d:Name>George Washington</d:Name> </m:properties> </content> </entry> <entry> ... </entry> </feed> Let's recap what we've done so far. But enough with services and XML - let's get this into our Windows Phone client application. Creating the DataServiceContext for the Client Use the latest DataSvcUtil.exe from http://odata.codeplex.com. As of today, that's in this download: http://odata.codeplex.com/releases/view/54698 You need to run it with a few options: /uri - This will point to the service URI. In this case, it's http://localhost:59342/PersonTestDataService.svc  Pick up the port number from your running server (e.g., the server formerly known as Cassini). /out - This is the DataServiceContext class that will be generated. You can name it whatever you'd like. /Version - should be set to 2.0 /DataServiceCollection - Include this flag to generate collections derived from the DataServiceCollection base, which brings in all the ObservableCollection goodness that handles your INotifyPropertyChanged events for you. Here's the console session from when we ran it: <ListBox x:Name="MainListBox" Margin="0,0,-12,0" ItemsSource="{Binding}" SelectionChanged="MainListBox_SelectionChanged"> Next, to keep things simple, change the Binding on the two TextBlocks within the DataTemplate to Name and ID, <ListBox x:Name="MainListBox" Margin="0,0,-12,0" ItemsSource="{Binding}" SelectionChanged="MainListBox_SelectionChanged"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Margin="0,0,0,17" Width="432"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextExtraLargeStyle}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding ID}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="12,-6,12,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextSubtleStyle}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> Getting The Context In the code-behind you’ll first declare a member variable to hold the context from the Entity Framework. This is named using convention over configuration. The db type is Person and the context is of type PersonContext, You initialize it by providing the URI, in this case using the URL obtained from the Cassini web server, PersonContext context = new PersonContext( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" ) ); Create a second member variable of type DataServiceCollection<Person> but do not initialize it, DataServiceCollection<Person> people; In the constructor you’ll initialize the DataServiceCollection using the PersonContext, public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); people = new DataServiceCollection<Person>( context ); Finally, you’ll load the people collection using the LoadAsync method, passing in the fully specified URI for the People collection in the web service, people.LoadAsync( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People" ) ); Note that this method runs asynchronously and when it is finished the people  collection is already populated. Thus, since we didn’t need or want to override any of the behavior we don’t implement the LoadCompleted. You can use the LoadCompleted event if you need to do any other UI updates, but you don't need to. The final code is as shown below: using System; using System.Data.Services.Client; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using DeadSimpleServer.Models; using Microsoft.Phone.Controls; namespace WindowsPhoneODataTest { public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage { PersonContext context = new PersonContext( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" ) ); DataServiceCollection<Person> people; // Constructor public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); // Set the data context of the listbox control to the sample data // DataContext = App.ViewModel; people = new DataServiceCollection<Person>( context ); people.LoadAsync( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People" ) ); DataContext = people; this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler( MainPage_Loaded ); } // Handle selection changed on ListBox private void MainListBox_SelectionChanged( object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e ) { // If selected index is -1 (no selection) do nothing if ( MainListBox.SelectedIndex == -1 ) return; // Navigate to the new page NavigationService.Navigate( new Uri( "/DetailsPage.xaml?selectedItem=" + MainListBox.SelectedIndex, UriKind.Relative ) ); // Reset selected index to -1 (no selection) MainListBox.SelectedIndex = -1; } // Load data for the ViewModel Items private void MainPage_Loaded( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) { if ( !App.ViewModel.IsDataLoaded ) { App.ViewModel.LoadData(); } } } } With people populated we can set it as the DataContext and run the application; you’ll find that the Name and ID are displayed in the list on the Mainpage. Here's how the pieces in the client fit together: Complete source code available here

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• JMS Step 7 - How to Write to an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) Queue from a BPEL Process

  - by John-Brown.Evans

  JMS Step 7 - How to Write to an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) Queue from a BPEL Process ol{margin:0;padding:0} .jblist{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0;padding-left:0pt;margin-left:36pt} .c4_7{vertical-align:top;width:468pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c3_7{vertical-align:top;width:234pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:0pt 5pt 0pt 5pt} .c6_7{vertical-align:top;width:156pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c16_7{background-color:#ffffff;padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt} .c0_7{height:11pt;direction:ltr} .c9_7{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c17_7{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c5_7{direction:ltr} .c18_7{background-color:#ffff00} .c2_7{background-color:#f3f3f3} .c14_7{height:0pt} .c8_7{text-indent:36pt} .c11_7{text-align:center} .c7_7{font-style:italic} .c1_7{font-family:"Courier New"} .c13_7{line-height:1.0} .c15_7{border-collapse:collapse} .c12_7{font-weight:bold} .c10_7{font-size:8pt} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt} .subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} This post continues the series of JMS articles which demonstrate how to use JMS queues in a SOA context. The previous posts were: JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue JMS Step 3 - Using the QueueReceive.java Sample Program to Read a Message from a JMS Queue JMS Step 4 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Writes a Message Based on an XML Schema to a JMS Queue JMS Step 5 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Reads a Message Based on an XML Schema from a JMS Queue JMS Step 6 - How to Set Up an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) for SOA Purposes This example demonstrates how to write a simple message to an Oracle AQ via the the WebLogic AQ JMS functionality from a BPEL process and a JMS adapter. If you have not yet reviewed the previous posts, please do so first, especially the JMS Step 6 post, as this one references objects created there. 1. Recap and Prerequisites In the previous example, we created an Oracle Advanced Queue (AQ) and some related JMS objects in WebLogic Server to be able to access it via JMS. Here are the objects which were created and their names and JNDI names: Database Objects Name Type AQJMSUSER Database User MyQueueTable Advanced Queue (AQ) Table UserQueue Advanced Queue WebLogic Server Objects Object Name Type JNDI Name aqjmsuserDataSource Data Source jdbc/aqjmsuserDataSource AqJmsModule JMS System Module AqJmsForeignServer JMS Foreign Server AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory JMS Foreign Server Connection Factory AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory AqJmsForeignDestination AQ JMS Foreign Destination queue/USERQUEUE eis/aqjms/UserQueue Connection Pool eis/aqjms/UserQueue 2 . Create a BPEL Composite with a JMS Adapter Partner Link This step requires that you have a valid Application Server Connection defined in JDeveloper, pointing to the application server on which you created the JMS Queue and Connection Factory. You can create this connection in JDeveloper under the Application Server Navigator. Give it any name and be sure to test the connection before completing it. This sample will write a simple XML message to the AQ JMS queue via the JMS adapter, based on the following XSD file, which consists of a single string element: stringPayload.xsd <?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252" ?> <xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"                xmlns="http://www.example.org"                targetNamespace="http://www.example.org"                elementFormDefault="qualified">  <xsd:element name="exampleElement" type="xsd:string">  </xsd:element> </xsd:schema> The following steps are all executed in JDeveloper. The SOA project will be created inside a JDeveloper Application. If you do not already have an application to contain the project, you can create a new one via File > New > General > Generic Application. Give the application any name, for example JMSTests and, when prompted for a project name and type, call the project   JmsAdapterWriteAqJms  and select SOA as the project technology type. If you already have an application, continue below. Create a SOA Project Create a new project and select SOA Tier > SOA Project as its type. Name it JmsAdapterWriteAqJms . When prompted for the composite type, choose Composite With BPEL Process. When prompted for the BPEL Process, name it JmsAdapterWriteAqJms too and choose Synchronous BPEL Process as the template. This will create a composite with a BPEL process and an exposed SOAP service. Double-click the BPEL process to open and begin editing it. You should see a simple BPEL process with a Receive and Reply activity. As we created a default process without an XML schema, the input and output variables are simple strings. Create an XSD File An XSD file is required later to define the message format to be passed to the JMS adapter. In this step, we create a simple XSD file, containing a string variable and add it to the project. First select the xsd item in the left-hand navigation tree to ensure that the XSD file is created under that item. Select File > New > General > XML and choose XML Schema. Call it stringPayload.xsd  and when the editor opens, select the Source view. then replace the contents with the contents of the stringPayload.xsd example above and save the file. You should see it under the XSD item in the navigation tree. Create a JMS Adapter Partner Link We will create the JMS adapter as a service at the composite level. If it is not already open, double-click the composite.xml file in the navigator to open it. From the Component Palette, drag a JMS adapter over onto the right-hand swim lane, under External References. This will start the JMS Adapter Configuration Wizard. Use the following entries: Service Name: JmsAdapterWrite Oracle Enterprise Messaging Service (OEMS): Oracle Advanced Queueing AppServer Connection: Use an existing application server connection pointing to the WebLogic server on which the connection factory created earlier is located. You can use the “+” button to create a connection directly from the wizard, if you do not already have one. Adapter Interface > Interface: Define from operation and schema (specified later) Operation Type: Produce Message Operation Name: Produce_message Produce Operation Parameters Destination Name: Wait for the list to populate. (Only foreign servers are listed here, because Oracle Advanced Queuing was selected earlier, in step 3) .         Select the foreign server destination created earlier, AqJmsForeignDestination (queue) . This will automatically populate the Destination Name field with the name of the foreign destination, queue/USERQUEUE . JNDI Name: The JNDI name to use for the JMS connection. This is the JNDI name of the connection pool created in the WebLogic Server.JDeveloper does not verify the value entered here. If you enter a wrong value, the JMS adapter won’t find the queue and you will get an error message at runtime. In our example, this is the value eis/aqjms/UserQueue Messages URL: We will use the XSD file we created earlier, stringPayload.xsd to define the message format for the JMS adapter. Press the magnifying glass icon to search for schema files. Expand Project Schema Files > stringPayload.xsd and select exampleElement : string . Press Next and Finish, which will complete the JMS Adapter configuration. Wire the BPEL Component to the JMS Adapter In this step, we link the BPEL process/component to the JMS adapter. From the composite.xml editor, drag the right-arrow icon from the BPEL process to the JMS adapter’s in-arrow.   This completes the steps at the composite level. 3. Complete the BPEL Process Design Invoke the JMS Adapter Open the BPEL component by double-clicking it in the design view of the composite.xml. This will display the BPEL process in the design view. You should see the JmsAdapterWrite partner link under one of the two swim lanes. We want it in the right-hand swim lane. If JDeveloper displays it in the left-hand lane, right-click it and choose Display > Move To Opposite Swim Lane. An Invoke activity is required in order to invoke the JMS adapter. Drag an Invoke activity between the Receive and Reply activities. Drag the right-hand arrow from the Invoke activity to the JMS adapter partner link. This will open the Invoke editor. The correct default values are entered automatically and are fine for our purposes. We only need to define the input variable to use for the JMS adapter. By pressing the green “+” symbol, a variable of the correct type can be auto-generated, for example with the name Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable. Press OK after creating the variable. Assign Variables Drag an Assign activity between the Receive and Invoke activities. We will simply copy the input variable to the JMS adapter and, for completion, so the process has an output to print, again to the process’s output variable. Double-click the Assign activity and create two Copy rules: for the first, drag Variables > inputVariable > payload > client:process > client:input_string to Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable > body > ns2:exampleElement for the second, drag the same input variable to outputVariable > payload > client:processResponse > client:result This will create two copy rules, similar to the following: Press OK. This completes the BPEL and Composite design. 4. Compile and Deploy the Composite Compile the process by pressing the Make or Rebuild icons or by right-clicking the project name in the navigator and selecting Make... or Rebuild... If the compilation is successful, deploy it to the SOA server connection defined earlier. (Right-click the project name in the navigator, select Deploy to Application Server, choose the application server connection, choose the partition on the server (usually default) and press Finish. You should see the message ----  Deployment finished.  ---- in the Deployment frame, if the deployment was successful. 5. Test the Composite Execute a Test Instance In a browser, log in to the Enterprise Manager 11g Fusion Middleware Control (EM) for your SOA installation. Navigate to SOA > soa-infra (soa_server1) > default (or wherever you deployed your composite) and click on  JmsAdapterWriteAqJms [1.0] , then press the Test button. Enter any string into the text input field, for example “Test message from JmsAdapterWriteAqJms” then press Test Web Service. If the instance is successful, you should see the same text you entered in the Response payload frame. Monitor the Advanced Queue The test message will be written to the advanced queue created at the top of this sample. To confirm it, log in to the database as AQJMSUSER and query the MYQUEUETABLE database table. For example, from a shell window with SQL*Plus sqlplus aqjmsuser/aqjmsuser SQL> SELECT user_data FROM myqueuetable; which will display the message contents, for example Similarly, you can use the JDeveloper Database Navigator to view the contents. Use a database connection to the AQJMSUSER and in the navigator, expand Queues Tables and select MYQUEUETABLE. Select the Data tab and scroll to the USER_DATA column to view its contents. This concludes this example. The following post will be the last one in this series. In it, we will learn how to read the message we just wrote using a BPEL process and AQ JMS. Best regards John-Brown Evans Oracle Technology Proactive Support Delivery

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• Windows Azure: Backup Services Release, Hyper-V Recovery Manager, VM Enhancements, Enhanced Enterprise Management Support

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a huge set of updates to Windows Azure.  These new capabilities include: Backup Services: General Availability of Windows Azure Backup Services Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Public preview of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Configuration Active Directory: Securely manage hundreds of SaaS applications Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure SDK 2.2: A massive update of our SDK + Visual Studio tooling support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately.  Below are more details about them. Backup Service: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Backup Today we are releasing Windows Azure Backup Service as a general availability service.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. Windows Azure Backup is a cloud based backup solution for Windows Server which allows files and folders to be backed up and recovered from the cloud, and provides off-site protection against data loss. The service provides IT administrators and developers with the option to back up and protect critical data in an easily recoverable way from any location with no upfront hardware cost. Windows Azure Backup is built on the Windows Azure platform and uses Windows Azure blob storage for storing customer data. Windows Server uses the downloadable Windows Azure Backup Agent to transfer file and folder data securely and efficiently to the Windows Azure Backup Service. Along with providing cloud backup for Windows Server, Windows Azure Backup Service also provides capability to backup data from System Center Data Protection Manager and Windows Server Essentials, to the cloud. All data is encrypted onsite before it is sent to the cloud, and customers retain and manage the encryption key (meaning the data is stored entirely secured and can’t be decrypted by anyone but yourself). Getting Started To get started with the Windows Azure Backup Service, create a new Backup Vault within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Click New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Backup Vault to do this: Once the backup vault is created you’ll be presented with a simple tutorial that will help guide you on how to register your Windows Servers with it: Once the servers you want to backup are registered, you can use the appropriate local management interface (such as the Microsoft Management Console snap-in, System Center Data Protection Manager Console, or Windows Server Essentials Dashboard) to configure the scheduled backups and to optionally initiate recoveries. You can follow these tutorials to learn more about how to do this: Tutorial: Schedule Backups Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with setting up a backup schedule for your registered Windows Servers. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to set up a custom backup schedule. Tutorial: Recover Files and Folders Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with recovering data from a backup. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to do the same tasks. Below are some of the key benefits the Windows Azure Backup Service provides: Simple configuration and management. Windows Azure Backup Service integrates with the familiar Windows Server Backup utility in Windows Server, the Data Protection Manager component in System Center and Windows Server Essentials, in order to provide a seamless backup and recovery experience to a local disk, or to the cloud. Block level incremental backups. The Windows Azure Backup Agent performs incremental backups by tracking file and block level changes and only transferring the changed blocks, hence reducing the storage and bandwidth utilization. Different point-in-time versions of the backups use storage efficiently by only storing the changes blocks between these versions. Data compression, encryption and throttling. The Windows Azure Backup Agent ensures that data is compressed and encrypted on the server before being sent to the Windows Azure Backup Service over the network. As a result, the Windows Azure Backup Service only stores encrypted data in the cloud storage. The encryption key is not available to the Windows Azure Backup Service, and as a result the data is never decrypted in the service. Also, users can setup throttling and configure how the Windows Azure Backup service utilizes the network bandwidth when backing up or restoring information. Data integrity is verified in the cloud. In addition to the secure backups, the backed up data is also automatically checked for integrity once the backup is done. As a result, any corruptions which may arise due to data transfer can be easily identified and are fixed automatically. Configurable retention policies for storing data in the cloud. The Windows Azure Backup Service accepts and implements retention policies to recycle backups that exceed the desired retention range, thereby meeting business policies and managing backup costs. Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Now Available in Public Preview I’m excited to also announce the public preview of a new Windows Azure Service – the Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM). Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager helps protect your business critical services by coordinating the replication and recovery of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 private clouds at a secondary location. With automated protection, asynchronous ongoing replication, and orderly recovery, the Hyper-V Recovery Manager service can help you implement Disaster Recovery and restore important services accurately, consistently, and with minimal downtime. Application data in an Hyper-V Recovery Manager scenarios always travels on your on-premise replication channel. Only metadata (such as names of logical clouds, virtual machines, networks etc.) that is needed for orchestration is sent to Azure. All traffic sent to/from Azure is encrypted. You can begin using Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery today by clicking New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Hyper-V Recovery Manager within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can read more about Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager in Brad Anderson’s 9-part series, Transform the datacenter. To learn more about setting up Hyper-V Recovery Manager follow our detailed step-by-step guide. Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Today’s Windows Azure release includes a number of nice updates to Windows Azure Virtual Machines.  These improvements include: Ability to Delete both VM Instances + Attached Disks in One Operation Prior to today’s release, when you deleted VMs within Windows Azure we would delete the VM instance – but not delete the drives attached to the VM.  You had to manually delete these yourself from the storage account.  With today’s update we’ve added a convenience option that now allows you to either retain or delete the attached disks when you delete the VM:   We’ve also added the ability to delete a cloud service, its deployments, and its role instances with a single action. This can either be a cloud service that has production and staging deployments with web and worker roles, or a cloud service that contains virtual machines.  To do this, simply select the Cloud Service within the Windows Azure Management Portal and click the “Delete” button: Warnings on Availability Sets with Only One Virtual Machine In Them One of the nice features that Windows Azure Virtual Machines supports is the concept of “Availability Sets”.  An “availability set” allows you to define a tier/role (e.g. webfrontends, databaseservers, etc) that you can map Virtual Machines into – and when you do this Windows Azure separates them across fault domains and ensures that at least one of them is always available during servicing operations.  This enables you to deploy applications in a high availability way. One issue we’ve seen some customers run into is where they define an availability set, but then forget to map more than one VM into it (which defeats the purpose of having an availability set).  With today’s release we now display a warning in the Windows Azure Management Portal if you have only one virtual machine deployed in an availability set to help highlight this: You can learn more about configuring the availability of your virtual machines here. Configuring SQL Server Always On SQL Server Always On is a great feature that you can use with Windows Azure to enable high availability and DR scenarios with SQL Server. Today’s Windows Azure release makes it even easier to configure SQL Server Always On by enabling “Direct Server Return” endpoints to be configured and managed within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Previously, setting this up required using PowerShell to complete the endpoint configuration.  Starting today you can enable this simply by checking the “Direct Server Return” checkbox: You can learn more about how to use direct server return for SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups here. Active Directory: Application Access Enhancements This summer we released our initial preview of our Application Access Enhancements for Windows Azure Active Directory.  This service enables you to securely implement single-sign-on (SSO) support against SaaS applications (including Office 365, SalesForce, Workday, Box, Google Apps, GitHub, etc) as well as LOB based applications (including ones built with the new Windows Azure AD support we shipped last week with ASP.NET and VS 2013). Since the initial preview we’ve enhanced our SAML federation capabilities, integrated our new password vaulting system, and shipped multi-factor authentication support. We've also turned on our outbound identity provisioning system and have it working with hundreds of additional SaaS Applications: Earlier this month we published an update on dates and pricing for when the service will be released in general availability form.  In this blog post we announced our intention to release the service in general availability form by the end of the year.  We also announced that the below features would be available in a free tier with it: SSO to every SaaS app we integrate with – Users can Single Sign On to any app we are integrated with at no charge. This includes all the top SAAS Apps and every app in our application gallery whether they use federation or password vaulting. Application access assignment and removal – IT Admins can assign access privileges to web applications to the users in their active directory assuring that every employee has access to the SAAS Apps they need. And when a user leaves the company or changes jobs, the admin can just as easily remove their access privileges assuring data security and minimizing IP loss User provisioning (and de-provisioning) – IT admins will be able to automatically provision users in 3rd party SaaS applications like Box, Salesforce.com, GoToMeeting, DropBox and others. We are working with key partners in the ecosystem to establish these connections, meaning you no longer have to continually update user records in multiple systems. Security and auditing reports – Security is a key priority for us. With the free version of these enhancements you'll get access to our standard set of access reports giving you visibility into which users are using which applications, when they were using them and where they are using them from. In addition, we'll alert you to un-usual usage patterns for instance when a user logs in from multiple locations at the same time. Our Application Access Panel – Users are logging in from every type of devices including Windows, iOS, & Android. Not all of these devices handle authentication in the same manner but the user doesn't care. They need to access their apps from the devices they love. Our Application Access Panel will support the ability for users to access access and launch their apps from any device and anywhere. You can learn more about our plans for application management with Windows Azure Active Directory here.  Try out the preview and start using it today. Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure Active Directory provides the ability to manage your organization in a directory which is hosted entirely in the cloud, or alternatively kept in sync with an on-premises Windows Server Active Directory solution (allowing you to seamlessly integrate with the directory you already have).  With today’s Windows Azure release we are integrating Windows Azure Active Directory even more within the core Windows Azure management experience, and enabling an even richer enterprise security offering.  Specifically: 1) All Windows Azure accounts now have a default Windows Azure Active Directory created for them.  You can create and map any users you want into this directory, and grant administrative rights to manage resources in Windows Azure to these users. 2) You can keep this directory entirely hosted in the cloud – or optionally sync it with your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory.  Both options are free.  The later approach is ideal for companies that wish to use their corporate user identities to sign-in and manage Windows Azure resources.  It also ensures that if an employee leaves an organization, his or her access control rights to the company’s Windows Azure resources are immediately revoked. 3) The Windows Azure Service Management APIs have been updated to support using Windows Azure Active Directory credentials to sign-in and perform management operations.  Prior to today’s release customers had to download and use management certificates (which were not scoped to individual users) to perform management operations.  We still support this management certificate approach (don’t worry – nothing will stop working).  But we think the new Windows Azure Active Directory authentication support enables an even easier and more secure way for customers to manage resources going forward.  4) The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release (which is also shipping today) includes built-in support for the new Service Management APIs that authenticate with Windows Azure Active Directory, and now allow you to create and manage Windows Azure applications and resources directly within Visual Studio using your Active Directory credentials.  This, combined with updated PowerShell scripts that also support Active Directory, enables an end-to-end enterprise authentication story with Windows Azure. Below are some details on how all of this works: Subscriptions within a Directory As part of today’s update, we have associated all existing Window Azure accounts with a Windows Azure Active Directory (and created one for you if you don’t already have one). When you login to the Windows Azure Management Portal you’ll now see the directory name in the URI of the browser.  For example, in the screen-shot below you can see that I have a “scottgu” directory that my subscriptions are hosted within: Note that you can continue to use Microsoft Accounts (formerly known as Microsoft Live IDs) to sign-into Windows Azure.  These map just fine to a Windows Azure Active Directory – so there is no need to create new usernames that are specific to a directory if you don’t want to.  In the scenario above I’m actually logged in using my @hotmail.com based Microsoft ID which is now mapped to a “scottgu” active directory that was created for me.  By default everything will continue to work just like you used to before. Manage your Directory You can manage an Active Directory (including the one we now create for you by default) by clicking the “Active Directory” tab in the left-hand side of the portal.  This will list all of the directories in your account.  Clicking one the first time will display a getting started page that provides documentation and links to perform common tasks with it: You can use the built-in directory management support within the Windows Azure Management Portal to add/remove/manage users within the directory, enable multi-factor authentication, associate a custom domain (e.g. mycompanyname.com) with the directory, and/or rename the directory to whatever friendly name you want (just click the configure tab to do this).  You can also setup the directory to automatically sync with an on-premises Active Directory using the “Directory Integration” tab. Note that users within a directory by default do not have admin rights to login or manage Windows Azure based resources.  You still need to explicitly grant them co-admin permissions on a subscription for them to login or manage resources in Windows Azure.  You can do this by clicking the Settings tab on the left-hand side of the portal and then by clicking the administrators tab within it. Sign-In Integration within Visual Studio If you install the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release, you can now connect to Windows Azure from directly inside Visual Studio without having to download any management certificates.  You can now just right-click on the “Windows Azure” icon within the Server Explorer and choose the “Connect to Windows Azure” context menu option to do so: Doing this will prompt you to enter the email address of the username you wish to sign-in with (make sure this account is a user in your directory with co-admin rights on a subscription): You can use either a Microsoft Account (e.g. Windows Live ID) or an Active Directory based Organizational account as the email.  The dialog will update with an appropriate login prompt depending on which type of email address you enter: Once you sign-in you’ll see the Windows Azure resources that you have permissions to manage show up automatically within the Visual Studio server explorer and be available to start using: No downloading of management certificates required.  All of the authentication was handled using your Windows Azure Active Directory! Manage Subscriptions across Multiple Directories If you have already have multiple directories and multiple subscriptions within your Windows Azure account, we have done our best to create a good default mapping of your subscriptions->directories as part of today’s update.  If you don’t like the default subscription-to-directory mapping we have done you can click the Settings tab in the left-hand navigation of the Windows Azure Management Portal and browse to the Subscriptions tab within it: If you want to map a subscription under a different directory in your account, simply select the subscription from the list, and then click the “Edit Directory” button to choose which directory to map it to.  Mapping a subscription to a different directory takes only seconds and will not cause any of the resources within the subscription to recycle or stop working.  We’ve made the directory->subscription mapping process self-service so that you always have complete control and can map things however you want. Filtering By Directory and Subscription Within the Windows Azure Management Portal you can filter resources in the portal by subscription (allowing you to show/hide different subscriptions).  If you have subscriptions mapped to multiple directory tenants, we also now have a filter drop-down that allows you to filter the subscription list by directory tenant.  This filter is only available if you have multiple subscriptions mapped to multiple directories within your Windows Azure Account:   Windows Azure SDK 2.2 Today we are also releasing a major update of our Windows Azure SDK.  The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release adds some great new features including: Visual Studio 2013 Support Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter I’ll post a follow-up blog shortly with more details about all of the above. Additional Updates In addition to the above enhancements, today’s release also includes a number of additional improvements: AutoScale: Richer time and date based scheduling support (set different rules on different dates) AutoScale: Ability to Scale to Zero Virtual Machines (very useful for Dev/Test scenarios) AutoScale: Support for time-based scheduling of Mobile Service AutoScale rules Operation Logs: Auditing support for Service Bus management operations Today we also shipped a major update to the Windows Azure SDK – Windows Azure SDK 2.2.  It has so much goodness in it that I have a whole second blog post coming shortly on it! :-) Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a bunch of great new scenarios, and enables a much richer enterprise authentication offering. 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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• Working with PivotTables in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  PivotTables are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Excel.  They allow large amounts of data to be analyzed and summarized in just a few mouse clicks. In this article, we explore PivotTables, understand what they are, and learn how to create and customize them. Note:  This article is written using Excel 2010 (Beta).  The concept of a PivotTable has changed little over the years, but the method of creating one has changed in nearly every iteration of Excel.  If you are using a version of Excel that is not 2010, expect different screens from the ones you see in this article. A Little History In the early days of spreadsheet programs, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost.  Its dominance was so complete that people thought it was a waste of time for Microsoft to bother developing their own spreadsheet software (Excel) to compete with Lotus.  Flash-forward to 2010, and Excel’s dominance of the spreadsheet market is greater than Lotus’s ever was, while the number of users still running Lotus 1-2-3 is approaching zero.  How did this happen?  What caused such a dramatic reversal of fortunes? Industry analysts put it down to two factors:  Firstly, Lotus decided that this fancy new GUI platform called “Windows” was a passing fad that would never take off.  They declined to create a Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 (for a few years, anyway), predicting that their DOS version of the software was all anyone would ever need.  Microsoft, naturally, developed Excel exclusively for Windows.  Secondly, Microsoft developed a feature for Excel that Lotus didn’t provide in 1-2-3, namely PivotTables.  The PivotTables feature, exclusive to Excel, was deemed so staggeringly useful that people were willing to learn an entire new software package (Excel) rather than stick with a program (1-2-3) that didn’t have it.  This one feature, along with the misjudgment of the success of Windows, was the death-knell for Lotus 1-2-3, and the beginning of the success of Microsoft Excel. Understanding PivotTables So what is a PivotTable, exactly? Put simply, a PivotTable is a summary of some data, created to allow easy analysis of said data.  But unlike a manually created summary, Excel PivotTables are interactive.  Once you have created one, you can easily change it if it doesn’t offer the exact insights into your data that you were hoping for.  In a couple of clicks the summary can be “pivoted” – rotated in such a way that the column headings become row headings, and vice versa.  There’s a lot more that can be done, too.  Rather than try to describe all the features of PivotTables, we’ll simply demonstrate them… The data that you analyze using a PivotTable can’t be just any data – it has to be raw data, previously unprocessed (unsummarized) – typically a list of some sort.  An example of this might be the list of sales transactions in a company for the past six months. Examine the data shown below: Notice that this is not raw data.  In fact, it is already a summary of some sort.  In cell B3 we can see $30,000, which apparently is the total of James Cook’s sales for the month of January.  So where is the raw data?  How did we arrive at the figure of $30,000?  Where is the original list of sales transactions that this figure was generated from?  It’s clear that somewhere, someone must have gone to the trouble of collating all of the sales transactions for the past six months into the summary we see above.  How long do you suppose this took?  An hour?  Ten?  Probably. If we were to track down the original list of sales transactions, it might look something like this: You may be surprised to learn that, using the PivotTable feature of Excel, we can create a monthly sales summary similar to the one above in a few seconds, with only a few mouse clicks.  We can do this – and a lot more too! How to Create a PivotTable First, ensure that you have some raw data in a worksheet in Excel.  A list of financial transactions is typical, but it can be a list of just about anything:  Employee contact details, your CD collection, or fuel consumption figures for your company’s fleet of cars. So we start Excel… …and we load such a list… Once we have the list open in Excel, we’re ready to start creating the PivotTable. Click on any one single cell within the list: Then, from the Insert tab, click the PivotTable icon: The Create PivotTable box appears, asking you two questions:  What data should your new PivotTable be based on, and where should it be created?  Because we already clicked on a cell within the list (in the step above), the entire list surrounding that cell is already selected for us ($A$1:$G$88 on the Payments sheet, in this example).  Note that we could select a list in any other region of any other worksheet, or even some external data source, such as an Access database table, or even a MS-SQL Server database table.  We also need to select whether we want our new PivotTable to be created on a new worksheet, or on an existing one.  In this example we will select a new one: The new worksheet is created for us, and a blank PivotTable is created on that worksheet: Another box also appears:  The PivotTable Field List.  This field list will be shown whenever we click on any cell within the PivotTable (above): The list of fields in the top part of the box is actually the collection of column headings from the original raw data worksheet.  The four blank boxes in the lower part of the screen allow us to choose the way we would like our PivotTable to summarize the raw data.  So far, there is nothing in those boxes, so the PivotTable is blank.  All we need to do is drag fields down from the list above and drop them in the lower boxes.  A PivotTable is then automatically created to match our instructions.  If we get it wrong, we only need to drag the fields back to where they came from and/or drag new fields down to replace them. The Values box is arguably the most important of the four.  The field that is dragged into this box represents the data that needs to be summarized in some way (by summing, averaging, finding the maximum, minimum, etc).  It is almost always numerical data.  A perfect candidate for this box in our sample data is the “Amount” field/column.  Let’s drag that field into the Values box: Notice that (a) the “Amount” field in the list of fields is now ticked, and “Sum of Amount” has been added to the Values box, indicating that the amount column has been summed. If we examine the PivotTable itself, we indeed find the sum of all the “Amount” values from the raw data worksheet: We’ve created our first PivotTable!  Handy, but not particularly impressive.  It’s likely that we need a little more insight into our data than that. Referring to our sample data, we need to identify one or more column headings that we could conceivably use to split this total.  For example, we may decide that we would like to see a summary of our data where we have a row heading for each of the different salespersons in our company, and a total for each.  To achieve this, all we need to do is to drag the “Salesperson” field into the Row Labels box: Now, finally, things start to get interesting!  Our PivotTable starts to take shape….   With a couple of clicks we have created a table that would have taken a long time to do manually. So what else can we do?  Well, in one sense our PivotTable is complete.  We’ve created a useful summary of our source data.  The important stuff is already learned!  For the rest of the article, we will examine some ways that more complex PivotTables can be created, and ways that those PivotTables can be customized. First, we can create a two-dimensional table.  Let’s do that by using “Payment Method” as a column heading.  Simply drag the “Payment Method” heading to the Column Labels box: Which looks like this: Starting to get very cool! Let’s make it a three-dimensional table.  What could such a table possibly look like?  Well, let’s see… Drag the “Package” column/heading to the Report Filter box: Notice where it ends up…. This allows us to filter our report based on which “holiday package” was being purchased.  For example, we can see the breakdown of salesperson vs payment method for all packages, or, with a couple of clicks, change it to show the same breakdown for the “Sunseekers” package: And so, if you think about it the right way, our PivotTable is now three-dimensional.  Let’s keep customizing… If it turns out, say, that we only want to see cheque and credit card transactions (i.e. no cash transactions), then we can deselect the “Cash” item from the column headings.  Click the drop-down arrow next to Column Labels, and untick “Cash”: Let’s see what that looks like…As you can see, “Cash” is gone. Formatting This is obviously a very powerful system, but so far the results look very plain and boring.  For a start, the numbers that we’re summing do not look like dollar amounts – just plain old numbers.  Let’s rectify that. A temptation might be to do what we’re used to doing in such circumstances and simply select the whole table (or the whole worksheet) and use the standard number formatting buttons on the toolbar to complete the formatting.  The problem with that approach is that if you ever change the structure of the PivotTable in the future (which is 99% likely), then those number formats will be lost.  We need a way that will make them (semi-)permanent. First, we locate the “Sum of Amount” entry in the Values box, and click on it.  A menu appears.  We select Value Field Settings… from the menu: The Value Field Settings box appears. Click the Number Format button, and the standard Format Cells box appears: From the Category list, select (say) Accounting, and drop the number of decimal places to 0.  Click OK a few times to get back to the PivotTable… As you can see, the numbers have been correctly formatted as dollar amounts. While we’re on the subject of formatting, let’s format the entire PivotTable.  There are a few ways to do this.  Let’s use a simple one… Click the PivotTable Tools/Design tab: Then drop down the arrow in the bottom-right of the PivotTable Styles list to see a vast collection of built-in styles: Choose any one that appeals, and look at the result in your PivotTable:   Other Options We can work with dates as well.  Now usually, there are many, many dates in a transaction list such as the one we started with.  But Excel provides the option to group data items together by day, week, month, year, etc.  Let’s see how this is done. First, let’s remove the “Payment Method” column from the Column Labels box (simply drag it back up to the field list), and replace it with the “Date Booked” column: As you can see, this makes our PivotTable instantly useless, giving us one column for each date that a transaction occurred on – a very wide table! To fix this, right-click on any date and select Group… from the context-menu: The grouping box appears.  We select Months and click OK: Voila!  A much more useful table: (Incidentally, this table is virtually identical to the one shown at the beginning of this article – the original sales summary that was created manually.) Another cool thing to be aware of is that you can have more than one set of row headings (or column headings): …which looks like this…. You can do a similar thing with column headings (or even report filters). Keeping things simple again, let’s see how to plot averaged values, rather than summed values. First, click on “Sum of Amount”, and select Value Field Settings… from the context-menu that appears: In the Summarize value field by list in the Value Field Settings box, select Average: While we’re here, let’s change the Custom Name, from “Average of Amount” to something a little more concise.  Type in something like “Avg”: Click OK, and see what it looks like.  Notice that all the values change from summed totals to averages, and the table title (top-left cell) has changed to “Avg”: If we like, we can even have sums, averages and counts (counts = how many sales there were) all on the same PivotTable! Here are the steps to get something like that in place (starting from a blank PivotTable): Drag “Salesperson” into the Column Labels Drag “Amount” field down into the Values box three times For the first “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Total” and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the second “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Average”, its function to Average and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the third “Amount” field, change its name to “Count” and its function to Count Drag the automatically created field from Column Labels to Row Labels Here’s what we end up with: Total, average and count on the same PivotTable! Conclusion There are many, many more features and options for PivotTables created by Microsoft Excel – far too many to list in an article like this.  To fully cover the potential of PivotTables, a small book (or a large website) would be required.  Brave and/or geeky readers can explore PivotTables further quite easily:  Simply right-click on just about everything, and see what options become available to you.  There are also the two ribbon-tabs: PivotTable Tools/Options and Design.  It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – it’s easy to delete the PivotTable and start again – a possibility old DOS users of Lotus 1-2-3 never had. We’ve included an Excel that should work with most versions of Excel, so you can download to practice your PivotTable skills. Download Our Practice Excel File Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Magnify Selected Cells In Excel 2007Share Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer

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• An Introduction to Meteor

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog post is to give you a brief introduction to Meteor which is a framework for building Single Page Apps. In this blog entry, I provide a walkthrough of building a simple Movie database app. What is special about Meteor? Meteor has two jaw-dropping features: Live HTML – If you make any changes to the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or data on the server then every client shows the changes automatically without a browser refresh. For example, if you change the background color of a page to yellow then every open browser will show the new yellow background color without a refresh. Or, if you add a new movie to a collection of movies, then every open browser will display the new movie automatically. With Live HTML, users no longer need a refresh button. Changes to an application happen everywhere automatically without any effort. The Meteor framework handles all of the messy details of keeping all of the clients in sync with the server for you. Latency Compensation – When you modify data on the client, these modifications appear as if they happened on the server without any delay. For example, if you create a new movie then the movie appears instantly. However, that is all an illusion. In the background, Meteor updates the database with the new movie. If, for whatever reason, the movie cannot be added to the database then Meteor removes the movie from the client automatically. Latency compensation is extremely important for creating a responsive web application. You want the user to be able to make instant modifications in the browser and the framework to handle the details of updating the database without slowing down the user. Installing Meteor Meteor is licensed under the open-source MIT license and you can start building production apps with the framework right now. Be warned that Meteor is still in the “early preview” stage. It has not reached a 1.0 release. According to the Meteor FAQ, Meteor will reach version 1.0 in “More than a month, less than a year.” Don’t be scared away by that. You should be aware that, unlike most open source projects, Meteor has financial backing. The Meteor project received an $11.2 million round of financing from Andreessen Horowitz. So, it would be a good bet that this project will reach the 1.0 mark. And, if it doesn’t, the framework as it exists right now is still very powerful. Meteor runs on top of Node.js. You write Meteor apps by writing JavaScript which runs both on the client and on the server. You can build Meteor apps on Windows, Mac, or Linux (Although the support for Windows is still officially unofficial). If you want to install Meteor on Windows then download the MSI from the following URL: http://win.meteor.com/ If you want to install Meteor on Mac/Linux then run the following CURL command from your terminal: curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh Meteor will install all of its dependencies automatically including Node.js. However, I recommend that you install Node.js before installing Meteor by installing Node.js from the following address: http://nodejs.org/ If you let Meteor install Node.js then Meteor won’t install NPM which is the standard package manager for Node.js. If you install Node.js and then you install Meteor then you get NPM automatically. Creating a New Meteor App To get a sense of how Meteor works, I am going to walk through the steps required to create a simple Movie database app. Our app will display a list of movies and contain a form for creating a new movie. The first thing that we need to do is create our new Meteor app. Open a command prompt/terminal window and execute the following command: Meteor create MovieApp After you execute this command, you should see something like the following: Follow the instructions: execute cd MovieApp to change to your MovieApp directory, and run the meteor command. Executing the meteor command starts Meteor on port 3000. Open up your favorite web browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000 and you should see the default Meteor Hello World page: Open up your favorite development environment to see what the Meteor app looks like. Open the MovieApp folder which we just created. Here’s what the MovieApp looks like in Visual Studio 2012: Notice that our MovieApp contains three files named MovieApp.css, MovieApp.html, and MovieApp.js. In other words, it contains a Cascading Style Sheet file, an HTML file, and a JavaScript file. Just for fun, let’s see how the Live HTML feature works. Open up multiple browsers and point each browser at http://localhost:3000. Now, open the MovieApp.html page and modify the text “Hello World!” to “Hello Cruel World!” and save the change. The text in all of the browsers should update automatically without a browser refresh. Pretty amazing, right? Controlling Where JavaScript Executes You write a Meteor app using JavaScript. Some of the JavaScript executes on the client (the browser) and some of the JavaScript executes on the server and some of the JavaScript executes in both places. For a super simple app, you can use the Meteor.isServer and Meteor.isClient properties to control where your JavaScript code executes. For example, the following JavaScript contains a section of code which executes on the server and a section of code which executes in the browser: if (Meteor.isClient) { console.log("Hello Browser!"); } if (Meteor.isServer) { console.log("Hello Server!"); } console.log("Hello Browser and Server!"); When you run the app, the message “Hello Browser!” is written to the browser JavaScript console. The message “Hello Server!” is written to the command/terminal window where you ran Meteor. Finally, the message “Hello Browser and Server!” is execute on both the browser and server and the message appears in both places. For simple apps, using Meteor.isClient and Meteor.isServer to control where JavaScript executes is fine. For more complex apps, you should create separate folders for your server and client code. Here are the folders which you can use in a Meteor app: · client – This folder contains any JavaScript which executes only on the client. · server – This folder contains any JavaScript which executes only on the server. · common – This folder contains any JavaScript code which executes on both the client and server. · lib – This folder contains any JavaScript files which you want to execute before any other JavaScript files. · public – This folder contains static application assets such as images. For the Movie App, we need the client, server, and common folders. Delete the existing MovieApp.js, MovieApp.html, and MovieApp.css files. We will create new files in the right locations later in this walkthrough. Combining HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Files Meteor combines all of your JavaScript files, and all of your Cascading Style Sheet files, and all of your HTML files automatically. If you want to create one humongous JavaScript file which contains all of the code for your app then that is your business. However, if you want to build a more maintainable application, then you should break your JavaScript files into many separate JavaScript files and let Meteor combine them for you. Meteor also combines all of your HTML files into a single file. HTML files are allowed to have the following top-level elements: <head> — All <head> files are combined into a single <head> and served with the initial page load. <body> — All <body> files are combined into a single <body> and served with the initial page load. <template> — All <template> files are compiled into JavaScript templates. Because you are creating a single page app, a Meteor app typically will contain a single HTML file for the <head> and <body> content. However, a Meteor app typically will contain several template files. In other words, all of the interesting stuff happens within the <template> files. Displaying a List of Movies Let me start building the Movie App by displaying a list of movies. In order to display a list of movies, we need to create the following four files: · client\movies.html – Contains the HTML for the <head> and <body> of the page for the Movie app. · client\moviesTemplate.html – Contains the HTML template for displaying the list of movies. · client\movies.js – Contains the JavaScript for supplying data to the moviesTemplate. · server\movies.js – Contains the JavaScript for seeding the database with movies. After you create these files, your folder structure should looks like this: Here’s what the client\movies.html file looks like: <head> <title>My Movie App</title> </head> <body> <h1>Movies</h1> {{> moviesTemplate }} </body>   Notice that it contains <head> and <body> top-level elements. The <body> element includes the moviesTemplate with the syntax {{> moviesTemplate }}. The moviesTemplate is defined in the client/moviesTemplate.html file: <template name="moviesTemplate"> <ul> {{#each movies}} <li> {{title}} </li> {{/each}} </ul> </template> By default, Meteor uses the Handlebars templating library. In the moviesTemplate above, Handlebars is used to loop through each of the movies using {{#each}}…{{/each}} and display the title for each movie using {{title}}. The client\movies.js JavaScript file is used to bind the moviesTemplate to the Movies collection on the client. Here’s what this JavaScript file looks like: // Declare client Movies collection Movies = new Meteor.Collection("movies"); // Bind moviesTemplate to Movies collection Template.moviesTemplate.movies = function () { return Movies.find(); }; The Movies collection is a client-side proxy for the server-side Movies database collection. Whenever you want to interact with the collection of Movies stored in the database, you use the Movies collection instead of communicating back to the server. The moviesTemplate is bound to the Movies collection by assigning a function to the Template.moviesTemplate.movies property. The function simply returns all of the movies from the Movies collection. The final file which we need is the server-side server\movies.js file: // Declare server Movies collection Movies = new Meteor.Collection("movies"); // Seed the movie database with a few movies Meteor.startup(function () { if (Movies.find().count() == 0) { Movies.insert({ title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas" }); Movies.insert({ title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }); Movies.insert({ title: "King Kong", director: "Jackson" }); } }); The server\movies.js file does two things. First, it declares the server-side Meteor Movies collection. When you declare a server-side Meteor collection, a collection is created in the MongoDB database associated with your Meteor app automatically (Meteor uses MongoDB as its database automatically). Second, the server\movies.js file seeds the Movies collection (MongoDB collection) with three movies. Seeding the database gives us some movies to look at when we open the Movies app in a browser. Creating New Movies Let me modify the Movies Database App so that we can add new movies to the database of movies. First, I need to create a new template file – named client\movieForm.html – which contains an HTML form for creating a new movie: <template name="movieForm"> <fieldset> <legend>Add New Movie</legend> <form> <div> <label> Title: <input id="title" /> </label> </div> <div> <label> Director: <input id="director" /> </label> </div> <div> <input type="submit" value="Add Movie" /> </div> </form> </fieldset> </template> In order for the new form to show up, I need to modify the client\movies.html file to include the movieForm.html template. Notice that I added {{> movieForm }} to the client\movies.html file: <head> <title>My Movie App</title> </head> <body> <h1>Movies</h1> {{> moviesTemplate }} {{> movieForm }} </body> After I make these modifications, our Movie app will display the form: The next step is to handle the submit event for the movie form. Below, I’ve modified the client\movies.js file so that it contains a handler for the submit event raised when you submit the form contained in the movieForm.html template: // Declare client Movies collection Movies = new Meteor.Collection("movies"); // Bind moviesTemplate to Movies collection Template.moviesTemplate.movies = function () { return Movies.find(); }; // Handle movieForm events Template.movieForm.events = { 'submit': function (e, tmpl) { // Don't postback e.preventDefault(); // create the new movie var newMovie = { title: tmpl.find("#title").value, director: tmpl.find("#director").value }; // add the movie to the db Movies.insert(newMovie); } }; The Template.movieForm.events property contains an event map which maps event names to handlers. In this case, I am mapping the form submit event to an anonymous function which handles the event. In the event handler, I am first preventing a postback by calling e.preventDefault(). This is a single page app, no postbacks are allowed! Next, I am grabbing the new movie from the HTML form. I’m taking advantage of the template find() method to retrieve the form field values. Finally, I am calling Movies.insert() to insert the new movie into the Movies collection. Here, I am explicitly inserting the new movie into the client-side Movies collection. Meteor inserts the new movie into the server-side Movies collection behind the scenes. When Meteor inserts the movie into the server-side collection, the new movie is added to the MongoDB database associated with the Movies app automatically. If server-side insertion fails for whatever reasons – for example, your internet connection is lost – then Meteor will remove the movie from the client-side Movies collection automatically. In other words, Meteor takes care of keeping the client Movies collection and the server Movies collection in sync. If you open multiple browsers, and add movies, then you should notice that all of the movies appear on all of the open browser automatically. You don’t need to refresh individual browsers to update the client-side Movies collection. Meteor keeps everything synchronized between the browsers and server for you. Removing the Insecure Module To make it easier to develop and debug a new Meteor app, by default, you can modify the database directly from the client. For example, you can delete all of the data in the database by opening up your browser console window and executing multiple Movies.remove() commands. Obviously, enabling anyone to modify your database from the browser is not a good idea in a production application. Before you make a Meteor app public, you should first run the meteor remove insecure command from a command/terminal window: Running meteor remove insecure removes the insecure package from the Movie app. Unfortunately, it also breaks our Movie app. We’ll get an “Access denied” error in our browser console whenever we try to insert a new movie. No worries. I’ll fix this issue in the next section. Creating Meteor Methods By taking advantage of Meteor Methods, you can create methods which can be invoked on both the client and the server. By taking advantage of Meteor Methods you can: 1. Perform form validation on both the client and the server. For example, even if an evil hacker bypasses your client code, you can still prevent the hacker from submitting an invalid value for a form field by enforcing validation on the server. 2. Simulate database operations on the client but actually perform the operations on the server. Let me show you how we can modify our Movie app so it uses Meteor Methods to insert a new movie. First, we need to create a new file named common\methods.js which contains the definition of our Meteor Methods: Meteor.methods({ addMovie: function (newMovie) { // Perform form validation if (newMovie.title == "") { throw new Meteor.Error(413, "Missing title!"); } if (newMovie.director == "") { throw new Meteor.Error(413, "Missing director!"); } // Insert movie (simulate on client, do it on server) return Movies.insert(newMovie); } }); The addMovie() method is called from both the client and the server. This method does two things. First, it performs some basic validation. If you don’t enter a title or you don’t enter a director then an error is thrown. Second, the addMovie() method inserts the new movie into the Movies collection. When called on the client, inserting the new movie into the Movies collection just updates the collection. When called on the server, inserting the new movie into the Movies collection causes the database (MongoDB) to be updated with the new movie. You must add the common\methods.js file to the common folder so it will get executed on both the client and the server. Our folder structure now looks like this: We actually call the addMovie() method within our client code in the client\movies.js file. Here’s what the updated file looks like: // Declare client Movies collection Movies = new Meteor.Collection("movies"); // Bind moviesTemplate to Movies collection Template.moviesTemplate.movies = function () { return Movies.find(); }; // Handle movieForm events Template.movieForm.events = { 'submit': function (e, tmpl) { // Don't postback e.preventDefault(); // create the new movie var newMovie = { title: tmpl.find("#title").value, director: tmpl.find("#director").value }; // add the movie to the db Meteor.call( "addMovie", newMovie, function (err, result) { if (err) { alert("Could not add movie " + err.reason); } } ); } }; The addMovie() method is called – on both the client and the server – by calling the Meteor.call() method. This method accepts the following parameters: · The string name of the method to call. · The data to pass to the method (You can actually pass multiple params for the data if you like). · A callback function to invoke after the method completes. In the JavaScript code above, the addMovie() method is called with the new movie retrieved from the HTML form. The callback checks for an error. If there is an error then the error reason is displayed in an alert (please don’t use alerts for validation errors in a production app because they are ugly!). Summary The goal of this blog post was to provide you with a brief walk through of a simple Meteor app. I showed you how you can create a simple Movie Database app which enables you to display a list of movies and create new movies. I also explained why it is important to remove the Meteor insecure package from a production app. I showed you how to use Meteor Methods to insert data into the database instead of doing it directly from the client. I’m very impressed with the Meteor framework. The support for Live HTML and Latency Compensation are required features for many real world Single Page Apps but implementing these features by hand is not easy. Meteor makes it easy.

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• Simple MSBuild Configuration: Updating Assemblies With A Version Number

  - by srkirkland

  When distributing a library you often run up against versioning problems, once facet of which is simply determining which version of that library your client is running.  Of course, each project in your solution has an AssemblyInfo.cs file which provides, among other things, the ability to set the Assembly name and version number.  Unfortunately, setting the assembly version here would require not only changing the version manually for each build (depending on your schedule), but keeping it in sync across all projects.  There are many ways to solve this versioning problem, and in this blog post I’m going to try to explain what I think is the easiest and most flexible solution.  I will walk you through using MSBuild to create a simple build script, and I’ll even show how to (optionally) integrate with a Team City build server.  All of the code from this post can be found at https://github.com/srkirkland/BuildVersion. Create CommonAssemblyInfo.cs The first step is to create a common location for the repeated assembly info that is spread across all of your projects.  Create a new solution-level file (I usually create a Build/ folder in the solution root, but anywhere reachable by all your projects will do) called CommonAssemblyInfo.cs.  In here you can put any information common to all your assemblies, including the version number.  An example CommonAssemblyInfo.cs is as follows: using System.Reflection; using System.Resources; using System.Runtime.InteropServices;   [assembly: AssemblyCompany("University of California, Davis")] [assembly: AssemblyProduct("BuildVersionTest")] [assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Scott Kirkland & UC Regents")] [assembly: AssemblyConfiguration("")] [assembly: AssemblyTrademark("")]   [assembly: ComVisible(false)]   [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.2.3.4")] //Will be replaced   [assembly: NeutralResourcesLanguage("en-US")] .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; }   Cleanup AssemblyInfo.cs & Link CommonAssemblyInfo.cs For each of your projects, you’ll want to clean up your assembly info to contain only information that is unique to that assembly – everything else will go in the CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file.  For most of my projects, that just means setting the AssemblyTitle, though you may feel AssemblyDescription is warranted.  An example AssemblyInfo.cs file is as follows: using System.Reflection;   [assembly: AssemblyTitle("BuildVersionTest")] .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; } Next, you need to “link” the CommonAssemblyinfo.cs file into your projects right beside your newly lean AssemblyInfo.cs file.  To do this, right click on your project and choose Add | Existing Item from the context menu.  Navigate to your CommonAssemblyinfo.cs file but instead of clicking Add, click the little down-arrow next to add and choose “Add as Link.”  You should see a little link graphic similar to this: We’ve actually reduced complexity a lot already, because if you build all of your assemblies will have the same common info, including the product name and our static (fake) assembly version.  Let’s take this one step further and introduce a build script. Create an MSBuild file What we want from the build script (for now) is basically just to have the common assembly version number changed via a parameter (eventually to be passed in by the build server) and then for the project to build.  Also we’d like to have a flexibility to define what build configuration to use (debug, release, etc). In order to find/replace the version number, we are going to use a Regular Expression to find and replace the text within your CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file.  There are many other ways to do this using community build task add-ins, but since we want to keep it simple let’s just define the Regular Expression task manually in a new file, Build.tasks (this example taken from the NuGet build.tasks file). <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Go" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <UsingTask TaskName="RegexTransform" TaskFactory="CodeTaskFactory" AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.Build.Tasks.v4.0.dll"> <ParameterGroup> <Items ParameterType="Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITaskItem[]" /> </ParameterGroup> <Task> <Using Namespace="System.IO" /> <Using Namespace="System.Text.RegularExpressions" /> <Using Namespace="Microsoft.Build.Framework" /> <Code Type="Fragment" Language="cs"> <![CDATA[ foreach(ITaskItem item in Items) { string fileName = item.GetMetadata("FullPath"); string find = item.GetMetadata("Find"); string replaceWith = item.GetMetadata("ReplaceWith"); if(!File.Exists(fileName)) { Log.LogError(null, null, null, null, 0, 0, 0, 0, String.Format("Could not find version file: {0}", fileName), new object[0]); } string content = File.ReadAllText(fileName); File.WriteAllText( fileName, Regex.Replace( content, find, replaceWith ) ); } ]]> </Code> </Task> </UsingTask> </Project> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If you glance at the code, you’ll see it’s really just going a Regex.Replace() on a given file, which is exactly what we need. Now we are ready to write our build file, called (by convention) Build.proj. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Go" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <Import Project="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\Build.tasks" /> <PropertyGroup> <Configuration Condition="'$(Configuration)' == ''">Debug</Configuration> <SolutionRoot>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)</SolutionRoot> </PropertyGroup>   <ItemGroup> <RegexTransform Include="$(SolutionRoot)\CommonAssemblyInfo.cs"> <Find>(?&lt;major&gt;\d+)\.(?&lt;minor&gt;\d+)\.\d+\.(?&lt;revision&gt;\d+)</Find> <ReplaceWith>$(BUILD_NUMBER)</ReplaceWith> </RegexTransform> </ItemGroup>   <Target Name="Go" DependsOnTargets="UpdateAssemblyVersion; Build"> </Target>   <Target Name="UpdateAssemblyVersion" Condition="'$(BUILD_NUMBER)' != ''"> <RegexTransform Items="@(RegexTransform)" /> </Target>   <Target Name="Build"> <MSBuild Projects="$(SolutionRoot)\BuildVersionTest.sln" Targets="Build" /> </Target>   </Project> Reviewing this MSBuild file, we see that by default the “Go” target will be called, which in turn depends on “UpdateAssemblyVersion” and then “Build.”  We go ahead and import the Bulid.tasks file and then setup some handy properties for setting the build configuration and solution root (in this case, my build files are in the solution root, but we might want to create a Build/ directory later).  The rest of the file flows logically, we setup the RegexTransform to match version numbers such as <major>.<minor>.1.<revision> (1.2.3.4 in our example) and replace it with a $(BUILD_NUMBER) parameter which will be supplied externally.  The first target, “UpdateAssemblyVersion” just runs the RegexTransform, and the second target, “Build” just runs the default MSBuild on our solution. Testing the MSBuild file locally Now we have a build file which can replace assembly version numbers and build, so let’s setup a quick batch file to be able to build locally.  To do this you simply create a file called Build.cmd and have it call MSBuild on your Build.proj file.  I’ve added a bit more flexibility so you can specify build configuration and version number, which makes your Build.cmd look as follows: set config=%1 if "%config%" == "" ( set config=debug ) set version=%2 if "%version%" == "" ( set version=2.3.4.5 ) %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild Build.proj /p:Configuration="%config%" /p:build_number="%version%" .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 if you click on the Build.cmd file, you will get a default debug build using the version 2.3.4.5.  Let’s run it in a command window with the parameters set for a release build version 2.0.1.453.   Excellent!  We can now run one simple command and govern the build configuration and version number of our entire solution.  Each DLL produced will have the same version number, making determining which version of a library you are running very simple and accurate. Configure the build server (TeamCity) Of course you are not really going to want to run a build command manually every time, and typing in incrementing version numbers will also not be ideal.  A good solution is to have a computer (or set of computers) act as a build server and build your code for you, providing you a consistent environment, excellent reporting, and much more.  One of the most popular Build Servers is JetBrains’ TeamCity, and this last section will show you the few configuration parameters to use when setting up a build using your MSBuild file created earlier.  If you are using a different build server, the same principals should apply. First, when setting up the project you want to specify the “Build Number Format,” often given in the form <major>.<minor>.<revision>.<build>.  In this case you will set major/minor manually, and optionally revision (or you can use your VCS revision number with %build.vcs.number%), and then build using the {0} wildcard.  Thus your build number format might look like this: 2.0.1.{0}.  During each build, this value will be created and passed into the $BUILD_NUMBER variable of our Build.proj file, which then uses it to decorate your assemblies with the proper version. After setting up the build number, you must choose MSBuild as the Build Runner, then provide a path to your build file (Build.proj).  After specifying your MSBuild Version (equivalent to your .NET Framework Version), you have the option to specify targets (the default being “Go”) and additional MSBuild parameters.  The one parameter that is often useful is manually setting the configuration property (/p:Configuration="Release") if you want something other than the default (which is Debug in our example).  Your resulting configuration will look something like this: [Under General Settings] [Build Runner Settings]   Now every time your build is run, a newly incremented build version number will be generated and passed to MSBuild, which will then version your assemblies and build your solution.   A Quick Review Our goal was to version our output assemblies in an automated way, and we accomplished it by performing a few quick steps: Move the common assembly information, including version, into a linked CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file Create a simple MSBuild script to replace the common assembly version number and build your solution Direct your build server to use the created MSBuild script That’s really all there is to it.  You can find all of the code from this post at https://github.com/srkirkland/BuildVersion. Enjoy!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 06, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 06, 2010Popular ReleasesAura: Aura Preview 1: Rewritten from scratch. This release supports getting color only from icon of foreground window.myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingmytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta: mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta web Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.4, MVC3 RC WARNING For run and debug mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src download and ...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.3 Beta: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Moved menu management and keyboard navigation code to the new PopupMenuManager class - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.0: First public releaseMiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (December 2010): The release is targetted for stable daily use. With improved performance and enhanced compatibility with several latest PHP open source applications; it makes this release perfect replacement of your old PHP runtime. Changes made within this release include following and much more: Performance improvements based on real-world applications experience. We determined biggest bottlenecks and we found and removed overheads causing performance problems in many PHP applications. Reimplemented nat...Chronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.26.7024: Fixed updater; Fixed MegauploadDJ - jQuery WebControls for ASP.NET: DJ 1.2: What is new? Update to support jQuery 1.4.2 Update to support jQuery ui 1.8.6 Update to Visual Studio 2010 New WebControls with samples added Autocomplete WebControl Button WebControl ToggleButt WebControl The example web site is including in source code project.LateBindingApi.Excel: LateBindingApi.Excel Release 0.7g: Unterschiede zur Vorgängerversion: - Zusätzliche Interior Properties - Group / Ungroup Methoden für Range - Bugfix COM Reference Handling für Application Objekt in einigen Klassen Release+Samples V0.7g: - Enthält Laufzeit DLL und Beispielprojekte Beispielprojekte: COMAddinExample - Demonstriert ein versionslos angebundenes COMAddin Example01 - Background Colors und Borders für Cells Example02 - Font Attributes undAlignment für Cells Example03 - Numberformats Example04 - Shapes, WordArts, P...ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit: November 2010 - v2.1: ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit v2.1 Added Windows Phone 7 build. New controls added: InfoWindow ChildPage (Windows Phone 7 only) See what's new here full details for : http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/help/#/What_s_new_in_2_1/016600000025000000/ Note: Requires Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0.ASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.1: Atomic CMS 2.1.1 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.5 beta Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.5 beta with the following new feature: New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. Also this release includes few bug fixes: AxisXLabel label were getting clipped if angle was set for AxisLabels and ScrollingEnabled was not set in Chart. If LabelStyle property was set as 'Inside', size of the Pie was not proper. Yo...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.1.1: 2.1.1This release adds in the changes for 4.03a. To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Switched Searing Flames bac...AI: Initial 0.0.1: It’s simply just one code file; it simulates AI and machine in a simulated world. The AI has a little understanding of its body machine and parts, and able to use its feet to do actions just start and stop walking. The world is all of white with nothing but just the machine on a white planet. Colors, odors and position information make no sense. I’m previous C# programmer and I’m learning F# during this project, although I’m still not a good F# programmer, in this project I learning to prog...NKinect: NKinect Preview: Build features: Accelerometer reading Motor serial number property Realtime image update Realtime depth calculation Export to PLY (On demand) Control motor LED Control Kinect tiltMicrosoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V1.0 - N-Layer DDD Sample App .NET 4.0: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools http://re...Sense/Net Enterprise Portal & ECMS: SenseNet 6.0.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.1 Community Edition This half year we have been working quite fiercely to bring you the long-awaited release of Sense/Net 6.0. Download this Community Edition to see what we have been up to. These months we have worked on getting the WebCMS capabilities of Sense/Net 6.0 up to par. New features include: New, powerful page and portlet editing experience. HTML and CSS cleanup, new, powerful site skinning system. Upgraded, lightning-fast indexing and query via Lucene. Limita...Minecraft GPS: Minecraft GPS 1.1.1: New Features Compass! New style. Set opacity on main window to allow overlay of Minecraft. Open World in any folder. Fixes Fixed style so listbox won't grow the window size. Fixed open file dialog issue on non-vista kernel machines.New ProjectsAboutTime: The AboutTime WPF controls project is aimed at developing custom controls that relate to time.aReader: aReader is a free software, it's used as an XPS document reader. It's developed in C# Language and use Windows Presentation Foundation technology with .NET Framework 3.5. Mixed with Ribbon Controls Library for GUI (Graphic User Interface) make this application user friendly.Battle Net Info: Battle Net Info provides information of the StarCraft2 player from his profile pageBencoder: Library for encode/decode bencode file or string. It's developing on C#.BiBongNet: BiBongNet Project.Binhnt: BinhntC++ Bloom Filter Library: C++ Bloom Filter LibraryChild Sponsorship Manager: Sponsorship Manager is developed for a NPO that provides child sponsorship in developing countries. It is possible to track sponsor child relations, gifts and payments. It is developed in visual basic . netDocBlogger: This is a tool for automatically converting existing XML comments from your project into MSDN style HTML for posting to the codeplex site. This will use the MetaBlog API to post code, but can be used in a copy paste fashion right away.Dynamic Rdlc WebControl: "Dynamic Rdlc WebControl" is an ASP .NET WebControl to generate dynamic reports in RDLC format without generate physical files. Suports groups and totalizers. It is developed with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, ASP .NET and C# 4.Fake Call for Windows Phone 7: Coding4Fun Windows Phone 7 fake call applicationFlow launcher: Flow is the worlds fastest application launcher, using an onscreen keyboard and mnemonics to achieve lightning fast shortcut launching.GaDotNet: GaDotNet is an open source library designed to make it easy to log page views, events and transactions, through c# code, without using JavaScript or even needing to have a browser.HackerNews for WP7: HackerNews is a WP7 client for the HackerNews website.How much is this meeting costing us?: Coding4Fun Windows Phone 7 "How much is this meeting costing us?" applicationKLAB: KLABMap Navigator: Map Navigator - it's a silverlight application intended to work with maps.MNRT: MNRT implements (demonstrates) several techniques to realize fast global illumination for dynamic scenes on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) using CUDA. A GPU-based kd-tree was implemented to accelerate both ray tracing and photon mapping.MVC Helpers: MVC Helper makes developing views easier. It contains extended helpers classes to render view content. It is developed in C#.Net Extended Helpers for Grid has been created so far. MVCPets: This is a projected dedicated to providing a free platform to be used by animal rescue organizations. The hope is that this project can fill the void for those rescue groups that can't afford to pay a professional web designer/developer.MyGraphicProgram: ???????????????NAI: This project is a step by step illustration of some Numerical Analysis methods.Nemono: Nemono is an application that runs in the background, and is activated by pressing a key combination like ALT+W. When activated, Nemono uses context awareness to present relevant shortcuts to the user, and mnemonics to execute shortcuts.opojo: opojoOxyPlot: OxyPlot is a .NET library for making XY line plots. The focus is on simplicity and performance. The library contains custom controls for WPF and Windows Forms. The plots can also be exported to SVG, PDF and PNG.PowerChumby: PowerChumby is a Perl CGI script and a PowerShell module that gives you a PowerShell way of controlling your Chumby.RHoK Berlin Visio Projekt: Random Hacks of Kindness - Berlin Projekt für die Senatsverwaltung für Gesundheit, Umwelt und Verbraucherschutz Query, integrate and display external data in Microsoft Visio. It's developed in C#.sc2md: starcraft.md news portalSlide Show: Coding4Fun Windows Phone 7 Slide Show applicationsmartcon: smart control centerTFS Fav source: Favourites for source location in VSTwitter Followers Monitor: Free and Open Source tool that will let you monitor any Twitter account for its new & lost followers even if it's not yours and you don't have its credentials. It allows you to add several Twitter accounts and be updated right from your desktop.

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• Node.js Adventure - Host Node.js on Windows Azure Worker Role

  - by Shaun

  In my previous post I demonstrated about how to develop and deploy a Node.js application on Windows Azure Web Site (a.k.a. WAWS). WAWS is a new feature in Windows Azure platform. Since it’s low-cost, and it provides IIS and IISNode components so that we can host our Node.js application though Git, FTP and WebMatrix without any configuration and component installation. But sometimes we need to use the Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS) and host our Node.js on worker role. Below are some benefits of using worker role. - WAWS leverages IIS and IISNode to host Node.js application, which runs in x86 WOW mode. It reduces the performance comparing with x64 in some cases. - WACS worker role does not need IIS, hence there’s no restriction of IIS, such as 8000 concurrent requests limitation. - WACS provides more flexibility and controls to the developers. For example, we can RDP to the virtual machines of our worker role instances. - WACS provides the service configuration features which can be changed when the role is running. - WACS provides more scaling capability than WAWS. In WAWS we can have at most 3 reserved instances per web site while in WACS we can have up to 20 instances in a subscription. - Since when using WACS worker role we starts the node by ourselves in a process, we can control the input, output and error stream. We can also control the version of Node.js.   Run Node.js in Worker Role Node.js can be started by just having its execution file. This means in Windows Azure, we can have a worker role with the “node.exe” and the Node.js source files, then start it in Run method of the worker role entry class. Let’s create a new windows azure project in Visual Studio and add a new worker role. Since we need our worker role execute the “node.exe” with our application code we need to add the “node.exe” into our project. Right click on the worker role project and add an existing item. By default the Node.js will be installed in the “Program Files\nodejs” folder so we can navigate there and add the “node.exe”. Then we need to create the entry code of Node.js. In WAWS the entry file must be named “server.js”, which is because it’s hosted by IIS and IISNode and IISNode only accept “server.js”. But here as we control everything we can choose any files as the entry code. For example, I created a new JavaScript file named “index.js” in project root. Since we created a C# Windows Azure project we cannot create a JavaScript file from the context menu “Add new item”. We have to create a text file, and then rename it to JavaScript extension. After we added these two files we should set their “Copy to Output Directory” property to “Copy Always”, or “Copy if Newer”. Otherwise they will not be involved in the package when deployed. Let’s paste a very simple Node.js code in the “index.js” as below. As you can see I created a web server listening at port 12345. 1: var http = require("http"); 2: var port = 12345; 3:  4: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 5: res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" }); 6: res.end("Hello World\n"); 7: }).listen(port); 8:  9: console.log("Server running at port %d", port); Then we need to start “node.exe” with this file when our worker role was started. This can be done in its Run method. I found the Node.js and entry JavaScript file name, and then create a new process to run it. Our worker role will wait for the process to be exited. If everything is OK once our web server was opened the process will be there listening for incoming requests, and should not be terminated. The code in worker role would be like this. 1: public override void Run() 2: { 3: // This is a sample worker implementation. Replace with your logic. 4: Trace.WriteLine("NodejsHost entry point called", "Information"); 5:  6: // retrieve the node.exe and entry node.js source code file name. 7: var node = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(@"%RoleRoot%\approot\node.exe"); 8: var js = "index.js"; 9:  10: // prepare the process starting of node.exe 11: var info = new ProcessStartInfo(node, js) 12: { 13: CreateNoWindow = false, 14: ErrorDialog = true, 15: WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Normal, 16: UseShellExecute = false, 17: WorkingDirectory = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(@"%RoleRoot%\approot") 18: }; 19: Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1}", node, js), "Information"); 20:  21: // start the node.exe with entry code and wait for exit 22: var process = Process.Start(info); 23: process.WaitForExit(); 24: } Then we can run it locally. In the computer emulator UI the worker role started and it executed the Node.js, then Node.js windows appeared. Open the browser to verify the website hosted by our worker role. Next let’s deploy it to azure. But we need some additional steps. First, we need to create an input endpoint. By default there’s no endpoint defined in a worker role. So we will open the role property window in Visual Studio, create a new input TCP endpoint to the port we want our website to use. In this case I will use 80. Even though we created a web server we should add a TCP endpoint of the worker role, since Node.js always listen on TCP instead of HTTP. And then changed the “index.js”, let our web server listen on 80. 1: var http = require("http"); 2: var port = 80; 3:  4: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 5: res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" }); 6: res.end("Hello World\n"); 7: }).listen(port); 8:  9: console.log("Server running at port %d", port); Then publish it to Windows Azure. And then in browser we can see our Node.js website was running on WACS worker role. We may encounter an error if we tried to run our Node.js website on 80 port at local emulator. This is because the compute emulator registered 80 and map the 80 endpoint to 81. But our Node.js cannot detect this operation. So when it tried to listen on 80 it will failed since 80 have been used.   Use NPM Modules When we are using WAWS to host Node.js, we can simply install modules we need, and then just publish or upload all files to WAWS. But if we are using WACS worker role, we have to do some extra steps to make the modules work. Assuming that we plan to use “express” in our application. Firstly of all we should download and install this module through NPM command. But after the install finished, they are just in the disk but not included in the worker role project. If we deploy the worker role right now the module will not be packaged and uploaded to azure. Hence we need to add them to the project. On solution explorer window click the “Show all files” button, select the “node_modules” folder and in the context menu select “Include In Project”. But that not enough. We also need to make all files in this module to “Copy always” or “Copy if newer”, so that they can be uploaded to azure with the “node.exe” and “index.js”. This is painful step since there might be many files in a module. So I created a small tool which can update a C# project file, make its all items as “Copy always”. The code is very simple. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: if (args.Length < 1) 4: { 5: Console.WriteLine("Usage: copyallalways [project file]"); 6: return; 7: } 8:  9: var proj = args[0]; 10: File.Copy(proj, string.Format("{0}.bak", proj)); 11:  12: var xml = new XmlDocument(); 13: xml.Load(proj); 14: var nsManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(xml.NameTable); 15: nsManager.AddNamespace("pf", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"); 16:  17: // add the output setting to copy always 18: var contentNodes = xml.SelectNodes("//pf:Project/pf:ItemGroup/pf:Content", nsManager); 19: UpdateNodes(contentNodes, xml, nsManager); 20: var noneNodes = xml.SelectNodes("//pf:Project/pf:ItemGroup/pf:None", nsManager); 21: UpdateNodes(noneNodes, xml, nsManager); 22: xml.Save(proj); 23:  24: // remove the namespace attributes 25: var content = xml.InnerXml.Replace("<CopyToOutputDirectory xmlns=\"\">", "<CopyToOutputDirectory>"); 26: xml.LoadXml(content); 27: xml.Save(proj); 28: } 29:  30: static void UpdateNodes(XmlNodeList nodes, XmlDocument xml, XmlNamespaceManager nsManager) 31: { 32: foreach (XmlNode node in nodes) 33: { 34: var copyToOutputDirectoryNode = node.SelectSingleNode("pf:CopyToOutputDirectory", nsManager); 35: if (copyToOutputDirectoryNode == null) 36: { 37: var n = xml.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, "CopyToOutputDirectory", null); 38: n.InnerText = "Always"; 39: node.AppendChild(n); 40: } 41: else 42: { 43: if (string.Compare(copyToOutputDirectoryNode.InnerText, "Always", true) != 0) 44: { 45: copyToOutputDirectoryNode.InnerText = "Always"; 46: } 47: } 48: } 49: } Please be careful when use this tool. I created only for demo so do not use it directly in a production environment. Unload the worker role project, execute this tool with the worker role project file name as the command line argument, it will set all items as “Copy always”. Then reload this worker role project. Now let’s change the “index.js” to use express. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3:  4: var port = 80; 5:  6: app.configure(function () { 7: }); 8:  9: app.get("/", function (req, res) { 10: res.send("Hello Node.js!"); 11: }); 12:  13: app.get("/User/:id", function (req, res) { 14: var id = req.params.id; 15: res.json({ 16: "id": id, 17: "name": "user " + id, 18: "company": "IGT" 19: }); 20: }); 21:  22: app.listen(port); Finally let’s publish it and have a look in browser.   Use Windows Azure SQL Database We can use Windows Azure SQL Database (a.k.a. WACD) from Node.js as well on worker role hosting. Since we can control the version of Node.js, here we can use x64 version of “node-sqlserver” now. This is better than if we host Node.js on WAWS since it only support x86. Just install the “node-sqlserver” module from NPM, copy the “sqlserver.node” from “Build\Release” folder to “Lib” folder. Include them in worker role project and run my tool to make them to “Copy always”. Finally update the “index.js” to use WASD. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var sql = require("node-sqlserver"); 3:  4: var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=tcp:{SERVER NAME}.database.windows.net,1433;Database={DATABASE NAME};Uid={LOGIN}@{SERVER NAME};Pwd={PASSWORD};Encrypt=yes;Connection Timeout=30;"; 5: var port = 80; 6:  7: var app = express(); 8:  9: app.configure(function () { 10: app.use(express.bodyParser()); 11: }); 12:  13: app.get("/", function (req, res) { 14: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 15: if (err) { 16: console.log(err); 17: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 18: } 19: else { 20: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 21: if (err) { 22: console.log(err); 23: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 24: } 25: else { 26: res.json(results); 27: } 28: }); 29: } 30: }); 31: }); 32:  33: app.get("/text/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 34: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 35: if (err) { 36: console.log(err); 37: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 38: } 39: else { 40: var key = req.params.key; 41: var culture = req.params.culture; 42: var command = "SELECT * FROM [Resource] WHERE [Key] = '" + key + "' AND [Culture] = '" + culture + "'"; 43: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 44: if (err) { 45: console.log(err); 46: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 47: } 48: else { 49: res.json(results); 50: } 51: }); 52: } 53: }); 54: }); 55:  56: app.get("/sproc/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 57: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 58: if (err) { 59: console.log(err); 60: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 61: } 62: else { 63: var key = req.params.key; 64: var culture = req.params.culture; 65: var command = "EXEC GetItem '" + key + "', '" + culture + "'"; 66: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 67: if (err) { 68: console.log(err); 69: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 70: } 71: else { 72: res.json(results); 73: } 74: }); 75: } 76: }); 77: }); 78:  79: app.post("/new", function (req, res) { 80: var key = req.body.key; 81: var culture = req.body.culture; 82: var val = req.body.val; 83:  84: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 85: if (err) { 86: console.log(err); 87: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 88: } 89: else { 90: var command = "INSERT INTO [Resource] VALUES ('" + key + "', '" + culture + "', N'" + val + "')"; 91: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 92: if (err) { 93: console.log(err); 94: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 95: } 96: else { 97: res.send(200, "Inserted Successful"); 98: } 99: }); 100: } 101: }); 102: }); 103:  104: app.listen(port); Publish to azure and now we can see our Node.js is working with WASD through x64 version “node-sqlserver”.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to host our Node.js in Windows Azure Cloud Service worker role. By using worker role we can control the version of Node.js, as well as the entry code. And it’s possible to do some pre jobs before the Node.js application started. It also removed the IIS and IISNode limitation. I personally recommended to use worker role as our Node.js hosting. But there are some problem if you use the approach I mentioned here. The first one is, we need to set all JavaScript files and module files as “Copy always” or “Copy if newer” manually. The second one is, in this way we cannot retrieve the cloud service configuration information. For example, we defined the endpoint in worker role property but we also specified the listening port in Node.js hardcoded. It should be changed that our Node.js can retrieve the endpoint. But I can tell you it won’t be working here. In the next post I will describe another way to execute the “node.exe” and Node.js application, so that we can get the cloud service configuration in Node.js. I will also demonstrate how to use Windows Azure Storage from Node.js by using the Windows Azure Node.js SDK.   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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• The broken Promise of the Mobile Web

  - by Rick Strahl

  High end mobile devices have been with us now for almost 7 years and they have utterly transformed the way we access information. Mobile phones and smartphones that have access to the Internet and host smart applications are in the hands of a large percentage of the population of the world. In many places even very remote, cell phones and even smart phones are a common sight. I’ll never forget when I was in India in 2011 I was up in the Southern Indian mountains riding an elephant out of a tiny local village, with an elephant herder in front riding atop of the elephant in front of us. He was dressed in traditional garb with the loin wrap and head cloth/turban as did quite a few of the locals in this small out of the way and not so touristy village. So we’re slowly trundling along in the forest and he’s lazily using his stick to guide the elephant and… 10 minutes in he pulls out his cell phone from his sash and starts texting. In the middle of texting a huge pig jumps out from the side of the trail and he takes a picture running across our path in the jungle! So yeah, mobile technology is very pervasive and it’s reached into even very buried and unexpected parts of this world. Apps are still King Apps currently rule the roost when it comes to mobile devices and the applications that run on them. If there’s something that you need on your mobile device your first step usually is to look for an app, not use your browser. But native app development remains a pain in the butt, with the requirement to have to support 2 or 3 completely separate platforms. There are solutions that try to bridge that gap. Xamarin is on a tear at the moment, providing their cross-device toolkit to build applications using C#. While Xamarin tools are impressive – and also *very* expensive – they only address part of the development madness that is app development. There are still specific device integration isssues, dealing with the different developer programs, security and certificate setups and all that other noise that surrounds app development. There’s also PhoneGap/Cordova which provides a hybrid solution that involves creating local HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications, and then packaging them to run in a specialized App container that can run on most mobile device platforms using a WebView interface. This allows for using of HTML technology, but it also still requires all the set up, configuration of APIs, security keys and certification and submission and deployment process just like native applications – you actually lose many of the benefits that  Web based apps bring. The big selling point of Cordova is that you get to use HTML have the ability to build your UI once for all platforms and run across all of them – but the rest of the app process remains in place. Apps can be a big pain to create and manage especially when we are talking about specialized or vertical business applications that aren’t geared at the mainstream market and that don’t fit the ‘store’ model. If you’re building a small intra department application you don’t want to deal with multiple device platforms and certification etc. for various public or corporate app stores. That model is simply not a good fit both from the development and deployment perspective. Even for commercial, big ticket apps, HTML as a UI platform offers many advantages over native, from write-once run-anywhere, to remote maintenance, single point of management and failure to having full control over the application as opposed to have the app store overloads censor you. In a lot of ways Web based HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications have so much potential for building better solutions based on existing Web technologies for the very same reasons a lot of content years ago moved off the desktop to the Web. To me the Web as a mobile platform makes perfect sense, but the reality of today’s Mobile Web unfortunately looks a little different… Where’s the Love for the Mobile Web? Yet here we are in the middle of 2014, nearly 7 years after the first iPhone was released and brought the promise of rich interactive information at your fingertips, and yet we still don’t really have a solid mobile Web platform. I know what you’re thinking: “But we have lots of HTML/JavaScript/CSS features that allows us to build nice mobile interfaces”. I agree to a point – it’s actually quite possible to build nice looking, rich and capable Web UI today. We have media queries to deal with varied display sizes, CSS transforms for smooth animations and transitions, tons of CSS improvements in CSS 3 that facilitate rich layout, a host of APIs geared towards mobile device features and lately even a number of JavaScript framework choices that facilitate development of multi-screen apps in a consistent manner. Personally I’ve been working a lot with AngularJs and heavily modified Bootstrap themes to build mobile first UIs and that’s been working very well to provide highly usable and attractive UI for typical mobile business applications. From the pure UI perspective things actually look very good. Not just about the UI But it’s not just about the UI - it’s also about integration with the mobile device. When it comes to putting all those pieces together into what amounts to a consolidated platform to build mobile Web applications, I think we still have a ways to go… there are a lot of missing pieces to make it all work together and integrate with the device more smoothly, and more importantly to make it work uniformly across the majority of devices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Slow Standards Adoption HTML standards implementations and ratification has been dreadfully slow, and browser vendors all seem to pick and choose different pieces of the technology they implement. The end result is that we have a capable UI platform that’s missing some of the infrastructure pieces to make it whole on mobile devices. There’s lots of potential but what is lacking that final 10% to build truly compelling mobile applications that can compete favorably with native applications. Some of it is the fragmentation of browsers and the slow evolution of the mobile specific HTML APIs. A host of mobile standards exist but many of the standards are in the early review stage and they have been there stuck for long periods of time and seem to move at a glacial pace. Browser vendors seem even slower to implement them, and for good reason – non-ratified standards mean that implementations may change and vendor implementations tend to be experimental and  likely have to be changed later. Neither Vendors or developers are not keen on changing standards. This is the typical chicken and egg scenario, but without some forward momentum from some party we end up stuck in the mud. It seems that either the standards bodies or the vendors need to carry the torch forward and that doesn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. Mobile Device Integration just isn’t good enough Current standards are not far reaching enough to address a number of the use case scenarios necessary for many mobile applications. While not every application needs to have access to all mobile device features, almost every mobile application could benefit from some integration with other parts of the mobile device platform. Integration with GPS, phone, media, messaging, notifications, linking and contacts system are benefits that are unique to mobile applications and could be widely used, but are mostly (with the exception of GPS) inaccessible for Web based applications today. Unfortunately trying to do most of this today only with a mobile Web browser is a losing battle. Aside from PhoneGap/Cordova’s app centric model with its own custom API accessing mobile device features and the token exception of the GeoLocation API, most device integration features are not widely supported by the current crop of mobile browsers. For example there’s no usable messaging API that allows access to SMS or contacts from HTML. Even obvious components like the Media Capture API are only implemented partially by mobile devices. There are alternatives and workarounds for some of these interfaces by using browser specific code, but that’s might ugly and something that I thought we were trying to leave behind with newer browser standards. But it’s not quite working out that way. It’s utterly perplexing to me that mobile standards like Media Capture and Streams, Media Gallery Access, Responsive Images, Messaging API, Contacts Manager API have only minimal or no traction at all today. Keep in mind we’ve had mobile browsers for nearly 7 years now, and yet we still have to think about how to get access to an image from the image gallery or the camera on some devices? Heck Windows Phone IE Mobile just gained the ability to upload images recently in the Windows 8.1 Update – that’s feature that HTML has had for 20 years! These are simple concepts and common problems that should have been solved a long time ago. It’s extremely frustrating to see build 90% of a mobile Web app with relative ease and then hit a brick wall for the remaining 10%, which often can be show stoppers. The remaining 10% have to do with platform integration, browser differences and working around the limitations that browsers and ‘pinned’ applications impose on HTML applications. The maddening part is that these limitations seem arbitrary as they could easily work on all mobile platforms. For example, SMS has a URL Moniker interface that sort of works on Android, works badly with iOS (only works if the address is already in the contact list) and not at all on Windows Phone. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work universally using the same interface – after all all phones have supported SMS since before the year 2000! But, it doesn’t have to be this way Change can happen very quickly. Take the GeoLocation API for example. Geolocation has taken off at the very beginning of the mobile device era and today it works well, provides the necessary security (a big concern for many mobile APIs), and is supported by just about all major mobile and even desktop browsers today. It handles security concerns via prompts to avoid unwanted access which is a model that would work for most other device APIs in a similar fashion. One time approval and occasional re-approval if code changes or caches expire. Simple and only slightly intrusive. It all works well, even though GeoLocation actually has some physical limitations, such as representing the current location when no GPS device is present. Yet this is a solved problem, where other APIs that are conceptually much simpler to implement have failed to gain any traction at all. Technically none of these APIs should be a problem to implement, but it appears that the momentum is just not there. Inadequate Web Application Linking and Activation Another important piece of the puzzle missing is the integration of HTML based Web applications. Today HTML based applications are not first class citizens on mobile operating systems. When talking about HTML based content there’s a big difference between content and applications. Content is great for search engine discovery and plain browser usage. Content is usually accessed intermittently and permanent linking is not so critical for this type of content.  But applications have different needs. Applications need to be started up quickly and must be easily switchable to support a multi-tasking user workflow. Therefore, it’s pretty crucial that mobile Web apps are integrated into the underlying mobile OS and work with the standard task management features. Unfortunately this integration is not as smooth as it should be. It starts with actually trying to find mobile Web applications, to ‘installing’ them onto a phone in an easily accessible manner in a prominent position. The experience of discovering a Mobile Web ‘App’ and making it sticky is by no means as easy or satisfying. Today the way you’d go about this is: Open the browser Search for a Web Site in the browser with your search engine of choice Hope that you find the right site Hope that you actually find a site that works for your mobile device Click on the link and run the app in a fully chrome’d browser instance (read tiny surface area) Pin the app to the home screen (with all the limitations outline above) Hope you pointed at the right URL when you pinned Even for you and me as developers, there are a few steps in there that are painful and annoying, but think about the average user. First figuring out how to search for a specific site or URL? And then pinning the app and hopefully from the right location? You’ve probably lost more than half of your audience at that point. This experience sucks. For developers too this process is painful since app developers can’t control the shortcut creation directly. This problem often gets solved by crazy coding schemes, with annoying pop-ups that try to get people to create shortcuts via fancy animations that are both annoying and add overhead to each and every application that implements this sort of thing differently. And that’s not the end of it - getting the link onto the home screen with an application icon varies quite a bit between browsers. Apple’s non-standard meta tags are prominent and they work with iOS and Android (only more recent versions), but not on Windows Phone. Windows Phone instead requires you to create an actual screen or rather a partial screen be captured for a shortcut in the tile manager. Who had that brilliant idea I wonder? Surprisingly Chrome on recent Android versions seems to actually get it right – icons use pngs, pinning is easy and pinned applications properly behave like standalone apps and retain the browser’s active page state and content. Each of the platforms has a different way to specify icons (WP doesn’t allow you to use an icon image at all), and the most widely used interface in use today is a bunch of Apple specific meta tags that other browsers choose to support. The question is: Why is there no standard implementation for installing shortcuts across mobile platforms using an official format rather than a proprietary one? Then there’s iOS and the crazy way it treats home screen linked URLs using a crazy hybrid format that is neither as capable as a Web app running in Safari nor a WebView hosted application. Moving off the Web ‘app’ link when switching to another app actually causes the browser and preview it to ‘blank out’ the Web application in the Task View (see screenshot on the right). Then, when the ‘app’ is reactivated it ends up completely restarting the browser with the original link. This is crazy behavior that you can’t easily work around. In some situations you might be able to store the application state and restore it using LocalStorage, but for many scenarios that involve complex data sources (like say Google Maps) that’s not a possibility. The only reason for this screwed up behavior I can think of is that it is deliberate to make Web apps a pain in the butt to use and forcing users trough the App Store/PhoneGap/Cordova route. App linking and management is a very basic problem – something that we essentially have solved in every desktop browser – yet on mobile devices where it arguably matters a lot more to have easy access to web content we have to jump through hoops to have even a remotely decent linking/activation experience across browsers. Where’s the Money? It’s not surprising that device home screen integration and Mobile Web support in general is in such dismal shape – the mobile OS vendors benefit financially from App store sales and have little to gain from Web based applications that bypass the App store and the cash cow that it presents. On top of that, platform specific vendor lock-in of both end users and developers who have invested in hardware, apps and consumables is something that mobile platform vendors actually aspire to. Web based interfaces that are cross-platform are the anti-thesis of that and so again it’s no surprise that the mobile Web is on a struggling path. But – that may be changing. More and more we’re seeing operations shifting to services that are subscription based or otherwise collect money for usage, and that may drive more progress into the Web direction in the end . Nothing like the almighty dollar to drive innovation forward. Do we need a Mobile Web App Store? As much as I dislike moderated experiences in today’s massive App Stores, they do at least provide one single place to look for apps for your device. I think we could really use some sort of registry, that could provide something akin to an app store for mobile Web apps, to make it easier to actually find mobile applications. This could take the form of a specialized search engine, or maybe a more formal store/registry like structure. Something like apt-get/chocolatey for Web apps. It could be curated and provide at least some feedback and reviews that might help with the integrity of applications. Coupled to that could be a native application on each platform that would allow searching and browsing of the registry and then also handle installation in the form of providing the home screen linking, plus maybe an initial security configuration that determines what features are allowed access to for the app. I’m not holding my breath. In order for this sort of thing to take off and gain widespread appeal, a lot of coordination would be required. And in order to get enough traction it would have to come from a well known entity – a mobile Web app store from a no name source is unlikely to gain high enough usage numbers to make a difference. In a way this would eliminate some of the freedom of the Web, but of course this would also be an optional search path in addition to the standard open Web search mechanisms to find and access content today. Security Security is a big deal, and one of the perceived reasons why so many IT professionals appear to be willing to go back to the walled garden of deployed apps is that Apps are perceived as safe due to the official review and curation of the App stores. Curated stores are supposed to protect you from malware, illegal and misleading content. It doesn’t always work out that way and all the major vendors have had issues with security and the review process at some time or another. Security is critical, but I also think that Web applications in general pose less of a security threat than native applications, by nature of the sandboxed browser and JavaScript environments. Web applications run externally completely and in the HTML and JavaScript sandboxes, with only a very few controlled APIs allowing access to device specific features. And as discussed earlier – security for any device interaction can be granted the same for mobile applications through a Web browser, as they can for native applications either via explicit policies loaded from the Web, or via prompting as GeoLocation does today. Security is important, but it’s certainly solvable problem for Web applications even those that need to access device hardware. Security shouldn’t be a reason for Web apps to be an equal player in mobile applications. Apps are winning, but haven’t we been here before? So now we’re finding ourselves back in an era of installed app, rather than Web based and managed apps. Only it’s even worse today than with Desktop applications, in that the apps are going through a gatekeeper that charges a toll and censors what you can and can’t do in your apps. Frankly it’s a mystery to me why anybody would buy into this model and why it’s lasted this long when we’ve already been through this process. It’s crazy… It’s really a shame that this regression is happening. We have the technology to make mobile Web apps much more prominent, but yet we’re basically held back by what seems little more than bureaucracy, partisan bickering and self interest of the major parties involved. Back in the day of the desktop it was Internet Explorer’s 98+%  market shareholding back the Web from improvements for many years – now it’s the combined mobile OS market in control of the mobile browsers. If mobile Web apps were allowed to be treated the same as native apps with simple ways to install and run them consistently and persistently, that would go a long way to making mobile applications much more usable and seriously viable alternatives to native apps. But as it is mobile apps have a severe disadvantage in placement and operation. There are a few bright spots in all of this. Mozilla’s FireFoxOs is embracing the Web for it’s mobile OS by essentially building every app out of HTML and JavaScript based content. It supports both packaged and certified package modes (that can be put into the app store), and Open Web apps that are loaded and run completely off the Web and can also cache locally for offline operation using a manifest. Open Web apps are treated as full class citizens in FireFoxOS and run using the same mechanism as installed apps. Unfortunately FireFoxOs is getting a slow start with minimal device support and specifically targeting the low end market. We can hope that this approach will change and catch on with other vendors, but that’s also an uphill battle given the conflict of interest with platform lock in that it represents. Recent versions of Android also seem to be working reasonably well with mobile application integration onto the desktop and activation out of the box. Although it still uses the Apple meta tags to find icons and behavior settings, everything at least works as you would expect – icons to the desktop on pinning, WebView based full screen activation, and reliable application persistence as the browser/app is treated like a real application. Hopefully iOS will at some point provide this same level of rudimentary Web app support. What’s also interesting to me is that Microsoft hasn’t picked up on the obvious need for a solid Web App platform. Being a distant third in the mobile OS war, Microsoft certainly has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using fresh ideas and expanding into areas that the other major vendors are neglecting. But instead Microsoft is trying to beat the market leaders at their own game, fighting on their adversary’s terms instead of taking a new tack. Providing a kick ass mobile Web platform that takes the lead on some of the proposed mobile APIs would be something positive that Microsoft could do to improve its miserable position in the mobile device market. Where are we at with Mobile Web? It sure sounds like I’m really down on the Mobile Web, right? I’ve built a number of mobile apps in the last year and while overall result and response has been very positive to what we were able to accomplish in terms of UI, getting that final 10% that required device integration dialed was an absolute nightmare on every single one of them. Big compromises had to be made and some features were left out or had to be modified for some devices. In two cases we opted to go the Cordova route in order to get the integration we needed, along with the extra pain involved in that process. Unless you’re not integrating with device features and you don’t care deeply about a smooth integration with the mobile desktop, mobile Web development is fraught with frustration. So, yes I’m frustrated! But it’s not for lack of wanting the mobile Web to succeed. I am still a firm believer that we will eventually arrive a much more functional mobile Web platform that allows access to the most common device features in a sensible way. It wouldn't be difficult for device platform vendors to make Web based applications first class citizens on mobile devices. But unfortunately it looks like it will still be some time before this happens. So, what’s your experience building mobile Web apps? Are you finding similar issues? Just giving up on raw Web applications and building PhoneGap apps instead? Completely skipping the Web and going native? Leave a comment for discussion. Resources Rick Strahl on DotNet Rocks talking about Mobile Web© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in HTML5  Mobile   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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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 10, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 10, 2010Popular ReleasesFree Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire Silverlight, WPF Charts v3.6.5 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.5 with the following new feature: * New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. You can visit Visifire documentation to know more. http://www.visifire.com/visifirechartsdocumentation.php Also this release includes few bug fixes: * Chart threw exception while adding new Axis in Chart using Vi...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.5 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.UserVoice Helper for WebMatrix: UserVoice Helper v0.9: This version will work with ASP.NET WebPages and ASP.NET MVC ApplicationsDNN Simple Article: DNNSimpleArticle Module V00.00.03: The initial release of the DNNSimpleArticle module (labelled V00.00.03) There are C# and VB versions of this module for this initial release. No promises that going forward there will be packages for both languages provided for future releases. This module provides the following functionality Create and display articles Display a paged list of articles Articles get created as DNN ContentItems Categorization provided through DNN Taxonomy SEO functionality for article display providi...UOB & ME: UOB_ME 2.5: latest versionCouchDB.NET: CouchDB.NET 0.1: CouchDB.NET ------- Libraries and providers to use CouchDB features from .NET This distribution includes the following projects: - MachineKeyGenerator: Command line tool to generate a machine key string for use in App.Config and Web.Config files. - CouchDB.NET: Library to facilitate the use of CouchDB features. It uses Hadi Hariri's EasyHttp library to communicate with the CouchDB server. More info at: https://github.com/hhariri/EasyHttp - CouchDb.ASP.NET: ASP.NET Membership Provider and ASP...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.3: AutoLoL now supports importing the build pages from Mobafire.com as well! Just insert the url to the build and voila. (For example: http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/unforgivens-guide-how-to-build-a-successful-mordekaiser-24061) Stable release of AutoChat (It is still recommended to use with caution and to read the documentation) It is now possible to associate *.lolm files with AutoLoL to quickly open them The selected spells are now displayed in the masteries tab for qu...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.2: - Added auto insertion of RLE (RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING) Unicode character for the RTL languages. - Fixed delete rows issue.PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7: This is a final stable release of PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7. This is a minor incremental release that contains all the functionality available in 53121 plus additional features listed below: Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3 Ability to ...Algorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.SuperSocket, an extensible socket application framework: SuperSocket 1.0 SP1: Fixed bugs: fixed a potential bug that the running state hadn't been updated after socket server stopped fixed a synchronization issue when clearing timeout session fixed a bug in ArraySegmentList fixed a bug on getting configuration valueCslaGenFork: CslaGenFork 4.0 CTP 2: The version is 4.0.1 CTP2 and was released 2010 December 7 and includes the following files: CslaGenFork 4.0.1-2010-12-07 Setup.msi Templates-2010-10-07.zip For getting started instructions, refer to How to section. Overview of the changes Since CTP1 there were 53 work items closed (28 features, 24 issues and 1 task). During this 60 days a lot of work has been done on several areas. First the stereotypes: EditableRoot is OK EditableChild is OK EditableRootCollection is OK Editable...My Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.0 ALPHA: 2.2.0 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a. at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated En...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. 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It must be run on a machine with Exchange System Manager for Exchange 2003 installed, but it will work against mailboxes on 2003 or 2007 (not 2010).GearSynth Plugin: a plugin for graphsynth that makes gear trainsGroceryList: TBD with first versionIBMS Suite Build on the Associate Platform: A new way of approaching Information Systems. From the UI, users of the IS will be able to build and manipulate the IS to whatever way fits their needs. We have simplified development, removed the chasm between management and IT and give the power of simplification to the user!Ivy Nasha Framework: A PHP FrameworkjQuery helpers for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC: jQuery helpers makes it easier for ASP.NET developers to build jQuery scripts. It's developed in C#. JSTest.NET: JSTest.NET enabled JavaScript unit tests to be run directly in the test framework of your choice (MSTest, NUnit, xUnit, etc) and all without the need for a web browser. 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• Setting up a local AI server - easy with Solaris 11

  - by Stefan Hinker

  Many things are new in Solaris 11, Autoinstall is one of them.  If, like me, you've known Jumpstart for the last 2 centuries or so, you'll have to start from scratch.  Well, almost, as the concepts are similar, and it's not all that difficult.  Just new. I wanted to have an AI server that I could use for demo purposes, on the train if need be.  That answers the question of hardware requirements: portable.  But let's start at the beginning. First, you need an OS image, of course.  In the new world of Solaris 11, it is now called a repository.  The original can be downloaded from the Solaris 11 page at Oracle.   What you want is the "Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Repository Image", which comes in two parts that can be combined using cat.  MD5 checksums for these (and all other downloads from that page) are available closer to the top of the page. With that, building the repository is quick and simple: # zfs create -o mountpoint=/export/repo rpool/ai/repo # zfs create rpool/ai/repo/s11 # mount -o ro -F hsfs /tmp/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso /mnt # rsync -aP /mnt/repo /export/repo/s11 # umount /mnt # pkgrepo rebuild -s /export/repo/sol11/repo # zfs snapshot rpool/ai/repo/sol11@fcs # pkgrepo info -s /export/repo/sol11/repo PUBLISHER PACKAGES STATUS UPDATED solaris 4292 online 2012-03-12T20:47:15.378639Z That's all there's to it.  Let's make a snapshot, just to be on the safe side.  You never know when one will come in handy.  To use this repository, you could just add it as a file-based publisher: # pkg set-publisher -g file:///export/repo/sol11/repo solaris In case I'd want to access this repository through a (virtual) network, i'll now quickly activate the repository-service: # svccfg -s application/pkg/server \ setprop pkg/inst_root=/export/repo/sol11/repo # svccfg -s application/pkg/server setprop pkg/readonly=true # svcadm refresh application/pkg/server # svcadm enable application/pkg/server That's all you need - now point your browser to http://localhost/ to view your beautiful repository-server. Step 1 is done.  All of this, by the way, is nicely documented in the README file that's contained in the repository image. Of course, we already have updates to the original release.  You can find them in MOS in the Oracle Solaris 11 Support Repository Updates (SRU) Index.  You can simply add these to your existing repository or create separate repositories for each SRU.  The individual SRUs are self-sufficient and incremental - SRU4 includes all updates from SRU2 and SRU3.  With ZFS, you can also get both: A full repository with all updates and at the same time incremental ones up to each of the updates: # mount -o ro -F hsfs /tmp/sol-11-1111-sru4-05-incr-repo.iso /mnt # pkgrecv -s /mnt/repo -d /export/repo/sol11/repo '*' # umount /mnt # pkgrepo rebuild -s /export/repo/sol11/repo # zfs snapshot rpool/ai/repo/sol11@sru4 # zfs set snapdir=visible rpool/ai/repo/sol11 # svcadm restart svc:/application/pkg/server:default The normal repository is now updated to SRU4.  Thanks to the ZFS snapshots, there is also a valid repository of Solaris 11 11/11 without the update located at /export/repo/sol11/.zfs/snapshot/fcs . If you like, you can also create another repository service for each update, running on a separate port. But now lets continue with the AI server.  Just a little bit of reading in the dokumentation makes it clear that we will need to run a DHCP server for this.  Since I already have one active (for my SunRay installation) and since it's a good idea to have these kinds of services separate anyway, I decided to create this in a Zone.  So, let's create one first: # zfs create -o mountpoint=/export/install rpool/ai/install # zfs create -o mountpoint=/zones rpool/zones # zonecfg -z ai-server zonecfg:ai-server> create create: Using system default template 'SYSdefault' zonecfg:ai-server> set zonepath=/zones/ai-server zonecfg:ai-server> add dataset zonecfg:ai-server:dataset> set name=rpool/ai/install zonecfg:ai-server:dataset> set alias=install zonecfg:ai-server:dataset> end zonecfg:ai-server> commit zonecfg:ai-server> exit # zoneadm -z ai-server install # zoneadm -z ai-server boot ; zlogin -C ai-server Give it a hostname and IP address at first boot, and there's the Zone.  For a publisher for Solaris packages, it will be bound to the "System Publisher" from the Global Zone.  The /export/install filesystem, of course, is intended to be used by the AI server.  Let's configure it now: #zlogin ai-server root@ai-server:~# pkg install install/installadm root@ai-server:~# installadm create-service -n x86-fcs -a i386 \ -s pkg://solaris/install-image/[email protected],5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2.1482 \ -d /export/install/fcs -i 192.168.2.20 -c 3 With that, the core AI server is already done.  What happened here?  First, I installed the AI server software.  IPS makes that nice and easy.  If necessary, it'll also pull in the required DHCP-Server and anything else that might be missing.  Watch out for that DHCP server software.  In Solaris 11, there are two different versions.  There's the one you might know from Solaris 10 and earlier, and then there's a new one from ISC.  The latter is the one we need for AI.  The SMF service names of both are very similar.  The "old" one is "svc:/network/dhcp-server:default". The ISC-server comes with several SMF-services. We at least need "svc:/network/dhcp/server:ipv4".  The command "installadm create-service" creates the installation-service. It's called "x86-fcs", serves the "i386" architecture and gets its boot image from the repository of the system publisher, using version 5.11,5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2.1482, which is Solaris 11 11/11.  (The option "-a i386" in this example is optional, since the installserver itself runs on a x86 machine.) The boot-environment for clients is created in /export/install/fcs and the DHCP-server is configured for 3 IP-addresses starting at 192.168.2.20.  This configuration is stored in a very human readable form in /etc/inet/dhcpd4.conf.  An AI-service for SPARC systems could be created in the very same way, using "-a sparc" as the architecture option. Now we would be ready to register and install the first client.  It would be installed with the default "solaris-large-server" using the publisher "http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release" and would query it's configuration interactively at first boot.  This makes it very clear that an AI-server is really only a boot-server.  The true source of packets to install can be different.  Since I don't like these defaults for my demo setup, I did some extra config work for my clients. The configuration of a client is controlled by manifests and profiles.  The manifest controls which packets are installed and how the filesystems are layed out.  In that, it's very much like the old "rules.ok" file in Jumpstart.  Profiles contain additional configuration like root passwords, primary user account, IP addresses, keyboard layout etc.  Hence, profiles are very similar to the old sysid.cfg file. The easiest way to get your hands on a manifest is to ask the AI server we just created to give us it's default one.  Then modify that to our liking and give it back to the installserver to use: root@ai-server:~# mkdir -p /export/install/configs/manifests root@ai-server:~# cd /export/install/configs/manifests root@ai-server:~# installadm export -n x86-fcs -m orig_default \ -o orig_default.xml root@ai-server:~# cp orig_default.xml s11-fcs.small.local.xml root@ai-server:~# vi s11-fcs.small.local.xml root@ai-server:~# more s11-fcs.small.local.xml <!DOCTYPE auto_install SYSTEM "file:///usr/share/install/ai.dtd.1"> <auto_install> <ai_instance name="S11 Small fcs local"> <target> <logical> <zpool name="rpool" is_root="true"> <filesystem name="export" mountpoint="/export"/> <filesystem name="export/home"/> <be name="solaris"/> </zpool> </logical> </target> <software type="IPS"> <destination> <image> <!-- Specify locales to install --> <facet set="false">facet.locale.*</facet> <facet set="true">facet.locale.de</facet> <facet set="true">facet.locale.de_DE</facet> <facet set="true">facet.locale.en</facet> <facet set="true">facet.locale.en_US</facet> </image> </destination> <source> <publisher name="solaris"> <origin name="http://192.168.2.12/"/> </publisher> </source> <!-- By default the latest build available, in the specified IPS repository, is installed. If another build is required, the build number has to be appended to the 'entire' package in the following form: <name>pkg:/[email protected]#</name> --> <software_data action="install"> <name>pkg:/[email protected],5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2.0</name> <name>pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server</name> </software_data> </software> </ai_instance> </auto_install> root@ai-server:~# installadm create-manifest -n x86-fcs -d \ -f ./s11-fcs.small.local.xml root@ai-server:~# installadm list -m -n x86-fcs Manifest Status Criteria -------- ------ -------- S11 Small fcs local Default None orig_default Inactive None The major points in this new manifest are: Install "solaris-small-server" Install a few locales less than the default.  I'm not that fluid in French or Japanese... Use my own package service as publisher, running on IP address 192.168.2.12 Install the initial release of Solaris 11:  pkg:/[email protected],5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2.0 Using a similar approach, I'll create a default profile interactively and use it as a template for a few customized building blocks, each defining a part of the overall system configuration.  The modular approach makes it easy to configure numerous clients later on: root@ai-server:~# mkdir -p /export/install/configs/profiles root@ai-server:~# cd /export/install/configs/profiles root@ai-server:~# sysconfig create-profile -o default.xml root@ai-server:~# cp default.xml general.xml; cp default.xml mars.xml root@ai-server:~# cp default.xml user.xml root@ai-server:~# vi general.xml mars.xml user.xml root@ai-server:~# more general.xml mars.xml user.xml :::::::::::::: general.xml :::::::::::::: <!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM "/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1"> <service_bundle type="profile" name="sysconfig"> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/timezone"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="timezone"> <propval type="astring" name="localtime" value="Europe/Berlin"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/environment"> <instance enabled="true" name="init"> <property_group type="application" name="environment"> <propval type="astring" name="LANG" value="C"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/keymap"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="system" name="keymap"> <propval type="astring" name="layout" value="US-English"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/console-login"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="ttymon"> <propval type="astring" name="terminal_type" value="vt100"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="network/physical"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="netcfg"> <propval type="astring" name="active_ncp" value="DefaultFixed"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/name-service/switch"> <property_group type="application" name="config"> <propval type="astring" name="default" value="files"/> <propval type="astring" name="host" value="files dns"/> <propval type="astring" name="printer" value="user files"/> </property_group> <instance enabled="true" name="default"/> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/name-service/cache"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"/> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="network/dns/client"> <property_group type="application" name="config"> <property type="net_address" name="nameserver"> <net_address_list> <value_node value="192.168.2.1"/> </net_address_list> </property> </property_group> <instance enabled="true" name="default"/> </service> </service_bundle> :::::::::::::: mars.xml :::::::::::::: <!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM "/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1"> <service_bundle type="profile" name="sysconfig"> <service version="1" type="service" name="network/install"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="install_ipv4_interface"> <propval type="astring" name="address_type" value="static"/> <propval type="net_address_v4" name="static_address" value="192.168.2.100/24"/> <propval type="astring" name="name" value="net0/v4"/> <propval type="net_address_v4" name="default_route" value="192.168.2.1"/> </property_group> <property_group type="application" name="install_ipv6_interface"> <propval type="astring" name="stateful" value="yes"/> <propval type="astring" name="stateless" value="yes"/> <propval type="astring" name="address_type" value="addrconf"/> <propval type="astring" name="name" value="net0/v6"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/identity"> <instance enabled="true" name="node"> <property_group type="application" name="config"> <propval type="astring" name="nodename" value="mars"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> </service_bundle> :::::::::::::: user.xml :::::::::::::: <!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM "/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1"> <service_bundle type="profile" name="sysconfig"> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/config-user"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="root_account"> <propval type="astring" name="login" value="root"/> <propval type="astring" name="password" value="noIWillNotTellYouMyPasswordNotEvenEncrypted"/> <propval type="astring" name="type" value="role"/> </property_group> <property_group type="application" name="user_account"> <propval type="astring" name="login" value="stefan"/> <propval type="astring" name="password" value="noIWillNotTellYouMyPasswordNotEvenEncrypted"/> <propval type="astring" name="type" value="normal"/> <propval type="astring" name="description" value="Stefan Hinker"/> <propval type="count" name="uid" value="12345"/> <propval type="count" name="gid" value="10"/> <propval type="astring" name="shell" value="/usr/bin/bash"/> <propval type="astring" name="roles" value="root"/> <propval type="astring" name="profiles" value="System Administrator"/> <propval type="astring" name="sudoers" value="ALL=(ALL) ALL"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> </service_bundle> root@ai-server:~# installadm create-profile -n x86-fcs -f general.xml root@ai-server:~# installadm create-profile -n x86-fcs -f user.xml root@ai-server:~# installadm create-profile -n x86-fcs -f mars.xml \ -c ipv4=192.168.2.100 root@ai-server:~# installadm list -p Service Name Profile ------------ ------- x86-fcs general.xml mars.xml user.xml root@ai-server:~# installadm list -n x86-fcs -p Profile Criteria ------- -------- general.xml None mars.xml ipv4 = 192.168.2.100 user.xml None Here's the idea behind these files: "general.xml" contains settings valid for all my clients.  Stuff like DNS servers, for example, which in my case will always be the same. "user.xml" only contains user definitions.  That is, a root password and a primary user.Both of these profiles will be valid for all clients (for now). "mars.xml" defines network settings for an individual client.  This profile is associated with an IP-Address.  For this to work, I'll have to tweak the DHCP-settings in the next step: root@ai-server:~# installadm create-client -e 08:00:27:AA:3D:B1 -n x86-fcs root@ai-server:~# vi /etc/inet/dhcpd4.conf root@ai-server:~# tail -5 /etc/inet/dhcpd4.conf host 080027AA3DB1 { hardware ethernet 08:00:27:AA:3D:B1; fixed-address 192.168.2.100; filename "01080027AA3DB1"; } This completes the client preparations.  I manually added the IP-Address for mars to /etc/inet/dhcpd4.conf.  This is needed for the "mars.xml" profile.  Disabling arbitrary DHCP-replies will shut up this DHCP server, making my life in a shared environment a lot more peaceful ;-)Now, I of course want this installation to be completely hands-off.  For this to work, I'll need to modify the grub boot menu for this client slightly.  You can find it in /etc/netboot.  "installadm create-client" will create a new boot menu for every client, identified by the client's MAC address.  The template for this can be found in a subdirectory with the name of the install service, /etc/netboot/x86-fcs in our case.  If you don't want to change this manually for every client, modify that template to your liking instead. root@ai-server:~# cd /etc/netboot root@ai-server:~# cp menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1 menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1.org root@ai-server:~# vi menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1 root@ai-server:~# diff menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1 menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1.org 1,2c1,2 < default=1 < timeout=10 --- > default=0 > timeout=30 root@ai-server:~# more menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1 default=1 timeout=10 min_mem64=0 title Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Text Installer and command line kernel$ /x86-fcs/platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B install_media=htt p://$serverIP:5555//export/install/fcs,install_service=x86-fcs,install_svc_addre ss=$serverIP:5555 module$ /x86-fcs/platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive title Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Automated Install kernel$ /x86-fcs/platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B install=true,inst all_media=http://$serverIP:5555//export/install/fcs,install_service=x86-fcs,inst all_svc_address=$serverIP:5555,livemode=text module$ /x86-fcs/platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive Now just boot the client off the network using PXE-boot.  For my demo purposes, that's a client from VirtualBox, of course.  That's all there's to it.  And despite the fact that this blog entry is a little longer - that wasn't that hard now, was it?

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• Announcing the release of the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 for .NET

  - by ScottGu

  Today we released the v2.1 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET.  This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK and it includes some great new features and enhancements. These new capabilities include: Visual Studio 2013 Preview Support: The Windows Azure SDK now supports using the new VS 2013 Preview Visual Studio 2013 VM Image: Windows Azure now has a built-in VM image that you can use to host and develop with VS 2013 in the cloud Visual Studio Server Explorer Enhancements: Redesigned with improved filtering and auto-loading of subscription resources Virtual Machines: Start and Stop VM’s w/suspend billing directly from within Visual Studio Cloud Services: New Emulator Express option with reduced footprint and Run as Normal User support Service Bus: New high availability options, Notification Hub support, Improved VS tooling PowerShell Automation: Lots of new PowerShell commands for automating Web Sites, Cloud Services, VMs and more All of these SDK enhancements are now available to start using immediately and you can download the SDK from the Windows Azure .NET Developer Center.  Visual Studio’s Team Foundation Service (http://tfs.visualstudio.com/) has also been updated to support today’s SDK 2.1 release, and the SDK 2.1 features can now be used with it (including with automated builds + tests). Below are more details on the new features and capabilities released today: Visual Studio 2013 Preview Support Today’s Window Azure SDK 2.1 release adds support for the recent Visual Studio 2013 Preview. The 2.1 SDK also works with Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012, and works side by side with the previous Windows Azure SDK 1.8 and 2.0 releases. To install the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 on your local computer, choose the “install the sdk” link from the Windows Azure .NET Developer Center. Then, chose which version of Visual Studio you want to use it with.  Clicking the third link will install the SDK with the latest VS 2013 Preview: If you don’t already have the Visual Studio 2013 Preview installed on your machine, this will also install Visual Studio Express 2013 Preview for Web. Visual Studio 2013 VM Image Hosted in the Cloud One of the requests we’ve heard from several customers has been to have the ability to host Visual Studio within the cloud (avoiding the need to install anything locally on your computer). With today’s SDK update we’ve added a new VM image to the Windows Azure VM Gallery that has Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview, SharePoint 2013, SQL Server 2012 Express and the Windows Azure 2.1 SDK already installed on it.  This provides a really easy way to create a development environment in the cloud with the latest tools. With the recent shutdown and suspend billing feature we shipped on Windows Azure last month, you can spin up the image only when you want to do active development, and then shut down the virtual machine and not have to worry about usage charges while the virtual machine is not in use. You can create your own VS image in the cloud by using the New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery menu within the Windows Azure Management Portal, and then by selecting the “Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview” template: Visual Studio Server Explorer: Improved Filtering/Management of Subscription Resources With the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release you’ll notice significant improvements in the Visual Studio Server Explorer. The explorer has been redesigned so that all Windows Azure services are now contained under a single Windows Azure node.  From the top level node you can now manage your Windows Azure credentials, import a subscription file or filter Server Explorer to only show services from particular subscriptions or regions. Note: The Web Sites and Mobile Services nodes will appear outside the Windows Azure Node until the final release of VS 2013. If you have installed the ASP.NET and Web Tools Preview Refresh, though, the Web Sites node will appear inside the Windows Azure node even with the VS 2013 Preview. Once your subscription information is added, Windows Azure services from all your subscriptions are automatically enumerated in the Server Explorer. You no longer need to manually add services to Server Explorer individually. This provides a convenient way of viewing all of your cloud services, storage accounts, service bus namespaces, virtual machines, and web sites from one location: Subscription and Region Filtering Support Using the Windows Azure node in Server Explorer, you can also now filter your Windows Azure services in the Server Explorer by the subscription or region they are in.  If you have multiple subscriptions but need to focus your attention to just a few subscription for some period of time, this a handy way to hide the services from other subscriptions view until they become relevant. You can do the same sort of filtering by region. To enable this, just select “Filter Services” from the context menu on the Windows Azure node: Then choose the subscriptions and/or regions you want to filter by. In the below example, I’ve decided to show services from my pay-as-you-go subscription within the East US region: Visual Studio will then automatically filter the items that show up in the Server Explorer appropriately: With storage accounts and service bus namespaces, you sometimes need to work with services outside your subscription. To accommodate that scenario, those services allow you to attach an external account (from the context menu). You’ll notice that external accounts have a slightly different icon in server explorer to indicate they are from outside your subscription. Other Improvements We’ve also improved the Server Explorer by adding additional properties and actions to the service exposed. You now have access to most of the properties on a cloud service, deployment slot, role or role instance as well as the properties on storage accounts, virtual machines and web sites. Just select the object of interest in Server Explorer and view the properties in the property pane. We also now have full support for creating/deleting/update storage tables, blobs and queues from directly within Server Explorer.  Simply right-click on the appropriate storage account node and you can create them directly within Visual Studio: Virtual Machines: Start/Stop within Visual Studio Virtual Machines now have context menu actions that allow you start, shutdown, restart and delete a Virtual Machine directly within the Visual Studio Server Explorer. The shutdown action enables you to shut down the virtual machine and suspend billing when the VM is not is use, and easily restart it when you need it: This is especially useful in Dev/Test scenarios where you can start a VM – such as a SQL Server – during your development session and then shut it down / suspend billing when you are not developing (and no longer be billed for it). You can also now directly remote desktop into VMs using the “Connect using Remote Desktop” context menu command in VS Server Explorer.  Cloud Services: Emulator Express with Run as Normal User Support You can now launch Visual Studio and run your cloud services locally as a Normal User (without having to elevate to an administrator account) using a new Emulator Express option included as a preview feature with this SDK release.  Emulator Express is a version of the Windows Azure Compute Emulator that runs a restricted mode – one instance per role – and it doesn’t require administrative permissions and uses 40% less resources than the full Windows Azure Emulator. Emulator Express supports both web and worker roles. To run your application locally using the Emulator Express option, simply change the following settings in the Windows Azure project. On the shortcut menu for the Windows Azure project, choose Properties, and then choose the Web tab. Check the setting for IIS (Internet Information Services). Make sure that the option is set to IIS Express, not the full version of IIS. Emulator Express is not compatible with full IIS. On the Web tab, choose the option for Emulator Express. Service Bus: Notification Hubs With the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release we are adding support for Windows Azure Notification Hubs as part of our official Windows Azure SDK, inside of Microsoft.ServiceBus.dll (previously the Notification Hub functionality was in a preview assembly). You are now able to create, update and delete Notification Hubs programmatically, manage your device registrations, and send push notifications to all your mobile clients across all platforms (Windows Store, Windows Phone 8, iOS, and Android). Learn more about Notification Hubs on MSDN here, or watch the Notification Hubs //BUILD/ presentation here. Service Bus: Paired Namespaces One of the new features included with today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release is support for Service Bus “Paired Namespaces”.  Paired Namespaces enable you to better handle situations where a Service Bus service namespace becomes unavailable (for example: due to connectivity issues or an outage) and you are unable to send or receive messages to the namespace hosting the queue, topic, or subscription. Previously,to handle this scenario you had to manually setup separate namespaces that can act as a backup, then implement manual failover and retry logic which was sometimes tricky to get right. Service Bus now supports Paired Namespaces, which enables you to connect two namespaces together. When you activate the secondary namespace, messages are stored in the secondary queue for delivery to the primary queue at a later time. If the primary container (namespace) becomes unavailable for some reason, automatic failover enables the messages in the secondary queue. For detailed information about paired namespaces and high availability, see the new topic Asynchronous Messaging Patterns and High Availability. Service Bus: Tooling Improvements In this release, the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio contain several enhancements and changes to the management of Service Bus messaging entities using Visual Studio’s Server Explorer. The most noticeable change is that the Service Bus node is now integrated into the Windows Azure node, and supports integrated subscription management. Additionally, there has been a change to the code generated by the Windows Azure Worker Role with Service Bus Queue project template. This code now uses an event-driven “message pump” programming model using the QueueClient.OnMessage method. PowerShell: Tons of New Automation Commands Since my last blog post on the previous Windows Azure SDK 2.0 release, we’ve updated Windows Azure PowerShell (which is a separate download) five times. You can find the full change log here. We’ve added new cmdlets in the following areas: China instance and Windows Azure Pack support Environment Configuration VMs Cloud Services Web Sites Storage SQL Azure Service Bus China Instance and Windows Azure Pack We now support the following cmdlets for the China instance and Windows Azure Pack, respectively: China Instance: Web Sites, Service Bus, Storage, Cloud Service, VMs, Network Windows Azure Pack: Web Sites, Service Bus We will have full cmdlet support for these two Windows Azure environments in PowerShell in the near future. Virtual Machines: Stop/Start Virtual Machines Similar to the Start/Stop VM capability in VS Server Explorer, you can now stop your VM and suspend billing: If you want to keep the original behavior of keeping your stopped VM provisioned, you can pass in the -StayProvisioned switch parameter. Virtual Machines: VM endpoint ACLs We’ve added and updated a bunch of cmdlets for you to configure fine-grained network ACL on your VM endpoints. You can use the following cmdlets to create ACL config and apply them to a VM endpoint: New-AzureAclConfig Get-AzureAclConfig Set-AzureAclConfig Remove-AzureAclConfig Add-AzureEndpoint -ACL Set-AzureEndpoint –ACL The following example shows how to add an ACL rule to an existing endpoint of a VM. Other improvements for Virtual Machine management includes Added -NoWinRMEndpoint parameter to New-AzureQuickVM and Add-AzureProvisioningConfig to disable Windows Remote Management Added -DirectServerReturn parameter to Add-AzureEndpoint and Set-AzureEndpoint to enable/disable direct server return Added Set-AzureLoadBalancedEndpoint cmdlet to modify load balanced endpoints Cloud Services: Remote Desktop and Diagnostics Remote Desktop and Diagnostics are popular debugging options for Cloud Services. We’ve introduced cmdlets to help you configure these two Cloud Service extensions from Windows Azure PowerShell. Windows Azure Cloud Services Remote Desktop extension: New-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtensionConfig Get-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Set-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Remove-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Windows Azure Cloud Services Diagnostics extension New-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtensionConfig Get-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension Set-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension Remove-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension The following example shows how to enable Remote Desktop for a Cloud Service. Web Sites: Diagnostics With our last SDK update, we introduced the Get-AzureWebsiteLog –Tail cmdlet to get the log streaming of your Web Sites. Recently, we’ve also added cmdlets to configure Web Site application diagnostics: Enable-AzureWebsiteApplicationDiagnostic Disable-AzureWebsiteApplicationDiagnostic The following 2 examples show how to enable application diagnostics to the file system and a Windows Azure Storage Table: SQL Database Previously, you had to know the SQL Database server admin username and password if you want to manage the database in that SQL Database server. Recently, we’ve made the experience much easier by not requiring the admin credential if the database server is in your subscription. So you can simply specify the -ServerName parameter to tell Windows Azure PowerShell which server you want to use for the following cmdlets. Get-AzureSqlDatabase New-AzureSqlDatabase Remove-AzureSqlDatabase Set-AzureSqlDatabase We’ve also added a -AllowAllAzureServices parameter to New-AzureSqlDatabaseServerFirewallRule so that you can easily add a firewall rule to whitelist all Windows Azure IP addresses. Besides the above experience improvements, we’ve also added cmdlets get the database server quota and set the database service objective. Check out the following cmdlets for details. Get-AzureSqlDatabaseServerQuota Get-AzureSqlDatabaseServiceObjective Set-AzureSqlDatabase –ServiceObjective Storage and Service Bus Other new cmdlets include Storage: CRUD cmdlets for Azure Tables and Queues Service Bus: Cmdlets for managing authorization rules on your Service Bus Namespace, Queue, Topic, Relay and NotificationHub Summary Today’s release includes a bunch of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  All the above features/enhancements are shipped and available to use immediately as part of the 2.1 release of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. 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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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 05, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 05, 2012Popular ReleasesSimple Injector: Simple Injector v1.4.1: This release adds two small improvements to the SimpleInjector.Extensions.dll. No changes have been made to the core library. New features and improvements in this release for the SimpleInjector.Extensions.dll The RegisterManyForOpenGeneric extension methods now accept non-generic decorator, as long as they implement the given open generic service type. GetTypesToRegister methods added to the OpenGenericBatchRegistrationExtensions class which allows to customize the behavior. Note that the...SQL Scriptz Runner: Application: Scriptz Runner source code and applicationCommonLibrary: Code: CodePowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.5.2: Added support for PowerGUI 3.2.Path Copy Copy: 10.0: New version with the following biggest new features: Regular expression support in custom commands (see this work item) Import/export feature for custom commands (see this work item) This version also addresses the following work items: 11353 11348 This version is a recommended upgrade for all users. Note: new custom commands that user regular expressions won't be compatible with earlier versions (if installed by registry manipulation or via network installation), but everything else is ...VidCoder: 1.3.1: Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.6 release (svn 4472). Removed erroneous "None" container choice. Change some logic and help text to stop assuming you have to pick the VIDEO_TS folder for a DVD scan. This should make previewing DVD titles on the Queue Multiple Titles window possible when you've picked the root DVD directory.ASP.NET MVC Framework - Abstracting Data Annotations, HTML5, Knockout JS techs: Version 1.0: Please download the source code. I am not associating any dll for release.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.0: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-03-04 v3.1.0 -??Hidden???????（〓?〓）。 -?PageManager??...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.9.1: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...Windows Phone Commands for VS2010: Version 1.0: Initial Release Version 1.0 Connect from device or emulator (Monitors the connection) Show Device information (Plataform, build , version, avaliable memory, total memory, architeture Manager installed applications (Launch, uninstall and explorer isolate storage files) Manager core applications (Launch blocked applications from emulator (Office, Calculator, alarm, calendar , etc) Manager blocked settings from emulator (Airplane Mode, Celullar Network, Wifi, etc) Deploy and update ap...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.01.00: Changes on Version 06.01.00 Fixed issue on GraySmallTitle container, that breaks the layout Fixed issue on Blue Metro7 Skin where the Search, Login, Register, Date is missing Fixed issue with the Version numbers on the target file Fixed issue where the jQuery and jQuery-UI files not deleted on upgrade from Version 01.00.00 Added a internal page where the Image Slider would be replaces with a BannerPaneMedia Companion: MC 3.433b Release: General More GUI tweaks (mostly imperceptible!) Updates for mc_com.exe TV The 'Watched' button has been re-instigated Added TV Menu sub-option to search ALL for new Episodes (includes locked shows) Movies Added 'Source' field (eg DVD, Bluray, HDTV), customisable in Advanced Preferences (try it out, let us know how it works!) Added HTML <<format>> tag with optional parameters for video container, source, and resolution (updated HTML tags to be added to Documentation shortly) Known Issu...Picturethrill: Version 2.3.2.0: Release includes Self-Update feature for Picturethrill. What that means for users is that they are always guaranteed to have a fresh copy of Picturethrill on their computers with all latest fixes. When Picturethrill adds a new website to get pictures from, you will get it too!Simple MVVM Toolkit for Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone: Simple MVVM Toolkit v3.0.0.0: Added support for Silverlight 5.0 and Windows Phone 7.1. Upgraded project templates and samples. Upgraded installer. There are some new prerequisites required for this version, namely Silverlight 5 Tools, Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5 (until the SDK is released), Windows Phone 7.1 SDK. Because it is in the experimental band, I have also removed the dependency on the Silverlight Testing Framework. You can use it if you wish, but the Ria Services project template no longer uses ...CODE Framework: 4.0.20301: The latest version adds a number of new features to the WPF system (such as stylable and testable messagebox support) as well as various new features throughout the system (especially in the Utilities namespace).MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0.2 (Beta): A friendlier User Interface. A logger file to catch exceptions so you may send it to use to improve and fix any bugs that may occur. A feedback form because we always love hearing what you guy's think of MyRouter. Check for update menu item for you to stay up to date will the latest changes. Facebook fan page so you may spread the word and share MyRouter with friends and family And Many other exciting features were sure your going to love!WPF Sound Visualization Library: WPF SVL 0.3 (Source, Binaries, Examples, Help): Version 0.3 of WPFSVL. This includes three new controls: an equalizer, a digital clock, and a time editor.Orchard Project: Orchard 1.4: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-NotesNetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.15: 3.6.0.15 28-Feb-2012 • Fix: The communication object, System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, cannot be used for communication because it is in the Faulted state. Work Item 10435: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10435 • Fix: Made StorageCache thread safe. Thanks to tangrl. • Fix: Members property of SqlAzManApplicationGroup is not functioning. Thanks to tangrl. Work Item 10267: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10267 • Fix: Indexer are making database calls. Thanks to t...SCCM Client Actions Tool: Client Actions Tool v1.1: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.1 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added stop button to stop the ongoing process. Added action "Query update status". Added option "saveOnlineComputers" in config.ini to enable saving list of online computers from last session. Default value for "LatestClientVersion" set to SP2 R3 (4.00.6487.2157). Wuauserv service manual startup mode is considered healthy on Windows 7. Errors are now suppressed in checkReleases...New ProjectsAbsolute Risk Game: Risk Game is a classic "World Domination Risk" game where you try to conquer the world.Architecture Document Catalog: The Architecture Document Catalog is a catalog for various documentation used by software solution architects. The initial architecture framework supported is from Rozanski and Woods, also called Viewpoints and Perspectives. It's in C#, Silverlight, WCF RIA Services.Background Worker Job Execution & Job Scheduler: Background worker is a multi-threaded job execution and scheduling engine. Very similar to Quartz, but with a slightly different focus.BWOS: preparing a new operating system. and name BWOS. CommonLibrary: Common modules and componentesCustomizeTool: CustomizeToolData Foundry: Data Foundry is a Swiss army knife for database administrator. With capabilities to cross reference check data between tables to find orphaned data and table relations.Data Grid Extensions: Modular extensions for the DataGrid control. Attach filtering capabilities to your existing DataGrid.dk.Helper: dk.Helper makes it easier for tribal wars game players (divoke-kmene.sk) to manage common activities in game. It's developed in C#.ExEn: ExEn is a high-performance implementation of a subset of the XNA API that runs on Silverlight, iOS and Android.Extended Methods for .NET: Developed in VB.NET, this DLL includes some functions I came across over the internet. Originally they were functions. I made some changes to suit my work and recreated them as Extended methods. Currently includes two extended methods for the Image class and one extended method for the String class. I will update it with new methods as I go along.GestionarComenzi: Gestioneaza Comenzi - Firma transporturiGIS Library Management: GIS Library Management System.iFinity Cache Master for DotNetNuke: The iFinity DotNetNuke Cache Master is an Administration module for DotNetNuke. This module allows administrators to inspect the current contents of the ASP.NET Cache in their running DotNetNuke installation. A very useful tool for developers working with the DotNetNuke cache.intelliEssay Document Format Checker: This is a product that tries to check a document's format to see if it conforms to certain given standard.Just T[he]IP: "Just The IP" leverages the Bing API v2 and the ip: Bing Advanced Operator to list the other web sites hosted at this IP Address (that are indexed by Bing).KTool: Ktool is a tool for learning japanese kanji. This program is still in developed. Current version can only display and find a kanji word (Press ctrl-F on main screen for search). Developed in WPF, .NET 4.0Lab Checker: Lab Checker makes it easy for teacher to check students' programs. It allows a student to test his program on a set of test cases which eliminates the need to run the program manually.MeoBox Vera Control Plugin: This is my project for creating a plugin to control my MeoBox ( Scientific Atlanta ) using Vera ( www.micasaverde.com ) Should work with other TV2Client boxesNUnitTestHelper: NUnitTestHelper is a helper class for developing unit tests for C# applications with NUnit framework. This helper library provides set of classes and method which can be used for accomplishing faster unit test development for any kind of project. NUnitTestBase – Supports basic functionality for writing a unit test with NUnit framework. This base class provides built in support for mocking framework. This version provides support for Rhino mocking framework.OnlineExam: Common online examination system based on Asp.net MVC3 can used for knowledge test, I/Q test, college test or most other test project.Orchard Code Generation Extensions: Code Generation Extensions module for Orchard.OrchardTranstion_CN: Orchar?? OsAvatar: to next step showOwnTools: About my toolsPhone Finder App: PhoneFinder will be a Windows Phone platform app alternative for finding a lost or stolen phone. Our plan is to have additional functionality the Windows software does not include. It will be developed using ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, C#, etc.PoshChat: PoshChat is a client/server chat program written in PowerShell. Supports multiple client connections to a single server to chat.Process Attachment And Secure Text: ProcessAttachmentAndSecureText is an Exchange Transport Agent DLL and associated ASPX page. It is used to 1) strip out attachments and send them to an upload portal, and 2) to strip out text from emails and send it to an upload portal. It is currently coded for Exchange 2010Resource Viewer - Visual Studio Extension: Simply put the “resource viewer extension” enables you to visually view your ResourceDictionary. To open it go to: View – Other Windows – Resource Viewer. When working with WPF/Silverlight you put your reusable resources in a common ResourceDictionary, those resources might be of type Style, SolidColorBrush, DrawingBrush, BitmapImage and more. The problems starts when you have that ResourceDictionary you have no way to see how your resources look like, making the work process (of both t...Scumm XNA: Scumm XNA is an engine that runs old school LucasArts graphical adventure games. It is written completely in C# and will run on PC, Xbox 360 and Windows phone. The code is inspired by ScummVM but this project is not a port, it is a complete rewrite in order to optimize the engine for the CLR. Of course, you will need to own the orinigal games in order to use it. Currently, I will focus my work on the great "Day of Tentacle" game specifically the CD version.SDX DataGrid: SDXDataGrid is a comprehensive data grid component for Microsoft .NET 3.5 web application developers. It is designed to ease the exhausting process of implementing the necessary code for sorting, navigation, grouping, searching and data editing in a data representation object.SQL Scriptz Runner: Features are : Drag And Drop script files Run a directory of script files Sql Script out put messages during execution Script passed or failed that are colored green and red (yellow for running) Stop on error option Open script on error option Run report with time taken for each uComponents Demo: A demo for the code of running uComponents in Umbraco siteUnixTable: UnixTable makes it easier to realize application to access database, with no code but only with visual instrument at runtime. You'll no longer have to write query or code to read table from database. It's developed in Visual Basic for .NET 4. VOA Player.NET: VOA Player is a lightweight windows client for listening VOA Special English. Because of GFW blocking it fetch RSS data via rss2proxy.appspot.com indirectly. User can view article page and listen MP3 stream. The project is a C# implementation of voaplayer.sinaapp.com.Windows Metafile Library: The library supports reading and writing WMF files. Source code is written in pure .NET from scratch following the Windows Metafile Format Specification.Windows Phone 7.1 + MicroFramework (a phone device as remote control): Windows Phone 7.1 + .Net MicroFramework (How use a windows phone device as remote control of a Fez Panda II/MicroFramework board). A windows phone device can be connected to a wifi network (for example a wifi router). If you have also a MicroFramework board connected to the wifi network; you can send some http rest commands from the windows phone device to the MicroFramework board. The microframework board, it must support the tcp/ip protocol through a connect shield. In this exaple it will...XBMC Cache Manager: A Windows Service to manage a shared XBMC MySQL database and shared cache folder.

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• Diving into OpenStack Network Architecture - Part 1

  - by Ronen Kofman

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} rkofman Normal rkofman 83 3045 2014-05-23T21:11:00Z 2014-05-27T06:58:00Z 3 1883 10739 Oracle Corporation 89 25 12597 12.00 140 Clean Clean false false false false EN-US X-NONE HE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-bidi-language:AR-SA;} Before we begin OpenStack networking has very powerful capabilities but at the same time it is quite complicated. In this blog series we will review an existing OpenStack setup using the Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview and explain the different network components through use cases and examples. The goal is to show how the different pieces come together and provide a bigger picture view of the network architecture in OpenStack. This can be very helpful to users making their first steps in OpenStack or anyone wishes to understand how networking works in this environment.  We will go through the basics first and build the examples as we go. According to the recent Icehouse user survey and the one before it, Neutron with Open vSwitch plug-in is the most widely used network setup both in production and in POCs (in terms of number of customers) and so in this blog series we will analyze this specific OpenStack networking setup. As we know there are many options to setup OpenStack networking and while Neturon + Open vSwitch is the most popular setup there is no claim that it is either best or the most efficient option. Neutron + Open vSwitch is an example, one which provides a good starting point for anyone interested in understanding OpenStack networking. Even if you are using different kind of network setup such as different Neutron plug-in or even not using Neutron at all this will still be a good starting point to understand the network architecture in OpenStack. The setup we are using for the examples is the one used in the Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview. Installing it is simple and it would be helpful to have it as reference. In this setup we use eth2 on all servers for VM network, all VM traffic will be flowing through this interface.The Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview is using VLANs for L2 isolation to provide tenant and network isolation. The following diagram shows how we have configured our deployment: This first post is a bit long and will focus on some basic concepts in OpenStack networking. The components we will be discussing are Open vSwitch, network namespaces, Linux bridge and veth pairs. Note that this is not meant to be a comprehensive review of these components, it is meant to describe the component as much as needed to understand OpenStack network architecture. All the components described here can be further explored using other resources. Open vSwitch (OVS) In the Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview OVS is used to connect virtual machines to the physical port (in our case eth2) as shown in the deployment diagram. OVS contains bridges and ports, the OVS bridges are different from the Linux bridge (controlled by the brctl command) which are also used in this setup. To get started let’s view the OVS structure, use the following command: # ovs-vsctl show 7ec51567-ab42-49e8-906d-b854309c9edf     Bridge br-int         Port br-int             Interface br-int type: internal         Port "int-br-eth2"             Interface "int-br-eth2"     Bridge "br-eth2"         Port "br-eth2"             Interface "br-eth2" type: internal         Port "eth2"             Interface "eth2"         Port "phy-br-eth2"             Interface "phy-br-eth2" ovs_version: "1.11.0" We see a standard post deployment OVS on a compute node with two bridges and several ports hanging off of each of them. The example above is a compute node without any VMs, we can see that the physical port eth2 is connected to a bridge called “br-eth2”. We also see two ports "int-br-eth2" and "phy-br-eth2" which are actually a veth pair and form virtual wire between the two bridges, veth pairs are discussed later in this post. When a virtual machine is created a port is created on one the br-int bridge and this port is eventually connected to the virtual machine (we will discuss the exact connectivity later in the series). Here is how OVS looks after a VM was launched: # ovs-vsctl show efd98c87-dc62-422d-8f73-a68c2a14e73d     Bridge br-int         Port "int-br-eth2"             Interface "int-br-eth2"         Port br-int             Interface br-int type: internal         Port "qvocb64ea96-9f" tag: 1             Interface "qvocb64ea96-9f"     Bridge "br-eth2"         Port "phy-br-eth2"             Interface "phy-br-eth2"         Port "br-eth2"             Interface "br-eth2" type: internal         Port "eth2"             Interface "eth2" ovs_version: "1.11.0" Bridge "br-int" now has a new port "qvocb64ea96-9f" which connects to the VM and tagged with VLAN 1. Every VM which will be launched will add a port on the “br-int” bridge for every network interface the VM has. Another useful command on OVS is dump-flows for example: # ovs-ofctl dump-flows br-int NXST_FLOW reply (xid=0x4): cookie=0x0, duration=735.544s, table=0, n_packets=70, n_bytes=9976, idle_age=17, priority=3,in_port=1,dl_vlan=1000 actions=mod_vlan_vid:1,NORMAL cookie=0x0, duration=76679.786s, table=0, n_packets=0, n_bytes=0, idle_age=65534, hard_age=65534, priority=2,in_port=1 actions=drop cookie=0x0, duration=76681.36s, table=0, n_packets=68, n_bytes=7950, idle_age=17, hard_age=65534, priority=1 actions=NORMAL As we see the port which is connected to the VM has the VLAN tag 1. However the port on the VM network (eth2) will be using tag 1000. OVS is modifying the vlan as the packet flow from the VM to the physical interface. In OpenStack the Open vSwitch agent takes care of programming the flows in Open vSwitch so the users do not have to deal with this at all. If you wish to learn more about how to program the Open vSwitch you can read more about it at http://openvswitch.org looking at the documentation describing the ovs-ofctl command. Network Namespaces (netns) Network namespaces is a very cool Linux feature can be used for many purposes and is heavily used in OpenStack networking. Network namespaces are isolated containers which can hold a network configuration and is not seen from outside of the namespace. A network namespace can be used to encapsulate specific network functionality or provide a network service in isolation as well as simply help to organize a complicated network setup. Using the Oracle OpenStack Tech Preview we are using the latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel R3 (UEK3), this kernel provides a complete support for netns. Let's see how namespaces work through couple of examples to control network namespaces we use the ip netns command: Defining a new namespace: # ip netns add my-ns # ip netns list my-ns As mentioned the namespace is an isolated container, we can perform all the normal actions in the namespace context using the exec command for example running the ifconfig command: # ip netns exec my-ns ifconfig -a lo        Link encap:Local Loopback           LOOPBACK  MTU:16436 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) We can run every command in the namespace context, this is especially useful for debug using tcpdump command, we can ping or ssh or define iptables all within the namespace. Connecting the namespace to the outside world: There are various ways to connect into a namespaces and between namespaces we will focus on how this is done in OpenStack. OpenStack uses a combination of Open vSwitch and network namespaces. OVS defines the interfaces and then we can add those interfaces to namespace. So first let's add a bridge to OVS: # ovs-vsctl add-br my-bridge Now let's add a port on the OVS and make it internal: # ovs-vsctl add-port my-bridge my-port # ovs-vsctl set Interface my-port type=internal And let's connect it into the namespace: # ip link set my-port netns my-ns Looking inside the namespace: # ip netns exec my-ns ifconfig -a lo        Link encap:Local Loopback           LOOPBACK  MTU:65536 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) my-port   Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 22:04:45:E2:85:21           BROADCAST  MTU:1500 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) Now we can add more ports to the OVS bridge and connect it to other namespaces or other device like physical interfaces. Neutron is using network namespaces to implement network services such as DCHP, routing, gateway, firewall, load balance and more. In the next post we will go into this in further details. Linux Bridge and veth pairs Linux bridge is used to connect the port from OVS to the VM. Every port goes from the OVS bridge to a Linux bridge and from there to the VM. The reason for using regular Linux bridges is for security groups’ enforcement. Security groups are implemented using iptables and iptables can only be applied to Linux bridges and not to OVS bridges. Veth pairs are used extensively throughout the network setup in OpenStack and are also a good tool to debug a network problem. Veth pairs are simply a virtual wire and so veths always come in pairs. Typically one side of the veth pair will connect to a bridge and the other side to another bridge or simply left as a usable interface. In this example we will create some veth pairs, connect them to bridges and test connectivity. This example is using regular Linux server and not an OpenStack node: Creating a veth pair, note that we define names for both ends: # ip link add veth0 type veth peer name veth1 # ifconfig -a . . veth0     Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 5E:2C:E6:03:D0:17           BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) veth1     Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr E6:B6:E2:6D:42:B8           BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500 Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b) . . To make the example more meaningful this we will create the following setup: veth0 => veth1 => br-eth3 => eth3 ======> eth2 on another Linux server br-eth3 – a regular Linux bridge which will be connected to veth1 and eth3 eth3 – a physical interface with no IP on it, connected to a private network eth2 – a physical interface on the remote Linux box connected to the private network and configured with the IP of 50.50.50.1 Once we create the setup we will ping 50.50.50.1 (the remote IP) through veth0 to test that the connection is up: # brctl addbr br-eth3 # brctl addif br-eth3 eth3 # brctl addif br-eth3 veth1 # brctl show bridge name     bridge id               STP enabled     interfaces br-eth3         8000.00505682e7f6       no              eth3                                                         veth1 # ifconfig veth0 50.50.50.50 # ping -I veth0 50.50.50.51 PING 50.50.50.51 (50.50.50.51) from 50.50.50.50 veth0: 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 50.50.50.51: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.454 ms 64 bytes from 50.50.50.51: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.298 ms When the naming is not as obvious as the previous example and we don't know who are the paired veth interfaces we can use the ethtool command to figure this out. The ethtool command returns an index we can look up using ip link command, for example: # ethtool -S veth1 NIC statistics: peer_ifindex: 12 # ip link . . 12: veth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000 Summary That’s all for now, we quickly reviewed OVS, network namespaces, Linux bridges and veth pairs. These components are heavily used in the OpenStack network architecture we are exploring and understanding them well will be very useful when reviewing the different use cases. In the next post we will look at how the OpenStack network is laid out connecting the virtual machines to each other and to the external world. @RonenKofman

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• What Every Developer Should Know About MSI Components

  - by Alois Kraus

  Hopefully nothing. But if you have to do more than simple XCopy deployment and you need to support updates, upgrades and perhaps side by side scenarios there is no way around MSI. You can create Msi files with a Visual Studio Setup project which is severely limited or you can use the Windows Installer Toolset. I cannot talk about WIX with my German colleagues because WIX has a very special meaning. It is funny to always use the long name when I talk about deployment possibilities. Alternatively you can buy commercial tools which help you to author Msi files but I am not sure how good they are. Given enough pain with existing solutions you can also learn the MSI Apis and create your own packaging solution. If I were you I would use either a commercial visual tool when you do easy deployments or use the free Windows Installer Toolset. Once you know the WIX schema you can create well formed wix xml files easily with any editor. Then you can “compile” from the wxs files your Msi package. Recently I had the “pleasure” to get my hands dirty with C++ (again) and the MSI technology. Installation is a complex topic but after several month of digging into arcane MSI issues I can safely say that there should exist an easier way to install and update files as today. I am not alone with this statement as John Robbins (creator of the cool tool Paraffin) states: “.. It's a brittle and scary API in Windows …”. To help other people struggling with installation issues I present you the advice I (and others) found useful and what will happen if you ignore this advice. What is a MSI file? A MSI file is basically a database with tables which reference each other to control how your un/installation should work. The basic idea is that you declare via these tables what you want to install and MSI controls the how to get your stuff onto or off your machine. Your “stuff” consists usually of files, registry keys, shortcuts and environment variables. Therefore the most important tables are File, Registry, Environment and Shortcut table which define what will be un/installed. The key to master MSI is that every resource (file, registry key ,…) is associated with a MSI component. The actual payload consists of compressed files in the CAB format which can either be embedded into the MSI file or reside beside the MSI file or in a subdirectory below it. To examine MSI files you need Orca a free MSI editor provided by MS. There is also another free editor called Super Orca which does support diffs between MSI and it does not lock the MSI files. But since Orca comes with a shell extension I tend to use only Orca because it is so easy to right click on a MSI file and open it with this tool. How Do I Install It? Double click it. This does work for fresh installations as well as major upgrades. Updates need to be installed via the command line via msiexec /i <msi> REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vomus   This tells the installer to reinstall all already installed features (new features will NOT be installed). The reinstallmode letters do force an overwrite of the old cached package in the %WINDIR%\Installer folder. All files, shortcuts and registry keys are redeployed if they are missing or need to be replaced with a newer version. When things did go really wrong and you want to overwrite everything unconditionally use REINSTALLMODE=vamus. How To Enable MSI Logs? You can download a MSI from Microsoft which installs some registry keys to enable full MSI logging. The log files can be found in your %TEMP% folder and are called MSIxxxx.log. Alternatively you can add to your msiexec command line the option msiexec …. /l*vx <LogFileName> Personally I find it rather strange that * does not mean full logging. To really get all logs I need to add v and x which is documented in the msiexec help but I still find this behavior unintuitive. What are MSI components? The whole MSI logic is bound to the concept of MSI components. Nearly every msi table has a Component column which binds an installable resource to a component. Below are the screenshots of the FeatureComponents and Component table of an example MSI. The Feature table defines basically the feature hierarchy.  To find out what belongs to a feature you need to look at the FeatureComponents table where for each feature the components are listed which will be installed when a feature is installed. The MSI components are defined in the  Component table. This table has as first column the component name and as second column the component id which is a GUID. All resources you want to install belong to a MSI component. Therefore nearly all MSI tables have a Component_ column which contains the component name. If you look e.g. a the File table you see that every file belongs to a component which is true for all other tables which install resources. The component table is the glue between all other tables which contain the resources you want to install. So far so easy. Why is MSI then so complex? Most MSI problems arise from the fact that you did violate a MSI component rule in one or the other way. When you install a feature the reference count for all components belonging to this feature will increase by one. If your component is installed by more than one feature it will get a higher refcount. When you uninstall a feature its refcount will drop by one. Interesting things happen if the component reference count reaches zero: Then all associated resources will be deleted. That looks like a reasonable thing and it is. What it makes complex are the strange component rules you have to follow. Below are some important component rules from the Tao of the Windows Installer … Rule 16: Follow Component Rules Components are a very important part of the Installer technology. They are the means whereby the Installer manages the resources that make up your application. The SDK provides the following guidelines for creating components in your package: Never create two components that install a resource under the same name and target location. If a resource must be duplicated in multiple components, change its name or target location in each component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Two components must not have the same key path file. This is a consequence of the previous rule. The key path value points to a particular file or folder belonging to the component that the installer uses to detect the component. If two components had the same key path file, the installer would be unable to distinguish which component is installed. Two components however may share a key path folder. Do not create a version of a component that is incompatible with all previous versions of the component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Do not create components containing resources that will need to be installed into more than one directory on the user’s system. The installer installs all of the resources in a component into the same directory. It is not possible to install some resources into subdirectories. Do not include more than one COM server per component. If a component contains a COM server, this must be the key path for the component. Do not specify more than one file per component as a target for the Start menu or a Desktop shortcut. … And these rules do not even talk about component ids, update packages and upgrades which you need to understand as well. Lets suppose you install two MSIs (MSI1 and MSI2) which have the same ComponentId but different component names. Both do install the same file. What will happen when you uninstall MSI2?   Hm the file should stay there. But the component names are different. Yes and yes. But MSI uses not use the component name as key for the refcount. Instead the ComponentId column of the Component table which contains a GUID is used as identifier under which the refcount is stored. The components Comp1 and Comp2 are identical from the MSI perspective. After the installation of both MSIs the Component with the Id {100000….} has a refcount of two. After uninstallation of one MSI there is still a refcount of one which drops to zero just as expected when we uninstall the last msi. Then the file which was the same for both MSIs is deleted. You should remember that MSI keeps a refcount across MSIs for components with the same component id. MSI does manage components not the resources you did install. The resources associated with a component are then and only then deleted when the refcount of the component reaches zero.   The dependencies between features, components and resources can be described as relations. m,k are numbers >= 1, n can be 0. Inside a MSI the following relations are valid Feature    1  –> n Components Component    1 –> m Features Component      1  –>  k Resources These relations express that one feature can install several components and features can share components between them. Every (meaningful) component will install at least one resource which means that its name (primary key to stay in database speak) does occur in some other table in the Component column as value which installs some resource. Lets make it clear with an example. We want to install with the feature MainFeature some files a registry key and a shortcut. We can then create components Comp1..3 which are referenced by the resources defined in the corresponding tables.   Feature Component Registry File Shortcuts MainFeature Comp1 RegistryKey1     MainFeature Comp2   File.txt   MainFeature Comp3   File2.txt Shortcut to File2.txt   It is illegal that the same resource is part of more than one component since this would break the refcount mechanism. Lets illustrate this:            Feature ComponentId Resource Reference Count Feature1 {1000-…} File1.txt 1 Feature2 {2000-….} File1.txt 1 The installation part works well but what happens when you uninstall Feature2? Component {20000…} gets a refcount of zero where MSI deletes all resources belonging to this component. In this case File1.txt will be deleted. But Feature1 still has another component {10000…} with a refcount of one which means that the file was deleted too early. You just have ruined your installation. To fix it you then need to click on the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs to let MSI reinstall any missing registry keys, files or shortcuts. The vigilant reader might has noticed that there is more in the Component table. Beside its name and GUID it has also an installation directory, attributes and a KeyPath. The KeyPath is a reference to a file or registry key which is used to detect if the component is already installed. This becomes important when you repair or uninstall a component. To find out if the component is already installed MSI checks if the registry key or file referenced by the KeyPath property does exist. When it does not exist it assumes that it was either already uninstalled (can lead to problems during uninstall) or that it is already installed and all is fine. Why is this detail so important? Lets put all files into one component. The KeyPath should be then one of the files of your component to check if it was installed or not. When your installation becomes corrupt because a file was deleted you cannot repair it with the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs because MSI checks the component integrity via the Resource referenced by its KeyPath. As long as you did not delete the KeyPath file MSI thinks all resources with your component are installed and never executes any repair action. You get even more trouble when you try to remove files during an upgrade (you cannot remove files during an update) from your super component which contains all files. The only way out and therefore best practice is to assign for every resource you want to install an extra component. This ensures painless updatability and repairs and you have much less effort to remove specific files during an upgrade. In effect you get this best practice relation Feature 1  –> n Components Component   1  –>  1 Resources MSI Component Rules Rule 1 – One component per resource Every resource you want to install (file, registry key, value, environment value, shortcut, directory, …) must get its own component which does never change between versions as long as the install location is the same. Penalty If you add more than one resources to a component you will break the repair capability of MSI because the KeyPath is used to check if the component needs repair. MSI ComponentId Files MSI 1.0 {1000} File1-5 MSI 2.0 {2000} File2-5 You want to remove File1 in version 2.0 of your MSI. Since you want to keep the other files you create a new component and add them there. MSI will delete all files if the component refcount of {1000} drops to zero. The files you want to keep are added to the new component {2000}. Ok that does work if your upgrade does uninstall the old MSI first. This will cause the refcount of all previously installed components to reach zero which means that all files present in version 1.0 are deleted. But there is a faster way to perform your upgrade by first installing your new MSI and then remove the old one.  If you choose this upgrade path then you will loose File1-5 after your upgrade and not only File1 as intended by your new component design.   Rule 2 – Only add, never remove resources from a component If you did follow rule 1 you will not need Rule 2. You can add in a patch more resources to one component. That is ok. But you can never remove anything from it. There are tricky ways around that but I do not want to encourage bad component design. Penalty Lets assume you have 2 MSI files which install under the same component one file   MSI1 MSI2 {1000} - ComponentId {1000} – ComponentId File1.txt File2.txt   When you install and uninstall both MSIs you will end up with an installation where either File1 or File2 will be left. Why? It seems that MSI does not store the resources associated with each component in its internal database. Instead Windows will simply query the MSI that is currently uninstalled for all resources belonging to this component. Since it will find only one file and not two it will only uninstall one file. That is the main reason why you never can remove resources from a component!   Rule 3 Never Remove A Component From an Update MSI. This is the same as if you change the GUID of a component by accident for your new update package. The resulting update package will not contain all components from the previously installed package. Penalty When you remove a component from a feature MSI will set the feature state during update to Advertised and log a warning message into its log file when you did enable MSI logging. SELMGR: ComponentId '{2DCEA1BA-3E27-E222-484C-D0D66AEA4F62}' is registered to feature 'xxxxxxx, but is not present in the Component table.  Removal of components from a feature is not supported! MSI (c) (24:44) [07:53:13:436]: SELMGR: Removal of a component from a feature is not supported Advertised means that MSI treats all components of this feature as not installed. As a consequence during uninstall nothing will be removed since it is not installed! This is not only bad because uninstall does no longer work but this feature will also not get the required patches. All other features which have followed component versioning rules for update packages will be updated but the one faulty feature will not. This results in very hard to find bugs why an update was only partially successful. Things got better with Windows Installer 4.5 but you cannot rely on that nobody will use an older installer. It is a good idea to add to your update msiexec call MSIENFORCEUPGRADECOMPONENTRULES=1 which will abort the installation if you did violate this rule.

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