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• What Counts For a DBA: Fitness

  - by Louis Davidson

  If you know me, you can probably guess that physical exercise is not really my thing. There was a time in my past when it a larger part of my life, but even then never in the same sort of passionate way as a number of our SQL friends.  For me, I find that mental exercise satisfies what I believe to be the same inner need that drives people to run farther than I like to drive on most Saturday mornings, and it is certainly just as addictive. Mental fitness shares many common traits with physical fitness, especially the need to attain it through repetitive training. I only wish that mental training burned off a bacon cheeseburger in the same manner as does jogging around a dewy park on Saturday morning. In physical training, there are at least two goals, the first of which is to be physically able to do a task. The second is to train the brain to perform the task without thinking too hard about it. No matter how long it has been since you last rode a bike, you will be almost certainly be able to hop on and start riding without thinking about the process of pedaling or balancing. If you’ve never ridden a bike, you could be a physics professor /Olympic athlete and still crash the first few times you try, even though you are as strong as an ox and your knowledge of the physics of bicycle riding makes the concept child’s play. For programming tasks, the process is very similar. As a DBA, you will come to know intuitively how to backup, optimize, and secure database systems. As a data programmer, you will work to instinctively use the clauses of Transact-SQL DML so that, when you need to group data three ways (and not four), you will know to use the GROUP BY clause with GROUPING SETS without resorting to a search engine.  You have the skill. Making it naturally then requires repetition and experience is the primary requirement, not just simply learning about a topic. The hardest part of being really good at something is this difference between knowledge and skill. I have recently taken several informative training classes with Kimball University on data warehousing and ETL. Now I have a lot more knowledge about designing data warehouses than before. I have also done a good bit of data warehouse designing of late and have started to improve to some level of proficiency with the theory. Yet, for all of this head knowledge, it is still a struggle to take what I have learned and apply it to the designs I am working on.  Data warehousing is still a task that is not yet deeply ingrained in my brain muscle memory. On the other hand, relational database design is something that no matter how much or how little I may get to do it, I am comfortable doing it. I have done it as a profession now for well over a decade, I teach classes on it, and I also have done (and continue to do) a lot of mental training beyond the work day. Sometimes the training is just basic education, some reading blogs and attending sessions at PASS events.  My best training comes from spending time working on other people’s design issues in forums (though not nearly as much as I would like to lately). Working through other people’s problems is a great way to exercise your brain on problems with which you’re not immediately familiar. The final bit of exercise I find useful for cultivating mental fitness for a data professional is also probably the nerdiest thing that I will ever suggest you do.  Akin to running in place, the idea is to work through designs in your head. I have designed more than one database system that would revolutionize grocery store operations, sales at my local Target store, the ordering process at Amazon, and ways to improve Disney World operations to get me through a line faster (some of which they are starting to implement without any of my help.) Never are the designs truly fleshed out, but enough to work through structures and processes.  On “paper”, I have designed database systems to catalog things as trivial as my Lego creations, rental car companies and my audio and video collections. Once I get the database designed mentally, sometimes I will create the database, add some data (often using Red-Gate’s Data Generator), and write a few queries to see if a concept was realistic, but I will rarely fully flesh out the database since I have no desire to do any user interface programming anymore.  The mental training allows me to keep in practice for when the time comes to do the work I love the most for real…even if I have been spending most of my work time lately building data warehouses.  If you are really strong of mind and body, perhaps you can mix a mental run with a physical run; though don’t run off of a cliff while contemplating how you might design a database to catalog the trees on a mountain…that would be contradictory to the purpose of both types of exercise.

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• What Counts for a DBA: Humility

  - by drsql

  In football (the American sort, naturally,) there are a select group of players who really hope to never have their names called during the game. They are members of the offensive line, and their job is to protect other players so they can deliver the ball to the goal to score points. When you do hear their name called, it is usually because they made a mistake and the player that they were supposed to protect ended up flat on his back admiring the clouds in the sky instead of advancing towards the goal to scoring point. Even on the rare occasion their name is called for a good reason, it is usually because they were making up for a teammate who had made a mistake and they covered up for them. The role of offensive lineman is a very good analogy for the role of the admin DBA. As a DBA, you are called on to be barely visible and rarely heard, protecting the company data assets tenaciously, even though the enemies to our craft surround us on all sides:. Developers: Cries of ‘foul!’ often ensue when the DBA says that they want data integrity to be stringently enforced and that documentation is needed so they can support systems, mostly because every error occurrence in the enterprise will be initially blamed on the database and fall to the DBA to troubleshoot. Insisting too loudly may bring those cries of ‘foul’ that somewhat remind you of when your 2 year old daughter didn't want to go to bed. The result of this petulance is that the next "enemy" gets involved. Managers: The concerns that motivate DBAs to argue will not excite the kind of manager who gets his technical knowledge from a glossy magazine filled with buzzwords, charts, and pretty pictures. However, the other programmers in the organization will tickle the buzzword void with a stream of new-sounding ideas and technologies constantly, along with warnings that if we did care about data integrity and document things, the budget would explode! In contrast, the arguments for integrity of data and supportability tend to be about as exciting as watching grass grow, and far too many manager types seem to prefer to smoke it than watch it. Packaged Applications: The DBA is rarely given a chance to review a new application that is being demonstrated for the enterprise, and rarer still is the DBA that gets a veto of an application because the database it uses has clearly been created by an architect that won't read a data modeling book because he is already married. More often than not this leads to hours of work for the DBA trying to performance-tune a database with a menagerie of rules that must be followed to stay within the  application support agreement, such as no changing indexes on a third party schema even though there are 10 billion rows instead of the 10 thousand when the system was last optimized. Hardware Failures: Physical disks, networking devices, memory, and backup devices all come with a measure known as ‘mean time before failure’ and it is never listed in centuries or eons. More like years, and the term ‘mean’ indicates that half of the devices are expected to fail before that, which by my calendar means any hour of any day that it wants to fail it will. But the DBA sucks it up and does the task at hand with a humility that makes them nearly invisible to all but the most observant person in the organization. The best DBAs I know are so proactive in their relentless pursuit of perfection that they detect many of the bugs (which they seldom caused) in the system well before they become a problem. In the end the DBA gets noticed for one of same two reasons as the offensive lineman. You make a mistake, like dropping a critical production database that had never been backed up; or when a system crashes for any reason whatsoever and they are on the spot with troubleshooting and system restoration plans that have been well thought out, tested, and tested again. Not because there is any glory in it, but because it is what they do.   Note: The characteristics of the professions referred to in this blog are meant to be overstated stereotypes for humorous effect, and even some DBAs aren't quite this perfect. If you are reading this far and haven’t hand written a 10 page flaming comment about how you are a _______ and you aren’t like this, that is awesome. Not every situation applies to everyone, but if you have never worked with a bad packaged app, a magazine trained manager, programmers that aren’t team players, or hardware that occasionally failed, relax and go have a unicorn sandwich before you wake up.

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• CPU Usage in Very Large Coherence Clusters

  - by jpurdy

  When sizing Coherence installations, one of the complicating factors is that these installations (by their very nature) tend to be application-specific, with some being large, memory-intensive caches, with others acting as I/O-intensive transaction-processing platforms, and still others performing CPU-intensive calculations across the data grid. Regardless of the primary resource requirements, Coherence sizing calculations are inherently empirical, in that there are so many permutations that a simple spreadsheet approach to sizing is rarely optimal (though it can provide a good starting estimate). So we typically recommend measuring actual resource usage (primarily CPU cycles, network bandwidth and memory) at a given load, and then extrapolating from those measurements. Of course there may be multiple types of load, and these may have varying degrees of correlation -- for example, an increased request rate may drive up the number of objects "pinned" in memory at any point, but the increase may be less than linear if those objects are naturally shared by concurrent requests. But for most reasonably-designed applications, a linear resource model will be reasonably accurate for most levels of scale. However, at extreme scale, sizing becomes a bit more complicated as certain cluster management operations -- while very infrequent -- become increasingly critical. This is because certain operations do not naturally tend to scale out. In a small cluster, sizing is primarily driven by the request rate, required cache size, or other application-driven metrics. In larger clusters (e.g. those with hundreds of cluster members), certain infrastructure tasks become intensive, in particular those related to members joining and leaving the cluster, such as introducing new cluster members to the rest of the cluster, or publishing the location of partitions during rebalancing. These tasks have a strong tendency to require all updates to be routed via a single member for the sake of cluster stability and data integrity. Fortunately that member is dynamically assigned in Coherence, so it is not a single point of failure, but it may still become a single point of bottleneck (until the cluster finishes its reconfiguration, at which point this member will have a similar load to the rest of the members). The most common cause of scaling issues in large clusters is disabling multicast (by configuring well-known addresses, aka WKA). This obviously impacts network usage, but it also has a large impact on CPU usage, primarily since the senior member must directly communicate certain messages with every other cluster member, and this communication requires significant CPU time. In particular, the need to notify the rest of the cluster about membership changes and corresponding partition reassignments adds stress to the senior member. Given that portions of the network stack may tend to be single-threaded (both in Coherence and the underlying OS), this may be even more problematic on servers with poor single-threaded performance. As a result of this, some extremely large clusters may be configured with a smaller number of partitions than ideal. This results in the size of each partition being increased. When a cache server fails, the other servers will use their fractional backups to recover the state of that server (and take over responsibility for their backed-up portion of that state). The finest granularity of this recovery is a single partition, and the single service thread can not accept new requests during this recovery. Ordinarily, recovery is practically instantaneous (it is roughly equivalent to the time required to iterate over a set of backup backing map entries and move them to the primary backing map in the same JVM). But certain factors can increase this duration drastically (to several seconds): large partitions, sufficiently slow single-threaded CPU performance, many or expensive indexes to rebuild, etc. The solution of course is to mitigate each of those factors but in many cases this may be challenging. Larger clusters also lead to the temptation to place more load on the available hardware resources, spreading CPU resources thin. As an example, while we've long been aware of how garbage collection can cause significant pauses, it usually isn't viewed as a major consumer of CPU (in terms of overall system throughput). Typically, the use of a concurrent collector allows greater responsiveness by minimizing pause times, at the cost of reducing system throughput. However, at a recent engagement, we were forced to turn off the concurrent collector and use a traditional parallel "stop the world" collector to reduce CPU usage to an acceptable level. In summary, there are some less obvious factors that may result in excessive CPU consumption in a larger cluster, so it is even more critical to test at full scale, even though allocating sufficient hardware may often be much more difficult for these large clusters.

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• Business Case for investing time developing Stubs and BizUnit Tests

  - by charlie.mott

  I was recently in a position where I had to justify why effort should be spent developing Stubbed Integration Tests for BizTalk solutions. These tests are usually developed using the BizUnit framework. I assumed that most seasoned BizTalk developers would consider this best practice. Even though Microsoft suggest use of BizUnit on MSDN, I've not found a single site listing the justifications for investing time writing stubs and BizUnit tests. Stubs Stubs should be developed to isolate your development team from external dependencies. This is described by Michael Stephenson here. Failing to do this can result in the following problems: In contract-first scenarios, the external system interface will have been defined.  But the interface may not have been setup or even developed yet for the BizTalk developers to work with. By the time you open the target location to see the data BizTalk has sent, it may have been swept away. If you are relying on the UI of the target system to see the data BizTalk has sent, what do you do if it fails to arrive? It may take time for the data to be processed or it may be scheduled to be processed later. Learning how to use the source\target systems and investigations into where things go wrong in these systems will slow down the BizTalk development effort. By the time the data is visible in a UI it may have undergone further transformations. In larger development teams working together, do you all use the same source and target instances. How do you know which data was created by whose tests? How do you know which event log error message are whose?  Another developer may have “cleaned up” your data. It is harder to write BizUnit tests that clean up the data\logs after each test run. What if your B2B partners' source or target system cannot support the sort of testing you want to do. They may not even have a development or test instance that you can work with. Their single test instance may be used by the SIT\UAT teams. There may be licencing costs of setting up an instances of the external system. The stubs I like to use are generic stubs that can accept\return any message type.  Usually I need to create one per protocol. They should be driven by BizUnit steps to: validates the data received; and select a response messages (or error response). Once built, they can be re-used for many integration tests and from project to project. I’m not saying that developers should never test against a real instance.  Every so often, you still need to connect to real developer or test instances of the source and target endpoints\services. The interface developers may ask you to send them some data to see if everything still works.  Or you might want some messages sent to BizTalk to get confidence that everything still works beyond BizTalk. Tests Automated “Stubbed Integration Tests” are usually built using the BizUnit framework. These facilitate testing of the entire integration process from source stub to target stub. It will ensure that all of the BizTalk components are configured together correctly to meet all the requirements. More fine grained unit testing of individual BizTalk components is still encouraged.  But BizUnit provides much the easiest way to test some components types (e.g. Orchestrations). Using BizUnit with the Behaviour Driven Development approach described by Mike Stephenson delivers the following benefits: source: http://biztalkbddsample.codeplex.com – Video 1. Requirements can be easily defined using Given/When/Then Requirements are close to the code so easier to manage as features and scenarios Requirements are defined in domain language The feature files can be used as part of the documentation The documentation is accurate to the build of code and can be published with a release The scenarios are effective to document the scenarios and are not over excessive The scenarios are maintained with the code There’s an abstraction between the intention and implementation of tests making them easier to understand The requirements drive the testing These same tests can also be used to drive load testing as described here. If you don't do this ... If you don't follow the above “Stubbed Integration Tests” approach, the developer will need to manually trigger the tests. This has the following risks: Developers are unlikely to check all the scenarios each time and all the expected conditions each time. After the developer leaves, these manual test steps may be lost. What test scenarios are there?  What test messages did they use for each scenario? There is no mechanism to prove adequate test coverage. A test team may attempt to automate integration test scenarios in a test environment through the triggering of tests from a source system UI. If this is a replacement for BizUnit tests, then this carries the following risks: It moves the tests downstream, so problems will be found later in the process. Testers may not check all the expected conditions within the BizTalk infrastructure such as: event logs, suspended messages, etc. These automated tests may also get in the way of manual tests run on these environments.

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• Application Composer: Exposing Your Customizations in BI Analytics and Reporting

  - by Richard Bingham

  Introduction This article explains in simple terms how to ensure the customizations and extensions you have made to your Fusion Applications are available for use in reporting and analytics. It also includes four embedded demo videos from our YouTube channel (if they don't appear check the browser address bar for a blocking shield icon). If you are new to Business Intelligence consider first reviewing our getting started article, and you can read more about the topic of custom subject areas in the documentation book Extending Sales. There are essentially four sections to this post. First we look at how custom fields added to standard objects are made available for reporting. Secondly we look at creating custom subject areas on the standard objects. Next we consider reporting on custom objects, starting with simple standalone objects, then child custom objects, and finally custom objects with relationships. Finally this article reviews how flexfields are exposed for reporting. Whilst this article applies to both Cloud/SaaS and on-premises deployments, if you are an on-premises developer then you can also use the BI Administration Tool to customize your BI metadata repository (the RPD) and create new subject areas. Whilst this is not covered here you can read more in Chapter 8 of the Extensibility Guide for Developers. Custom Fields on Standard Objects If you add a custom field to your standard object then it's likely you'll want to include it in your reports. This is very simple, since all new fields are instantly available in the "[objectName] Extension" folder in existing subject areas. The following two minute video demonstrates this. Custom Subject Areas for Standard Objects You can create your own subject areas for use in analytics and reporting via Application Composer. An example use-case could be to simplify the seeded subject areas, since they sometimes contain complex data fields and internal values that could confuse business users. One thing to note is that you cannot create subject areas in a sandbox, as it is not supported by BI, so once your custom object is tested and complete you'll need to publish the sandbox before moving forwards. The subject area creation processes is essentially two-fold. Once the request is submitted the ADF artifacts are generated, then secondly the related metadata is sent to the BI presentation server API's to make the updates there. One thing to note is that this second step may take up to ten minutes to complete. Once finished the status of the custom subject area request should show as 'OK' and it is then ready for use. Within the creation processes wizard-like steps there are three concepts worth highlighting: Date Flattening - this feature permits the roll up of reports at various date levels, such as data by week, month, quarter, or year. You simply check the box to enable it for that date field. Measures - these are your own functions that you can build into the custom subject area. They are related to the field data type and include min-max for dates, and sum(), avg(), and count() for  numeric fields. Implicit Facts - used to make the BI metadata join between your object fields and the calculated measure fields. The advice is to choose the most frequently used measure to ensure consistency. This video shows a simple example, where a simplified subject area is created for the customer 'Contact' standard object, picking just a few fields upon which users can then create reports. Custom Objects Custom subject areas support three types of custom objects. First is a simple standalone custom object and for which the same process mentioned above applies. The next is a custom child object created on a standard object parent, and finally a custom object that is related to a parent object - usually through a dynamic choice list. Whilst the steps in each of these last two are mostly the same, there are differences in the way you choose the objects and their fields. This is illustrated in the videos below.The first video shows the process for creating a custom subject area for a simple standalone custom object. This second video demonstrates how to create custom subject areas for custom objects that are of parent:child type, as well as those those with dynamic-choice-list relationships. &lt;span id=&quot;XinhaEditingPostion&quot;&gt;&lt;/span&gt; Flexfields Dynamic and Extensible Flexfields satisfy a similar requirement as custom fields (for Application Composer), with flexfields common across the Fusion Financials, Supply Chain and Procurement, and HCM applications. The basic principle is when you enable and configure your flexfields, in the edit page under each segment region (for both global and context segments) there is a BI Enabled check box. Once this is checked and you've completed your configuration, you run the Scheduled Process job named 'Import Oracle Fusion Data Extensions for Transactional Business Intelligence' to generate and migrate the related BI artifacts and data. This applies for dynamic, key, and extensible flexfields. Of course there is more to consider in terms of how you wish your flexfields to be implemented and exposed in your reports, and details are given in Chapter 4 of the Extending Applications guide.

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• Windows Phone 8 Announcement

  - by Tim Murphy

  As if the Surface announcement on Monday wasn’t exciting enough, today Microsoft announce that Windows Phone 8 will be coming this fall.  That itself is great news, but the features coming were like confetti flying in all different directions.  Given this speed I couldn’t capture every feature they covered.  A summary of what I did capture is listed below starting with their eight main features. Common Core The first thing that they covered is that Windows Phone 8 will share a core OS with Windows 8.  It will also run natively on multiple cores.  They mentioned that they have run it on up to 64 cores to this point.  The phones as you might expect will at least start as dual core.  If you remember there were metrics saying that Windows Phone 7 performed operations faster on a single core than other platforms did with dual cores.  The metrics they showed here indicate that Windows Phone 8 runs faster on comparable dual core hardware than other platforms. New Screen Resolutions Screen resolution has never been an issue for me, but it has been a criticism of Windows Phone 7 in the media.  Windows Phone 8 will supports three screen resolutions: WVGA 800 x 480, WXGA 1280 x 768, and 720 1280x720.  Hopefully this makes pixel counters a little happier. MicroSD Support This was one of my pet peeves when I got my Samsung Focus. With Windows Phone 8 the operating system will support adding MicroSD cards after initial setup.  Of course this is dependent on the hardware company on implementing it, but I think we have seen that even feature phone manufacturers have not had a problem supporting this in the past. NFC NFC has been an anticipated feature for some time.  What Microsoft showed today included the fact that they didn’t just want it to be for the phone.  There is cross platform NFC functionality between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.  The demos , while possibly a bit fanciful, showed would could be achieved even in a retail environment.  We are getting closer and closer to a Minority Report world with these technologies. Wallet Windows Phone 8 isn’t the first platform to have a wallet concept.  What they have done to differentiate themselves is to make it sot that it is not dependent on a SIM type chip like other platforms.  They have also expanded the concept beyond just banks to other types of credits such as airline miles. Nokia Mapping People have been envious of the Lumia phones having the Nokia mapping software.  Now all Windows Phone 8 devices will use NavTeq data and will have the capability to run in an offline fashion.  This is a major step forward from the Bing “touch for the next turn” maps. IT Administration The lack of features for enterprise administration and deployment was a complaint even before the Windows Phone 7 was released.  With the Windows Phone 8 release such features as Bitlocker and Secure boot will be baked into the OS. We will also have the ability to privately sign and distribute applications. Changing Start Screen Joe Belfiore made a big deal about this aspect of the new release.  Users will have more color themes available to them and the live tiles will be highly customizable. You will have the ability to resize and organize the tiles in a more dynamic way.  This allows for less important tiles or ones with less information to be made smaller.  And There Is More So what other tidbits came out of the presentation?  Later this summer the API for WP8 will be available.  There will be developer events coming to a city near you.  Another announcement of interest to developers is the ability to write applications at a native code level.  This is a boon for game developers and those who need highly efficient applications. As a topper on the cake there was mention of in app payment. On the consumer side we also found out that all updates will be available over the air.  Along with this came the fact that Microsoft will support all devices with updates for at least 18 month and you will be able to subscribe for early updates.  Update coming for Windows Phone 7.5 customers to WP7.8.  The main enhancement will be the new live tile features.  The big bonus is that the update will bypass the carriers.  I would assume though that you will be brought up to date with all previous patches that your carrier may not have released. There is so much more, but that is enough for one post.  Needless to say, EXCITING! del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 8,WP8,Windows Phone 7,WP7,Announcements,Microsoft

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• Processing Kinect v2 Color Streams in Parallel

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2014/08/20/processing-kinect-v2-color-streams-in-parallel.aspxProcessing Kinect v2 Color Streams in Parallel I've really been enjoying being a part of the Kinect for Windows Developer's Preview. The new hardware has some really impressive capabilities. However, with great power comes great system specs. Unfortunately, my little laptop that could is not 100% up to the task; I've had to get a little creative. The most disappointing thing I've run into is that I can't always cleanly display the color camera stream in managed code. I managed to strip the code down to what I believe is the bear minimum: using( ColorFrame _ColorFrame = e.FrameReference.AcquireFrame() ) { if( null == _ColorFrame ) return;   BitmapToDisplay.Lock(); _ColorFrame.CopyConvertedFrameDataToIntPtr( BitmapToDisplay.BackBuffer, Convert.ToUInt32( BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride * BitmapToDisplay.PixelHeight ), ColorImageFormat.Bgra ); BitmapToDisplay.AddDirtyRect( new Int32Rect( 0, 0, _ColorFrame.FrameDescription.Width, _ColorFrame.FrameDescription.Height ) ); BitmapToDisplay.Unlock(); } With this snippet, I'm placing the converted Bgra32 color stream directly on the BackBuffer of the WriteableBitmap. This gives me pretty smooth playback, but I still get the occasional freeze for half a second. After a bit of profiling, I discovered there were a few problems. The first problem is the size of the buffer along with the conversion on the buffer. At this time, the raw image format of the data from the Kinect is Yuy2. This is great for direct video processing. It would be ideal if I had a WriteableVideo object in WPF. However, this is not the case. Further digging led me to the real problem. It appears that the SDK is converting the input serially. Let's think about this for a second. The color camera is a 1080p camera. As we should all know, this give us a native resolution of 1920 x 1080. This produces 2,073,600 pixels. Yuy2 uses 4 bytes per 2 pixel, for a buffer size of 4,147,200 bytes. Bgra32 uses 4 bytes per pixel, for a buffer size of 8,294,400 bytes. The SDK appears to be doing this on one thread. I started wondering if I chould do this better myself. I mean, I have 8 cores in my system. Why can't I use them all? The first problem is converting a Yuy2 frame into a Bgra32 frame. It is NOT trivial. I spent a day of research of just how to do this. In the end, I didn't even produce the best algorithm possible, but it did work. After I managed to get that to work, I knew my next step was the get the conversion operation off the UI Thread. This was a simple process of throwing the work into a Task. Of course, this meant I had to marshal the final write to the WriteableBitmap back to the UI thread. Finally, I needed to vectorize the operation so I could run it safely in parallel. This was, mercifully, not quite as hard as I thought it would be. I had my loop return an index to a pair of pixels. From there, I had to tell the loop to do everything for this pair of pixels. If you're wondering why I did it for pairs of pixels, look back above at the specification for the Yuy2 format. I won't go into full detail on why each 4 bytes contains 2 pixels of information, but rest assured that there is a reason why the format is described in that way. The first working attempt at this algorithm successfully turned my poor laptop into a space heater. I very quickly brought and maintained all 8 cores up to about 97% usage. That's when I remembered that obscure option in the Task Parallel Library where you could limit the amount of parallelism used. After a little trial and error, I discovered 4 parallel tasks was enough for most cases. This yielded the follow code: private byte ClipToByte( int p_ValueToClip ) { return Convert.ToByte( ( p_ValueToClip < byte.MinValue ) ? byte.MinValue : ( ( p_ValueToClip > byte.MaxValue ) ? byte.MaxValue : p_ValueToClip ) ); }   private void ColorFrameArrived( object sender, ColorFrameArrivedEventArgs e ) { if( null == e.FrameReference ) return;   // If you do not dispose of the frame, you never get another one... using( ColorFrame _ColorFrame = e.FrameReference.AcquireFrame() ) { if( null == _ColorFrame ) return;   byte[] _InputImage = new byte[_ColorFrame.FrameDescription.LengthInPixels * _ColorFrame.FrameDescription.BytesPerPixel]; byte[] _OutputImage = new byte[BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride * BitmapToDisplay.PixelHeight]; _ColorFrame.CopyRawFrameDataToArray( _InputImage );   Task.Factory.StartNew( () => { ParallelOptions _ParallelOptions = new ParallelOptions(); _ParallelOptions.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 4;   Parallel.For( 0, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.LengthInPixels / 2, _ParallelOptions, ( _Index ) => { // See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd206750(v=vs.85).aspx int _Y0 = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 0] - 16; int _U = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 1] - 128; int _Y1 = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 2] - 16; int _V = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 3] - 128;   byte _R = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 + 409 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); byte _G = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 - 100 * _U - 208 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); byte _B = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 + 516 * _U + 128 ) >> 8 );   _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 0] = _B; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 1] = _G; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 2] = _R; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 3] = 0xFF; // A   _R = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 + 409 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); _G = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 - 100 * _U - 208 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); _B = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 + 516 * _U + 128 ) >> 8 );   _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 4] = _B; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 5] = _G; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 6] = _R; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 7] = 0xFF; } );   Application.Current.Dispatcher.Invoke( () => { BitmapToDisplay.WritePixels( new Int32Rect( 0, 0, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.Width, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.Height ), _OutputImage, BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride, 0 ); } ); } ); } } This seemed to yield a results I wanted, but there was still the occasional stutter. This lead to what I realized was the second problem. There is a race condition between the UI Thread and me locking the WriteableBitmap so I can write the next frame. Again, I'm writing approximately 8MB to the back buffer. Then, I started thinking I could cheat. The Kinect is running at 30 frames per second. The WPF UI Thread runs at 60 frames per second. This made me not feel bad about exploiting the Composition Thread. I moved the bulk of the code from the FrameArrived handler into CompositionTarget.Rendering. Once I was in there, I polled from a frame, and rendered it if it existed. Since, in theory, I'm only killing the Composition Thread every other hit, I decided I was ok with this for cases where silky smooth video performance REALLY mattered. This ode looked like this: private byte ClipToByte( int p_ValueToClip ) { return Convert.ToByte( ( p_ValueToClip < byte.MinValue ) ? byte.MinValue : ( ( p_ValueToClip > byte.MaxValue ) ? byte.MaxValue : p_ValueToClip ) ); }   void CompositionTarget_Rendering( object sender, EventArgs e ) { using( ColorFrame _ColorFrame = FrameReader.AcquireLatestFrame() ) { if( null == _ColorFrame ) return;   byte[] _InputImage = new byte[_ColorFrame.FrameDescription.LengthInPixels * _ColorFrame.FrameDescription.BytesPerPixel]; byte[] _OutputImage = new byte[BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride * BitmapToDisplay.PixelHeight]; _ColorFrame.CopyRawFrameDataToArray( _InputImage );   ParallelOptions _ParallelOptions = new ParallelOptions(); _ParallelOptions.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 4;   Parallel.For( 0, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.LengthInPixels / 2, _ParallelOptions, ( _Index ) => { // See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd206750(v=vs.85).aspx int _Y0 = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 0] - 16; int _U = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 1] - 128; int _Y1 = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 2] - 16; int _V = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 3] - 128;   byte _R = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 + 409 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); byte _G = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 - 100 * _U - 208 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); byte _B = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 + 516 * _U + 128 ) >> 8 );   _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 0] = _B; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 1] = _G; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 2] = _R; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 3] = 0xFF; // A   _R = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 + 409 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); _G = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 - 100 * _U - 208 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); _B = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 + 516 * _U + 128 ) >> 8 );   _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 4] = _B; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 5] = _G; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 6] = _R; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 7] = 0xFF; } );   BitmapToDisplay.WritePixels( new Int32Rect( 0, 0, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.Width, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.Height ), _OutputImage, BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride, 0 ); } }

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• UK OUG Conference Highlights and Insights

  - by Richard Bingham

  As per my preemptive post, this was the first time the annual conference organized by the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) was split into two events, one for Oracle Applications and another in December for Oracle Technology. Apps13, as it was branded, was hailed as a success, with over 1000 registered attendees and three days of sessions, exhibition, round-tables and many other types of content. As this poster on their stand illustrates, the UKOUG is a strong community with popular participants from both big and small Oracle partners and customers. The venue was a more intimate setting than previous years also, allowing everyone to casually bump into those they hoped to. It gave a real feeling of an Apps Community. The main themes over the days where CRM and Customer Experience, HCM, and FIN/SCM. This allowed people to attend just one focused day if they wanted. In addition the Apps Transformation stream ran across all three days, offering insights, advice, and details on the newer product solutions like Fusion Applications.  Here are some of the key take-aways I got from the conference, specific to my role in Fusion Applications Developer Relations: User Experience continues to be a significant reason for adopting some of the newer application products available, with immediately obvious gains in user productivity and satisfaction reported by customers. Also this doesn't stop with the baked-in UX either, with their Design Patterns proving popular and indeed currently being extended to including things like extending on ADF mobile and customizing the Simplified UI. More on this to come from us soon. The executive sessions emphasized the "it's a journey" phrase, illustrating that modern business applications are powered by technologies such as Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data and these can be harnessed to help propel your organization forward. Indeed the emphasis is away from the traditional vendor prescribed linear applications road map, and towards plotting a course based on business priorities supported by a broad range of integrated solutions. To help with this several conference sessions demoed the new "Applications Navigator" tool, developed in partnership with OUG members, which offers a visual framework to help organizations plan their Oracle Applications investments around business and technology imperatives. Initial reaction was positive, especially as customers do not need to decipher Oracle's huge product catalog and embeds the best blend of proven and integrated applications solutions. We'll share more on this when it is generally available. Several sessions focused around explanations and interpretation of Oracle OpenWorld 2013, helping highlight the key Oracle Applications messages and directions. With a relative small percentage of conference attendees also at OpenWorld (from a show of hands) this was a popular way to distill the information available down into specific items of interest for the community. Please note the original OpenWorld 2013 content is still available for download but will not remain available forever (via the Oracle website OpenWorld Content Catalog > pick a session > see the PDF download). With the release of E-Business Suite 12.2 the move to develop and deploy on the Fusion Middleware stack becomes a reality for many Oracle Applications customers. This coupled with recent E-Business Suite features such as the Integrated SOA Gateway and the E-Business Suite SDK for Java, illustrates how the gap between the technologies and techniques involved in extending E-Business Suite and Fusion Applications is quickly narrowing. We'll see this merging continue to evolve going forwards. Getting started with Oracle Cloud Applications is actually easier than many customers expected, with a broad selection of both large and medium sized organizations explaining how they added new features to their existing Oracle Applications portfolios. New functionality available from Fusion HCM and CX are popular extensions that do not have to disrupt those core business services. Coexistence is the buzzword here, and the available integration is also simpler than many expected, commonly involving an initial setup data load, then regularly incremental synchronizations, often without a need for real-time constant communication between systems. With much of this pre-built already the implementation process is also quite rapid. With most people dressed in suits, we wanted to get the conversations going without the traditional english reserve, so we decided to make ourselves a bit more obvious, as the photo below shows. This seemed to be quite successful and helped those interested identify and approach us. Keep a look out for similar again. In fact if you're in the UK there is an "Apps Transformation Day" planned by the UKOUG for the 19th March 2014, with more details to follow. Again something we'll be sure to participate in. I am hoping to attend the next half of the UKOUG annual conference, Tech13, that focuses more on Oracle technology and where there is more likely to be larger attendance of those interested in the lower-level aspects of applications customization and development. If you're going, let me know and maybe we can meet up.

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• Indexed Drawing in OpenGL not working

  - by user2050846

  I am trying to render 2 types of primitives- - points ( a Point Cloud ) - triangles ( a Mesh ) I am rendering points simply without any index arrays and they are getting rendered fine. To render the meshes I am using indexed drawing with the face list array having the indices of the vertices to be rendered as Triangles. Vertices and their corresponding vertex colors are stored in their corresponding buffers. But the indexed drawing command do not draw anything. The code is as follows- Main Display Function: void display() { simple->enable(); simple->bindUniform("MV",modelview); simple->bindUniform("P", projection); // rendering Point Cloud glBindVertexArray(vao); // Vertex buffer Point Cloud glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,vertexbuffer); glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glVertexAttribPointer(0,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); // Color Buffer point Cloud glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,colorbuffer); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(1,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); // Render Colored Point Cloud //glDrawArrays(GL_POINTS,0,model->vertexCount); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); // ---------------- END---------------------// //// Floor Rendering glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,fl); glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(0,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); glVertexAttribPointer(1,4,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,(void *)48); glDrawArrays(GL_QUADS,0,4); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); // -----------------END---------------------// //Rendering the Meshes //////////// PART OF CODE THAT IS NOT DRAWING ANYTHING //////////////////// glBindVertexArray(vid); for(int i=0;i<NUM_MESHES;i++) { glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,mVertex[i]); glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(0,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); glVertexAttribPointer(1,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,(void *)(meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3))); //glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES,0,meshes[i]->vertexCount); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,mFace[i]); //cout<<gluErrorString(glGetError()); glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES,meshes[i]->faceCount*3,GL_FLOAT,(void *)0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); } glUseProgram(0); glutSwapBuffers(); glutPostRedisplay(); } Point Cloud Buffer Allocation Initialization: void initGLPointCloud() { glGenBuffers(1,&vertexbuffer); glGenBuffers(1,&colorbuffer); glGenBuffers(1,&fl); //Populates the position buffer glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,vertexbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, model->vertexCount * sizeof (glm::vec3), &model->positions[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); //Populates the color buffer glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, colorbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, model->vertexCount * sizeof (glm::vec3), &model->colors[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); model->FreeMemory(); // To free the not needed memory, as the data has been already // copied on graphic card, and wont be used again. glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,0); } Meshes Buffer Initialization: void initGLMeshes(int i) { glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,mVertex[i]); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3)*2,NULL,GL_STATIC_DRAW); glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,0,meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3),&meshes[i]->positions[0]); glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3),meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3),&meshes[i]->colors[0]); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,mFace[i]); glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,meshes[i]->faceCount*sizeof(glm::vec3), &meshes[i]->faces[0],GL_STATIC_DRAW); meshes[i]->FreeMemory(); //glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,0); } Initialize the Rendering, load and create shader and calls the mesh and PCD initializers. void initRender() { simple= new GLSLShader("shaders/simple.vert","shaders/simple.frag"); //Point Cloud //Sets up VAO glGenVertexArrays(1, &vao); glBindVertexArray(vao); initGLPointCloud(); //floorData glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, fl); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(floorData), &floorData[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,0); glBindVertexArray(0); //Meshes for(int i=0;i<NUM_MESHES;i++) { if(i==0) // SET up the new vertex array state for indexed Drawing { glGenVertexArrays(1, &vid); glBindVertexArray(vid); glGenBuffers(NUM_MESHES,mVertex); glGenBuffers(NUM_MESHES,mColor); glGenBuffers(NUM_MESHES,mFace); } initGLMeshes(i); } glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); } Any help would be much appreciated, I have been breaking my head on this problem since 3 days, and still it is unsolved.

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• The design of a generic data synchronizer, or, an [object] that does [actions] with the aid of [helpers]

  - by acheong87

  I'd like to create a generic data-source "synchronizer," where data-source "types" may include MySQL databases, Google Spreadsheets documents, CSV files, among others. I've been trying to figure out how to structure this in terms of classes and interfaces, keeping in mind (what I've read about) composition vs. inheritance and is-a vs. has-a, but each route I go down seems to violate some principle. For simplicity, assume that all data-sources have a header-row-plus-data-rows format. For example, assume that the first rows of Google Spreadsheets documents and CSV files will have column headers, a.k.a. "fields" (to parallel database fields). Also, eventually, I would like to implement this in PHP, but avoiding language-specific discussion would probably be more productive. Here's an overview of what I've tried. Part 1/4: ISyncable class CMySQL implements ISyncable GetFields() // sql query, pdo statement, whatever AddFields() RemFields() ... _dbh class CGoogleSpreadsheets implements ISyncable GetFields() // zend gdata api AddFields() RemFields() ... _spreadsheetKey _worksheetId class CCsvFile implements ISyncable GetFields() // read from buffer AddFields() RemFields() ... _buffer interface ISyncable GetFields() AddFields($field1, $field2, ...) RemFields($field1, $field2, ...) ... CanAddFields() // maybe the spreadsheet is locked for write, or CanRemFields() // maybe no permission to alter a database table ... AddRow() ModRow() RemRow() ... Open() Close() ... First Question: Does it make sense to use an interface, as above? Part 2/4: CSyncer Next, the thing that does the syncing. class CSyncer __construct(ISyncable $A, ISyncable $B) Push() // sync A to B Pull() // sync B to A Sync() // Push() and Pull() only differ in direction; factor. // Sync()'s job is to make sure that the fields on each side // match, to add fields where appropriate and possible, to // account for different column-orderings, etc., and of // course, to add and remove rows as necessary to sync. ... _A _B Second Question: Does it make sense to define such a class, or am I treading dangerously close to the "Kingdom of Nouns"? Part 3/4: CTranslator? ITranslator? Now, here's where I actually get lost, assuming the above is passable. Sometimes, two ISyncables speak different "dialects." For example, believe it or not, Google Spreadsheets (accessed through the Google Data API "list feed") returns column headers lower-cased and stripped of all spaces and symbols! That is, sys_TIMESTAMP is systimestamp, as far as my code can tell. (Yes, I am aware that the "cell feed" does not strip the name so; however cell-by-cell manipulation is too slow for what I'm doing.) One can imagine other hypothetical examples. Perhaps even the data itself can be in different "dialects." But let's take it as given for now, and not argue this if possible. Third Question: How would you implement "translation"? Note: Taking all this as an exercise, I'm more interested in the "idealized" design, rather than the practical one. (God knows that shipped sailed when I began this project.) Part 4/4: Further Thought Here's my train of thought to demonstrate I've thunk, albeit unfruitfully: First, I thought, primitively, "I'll just modify CMySQL::GetFields() to lower-case and strip field names so they're compatible with Google Spreadsheets." But of course, then my class should really be called, CMySQLForGoogleSpreadsheets, and that can't be right. So, the thing which translates must exist outside of an ISyncable implementor. And surely it can't be right to make each translation a method in CSyncer. If it exists outside of both ISyncable and CSyncer, then what is it? (Is it even an "it"?) Is it an abstract class, i.e. abstract CTranslator? Is it an interface, since a translator only does, not has, i.e. interface ITranslator? Does it even require instantiation? e.g. If it's an ITranslator, then should its translation methods be static? (I learned what "late static binding" meant, today.) And, dear God, whatever it is, how should a CSyncer use it? Does it "have" it? Is it, "it"? Who am I? ...am I, "I"? I've attempted to break up the question into sub-questions, but essentially my question is singular: How does one implement an object A that conceptually "links" (has) two objects b1 and b2 that share a common interface B, where certain pairs of b1 and b2 require a helper, e.g. a translator, to be handled by A? Something tells me that I've overcomplicated this design, or violated a principle much higher up. Thank you all very much for your time and any advice you can provide.

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• No More NCrunch For Me

  - by Steve Wilkes

  When I opened up Visual Studio this morning, I was greeted with this little popup: NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if and when you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial (which I thought was fair enough), and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why. Before I start, let me say that I think NCrunch is a good product, which is to say it's had a positive impact on my programming. I've used it to help test-drive a library I'm making right from the start of the project, and especially at the beginning it was very useful to have it run all my tests whenever I made a change. The first problem is that while that was cool to start with, it’s recently become a bit of a chore. Problems Running Tests NCrunch has two 'engine modes' in which it can run tests for you - it can run all your tests when you make a change, or it can figure out which tests were impacted and only run those. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty early on that that second option (which is marked as 'experimental') wasn't really working for me, so I had to have it run everything. With a smallish number of tests and while I was adding new features that was great, but I've now got 445 tests (still not exactly loads) and am more in a 'clean and tidy' mode where I know that a change I'm making will probably only affect a particular subset of the tests. With that in mind it's a bit of a drag sitting there after I make a change and having to wait for NCrunch to run everything. I could disable it and manually run the tests I know are impacted, but then what's the point of having NCrunch? If the 'impacted only' engine mode worked well this problem would go away, but that's not what I found. Secondly, what's wrong with this picture? I've got 445 tests, and NCrunch has queued 455 tests to run. So it's queued duplicate tests - in this quickly-screenshotted case 10, but I've seen the total queue get up over 600. If I'm already itchy waiting for it to run all my tests against a change I know only affects a few, I'm even itchier waiting for it to run a lot of them twice. Problems With Code Coverage NCrunch marks each line of code with a dot to say if it's covered by tests - a black dot says the line isn't covered, a red dot says it's covered but at least one of the covering tests is failing, and a green dot means all the covering tests pass. It also calculates coverage statistics for you. Unfortunately, there's a couple of flaws in the coverage. Firstly, it doesn't support ExcludeFromCodeCoverage attributes. This feature has been requested and I expect will be included in a later release, but right now it doesn't. So this: ...is counted as a non-covered line, and drags your coverage statistics down. Hmph. As well as that, coverage of certain types of code is missed. This: ...is definitely covered. I am 100% absolutely certain it is, by several tests. NCrunch doesn't pick it up, down go my coverage statistics. I've had NCrunch find genuinely uncovered code which I've been able to remove, and that's great, but what's the coverage percentage on this project? Umm... I don't know. Conclusion None of these are major, tool-crippling problems, and I expect NCrunch to get much better in future releases. The current version has some great features, like this: ...that's a line of code with a failing test covering it, and NCrunch can run that failing test and take me to that line exquisitely easily. That's awesome! I'd happily pay for a tool that can do that. But here's the thing: NCrunch (currently) costs $159 (about £100) for a personal licence and $289 (about £180) for a commercial one. I'm not sure which one I'd need as my project is a personal one which I'm intending to open-source, but I'm a professional, self-employed developer, but in any case - that seems like a lot of money for an imperfect tool. If it did everything it's advertised to do more or less perfectly I'd consider it, but it doesn't. So no more NCrunch for me.

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• Cloud Deployment Models

  - by B R Clouse

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE As the cloud paradigm grows in depth and breadth, more readers are approaching the topic for the first time, or from a new perspective.  This blog is a basic review of  cloud deployment models, to help orient newcomers and neophytes. Most cloud deployments today are either private or public. It is also possible to connect a private cloud and a public cloud to form a hybrid cloud. A private cloud is for the exclusive use of an organization. Enterprises, universities and government agencies throughout the world are using private clouds. Some have designed, built and now manage their private clouds. Others use a private cloud that was built by and is now managed by a provider, hosted either onsite or at the provider’s datacenter. Because private clouds are for exclusive use, they are usually the option chosen by organizations with concerns about data security and guaranteed performance. Public clouds are open to anyone with an Internet connection. Because they require no capital investment from their users, they are particularly attractive to companies with limited resources in less regulated environments and for temporary workloads such as development and test environments. Public clouds offer a range of products, from end-user software packages to more basic services such as databases or operating environments. Public clouds may also offer cloud services such as a disaster recovery for a private cloud, or the ability to “cloudburst” a temporary workload spike from a private cloud to a public cloud. These are examples of a hybrid cloud. These are most feasible when the private and public clouds are built with similar technologies. Usually people think of a public cloud in terms of a user role, e.g., “Which public cloud should I consider using?” But someone needs to own and manage that public cloud. The company who owns and operates a public cloud is known as a public cloud provider. Oracle Database Cloud Service, Amazon RDS, database.com and Savvis Symphony Database are examples of public cloud database services. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When evaluating deployment models, be aware that you can use any or all of the available options. Some workloads may be best-suited for a private cloud, some for a public or hybrid cloud. And you might deploy multiple private clouds in your organization. If you are going to combine multiple clouds, then you want to make sure that each cloud is based on a consistent technology portfolio and architecture. This simplifies management and gives you the greatest flexibility in moving resources and workloads among your different clouds. Oracle’s portfolio of cloud products and services enables both deployment models. Oracle can manage either model. Universities, government agencies and companies in all types of business everywhere in the world are using clouds built with the Oracle portfolio. By employing a consistent portfolio, these customers are able to run all of their workloads – from test and development to the most mission-critical -- in a consistent manner: One Enterprise Cloud, powered by Oracle.   /* 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• How to make creating viewmodels at runtime less painfull

  - by Mr Happy

  I apologize for the long question, it reads a bit as a rant, but I promise it's not! I've summarized my question(s) below In the MVC world, things are straightforward. The Model has state, the View shows the Model, and the Controller does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a controller has no state. To do stuff the Controller has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a controller you care about supplying those dependencies, nothing else. When you execute an action (method on Controller), you use those dependencies to retrieve or update the Model or calling some other domain service. If there's any context, say like some user wants to see the details of a particular item, you pass the Id of that item as parameter to the Action. Nowhere in the Controller is there any reference to any state. So far so good. Enter MVVM. I love WPF, I love data binding. I love frameworks that make data binding to ViewModels even easier (using Caliburn Micro a.t.m.). I feel things are less straightforward in this world though. Let's do the exercise again: the Model has state, the View shows the ViewModel, and the ViewModel does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a ViewModel does have state! (to clarify; maybe it delegates all the properties to one or more Models, but that means it must have a reference to the model one way or another, which is state in itself) To do stuff the ViewModel has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a ViewModel you care about supplying those dependencies, but also the state. And this, ladies and gentlemen, annoys me to no end. Whenever you need to instantiate a ProductDetailsViewModel from the ProductSearchViewModel (from which you called the ProductSearchWebService which in turn returned IEnumerable<ProductDTO>, everybody still with me?), you can do one of these things: call new ProductDetailsViewModel(productDTO, _shoppingCartWebService /* dependcy */);, this is bad, imagine 3 more dependencies, this means the ProductSearchViewModel needs to take on those dependencies as well. Also changing the constructor is painfull. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelFactory.Create().Initialize(productDTO);, the factory is just a Func, they are easily generated by most IoC frameworks. I think this is bad because Init methods are a leaky abstraction. You also can't use the readonly keyword for fields that are set in the Init method. I'm sure there are a few more reasons. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelAbstractFactory.Create(productDTO); So... this is the pattern (abstract factory) that is usually recommended for this type of problem. I though it was genious since it satisfies my craving for static typing, until I actually started using it. The amount of boilerplate code is I think too much (you know, apart from the ridiculous variable names I get use). For each ViewModel that needs runtime parameters you'll get two extra files (factory interface and implementation), and you need to type the non-runtime dependencies like 4 extra times. And each time the dependencies change, you get to change it in the factory as well. It feels like I don't even use an DI container anymore. (I think Castle Windsor has some kind of solution for this [with it's own drawbacks, correct me if I'm wrong]). do something with anonymous types or dictionary. I like my static typing. So, yeah. Mixing state and behavior in this way creates a problem which don't exist at all in MVC. And I feel like there currently isn't a really adequate solution for this problem. Now I'd like to observe some things: People actually use MVVM. So they either don't care about all of the above, or they have some brilliant other solution. I haven't found an indepth example of MVVM with WPF. For example, the NDDD-sample project immensely helped me understand some DDD concepts. I'd really like it if someone could point me in the direction of something similar for MVVM/WPF. Maybe I'm doing MVVM all wrong and I should turn my design upside down. Maybe I shouldn't have this problem at all. Well I know other people have asked the same question so I think I'm not the only one. To summarize Am I correct to conclude that having the ViewModel being an integration point for both state and behavior is the reason for some difficulties with the MVVM pattern as a whole? Is using the abstract factory pattern the only/best way to instantiate a ViewModel in a statically typed way? Is there something like an in depth reference implementation available? Is having a lot of ViewModels with both state/behavior a design smell?

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• Access Control Service: Handling Errors

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  Another common problem with external authentication is how to deal with sign in errors. In active federation like WS-Trust there are well defined SOAP faults to communicate problem to a client. But with web applications, the error information is typically generated and displayed on the external sign in page. The relying party does not know about the error, nor can it help the user in any way. The Access Control Service allows to post sign in errors to a specified page. You setup this page in the relying party registration. That means that whenever an error occurs in ACS, the error information gets packaged up as a JSON string and posted to the page specified. This way you get structued error information back into you application so you can display a friendlier error message or log the error. I added error page support to my ACS2 sample, which can be downloaded here. How to turn the JSON error into CLR types The JSON schema is reasonably simple, the following class turns the JSON into an object: [DataContract] public class AcsErrorResponse {     [DataMember(Name = "context", Order = 1)]     public string Context { get; set; }     [DataMember(Name = "httpReturnCode", Order = 2)]     public string HttpReturnCode { get; set; }     [DataMember(Name = "identityProvider", Order = 3)]        public string IdentityProvider { get; set; }     [DataMember(Name = "timeStamp", Order = 4)]     public string TimeStamp { get; set; }     [DataMember(Name = "traceId", Order = 5)]     public string TraceId { get; set; }     [DataMember(Name = "errors", Order = 6)]     public List<AcsError> Errors { get; set; }     public static AcsErrorResponse Read(string json)     {         var serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer( typeof(AcsErrorResponse));         var response = serializer.ReadObject( new MemoryStream(Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json))) as AcsErrorResponse;         if (response != null)         {             return response;         }         else         {             throw new ArgumentException("json");         }     } } [DataContract] public class AcsError {     [DataMember(Name = "errorCode", Order = 1)]     public string Code { get; set; }             [DataMember(Name = "errorMessage", Order = 2)]     public string Message { get; set; } } Retrieving the error information You then need to provide a page that takes the POST and deserializes the information. My sample simply fills a view that shows all information. But that’s for diagnostic/sample purposes only. You shouldn’t show the real errors to your end users. public class SignInErrorController : Controller {     [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Index()     {         var errorDetails = Request.Form["ErrorDetails"];         var response = AcsErrorResponse.Read(errorDetails);         return View("SignInError", response);     } } Also keep in mind that the error page is an anonymous page and that you are taking external input. So all the usual input validation applies.

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• Data Source Security Part 1

  - by Steve Felts

  I’ve written a couple of articles on how to store data source security credentials using the Oracle wallet.  I plan to write a few articles on the various types of security available to WebLogic Server (WLS) data sources.  There are more options than you might think! There have been several enhancements in this area in WLS 10.3.6.  There are a couple of more enhancements planned for release WLS 12.1.2 that I will include here for completeness.  This isn’t intended as a teaser.  If you call your Oracle support person, you can get them now as minor patches to WLS 10.3.6.   The current security documentation is scattered in a few places, has a few incorrect statements, and is missing a few topics.  It also seems that the knowledge of how to apply some of these features isn’t written down.  The goal of these articles is to talk about WLS data source security in a unified way and to introduce some approaches to using the available features.  Introduction to WebLogic Data Source Security Options By default, you define a single database user and password for a data source.  You can store it in the data source descriptor or make use of the Oracle wallet.  This is a very simple and efficient approach to security.  All of the connections in the connection pool are owned by this user and there is no special processing when a connection is given out.  That is, it’s a homogeneous connection pool and any request can get any connection from a security perspective (there are other aspects like affinity).  Regardless of the end user of the application, all connections in the pool use the same security credentials to access the DBMS.   No additional information is needed when you get a connection because it’s all available from the data source descriptor (or wallet). java.sql.Connection conn =  mydatasource.getConnection(); Note: You can enter the password as a name-value pair in the Properties field (this not permitted for production environments) or you can enter it in the Password field of the data source descriptor. The value in the Password field overrides any password value defined in the Properties passed to the JDBC Driver when creating physical database connections. It is recommended that you use the Password attribute in place of the password property in the properties string because the Password value is encrypted in the configuration file (stored as the password-encrypted attribute in the jdbc-driver-params tag in the module file) and is hidden in the administration console.  The Properties and Password fields are located on the administration console Data Source creation wizard or Data Source Configuration tab. The JDBC API can also be used to programmatically specify a database user name and password as in the following.  java.sql.Connection conn = mydatasource.getConnection(“user”, “password”); According to the JDBC specification, it’s supposed to take a database user and associated password but different vendors implement this differently.  WLS, by default, treats this as an application server user and password.  The pair is authenticated to see if it’s a valid user and that user is used for WLS security permission checks.  By default, the user is then mapped to a database user and password using the data source credential mapper, so this API sort of follows the specification but database credentials are one-step removed from the application code.  More details and the rationale are described later. While the default approach is simple, it does mean that only one database user is doing all of the work.  You can’t figure out who actually did the update and you can’t restrict SQL operations by who is running the operation, at least at the database level.   Any type of per-user logic will need to be in the application code instead of having the database do it.  There are various WLS data source features that can be configured to provide some per-user information about the operations to the database. WebLogic Data Source Security Options This table describes the features available for WebLogic data sources to configure database security credentials and a brief description.  It also captures information about the compatibility of these features with one another. Feature Description Can be used with Can’t be used with User authentication (default) Default getConnection(user, password) behavior – validate the input and use the user/password in the descriptor. Set client identifier Proxy Session, Identity pooling, Use database credentials Use database credentials Instead of using the credential mapper, use the supplied user and password directly. Set client identifier, Proxy session, Identity pooling User authentication, Multi Data Source Set Client Identifier Set a client identifier property associated with the connection (Oracle and DB2 only). Everything Proxy Session Set a light-weight proxy user associated with the connection (Oracle-only). Set client identifier, Use database credentials Identity pooling, User authentication Identity pooling Heterogeneous pool of connections owned by specified users. Set client identifier, Use database credentials Proxy session, User authentication, Labeling, Multi-datasource, Active GridLink Note that all of these features are available with both XA and non-XA drivers. Currently, the Proxy Session and Use Database Credentials options are on the Oracle tab of the Data Source Configuration tab of the administration console (even though the Use Database Credentials feature is not just for Oracle databases – oops).  The rest of the features are on the Identity tab of the Data Source Configuration tab in the administration console (plan on seeing them all in one place in the future). The subsequent articles will describe these features in more detail.  Keep referring back to this table to see the big picture.

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• What Counts for A DBA: Observant

  - by drsql

  When walking up to the building where I work, I can see CCTV cameras placed here and there for monitoring access to the building. We are required to wear authorization badges which could be checked at any time. Do we have enemies?  Of course! No one is 100% safe; even if your life is a fairy tale, there is always a witch with an apple waiting to snack you into a thousand years of slumber (or at least so I recollect from elementary school.) Even Little Bo Peep had to keep a wary lookout.    We nerdy types (or maybe it was just me?) generally learned on the school playground to keep an eye open for unprovoked attack from simpler, but more muscular souls, and take steps to avoid messy confrontations well in advance. After we’d apprehensively negotiated adulthood with varying degrees of success, these skills of watching for danger, and avoiding it,  translated quite well to the technical careers so many of us were destined for. And nowhere else is this talent for watching out for irrational malevolence so appropriate as in a career as a production DBA.   It isn’t always active malevolence that the DBA needs to watch out for, but the even scarier quirks of common humanity.  A large number of the issues that occur in the enterprise happen just randomly or even just one time ever in a spurious manner, like in the case where a person decided to download the entire MSDN library of software, cross join every non-indexed billion row table together, and simultaneously stream the HD feed of 5 different sporting events, making the network access slow while the corporate online sales just started. The decent DBA team, like the going, gets tough under such circumstances. They spring into action, checking all of the sources of active information, observes the issue is no longer happening now, figures that either it wasn’t the database’s fault and that the reboot of the whatever device on the network fixed the problem.  This sort of reactive support is good, and will be the initial reaction of even excellent DBAs, but it is not the end of the story if you really want to know what happened and avoid getting called again when it isn’t even your fault.   When fires start raging within the corporate software forest, the DBA’s instinct is to actively find a way to douse the flames and get back to having no one in the company have any idea who they are.  Even better for them is to find a way of killing a potential problem while the fires are small, long before they can be classified as raging. The observant DBA will have already been monitoring the server environment for months in advance.  Most troubles, such as disk space and security intrusions, can be predicted and dealt with by alerting systems, whereas other trouble can come out of the blue and requires a skill of observing ongoing conditions and noticing inexplicable changes that could signal an emerging problem.  You can’t automate the DBA, because the bankable skill of a DBA is in detecting the early signs of unexpected problems, and working out how to deal with them before anyone else notices them.    To achieve this, the DBA will check the situation as it is currently happening,  and in many cases is likely to have been the person who submitted the problem to the level 1 support person in the first place, just to let the support team know of impending issues (always well received, I tell you what!). Database and host computer settings, configurations, and even critical data might be profiled and captured for later comparisons. He’ll use Monitoring tools, built-in, commercial (Not to be too crassly commercial or anything, but there is one such tool is SQL Monitor) and lots of homebrew monitoring tools to monitor for problems and changes in the server environment.   You will know that you have it right when a support call comes in and you can look at your monitoring tools and quickly respond that “response time is well within the normal range, the query that supports the failing interface works perfectly and has actually only been called 67% as often as normal, so I am more than willing to help diagnose the problem, but it isn’t the database server’s fault and is probably a client or networking slowdown causing the interface to be used less frequently than normal.” And that is the best thing for any DBA to observe…

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• Is it feasible and useful to auto-generate some code of unit tests?

  - by skiwi

  Earlier today I have come up with an idea, based upon a particular real use case, which I would want to have checked for feasability and usefulness. This question will feature a fair chunk of Java code, but can be applied to all languages running inside a VM, and maybe even outside. While there is real code, it uses nothing language-specific, so please read it mostly as pseudo code. The idea Make unit testing less cumbersome by adding in some ways to autogenerate code based on human interaction with the codebase. I understand this goes against the principle of TDD, but I don't think anyone ever proved that doing TDD is better over first creating code and then immediatly therafter the tests. This may even be adapted to be fit into TDD, but that is not my current goal. To show how it is intended to be used, I'll copy one of my classes here, for which I need to make unit tests. public class PutMonsterOnFieldAction implements PlayerAction { private final int handCardIndex; private final int fieldMonsterIndex; public PutMonsterOnFieldAction(final int handCardIndex, final int fieldMonsterIndex) { this.handCardIndex = Arguments.requirePositiveOrZero(handCardIndex, "handCardIndex"); this.fieldMonsterIndex = Arguments.requirePositiveOrZero(fieldMonsterIndex, "fieldCardIndex"); } @Override public boolean isActionAllowed(final Player player) { Objects.requireNonNull(player, "player"); Hand hand = player.getHand(); Field field = player.getField(); if (handCardIndex >= hand.getCapacity()) { return false; } if (fieldMonsterIndex >= field.getMonsterCapacity()) { return false; } if (field.hasMonster(fieldMonsterIndex)) { return false; } if (!(hand.get(handCardIndex) instanceof MonsterCard)) { return false; } return true; } @Override public void performAction(final Player player) { Objects.requireNonNull(player); if (!isActionAllowed(player)) { throw new PlayerActionNotAllowedException(); } Hand hand = player.getHand(); Field field = player.getField(); field.setMonster(fieldMonsterIndex, (MonsterCard)hand.play(handCardIndex)); } } We can observe the need for the following tests: Constructor test with valid input Constructor test with invalid inputs isActionAllowed test with valid input isActionAllowed test with invalid inputs performAction test with valid input performAction test with invalid inputs My idea mainly focuses on the isActionAllowed test with invalid inputs. Writing these tests is not fun, you need to ensure a number of conditions and you check whether it really returns false, this can be extended to performAction, where an exception needs to be thrown in that case. The goal of my idea is to generate those tests, by indicating (through GUI of IDE hopefully) that you want to generate tests based on a specific branch. The implementation by example User clicks on "Generate code for branch if (handCardIndex >= hand.getCapacity())". Now the tool needs to find a case where that holds. (I haven't added the relevant code as that may clutter the post ultimately) To invalidate the branch, the tool needs to find a handCardIndex and hand.getCapacity() such that the condition >= holds. It needs to construct a Player with a Hand that has a capacity of at least 1. It notices that the capacity private int of Hand needs to be at least 1. It searches for ways to set it to 1. Fortunately it finds a constructor that takes the capacity as an argument. It uses 1 for this. Some more work needs to be done to succesfully construct a Player instance, involving the creation of objects that have constraints that can be seen by inspecting the source code. It has found the hand with the least capacity possible and is able to construct it. Now to invalidate the test it will need to set handCardIndex = 1. It constructs the test and asserts it to be false (the returned value of the branch) What does the tool need to work? In order to function properly, it will need the ability to scan through all source code (including JDK code) to figure out all constraints. Optionally this could be done through the javadoc, but that is not always used to indicate all constraints. It could also do some trial and error, but it pretty much stops if you cannot attach source code to compiled classes. Then it needs some basic knowledge of what the primitive types are, including arrays. And it needs to be able to construct some form of "modification trees". The tool knows that it needs to change a certain variable to a different value in order to get the correct testcase. Hence it will need to list all possible ways to change it, without using reflection obviously. What this tool will not replace is the need to create tailored unit tests that tests all kinds of conditions when a certain method actually works. It is purely to be used to test methods when they invalidate constraints. My questions: Is creating such a tool feasible? Would it ever work, or are there some obvious problems? Would such a tool be useful? Is it even useful to automatically generate these testcases at all? Could it be extended to do even more useful things? Does, by chance, such a project already exist and would I be reinventing the wheel? If not proven useful, but still possible to make such thing, I will still consider it for fun. If it's considered useful, then I might make an open source project for it depending on the time. For people searching more background information about the used Player and Hand classes in my example, please refer to this repository. At the time of writing the PutMonsterOnFieldAction has not been uploaded to the repo yet, but this will be done once I'm done with the unit tests.

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• IsNumeric() Broken? Only up to a point.

  - by Phil Factor

  In SQL Server, probably the best-known 'broken' function is poor ISNUMERIC() . The documentation says 'ISNUMERIC returns 1 when the input expression evaluates to a valid numeric data type; otherwise it returns 0. ISNUMERIC returns 1 for some characters that are not numbers, such as plus (+), minus (-), and valid currency symbols such as the dollar sign ($).'Although it will take numeric data types (No, I don't understand why either), its main use is supposed to be to test strings to make sure that you can convert them to whatever numeric datatype you are using (int, numeric, bigint, money, smallint, smallmoney, tinyint, float, decimal, or real). It wouldn't actually be of much use anyway, since each datatype has different rules. You actually need a RegEx to do a reasonably safe check. The other snag is that the IsNumeric() function  is a bit broken. SELECT ISNUMERIC(',')This cheerfully returns 1, since it believes that a comma is a currency symbol (not a thousands-separator) and you meant to say 0, in this strange currency.  However, SELECT ISNUMERIC(N'£')isn't recognized as currency.  '+' and  '-' is seen to be numeric, which is stretching it a bit. You'll see that what it allows isn't really broken except that it doesn't recognize Unicode currency symbols: It just tells you that one numeric type is likely to accept the string if you do an explicit conversion to it using the string. Both these work fine, so poor IsNumeric has to follow suit. SELECT  CAST('0E0' AS FLOAT)SELECT  CAST (',' AS MONEY) but it is harder to predict which data type will accept a '+' sign. SELECT  CAST ('+' AS money) --0.00SELECT  CAST ('+' AS INT)   --0SELECT  CAST ('+' AS numeric)/* Msg 8115, Level 16, State 6, Line 4 Arithmetic overflow error converting varchar to data type numeric.*/SELECT  CAST ('+' AS FLOAT)/*Msg 8114, Level 16, State 5, Line 5Error converting data type varchar to float.*/> So we can begin to say that the maybe IsNumeric isn't really broken, but is answering a silly question 'Is there some numeric datatype to which i can convert this string? Almost, but not quite. The bug is that it doesn't understand Unicode currency characters such as the euro or franc which are actually valid when used in the CAST function. (perhaps they're delaying fixing the euro bug just in case it isn't necessary).SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'?23.67') --0SELECT  CAST (N'?23.67' AS money) --23.67SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'£100.20') --1SELECT  CAST (N'£100.20' AS money) --100.20 Also the CAST function itself is quirky in that it cannot convert perfectly reasonable string-representations of integers into integersSELECT ISNUMERIC('200,000')       --1SELECT  CAST ('200,000' AS INT)   --0/*Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 2Conversion failed when converting the varchar value '200,000' to data type int.*/  A more sensible question is 'Is this an integer or decimal number'. This cuts out a lot of the apparent quirkiness. We do this by the '+E0' trick. If we want to include floats in the check, we'll need to make it a bit more complicated. Here is a small test-rig. SELECT  PossibleNumber,         ISNUMERIC(CAST(PossibleNumber AS NVARCHAR(20)) + 'E+00') AS Hack,        ISNUMERIC (PossibleNumber + CASE WHEN PossibleNumber LIKE '%E%'                                          THEN '' ELSE 'E+00' END) AS Hackier,        ISNUMERIC(PossibleNumber) AS RawIsNumericFROM    (SELECT CAST(',' AS NVARCHAR(10)) AS PossibleNumber          UNION SELECT '£' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION SELECT '56' UNION SELECT '456.67890'         UNION SELECT '0E0' UNION SELECT '-'         UNION SELECT '-' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'¢'        UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'?34.56'         UNION SELECT '-345' UNION SELECT '3.332228E+09') AS examples Which gives the result ... PossibleNumber Hack Hackier RawIsNumeric-------------- ----------- ----------- ------------? 0 0 0- 0 0 1, 0 0 1. 0 0 1¢ 0 0 1£ 0 0 1? 0 0 0?34.56 0 0 00E0 0 1 13.332228E+09 0 1 1-345 1 1 1456.67890 1 1 156 1 1 1 I suspect that this is as far as you'll get before you abandon IsNumeric in favour of a regex. You can only get part of the way with the LIKE wildcards, because you cannot specify quantifiers. You'll need full-blown Regex strings like these ..[-+]?\b[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?\b #INT or REAL[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,3}\b #TINYINT[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,5}\b #SMALLINT.. but you'll get even these to fail to catch numbers out of range.So is IsNumeric() an out and out rogue function? Not really, I'd say, but then it would need a damned good lawyer.

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• Ninject WithConstructorArgument : No matching bindings are available, and the type is not self-bindable

  - by Jean-François Beauchamp

  My understanding of WithConstructorArgument is probably erroneous, because the following is not working: I have a service, lets call it MyService, whose constructor is taking multiple objects, and a string parameter called testEmail. For this string parameter, I added the following Ninject binding: string testEmail = "[email protected]"; kernel.Bind<IMyService>().To<MyService>().WithConstructorArgument("testEmail", testEmail); However, when executing the following line of code, I get an exception: var myService = kernel.Get<MyService>(); Here is the exception I get: Error activating string No matching bindings are available, and the type is not self-bindable. Activation path: 2) Injection of dependency string into parameter testEmail of constructor of type MyService 1) Request for MyService Suggestions: 1) Ensure that you have defined a binding for string. 2) If the binding was defined in a module, ensure that the module has been loaded into the kernel. 3) Ensure you have not accidentally created more than one kernel. 4) If you are using constructor arguments, ensure that the parameter name matches the constructors parameter name. 5) If you are using automatic module loading, ensure the search path and filters are correct. What am I doing wrong here? UPDATE: Here is the MyService constructor: [Ninject.Inject] public MyService(IMyRepository myRepository, IMyEventService myEventService, IUnitOfWork unitOfWork, ILoggingService log, IEmailService emailService, IConfigurationManager config, HttpContextBase httpContext, string testEmail) { this.myRepository = myRepository; this.myEventService = myEventService; this.unitOfWork = unitOfWork; this.log = log; this.emailService = emailService; this.config = config; this.httpContext = httpContext; this.testEmail = testEmail; } I have standard bindings for all the constructor parameter types. Only 'string' has no binding, and HttpContextBase has a binding that is a bit different: kernel.Bind<HttpContextBase>().ToMethod(context => new HttpContextWrapper(new HttpContext(new MyHttpRequest("", "", "", null, new StringWriter())))); and MyHttpRequest is defined as follows: public class MyHttpRequest : SimpleWorkerRequest { public string UserHostAddress; public string RawUrl; public MyHttpRequest(string appVirtualDir, string appPhysicalDir, string page, string query, TextWriter output) : base(appVirtualDir, appPhysicalDir, page, query, output) { this.UserHostAddress = "127.0.0.1"; this.RawUrl = null; } }

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• MVC - Ajax form - return partial view doesnt update in <div> target

  - by Jack

  I have an index view that I want to update automatically as the user types in a client id. I got something similiar to work (only it was updating just a label) - but this will not work. What happens is the partial is just rendered by itself (not in place of the UpdateTargetID). So the data is rendered on a new page. Here is my code: Controller: public ActionResult ClientList(string queryText) { var clients = CR.GetClientLike(queryText); return PartialView("ClientIndex", clients); } Partial View: <table> <thead> <tr> <td>Client ID</td> <td>Phone1</td> <td>Phone2</td> <td>Phone3</td> <td>Phone4</td> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <% if (Model != null) { foreach (Client c in Model) { %> <tr> <td><%= Html.Encode(c.ClientID)%></td> <td><%= Html.Encode(c.WorkPhone)%></td> <td><%= Html.Encode(c.WorkPhone1)%></td> <td><%= Html.Encode(c.WorkPhone2)%></td> <td><%= Html.Encode(c.WorkPhone3)%></td> </tr> <% } } %> </tbody> Main View: Insert code messed up, so this is just copy/pasted: $(function() { $("#queryText").keyup(function() { $('#sForm').submit(); }); }); <% using (Ajax.BeginForm("ClientList", /* new { queryText = Form.Controls[2] ?? }*/"", new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId = "status", InsertionMode = InsertionMode.Replace }, new { @id = "sForm" })) { % <% } % <div id="status" class="status" name="status"> <%--<% Html.RenderPartial("ClientIndex", ViewData["clients"]); %> Should this be here???? --%> </div>

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• WPF Dynamic Layout with ItemsControl and Grid

  - by Jason Williams

  I am creating a WPF form. One of the requirements is that it have a sector-based layout so that a control can be explicitly placed in one of the sectors/cells. I have created a tic-tac-toe example below to convey my problem: There are two types and one base type: public class XMoveViewModel : MoveViewModel { } public class OMoveViewModel : MoveViewModel { } public class MoveViewModel { public int Row { get; set; } public int Column { get; set; } } The DataContext of the form is set to an instance of: public class MainViewModel : ViewModelBase { public MainViewModel() { Moves = new ObservableCollection<MoveViewModel>() { new XMoveViewModel() { Row = 0, Column = 0 }, new OMoveViewModel() { Row = 1, Column = 0 }, new XMoveViewModel() { Row = 1, Column = 1 }, new OMoveViewModel() { Row = 0, Column = 2 }, new XMoveViewModel() { Row = 2, Column = 2} }; } public ObservableCollection<MoveViewModel> Moves { get; set; } } And finally, the XAML looks like this: <Window.Resources> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type vm:XMoveViewModel}"> <Image Source="XMove.png" Grid.Row="{Binding Path=Row}" Grid.Column="{Binding Path=Column}" Stretch="None" /> </DataTemplate> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type vm:OMoveViewModel}"> <Image Source="OMove.png" Grid.Row="{Binding Path=Row}" Grid.Column="{Binding Path=Column}" Stretch="None" /> </DataTemplate> </Window.Resources> <Grid> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Path=Moves}"> <ItemsControl.ItemsPanel> <ItemsPanelTemplate> <Grid ShowGridLines="True"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition /> <RowDefinition /> <RowDefinition /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition /> <ColumnDefinition /> <ColumnDefinition /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> </Grid> </ItemsPanelTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemsPanel> </ItemsControl> </Grid> What was not so obvious to me when I started was that the ItemsControl element actually wraps each item in a container, so my Grid.Row and Grid.Column bindings are ignored since the images are not directly contained within the grid. Thus, all of the images are placed in the default Row and Column (0, 0). What is happening: The desired result: So, my question is this: how can I achieve the dynamic placement of my controls in a grid? I would prefer a XAML/Data Binding/MVVM-friendly solution. Thanks.

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• WPF Combobox: Autocomplete

  - by user279244

  Hi, I have implemented a Autocomplete enabled Combobox in WPF. It is like below... private void cbxSession_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { cbxSession.ApplyTemplate(); TextBox textBox = cbxSession.Template.FindName("PART_EditableTextBox", cbxSession) as TextBox; textBox.IsReadOnly = false; if (textBox != null) { textBox.KeyUp += new KeyEventHandler(textBox_KeyUp); textBox.KeyUp += delegate { ///open the drop down and start filtering based on what the user types into the combobox cbxSession.IsDropDownOpen = true; cbxSession.Items.Filter += a => { if (a.ToString().ToUpper().Contains(textBox.Text.ToUpper())) return true; else return false; }; }; } } void textBox_KeyUp(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) { if ((e.Key == System.Windows.Input.Key.Up) || (e.Key == System.Windows.Input.Key.Down)) { e.Handled = true; } else if (e.Key == System.Windows.Input.Key.Enter) { e.Handled = true; cbxSession.IsDropDownOpen = false; } } void textBox_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) { cbxSession.SelectionChanged -= cbxSession_SelectionChanged; if (e.Key == System.Windows.Input.Key.Enter) { e.Handled = true; cbxSession.SelectionChanged += cbxSession_SelectionChanged; } if ((e.Key == System.Windows.Input.Key.Up) || (e.Key == System.Windows.Input.Key.Down)) { e.Handled = true; } } private void cbxSession_DropDownClosed(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (cbxSession.Text != "") { TextBox textBox = cbxSession.Template.FindName("PART_EditableTextBox", cbxSession) as TextBox; if (!cbxSession.Items.Contains(textBox.Text)) { textBox.Text = cbxSession.Text; } } } private void cbxSession_DropDownOpened(object sender, EventArgs e) { cbxSession.Items.Filter += a => { return true; }; } <ComboBox x:Name="cbxSession" Width="260" Canvas.Top="5" Canvas.Left="79" Height="25" Visibility="Visible" SelectionChanged="cbxSession_SelectionChanged" MaxDropDownHeight="200" IsTextSearchEnabled="False" IsEditable="True" IsReadOnly="True" Loaded="cbxSession_Loaded" DropDownClosed="cbxSession_DropDownClosed" StaysOpenOnEdit="True" DropDownOpened="cbxSession_DropDownOpened"> <ComboBox.ItemsPanel> <ItemsPanelTemplate> <VirtualizingStackPanel IsVirtualizing="True" IsItemsHost="True"/> </ItemsPanelTemplate> </ComboBox.ItemsPanel> </ComboBox> But, the problem I am facing is... When I try searching, the first character goes missing. And this happens only once. Secondly, When I am using Arrow buttons to the filtered items, the ComboboxSelectionChanged event is fired. Is there any way to make it fire only on the click of 'Enter'

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• jqGrid multi-checkbox custom edittype solution

  - by gsiler

  For those of you trying to understand jqGrid custom edit types ... I created a multi-checkbox form element, and thought I'd share. This was built using version 3.6.4. If anyone has a more efficient solution, please pass it on. Within the colModel, the appropriate edit fields look like this: edittype:'custom' editoptions:{ custom_element:MultiCheckElem, custom_value:MultiCheckVal, list:'Check1,Check2,Check3,Check4' } Here are the javascript functions (BTW, It also works – with some modifications – when the list of checkboxes is in a DIV block): //———————————————————— // Description: // MultiCheckElem is the "custom_element" function that builds the custom multiple check box input // element. From what I have gathered, jqGrid calls this the first time the form is launched. After // that, only the "custom_value" function is called. // // The full list of checkboxes is in the jqGrid "editoptions" section "list" tag (in the options // parameter). //———————————————————— function MultiCheckElem( value, options ) { //———- // for each checkbox in the list // build the input element // set the initial "checked" status // endfor //———- var ctl = ''; var ckboxAry = options.list.split(','); for ( var i in ckboxAry ) { var item = ckboxAry[i]; ctl += '<input type="checkbox" '; if ( value.indexOf(item + '|') != -1 ) ctl += 'checked="checked" '; ctl += 'value="' + item + '"> ' + item + '</input><br />&nbsp;'; } ctl = ctl.replace( /<br />&nbsp;$/, '' ); return ctl; } //———————————————————— // Description: // MultiCheckVal is the "custom_value" function for the custom multiple check box input element. It // appears that jqGrid invokes this function the first time the form is submitted and, the rest of // the time, when the form is launched (action = set) and when it is submitted (action = 'get'). //———————————————————— function MultiCheckVal(elem, action, val) { var items = ''; if (action == 'get') // the form has been submitted { //———- // for each input element // if it's checked, add it to the list of items // endfor //———- for (var i in elem) { if (elem[i].tagName == 'INPUT' && elem[i].checked ) items += elem[i].value + ','; } // items contains a comma delimited list that is returned as the result of the element items = items.replace(/,$/, ''); } else // the form is launched { //———- // for each input element // based on the input value, set the checked status // endfor //———- for (var i in elem) { if (elem[i].tagName == 'INPUT') { if (val.indexOf(elem[i].value + '|') == -1) elem[i].checked = false; else elem[i].checked = true; } } // endfor } return items; }

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• "No message serializer has been configured" error when starting NServiceBus endpoint

  - by SteveBering

  My GenericHost hosted service is failing to start with the following message: 2010-05-07 09:13:47,406 [1] FATAL NServiceBus.Host.Internal.GenericHost [(null)] <(null) - System.InvalidOperationException: No message serializer has been con figured. at NServiceBus.Unicast.Transport.Msmq.MsmqTransport.CheckConfiguration() in d:\BuildAgent-02\work\672d81652eaca4e1\src\impl\unicast\NServiceBus.Unicast.Msmq\ MsmqTransport.cs:line 241 at NServiceBus.Unicast.Transport.Msmq.MsmqTransport.Start() in d:\BuildAgent-02\work\672d81652eaca4e1\src\impl\unicast\NServiceBus.Unicast.Msmq\MsmqTransport .cs:line 211 at NServiceBus.Unicast.UnicastBus.NServiceBus.IStartableBus.Start(Action startupAction) in d:\BuildAgent-02\work\672d81652eaca4e1\src\unicast\NServiceBus.Uni cast\UnicastBus.cs:line 694 at NServiceBus.Unicast.UnicastBus.NServiceBus.IStartableBus.Start() in d:\BuildAgent-02\work\672d81652eaca4e1\src\unicast\NServiceBus.Unicast\UnicastBus.cs:l ine 665 at NServiceBus.Host.Internal.GenericHost.Start() in d:\BuildAgent-02\work\672d81652eaca4e1\src\host\NServiceBus.Host\Internal\GenericHost.cs:line 77 My endpoint configuration looks like: public class ServiceEndpointConfiguration : IConfigureThisEndpoint, AsA_Publisher, IWantCustomInitialization { public void Init() { // build out persistence infrastructure var sessionFactory = Bootstrapper.InitializePersistence(); // configure NServiceBus infrastructure var container = Bootstrapper.BuildDependencies(sessionFactory); // set up logging log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure(); Configure.With() .Log4Net() .UnityBuilder(container) .XmlSerializer(); } } And my app.config looks like: <configSections> <section name="MsmqTransportConfig" type="NServiceBus.Config.MsmqTransportConfig, NServiceBus.Core" /> <section name="UnicastBusConfig" type="NServiceBus.Config.UnicastBusConfig, NServiceBus.Core" /> <section name="Logging" type="NServiceBus.Config.Logging, NServiceBus.Core" /> <section name="log4net" type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler, log4net" requirePermission="false" /> </configSections> <Logging Threshold="DEBUG" /> <MsmqTransportConfig InputQueue="NServiceBus.ServiceInput" ErrorQueue="NServiceBus.Errors" NumberOfWorkerThreads="1" MaxRetries="2" /> <UnicastBusConfig DistributorControlAddress="" DistributorDataAddress="" ForwardReceivedMessagesTo="NServiceBus.Auditing"> <MessageEndpointMappings> <!-- publishers don't need to set this for their own message types --> </MessageEndpointMappings> </UnicastBusConfig> <connectionStrings> <add name="Db" connectionString="Data Source=..." providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings> <log4net debug="true"> <root> <level value="INFO"/> </root> <logger name="NHibernate"> <level value="ERROR" /> </logger> </log4net> This has worked in the past, but seems to be failing when the generic host starts. My endpoint configuration is below, along with the app.config for the service. What is strange is that in my endpoint configuration, I am specifying to use the XmlSerializer for message serialization. I don't see any other errors in the console output preceding the error message. What am I missing? Thanks, Steve

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• How can I use WCF with only basichttpbinding, SSL and Basic Authentication in IIS?

  - by Tim

  Hello, Is it possible to setup a WCF service with SSL and Basic Authentication in IIS using only BasicHttpBinding-binding? (I can’t use the wsHttpBinding-binding) The site is hosted on IIS 7, with the following authentication set up: - Anonymous access: off - Basic authentication: on - Integrated Windows authentication: off !! Service Config: <services> <service name="NameSpace.SomeService"> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="https://hostname/SomeService/" /> </baseAddresses> </host> <!-- Service Endpoints --> <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingNamespace="http://hostname/SomeMethodName/1" contract="NameSpace.ISomeInterfaceService" name="Default" /> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpsBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange"/> </service> </services> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior> <!-- To avoid disclosing metadata information, set the value below to false and remove the metadata endpoint above before deployment --> <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="true"/> <!-- To receive exception details in faults for debugging purposes, set the value below to true. Set to false before deployment to avoid disclosing exception information --> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/> <exceptionShielding/> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> I tried 2 types of bindings with two different errors: 1 - IIS Error: 'Could not find a base address that matches scheme http for the endpoint with binding BasicHttpBinding. Registered base address schemes are [https]. <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding> <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> <transport clientCredentialType="Basic"/> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> 2 - IIS Error: Security settings for this service require 'Anonymous' Authentication but it is not enabled for the IIS application that hosts this service. <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding> <security mode="Transport"> <transport clientCredentialType="Basic"/> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> Does somebody know how to configure this correctly? (if possible?)

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