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SQL Cruise Alaska 2011

- by Grant Fritchey

I had the extreme good fortune to get sent on the last SQL Cruise to Alaska. I love my job. In case you don't what this is, SQL Cruise is a trip on a cruise ship during which you get to attend classes while on the boat, learning all about SQL Server and related topics as well as network with the instructors and the other Cruisers. Frankly, it's amazing. Classes ran from Monday, 5/30, to Saturday, 6/4. The networking was constant, between classes, at night on cruise ship, out on excursions in Alaskan rainforests and while snorkeling in ocean waters. Here's a run down of the experience from my point of view. Because I couldn't travel out 2 days early, I missed the BBQ that occurred the day before the cruise when many of the Cruisers received their swag bags. Some of that swag came from Red Gate. I researched what was useful on a cruise like this and purchased small flashlights and binoculars for all the Cruisers. The flashlights were because, depending on your cabin, ships can be very dark. The binoculars were so that the cruisers could watch all the beautiful landscape as it flowed by. I would have liked to have been there when the bags were opened, but I heard from several people that they appreciated the gifts. Cruisers "In" the hot tub. Pictured: Marjory Woody, Michele Grondin, Kyle Brandt, Grant Fritchey, John Halunen Sunday I went to board the ship with my wife. We had a bit of an adventure because I messed up our documents. It all worked out and we got on board to meet up at the back of the boat at one of the outdoor bars with the other Cruisers, thanks to tweets letting everyone know where to go. That was the end of electronic coordination on the trip (connectivity in Alaska was horrible for everyone except AT&T). The Cruisers were a great bunch of people and it was a real honor to meet them and get to spend time with them. After everyone settled into their cabins, our very first activity was a contest, sponsored by Red Gate. The Cruisers, in an effort to get to know each other and the ship, were required to go all over taking various photographs, some of them hilarious. The winning team of three would all win prizes. Some of the significant others helped out and I tagged along with a team that tied for first but lost the coin toss. The winning team consisted of Christina Leo (blog|twitter), Ryan Malcom (twitter), Neil Hambly (blog|twitter). They then had to do math and identify the cabin with the lowest prime number, oh, and get a picture of it and be the first to get back up to the bar where we were waiting. Christina came in first and very happily carried home an Ipad2. Ryan won a 1TB portable hard drive and Neil won a wireless mouse (picture below, note my special SQL Server Central Friday Shirt. Thanks Steve (blog|twitter)). Winners: Christina Leo, Neil Hambly, Ryan Malcolm. Just Lucky: Grant Fritchey Monday morning classes started. Buck Woody (blog|twitter) was a special guest speaker on this cruise. His theme was "Three C's on the High Seas: Career, Communication and Cloud." The first session was all on Career. I'm not going to type out all my notes from the session, but let's just say, if you get the chance to hear Buck talk about how to manage your career, I suggest you attend. I have a ton of blog posts that I'll be putting together over the next several months (yes, months) both here and over on ScaryDBA. I also have a bunch of work I'm going to be doing to get my career performance bumped up a notch or two (and let's face it, that won't be easy). Later on Monday, Tim Ford (blog|twitter) did a session on DMOs. Specifically the session was on Tim's Period Table of DMOs that he has put together, and how to use some of the more interesting DMOs in your day to day job. It was a great session, packed with good information. Next, Brent Ozar (blog|twitter) did a session on how to monitor and guide SAN configuration for the DBA that doesn't have access to the SAN. That was some seriously useful information. Tuesday morning we only had a single class. Kendra Little (blog|twitter) taught us all about "No Lock for Yes Fun". It was all about the different transaction isolation levels and how they work. There is so often confusion in this area and Kendra does a great job in clarifying the information. Also, she tosses in her excellent drawings to liven up the presentation. Then it was excursion time in Juneau. My wife and I, along with several other Cruisers, took a hike up around the Mendenhall Glacier. It was absolutely beautiful weather and walking through the Alaskan rain forest was a treat. Our guide, Jason, was a great guy and it was a good day of hiking. Wednesday was an all day excursion in Skagway. My wife and I took the "Ghost and Good Time Girls" walking tour that ended up at a bar that used to be a brothel, the Red Onion. It was a great history of the town. We went back out and hit a few museums and exhibits. We also hiked up the side of the mountain to see the Dewey Lake and some great views of the town. Finally we hiked out to the far side of town to see the Gold Rush cemetery. Hiking done we went back to the boat and had a quiet dinner on our own. Thursday we cruised through Glacier Bay and saw at least four different glaciers including sitting next to the Marjory Glacier for about an hour. It was amazing. Then it got better. We went into class with Buck again, this time to talk about Communication. Again, I've got pages of notes that I'm going to be referring back to for some time to come. This was an excellent opportunity to learn. Snorkelers: Nicole Bertrand, Aaron Bertrand, Grant Fritchey, Neil Hambly, Christina Leo, John Robel, Yanni Robel, Tim Ford Friday we pulled into Ketchikan. A bunch of us went snorkeling. Yes, snorkeling. Yes, in Alaska. Yes, snorkeling in the ocean in Alaska. It was fantastic. They had us put on 7mm thick wet suits (an adventure all by itself) so it was basically warm the entire time we were in the water (except for the occasional squirt of cold water down my back). Before we got in the water a bald eagle flew up and landed about 15 feet in front of us, which was just an incredible event. Then our guide pointed out about 14 other eagles in the area, hanging out in the trees. Wow! The water was pretty clear and there was a ton of things to see. That was absolutely a blast. Back on the boat I presented a session called Execution Plans: The Deep Dive (note the nautical theme). It seemed to go over well and I had several good questions come out of the session that will lead to new blog posts. After I presented, it was Aaron Bertrand's (blog|twitter) turn. He did a session on "What's New in Denali" that provided a lot of great information. He was able to incorporate new things straight out of Tech-Ed, so this was expanded beyond his usual presentation. The man really knows what he's talking about and communicates it well. Saturday we were travelling so there was time for a bunch of classes. Jeremiah Peschka (blog|twitter) did a great overview of some of the NoSQL databases and what they should be used for. The session was called "The Database is Dead" but it was really about how there are specific uses for these databases that SQL Server doesn't fill, but also that these databases can't replace SQL Server in other areas. Again, good material. Brent Ozar presented again with a session on Defensive Indexing. It was an overview of how indexes work and a deep dive into how to apply them appropriately in your databases to better support access. A good session, as you would expect. Then we pulled into Victoria, BC, in Canada and had a nice dinner with several of the Cruisers, including Denny Cherry (blog|twitter). After that it was back to Seattle on Sunday. By the way, the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle isn't a Science Fiction Museum any more. I was very disappointed to discover this. Overall, it was a great experience. I'm extremely appreciative of Red Gate for sending me and for Tim, Brent, Kendra and Jeremiah for having me. The other Cruisers were all amazing people and it was an honor & privilege to meet them and spend time with them. While this was a seriously fun time, it was also a very serious training opportunity with solid information coming from seasoned industry pros.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 29, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 29, 2012Popular ReleasesDotNetNuke Azure Accelerator: DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator 6.2: Windows Azure deployments of DotNetNuke Community using virtual hard drive (cloud-drive) image that is created dynamically on the cloud. Enables the creation of new DotNetNuke host instances from on-premise to the cloud using a wizard that guides you on this process, creating the SQL Azure database, uploading the solution engine and associated service configurations. New features in this releaseModified the web roles endpoints to allow traffic on port 443 Changed the package unzip operati...Thales Simulator Library: Version 0.9.6: The Thales Simulator Library is an implementation of a software emulation of the Thales (formerly Zaxus & Racal) Hardware Security Module cryptographic device. This release fixes a problem with the FK command and a bug in the implementation of PIN block 05 format deconstruction. A new 0.9.6.Binaries file has been posted. This includes executable programs without an installer, including the GUI and console simulators, the key manager and the PVV clashing demo. Please note that you will need ...myManga: myManga v1.0.0.2: Fixed the 'Lost+Brain' error on MangaReader. The main download has this update. The second download is for those who have already downloaded the old v1.0.0.2. DELETE OLD EXE and DLLs before you copy the new files over.To update from v1.0.0.1:Extract new myManga EXE and DLLs from Zip to folder of choosing. Copy MangaInfo and MangaArchives folder from old myManga folder to new folder from step 1. ORDelete: The new myManga.exe contains the CoreMangaClasses.dll and Manga.dll internally. Delet...????: ????2.0.1: 1、?????。WiX Toolset: WiX v3.6 RC: WiX v3.6 RC (3.6.2928.0) provides feature complete Burn with VS11 support. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/5/28/WiX-v3.6-Release-Candidate-availableJavascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.7: SetParameter() reverts to its old behaviour of allowing JavaScript code to add new properties to wrapped C# objects. The behavior added briefly in 0.6 (throws an exception) can be had via the new SetParameterOptions.RejectUnknownProperties. TerminateExecution now uses its isolate to terminate the correct context automatically. Added support for converting all C# integral types, decimal and enums to JavaScript numbers. (Previously only the common types were handled properly.) Bug fixe...Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v12: Version History Changed in v12: background document analysis new options dialog with Quick Set selections for behavior new "glow" style for guides new menu icon in VS 11 preview control now uses editor theming highlighting can be customised on each line fixed issues with collapsed code blocks improved behaviour around left-aligned pragma/preprocessor commands (C#/C++) new settings for controlling guides in empty lines restructured settings storage (should be more reliable) ...callisto: callisto 2.0.29: Added DNS functionality to scripting. See documentation section for details of how to incorporate this into your scripts.ZXMAK2: Version 2.6.2.2: - implemented read port #7FFD glitch for ULA128 (fusetest) - fix unhandled exception inside open dialog - fix Z80 format serializer (support 55 bytes header & non compressed 128 blocks - thanks to Ralf) This release include SPRINTER emulation, but boot system disk image was removed.Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (May 2012): Fixes: unserialize() of negative float numbers fix pcre possesive quantifiers and character class containing ()[] array deserilization when the array contains a reference to ISerializable parsing lambda function fix round() reimplemented as it is in PHP to avoid .NET rounding errors filesize bypass for FileInfo.Length bug in Mono New features: Time zones reimplemented, uses Windows/Linux databaseSharePoint Euro 2012 - UEFA European Football Predictor: havivi.euro2012.wsp (1.1): New fetures:Admin enable / disable match Hide/Show Euro 2012 SharePoint lists (3 lists) Installing SharePoint Euro 2012 PredictorSharePoint Euro 2012 Predictor has been developed as a SharePoint Sandbox solution to support SharePoint Online (Office 365) Download the solution havivi.euro2012.wsp from the download page: Downloads Upload this solution to your Site Collection via the solutions area. Click on Activate to make the web parts in the solution available for use in the Site C...ScreenShot: InstallScreenShot: This is the current stable release.????SDK for .Net 4.0+(OAuth2.0+??V2?API): ??V2?SDK???: ????SDK for .Net 4.X???????PHP?SDK???OAuth??API???Client???。 ??????API?? ???????OAuth2.0???? ???：????????，DEMO??AppKey????????????????，?????AppKey，????AppKey???????????，?????“????>????>????>??????”.Net Code Samples: Code Samples: Code samples (SLNs).LINQ_Koans: LinqKoans v.02: Cleaned up a bitExpression Tree Visualizer for VS 2010: Expression Tree Visualizer Beta: This is a beta release, in this release some expression types are not handled and use a default visualization behavior. The first release will be published soon. Wait for it...Ulfi: Ulfi source: Build with Visual Studio 2010 Express C# or betterJayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.0 RC1 Refresh 2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript developers to query and update data from different sources like webSQL, indexedDB, OData, Facebook or YQL. See it in action in this 6 minutes video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlJHgj1y0CU RC1 R2 Release highlights Knockout.js integrationUsing the Knockout.js module, your UI can be automatically refreshed when the data model changes, so you can develop the front-end of your data manager app even faster. Querying 1:N relations in W...Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: 00.00.08 for DNN6: BEFORE USE YOU need to install the MSBuild Community Tasks available from http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org For best results you should configure your development environment as described in this blog post Then read this latest blog post about customizing and using these custom templates. Installation is simple To use this template place the ZIP (not extracted) file in your My Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\Web OR for VB My Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Te...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.53: fix issue #18106, where member operators on numeric literals caused the member part to be duplicated when not minifying numeric literals ADD NEW FEATURE: ability to create source map files! The first mapfile format to be supported is the Script# format. Use the new -map filename switch to create map files when building your sources.New ProjectsActive Log Reader: The active log reader provides the ability for a client to subscribe to specific changes in a set of files in a directory. For example, it allows you to actively monitor all .log files in your C:\Windows directory (and sub-directories) and callback whenever the word "ERROR" shows up (or any regular expression you can come up with). The accompanying test project outlines example usage.ADO.NET light wrapper: ADO.NET light wrapper is thin IEnumerable layer about ADO.NET for provide easy way to access data with strong typing support. Allen Neighborhood Center: Allen Neighborhood Center data interactionsCildads: The first attempt at centryCMT: Course Management Tool ProjectCode Builder: this is the Builder project.Connect: this is the Connect project.Craig's Framework: A basic framework that is used to speed up building MVC applications and make certain things simpler.CRM 2011 Fetch XML Execute Tool: This is a dev tool used to execute fetch xml to get the results from the connected CRM 2011 instanceDallasDB: A struct based database. DallasDB will have no full functionality until at least version 0.0.1, and won't be ready for professional use until version 1.0.0. EasyMvc: It provides a trainning sample to develop a web application base on MVC3 EF4.0 SQL Compact 4. Besides, a common business permission, logging, configration have been applied simply. Share with some implement idea about web, mvc, jquery,orm. Appreciate your advice.Entity: this is the Entity project.FogLampz: FogLampz is a .NET wrapper around around the FogBugz API.Geeba: Geeba Forum for Students in BGU UniversityHibernate: this is the Hibernate project.JSense - IntelliSense for JavaScript: JSense provides JavaScript IntelliSense meta-automation for Visual Studio 2010 projectsMichael: this is Michael's project.ModAdder: Minecraft Mod InstallerMVVM ORM: The purpose of MVVM ORM is to create models and their interactions as defined in some database for WPF applications Models are derived from tables, views and stored procedures. Interactions include insert/update/delete, with FK relationships taken into account. nihao: The summary is required.Report: this is the Report project.REST Start Kit for BizTalk: This project enables BizTalk Server to expose RESTFul services through the WCF-Custom adapter. The library supports both receive and send, both XML and JSON with all HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT and DELETE). The solution is based on two custom WCF behaviors, one to be used on Receive Locations and one on Send Ports. Hopeully you'll find them easy to use, but if you have any issues, please use the discussions forum.RovignetaWinPhone7: bla bla blaScreenShot: A simple utility that enhances the experience of taking screenshots and annotating them. And all of it happens with the screenshot key that you are most used to. PrintScreen. Give it a try. You will forget the traditional tedious screenshot mechanism.SDM Exam 2012: This is an exam project for 4th semester.Struts: this is the Struts project.TheStoreDepot: depot for the StoreTibiaBot: TibiaBot is an open source application dedicated to extend your gaming experience in MMORPG game called Tibia. Besides of very many built-in functions, TibiaBot has implemented IronRuby script engine, which allows You to creating new functionality to base program.TopicInterDisciplinary: Topic inter-disciplinary owner: sherry, chen1984yangWebAppMatrix: ??WebApp??，?????！

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C#/.NET Little Wonders: Tuples and Tuple Factory Methods

- by James Michael Hare

Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can really help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. This week, we look at the System.Tuple class and the handy factory methods for creating a Tuple by inferring the types. What is a Tuple? The System.Tuple is a class that tends to inspire a reaction in one of two ways: love or hate. Simply put, a Tuple is a data structure that holds a specific number of items of a specific type in a specific order. That is, a Tuple<int, string, int> is a tuple that contains exactly three items: an int, followed by a string, followed by an int. The sequence is important not only to distinguish between two members of the tuple with the same type, but also for comparisons between tuples. Some people tend to love tuples because they give you a quick way to combine multiple values into one result. This can be handy for returning more than one value from a method (without using out or ref parameters), or for creating a compound key to a Dictionary, or any other purpose you can think of. They can be especially handy when passing a series of items into a call that only takes one object parameter, such as passing an argument to a thread's startup routine. In these cases, you do not need to define a class, simply create a tuple containing the types you wish to return, and you are ready to go? On the other hand, there are some people who see tuples as a crutch in object-oriented design. They may view the tuple as a very watered down class with very little inherent semantic meaning. As an example, what if you saw this in a piece of code: 1: var x = new Tuple<int, int>(2, 5); What are the contents of this tuple? If the tuple isn't named appropriately, and if the contents of each member are not self evident from the type this can be a confusing question. The people who tend to be against tuples would rather you explicitly code a class to contain the values, such as: 1: public sealed class RetrySettings 2: { 3: public int TimeoutSeconds { get; set; } 4: public int MaxRetries { get; set; } 5: } Here, the meaning of each int in the class is much more clear, but it's a bit more work to create the class and can clutter a solution with extra classes. So, what's the correct way to go? That's a tough call. You will have people who will argue quite well for one or the other. For me, I consider the Tuple to be a tool to make it easy to collect values together easily. There are times when I just need to combine items for a key or a result, in which case the tuple is short lived and so the meaning isn't easily lost and I feel this is a good compromise. If the scope of the collection of items, though, is more application-wide I tend to favor creating a full class. Finally, it should be noted that tuples are immutable. That means they are assigned a value at construction, and that value cannot be changed. Now, of course if the tuple contains an item of a reference type, this means that the reference is immutable and not the item referred to. Tuples from 1 to N Tuples come in all sizes, you can have as few as one element in your tuple, or as many as you like. However, since C# generics can't have an infinite generic type parameter list, any items after 7 have to be collapsed into another tuple, as we'll show shortly. So when you declare your tuple from sizes 1 (a 1-tuple or singleton) to 7 (a 7-tuple or septuple), simply include the appropriate number of type arguments: 1: // a singleton tuple of integer 2: Tuple<int> x; 3: 4: // or more 5: Tuple<int, double> y; 6: 7: // up to seven 8: Tuple<int, double, char, double, int, string, uint> z; Anything eight and above, and we have to nest tuples inside of tuples. The last element of the 8-tuple is the generic type parameter Rest, this is special in that the Tuple checks to make sure at runtime that the type is a Tuple. This means that a simple 8-tuple must nest a singleton tuple (one of the good uses for a singleton tuple, by the way) for the Rest property. 1: // an 8-tuple 2: Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, double, char, Tuple<string>> t8; 3: 4: // an 9-tuple 5: Tuple<int, int, int, int, double, int, char, Tuple<string, DateTime>> t9; 6: 7: // a 16-tuple 8: Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, int, Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, int, Tuple<int,int>>> t14; Notice that on the 14-tuple we had to have a nested tuple in the nested tuple. Since the tuple can only support up to seven items, and then a rest element, that means that if the nested tuple needs more than seven items you must nest in it as well. Constructing tuples Constructing tuples is just as straightforward as declaring them. That said, you have two distinct ways to do it. The first is to construct the tuple explicitly yourself: 1: var t3 = new Tuple<int, string, double>(1, "Hello", 3.1415927); This creates a triple that has an int, string, and double and assigns the values 1, "Hello", and 3.1415927 respectively. Make sure the order of the arguments supplied matches the order of the types! Also notice that we can't half-assign a tuple or create a default tuple. Tuples are immutable (you can't change the values once constructed), so thus you must provide all values at construction time. Another way to easily create tuples is to do it implicitly using the System.Tuple static class's Create() factory methods. These methods (much like C++'s std::make_pair method) will infer the types from the method call so you don't have to type them in. This can dramatically reduce the amount of typing required especially for complex tuples! 1: // this 4-tuple is typed Tuple<int, double, string, char> 2: var t4 = Tuple.Create(42, 3.1415927, "Love", 'X'); Notice how much easier it is to use the factory methods and infer the types? This can cut down on typing quite a bit when constructing tuples. The Create() factory method can construct from a 1-tuple (singleton) to an 8-tuple (octuple), which of course will be a octuple where the last item is a singleton as we described before in nested tuples. Accessing tuple members Accessing a tuple's members is simplicity itself… mostly. The properties for accessing up to the first seven items are Item1, Item2, …, Item7. If you have an octuple or beyond, the final property is Rest which will give you the nested tuple which you can then access in a similar matter. Once again, keep in mind that these are read-only properties and cannot be changed. 1: // for septuples and below, use the Item properties 2: var t1 = Tuple.Create(42, 3.14); 3: 4: Console.WriteLine("First item is {0} and second is {1}", 5: t1.Item1, t1.Item2); 6: 7: // for octuples and above, use Rest to retrieve nested tuple 8: var t9 = new Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, int, 9: Tuple<int, int>>(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,Tuple.Create(8,9)); 10: 11: Console.WriteLine("The 8th item is {0}", t9.Rest.Item1); Tuples are IStructuralComparable and IStructuralEquatable Most of you know about IComparable and IEquatable, what you may not know is that there are two sister interfaces to these that were added in .NET 4.0 to help support tuples. These IStructuralComparable and IStructuralEquatable make it easy to compare two tuples for equality and ordering. This is invaluable for sorting, and makes it easy to use tuples as a compound-key to a dictionary (one of my favorite uses)! Why is this so important? Remember when we said that some folks think tuples are too generic and you should define a custom class? This is all well and good, but if you want to design a custom class that can automatically order itself based on its members and build a hash code for itself based on its members, it is no longer a trivial task! Thankfully the tuple does this all for you through the explicit implementations of these interfaces. For equality, two tuples are equal if all elements are equal between the two tuples, that is if t1.Item1 == t2.Item1 and t1.Item2 == t2.Item2, and so on. For ordering, it's a little more complex in that it compares the two tuples one at a time starting at Item1, and sees which one has a smaller Item1. If one has a smaller Item1, it is the smaller tuple. However if both Item1 are the same, it compares Item2 and so on. For example: 1: var t1 = Tuple.Create(1, 3.14, "Hi"); 2: var t2 = Tuple.Create(1, 3.14, "Hi"); 3: var t3 = Tuple.Create(2, 2.72, "Bye"); 4: 5: // true, t1 == t2 because all items are == 6: Console.WriteLine("t1 == t2 : " + t1.Equals(t2)); 7: 8: // false, t1 != t2 because at least one item different 9: Console.WriteLine("t2 == t2 : " + t2.Equals(t3)); The actual implementation of IComparable, IEquatable, IStructuralComparable, and IStructuralEquatable is explicit, so if you want to invoke the methods defined there you'll have to manually cast to the appropriate interface: 1: // true because t1.Item1 < t3.Item1, if had been same would check Item2 and so on 2: Console.WriteLine("t1 < t3 : " + (((IComparable)t1).CompareTo(t3) < 0)); So, as I mentioned, the fact that tuples are automatically equatable and comparable (provided the types you use define equality and comparability as needed) means that we can use tuples for compound keys in hashing and ordering containers like Dictionary and SortedList: 1: var tupleDict = new Dictionary<Tuple<int, double, string>, string>(); 2: 3: tupleDict.Add(t1, "First tuple"); 4: tupleDict.Add(t2, "Second tuple"); 5: tupleDict.Add(t3, "Third tuple"); Because IEquatable defines GetHashCode(), and Tuple's IStructuralEquatable implementation creates this hash code by combining the hash codes of the members, this makes using the tuple as a complex key quite easy! For example, let's say you are creating account charts for a financial application, and you want to cache those charts in a Dictionary based on the account number and the number of days of chart data (for example, a 1 day chart, 1 week chart, etc): 1: // the account number (string) and number of days (int) are key to get cached chart 2: var chartCache = new Dictionary<Tuple<string, int>, IChart>(); Summary The System.Tuple, like any tool, is best used where it will achieve a greater benefit. I wouldn't advise overusing them, on objects with a large scope or it can become difficult to maintain. However, when used properly in a well defined scope they can make your code cleaner and easier to maintain by removing the need for extraneous POCOs and custom property hashing and ordering. They are especially useful in defining compound keys to IDictionary implementations and for returning multiple values from methods, or passing multiple values to a single object parameter. 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Web API, JavaScript, Chrome & Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

- by Brian Lanham

The team spent much of the week working through this issues related to Chrome running on Windows 8 consuming cross-origin resources using Web API. We thought it was resolved on day 2 but it resurfaced the next day. We definitely resolved it today though. I believe I do not fully understand the situation but I am going to explain what I know in an effort to help you avoid and/or resolve a similar issue. References We referenced many sources during our trial-and-error troubleshooting. These are the links we reference in order of applicability to the solution: Zoiner Tejada JavaScript and other material from -> http://www.devproconnections.com/content1/topic/microsoft-azure-cors-141869/catpath/windows-azure-platform2/page/3 WebDAV Where I learned about “Accept” –> http://www-jo.se/f.pfleger/cors-and-iis? IT Hit Tells about NOT using ‘*’ –> http://www.webdavsystem.com/ajax/programming/cross_origin_requests Carlos Figueira Sample back-end code (newer) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d (older version) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/CORS-support-in-ASPNET-Web-01e9980a Background As a measure of protection, Web designers (W3C) and implementers (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla) made it so that a request, especially a JSON request (but really any URL), sent from one domain to another will only work if the requestee “knows” about the requester and allows requests from it. So, for example, if you write a ASP.NET MVC Web API service and try to consume it from multiple apps, the browsers used may (will?) indicate that you are not allowed by showing an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” error indicating the requester is not allowed to make requests. Internet Explorer (big surprise) is the odd-hair-colored step-child in this mix. It seems that running locally at least IE allows this for development purposes. Chrome and Firefox do not. In fact, Chrome is quite restrictive. Notice the images below. IE shows data (a tabular view with one row for each day of a week) while Chrome does not (trust me, neither does Firefox). Further, the Chrome developer console shows an XmlHttpRequest (XHR) error. Screen captures from IE (left) and Chrome (right). Note that Chrome does not display data and the console shows an XHR error. Why does this happen? The Web browser submits these requests and processes the responses and each browser is different. Okay, so, IE is probably the only one that’s truly different. However, Chrome has a specific process of performing a “pre-flight” check to make sure the service can respond to an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) request. So basically, the sequence is, if I understand correctly: 1)Page Loads –> 2)JavaScript Request Processed by Browser –> 3)Browsers Prepares to Submit Request –> 4)[Chrome] Browser Submits Pre-Flight Request –> 5)Server Responds with HTTP 200 –> 6)Browser Submits Request –> 7)Server Responds with Data –> 8)Page Shows Data This situation occurs for both GET and POST methods. Typically, GET methods are called with query string parameters so there is no data posted. Instead, the requesting domain needs to be permitted to request data but generally nothing more is required. POSTs on the other hand send form data. Therefore, more configuration is required (you’ll see the configuration below). AJAX requests are not friendly with this (POSTs) either because they don’t post in a form. How to fix it. The team went through many iterations of self-hair removal and we think we finally have a working solution. The trial-and-error approach eventually worked and we referenced many sources for the information. I indicate those references above. There are basically three (3) tasks needed to make this work. Assumptions: You are using Visual Studio, Web API, JavaScript, and have Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, and several browsers. 1. Configure the client Joel Cochran centralized our “cors-oriented” JavaScript (from here). There are two calls including one for GET and one for POST function(url, data, callback) { console.log(data); $.support.cors = true; var jqxhr = $.post(url, data, callback, "json") .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) { if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) { var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); xdr.open("post", url); xdr.onload = function () { if (callback) { callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success'); } }; xdr.send(data); } else { console.log(">" + jqXhHR.status); alert("corsAjax.post error: " + status + ", " + errorThrown); } }); }; The GET CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) function(url, callback) { $.support.cors = true; var jqxhr = $.get(url, null, callback, "json") .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) { if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) { var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); xdr.open("get", url); xdr.onload = function () { if (callback) { callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success'); } }; xdr.send(); } else { alert("CORS is not supported in this browser or from this origin."); } }); }; The POST CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) Now you need to call these functions to get and post your data (instead of, say, using $.Ajax). Here is a GET example: corsAjax.get(url, function(data) { if (data !== null && data.length !== undefined) { // do something with data } }); And here is a POST example: corsAjax.post(url, item); Simple…except…you’re not done yet. 2. Change Web API Controllers to Allow CORS There are actually two steps here. Do you remember above when we mentioned the “pre-flight” check? Chrome actually asks the server if it is allowed to ask it for cross-origin resource sharing access. So you need to let the server know it’s okay. This is a two-part activity. a) Add the appropriate response header Access-Control-Allow-Origin, and b) permit the API functions to respond to various methods including GET, POST, and OPTIONS. OPTIONS is the method that Chrome and other browsers use to ask the server if it can ask about permissions. Here is an example of a Web API controller thus decorated: NOTE: You’ll see a lot of references to using “*” in the header value. For security reasons, Chrome does NOT recognize this is valid. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "http://localhost:51234")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Credentials", "true")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, COPY, MOVE, DELETE, MKCOL, LOCK, UNLOCK, PUT, GETLIB, VERSION-CONTROL, CHECKIN, CHECKOUT, UNCHECKOUT, REPORT, UPDATE, CANCELUPLOAD, HEAD, OPTIONS, GET, POST")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destination, Content-Type, Depth, User-Agent, X-File-Size, X-Requested-With, If-Modified-Since, X-File-Name, Cache-Control")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Max-Age", "3600")] public abstract class BaseApiController : ApiController { [HttpGet] [HttpOptions] public IEnumerable<foo> GetFooItems(int id) { return foo.AsEnumerable(); } [HttpPost] [HttpOptions] public void UpdateFooItem(FooItem fooItem) { // NOTE: The fooItem object may or may not // (probably NOT) be set with actual data. // If not, you need to extract the data from // the posted form manually. if (fooItem.Id == 0) // However you check for default... { // We use NewtonSoft.Json. string jsonString = context.Request.Form.GetValues(0)[0].ToString(); Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer js = new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer(); fooItem = js.Deserialize<FooItem>(new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonTextReader(new System.IO.StringReader(jsonString))); } // Update the set fooItem object. } } Please note a few specific additions here: * The header attributes at the class level are required. Note all of those methods and headers need to be specified but we find it works this way so we aren’t touching it. * Web API will actually deserialize the posted data into the object parameter of the called method on occasion but so far we don’t know why it does and doesn’t. * [HttpOptions] is, again, required for the pre-flight check. * The “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” response header should NOT NOT NOT contain an ‘*’. 3. Headers and Methods and Such We had most of this code in place but found that Chrome and Firefox still did not render the data. Interestingly enough, Fiddler showed that the GET calls succeeded and the JSON data is returned properly. We learned that among the headers set at the class level, we needed to add “ACCEPT”. Note that I accidentally added it to methods and to headers. Adding it to methods worked but I don’t know why. We added it to headers also for good measure. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPA... [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destin... Next Steps That should do it. If it doesn’t let us know. What to do next? * Don’t hardcode the allowed domains. Note that port numbers and other domain name specifics will cause problems and must be specified. If this changes do you really want to deploy updated software? Consider Miguel Figueira’s approach in the following link to writing a custom HttpHeaderAttribute class that allows you to specify the domain names and then you can do it dynamically. There are, of course, other ways to do it dynamically but this is a clean approach. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d

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Get Started using Build-Deploy-Test Workflow with TFS 2012

- by Jakob Ehn

TFS 2012 introduces a new type of Lab environment called Standard Environment. This allows you to setup a full Build Deploy Test (BDT) workflow that will build your application, deploy it to your target machine(s) and then run a set of tests on that server to verify the deployment. In TFS 2010, you had to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager and involve half of your IT department to get going. Now all you need is a server (virtual or physical) where you want to deploy and test your application. You don’t even have to install a test agent on the machine, TFS 2012 will do this for you! Although each step is rather simple, the entire process of setting it up consists of a bunch of steps. So I thought that it could be useful to run through a typical setup.I will also link to some good guidance from MSDN on each topic. High Level Steps Install and configure Visual Studio 2012 Test Controller on Target Server Create Standard Environment Create Test Plan with Test Case Run Test Case Create Coded UI Test from Test Case Associate Coded UI Test with Test Case Create Build Definition using LabDefaultTemplate 1. Install and Configure Visual Studio 2012 Test Controller on Target Server First of all, note that you do not have to have the Test Controller running on the target server. It can be running on another server, as long as the Test Agent can communicate with the test controller and the test controller can communicate with the TFS server. If you have several machines in your environment (web server, database server etc..), the test controller can be installed either on one of those machines or on a dedicated machine. To install the test controller, simply mount the Visual Studio Agents media on the server and browse to the vstf_controller.exe file located in the TestController folder. Run through the installation, you might need to reboot the server since it installs .NET 4.5. When the test controller is installed, the Test Controller configuration tool will launch automatically (if it doesn’t, you can start it from the Start menu). Here you will supply the credentials of the account running the test controller service. Note that this account will be given the necessary permissions in TFS during the configuration. Make sure that you have entered a valid account by pressing the Test link. Also, you have to register the test controller with the TFS collection where your test plan is located (and usually the code base of course) When you press Apply Settings, all the configuration will be done. You might get some warnings at the end, that might or might not cause a problem later. Be sure to read them carefully. For more information about configuring your test controllers, see Setting Up Test Controllers and Test Agents to Manage Tests with Visual Studio 2. Create Standard Environment Now you need to create a Lab environment in Microsoft Test Manager. Since we are using an existing physical or virtual machine we will create a Standard Environment. Open MTM and go to Lab Center. Click New to create a new environment Enter a name for the environment. Since this environment will only contain one machine, we will use the machine name for the environment (TargetServer in this case) On the next page, click Add to add a machine to the environment. Enter the name of the machine (TargetServer.Domain.Com), and give it the Web Server role. The name must be reachable both from your machine during configuration and from the TFS app tier server. You also need to supply an account that is a local administration on the target server. This is needed in order to automatically install a test agent later on the machine. On the next page, you can add tags to the machine. This is not needed in this scenario so go to the next page. Here you will specify which test controller to use and that you want to run UI tests on this environment. This will in result in a Test Agent being automatically installed and configured on the target server. The name of the machine where you installed the test controller should be available on the drop down list (TargetServer in this sample). If you can’t see it, you might have selected a different TFS project collection. Press Next twice and then Verify to verify all the settings: Press finish. This will now create and prepare the environment, which means that it will remote install a test agent on the machine. As part of this installation, the remote server will be restarted. 3-5. Create Test Plan, Run Test Case, Create Coded UI Test I will not cover step 3-5 here, there are plenty of information on how you create test plans and test cases and automate them using Coded UI Tests. In this example I have a test plan called My Application and it contains among other things a test suite called Automated Tests where I plan to put test cases that should be automated and executed as part of the BDT workflow. For more information about Coded UI Tests, see Verifying Code by Using Coded User Interface Tests 6. Associate Coded UI Test with Test Case OK, so now we want to automate our Coded UI Test and have it run as part of the BDT workflow. You might think that you coded UI test already is automated, but the meaning of the term here is that you link your coded UI Test to an existing Test Case, thereby making the Test Case automated. And the test case should be part of the test suite that we will run during the BDT. Open the solution that contains the coded UI test method. Open the Test Case work item that you want to automate. Go to the Associated Automation tab and click on the “…” button. Select the coded UI test that you corresponds to the test case: Press OK and the save the test case For more information about associating an automated test case with a test case, see How to: Associate an Automated Test with a Test Case 7. Create Build Definition using LabDefaultTemplate Now we are ready to create a build definition that will implement the full BDT workflow. For this purpose we will use the LabDefaultTemplate.11.xaml that comes out of the box in TFS 2012. This build process template lets you take the output of another build and deploy it to each target machine. Since the deployment process will be running on the target server, you will have less problem with permissions and firewalls than if you were to remote deploy your solution. So, before creating a BDT workflow build definition, make sure that you have an existing build definition that produces a release build of your application. Go to the Builds hub in Team Explorer and select New Build Definition Give the build definition a meaningful name, here I called it MyApplication.Deploy Set the trigger to Manual Define a workspace for the build definition. Note that a BDT build doesn’t really need a workspace, since all it does is to launch another build definition and deploy the output of that build. But TFS doesn’t allow you to save a build definition without adding at least one mapping. On Build Defaults, select the build controller. Since this build actually won’t produce any output, you can select the “This build does not copy output files to a drop folder” option. On the process tab, select the LabDefaultTemplate.11.xaml. This is usually located at $/TeamProject/BuildProcessTemplates/LabDefaultTemplate.11.xaml. To configure it, press the … button on the Lab Process Settings property First, select the environment that you created before: Select which build that you want to deploy and test. The “Select an existing build” option is very useful when developing the BDT workflow, because you do not have to run through the target build every time, instead it will basically just run through the deployment and test steps which speeds up the process. Here I have selected to queue a new build of the MyApplication.Test build definition On the deploy tab, you need to specify how the application should be installed on the target server. You can supply a list of deployment scripts with arguments that will be executed on the target server. In this example I execute the generated web deploy command file to deploy the solution. If you for example have databases you can use sqlpackage.exe to deploy the database. If you are producing MSI installers in your build, you can run them using msiexec.exe and so on. A good practice is to create a batch file that contain the entire deployment that you can run both locally and on the target server. Then you would just execute the deployment batch file here in one single step. The workflow defines some variables that are useful when running the deployments. These variables are: $(BuildLocation) The full path to where your build files are located $(InternalComputerName_<VM Name>) The computer name for a virtual machine in a SCVMM environment $(ComputerName_<VM Name>) The fully qualified domain name of the virtual machine As you can see, I specify the path to the myapplication.deploy.cmd file using the $(BuildLocation) variable, which is the drop folder of the MyApplication.Test build. Note: The test agent account must have read permission in this drop location. You can find more information here on Building your Deployment Scripts On the last tab, we specify which tests to run after deployment. Here I select the test plan and the Automated Tests test suite that we saw before: Note that I also selected the automated test settings (called TargetServer in this case) that I have defined for my test plan. In here I define what data that should be collected as part of the test run. For more information about test settings, see Specifying Test Settings for Microsoft Test Manager Tests We are done! Queue your BDT build and wait for it to finish. If the build succeeds, your build summary should look something like this:

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Install NPM Packages Automatically for Node.js on Windows Azure Web Site

- by Shaun

In one of my previous post I described and demonstrated how to use NPM packages in Node.js and Windows Azure Web Site (WAWS). In that post I used NPM command to install packages, and then use Git for Windows to commit my changes and sync them to WAWS git repository. Then WAWS will trigger a new deployment to host my Node.js application. Someone may notice that, a NPM package may contains many files and could be a little bit huge. For example, the “azure” package, which is the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js, is about 6MB. Another popular package “express”, which is a rich MVC framework for Node.js, is about 1MB. When I firstly push my codes to Windows Azure, all of them must be uploaded to the cloud. Is that possible to let Windows Azure download and install these packages for us? In this post, I will introduce how to make WAWS install all required packages for us when deploying. Let’s Start with Demo Demo is most straightforward. Let’s create a new WAWS and clone it to my local disk. Drag the folder into Git for Windows so that it can help us commit and push. Please refer to this post if you are not familiar with how to use Windows Azure Web Site, Git deployment, git clone and Git for Windows. And then open a command windows and install a package in our code folder. Let’s say I want to install “express”. And then created a new Node.js file named “server.js” and pasted the code as below. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3: 4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7: 8: console.log("Web application opened."); 9: app.listen(process.env.PORT); If we switch to Git for Windows right now we will find that it detected the changes we made, which includes the “server.js” and all files under “node_modules” folder. What we need to upload should only be our source code, but the huge package files also have to be uploaded as well. Now I will show you how to exclude them and let Windows Azure install the package on the cloud. First we need to add a special file named “.gitignore”. It seems cannot be done directly from the file explorer since this file only contains extension name. So we need to do it from command line. Navigate to the local repository folder and execute the command below to create an empty file named “.gitignore”. If the command windows asked for input just press Enter. 1: echo > .gitignore Now open this file and copy the content below and save. 1: node_modules Now if we switch to Git for Windows we will found that the packages under the “node_modules” were not in the change list. So now if we commit and push, the “express” packages will not be uploaded to Windows Azure. Second, let’s tell Windows Azure which packages it needs to install when deploying. Create another file named “package.json” and copy the content below into that file and save. 1: { 2: "name": "npmdemo", 3: "version": "1.0.0", 4: "dependencies": { 5: "express": "*" 6: } 7: } Now back to Git for Windows, commit our changes and push it to WAWS. Then let’s open the WAWS in developer portal, we will see that there’s a new deployment finished. Click the arrow right side of this deployment we can see how WAWS handle this deployment. Especially we can find WAWS executed NPM. And if we opened the log we can review what command WAWS executed to install the packages and the installation output messages. As you can see WAWS installed “express” for me from the cloud side, so that I don’t need to upload the whole bunch of the package to Azure. Open this website and we can see the result, which proved the “express” had been installed successfully. What’s Happened Under the Hood Now let’s explain a bit on what the “.gitignore” and “package.json” mean. The “.gitignore” is an ignore configuration file for git repository. All files and folders listed in the “.gitignore” will be skipped from git push. In the example below I copied “node_modules” into this file in my local repository. This means, do not track and upload all files under the “node_modules” folder. So by using “.gitignore” I skipped all packages from uploading to Windows Azure. “.gitignore” can contain files, folders. It can also contain the files and folders that we do NOT want to ignore. In the next section we will see how to use the un-ignore syntax to make the SQL package included. The “package.json” file is the package definition file for Node.js application. We can define the application name, version, description, author, etc. information in it in JSON format. And we can also put the dependent packages as well, to indicate which packages this Node.js application is needed. In WAWS, name and version is necessary. And when a deployment happened, WAWS will look into this file, find the dependent packages, execute the NPM command to install them one by one. So in the demo above I copied “express” into this file so that WAWS will install it for me automatically. I updated the dependencies section of the “package.json” file manually. But this can be done partially automatically. If we have a valid “package.json” in our local repository, then when we are going to install some packages we can specify “--save” parameter in “npm install” command, so that NPM will help us upgrade the dependencies part. For example, when I wanted to install “azure” package I should execute the command as below. Note that I added “--save” with the command. 1: npm install azure --save Once it finished my “package.json” will be updated automatically. Each dependent packages will be presented here. The JSON key is the package name while the value is the version range. Below is a brief list of the version range format. For more information about the “package.json” please refer here. Format Description Example version Must match the version exactly. "azure": "0.6.7" >=version Must be equal or great than the version. "azure": ">0.6.0" 1.2.x The version number must start with the supplied digits, but any digit may be used in place of the x. "azure": "0.6.x" ~version The version must be at least as high as the range, and it must be less than the next major revision above the range. "azure": "~0.6.7" * Matches any version. "azure": "*" And WAWS will install the proper version of the packages based on what you defined here. The process of WAWS git deployment and NPM installation would be like this. But Some Packages… As we know, when we specified the dependencies in “package.json” WAWS will download and install them on the cloud. For most of packages it works very well. But there are some special packages may not work. This means, if the package installation needs some special environment restraints it might be failed. For example, the SQL Server Driver for Node.js package needs “node-gyp”, Python and C++ 2010 installed on the target machine during the NPM installation. If we just put the “msnodesql” in “package.json” file and push it to WAWS, the deployment will be failed since there’s no “node-gyp”, Python and C++ 2010 in the WAWS virtual machine. For example, the “server.js” file. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3: 4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7: 8: var sql = require("msnodesql"); 9: var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=tcp:tqy4c0isfr.database.windows.net,1433;Database=msteched2012;Uid=shaunxu@tqy4c0isfr;Pwd=P@ssw0rd123;Encrypt=yes;Connection Timeout=30;"; 10: app.get("/sql", function (req, res) { 11: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 12: if (err) { 13: console.log(err); 14: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 15: } 16: else { 17: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 18: if (err) { 19: console.log(err); 20: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 21: } 22: else { 23: res.json(results); 24: } 25: }); 26: } 27: }); 28: }); 29: 30: console.log("Web application opened."); 31: app.listen(process.env.PORT); The “package.json” file. 1: { 2: "name": "npmdemo", 3: "version": "1.0.0", 4: "dependencies": { 5: "express": "*", 6: "msnodesql": "*" 7: } 8: } And it failed to deploy to WAWS. From the NPM log we can see it’s because “msnodesql” cannot be installed on WAWS. The solution is, in “.gitignore” file we should ignore all packages except the “msnodesql”, and upload the package by ourselves. This can be done by use the content as below. We firstly un-ignored the “node_modules” folder. And then we ignored all sub folders but need git to check each sub folders. And then we un-ignore one of the sub folders named “msnodesql” which is the SQL Server Node.js Driver. 1: !node_modules/ 2: 3: node_modules/* 4: !node_modules/msnodesql For more information about the syntax of “.gitignore” please refer to this thread. Now if we go to Git for Windows we will find the “msnodesql” was included in the uncommitted set while “express” was not. I also need remove the dependency of “msnodesql” from “package.json”. Commit and push to WAWS. Now we can see the deployment successfully done. And then we can use the Windows Azure SQL Database from our Node.js application through the “msnodesql” package we uploaded. Summary In this post I demonstrated how to leverage the deployment process of Windows Azure Web Site to install NPM packages during the publish action. With the “.gitignore” and “package.json” file we can ignore the dependent packages from our Node.js and let Windows Azure Web Site download and install them while deployed. For some special packages that cannot be installed by Windows Azure Web Site, such as “msnodesql”, we can put them into the publish payload as well. With the combination of Windows Azure Web Site, Node.js and NPM it makes even more easy and quick for us to develop and deploy our Node.js application to the cloud. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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Team Foundation Server 2012 Build Global List Problems

- by Bob Hardister

My experience with the upgrade and use of TFS 2012 has been very positive. I did come across a couple of issues recently that tripped things up for a while. ISSUE 1 The first issue is that 2012 prior to Update 1 published an invalid build list item value to the collection global list. In 2010, the build global list, list item value syntax is an underscore between the build definition and the build number. In the 2012 RTM this underscore was replaced with a backslash, which is invalid. Specifically, an upload of the global list fails when the backslash is followed at some point by a period. The error when using the API is: <detail ExceptionMessage="TF26204: The account you entered is not recognized. Contact your Team Foundation Server administrator to add your account." BaseExceptionName="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.ValidationException"><details id="600019" http://schemas.microsoft.com/TeamFoundation/2005/06/WorkItemTracking/faultdetail/03"http://schemas.microsoft.com/TeamFoundation/2005/06/WorkItemTracking/faultdetail/03" /></detail> when uploading the global list via the process editor the error is: This issue is corrected in Update1 as the backslash is changed to a forward slash. ISSUE 2 The second issue is that when upgrading from 2010 to 2012, the builds in 2010 are not published to the 2012 global list. After the upgrade the 2012 global lists doesn’t have any builds and only builds run in 2012 are published to the global list. This was reported to the MSDN forums and Connect. To correct this I wrote a utility to pull all the builds and recreate the builds global list for each project in each collection. This is a console application with a program.cs, a globallists.cs and a app.config (not published here). The utility connects to TFS 2012, loops through the collections or a target collection as specified in the app.config. Then loops through the projects, the build definitions, and builds. It creates a global list for each project if that project has at least one build. Then it imports the new list to TFS. Here’s the code for program and globalists classes. Program.CS using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Client; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Common; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server; using System.IO; using System.Xml; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client; using System.Diagnostics; using Utilities; using System.Configuration; namespace TFSProjectUpdater_CLC { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { DateTime temp_d = System.DateTime.Now; string logName = temp_d.ToShortDateString(); logName = logName.Replace("/", "_"); logName = logName + "_" + temp_d.TimeOfDay; logName = logName.Replace(":", "."); logName = "TFSGlobalListBuildsUpdater_" + logName + ".log"; Trace.Listeners.Add(new TextWriterTraceListener(Path.Combine(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["logLocation"], logName))); Trace.AutoFlush = true; Trace.WriteLine("Start:" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); Console.WriteLine("Start:" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); string tfsServer = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["TargetTFS"].ToString(); GlobalLists gl = new GlobalLists(); //replace this with the URL to your TFS instance. Uri tfsUri = new Uri("https://" + tfsServer + "/tfs"); //bool foundLite = false; TfsConfigurationServer config = new TfsConfigurationServer(tfsUri, new UICredentialsProvider()); config.EnsureAuthenticated(); ITeamProjectCollectionService collectionService = config.GetService<ITeamProjectCollectionService>(); IList<TeamProjectCollection> collections = collectionService.GetCollections().OrderBy(collection => collection.Name.ToString()).ToList(); //target Collection string targetCollection = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["targetCollection"]; foreach (TeamProjectCollection coll in collections) { if (targetCollection.Equals(string.Empty)) { if (!coll.Name.Equals("TFS Archive") && !coll.Name.Equals("DefaultCol") && !coll.Name.Equals("Team Project Template Gallery")) { doWork(coll, tfsServer); } } else { if (coll.Name.Equals(targetCollection)) { doWork(coll, tfsServer); } } } Trace.WriteLine("Finished:" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); Console.WriteLine("Finished:" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) { Console.WriteLine("\nHit any key to exit..."); Console.ReadKey(); } Trace.Close(); } static void doWork(TeamProjectCollection coll, string tfsServer) { GlobalLists gl = new GlobalLists(); //target Collection string targetProject = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["targetProject"]; Trace.WriteLine("Collection: " + coll.Name); Uri u = new Uri("https://" + tfsServer + "/tfs/" + coll.Name.ToString()); TfsTeamProjectCollection c = TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory.GetTeamProjectCollection(u); ICommonStructureService icss = c.GetService<ICommonStructureService>(); try { Trace.WriteLine("\tChecking Collection Global Lists."); gl.RebuildBuildGlobalLists(c); } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine("Exception! :" + coll.Name); } } } } GlobalLists.CS using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Client; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Common; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client; using System.Configuration; using System.Xml; using System.Xml.Linq; using System.Diagnostics; namespace Utilities { public class GlobalLists { string GL_NewList = @"<gl:GLOBALLISTS xmlns:gl=""http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/workitemtracking/globallists""> <GLOBALLIST> </GLOBALLIST> </gl:GLOBALLISTS>"; public void RebuildBuildGlobalLists(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs) { WorkItemStore wis = new WorkItemStore(_tfs); //export the current globals lists file for the collection to save as a backup XmlDocument globalListsFile = wis.ExportGlobalLists(); globalListsFile.Save(@"c:\temp\" + _tfs.Name.Replace("\\", "_") + "_backupGlobalList.xml"); LogExportCurrentCollectionGlobalListsAsBackup(_tfs); //Build a new global build list from each build definition within each team project IBuildServer buildServer = _tfs.GetService<IBuildServer>(); foreach (Project p in wis.Projects) { XmlDocument newProjectGlobalList = new XmlDocument(); newProjectGlobalList.LoadXml(GL_NewList); LogInstanciateNewProjectBuildGlobalList(_tfs, p); BuildNewProjectBuildGlobalList(_tfs, wis, newProjectGlobalList, buildServer, p); LogEndOfProject(_tfs, p); } } // Private Methods private static void BuildNewProjectBuildGlobalList(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, WorkItemStore wis, XmlDocument newProjectGlobalList, IBuildServer buildServer, Project p) { //locate the template node XmlNamespaceManager nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(newProjectGlobalList.NameTable); nsmgr.AddNamespace("gl", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/workitemtracking/globallists"); XmlNode node = newProjectGlobalList.SelectSingleNode("//gl:GLOBALLISTS/GLOBALLIST", nsmgr); LogLocatedGlobalListNode(_tfs, p); //add the name attribute for the project build global list XmlElement buildListNode = (XmlElement)node; buildListNode.SetAttribute("name", "Builds - " + p.Name); LogAddedBuildNodeName(_tfs, p); //add new builds to the team project build global list bool buildsExist = false; if (AddNewBuilds(_tfs, newProjectGlobalList, buildServer, p, node, buildsExist)) { //import the new build global list for each project that has builds newProjectGlobalList.Save(@"c:\temp\" + _tfs.Name.Replace("\\", "_") + "_" + p.Name + "_" + "newGlobalList.xml"); //write out temp copy of the global list file to be imported LogImportReady(_tfs, p); wis.ImportGlobalLists(newProjectGlobalList.InnerXml); LogImportComplete(_tfs, p); } } private static bool AddNewBuilds(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, XmlDocument newProjectGlobalList, IBuildServer buildServer, Project p, XmlNode node, bool buildsExist) { var buildDefinitions = buildServer.QueryBuildDefinitions(p.Name); foreach (var buildDefinition in buildDefinitions) { var builds = buildDefinition.QueryBuilds(); foreach (var build in builds) { //insert the builds into the current build list node in the correct 2012 format buildsExist = true; XmlElement listItem = newProjectGlobalList.CreateElement("LISTITEM"); listItem.SetAttribute("value", buildDefinition.Name + "/" + build.BuildNumber.ToString().Replace(buildDefinition.Name + "_", "")); node.AppendChild(listItem); } } if (buildsExist) LogBuildListCreated(_tfs, p); else LogNoBuildsInProject(_tfs, p); return buildsExist; } // Logging Methods private static void LogExportCurrentCollectionGlobalListsAsBackup(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs) { Trace.WriteLine("\tExported Global List for " + _tfs.Name + " collection."); Console.WriteLine("\tExported Global List for " + _tfs.Name + " collection."); } private void LogInstanciateNewProjectBuildGlobalList(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, Project p) { Trace.WriteLine("\t\tInstanciated the new build global list for project " + p.Name + " in the " + _tfs.Name + " collection."); Console.WriteLine("\t\tInstanciated the new build global list for project \n\t\t\t" + p.Name + " in the \n\t\t\t" + _tfs.Name + " collection."); } private static void LogLocatedGlobalListNode(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, Project p) { Trace.WriteLine("\t\tLocated the build global list node for project " + p.Name + " in the " + _tfs.Name + " collection."); Console.WriteLine("\t\tLocated the build global list node for project \n\t\t\t" + p.Name + " in the \n\t\t\t" + _tfs.Name + " collection."); } private static void LogAddedBuildNodeName(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, Project p) { Trace.WriteLine("\t\tAdded the name attribute to the build global list for project " + p.Name + " in the " + _tfs.Name + " collection."); Console.WriteLine("\t\tAdded the name attribute to the build global list for project \n\t\t\t" + p.Name + " in the \n\t\t\t" + _tfs.Name + " collection."); } private static void LogBuildListCreated(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, Project p) { Trace.WriteLine("\t\tAdded all builds into the " + "Builds - " + p.Name + " list in the " + _tfs.Name + " collection."); Console.WriteLine("\t\tAdded all builds into the " + "Builds - \n\t\t\t" + p.Name + " list in the \n\t\t\t" + _tfs.Name + " collection."); } private static void LogNoBuildsInProject(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, Project p) { Trace.WriteLine("\t\tNo builds found for project " + p.Name + " in the " + _tfs.Name + " collection."); Console.WriteLine("\t\tNo builds found for project " + p.Name + " \n\t\t\tin the " + _tfs.Name + " collection."); } private void LogEndOfProject(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, Project p) { Trace.WriteLine("\t\tEND OF PROJECT " + p.Name); Trace.WriteLine(" "); Console.WriteLine("\t\tEND OF PROJECT " + p.Name); Console.WriteLine(); } private static void LogImportReady(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, Project p) { Trace.WriteLine("\t\tReady to import the build global list for project " + p.Name + " to the " + _tfs.Name + " collection."); Console.WriteLine("\t\tReady to import the build global list for project \n\t\t\t" + p.Name + " to the \n\t\t\t" + _tfs.Name + " collection."); } private static void LogImportComplete(TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs, Project p) { Trace.WriteLine("\t\tImport of the build global list for project " + p.Name + " to the " + _tfs.Name + " collection completed."); Console.WriteLine("\t\tImport of the build global list for project \n\t\t\t" + p.Name + " to the \n\t\t\t" + _tfs.Name + " collection completed."); } } }

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Do you play Sudoku ?

- by Gilles Haro

Did you know that 11gR2 database could solve a Sudoku puzzle with a single query and, most of the time, and this in less than a second ? The following query shows you how ! Simply pass a flattened Sudoku grid to it a get the result instantaneously ! col "Solution" format a9 col "Problem" format a9 with Iteration( initialSudoku, Step, EmptyPosition ) as ( select initialSudoku, InitialSudoku, instr( InitialSudoku, '-' ) from ( select '--64----2--7-35--1--58-----27---3--4---------4--2---96-----27--7--58-6--3----18--' InitialSudoku from dual ) union all select initialSudoku , substr( Step, 1, EmptyPosition - 1 ) || OneDigit || substr( Step, EmptyPosition + 1 ) , instr( Step, '-', EmptyPosition + 1 ) from Iteration , ( select to_char( rownum ) OneDigit from dual connect by rownum <= 9 ) OneDigit where EmptyPosition > 0 and not exists ( select null from ( select rownum IsPossible from dual connect by rownum <= 9 ) where OneDigit = substr( Step, trunc( ( EmptyPosition - 1 ) / 9 ) * 9 + IsPossible, 1 ) -- One line must contain the 1-9 digits or OneDigit = substr( Step, mod( EmptyPosition - 1, 9 ) - 8 + IsPossible * 9, 1 ) -- One row must contain the 1-9 digits or OneDigit = substr( Step, mod( trunc( ( EmptyPosition - 1 ) / 3 ), 3 ) * 3 -- One square must contain the 1-9 digits + trunc( ( EmptyPosition - 1 ) / 27 ) * 27 + IsPossible + trunc( ( IsPossible - 1 ) / 3 ) * 6 , 1 ) ) ) select initialSudoku "Problem", Step "Solution" from Iteration where EmptyPosition = 0 ; The Magic thing behind this is called Recursive Subquery Factoring. The Oracle documentation gives the following definition: If a subquery_factoring_clause refers to its own query_name in the subquery that defines it, then the subquery_factoring_clause is said to be recursive. A recursive subquery_factoring_clause must contain two query blocks: the first is the anchor member and the second is the recursive member. The anchor member must appear before the recursive member, and it cannot reference query_name. The anchor member can be composed of one or more query blocks combined by the set operators: UNION ALL, UNION, INTERSECT or MINUS. The recursive member must follow the anchor member and must reference query_name exactly once. You must combine the recursive member with the anchor member using the UNION ALL set operator. This new feature is a replacement of this old Hierarchical Query feature that exists in Oracle since the days of Aladdin (well, at least, release 2 of the database in 1977). Everyone remembers the old syntax : select empno, ename, job, mgr, level from emp start with mgr is null connect by prior empno = mgr; that could/should be rewritten (but not as often as it should) as withT_Emp (empno, name, level) as ( select empno, ename, job, mgr, level from emp start with mgr is null connect by prior empno = mgr ) select * from T_Emp; which uses the "with" syntax, whose main advantage is to clarify the readability of the query. Although very efficient, this syntax had the disadvantage of being a Non-Ansi Sql Syntax. Ansi-Sql version of Hierarchical Query is called Recursive Subquery Factoring. As of 11gR2, Oracle got compliant with Ansi Sql and introduced Recursive Subquery Factoring. It is basically an extension of the "With" clause that enables recursion. Now, the new syntax for the query would be with T_Emp (empno, name, job, mgr, hierlevel) as ( select E.empno, E.ename, E.job, E.mgr, 1 from emp E where E.mgr is null union all select E.empno, E.ename, E.job, E.mgr, T.hierlevel + 1from emp E join T_Emp T on ( E.mgr = T.empno ) ) select * from T_Emp; The anchor member is a replacement for the "start with" The recursive member is processed through iterations. It joins the Source table (EMP) with the result from the Recursive Query itself (T_Emp) Each iteration works with the results of all its preceding iterations. Iteration 1 works on the results of the first query Iteration 2 works on the results of Iteration 1 and first query Iteration 3 works on the results of Iteration 1, Iteration 2 and first query. So, knowing that, the Sudoku query it self-explaining; The anchor member contains the "Problem" : The Initial Sudoku and the Position of the first "hole" in the grid. The recursive member tries to replace the considered hole with any of the 9 digit that would satisfy the 3 rules of sudoku Recursion progress through the grid until it is complete. Another example : Fibonaccy Numbers : un = (un-1) + (un-2) with Fib (u1, u2, depth) as (select 1, 1, 1 from dual union all select u1+u2, u1, depth+1 from Fib where depth<10) select u1 from Fib; Conclusion Oracle brings here a new feature (which, to be honest, already existed on other concurrent systems) and extends the power of the database to new boundaries. It’s now up to developers to try and test it and find more useful application than solving puzzles… But still, solving a Sudoku in less time it takes to say it remains impressive… Interesting links: You might be interested by the following links which cover different aspects of this feature Oracle Documentation Lucas Jellema 's Blog Fibonaci Numbers

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Solaris: What comes next?

- by alanc

As you probably know by now, a few months ago, we released Solaris 11 after years of development. That of course means we now need to figure out what comes next - if Solaris 11 is “The First Cloud OS”, then what do we need to make future releases of Solaris be, to be modern and competitive when they're released? So we've been having planning and brainstorming meetings, and I've captured some notes here from just one of those we held a couple weeks ago with a number of the Silicon Valley based engineers. Now before someone sees an idea here and calls their product rep wanting to know what's up, please be warned what follows are rough ideas, and as I'll discuss later, none of them have any committment, schedule, working code, or even plan for integration in any possible future product at this time. (Please don't make me force you to read the full Oracle future product disclaimer here, you should know it by heart already from the front of every Oracle product slide deck.) To start with, we did some background research, looking at ideas from other Oracle groups, and competitive OS'es. We examined what was hot in the technology arena and where the interesting startups were heading. We then looked at Solaris to see where we could apply those ideas. Making Network Admins into Socially Networking Admins We all know an admin who has grumbled about being the only one stuck late at work to fix a problem on the server, or having to work the weekend alone to do scheduled maintenance. But admins are humans (at least most are), and crave companionship and community with their fellow humans. And even when they're alone in the server room, they're never far from a network connection, allowing access to the wide world of wonders on the Internet. Our solution here is not building a new social network - there's enough of those already, and Oracle even has its own Oracle Mix social network already. What we proposed is integrating Solaris features to help engage our system admins with these social networks, building community and bringing them recognition in the workplace, using achievement recognition systems as found in many popular gaming platforms. For instance, if you had a Facebook account, and a group of admin friends there, you could register it with our Social Network Utility For Facebook, and then your friends might see: Alan earned the achievement Critically Patched (April 2012) for patching all his servers. Matt is only at 50% - encourage him to complete this achievement today! To avoid any undue risk of advertising who has unpatched servers that are easier targets for hackers to break into, this information would be tightly protected via Facebook's world-renowned privacy settings to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. A related form of gamification we considered was replacing simple certfications with role-playing-game-style Experience Levels. Instead of just knowing an admin passed a test establishing a given level of competency, these would provide recruiters with a more detailed level of how much real-world experience an admin has. Achievements such as the one above would feed into it, but larger numbers of experience points would be gained by tougher or more critical tasks - such as recovering a down system, or migrating a service to a new platform. (As long as it was an Oracle platform of course - migrating to an HP or IBM platform would cause the admin to lose points with us.) Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a good way to prevent (if you will) “gaming” the system. For instance, a disgruntled admin might decide to start ignoring warnings from FMA that a part is beginning to fail or skip preventative maintenance, in the hopes that they'd cause a catastrophic failure to earn more points for bolstering their resume as they look for a job elsewhere, and not worrying about the effect on your business of a mission critical server going down. More Z's for ZFS Our suggested new feature for ZFS was inspired by the worlds most successful Z-startup of all time: Zynga. Using the Social Network Utility For Facebook described above, we'd tie it in with ZFS monitoring to help you out when you find yourself in a jam needing more disk space than you have, and can't wait a month to get a purchase order through channels to buy more. Instead with the click of a button you could post to your group: Alan can't find any space in his server farm! Can you help? Friends could loan you some space on their connected servers for a few weeks, knowing that you'd return the favor when needed. ZFS would create a new filesystem for your use on their system, and securely share it with your system using Kerberized NFS. If none of your friends have space, then you could buy temporary use space in small increments at affordable rates right there in Facebook, using your Facebook credits, and then file an expense report later, after the urgent need has passed. Universal Single Sign On One thing all the engineers agreed on was that we still had far too many "Single" sign ons to deal with in our daily work. On the web, every web site used to have its own password database, forcing us to hope we could remember what login name was still available on each site when we signed up, and which unique password we came up with to avoid having to disclose our other passwords to a new site. In recent years, the web services world has finally been reducing the number of logins we have to manage, with many services allowing you to login using your identity from Google, Twitter or Facebook. So we proposed following their lead, introducing PAM modules for web services - no more would you have to type in whatever login name IT assigned and try to remember the password you chose the last time password aging forced you to change it - you'd simply choose which web service you wanted to authenticate against, and would login to your Solaris account upon reciept of a cookie from their identity service. Pinning notes to the cloud We also all noted that we all have our own pile of notes we keep in our daily work - in text files in our home directory, in notebooks we carry around, on white boards in offices and common areas, on sticky notes on our monitors, or on scraps of paper pinned to our bulletin boards. The contents of the notes vary, some are things just for us, some are useful for our groups, some we would share with the world. For instance, when our group moved to a new building a couple years ago, we had a white board in the hallway listing all the NIS & DNS servers, subnets, and other network configuration information we needed to set up our Solaris machines after the move. Similarly, as Solaris 11 was finishing and we were all learning the new network configuration commands, we shared notes in wikis and e-mails with our fellow engineers. Users may also remember one of the popular features of Sun's old BigAdmin site was a section for sharing scripts and tips such as these. Meanwhile, the online "pin board" at Pinterest is taking the web by storm. So we thought, why not mash those up to solve this problem? We proposed a new BigAddPin site where users could “pin” notes, command snippets, configuration information, and so on. For instance, once they had worked out the ideal Automated Installation manifest for their app server, they could pin it up to share with the rest of their group, or choose to make it public as an example for the world. Localized data, such as our group's notes on the servers for our subnet, could be shared only to users connecting from that subnet. And notes that they didn't want others to see at all could be marked private, such as the list of phone numbers to call for late night pizza delivery to the machine room, the birthdays and anniversaries they can never remember but would be sleeping on the couch if they forgot, or the list of automatically generated completely random, impossible to remember root passwords to all their servers. For greater integration with Solaris, we'd put support right into the command shells — redirect output to a pinned note, set your path to include pinned notes as scripts you can run, or bring up your recent shell history and pin a set of commands to save for the next time you need to remember how to do that operation. Location service for Solaris servers A longer term plan would involve convincing the hardware design groups to put GPS locators with wireless transmitters in future server designs. This would help both admins and service personnel trying to find servers in todays massive data centers, and could feed into location presence apps to help show potential customers that while they may not see many Solaris machines on the desktop any more, they are all around. For instance, while walking down Wall Street it might show “There are over 2000 Solaris computers in this block.” [Note: this proposal was made before the recent media coverage of a location service aggregrator app with less noble intentions, and in hindsight, we failed to consider what happens when such data similarly falls into the wrong hands. We certainly wouldn't want our app to be misinterpreted as “There are over $20 million dollars of SPARC servers in this building, waiting for you to steal them.” so it's probably best it was rejected.] Harnessing the power of the GPU for Security Most modern OS'es make use of the widespread availability of high powered GPU hardware in today's computers, with desktop environments requiring 3-D graphics acceleration, whether in Ubuntu Unity, GNOME Shell on Fedora, or Aero Glass on Windows, but we haven't yet made Solaris fully take advantage of this, beyond our basic offering of Compiz on the desktop. Meanwhile, more businesses are interested in increasing security by using biometric authentication, but must also comply with laws in many countries preventing discrimination against employees with physical limations such as missing eyes or fingers, not to mention the lost productivity when employees can't login due to tinted contacts throwing off a retina scan or a paper cut changing their fingerprint appearance until it heals. Fortunately, the two groups considering these problems put their heads together and found a common solution, using 3D technology to enable authentication using the one body part all users are guaranteed to have - pam_phrenology.so, a new PAM module that uses an array USB attached web cams (or just one if the user is willing to spin their chair during login) to take pictures of the users head from all angles, create a 3D model and compare it to the one in the authentication database. While Mythbusters has shown how easy it can be to fool common fingerprint scanners, we have not yet seen any evidence that people can impersonate the shape of another user's cranium, no matter how long they spend beating their head against the wall to reshape it. This could possibly be extended to group users, using modern versions of some of the older phrenological studies, such as giving all users with long grey beards access to the System Architect role, or automatically placing users with pointy spikes in their hair into an easy use mode. Unfortunately, there are still some unsolved technical challenges we haven't figured out how to overcome. Currently, a visit to the hair salon causes your existing authentication to expire, and some users have found that shaving their heads is the only way to avoid bad hair days becoming bad login days. Reaction to these ideas After gathering all our notes on these ideas from the engineering brainstorming meeting, we took them in to present to our management. Unfortunately, most of their reaction cannot be printed here, and they chose not to accept any of these ideas as they were, but they did have some feedback for us to consider as they sent us back to the drawing board. They strongly suggested our ideas would be better presented if we weren't trying to decipher ink blotches that had been smeared by the condensation when we put our pint glasses on the napkins we were taking notes on, and to that end let us know they would not be approving any more engineering offsites in Irish themed pubs on the Friday of a Saint Patrick's Day weekend. (Hopefully they mean that situation specifically and aren't going to deny the funding for travel to this year's X.Org Developer's Conference just because it happens to be in Bavaria and ending on the Friday of the weekend Oktoberfest starts.) They recommended our research techniques could be improved over just sitting around reading blogs and checking our Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts, such as considering input from alternate viewpoints on topics such as gamification. They also mentioned that Oracle hadn't fully adopted some of Sun's common practices and we might have to try harder to get those to be accepted now that we are one unified company. So as I said at the beginning, don't pester your sales rep just yet for any of these, since they didn't get approved, but if you have better ideas, pass them on and maybe they'll get into our next batch of planning.

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Finding the Right Solution to Source and Manage Your Contractors

- by mark.rosenberg(at)oracle.com

Many of our PeopleSoft Enterprise applications customers operate in service-based industries, and all of our customers have at least some internal service units, such as IT, marketing, and facilities. Employing the services of contractors, often referred to as "contingent labor," to deliver either or both internal and external services is common practice. As we've transitioned from an industrial age to a knowledge age, talent has become a primary competitive advantage for most organizations. Contingent labor offers talent on flexible terms; it offers the ability to scale up operations, close skill gaps, and manage risk in the process of delivering services. Talent comes from many sources and the rise in the contingent worker (contractor, consultant, temporary, part time) has increased significantly in the past decade and is expected to reach 40 percent in the next decade. Managing the total pool of talent in a seamless integrated fashion not only saves organizations money and increases efficiency, but creates a better place for workers of all kinds to work. Although the term "contingent labor" is frequently used to describe both contractors and employees who have flexible schedules and relationships with an organization, the remainder of this discussion focuses on contractors. The term "contingent labor" is used interchangeably with "contractor." Recognizing the importance of contingent labor, our PeopleSoft customers often ask our team, "What Oracle vendor management system (VMS) applications should I evaluate for managing contractors?" In response, I thought it would be useful to describe and compare the three most common Oracle-based options available to our customers. They are: The enterprise licensed software model in which you implement and utilize the PeopleSoft Services Procurement (sPro) application and potentially other PeopleSoft applications; The software-as-a-service model in which you gain access to a derivative of PeopleSoft sPro from an Oracle Business Process Outsourcing Partner; and The managed service provider (MSP) model in which staffing industry professionals utilize either your enterprise licensed software or the software-as-a-service application to administer your contingent labor program. At this point, you may be asking yourself, "Why three options?" The answer is that since there is no "one size fits all" in terms of talent, there is also no "one size fits all" for effectively sourcing and managing contingent workers. Various factors influence how an organization thinks about and relates to its contractors, and each of the three Oracle-based options addresses an organization's needs and preferences differently. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe the options with respect to (A) pricing and software provisioning models; (B) control and flexibility; (C) level of engagement with contractors; and (D) approach to sourcing, employment law, and financial settlement. Option 1: Enterprise Licensed Software In this model, you purchase from Oracle the license and support for the applications you need. Typically, you license PeopleSoft sPro as your VMS tool for sourcing, monitoring, and paying your contract labor. In conjunction with sPro, you can also utilize PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) applications (if you do not already) to configure more advanced business processes for recruiting, training, and tracking your contractors. Many customers choose this enterprise license software model because of the functionality and natural integration of the PeopleSoft applications and because the cost for the PeopleSoft software is explicit. There is no fee per transaction to source each contractor under this model. Our customers that employ contractors to augment their permanent staff on billable client engagements often find this model appealing because there are no fees to affect their profit margins. With this model, you decide whether to have your own IT organization run the software or have the software hosted and managed by either Oracle or another application services provider. Your organization, perhaps with the assistance of consultants, configures, deploys, and operates the software for managing your contingent workforce. This model offers you the highest level of control and flexibility since your organization can configure the contractor process flow exactly to your business and security requirements and can extend the functionality with PeopleTools. This option has proven very valuable and applicable to our customers engaged in government contracting because their contingent labor management practices are subject to complex standards and regulations. Customers find a great deal of value in the application functionality and configurability the enterprise licensed software offers for managing contingent labor. Some examples of that functionality are... The ability to create a tiered network of preferred suppliers including competencies, pricing agreements, and elaborate candidate management capabilities. Configurable alerts and online collaboration for bid, resource requisition, timesheet, and deliverable entry, routing, and approval for both resource and deliverable-based services. The ability to manage contractors with the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects applications that are used to manage the permanent workforce. Because it allows you to utilize much of the same PeopleSoft HCM and Projects application functionality for contractors that you use for permanent employees, the enterprise licensed software model supports the deepest level of engagement with the contingent workforce. For example, you can: fill job openings with contingent labor; guide contingent workers through essential safety and compliance training with PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management; and source contingent workers directly to project-based assignments in PeopleSoft Resource Management and PeopleSoft Program Management. This option enables contingent workers to collaborate closely with your permanent staff on complex, knowledge-based efforts - R&D projects, billable client contracts, architecture and engineering projects spanning multiple years, and so on. With the enterprise licensed software model, your organization maintains responsibility for the sourcing, onboarding (including adherence to employment laws), and financial settlement processes. This means your organization maintains on staff or hires the expertise in these domains to utilize the software and interact with suppliers and contractors. Option 2: Software as a Service (SaaS) The effort involved in setting up and operating VMS software to handle a contingent workforce leads many organizations to seek a system that can be activated and configured within a few days and for which they can pay based on usage. Oracle's Business Process Outsourcing partner, Provade, Inc., provides exactly this option to our customers. Provade offers its vendor management software as a service over the Internet and usually charges your organization a fee that is a percentage of your total contingent labor spending processed through the Provade software. (Percentage of spend is the predominant fee model, although not the only one.) In addition to lower implementation costs, the effort of configuring and maintaining the software is largely upon Provade, not your organization. This can be very appealing to IT organizations that are thinly stretched supporting other important information technology initiatives. Built upon PeopleSoft sPro, the Provade solution is tailored for simple and quick deployment and administration. Provade has added capabilities to clone users rapidly and has simplified business documents, like work orders and change orders, to facilitate enterprise-wide, self-service adoption with little to no training. Provade also leverages Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to provide integrated spend analytics and dashboards. Although pure customization is more limited than with the enterprise licensed software model, Provade offers a very effective option for organizations that are regularly on-boarding and off-boarding high volumes of contingent staff hired to perform discrete support tasks (for example, order fulfillment during the holiday season, hourly clerical work, desktop technology repairs, and so on) or project tasks. The software is very configurable and at the same time very intuitive to even the most computer-phobic users. The level of contingent worker engagement your organization can achieve with the Provade option is generally the same as with the enterprise licensed software model since Provade can automatically establish contingent labor resources in your PeopleSoft applications. Provade has pre-built integrations to Oracle's PeopleSoft and the Oracle E-Business Suite procurement, projects, payables, and HCM applications, so that you can evaluate, train, assign, and track contingent workers like your permanent employees. Similar to the enterprise licensed software model, your organization is responsible for the contingent worker sourcing, administration, and financial settlement processes. This means your organization needs to maintain the staff expertise in these domains. Option 3: Managed Services Provider (MSP) Whether you are using the enterprise licensed model or the SaaS model, you may want to engage the services of sourcing, employment, payroll, and financial settlement professionals to administer your contingent workforce program. Firms that offer this expertise are often referred to as "MSPs," and they are typically staffing companies that also offer permanent and temporary hiring services. (In fact, many of the major MSPs are Oracle applications customers themselves, and they utilize the PeopleSoft Solution for the Staffing Industry to run their own business operations.) Usually, MSPs place their staff on-site at your facilities, and they can utilize either your enterprise licensed PeopleSoft sPro application or the Provade VMS SaaS software to administer the network of suppliers providing contingent workers. When you utilize an MSP, there is a separate fee for the MSP's service that is typically funded by the participating suppliers of the contingent labor. Also in this model, the suppliers of the contingent labor (not the MSP) usually pay the contingent labor force. With an MSP, you are intentionally turning over business process control for the advantages associated with having someone else manage the processes. The software option you choose will to a certain extent affect your process flexibility; however, the MSPs are often able to adapt their processes to the unique demands of your business. When you engage an MSP, you will want to give some thought to the level of engagement and "partnering" you need with your contingent workforce. Because the MSP acts as an intermediary, it can be very valuable in handling high volume, routine contracting for which there is a relatively low need for "partnering" with the contingent workforce. However, if your organization (or part of your organization) engages contingent workers for high-profile client projects that require diplomacy, intensive amounts of interaction, and personal trust, introducing an MSP into the process may prove less effective than handling the process with your own staff. In fact, in many organizations, it is common to enlist an MSP to handle contractors working on internal projects and to have permanent employees handle the contractor relationships that affect the portion of the services portfolio focused on customer-facing, billable projects. One of the key advantages of enlisting an MSP is that you do not have to maintain the expertise required for orchestrating the sourcing, hiring, and paying of contingent workers. These are the domain of the MSPs. If your own staff members are not prepared to manage the essential "overhead" processes associated with contingent labor, working with an MSP can make solid business sense. Proper administration of a contingent workforce can make the difference between project success and failure, operating profit and loss, and legal compliance and fines. Concluding Thoughts There is little doubt that thoughtfully and purposefully constructing a service delivery strategy that leverages the strengths of contingent workers can lead to better projects, deliverables, and business results. What requires a bit more thinking is determining the platform (or platforms) that will enable each part of your organization to best deliver on its mission.

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A Closable jQuery Plug-in

- by Rick Strahl

In my client side development I deal a lot with content that pops over the main page. Be it data entry ‘windows’ or dialogs or simple pop up notes. In most cases this behavior goes with draggable windows, but sometimes it’s also useful to have closable behavior on static page content that the user can choose to hide or otherwise make invisible or fade out. Here’s a small jQuery plug-in that provides .closable() behavior to most elements by using either an image that is provided or – more appropriately by using a CSS class to define the picture box layout. /* * * Closable * * Makes selected DOM elements closable by making them * invisible when close icon is clicked * * Version 1.01 * @requires jQuery v1.3 or later * * Copyright (c) 2007-2010 Rick Strahl * http://www.west-wind.com/ * * Licensed under the MIT license: * http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php Support CSS: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Options: * handle Element to place closebox into (like say a header). Use if main element and closebox container are two different elements. * closeHandler Function called when the close box is clicked. Return true to close the box return false to keep it visible. * cssClass The CSS class to apply to the close box DIV or IMG tag. * imageUrl Allows you to specify an explicit IMG url that displays the close icon. If used bypasses CSS image styling. * fadeOut Optional provide fadeOut speed. Default no fade out occurs */ (function ($) { $.fn.closable = function (options) { var opt = { handle: null, closeHandler: null, cssClass: "closebox", imageUrl: null, fadeOut: null }; $.extend(opt, options); return this.each(function (i) { var el = $(this); var pos = el.css("position"); if (!pos || pos == "static") el.css("position", "relative"); var h = opt.handle ? $(opt.handle).css({ position: "relative" }) : el; var div = opt.imageUrl ? $("<img>").attr("src", opt.imageUrl).css("cursor", "pointer") : $("<div>"); div.addClass(opt.cssClass) .click(function (e) { if (opt.closeHandler) if (!opt.closeHandler.call(this, e)) return; if (opt.fadeOut) $(el).fadeOut(opt.fadeOut); else $(el).hide(); }); if (opt.imageUrl) div.css("background-image", "none"); h.append(div); }); } })(jQuery); The plugin can be applied against any selector that is a container (typically a div tag). The close image or close box is provided typically by way of a CssClass - .closebox by default – which supplies the image as part of the CSS styling. The default styling for the box looks something like this: .closebox { position: absolute; right: 4px; top: 4px; background-image: url(images/close.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 14px; height: 14px; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.60; filter: alpha(opacity="80"); } .closebox:hover { opacity: 0.95; filter: alpha(opacity="100"); } Alternately you can also supply an image URL which overrides the background image in the style sheet. I use this plug-in mostly on pop up windows that can be closed, but it’s also quite handy for remove/delete behavior in list displays like this: you can find this sample here to look to play along: http://www.west-wind.com/WestwindWebToolkit/Samples/Ajax/AmazonBooks/BooksAdmin.aspx For closable windows it’s nice to have something reusable because in my client framework there are lots of different kinds of windows that can be created: Draggables, Modal Dialogs, HoverPanels etc. and they all use the client .closable plug-in to provide the closable operation in the same way with a few options. Plug-ins are great for this sort of thing because they can also be aggregated and so different components can pick and choose the behavior they want. The window here is a draggable, that’s closable and has shadow behavior and the server control can simply generate the appropriate plug-ins to apply to the main <div> tag: $().ready(function() { $('#ctl00_MainContent_panEditBook') .closable({ handle: $('#divEditBook_Header') }) .draggable({ dragDelay: 100, handle: '#divEditBook_Header' }) .shadow({ opacity: 0.25, offset: 6 }); }) The window is using the default .closebox style and has its handle set to the header bar (Book Information). The window is just closable to go away so no event handler is applied. Actually I cheated – the actual page’s .closable is a bit more ugly in the sample as it uses an image from a resources file: .closable({ imageUrl: '/WestWindWebToolkit/Samples/WebResource.axd?d=TooLongAndNastyToPrint', handle: $('#divEditBook_Header')}) so you can see how to apply a custom image, which in this case is generated by the server control wrapping the client DragPanel. More interesting maybe is to apply the .closable behavior to list scenarios. For example, each of the individual items in the list display also are .closable using this plug-in. Rather than having to define each item with Html for an image, event handler and link, when the client template is rendered the closable behavior is attached to the list. Here I’m using client-templating and the code that this is done with looks like this: function loadBooks() { showProgress(); // Clear the content $("#divBookListWrapper").empty(); var filter = $("#" + scriptVars.lstFiltersId).val(); Proxy.GetBooks(filter, function(books) { $(books).each(function(i) { updateBook(this); showProgress(true); }); }, onPageError); } function updateBook(book,highlight) { // try to retrieve the single item in the list by tag attribute id var item = $(".bookitem[tag=" +book.Pk +"]"); // grab and evaluate the template var html = parseTemplate(template, book); var newItem = $(html) .attr("tag", book.Pk.toString()) .click(function() { var pk = $(this).attr("tag"); editBook(this, parseInt(pk)); }) .closable({ closeHandler: function(e) { removeBook(this, e); }, imageUrl: "../../images/remove.gif" }); if (item.length > 0) item.after(newItem).remove(); else newItem.appendTo($("#divBookListWrapper")); if (highlight) { newItem .addClass("pulse") .effect("bounce", { distance: 15, times: 3 }, 400); setTimeout(function() { newItem.removeClass("pulse"); }, 1200); } } Here the closable behavior is applied to each of the items along with an event handler, which is nice and easy compared to having to embed the right HTML and click handling into each item in the list individually via markup. Ideally though (and these posts make me realize this often a little late) I probably should set up a custom cssClass to handle the rendering – maybe a CSS class called .removebox that only changes the image from the default box image. This example also hooks up an event handler that is fired in response to the close. In the list I need to know when the remove button is clicked so I can fire of a service call to the server to actually remove the item from the database. The handler code can also return false; to indicate that the window should not be closed optionally. Returning true will close the window. You can find more information about the .closable class behavior and options here: .closable Documentation Plug-ins make Server Control JavaScript much easier I find this plug-in immensely useful especial as part of server control code, because it simplifies the code that has to be generated server side tremendously. This is true of plug-ins in general which make it so much easier to create simple server code that only generates plug-in options, rather than full blocks of JavaScript code. For example, here’s the relevant code from the DragPanel server control which generates the .closable() behavior: if (this.Closable && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(DragHandleID) ) { string imageUrl = this.CloseBoxImage; if (imageUrl == "WebResource" ) imageUrl = ScriptProxy.GetWebResourceUrl(this, this.GetType(), ControlResources.CLOSE_ICON_RESOURCE); StringBuilder closableOptions = new StringBuilder("imageUrl: '" + imageUrl + "'"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.DragHandleID)) closableOptions.Append(",handle: $('#" + this.DragHandleID + "')"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.ClientDialogHandler)) closableOptions.Append(",handler: " + this.ClientDialogHandler); if (this.FadeOnClose) closableOptions.Append(",fadeOut: 'slow'"); startupScript.Append(@" .closable({ " + closableOptions + "})"); } The same sort of block is then used for .draggable and .shadow which simply sets options. Compared to the code I used to have in pre-jQuery versions of my JavaScript toolkit this is a walk in the park. In those days there was a bunch of JS generation which was ugly to say the least. I know a lot of folks frown on using server controls, especially the UI is client centric as the example is. However, I do feel that server controls can greatly simplify the process of getting the right behavior attached more easily and with the help of IntelliSense. Often the script markup is easier is especially if you are dealing with complex, multiple plug-in associations that often express more easily with property values on a control. Regardless of whether server controls are your thing or not this plug-in can be useful in many scenarios. Even in simple client-only scenarios using a plug-in with a few simple parameters is nicer and more consistent than creating the HTML markup over and over again. I hope some of you find this even a small bit as useful as I have. Related Links Download jquery.closable West Wind Web Toolkit jQuery Plug-ins © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery ASP.NET JavaScript

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Table Variables: an empirical approach.

- by Phil Factor

It isn’t entirely a pleasant experience to publish an article only to have it described on Twitter as ‘Horrible’, and to have it criticized on the MVP forum. When this happened to me in the aftermath of publishing my article on Temporary tables recently, I was taken aback, because these critics were experts whose views I respect. What was my crime? It was, I think, to suggest that, despite the obvious quirks, it was best to use Table Variables as a first choice, and to use local Temporary Tables if you hit problems due to these quirks, or if you were doing complex joins using a large number of rows. What are these quirks? Well, table variables have advantages if they are used sensibly, but this requires some awareness by the developer about the potential hazards and how to avoid them. You can be hit by a badly-performing join involving a table variable. Table Variables are a compromise, and this compromise doesn’t always work out well. Explicit indexes aren’t allowed on Table Variables, so one cannot use covering indexes or non-unique indexes. The query optimizer has to make assumptions about the data rather than using column distribution statistics when a table variable is involved in a join, because there aren’t any column-based distribution statistics on a table variable. It assumes a reasonably even distribution of data, and is likely to have little idea of the number of rows in the table variables that are involved in queries. However complex the heuristics that are used might be in determining the best way of executing a SQL query, and they most certainly are, the Query Optimizer is likely to fail occasionally with table variables, under certain circumstances, and produce a Query Execution Plan that is frightful. The experienced developer or DBA will be on the lookout for this sort of problem. In this blog, I’ll be expanding on some of the tests I used when writing my article to illustrate the quirks, and include a subsequent example supplied by Kevin Boles. A simplified example. We’ll start out by illustrating a simple example that shows some of these characteristics. We’ll create two tables filled with random numbers and then see how many matches we get between the two tables. We’ll forget indexes altogether for this example, and use heaps. We’ll try the same Join with two table variables, two table variables with OPTION (RECOMPILE) in the JOIN clause, and with two temporary tables. It is all a bit jerky because of the granularity of the timing that isn’t actually happening at the millisecond level (I used DATETIME). However, you’ll see that the table variable is outperforming the local temporary table up to 10,000 rows. Actually, even without a use of the OPTION (RECOMPILE) hint, it is doing well. What happens when your table size increases? The table variable is, from around 30,000 rows, locked into a very bad execution plan unless you use OPTION (RECOMPILE) to provide the Query Analyser with a decent estimation of the size of the table. However, if it has the OPTION (RECOMPILE), then it is smokin’. Well, up to 120,000 rows, at least. It is performing better than a Temporary table, and in a good linear fashion. What about mixed table joins, where you are joining a temporary table to a table variable? You’d probably expect that the query analyzer would throw up its hands and produce a bad execution plan as if it were a table variable. After all, it knows nothing about the statistics in one of the tables so how could it do any better? Well, it behaves as if it were doing a recompile. And an explicit recompile adds no value at all. (we just go up to 45000 rows since we know the bigger picture now) Now, if you were new to this, you might be tempted to start drawing conclusions. Beware! We’re dealing with a very complex beast: the Query Optimizer. It can come up with surprises What if we change the query very slightly to insert the results into a Table Variable? We change nothing else and just measure the execution time of the statement as before. Suddenly, the table variable isn’t looking so much better, even taking into account the time involved in doing the table insert. OK, if you haven’t used OPTION (RECOMPILE) then you’re toast. Otherwise, there isn’t much in it between the Table variable and the temporary table. The table variable is faster up to 8000 rows and then not much in it up to 100,000 rows. Past the 8000 row mark, we’ve lost the advantage of the table variable’s speed. Any general rule you may be formulating has just gone for a walk. What we can conclude from this experiment is that if you join two table variables, and can’t use constraints, you’re going to need that Option (RECOMPILE) hint. Count Dracula and the Horror Join. These tables of integers provide a rather unreal example, so let’s try a rather different example, and get stuck into some implicit indexing, by using constraints. What unusual words are contained in the book ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker? Here we get a table of all the common words in the English language (60,387 of them) and put them in a table. We put them in a Table Variable with the word as a primary key, a Table Variable Heap and a Table Variable with a primary key. We then take all the distinct words used in the book ‘Dracula’ (7,558 of them). We then create a table variable and insert into it all those uncommon words that are in ‘Dracula’. i.e. all the words in Dracula that aren’t matched in the list of common words. To do this we use a left outer join, where the right-hand value is null. The results show a huge variation, between the sublime and the gorblimey. If both tables contain a Primary Key on the columns we join on, and both are Table Variables, it took 33 Ms. If one table contains a Primary Key, and the other is a heap, and both are Table Variables, it took 46 Ms. If both Table Variables use a unique constraint, then the query takes 36 Ms. If neither table contains a Primary Key and both are Table Variables, it took 116383 Ms. Yes, nearly two minutes!! If both tables contain a Primary Key, one is a Table Variables and the other is a temporary table, it took 113 Ms. If one table contains a Primary Key, and both are Temporary Tables, it took 56 Ms.If both tables are temporary tables and both have primary keys, it took 46 Ms. Here we see table variables which are joined on their primary key again enjoying a slight performance advantage over temporary tables. Where both tables are table variables and both are heaps, the query suddenly takes nearly two minutes! So what if you have two heaps and you use option Recompile? If you take the rogue query and add the hint, then suddenly, the query drops its time down to 76 Ms. If you add unique indexes, then you've done even better, down to half that time. Here are the text execution plans.So where have we got to? Without drilling down into the minutiae of the execution plans we can begin to create a hypothesis. If you are using table variables, and your tables are relatively small, they are faster than temporary tables, but as the number of rows increases you need to do one of two things: either you need to have a primary key on the column you are using to join on, or else you need to use option (RECOMPILE) If you try to execute a query that is a join, and both tables are table variable heaps, you are asking for trouble, well- slow queries, unless you give the table hint once the number of rows has risen past a point (30,000 in our first example, but this varies considerably according to context). Kevin’s Skew In describing the table-size, I used the term ‘relatively small’. Kevin Boles produced an interesting case where a single-row table variable produces a very poor execution plan when joined to a very, very skewed table. In the original, pasted into my article as a comment, a column consisted of 100000 rows in which the key column was one number (1) . To this was added eight rows with sequential numbers up to 9. When this was joined to a single-tow Table Variable with a key of 2 it produced a bad plan. This problem is unlikely to occur in real usage, and the Query Optimiser team probably never set up a test for it. Actually, the skew can be slightly less extreme than Kevin made it. The following test showed that once the table had 54 sequential rows in the table, then it adopted exactly the same execution plan as for the temporary table and then all was well. Undeniably, real data does occasionally cause problems to the performance of joins in Table Variables due to the extreme skew of the distribution. We've all experienced Perfectly Poisonous Table Variables in real live data. As in Kevin’s example, indexes merely make matters worse, and the OPTION (RECOMPILE) trick does nothing to help. In this case, there is no option but to use a temporary table. However, one has to note that once the slight de-skew had taken place, then the plans were identical across a huge range. Conclusions Where you need to hold intermediate results as part of a process, Table Variables offer a good alternative to temporary tables when used wisely. They can perform faster than a temporary table when the number of rows is not great. For some processing with huge tables, they can perform well when only a clustered index is required, and when the nature of the processing makes an index seek very effective. Table Variables are scoped to the batch or procedure and are unlikely to hang about in the TempDB when they are no longer required. They require no explicit cleanup. Where the number of rows in the table is moderate, you can even use them in joins as ‘Heaps’, unindexed. Beware, however, since, as the number of rows increase, joins on Table Variable heaps can easily become saddled by very poor execution plans, and this must be cured either by adding constraints (UNIQUE or PRIMARY KEY) or by adding the OPTION (RECOMPILE) hint if this is impossible. Occasionally, the way that the data is distributed prevents the efficient use of Table Variables, and this will require using a temporary table instead. Tables Variables require some awareness by the developer about the potential hazards and how to avoid them. If you are not prepared to do any performance monitoring of your code or fine-tuning, and just want to pummel out stuff that ‘just runs’ without considering namby-pamby stuff such as indexes, then stick to Temporary tables. If you are likely to slosh about large numbers of rows in temporary tables without considering the niceties of processing just what is required and no more, then temporary tables provide a safer and less fragile means-to-an-end for you.

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Clusterware 11gR2 – Setting up an Active/Passive failover configuration

- by Gilles Haro

Oracle is providing a large range of interesting solutions to ensure High Availability of the database. Dataguard, RAC or even both configurations (as recommended by Oracle for a Maximum Available Architecture - MAA) are the most frequently found and used solutions. But, when it comes to protecting a system with an Active/Passive architecture with failover capabilities, people often thinks to other expensive third party cluster systems. Oracle Clusterware technology, which comes along at no extra-cost with Oracle Database or Oracle Unbreakable Linux, is - in the knowing of most people - often linked to Oracle RAC and therefore, is seldom used to implement failover solutions. Oracle Clusterware 11gR2 (a part of Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure) provides a comprehensive framework to setup automatic failover configurations. It is actually possible to make "failover-able'", and then to protect, almost any kind of application (from the simple xclock to the most complex Application Server). Quoting Oracle: “Oracle Clusterware is a portable cluster software that allows clustering of single servers so that they cooperate as a single system. Oracle Clusterware also provides the required infrastructure for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). In addition Oracle Clusterware enables the protection of any Oracle application or any other kind of application within a cluster.” In the next couple of lines, I will try to present the different steps to achieve this goal : Have a fully operational 11gR2 database protected by automatic failover capabilities. I assume you are fluent in installing Oracle Database 11gR2, Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11gR2 on a Linux system and that ASM is not a problem for you (as I am using it as a shared storage). If not, please have a look at Oracle Documentation. As often, I made my tests using an Oracle VirtualBox environment. The scripts are tested and functional on my system. Unfortunately, there can always be a typo or a mistake. This blog entry does not replace a course around the Clusterware Framework. I just hope it will let you see how powerful it is and that it will give you the whilst to go further with it... Note : This entry has been revised (rev.2) following comments from Philip Newlan. Prerequisite 2 Linux boxes (OELCluster01 and OELCluster02) at the same OS level. I used OEL 5 Update 5 with an Enterprise Kernel. Shared Storage (SAN). On my VirtualBox system, I used Openfiler to simulate the SAN Oracle 11gR2 Database (11.2.0.1) Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure (11.2.0.1) Step 1 - Install the software Using asmlib, create 3 ASM disks (ASM_CRS, ASM_DTA and ASM_FRA) Install Grid Infrastructure for a cluster (OELCluster01 and OELCluster02 are the 2 nodes of the cluster) Use ASM_CRS to store Voting Disk and OCR. Use SCAN. Install Oracle Database Standalone binaries on both nodes. Use asmca to check/mount the disk groups on 2 nodes Use dbca to create and configure a database on the primary node Let's name it DB11G. Copy the pfile, password file to the second node. Create adump directoty on the second node. Step 2 - Setup the resource to be protected After its creation with dbca, the database is automatically protected by the Oracle Restart technology available with Grid Infrastructure. Consequently, it restarts automatically (if possible) after a crash (ex: kill -9 smon). A database resource has been created for that in the Cluster Registry. We can observe this with the command : crsctl status resource that shows and ora.dba11g.db entry. Let's save the definition of this resource, for future use : mkdir -p /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts chown oracle:oinstall /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts crsctl status resource ora.db11g.db -p > /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/myResource.txt Although very interesting, Oracle Restart is not cluster aware and cannot restart the database on any other node of the cluster. So, let's remove it from the OCR definitions, we don't need it ! srvctl stop database -d DB11G srvctl remove database -d DB11G Instead of it, we need to create a new resource of a more general type : cluster_resource. Here are the steps to achieve this : Create an action script : /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh #!/bin/bash export ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 export ORACLE_SID=DB11G case $1 in 'start') $ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus /nolog <<EOF connect / as sysdba startup EOF RET=0 ;; 'stop') $ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus /nolog <<EOF connect / as sysdba shutdown immediate EOF RET=0 ;; 'clean') $ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus /nolog <<EOF connect / as sysdba shutdown abort ##for i in `ps -ef | grep -i $ORACLE_SID | awk '{print $2}' ` ;do kill -9 $i; done EOF RET=0 ;; 'check') ok=`ps -ef | grep smon | grep $ORACLE_SID | wc -l` if [ $ok = 0 ]; then RET=1 else RET=0 fi ;; '*') RET=0 ;; esac if [ $RET -eq 0 ]; then exit 0 else exit 1 fi This script must provide, at least, methods to start, stop, clean and check the database. It is self-explaining and contains nothing special. Just be aware that it must be runnable (+x), it runs as Oracle user (because of the ACL property - see later) and needs to know about the environment. Also make sure it exists on every node of the cluster. Moreover, as of 11.2, the clean method is mandatory. It must provide the “last gasp clean up”, for example, a shutdown abort or a kill –9 of all the remaining processes. chmod +x /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh scp /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh oracle@OELCluster02:/crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts Create a new resource file, based on the information we got from previous myResource.txt . Name it myNewResource.txt. myResource.txt is shown below. As we can see, it defines an ora.database.type resource, named ora.db11g.db. A lot of properties are related to this type of resource and do not need to be used for a cluster_resource. NAME=ora.db11g.db TYPE=ora.database.type ACL=owner:oracle:rwx,pgrp:oinstall:rwx,other::r-- ACTION_FAILURE_TEMPLATE= ACTION_SCRIPT= ACTIVE_PLACEMENT=1 AGENT_FILENAME=%CRS_HOME%/bin/oraagent%CRS_EXE_SUFFIX% AUTO_START=restore CARDINALITY=1 CHECK_INTERVAL=1 CHECK_TIMEOUT=600 CLUSTER_DATABASE=false DB_UNIQUE_NAME=DB11G DEFAULT_TEMPLATE=PROPERTY(RESOURCE_CLASS=database) PROPERTY(DB_UNIQUE_NAME= CONCAT(PARSE(%NAME%, ., 2), %USR_ORA_DOMAIN%, .)) ELEMENT(INSTANCE_NAME= %GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME%) DEGREE=1 DESCRIPTION=Oracle Database resource ENABLED=1 FAILOVER_DELAY=0 FAILURE_INTERVAL=60 FAILURE_THRESHOLD=1 GEN_AUDIT_FILE_DEST=/oracle/admin/DB11G/adump GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME= GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME@SERVERNAME(oelcluster01)=DB11G HOSTING_MEMBERS= INSTANCE_FAILOVER=0 LOAD=1 LOGGING_LEVEL=1 MANAGEMENT_POLICY=AUTOMATIC NLS_LANG= NOT_RESTARTING_TEMPLATE= OFFLINE_CHECK_INTERVAL=0 ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 PLACEMENT=restricted PROFILE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE= RESTART_ATTEMPTS=2 ROLE=PRIMARY SCRIPT_TIMEOUT=60 SERVER_POOLS=ora.DB11G SPFILE=+DTA/DB11G/spfileDB11G.ora START_DEPENDENCIES=hard(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) weak(type:ora.listener.type,uniform:ora.ons,uniform:ora.eons) pullup(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) START_TIMEOUT=600 STATE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE= STOP_DEPENDENCIES=hard(intermediate:ora.asm,shutdown:ora.DTA.dg,shutdown:ora.FRA.dg) STOP_TIMEOUT=600 UPTIME_THRESHOLD=1h USR_ORA_DB_NAME=DB11G USR_ORA_DOMAIN=haroland USR_ORA_ENV= USR_ORA_FLAGS= USR_ORA_INST_NAME=DB11G USR_ORA_OPEN_MODE=open USR_ORA_OPI=false USR_ORA_STOP_MODE=immediate VERSION=11.2.0.1.0 I removed database type related entries from myResource.txt and modified some other to produce the following myNewResource.txt. Notice the NAME property that should not have the ora. prefix Notice the TYPE property that is not ora.database.type but cluster_resource. Notice the definition of ACTION_SCRIPT. Notice the HOSTING_MEMBERS that enumerates the members of the cluster (as returned by the olsnodes command). NAME=DB11G.db TYPE=cluster_resource DESCRIPTION=Oracle Database resource ACL=owner:oracle:rwx,pgrp:oinstall:rwx,other::r-- ACTION_SCRIPT=/crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh PLACEMENT=restricted ACTIVE_PLACEMENT=0 AUTO_START=restore CARDINALITY=1 CHECK_INTERVAL=10 DEGREE=1 ENABLED=1 HOSTING_MEMBERS=oelcluster01 oelcluster02 LOGGING_LEVEL=1 RESTART_ATTEMPTS=1 START_DEPENDENCIES=hard(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) weak(type:ora.listener.type,uniform:ora.ons,uniform:ora.eons) pullup(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) START_TIMEOUT=600 STOP_DEPENDENCIES=hard(intermediate:ora.asm,shutdown:ora.DTA.dg,shutdown:ora.FRA.dg) STOP_TIMEOUT=600 UPTIME_THRESHOLD=1h Register the resource. Take care of the resource type. It needs to be a cluster_resource and not a ora.database.type resource (Oracle recommendation) . crsctl add resource DB11G.db -type cluster_resource -file /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/myNewResource.txt Step 3 - Start the resource crsctl start resource DB11G.db This command launches the ACTION_SCRIPT with a start and a check parameter on the primary node of the cluster. Step 4 - Test this We will test the setup using 2 methods. crsctl relocate resource DB11G.db This command calls the ACTION_SCRIPT (on the two nodes) to stop the database on the active node and start it on the other node. Once done, we can revert back to the original node, but, this time we can use a more "MS$ like" method :Turn off the server on which the database is running. After short delay, you should observe that the database is relocated on node 1. Conclusion Once the software installed and the standalone database created (which is a rather common and usual task), the steps to reach the objective are quite easy : Create an executable action script on every node of the cluster. Create a resource file. Create/Register the resource with OCR using the resource file. Start the resource. This solution is a very interesting alternative to licensable third party solutions. References Clusterware 11gR2 documentation Oracle Clusterware Resource Reference Clusterware for Unbreakable Linux Using Oracle Clusterware to Protect A Single Instance Oracle Database 11gR1 (to have an idea of complexity) Oracle Clusterware on OTN Gilles Haro Technical Expert - Core Technology, Oracle Consulting

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The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

- by Janice J. Heiss

Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant. It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle { private final int dataSize = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6); public void f() { { byte[] data = new byte[dataSize]; } byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize]; } public static void main(String[] args) { JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle(); jmp.f(); }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite { private final int dataSize = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6); public void f() { { byte[] data = new byte[dataSize]; } for(int i=0; i<10; i++) { System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory"); } byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize]; } public static void main(String[] args) { JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite(); jmp.f(); System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError"); }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

- by Janice J. Heiss

Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant. It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle { private final int dataSize = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6); public void f() { { byte[] data = new byte[dataSize]; } byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize]; } public static void main(String[] args) { JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle(); jmp.f(); }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite { private final int dataSize = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6); public void f() { { byte[] data = new byte[dataSize]; } for(int i=0; i<10; i++) { System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory"); } byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize]; } public static void main(String[] args) { JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite(); jmp.f(); System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError"); }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 26, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 26, 2012Popular ReleasesSOLID by example: All examples: All solid examplesJSLint for Resharper: 0.1.4560 Beta: Deadlock removed. No locks before reading cscript output from jslint, not verified to be very safe, but at least VS doesn't crash. Happy linting. :)SiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.1.1726.406): Use of new version of connection controls for a full support of OSDP authentication mechanism for CRM Online.DotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.02: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.02 Changes in 06.00.02 The scripts are now finally compatible with SQL Azure, tested in a new instance on Azure. If you are not targetting Azure, there is no need to upgrade from 06.00.01 (it won't hurt though). Changes in 06.00.01 Icons are shown in module action buttons (workaraound to core issue with IconAPI) Fix to Token2XSL Editor, changing List type raised exception MakeTumbnail and ShowXml handlers had been missing in install package Updated ...StreamInsight Samples: StreamInsight Product Team Samples V2.1: These samples correspond to the new StreamInsight APIs introduced with V2.1.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.2: Development on Umbraco v5 discontinued After much discussion and consultation with leaders from the Umbraco community it was decided that work on the v5 branch would be discontinued with efforts being refocused on the stable and feature rich v4 branch. For full details as to why this decision was made please watch the CodeGarden 12 Keynote. What about all that hard work?!?? We are not binning everything and it does not mean that all work done on 5 is lost! we are taking all of the best and m...IIS Express Manager: IIS Express 0.31 B: V0.1B - 04 May, 2012 Initiated Project. V0.2B - 05May, 2012 1. Fixed small bug. Threw error when stop button was pressed in an already stopped application. 2. Removed start and stop button. Double clicking on list items will now stop / start the websites. 3. Improved code readability. 4. Changed Orientation of Buttons in UI. V0.3B - 06May, 2012 1. Complete modification of IISEM and process ID handling 2. IISEM is now capable of reflecting the existing IISExpress processes right from startup...SPMegaMenu 0.2.0.a: SPMegaMenu 0.2.0.a: SPMegaMenu 0.2.0.a - *Refined the menu to allow for sub category additions. *Release 0.1.0.a did not allow for sub categories. *Also added a Javascript Array Prototype to facilitate removal of duplicates in the sub category return. (the prototype is added as a workaround as I am not able to get the CAML GroupBy function to work correctly against a lookup column)CodeGenerate: CodeGenerate Alpha: The Project can auto generate C# code. Include BLL Layer、Domain Layer、IDAL Layer、DAL Layer. Support SqlServer And Oracle This is a alpha program,but which can run and generate code. Generate database table info into MS WordXDA ROM HUB: XDA ROM HUB v0.9: Kernel listing added -- Thanks to iONEx Added scripts installer button. Added "Nandroid On The Go" -- Perform a Nandroid backup without a PC! Added official Android app!ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.8.2: +2012-06-24 v3.1.8 +????Grid???????（???????ExpandUnusedSpace????????）（??）。 -????MinColumnWidth（??????）。 -????AutoExpandColumn，???????????????（ColumnID）（?????ForceFitFirstTime??ForceFitAllTime，??????）。 -????AutoExpandColumnMax?AutoExpandColumnMin。 -????ForceFitFirstTime，????????????，??????????（????????????）。 -????ForceFitAllTime，????????????，??????????（??????????????????）。 -????VerticalScrollWidth，????????（??????????，0?????????????）。 -????grid/grid_forcefit.aspx。 -???????????En...AJAX Control Toolkit: June 2012 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - June 2012 Release Version 60623June 2012 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ASP.NET 2.0. The latest version that is compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 can be found here: 11121. - Pages using ...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.5: Version: 2.5.0.5 (Milestone 5): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete WAF: Add IsInDesignMode property to the WafConfiguration class. WAF: Introduce the IModuleController interface. WAF: Add ...Windows 8 Metro RSS Reader: Metro RSS Reader.v7: Updated for Windows 8 Release Preview Changed background and foreground colors Used VariableSizeGrid layout to wrap blog posts with images Sort items with Images first, text-only last Enabled Caching to improve navigation between framesConfuser: Confuser 1.9: Change log: * Stable output (i.e. given the same seed & input assemblies, you'll get the same output assemblies) + Generate debug symbols, now it is possible to debug the output under a debugger! (Of course without enabling anti debug) + Generating obfuscation database, most of the obfuscation data in stored in it. + Two tools utilizing the obfuscation database (Database viewer & Stack trace decoder) * Change the protection scheme -----Please read Bug Report before you report a bug-----...XDesigner.Development: First release: First releaseBlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.5: 2012.06.22 Ver5.6.5 　(1) FTP??????? EPSV ??　EPRT　???????MVVM Light Toolkit: V4RTM (binaries only) including Windows 8 RP: This package contains all the latest DLLs for MVVM Light V4 RTM. It includes the DLLs for Windows 8 Release Preview. An updated Nuget package is also available at http://nuget.org/packages/MvvmLightLibs An installer with binaries, snippets and templates will follow ASAP.Weapsy - ASP.NET MVC CMS: 1.0.0: - Some changes to Layout and CSS - Changed version number to 1.0.0.0 - Solved Cache and Session items handler error in IIS 7 - Created the Modules, Plugins and Widgets Areas - Replaced CKEditor with TinyMCE - Created the System Info page - Minor changesAcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v3.11.7: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ...New Projects1000: ONE THOUSANDBackground Folder Copy for Sharepoint 2010: En esta solución se combinan varios elementos para conseguir sincronizar una carpeta local o compartida con una librería de documentos de Sharepoint 2010Cache in sandbox: The illustration for the question on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/q/11182321/240613CCITTCodecs: A native .NET CCITT Group4 Codec. This is NOT a full featured tiff library. It only encodes pixels into group4.CharTest: Small utility that allows you to analyze a string of characters and see at-a-glance in which categories each characters belongs and other small features.EDT Attribute Editor: One of the applications in the Ecosystem Diagnosis & Treatment suite.EDT Geometry Navigator: One of the applications in the Ecosystem Diagnosis & Treatment suite.EDT Population Editor: One of the applications in the Ecosystem Diagnosis & Treatment suite.EDT Report Generator: One of the applications in the Ecosystem Diagnosis & Treatment suite.ePay payment gateway provider for NB_Store: ePay payment gateway provider for DNN module NB_StoreFizzBuzzCode: FizzBuzz coding assignmentINI Library: The IniLibrary is a simplified C# library for accessing INI files quickly and efficiently. It is able to parse virtually all INI files.jos .net sdk: jos .net sdkjQuery Metro Plug in: Simple jQuery plug in to create easy Metro UI.Metro Event To Command: Metro Event To Command is a replacement for EventToCommand behavior for Windows RT. MyMichael: My MichaelNETDeob0: .NET Deobfuscator by UbbeLoLNokia Image Downloader: Simple application to download image and video files from some source (typically phone). Application ensures that only new files will be downloaded into specified folder; previously downloaded files are ignored. Moreover, user can specify which folders will be searched for image and video files.PaRV: Parallelizing Runtime Detection and Prevention of Concurrency Errors: Will be added soonSimple Things to do website: Users can manage their own individual to-do lists by registering themselves on this site.SP Workflows: The SP Workflows utility is a tool used for monitoring a “Workflow Internal State” and “Workflow Status” for the workflows associated to a SharePoint List testdd06252012: zxctestddgit062520122: ghtestddhg06252012: zcxtesthg062520122: gfTopAddIn: Excel???? VSTOUniversal redirector: Use NTFS junctions to redirect directories, the easy way!VSE: This is a source management site for VSE before deployed.WPFClock: Simple clock app, written in WFP.www.blfoley.com Samples by Bradley Foley: A project containing various sample on quick ways to do thingsZune Connection Detector: A quick, clean method to detect if Zune is connected with Windows Phone.zy26: zy26 was here...

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Ubuntu 12.04 does not see windows already install on my computer (dual installation)

- by jacinta

I was trying to install the ubuntu 12.4 along side windows 7 on my new HP Pavilion 64k desktop with windows 7 computer but Ubuntu said that ( This computer has no detected operating system) and some one said (I suggest you chkdsk your Windows partition. I also suggest you resize the NTFS in WIndows then install Ubuntu to the free space.) Therefore I did (To shrink a simple or spanned volume using the Windows interface In Disk Management, right-click the simple or spanned volume you want to shrink. Click Shrink Volume…. Follow the instructions on your screen.) Then When I try to install ubuntu 12.4 after doing this, I received the same error. I was going to undo what I did but I see that I lose 1g when I do that so now what do I do? it says I can do a new simple volume and maybe then the space will no longer be unallocated. Please help me. I think I have a bad cd (ubuntu 12.4) cause from my research I see that I am not suppose to get a screen saying that (The computer has no detected operating system) I think this is a bad cd and I hope I did not mess up my computer. Please help. .................................................................................... O k I think I am following what you said about how to edit my question irrational john. I did chkdsk as you and actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) told me to AND ALSO did a lot of other things before I found out how to chkdsk. No problems. Thank you. Then I put back the space (extended) I took from system. I still was only able to put back 15 and not 16 so it is up to 99mb not back to 100mb. Then I shrank HP (C) as you told me, to 10 13,240 mb which is (12.93gb Unallocated). I did not change it into NTSF by doing the (New Simple Volume Action) I just left it. Then I tried to install UBUNTU 12.04 live CD amd64 and it gave me the results it was sometimes giving me before which is result (THAT Ubuntu) does not tell me weather I have or have not an already installed windows7. It just goes to a window that would have showed me information on what I have and on the bottom (DEVICE FOR BOOT LOADER INSTALLATION /dev/sda ) and the option to go BACK, QUIT, or INSTALL. (I think it is the INSTALLATION TYPE window). Therefore I do what I have been doing and I QUIT. What do I do now? Sorry that it seems like I cannot do anything on my own. On the Youtube video how to install ubuntu dual-boot alongside windows UBUNTU is installed so easy. The installation option page gives 3 options including dual instillation and the disk even lets you use a slider to slide to the size of the partition size you want. Yet my UBUNTU live cd is a mess and I checked it as one of you guys told me and got back information that it is good. Oh well this guy says you should press a control key to tell which device you are using to install ubuntu before the screen comes up. I guess cause it is old. This page also shows you easy stuff that do not show up on my cd. how to dual-boot UBUNTU and windows 7 P.S.. I saw this on the windows 7 website windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Formatting-disks-and-drives-frequently-asked-questions CREATE A BOOT PARTITION I HAD TO LEAVE OUT THE HTTP STUFF CAUSE I AM ONLY ALLOWED 2 ON A PAGE IT SAID To create a boot partition Warning Warning If you are installing different versions of Windows, you must install the earliest version first. If you don't do this, your computer may become inoperable. Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management.? Administrator permission required If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next. Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the volume, and then click Next. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following: If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next. To format the volume with the default settings, click Next. For more information about formatting, see Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions. Review your choices, and then click Finish. AND THIS ON ANOTHER PAGE. Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions Hard disks, the primary storage devices on your computer, need to be formatted before you can use them. When you format a disk, you configure it with a file system so that Windows can store information on the disk. Hard disks in new computers running Windows are already formatted. If you buy an additional hard disk to expand the storage of your computer, you might need to format it. Storage devices such as USB flash drives and flash memory cards usually come preformatted by the manufacturer, so you probably won't need to format them. CDs and DVDs, on the other hand, use different formats from hard disks and removable storage devices. For information about formatting CDs and DVDs, see Which CD or DVD format should I use? Warning Warning Formatting erases any existing files on a hard disk. If you format a hard disk that has files on it, the files will be deleted. WHAT I DID WAS I GOT TO COMPUTER MANAGEMENT SECTION THEN I CLICKED ON DRIVE HP(C) (it put stripes on to show it is selected) Then I click on ACTION selected ALL TASKS AND THEN selected SHRINK VOLUME and then chose how much space from what it was giving me that I wanted. (12.93gb) AND THAT WAS ALL I DID. THEN I TRIED TO INSTALL UBUNTU i NEVER GOT THE 3RD SCREEN THAT IS IN THE VIDEO I INCLUDED (THE YOUTUBE WITH THE ENGLISH GUY) INSTALLATION TYPE I ALSO DID NOT GET THE 4TH SCREEN THAT ALLOWS YOU TO SELECT PARTITION SIZE what i got next was the 2nd INSTILLATION TYPE window shown on the (LINUX BS DOS.COM) PAGE THAT I INCLUDED and it showed no information about any drives (no drives /partition or stuff was shown) only the Boot Loader statement and the dev/sda bar and that's why i did not press install but chose to QUIT. SORRY I JUST NOW SAW YOUR ANSWER IRRATIONAL JOHN. I SHRANK HP(C) BY 12.93GB MY UNALLOCATED SPACE IS NOW 12.93GB HP(C) = 907.17gb NTSF...YOU ARE CORRECT WITH EVERYTHING YOU SAID This is what i read on (http://)windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-a-boot-partition I am only allowed 2 links Create a boot partition You must be logged on as an administrator to perform these steps. A boot partition is a partition that contains the files for the Windows operating system. If you want to install a second operating system on your computer (called a dual-boot or multiboot configuration), you need to create another partition on the hard disk, and then install the additional operating system on the new partition. Your hard disk would then have one system partition and two boot partitions. (A system partition is the partition that contains the hardware-related files. These tell the computer where to look to start Windows.) To create a partition on a basic disk, there must be unallocated disk space on your hard disk. With Disk Management, you can create a maximum of three primary partitions on a hard disk. You can create extended partitions, which include logical drives within them, if you need more partitions on the disk. Picture of disk space in Computer ManagementUnallocated disk space If there is no unallocated space, you will either need to create space by shrinking or deleting an existing partition or by using a third-party partitioning tool to repartition your hard disk. For more information, see Can I repartition my hard disk? To create a boot partition Warning Warning If you are installing different versions of Windows, you must install the earliest version first. If you don't do this, your computer may become inoperable. Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management.? Administrator permission required If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next. Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the volume, and then click Next. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following: If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next. To format the volume with the default settings, click Next. For more information about formatting, see Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions. Review your choices, and then click Finish. I did what you told me @irrational john and this is the screen shot. I ENTERED ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo os-prober computer did not respond so I entered ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get -y remove dmraid computer responded with Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: dmraid 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded. After this operation, 141 kB disk space will be freed. (Reading database ... 147515 files and directories currently installed.) Removing dmraid ... update-initramfs is disabled since running on read-only media Processing triggers for man-db ... I entered ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo os-prober Computer Responded with /dev/sda1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain /dev/sda3:Windows Recovery Environment (loader):Windows1:chain ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ............... @obsessiveFOSS I don't know what is a Grub menu and I do not know what is the Ubuntu boot option The answer you gave to me was correct. This one {This apparently removes the dmraid metadata. After doing that, you can use the desktop icon Install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to start the Ubuntu installer. This time the Installation Type window should contain the option to Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7.} This is what I decided to do. I did not see the rest of your help 'till now. Never the less. I think the best thing for me to do now is to get a cheap used laptop and either do a dual installation or just install Ubuntu on to it. This way if I have any issues that I cannot solve like the one I had here, at least I will still have a usable computer to work on and to use to get answers with because I am not an expert like the people on this forum. Thanks a lot I will try to keep learning and do research enough to some day help someone else.

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Adopting Technologies for the Sake of Technologies

- by shiju

Unlike other engineering industries, the software engineering industry is really lacking maturity. The lack of maturity can see in different aspects of entire software development life cycle. I think other engineering industries are well organised and structured with common, proven engineering practices. The software engineering industry is greatly a diverse industry with different operating systems, and variety of development platforms, programming languages, frameworks and tools. Now these days, people are going behind the hypes and intellectual thoughts without understanding their core business problems and adopting technologies and practices for the sake of technologies and practices and simply becoming a “poster child” of technologies and practices. Understanding the core business problem and providing best, solid solution with a platform neutral approach, will give you more business values and ROI, instead of blindly adopting technologies and tailor-made your applications for the sake of technologies and practices. People have been simply migrating their solutions in favour of new technologies and different versions of frameworks without any business need. The “Pepsi Challenge” in the Software Development Pepsi Challenge marketing campaign of the 1980s was a popular and very interesting marketing promotion in which people taste one cup of Pepsi and another cup with Coca Cola. In the taste test, more than 50% of people were preferred Pepsi over Coca Cola. The success story behind the Pepsi was more sweetness contains in the Pepsi cola. They have simply added more sugar and more people preferred more sweet flavour. You can’t simply identify the better one after sipping one cup of cola based on the sweetness which contains. These things have been happening in the software industry for choosing development frameworks and technologies. People have been simply choosing frameworks based on the initial sugary feeling without understanding its core strengths and weakness. The sugary framework might be more harmful when you develop real-world systems. There is not any silver bullet for solving all kind of problems and frameworks and tools do have strengths and weakness. So it would be better to understand their strength and weakness. And please keep in mind that you have to develop real apps to understand the real capabilities and weakness of a framework. Evaluating a technology based on few blog posts will harm your projects and these bloggers might be lacking real-world experience with the framework. The Problem with Align a Development Practice with Tools Recently I have observed a discussion in a group where one guy asked suggestions for practicing Continuous Delivery (CD) as part of the agile based application engineering. Then the discussion quickly went to using and choosing a Continuous Integration (CI) tool and different people suggested different Continuous Integration (CI) tools for simply practicing Continuous Delivery. If you have worked with core agile engineering practices, you could clearly know that the real essence of agile is neither choosing a tool nor choosing a process. By simply choosing CI tool from a particular vendor will not ensure that you are delivering an evolving software based on customer feedback. You have to understand the real essence of a engineering practice and choose a right tool for practicing it instead of simply focus on a particular tool for a practicing an development practice. If you want to adopt a practice, you need a solid understanding on it with its real essence where tools are just helping us for better automation. Adopting New Technologies for the Sake of Technologies The another problem is that developers have been a tendency to adopt new technologies and simply migrating their existing apps to new technologies. It is okay if your existing system is having problem with a technology stack or or maintainability challenge with existing solution, and moving to new technology for solving the current problems. We have been adopting new technologies for solving new challenges like solving the scalability challenges when the application or user bases is growing unpredictably. Please keep in mind that all new technologies will become old after working with it for few years. The below Facebook status update of Janakiraman, expresses the attitude of a typical customer. For an example, Node.js is becoming a hottest buzzword in the software industry and many developers are trying to adopt Node.js for their apps. The important thing is that Node.js is a minimalist framework that does some great things for some problems, but it’s not a silver bullet. I have been also working with Node.js which is good for some problems, but really bad for choosing it for all kind of problems. By adopting new technologies for new projects is good if we could get real business values from it because newer framework would solve some existing well known problems and provide better solutions where it can incorporate good solutions for the latest challenges . But adopting a new technology for the sake of new technology is really bad idea. Another example is JavaScript is getting lot of attention so that lot of developers are developing heavy JavaScript centric web apps. First, they will adopt a client-side JavaScript MV* framework from AngularJS, Ember, Backbone etc, and develop a Single Page App(SPA) where they are repeating the mistakes we did in the past with server-side. The mistakes we did in the server-side is transforming to client-side. The problem is that people are just adopting new technologies, but not improving their solutions. I predict that many Single Page App will suck in the future. We need a hybrid approach where we should be able to leverage both server-side and client-side for developing next-generation web apps. The another problem is that if you like a particular framework, use it for all kind of apps. In the past, I know some Silverlight passionate guys were tried to use that framework for all kind of apps including larger line of business apps. And these days developers are migrating their existing Silverlight apps in favour of HTML5 buzzword. So the real question is, what is the business values we are getting from these apps when we are developing it for the sake of a particular technology instead of business need. The another problem is that our solutions consultants are trying to provide unnecessary solutions for the sake of a particular technology or for a hype. For an example, Big Data solutions are great for solving the problem of three Vs : volume, velocity and variety. But trying to put this for every application will make problems. Let’s say, there is a small web site running with limited budget and saying that we need a recommendation engine for the web site with a Hadoop based solution with a 16 node cluster, would be really horrible. If we really need a Hadoop based solution, got for it, but trying to put this for all application would be a big disaster. It would be great if could understand the core business problems first, and later choose a right framework for providing solutions for the actual business problem, instead of trying to provide so many solutions. The Problem with Tied Up to a Platform Vendor Some organizations and teams are tied up with a particular platform vendor where they don’t want to use any product other than their preferred or existing platform vendor. They will accept any product provided by the vendor regardless of its capability. This will lets you some benefits regards with integration and collaboration of different products provided by the same vendor, but it will loose your opportunity to provide better solution for your business problems. For a real world sample scenario, lot of companies have been using SAP for their ERP solutions. When they are thinking about mobility or thinking about developing hybrid mobile apps, they can easily find out a framework from SAP. SAP provides a framework for HTML 5 based UI development named SAPUI5. If you are simply adopting that framework only based for the preference of existing platform vendor, you might be loose different opportunities for providing better solution. Initially you might enjoy the sugary feeling provided by the platform vendor, but you have to think about developing apps which should be capable for solving future challenges. I am not saying that any framework is not good and I believe that all frameworks are good over another one for solving at least one problem. My point is that we should not tied up with any specific platform vendor unless your organization is having resource availability problems. Being Polyglot for Providing Right Solutions The modern software engineering industry is greatly diverse with different tools and platforms. Lot of open source frameworks and new programming languages have been releasing to the developer community, where choosing the right platform without any biased opinion, is really a difficult task. But it would really great if we could develop an attitude with platform neutral mindset and being a polyglot developer for providing better solutions based on the actual business problems. IMHO, we should learn a new programming language and a new framework every year. This will improve the quality of our developer capabilities and also improve the quality of our primary programming language skills. Being polyglot for individual developers and organizational teams will give you greater opportunity to your developer experience and also for your applications. Organizations can analyse their business problem without tied with any technology and later they can provide solutions by choosing different platform and tools. Summary In this blog post, what I was trying to say that we should not tied up or biased with any development platform, technology, vendor or programming language and we should not adopt technologies and practices for the sake of technologies. If we are adopting a technology or a practice for the sake of it, we are simply becoming a “poster child” of the technology and practice. We should not become a poster child of other people’s intellectual thoughts and theories, instead of it we should become solutions developers and solutions consultants where we should be able to provide better solutions for the business problems. Being a polyglot developer is a good idea for improving your developer skills which lets you provide better solutions for the business problems. The most important thing is that we should become platform neutral developers where our passion should be for providing brilliant solutions. It would be great if we could provide minimalist, pragmatic business solutions. You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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Taking web sites offline for demonstration

While working in software development in general, and in web development for a couple of customers it is quite common that it is necessary to provide a test bed where the client is able to get an image, or better said, a feeling for the visions and ideas you are talking about. Usually here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. we set up a demo web site on one of our staging servers, and provide credentials to the customer to access and review our progress and work ad hoc. This gives us the highest flexibility on both sides, as the test bed is simply online and available 24/7. We can update the structure, the UI and data at any time, and the client is able to view it as it suits best for her/him. Limited or lack of online connectivity But what is going to happen when your client is not capable to be online - no matter for what reasons; here are some more obvious ones: No internet connection (permanently or temporarily) Expensive connection, ie. mobile data package, stay at a hotel, etc. Presentation devices at an exhibition, ie. using tablets or iPads Being abroad for a certain time, and only occasionally online No network coverage, especially on mobile Bad infrastructure, like ie. in Third World countries Providing a catalogue on CD or USB pen drive Anyway, it doesn't matter really. We should be able to provide a solution for the circumstances of our customers. Presentation during an exhibition Recently, we had the following request from a customer: Is it possible to let us have a desktop version of ResortWork.co.uk that we can use for demo purposes at the forthcoming Ski Shows? It would allow us to let stand visitors browse the sites on an iPad to view jobs and training directory course listings. Yes, sure we can do that. Eventually, you might think why don't they simply use 3G enabled iPads for that purpose? As stated above, there might be several reasons for that - low coverage, expensive data packages, etc. Anyway, it is not a question on how to circumvent the request but to deliver a solution to that. Possible solutions... or not? We already did offline websites earlier, and even established complete mirrors of one or two web sites on our systems. There are actually several possibilities to handle this kind of request, and it mainly depends on the system or device where the offline site should be available on. Here, it is clearly expressed that we have to address this on an Apple iPad, well actually, I think that they'd like to use multiple devices during their exhibitions. Following is an overview of possible solutions depending on the technology or device in use, and how it can be done: Replication of source files and database The above mentioned web site is running on ASP.NET, IIS and SQL Server. In case that a laptop or slate runs a Windows OS, the easiest way would be to take a snapshot of the source files and database, and transfer them as local installation to those Windows machines. This approach would be fully operational on the local machine. Saving pages for offline usage This is actually a quite tedious job but still practicable for small web sites Tool based approach to 'harvest' the web site There quite some tools in the wild that could handle this job, namely wget, httrack, web copier, etc. Screenshots bundled as PDF document Not really... ;-) Creating screencast or video Simply navigate through your website and record your desktop session. Actually, we are using this kind of approach to track down difficult problems in order to see and understand exactly what the user was doing to cause an error. Of course, this list isn't complete and I'd love to get more of your ideas in the comments section below the article. Preparations for offline browsing The original website is dynamically and data-driven by ASP.NET, and looks like this: As we have to put the result onto iPads we are going to choose the tool-based approach to 'download' the whole web site for offline usage. Again, depending on the complexity of your web site you might have to check which of the applications produces the best results for you. My usual choice is to use wget but in this case, we run into problems related to the rewriting of hyperlinks. As a consequence of that we opted for using HTTrack. HTTrack comes in different flavours, like console application but also as either GUI (WinHTTrack on Windows) or Web client (WebHTTrack on Linux/Unix/BSD). Here's a brief description taken from the original website about HTTrack: HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. And there is an extensive documentation for all options and switches online. General recommendation is to go through the HTTrack Users Guide By Fred Cohen. It covers all the initial steps you need to get up and running. Be aware that it will take quite some time to get all the necessary resources down to your machine. Actually, for our customer we run the tool directly on their web server to avoid unnecessary traffic and bandwidth. After a couple of runs and some additional fine-tuning - explicit inclusion or exclusion of various external linked web sites - we finally had a more or less complete offline version available. A very handsome feature of HTTrack is the error/warning log after completing the download. It contains some detailed information about errors that appeared on the pages and the links within the pages that have been processed. Error: "Bad Request" (400) at link www.resortwork.co.uk/job-details_Ski_hire:tech_or_mgr_or_driver_37854.aspx (from www.resortwork.co.uk/Jobs_A_to_Z.aspx)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/images/applynow.png (from www.247recruit.net/css/global.css)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/activate.html (from www.247recruit.net/247recruit_tefl_jobs_network.html) In our situation, we took the records of HTTP 400/404 errors and passed them to the web development department. Improvements are to be expected soon. ;-) Quality assurance on the full-featured desktop Unfortunately, the generated output of HTTrack was still incomplete but luckily there were only images missing. Being directly on the web server we simply copied the missing images from the original source folder into our offline version. After that, we created an archive and transferred the file securely to our local workspace for further review and checks. From that point on, it wasn't necessary to get any more files from the original web server, and we could focus ourselves completely on the process of browsing and navigating through the offline version to isolate visual differences and functional problems. As said, the original web site runs on ASP.NET Web Forms and uses Postback calls for interaction like search, pagination and partly for navigation. This is the main field of improving the offline experience. Of course, same as for standard web development it is advised to test with various browsers, and strangely we discovered that the offline version looked pretty good on Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but not in Internet Explorer. A quick look at the HTML source shed some light on this, and there are conditional CSS inclusions based on the user agent. HTTrack is not acting as Internet Explorer and so we didn't have the necessary overrides for this browser. Not problematic after all in our case, but you might have to pay attention to this and get the IE-specific files explicitly. And while having a view at the source code, we also found out that HTTrack actually modifies the generated HTML output. In several occasions we discovered that <div> elements were converted into <table> constructs for no obvious reason; even nested structures. Search 'e'nd destroy - sed (or Notepad++) to the rescue During our intensive root cause analysis for a couple of HTML/CSS problems that needed some extra attention it is very helpful to be familiar with any editor that allows search and replace over multiple files like, ie. sed - stream editor for filtering and transforming text on Linux or my personal favourite Notepad++ on Windows. This allowed us to quickly fix a lot of anchors with onclick attributes and Javascript code that was addressed to ASP.NET files instead of their generated HTML counterparts, like so: grep -lr -e '.aspx' * | xargs sed -e 's/.aspx/.html?/g' The additional question mark after the HTML extension helps to separate the query string from the actual target and solved all our missing hyperlinks very fast. The same can be done in Notepad++ on Windows, too. Just use the 'Replace in files' feature and you are settled. Especially, in combination with Regular Expressions (regex). Landscape of browsers Okay, after several runs of HTML/CSS code analysis, searching and replacing some strings in a pool of more than 4.000 files, we finally had a very good match of an offline browsing experience in Firefox and Chrome on Linux. Next, we transferred that modified set of files to a Windows 8 machine for review on Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer 7 to 10, and a Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.7 to check the output on Safari and again on Chrome. Besides IE, for reasons already mentioned above, the results were identical. And last but not least it was about to check web site on tablets. Please continue to read on the following articles: Taking web sites offline for demonstration on Galaxy Tablet Taking web sites offline for demonstration on iPad

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Constant game speed independent of variable FPS in OpenGL with GLUT?

- by Nazgulled

I've been reading Koen Witters detailed article about different game loop solutions but I'm having some problems implementing the last one with GLUT, which is the recommended one. After reading a couple of articles, tutorials and code from other people on how to achieve a constant game speed, I think that what I currently have implemented (I'll post the code below) is what Koen Witters called Game Speed dependent on Variable FPS, the second on his article. First, through my searching experience, there's a couple of people that probably have the knowledge to help out on this but don't know what GLUT is and I'm going to try and explain (feel free to correct me) the relevant functions for my problem of this OpenGL toolkit. Skip this section if you know what GLUT is and how to play with it. GLUT Toolkit: GLUT is an OpenGL toolkit and helps with common tasks in OpenGL. The glutDisplayFunc(renderScene) takes a pointer to a renderScene() function callback, which will be responsible for rendering everything. The renderScene() function will only be called once after the callback registration. The glutTimerFunc(TIMER_MILLISECONDS, processAnimationTimer, 0) takes the number of milliseconds to pass before calling the callback processAnimationTimer(). The last argument is just a value to pass to the timer callback. The processAnimationTimer() will not be called each TIMER_MILLISECONDS but just once. The glutPostRedisplay() function requests GLUT to render a new frame so we need call this every time we change something in the scene. The glutIdleFunc(renderScene) could be used to register a callback to renderScene() (this does not make glutDisplayFunc() irrelevant) but this function should be avoided because the idle callback is continuously called when events are not being received, increasing the CPU load. The glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME) function returns the number of milliseconds since glutInit was called (or first call to glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME)). That's the timer we have with GLUT. I know there are better alternatives for high resolution timers, but let's keep with this one for now. I think this is enough information on how GLUT renders frames so people that didn't know about it could also pitch in this question to try and help if they fell like it. Current Implementation: Now, I'm not sure I have correctly implemented the second solution proposed by Koen, Game Speed dependent on Variable FPS. The relevant code for that goes like this: #define TICKS_PER_SECOND 30 #define MOVEMENT_SPEED 2.0f const int TIMER_MILLISECONDS = 1000 / TICKS_PER_SECOND; int previousTime; int currentTime; int elapsedTime; void renderScene(void) { (...) // Setup the camera position and looking point SceneCamera.LookAt(); // Do all drawing below... (...) } void processAnimationTimer(int value) { // setups the timer to be called again glutTimerFunc(TIMER_MILLISECONDS, processAnimationTimer, 0); // Get the time when the previous frame was rendered previousTime = currentTime; // Get the current time (in milliseconds) and calculate the elapsed time currentTime = glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME); elapsedTime = currentTime - previousTime; /* Multiply the camera direction vector by constant speed then by the elapsed time (in seconds) and then move the camera */ SceneCamera.Move(cameraDirection * MOVEMENT_SPEED * (elapsedTime / 1000.0f)); // Requests to render a new frame (this will call my renderScene() once) glutPostRedisplay(); } void main(int argc, char **argv) { glutInit(&argc, argv); (...) glutDisplayFunc(renderScene); (...) // Setup the timer to be called one first time glutTimerFunc(TIMER_MILLISECONDS, processAnimationTimer, 0); // Read the current time since glutInit was called currentTime = glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME); glutMainLoop(); } This implementation doesn't fell right. It works in the sense that helps the game speed to be constant dependent on the FPS. So that moving from point A to point B takes the same time no matter the high/low framerate. However, I believe I'm limiting the game framerate with this approach. Each frame will only be rendered when the time callback is called, that means the framerate will be roughly around TICKS_PER_SECOND frames per second. This doesn't feel right, you shouldn't limit your powerful hardware, it's wrong. It's my understanding though, that I still need to calculate the elapsedTime. Just because I'm telling GLUT to call the timer callback every TIMER_MILLISECONDS, it doesn't mean it will always do that on time. I'm not sure how can I fix this and to be completely honest, I have no idea what is the game loop in GLUT, you know, the while( game_is_running ) loop in Koen's article. But it's my understanding that GLUT is event-driven and that game loop starts when I call glutMainLoop() (which never returns), yes? I thought I could register an idle callback with glutIdleFunc() and use that as replacement of glutTimerFunc(), only rendering when necessary (instead of all the time as usual) but when I tested this with an empty callback (like void gameLoop() {}) and it was basically doing nothing, only a black screen, the CPU spiked to 25% and remained there until I killed the game and it went back to normal. So I don't think that's the path to follow. Using glutTimerFunc() is definitely not a good approach to perform all movements/animations based on that, as I'm limiting my game to a constant FPS, not cool. Or maybe I'm using it wrong and my implementation is not right? How exactly can I have a constant game speed with variable FPS? More exactly, how do I correctly implement Koen's Constant Game Speed with Maximum FPS solution (the fourth one on his article) with GLUT? Maybe this is not possible at all with GLUT? If not, what are my alternatives? What is the best approach to this problem (constant game speed) with GLUT? I originally posted this question on Stack Overflow before being pointed out about this site. The following is a different approach I tried after creating the question in SO, so I'm posting it here too. Another Approach: I've been experimenting and here's what I was able to achieve now. Instead of calculating the elapsed time on a timed function (which limits my game's framerate) I'm now doing it in renderScene(). Whenever changes to the scene happen I call glutPostRedisplay() (ie: camera moving, some object animation, etc...) which will make a call to renderScene(). I can use the elapsed time in this function to move my camera for instance. My code has now turned into this: int previousTime; int currentTime; int elapsedTime; void renderScene(void) { (...) // Setup the camera position and looking point SceneCamera.LookAt(); // Do all drawing below... (...) } void renderScene(void) { (...) // Get the time when the previous frame was rendered previousTime = currentTime; // Get the current time (in milliseconds) and calculate the elapsed time currentTime = glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME); elapsedTime = currentTime - previousTime; /* Multiply the camera direction vector by constant speed then by the elapsed time (in seconds) and then move the camera */ SceneCamera.Move(cameraDirection * MOVEMENT_SPEED * (elapsedTime / 1000.0f)); // Setup the camera position and looking point SceneCamera.LookAt(); // All drawing code goes inside this function drawCompleteScene(); glutSwapBuffers(); /* Redraw the frame ONLY if the user is moving the camera (similar code will be needed to redraw the frame for other events) */ if(!IsTupleEmpty(cameraDirection)) { glutPostRedisplay(); } } void main(int argc, char **argv) { glutInit(&argc, argv); (...) glutDisplayFunc(renderScene); (...) currentTime = glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME); glutMainLoop(); } Conclusion, it's working, or so it seems. If I don't move the camera, the CPU usage is low, nothing is being rendered (for testing purposes I only have a grid extending for 4000.0f, while zFar is set to 1000.0f). When I start moving the camera the scene starts redrawing itself. If I keep pressing the move keys, the CPU usage will increase; this is normal behavior. It drops back when I stop moving. Unless I'm missing something, it seems like a good approach for now. I did find this interesting article on iDevGames and this implementation is probably affected by the problem described on that article. What's your thoughts on that? Please note that I'm just doing this for fun, I have no intentions of creating some game to distribute or something like that, not in the near future at least. If I did, I would probably go with something else besides GLUT. But since I'm using GLUT, and other than the problem described on iDevGames, do you think this latest implementation is sufficient for GLUT? The only real issue I can think of right now is that I'll need to keep calling glutPostRedisplay() every time the scene changes something and keep calling it until there's nothing new to redraw. A little complexity added to the code for a better cause, I think. What do you think?

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Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response

- by Michael Stephenson

Background One of the clients I work with had been experiencing some issues for a while surrounding web service timeouts. It's been a little challenging to work through the problems due to limitations in the diagnostic information available from one of the applications, but I learned some interesting things while troubleshooting the problem which don't seem to have been discussed much in the community so I thought I'd share my findings. In the scenario we have BizTalk trying to make calls to a .net web service which was exposed as a WSE 2 endpoint. In the process BizTalk will try to make a large number of concurrent web service calls to the application, and the backend application has more than enough infrastructure and capability to handle the load. We have configured the <ConnectionManagement> section of the BizTalk configuration file to support up to 100 concurrent connections from each of our 2 BizTalk send servers to the web servers of the application. The problem we were facing was that the BizTalk side was reporting a significant number of timeouts when calling the web service. One of the biggest issues was the challenge of being able to correlate a message from BizTalk to the IIS log in the .net application and the custom logs in the application especially when there was a fairly large number of servers hosting the web services. However the key moment came when we were able to identify a specific call which had taken 40 seconds to execute on the server (yes a long time I know but that's a different story!). Anyway we were able to identify that this had timed out on the BizTalk side. Based on the normal 2 minute timeout we knew something unexpected was going on. From here I decided to do some experimentation and I wanted to start outside of BizTalk because my hunch was this was not a BizTalk behaviour but something which was being highlighted by BizTalk because of our large load. Server-side - Sample Web Service To begin with I created a sample web service. Nothing special just a vanilla asmx web service hosted in IIS6 on Windows 2003 Standard Edition. The web service is just a hello world style web service as shown in the below picture. The only key feature is that the server side web method has a 30 second sleep in it and will trace out some information before and after the thread is set to sleep. In the configuration for this web service there again is nothing special it's pretty much the most plain simple web service you could build. Client-Side To begin looking at what was happening with our example I created a number of different ways to consume the web service. SoapHttpClientProtocol Example I created a small application which would use a normal proxy generated to call the web service. It would iterate around a loop and make calls using the begin/end methods so I can do this asynchronously. I would do a loop of 20 calls with the ConnectionManager configuration section supporting only 5 concurrent connections to the server. <connectionManagement> <remove address="*"/> <add address = "*" maxconnection = "12" /> <add address = "http://<ServerName>" maxconnection = "5" /> </connectionManagement> </system.net> The below picture shows an example of the service calling code, key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service The Test I would run the client and execute 21 calls to the web service. The Results Below is the client side trace showing what's happening on the client. In the below diagram is the web service side trace showing what's happening on the server Some observations on the results are: All of the calls were successful from the clients perspective You could see the next call starting on the server as soon as the previous one had completed Calls took significantly longer than 40 seconds from the start of our call to the return. In fact call 20 took 2 minutes and 30 seconds from the perspective of my code to execute even though I had set the timeout to 40 seconds WSE 2 Sample In the second example I used the exact same code to call the web service again with a single exception that I modified the web service proxy to derive from WebServiceClient protocol which is part of WSE 2 (using SP3). The below picture shows the basic code and the key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service The Test This test would execute 21 calls from the client to the web service. The Results The below trace is from the client side: The below trace is from the server side: Some observations on the trace results for this scenario are: With call 4 if you look at the server side trace it did not start executing on the server for a number of seconds after the other 4 initial calls which were accepted by the server. I re-ran the test and this happened a couple of times and not on most others so at this point I'm just putting this down to something unexpected happening on the development machine and we will leave this observation out of scope of this article. You can see that the client side trace statement executed almost immediately in all cases All calls after the initial few calls would timeout On the client side the calls that did timeout; timed out in a longer duration than the 40 seconds we set as the timeout You can see that as calls were completing on the server the next calls were starting to come through The calls that timed out on the client did actually connect to the server and their server side execution completed successfully Elaboration on the findings Based on the above observations I have drawn the below sequence diagram to illustrate conceptually what is happening. Everything except the final web service object is on the client side of the call. In the diagram below I've put two notes on the Web Service Proxy to show the two different places where the different base classes seem to start their timeout counters. From the earlier samples we can work out that the timeout counter for the WSE web service proxy starts before the one for the SoapHttpClientProtocol proxy and the WSE one includes the time to get a connection from the pool; whereas the Soap proxy timeout just covers the method execution. One interesting observation is if we rerun the above sample and increase the number of calls from 21 to 100,000 then for the WSE sample we will see a similar pattern where everything after the first few calls will timeout on the client as soon as it makes a connection to the server whereas the soap proxy will happily plug away and process all of the calls without a single timeout. I have actually set the sample running overnight and this did happen. At this point you are probably thinking the same thoughts I was at the time about the differences in behaviour and which is right and why are they different? I'm not sure there is a definitive answer to this in the documentation, or at least not that I could find! I think you just have to consider that they are different and they could have different effects depending on your messaging solution. In lots of situations this is just not an issue as your concurrent requests doesn't get to the situation where you end up throttling the web service calls on the client side, however this is definitely more common with an integration broker such as BizTalk where you often have high throughput requirements. Some of the considerations you should make Based on this behaviour you should be aware of the following: In a .net application if you are making lots of concurrent web service calls from an application in an asynchronous manner your user may thing they are experiencing poor performance but you think your web service is working well. The problem could be that the client will have a default of 2 connections to remote servers so you should bear this in mind When you are developing a BizTalk solution or a .net solution with the WSE 2 stack you may experience timeouts under load and throttling the number of connections using the max connections element in the configuration file will not help you For an application using WSE2 or SoapHttpClientProtocol an expired timeout will not throw an error until after a connection to the server has been made so you should consider this in your transaction and durability patterns Our Work Around In the short term for our specific scenario we know that we can handle this by just increasing our timeout value. There is only a specific small window when we get lots of concurrent traffic that causes this scenario so we should be able to increase the timeout to take into consideration the additional client side wait, and on the odd occasion where we do get a timeout the BizTalk send port retry will handle this. What was causing our original problem was that for that short window we were getting a lot of retries which significantly increased the load on our send servers and highlighted the issue. Longer Term Solution As a longer term solution this really gives us more ammunition to argue a migration to WCF. The application we are calling has some factors which limit the protocols we can use but with WCF we would have more control on the various timeout options because in WCF you can configure specific parts of the timeout. Summary I've had this blog post on my to do list for ages but hopefully it will be useful to some people to just understand this behaviour and to possibly help you with some performance issues you may have. I do not believe there is too much in the way of documentation particularly around WSE2 and ASMX in this area so again another bit of ammunition for migrating to WCF. I'll try to do a follow up post with the sample for WCF to show how this changes things.

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Clusterware 11gR2 – Setting up an Active/Passive failover configuration

- by Gilles Haro

Oracle provides many interesting ways to ensure High Availability. Dataguard configurations, RAC configurations or even both (as recommended for a Maximum Available Architecture - MAA) are the most frequently found. But when it comes to protecting a system with an Active/Passive architecture with failover capabilities, one often thinks to expensive third party cluster systems. Oracle Clusterware technology, which comes free with Oracle Database, is – in the knowing of most people - often linked to Oracle RAC and therefore, is rarely used to implement failover solutions. 11gR2 Clusterware – which is part of Oracle Grid Infrastructure - provides a comprehensive framework to setup automatic failover configurations. It is actually possible to make “failover-able'” and, therefore to protect, almost every kind of application (from xclock to the more complex Application Server) In the next couple of lines, I will try to present the different steps to achieve this goal : Have a fully operational 11gR2 database protected by automatic failover capabilities. I assume you are fluent in installing Oracle Database 11gR2, Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11gR2 on a Linux system and that ASM is not a problem for you (as I am using it as a shared storage). If not, please have a look at Oracle Documentation. As often, I made my tests using an Oracle VirtualBox environment. The scripts are tested and functional. Unfortunately, there can always be a typo or a mistake. This blog entry is not a course around the Clusterware Framework. I just hope it will let you see how powerful it is and that it will give you the whilst to go further with it… Prerequisite 2 Linux boxes (OELCluster01 and OELCluster02) at the same OS level. I used OEL 5 Update 5 with Enterprise Kernel. Shared Storage (SAN). On my VirtualBox system, I used Openfiler to simulate the SAN Oracle 11gR2 Database (11.2.0.1) Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure (11.2.0.1) Step 1 – Install the software Using asmlib, create 3 ASM disks (ASM_CRS, ASM_DTA and ASM_FRA) Install Grid Infrastructure for a cluster (OELCluster01 and OELCluster02 are the 2 nodes of the cluster) Use ASM_CRS to store Voting Disk and OCR. Use SCAN. Install Oracle Database Standalone binaries on both nodes. Use asmca to check/mount the disk groups on 2 nodes Use dbca to create and configure a database on the primary node Let’s name it DB11G. Copy the pfile, password file to the second node. Create adump directoty on the second node. Step 2 - Setup the resource to be protected After its creation with dbca, the database is automatically protected by the Oracle Restart technology available with Grid Infrastructure. Consequently, it restarts automatically (if possible) after a crash (ex: kill –9 smon). A database resource has been created for that in the Cluster Registry. We can observe this with the command : crsctl status resource that shows and ora.dba11g.db entry. Let’s save the definition of this resource, for future use : mkdir –p /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts chown oracle:oinstall /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts crsctl status resource ora.db11g.db -p > /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/myResource.txt Although very interesting, Oracle Restart is not cluster aware and cannot restart the database on any other node of the cluster. So, let’s remove it from the OCR definitions, we don’t need it ! srvctl stop database -d DB11G srvctl remove database -d DB11G Instead of it, we need to create a new resource of a more general type : cluster_resource. Here are the steps to achieve this : Create an action script : /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh #!/bin/bash export ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 export ORACLE_SID=DB11G case $1 in 'start') $ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus /nolog <<EOF connect / as sysdba startup EOF RET=0 ;; 'stop') $ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus /nolog <<EOF connect / as sysdba shutdown immediate EOF RET=0 ;; 'check') ok=`ps -ef | grep smon | grep $ORACLE_SID | wc -l` if [ $ok = 0 ]; then RET=1 else RET=0 fi ;; '*') RET=0 ;; esac if [ $RET -eq 0 ]; then exit 0 else exit 1 fi This script must provide, at least, methods to start, stop and check the database. It is self-explaining and contains nothing special. Just be aware that it is run as Oracle user (because of the ACL property – see later) and needs to know about the environment. It also needs to be present on every node of the cluster. chmod +x /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh scp /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh oracle@OELCluster02:/crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts Create a new resource file, based on the information we got from previous myResource.txt . Name it myNewResource.txt. myResource.txt is shown below. As we can see, it defines an ora.database.type resource, named ora.db11g.db. A lot of properties are related to this type of resource and do not need to be used for a cluster_resource. NAME=ora.db11g.db TYPE=ora.database.type ACL=owner:oracle:rwx,pgrp:oinstall:rwx,other::r-- ACTION_FAILURE_TEMPLATE= ACTION_SCRIPT= ACTIVE_PLACEMENT=1 AGENT_FILENAME=%CRS_HOME%/bin/oraagent%CRS_EXE_SUFFIX% AUTO_START=restore CARDINALITY=1 CHECK_INTERVAL=1 CHECK_TIMEOUT=600 CLUSTER_DATABASE=false DB_UNIQUE_NAME=DB11G DEFAULT_TEMPLATE=PROPERTY(RESOURCE_CLASS=database) PROPERTY(DB_UNIQUE_NAME= CONCAT(PARSE(%NAME%, ., 2), %USR_ORA_DOMAIN%, .)) ELEMENT(INSTANCE_NAME= %GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME%) DEGREE=1 DESCRIPTION=Oracle Database resource ENABLED=1 FAILOVER_DELAY=0 FAILURE_INTERVAL=60 FAILURE_THRESHOLD=1 GEN_AUDIT_FILE_DEST=/oracle/admin/DB11G/adump GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME= GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME@SERVERNAME(oelcluster01)=DB11G HOSTING_MEMBERS= INSTANCE_FAILOVER=0 LOAD=1 LOGGING_LEVEL=1 MANAGEMENT_POLICY=AUTOMATIC NLS_LANG= NOT_RESTARTING_TEMPLATE= OFFLINE_CHECK_INTERVAL=0 ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 PLACEMENT=restricted PROFILE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE= RESTART_ATTEMPTS=2 ROLE=PRIMARY SCRIPT_TIMEOUT=60 SERVER_POOLS=ora.DB11G SPFILE=+DTA/DB11G/spfileDB11G.ora START_DEPENDENCIES=hard(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) weak(type:ora.listener.type,uniform:ora.ons,uniform:ora.eons) pullup(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) START_TIMEOUT=600 STATE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE= STOP_DEPENDENCIES=hard(intermediate:ora.asm,shutdown:ora.DTA.dg,shutdown:ora.FRA.dg) STOP_TIMEOUT=600 UPTIME_THRESHOLD=1h USR_ORA_DB_NAME=DB11G USR_ORA_DOMAIN=haroland USR_ORA_ENV= USR_ORA_FLAGS= USR_ORA_INST_NAME=DB11G USR_ORA_OPEN_MODE=open USR_ORA_OPI=false USR_ORA_STOP_MODE=immediate VERSION=11.2.0.1.0 I removed database type related entries from myResource.txt and modified some other to produce the following myNewResource.txt. Notice the NAME property that should not have the ora. prefix Notice the TYPE property that is not ora.database.type but cluster_resource. Notice the definition of ACTION_SCRIPT. Notice the HOSTING_MEMBERS that enumerates the members of the cluster (as returned by the olsnodes command). NAME=DB11G.db TYPE=cluster_resource DESCRIPTION=Oracle Database resource ACL=owner:oracle:rwx,pgrp:oinstall:rwx,other::r-- ACTION_SCRIPT=/crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/my_ActivePassive_Cluster.sh PLACEMENT=restricted ACTIVE_PLACEMENT=0 AUTO_START=restore CARDINALITY=1 CHECK_INTERVAL=10 DEGREE=1 ENABLED=1 HOSTING_MEMBERS=oelcluster01 oelcluster02 LOGGING_LEVEL=1 RESTART_ATTEMPTS=1 START_DEPENDENCIES=hard(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) weak(type:ora.listener.type,uniform:ora.ons,uniform:ora.eons) pullup(ora.DTA.dg,ora.FRA.dg) START_TIMEOUT=600 STOP_DEPENDENCIES=hard(intermediate:ora.asm,shutdown:ora.DTA.dg,shutdown:ora.FRA.dg) STOP_TIMEOUT=600 UPTIME_THRESHOLD=1h Register the resource. Take care of the resource type. It needs to be a cluster_resource and not a ora.database.type resource (Oracle recommendation) . crsctl add resource DB11G.db -type cluster_resource -file /crs/11.2.0/HA_scripts/myNewResource.txt Step 3 - Start the resource crsctl start resource DB11G.db This command launches the ACTION_SCRIPT with a start and a check parameter on the primary node of the cluster. Step 4 - Test this We will test the setup using 2 methods. crsctl relocate resource DB11G.db This command calls the ACTION_SCRIPT (on the two nodes) to stop the database on the active node and start it on the other node. Once done, we can revert back to the original node, but, this time we can use a more “MS$ like” method :Turn off the server on which the database is running. After short delay, you should observe that the database is relocated on node 1. Conclusion Once the software installed and the standalone database created (which is a rather common and usual task), the steps to reach the objective are quite easy : Create an executable action script on every node of the cluster. Create a resource file. Create/Register the resource with OCR using the resource file. Start the resource. This solution is a very interesting alternative to licensable third party solutions. References Clusterware 11gR2 documentation Oracle Clusterware Resource Reference Gilles Haro Technical Expert - Core Technology, Oracle Consulting

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The Return Of __FILE__ And __LINE__ In .NET 4.5

- by Alois Kraus

Good things are hard to kill. One of the most useful predefined compiler macros in C/C++ were __FILE__ and __LINE__ which do expand to the compilation units file name and line number where this value is encountered by the compiler. After 4.5 versions of .NET we are on par with C/C++ again. It is of course not a simple compiler expandable macro it is an attribute but it does serve exactly the same purpose. Now we do get CallerLineNumberAttribute == __LINE__ CallerFilePathAttribute == __FILE__ CallerMemberNameAttribute == __FUNCTION__ (MSVC Extension) The most important one is CallerMemberNameAttribute which is very useful to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface without the need to hard code the name of the property anymore. Now you can simply decorate your change method with the new CallerMemberName attribute and you get the property name as string directly inserted by the C# compiler at compile time. public string UserName { get { return _userName; } set { _userName=value; RaisePropertyChanged(); // no more RaisePropertyChanged(“UserName”)! } } protected void RaisePropertyChanged([CallerMemberName] string member = "") { var copy = PropertyChanged; if(copy != null) { copy(new PropertyChangedEventArgs(this, member)); } } Nice and handy. This was obviously the prime reason to implement this feature in the C# 5.0 compiler. You can repurpose this feature for tracing to get your hands on the method name of your caller along other stuff very fast now. All infos are added during compile time which is much faster than other approaches like walking the stack. The example on MSDN shows the usage of this attribute with an example public static void TraceMessage(string message, [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "", [CallerFilePath] string sourceFilePath = "", [CallerLineNumber] int sourceLineNumber = 0) { Console.WriteLine("Hi {0} {1} {2}({3})", message, memberName, sourceFilePath, sourceLineNumber); } When I do think of tracing I do usually want to have a API which allows me to Trace method enter and leave Trace messages with a severity like Info, Warning, Error When I do print a trace message it is very useful to print out method and type name as well. So your API must either be able to pass the method and type name as strings or extract it automatically via walking back one Stackframe and fetch the infos from there. The first glaring deficiency is that there is no CallerTypeAttribute yet because the C# compiler team was not satisfied with its performance. A usable Trace Api might therefore look like enum TraceTypes { None = 0, EnterLeave = 1 << 0, Info = 1 << 1, Warn = 1 << 2, Error = 1 << 3 } class Tracer : IDisposable { string Type; string Method; public Tracer(string type, string method) { Type = type; Method = method; if (IsEnabled(TraceTypes.EnterLeave,Type, Method)) { } } private bool IsEnabled(TraceTypes traceTypes, string Type, string Method) { // Do checking here if tracing is enabled return false; } public void Info(string fmt, params object[] args) { } public void Warn(string fmt, params object[] args) { } public void Error(string fmt, params object[] args) { } public static void Info(string type, string method, string fmt, params object[] args) { } public static void Warn(string type, string method, string fmt, params object[] args) { } public static void Error(string type, string method, string fmt, params object[] args) { } public void Dispose() { // trace method leave } } This minimal trace API is very fast but hard to maintain since you need to pass in the type and method name as hard coded strings which can change from time to time. But now we have at least CallerMemberName to rid of the explicit method parameter right? Not really. Since any acceptable usable trace Api should have a method signature like Tracexxx(… string fmt, params [] object args) we not able to add additional optional parameters after the args array. If we would put it before the format string we would need to make it optional as well which would mean the compiler would need to figure out what our trace message and arguments are (not likely) or we would need to specify everything explicitly just like before . There are ways around this by providing a myriad of overloads which in the end are routed to the very same method but that is ugly. I am not sure if nobody inside MS agrees that the above API is reasonable to have or (more likely) that the whole talk about you can use this feature for diagnostic purposes was not a core feature at all but a simple byproduct of making the life of INotifyPropertyChanged implementers easier. A way around this would be to allow for variable argument arrays after the params keyword another set of optional arguments which are always filled by the compiler but I do not know if this is an easy one. The thing I am missing much more is the not provided CallerType attribute. But not in the way you would think of. In the API above I did add some filtering based on method and type to stay as fast as possible for types where tracing is not enabled at all. It should be no more expensive than an additional method call and a bool variable check if tracing for this type is enabled at all. The data is tightly bound to the calling type and method and should therefore become part of the static type instance. Since extending the CLR type system for tracing is not something I do expect to happen I have come up with an alternative approach which allows me basically to attach run time data to any existing type object in super fast way. The key to success is the usage of generics. class Tracer<T> : IDisposable { string Method; public Tracer(string method) { if (TraceData<T>.Instance.Enabled.HasFlag(TraceTypes.EnterLeave)) { } } public void Dispose() { if (TraceData<T>.Instance.Enabled.HasFlag(TraceTypes.EnterLeave)) { } } public static void Info(string fmt, params object[] args) { } /// <summary> /// Every type gets its own instance with a fresh set of variables to describe the /// current filter status. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam> internal class TraceData<UsingType> { internal static TraceData<UsingType> Instance = new TraceData<UsingType>(); public bool IsInitialized = false; // flag if we need to reinit the trace data in case of reconfigured trace settings at runtime public TraceTypes Enabled = TraceTypes.None; // Enabled trace levels for this type } } We do not need to pass the type as string or Type object to the trace Api. Instead we define a generic Api that accepts the using type as generic parameter. Then we can create a TraceData static instance which is due to the nature of generics a fresh instance for every new type parameter. My tests on my home machine have shown that this approach is as fast as a simple bool flag check. If you have an application with many types using tracing you do not want to bring the app down by simply enabling tracing for one special rarely used type. The trace filter performance for the types which are not enabled must be therefore the fasted code path. This approach has the nice side effect that if you store the TraceData instances in one global list you can reconfigure tracing at runtime safely by simply setting the IsInitialized flag to false. A similar effect can be achieved with a global static Dictionary<Type,TraceData> object but big hash tables have random memory access semantics which is bad for cache locality and you always need to pay for the lookup which involves hash code generation, equality check and an indexed array access. The generic version is wicked fast and allows you to add more features to your tracing Api with minimal perf overhead. But it is cumbersome to write the generic type argument always explicitly and worse if you do refactor code and move parts of it to other classes it might be that you cannot configure tracing correctly. I would like therefore to decorate my type with an attribute [CallerType] class Tracer<T> : IDisposable to tell the compiler to fill in the generic type argument automatically. class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { using (var t = new Tracer()) // equivalent to new Tracer<Program>() { That would be really useful and super fast since you do not need to pass any type object around but you do have full type infos at hand. This change would be breaking if another non generic type exists in the same namespace where now the generic counterpart would be preferred. But this is an acceptable risk in my opinion since you can today already get conflicts if two generic types of the same name are defined in different namespaces. This would be only a variation of this issue. When you do think about this further you can add more features like to trace the exception in your Dispose method if the method is left with an exception with that little trick I did write some time ago. You can think of tracing as a super fast and configurable switch to write data to an output destination or to execute alternative actions. With such an infrastructure you can e.g. Reconfigure tracing at run time. Take a memory dump when a specific method is left with a specific exception. Throw an exception when a specific trace statement is hit (useful for testing error conditions). Execute a passed delegate which e.g. dumps additional state when enabled. Write data to an in memory ring buffer and dump it when specific events do occur (e.g. method is left with an exception, triggered from outside). Write data to an output device. …. This stuff is really useful to have when your code is in production on a mission critical server and you need to find the root cause of sporadic crashes of your application. It could be a buggy graphics card driver which throws access violations into your application (ok with .NET 4 not anymore except if you enable a compatibility flag) where you would like to have a minidump or you have reached after two weeks of operation a state where you need a full memory dump at a specific point in time in the middle of an transaction. At my older machine I do get with this super fast approach 50 million traces/s when tracing is disabled. When I do know that tracing is enabled for this type I can walk the stack by using StackFrameHelper.GetStackFramesInternal to check further if a specific action or output device is configured for this method which is about 2-3 times faster than the regular StackTrace class. Even with one String.Format I am down to 3 million traces/s so performance is not so important anymore since I do want to do something now. The CallerMemberName feature of the C# 5 compiler is nice but I would have preferred to get direct access to the MethodHandle and not to the stringified version of it. But I really would like to see a CallerType attribute implemented to fill in the generic type argument of the call site to augment the static CLR type data with run time data.

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EM12c Release 4: Database as a Service Enhancements

- by Adeesh Fulay

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.4 (or simply put EM12c R4) is the latest update to the product. As previous versions, this release provides tons of enhancements and bug fixes, attributing to improved stability and quality. One of the areas that is most exciting and has seen tremendous growth in the last few years is that of Database as a Service. EM12c R4 provides a significant update to Database as a Service. The key themes are: Comprehensive Database Service Catalog (includes single instance, RAC, and Data Guard) Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone (includes support for Database feature CloneDB) Improved Rapid Start Kits Extensible Metering and Chargeback Miscellaneous Enhancements 1. Comprehensive Database Service Catalog Before we get deep into implementation of a service catalog, lets first understand what it is and what benefits it provides. Per ITIL, a service catalog is an exhaustive list of IT services that an organization provides or offers to its employees or customers. Service catalogs have been widely popular in the space of cloud computing, primarily as the medium to provide standardized and pre-approved service definitions. There is already some good collateral out there that talks about Oracle database service catalogs. The two whitepapers i recommend reading are: Service Catalogs: Defining Standardized Database Service High Availability Best Practices for Database Consolidation: The Foundation for Database as a Service [Oracle MAA] EM12c comes with an out-of-the-box service catalog and self service portal since release 1. For the customers, it provides the following benefits: Present a collection of standardized database service definitions, Define standardized pools of hardware and software for provisioning, Role based access to cater to different class of users, Automated procedures to provision the predefined database definitions, Setup chargeback plans based on service tiers and database configuration sizes, etc Starting Release 4, the scope of services offered via the service catalog has been expanded to include databases with varying levels of availability - Single Instance (SI) or Real Application Clusters (RAC) databases with multiple data guard based standby databases. Some salient points of the data guard integration: Standby pools can now be defined across different datacenters or within the same datacenter as the primary (this helps in modelling the concept of near and far DR sites) The standby databases can be single instance, RAC, or RAC One Node databases Multiple standby databases can be provisioned, where the maximum limit is determined by the version of database software The standby databases can be in either mount or read only (requires active data guard option) mode All database versions 10g to 12c supported (as certified with EM 12c) All 3 protection modes can be used - Maximum availability, performance, security Log apply can be set to sync or async along with the required apply lag The different service levels or service tiers are popularly represented using metals - Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and so on. The Oracle MAA whitepaper (referenced above) calls out the various service tiers as defined by Oracle's best practices, but customers can choose any logical combinations from the table below: Primary Standby [1 or more] EM 12cR4 SI - SI SI RAC - RAC SI RAC RAC RON - RON RON where RON = RAC One Node is supported via custom post-scripts in the service template A sample service catalog would look like the image below. Here we have defined 4 service levels, which have been deployed across 2 data centers, and have 3 standardized sizes. Again, it is important to note that this is just an example to get the creative juices flowing. I imagine each customer would come up with their own catalog based on the application requirements, their RTO/RPO goals, and the product licenses they own. In the screenwatch titled 'Build Service Catalog using EM12c DBaaS', I walk through the complete steps required to setup this sample service catalog in EM12c. 2. Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone In my previous blog posts, i have described the snap clone feature in detail. Essentially, it provides a storage agnostic, self service, rapid, and space efficient approach to solving your data cloning problems. The net benefit is that you get incredible amounts of storage savings (on average 90%) all while cloning databases in a matter of minutes. Space and Time, two things enterprises would love to save on. This feature has been designed with the goal of providing data cloning capabilities while protecting your existing investments in server, storage, and software. With this in mind, we have pursued with the dual solution approach of Hardware and Software. In the hardware approach, we connect directly to your storage appliances and perform all low level actions required to rapidly clone your databases. While in the software approach, we use an intermediate software layer to talk to any storage vendor or any storage configuration to perform the same low level actions. Thus delivering the benefits of database thin cloning, without requiring you to drastically changing the infrastructure or IT's operating style. In release 4, we expand the scope of options supported by snap clone with the addition of database CloneDB. While CloneDB is not a new feature, it was first introduced in 11.2.0.2 patchset, it has over the years become more stable and mature. CloneDB leverages a combination of Direct NFS (or dNFS) feature of the database, RMAN image copies, sparse files, and copy-on-write technology to create thin clones of databases from existing backups in a matter of minutes. It essentially has all the traits that we want to present to our customers via the snap clone feature. For more information on cloneDB, i highly recommend reading the following sources: Blog by Tim Hall: Direct NFS (DNFS) CloneDB in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Oracle OpenWorld Presentation by Cern: Efficient Database Cloning using Direct NFS and CloneDB The advantages of the new CloneDB integration with EM12c Snap Clone are: Space and time savings Ease of setup - no additional software is required other than the Oracle database binary Works on all platforms Reduce the dependence on storage administrators Cloning process fully orchestrated by EM12c, and delivered to developers/DBAs/QA Testers via the self service portal Uses dNFS to delivers better performance, availability, and scalability over kernel NFS Complete lifecycle of the clones managed by EM12c - performance, configuration, etc 3. Improved Rapid Start Kits DBaaS deployments tend to be complex and its setup requires a series of steps. These steps are typically performed across different users and different UIs. The Rapid Start Kit provides a single command solution to setup Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Pluggable Database as a Service (PDBaaS). One command creates all the Cloud artifacts like Roles, Administrators, Credentials, Database Profiles, PaaS Infrastructure Zone, Database Pools and Service Templates. Once the Rapid Start Kit has been successfully executed, requests can be made to provision databases and PDBs from the self service portal. Rapid start kit can create complex topologies involving multiple zones, pools and service templates. It also supports standby databases and use of RMAN image backups. The Rapid Start Kit in reality is a simple emcli script which takes a bunch of xml files as input and executes the complete automation in a matter of seconds. On a full rack Exadata, it took only 40 seconds to setup PDBaaS end-to-end. This kit works for both Oracle's engineered systems like Exadata, SuperCluster, etc and also on commodity hardware. One can draw parallel to the Exadata One Command script, which again takes a bunch of inputs from the administrators and then runs a simple script that configures everything from network to provisioning the DB software. Steps to use the kit: The kit can be found under the SSA plug-in directory on the OMS: EM_BASE/oracle/MW/plugins/oracle.sysman.ssa.oms.plugin_12.1.0.8.0/dbaas/setup It can be run from this default location or from any server which has emcli client installed For most scenarios, you would use the script dbaas/setup/database_cloud_setup.py For Exadata, special integration is provided to reduce the number of inputs even further. The script to use for this scenario would be dbaas/setup/exadata_cloud_setup.py The database_cloud_setup.py script takes two inputs: Cloud boundary xml: This file defines the cloud topology in terms of the zones and pools along with host names, oracle home locations or container database names that would be used as infrastructure for provisioning database services. This file is optional in case of Exadata, as the boundary is well know via the Exadata system target available in EM. Input xml: This file captures inputs for users, roles, profiles, service templates, etc. Essentially, all inputs required to define the DB services and other settings of the self service portal. Once all the xml files have been prepared, invoke the script as follows for PDBaaS: emcli @database_cloud_setup.py -pdbaas -cloud_boundary=/tmp/my_boundary.xml -cloud_input=/tmp/pdb_inputs.xml The script will prompt for passwords a few times for key users like sysman, cloud admin, SSA admin, etc. Once complete, you can simply log into EM as the self service user and request for databases from the portal. More information available in the Rapid Start Kit chapter in Cloud Administration Guide. 4. Extensible Metering and Chargeback Last but not the least, Metering and Chargeback in release 4 has been made extensible in all possible regards. The new extensibility features allow customer, partners, system integrators, etc to : Extend chargeback to any target type managed in EM Promote any metric in EM as a chargeback entity Extend list of charge items via metric or configuration extensions Model abstract entities like no. of backup requests, job executions, support requests, etc A slew of emcli verbs have also been added that allows administrators to create, edit, delete, import/export charge plans, and assign cost centers all via the command line. More information available in the Chargeback API chapter in Cloud Administration Guide. 5. Miscellaneous Enhancements There are other miscellaneous, yet important, enhancements that are worth a mention. These mostly have been asked by customers like you. These are: Custom naming of DB Services Self service users can provide custom names for DB SID, DB service, schemas, and tablespaces Every custom name is validated for uniqueness in EM 'Create like' of Service Templates Now creating variants of a service template is only a click away. This would be vital when you publish service templates to represent different database sizes or service levels. Profile viewer View the details of a profile like datafile, control files, snapshot ids, export/import files, etc prior to its selection in the service template Cleanup automation - for failed and successful requests Single emcli command to cleanup all remnant artifacts of a failed request Cleanup can be performed on a per request bases or by the entire pool As an extension, you can also delete successful requests Improved delete user workflow Allows administrators to reassign cloud resources to another user or delete all of them Support for multiple tablespaces for schema as a service In addition to multiple schemas, user can also specify multiple tablespaces per request I hope this was a good introduction to the new Database as a Service enhancements in EM12c R4. I encourage you to explore many of these new and existing features and give us feedback. Good luck! References: Cloud Management Page on OTN Cloud Administration Guide [Documentation] -- Adeesh Fulay (@adeeshf)

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 17, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 17, 2012Popular ReleasesD3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.5: Compatible with 1.05.Test Management eXtensions PowerShell module: TMX 0.4.5: Bugfix in BackUp-TMXTestResults: 1. adding escape characters to sring data (at least, part) 2. ErrorRecord is now supported as a string Known issue: only one screenshot per test result.Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 3.0 (BETA): This is a beta release of the up coming MonoGame 3.0. It contains an Installer which will install a binary release of MonoGame on windows boxes with the following platforms. Windows, Linux, Android and Windows 8. If you need to build for iOS or Mac you will need to get the source code at this time as the installers for those platforms are not available yet. The installer will also install a bunch of Project templates for Visual Studio 2010 , 2012 and MonoDevleop. For those of you wish...Windawesome: Windawesome v1.4.1 x64: Fixed switching of applications across monitors Changed window flashing API (fix your config files) Added NetworkMonitorWidget (thanks to weiwen) Any issues/recommendations/requests for future versions? This is the 64-bit version of the release. Be sure to use that if you are on a 64-bit Windows. Works with "Required DLLs v3".CODE Framework: 4.0.21017.0: See change log in the Documentation section for details.Global Stock Exchange (Hobby Project): Global Stock Exchange - Invst Banking (Hobby Proj): Initial VersionMagelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.1: Add support for .net 4.0 to Magelia.Webstore.Client and StarterSite version 2.1.254.3 Scheduler Import & Export feature UTC datetime and timezone support .net 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 migration client magelia global refactoring nugget package http://nuget.org/packages/Magelia.Webstore.Client burst optimisation burst time improvment (multithreading, index, ...) current burst is still active when a new burst is generating bugfixes version 2.1.254.1RazorSourceGenerator: RazorSourceGenerator v1.0 Installer: RazorSourceGenerator v1.0 InstallerJayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.2.2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SqLite, HTML5 localStorage, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video Sencha Touch 2 example app using JayData: Netflix browser. What's new in JayData 1.2.2 For detailed release notes check the release notes. Revitalized IndexedDB providerNow you c...VFPX: FoxcodePlus: FoxcodePlus - Visual Studio like extensions to Visual FoxPro IntelliSense.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.8 Beta: fixed the icon for packages on the desktop fixed the install dialog closing right when it starts removed the link to "set up the sdk for me" as this is no longer supported. fixed bug where the device selection dialog would show, even if there was only one device connected. fixed toolbar from having "gap" between other toolbar removed main menu items that do not have any menus Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.0: Prva verzija ovog projekta, još je uvijek oznacena kao BETA - ovo znaci da su naša testiranja prošla uspješno :) No, kako mi ne proizvodimo neki software za blagajne, tako sve ovo nije niti isprobano u "realnim" uvjetima - svaka je sugestija, primjedba ili prijava bug-a je dobrodošla. Za sve ovo koristite, molimo, Discussions ili Issue Tracker. U ovom trenutku runtime binary je raspoloživ kao Any CPU za .NET verzije 2.0. Javite ukoliko trebaju i verzije buildane za 32-bit/64-bit kao i za .N...Squiggle - A free open source LAN Messenger: Squiggle 3.2 (Development): NOTE: This is development release and not recommended for production use. This release is mainly for enabling extensibility and interoperability with other platforms. Support for plugins Support for extensions Communication layer and protocol is platform independent (ZeroMQ, ProtocolBuffers) Bug fixes New /invite command Edit the sent message Disable update check NOTE: This is development release and not recommended for production use.AcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.8: See Change Log for details of the new features and bugfixes included in this release, and methods that are now deprecated. Note changes to the PDF Writer: tcPDF is no longer bundled with PHPExcel, but should be installed separately if you wish to use that 3rd-Party library with PHPExcel. Alternatively, you can choose to use mPDF or DomPDF as PDF Rendering libraries instead: PHPExcel now provides a configurable wrapper allowing you a choice of PDF renderer. See the documentation, or the PDF s...ALM Assessment Guidance: Community Value-Adds: Important: This download has been created using ALM Ranger bits by the community, for the community. Although ALM Rangers were involved in the process, the content has not been through their quality review. Please post your candid feedback and improvement suggestions to the Community tab of this Codeplex project. DirectX Tool Kit: October 12, 2012: October 12, 2012 Added PrimitiveBatch for drawing user primitives Debug object names for all D3D resources (for PIX and debug layer leak reporting)Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.70: Fixed issue described in discussion #399087: variable references within case values weren't getting resolved.GoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 6.1: Some important bug fixes and couple of new features were added. There are no major changes to the sample website. Source code could be downloaded from the Source Code section selecting branch release-6.1. Thus just builds of GoogleMap Control are issued here in this release. Update 14.Oct.2012 - Client side access fixed NuGet Package GoogleMap Control 6.1 NuGet Package FeaturesBounds property to provide ability to create a map by center and bounds as well; Setting in markup <artem:Goog...mojoPortal: 2.3.9.3: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2393-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, but we recommend you to use .NET 4, we will probably drop support for .NET 3.5 once .NET 4.5 is available The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code and are not intended for use in Visual Studio. To download the source code see getting the lates...New Projects1327on17jabbr: helloAESP: Projeto AESPAutoStor: Egyetemi kurzus keretében megvalósuló alkalmazás, melynek célja egy automatikus raktározó rendszer szimulációja, objektum-orientált megvalósítással.BetterPlaceBooking: 3rd semester project for DM76 Group 3BizMate: BizMate is a Web based Accounting systemDeneme: deneme yazisiDomainSharp: Integrated development environment for design of domain-specific languages and subsequent development in such languages.EasyTwitter: EasyTwitter it's a simple .NET library where you can use twitter in your web applications or win forms applications. EasyTwitter stills in developmentEDM Designer Extender: Entity Framework Designer Extender that provides new design time properties and a template item to generate DbContext classes.Formition Password Safe (Open Source): Formition Password Safe (Open Source) for Windows 7 is a free high functionality password tool to manage your passwords and other pieces of information.g1p2_web: sport club web site based on c# and mssqlGibbsLDASharp: GibbsLDASharp is a C# implementation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) using Gibbs Sampling technique for parameter estimation and inference. Intelligent Assistant Soccer Manager: Intelligent Assistant Soccer Manager, or IASM for short, is a decision support system that fully support condition based deploy of Fantacalcio® soccer teamIshaanOnDAL: Creating DAL Using class ObjectKeks - A 2D Graphics Engine in Java (jre7): Keks is an upcoming Java 2D Graphics Engine with the promise to become a Game Engine in the future.LDR Installer: LDR Installer to easily install security updates in hotfix mode.Live SDK with C# + REST: Usar Live SDK com API REST em qualquer sabor de windows. Use Live SDK with REST API in any flavor of windows.MacSonuclari: project to show soccer match result to for windows phone devices mozcms: mozcms for .NET 4.0 MVC 4.0!MS_Descriptions_Changer: This is utility change MS_Descriptions attribute on MS SQL Server 2005-2008 for Tables and Columns.Onestop.Contrib.DistributedEvict: Onestop.Contrib.DistributedEvict is an advanced module that has 2 primary features for managing cache in a web farm: Output Cache Evict & Remote SignalsOrchard Scripting Extensions: Core module for running scripts inside Orchard.Orchard Scripting Extensions: PHP: A child module for Orchard Scripting Extensions for running PHP code inside Orchard.Page Generated Skin Object for DotNetNuke: The Page Generated Skin Object for DotNetNuke displays the time taken to generate the current page in your custom DNN skin. ProductStore: this project is demo for mvc4, ef codefirst...Remote Controlled Switch for all RC Receivers.: AVR Tiny based simple switch for any rc receiver. Allows to turn off / on lights, sound effect, retracts chassis, using free servo channel. Report Generator in C#: This is a library used to generate reports.Resharper text localization add-in: Text localization plugin for Resharper 7.0 and some plugins development documentationRoad Addicts: Road Addicts is a mix between a strategy and a traffic simulation game.Sistema Distribuido de Pedidos de Insumos Médicos: This is school projectSplitOS: SplitOS - The user-friendly Text OSSQL Server Connection Auditor (SSCA): SSCA helps you test your database audit solution's effectiveness at auditing Microsoft SQL Server connections by automating DB connections, results, and logs.TCP Cellular Radio Driver: Addresses TCP mode shortcomings in the CellularRadio driver provided by GHI Electronics for the Seeed module. Allows transparent data connection over TCP.test1325on17: hellotesttom10162012git01: fds fdsUMK Game: Game Edukasi 3D Tatatertib LalulintasWebMatrix Extension Documentation - Staging: WebMatrix Extensión Development ServiceWhipstaff: Whipstaff is a PoC library for designing a common UI library leveraging WPF, ReactiveUI and DHGMS Data Manager. It is written in C#Windows 8 Store Apps - Tutoriales Paso a Paso: No hay mejor forma de aprender a escribir código, que leyendo código de otros. Conocé aquí tutoriales completos para crear tu primer app para Windows 8 Store. Yet Another Expression Parser - Reverse Polish Notation - C#: Following project contains a class library with simple Reverse Polish Notation implementation.

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