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• Which is the "best" data access framework/approach for C# and .NET?

  - by Frans

  (EDIT: I made it a community wiki as it is more suited to a collaborative format.) There are a plethora of ways to access SQL Server and other databases from .NET. All have their pros and cons and it will never be a simple question of which is "best" - the answer will always be "it depends". However, I am looking for a comparison at a high level of the different approaches and frameworks in the context of different levels of systems. For example, I would imagine that for a quick-and-dirty Web 2.0 application the answer would be very different from an in-house Enterprise-level CRUD application. I am aware that there are numerous questions on Stack Overflow dealing with subsets of this question, but I think it would be useful to try to build a summary comparison. I will endeavour to update the question with corrections and clarifications as we go. So far, this is my understanding at a high level - but I am sure it is wrong... I am primarily focusing on the Microsoft approaches to keep this focused. ADO.NET Entity Framework Database agnostic Good because it allows swapping backends in and out Bad because it can hit performance and database vendors are not too happy about it Seems to be MS's preferred route for the future Complicated to learn (though, see 267357) It is accessed through LINQ to Entities so provides ORM, thus allowing abstraction in your code LINQ to SQL Uncertain future (see Is LINQ to SQL truly dead?) Easy to learn (?) Only works with MS SQL Server See also Pros and cons of LINQ "Standard" ADO.NET No ORM No abstraction so you are back to "roll your own" and play with dynamically generated SQL Direct access, allows potentially better performance This ties in to the age-old debate of whether to focus on objects or relational data, to which the answer of course is "it depends on where the bulk of the work is" and since that is an unanswerable question hopefully we don't have to go in to that too much. IMHO, if your application is primarily manipulating large amounts of data, it does not make sense to abstract it too much into objects in the front-end code, you are better off using stored procedures and dynamic SQL to do as much of the work as possible on the back-end. Whereas, if you primarily have user interaction which causes database interaction at the level of tens or hundreds of rows then ORM makes complete sense. So, I guess my argument for good old-fashioned ADO.NET would be in the case where you manipulate and modify large datasets, in which case you will benefit from the direct access to the backend. Another case, of course, is where you have to access a legacy database that is already guarded by stored procedures. ASP.NET Data Source Controls Are these something altogether different or just a layer over standard ADO.NET? - Would you really use these if you had a DAL or if you implemented LINQ or Entities? NHibernate Seems to be a very powerful and powerful ORM? Open source Some other relevant links; NHibernate or LINQ to SQL Entity Framework vs LINQ to SQL

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• MySQL Split Time Ranges into Smaller Chunks

  - by Neren

  Hello all, I've recently been tasked with finishing a PHP/MySQL web app when the developer quit last week. I'm no MySQL expert, so I apologize if this is an intensely simple question. I've searched SO for the better part of two days trying to find a relatively easy solution to my problem, which is as follows. Problem in a Nutshell: I have a MySQL table full of start and end datetime (GMT -5) & UNIX Timestamp values covering durations of irregular length and need to break/split/divide them into more-regular time chunks (5 minutes). I'm not after a count of row entries per time chunk/bucket/period, if that makes any sense. Data Example: started, ended, started_UNIX, ended_UNIX 2010-10-25 15:12:33, 2010-10-25 15:47:09, 1288033953, 1288036029 What I'm hoping to get: 2010-10-25 15:12:33, 2010-10-25 15:15:00, 1288033953, 1288037700 2010-10-25 15:15:00, 2010-10-25 15:20:00, 1288037700, 1288038000 2010-10-25 15:20:00, 2010-10-25 15:25:00, 1288038000, 1288038300 2010-10-25 15:25:00, 2010-10-25 15:30:00, 1288038300, 1288038600 2010-10-25 15:30:00, 2010-10-25 15:35:00, 1288038600, 1288038900 2010-10-25 15:35:00, 2010-10-25 15:40:00, 1288038900, 1288039200 2010-10-25 15:40:00, 2010-10-25 15:45:00, 1288039200, 1288039500 2010-10-25 15:45:00, 2010-10-25 15:47:09, 1288039500, 1288039629 If you're interested, here's the quick & dirty on the app and why I need the data: App overview: The application receives very simple POST requests generated by a basic sensor device when its input pins go to ground, which submits an INSERT query to the database where MySQL records a timestamp (as started). When the input pins return from a grounded state, the device submits a different POST request, which causes the PHP app to submit an UPDATE query, where a modification time timestamp is inserted (as ended). My employer recently changed the periodic reporting unit of measure from Seconds "On" Per Day to Seconds "On" Per 5 Minute Interval. I had formulated what I thought would be a workable solution, but when I looked at it on paper, it looked like Rube Goldberg's nightmare constructed in MySQL, so that was out. Any suggestions as to how to break these spans into 5 minute blocks? Keeping it all in MySQL would be my preference, though I'll take any suggestions. Thank you for any suggestions you may have. Again, I apologize if this is a no-brainer. If I ask any additional questions of the SO collective consciousness in the future, I'll try to word them a bit better. Any help will be happily welcomed. Thanks, Neren

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• How to reliably categorize HTTP sessions in proxy to corresponding browser' windows/tabs user is viewing?

  - by Jehonathan

  I was using the Fiddler core .Net library as a local proxy to record the user activity in web. However I ended up with a problem which seems dirty to solve. I have a web browser say Google Chrome, and the user opened like 10 different tabs each with different web URLs. The problem is that the proxy records all the HTTP session initiated by each pages separately, causing me to figure out using my intelligence the tab which the corresponding HTTP session belonged to. I understand that this is because of the stateless nature of HTTP protocol. However I am just wondering is there an easy way to do this? I ended up with below c# code for that in Fiddler. Still its not a reliable solution due to the heuristics. This is a modification of the sample project bundled with Fiddler core for .NET 4. Basically what it does is filtering HTTP sessions initiated in last few seconds to find the first request or switching to another page made by the same tab in browser. It almost works, but not seems to be a universal solution. Fiddler.FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += delegate(Fiddler.Session oS) { //exclude other HTTP methods if (oS.oRequest.headers.HTTPMethod == "GET" || oS.oRequest.headers.HTTPMethod == "POST") //exclude other HTTP Status codes if (oS.oResponse.headers.HTTPResponseStatus == "200 OK" || oS.oResponse.headers.HTTPResponseStatus == "304 Not Modified") { //exclude other MIME responses (allow only text/html) var accept = oS.oRequest.headers.FindAll("Accept"); if (accept != null) { if(accept.Count>0) if (accept[0].Value.Contains("text/html")) { //exclude AJAX if (!oS.oRequest.headers.Exists("X-Requested-With")) { //find the referer for this request var referer = oS.oRequest.headers.FindAll("Referer"); //if no referer then assume this as a new request and display the same if(referer!=null) { //if no referer then assume this as a new request and display the same if (referer.Count > 0) { //lock the sessions Monitor.Enter(oAllSessions); //filter further using the response if (oS.oResponse.MIMEType == string.Empty || oS.oResponse.MIMEType == "text/html") //get all previous sessions with the same process ID this session request if(oAllSessions.FindAll(a=>a.LocalProcessID == oS.LocalProcessID) //get all previous sessions within last second (assuming the new tab opened initiated multiple sessions other than parent) .FindAll(z => (z.Timers.ClientBeginRequest > oS.Timers.ClientBeginRequest.AddSeconds(-1))) //get all previous sessions that belongs to the same port of the current session .FindAll(b=>b.port == oS.port ).FindAll(c=>c.clientIP ==oS.clientIP) //get all previus sessions with the same referrer URL of the current session .FindAll(y => referer[0].Value.Equals(y.fullUrl)) //get all previous sessions with the same host name of the current session .FindAll(m=>m.hostname==oS.hostname).Count==0 ) //if count ==0 that means this is the parent request Console.WriteLine(oS.fullUrl); //unlock sessions Monitor.Exit(oAllSessions); } else Console.WriteLine(oS.fullUrl); } else Console.WriteLine(oS.fullUrl); Console.WriteLine(); } } } } };

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• Why are these two sql statements deadlocking? (Deadlock graph + details included).

  - by Pure.Krome

  Hi folks, I've got the following deadlock graph that describes two sql statements that are deadlocking each other. I'm just not sure how to analyse this and then fix up my sql code to prevent this from happening. Main deadlock graph Click here for a bigger image. Left side, details Click here for a bigger image. Right side, details Click here for a bigger image. What is the code doing? I'm reading in a number of files (eg. lets say 3, for this example). Each file contains different data BUT the same type of data. I then insert data into LogEntries table and then (if required) I insert or delete something from the ConnectedClients table. Here's my sql code. using (TransactionScope transactionScope = new TransactionScope()) { _logEntryRepository.InsertOrUpdate(logEntry); // Now, if this log entry was a NewConnection or an LostConnection, then we need to make sure we update the ConnectedClients. if (logEntry.EventType == EventType.NewConnection) { _connectedClientRepository.Insert(new ConnectedClient { LogEntryId = logEntry.LogEntryId }); } // A (PB) BanKick does _NOT_ register a lost connection .. so we need to make sure we handle those scenario's as a LostConnection. if (logEntry.EventType == EventType.LostConnection || logEntry.EventType == EventType.BanKick) { _connectedClientRepository.Delete(logEntry.ClientName, logEntry.ClientIpAndPort); } _unitOfWork.Commit(); transactionScope.Complete(); } Now each file has it's own UnitOfWork instance (which means it has it's own database connection, transaction and repository context). So i'm assuming this means there's 3 different connections to the db all happening at the same time. Finally, this is using Entity Framework as the repository, but please don't let that stop you from having a think about this problem. Using a profiling tool, the Isolation Level is Serializable. I've also tried ReadCommited and ReadUncommited, but they both error :- ReadCommited: same as above. Deadlock. ReadUncommited: different error. EF exception that says it expected some result back, but got nothing. I'm guessing this is the LogEntryId Identity (scope_identity) value that is expected but not retrieve because of the dirty read. Please help! PS. It's Sql Server 2008, btw.

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• best alternative to in-definition initialization of static class members? (for SVN keywords)

  - by Jeff

  I'm storing expanded SVN keyword literals for .cpp files in 'static char const *const' class members and want to store the .h descriptions as similarly as possible. In short, I need to guarantee single instantiation of a static member (presumably in a .cpp file) to an auto-generated non-integer literal living in a potentially shared .h file. Unfortunately the language makes no attempt to resolve multiple instantiations resulting from assignments made outside class definitions and explicitly forbids non-integer inits inside class definitions. My best attempt (using static-wrapping internal classes) is not too dirty, but I'd really like to do better. Does anyone have a way to template the wrapper below or have an altogether superior approach? // Foo.h: class with .h/.cpp SVN info stored and logged statically class Foo { static Logger const verLog; struct hInfoWrap; public: static hInfoWrap const hInfo; static char const *const cInfo; }; // Would like to eliminate this per-class boilerplate. struct Foo::hInfoWrap { hInfoWrapper() : text("$Id$") { } char const *const text; }; ... // Foo.cpp: static inits called here Foo::hInfoWrap const Foo::hInfo; char const *const Foo::cInfo = "$Id$"; Logger const Foo::verLog(Foo::cInfo, Foo::hInfo.text); ... // Helper.h: output on construction, with no subsequent activity or stored fields class Logger { Logger(char const *info1, char const *info2) { cout << info0 << endl << info1 << endl; } }; Is there a way to get around the static linkage address issue for templating the hInfoWrap class on string literals? Extern char pointers assigned outside class definitions are linguistically valid but fail in essentially the same manner as direct member initializations. I get why the language shirks the whole resolution issue, but it'd be very convenient if an inverted extern member qualifier were provided, where the definition code was visible in class definitions to any caller but only actually invoked at the point of a single special declaration elsewhere. Anyway, I digress. What's the best solution for the language we've got, template or otherwise? Thanks!

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• Java Sorting "queue" list based on DateTime and Z Position (part of school project)

  - by Kuchinawa

  For a school project i have a list of 50k containers that arrive on a boat. These containers need to be sorted in a list in such a way that the earliest departure DateTimes are at the top and the containers above those above them. This list then gets used for a crane that picks them up in order. I started out with 2 Collection.sort() methods: 1st one to get them in the right XYZ order Collections.sort(containers, new Comparator<ContainerData>() { @Override public int compare(ContainerData contData1, ContainerData contData2) { return positionSort(contData1.getLocation(),contData2.getLocation()); } }); Then another one to reorder the dates while keeping the position in mind: Collections.sort(containers, new Comparator<ContainerData>() { @Override public int compare(ContainerData contData1, ContainerData contData2) { int c = contData1.getLeaveDateTimeFrom().compareTo(contData2.getLeaveDateTimeFrom()); int p = positionSort2(contData1.getLocation(), contData2.getLocation()); if(p != 0) c = p; return c; } }); But i never got this method to work.. What i got working now is rather quick and dirty and takes a long time to process (50seconds for all 50k): First a sort on DateTime: Collections.sort(containers, new Comparator<ContainerData>() { @Override public int compare(ContainerData contData1, ContainerData contData2) { return contData1.getLeaveDateTimeFrom().compareTo(contData2.getLeaveDateTimeFrom()); } }); Then a correction function that bumps top containers up: containers = stackCorrection(containers); private static List<ContainerData> stackCorrection(List<ContainerData> sortedContainerList) { for(int i = 0; i < sortedContainerList.size(); i++) { ContainerData current = sortedContainerList.get(i); // 5 = Max Stack (0 index) if(current.getLocation().getZ() < 5) { //Loop through possible containers above current for(int j = 5; j > current.getLocation().getZ(); --j) { //Search for container above for(int k = i + 1; k < sortedContainerList.size(); ++k) if(sortedContainerList.get(k).getLocation().getX() == current.getLocation().getX()) { if(sortedContainerList.get(k).getLocation().getY() == current.getLocation().getY()) { if(sortedContainerList.get(k).getLocation().getZ() == j) { //Found -> move container above current sortedContainerList.add(i, sortedContainerList.remove(k)); k = sortedContainerList.size(); i++; } } } } } } return sortedContainerList; } I would like to implement this in a better/faster way. So any hints are appreciated. :)

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• HTTP 500 Internal Server Error on IIS 7.5 with MVC3

  - by Tor Haugen

  I am trying to install an MVC3 application on our production server with no luck. The application is from a 3rd party (compiled), and so debugging is not available to me. Besides, I strongly suspect the error occurs before any code in the site has a chance to execute. Our staging server is - as far as I can determine - set up excactly like the production server. Both run Windows Server 2008 Standard R2, both also run a Sharepoint 2010 site (though this install doesn't touch that in any way). IIS is version 7.5, and .NET Framework 4.0 (required by the MVC app) is (recently) installed (by me, with a reboot after). The application is very small and simple and, as far as I can tell sticks to fairly standard functionality - including forms authentication (ie. it doesnt' pull any dirty tricks). The error message shown in the browser is very general: HTTP Error 500.0 - Internal Server Error An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur. The bit about 'An error message detailing the cause' being in the application event log seems to be just speculation - a pious hope that whatever code actually caused the error will log it. Nothing useful is to be found in the event log (only the very same message, logged by IIS). Module: AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule Notification: BeginRequest Handler: StaticFile Error Code: 0x80070002 Requested URL: http://xxxxxx.xxxxxx.xx:80/ Physical Path: C:\Xxxxxxx\Prod\WebClient Logon Method: Not yet determined Logon User: Not yet determined Using Failed Request Tracing, I have been able to track the error (as also indicated above) to the AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule: 103. -NOTIFY_MODULE_START ModuleName AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule Notification 1 fIsPostNotification false Notification BEGIN_REQUEST 104. -SET_RESPONSE_ERROR_DESCRIPTION ErrorDescription An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur. 105. -MODULE_SET_RESPONSE_ERROR_STATUS ModuleName AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule Notification 1 HttpStatus 500 HttpReason Internal Server Error HttpSubStatus 0 ErrorCode 2147942402 ConfigExceptionInfo Notification BEGIN_REQUEST ErrorCode The system cannot find the file specified. (0x80070002) So there you have it. Seemingly, the AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule fails to find some file. So some questions are: What is the AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule? It is not listed in the fairly exhausting list of modules configurable in IIS manager for the site. I have had no success googling it either. Maybe it's secret.. I access the root URL of the site. This is supposed to be redirected to /Account/LogOn by the FormsAuthenticationModule. Why then is the handler StaticFile? Is that a clue? I have tried removing the infamous system.webserver/modules/runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests attribute, and that makes the error go away (but MVC not actually working, of course). I am prepared to specify all necessary modules manually if that's what it takes, but if the AspNetInitClrHostFailureModule is actually needed, I will be just as stuck. Does anyone know, or can anyone direct me to someone who knows, exactly what modules a typical MVC3 application actually needs? This question might well be a duplicate of this one, but he didn't get any useful answer, and also asked less specific questions. So I'll have my own go. Hoping for some help here :) Edit: I have now tried setting up a trivial MVC 3 project on the server. I created a new project using the MVC Application template, compiled it and deployed it to the server. It behaves in exactly the same way. The server simply cannot run MVC 3 projects.

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• Squid w/ SquidGuard fails w/ "Too few redirector processes are running"

  - by DKNUCKLES

  I'm trying to implement a Squid proxy in a quick and easy fashion and I'm receiving some errors I have been unable to resolve. The box is a pre-made appliance, however it seems to fail on launch.The following is the cache.log file when I attempt to launch the squid service. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Starting Squid Cache version 3.0.STABLE20-20091201 for i686 -pc-linux-gnu... 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Process ID 12647 2012/11/18 22:14:29| With 1024 file descriptors available 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Performing DNS Tests... 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Successful DNS name lookup tests... 2012/11/18 22:14:29| DNS Socket created at 0.0.0.0, port 40513, FD 8 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Adding nameserver 192.168.0.78 from /etc/resolv.conf 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Adding nameserver 8.8.8.8 from /etc/resolv.conf 2012/11/18 22:14:29| helperOpenServers: Starting 5/5 'bin' processes 2012/11/18 22:14:29| ipcCreate: /opt/squidguard/bin: (13) Permission denied 2012/11/18 22:14:29| ipcCreate: /opt/squidguard/bin: (13) Permission denied 2012/11/18 22:14:29| ipcCreate: /opt/squidguard/bin: (13) Permission denied 2012/11/18 22:14:29| ipcCreate: /opt/squidguard/bin: (13) Permission denied 2012/11/18 22:14:29| ipcCreate: /opt/squidguard/bin: (13) Permission denied 2012/11/18 22:14:29| helperOpenServers: Starting 5/5 'squid-auth.pl' processes 2012/11/18 22:14:29| User-Agent logging is disabled. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Referer logging is disabled. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Unlinkd pipe opened on FD 23 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Swap maxSize 10240000 + 8192 KB, estimated 788322 objects 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Target number of buckets: 39416 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Using 65536 Store buckets 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Max Mem size: 8192 KB 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Max Swap size: 10240000 KB 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Version 1 of swap file with LFS support detected... 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Rebuilding storage in /opt/squid3/var/cache (DIRTY) 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Using Least Load store dir selection 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Set Current Directory to /opt/squid3/var/cache 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Loaded Icons. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Accepting HTTP connections at 10.0.0.6, port 3128, FD 25. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Accepting ICP messages at 0.0.0.0, port 3130, FD 26. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| HTCP Disabled. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Ready to serve requests. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Done reading /opt/squid3/var/cache swaplog (0 entries) 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Finished rebuilding storage from disk. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| 0 Entries scanned 2012/11/18 22:14:29| 0 Invalid entries. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| 0 With invalid flags. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| 0 Objects loaded. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| 0 Objects expired. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| 0 Objects cancelled. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| 0 Duplicate URLs purged. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| 0 Swapfile clashes avoided. 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Took 0.02 seconds ( 0.00 objects/sec). 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Beginning Validation Procedure 2012/11/18 22:14:29| WARNING: redirector #1 (FD 9) exited 2012/11/18 22:14:29| WARNING: redirector #2 (FD 10) exited 2012/11/18 22:14:29| WARNING: redirector #3 (FD 11) exited 2012/11/18 22:14:29| WARNING: redirector #4 (FD 12) exited 2012/11/18 22:14:29| Too few redirector processes are running FATAL: The redirector helpers are crashing too rapidly, need help! Squid Cache (Version 3.0.STABLE20-20091201): Terminated abnormally. CPU Usage: 0.112 seconds = 0.032 user + 0.080 sys Maximum Resident Size: 0 KB Page faults with physical i/o: 0 Memory usage for squid via mallinfo(): total space in arena: 2944 KB Ordinary blocks: 2857 KB 6 blks Small blocks: 0 KB 0 blks Holding blocks: 1772 KB 8 blks Free Small blocks: 0 KB Free Ordinary blocks: 86 KB Total in use: 4629 KB 157% Total free: 86 KB 3% The "permission denied" area is where I have been focusing my attention with no luck. The following is what I've tried. Chmod'ing the /opt/squidguard/bin folder to 777 Changing the user that squidguard runs under to root / nobody / www-data / squid3 Tried changing ownership of the /opt/squidguard/bin folder to all names listed above after assigning that user to run with squid. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

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• Detecting source of memory usage on a Linux box

  - by apeace

  I have a toy Linux box with 256mb RAM running Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS. Here is the output of free -m: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 245 122 122 0 19 64 -/+ buffers/cache: 38 206 Swap: 511 0 511 Unless I'm reading this wrong, 122mb is being used and only 84mb of that is disk cache. Here are all processes I'm running sorted by memory usage (ps -eo pmem,pcpu,rss,vsize,args | sort -k 1 -r): %MEM %CPU RSS VSZ COMMAND 5.0 0.0 12648 633140 node /home/node/main/sites.js 1.5 0.0 3884 251736 /usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon --no-daemon 1.3 0.0 3328 77108 sshd: apeace [priv] 0.9 0.0 2344 19624 -bash 0.7 0.0 1776 23620 /sbin/init 0.6 0.0 1624 77108 sshd: apeace@pts/0 0.6 0.0 1544 9940 redis-server /etc/redis/redis.conf 0.6 0.0 1524 25848 /usr/sbin/ntpd -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -g -u 103:105 0.5 0.0 1324 119880 rsyslogd -c4 0.4 0.0 1084 49308 /usr/sbin/sshd 0.4 0.0 1028 44376 /usr/sbin/exim4 -bd -q30m 0.3 0.0 904 6876 ps -eo pmem,pcpu,rss,vsize,args 0.3 0.0 888 21124 cron 0.3 0.0 868 23472 dbus-daemon --system --fork 0.2 0.0 732 19624 -bash 0.2 0.0 628 6128 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty1 0.2 0.0 628 16952 upstart-udev-bridge --daemon 0.2 0.0 564 16800 udevd --daemon 0.2 0.0 552 16796 udevd --daemon 0.2 0.0 548 16796 udevd --daemon 0.0 0.0 0 0 [xenwatch] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [xenbus] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [sync_supers] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [netns] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [migration/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [migration/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [migration/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [migration/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kthreadd] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kswapd0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kstriped] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksoftirqd/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksoftirqd/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksoftirqd/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksoftirqd/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksnapd] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kseriod] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kjournald] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [khvcd] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [khelper] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kblockd/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kblockd/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kblockd/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kblockd/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [flush-202:1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [events/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [events/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [events/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [events/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [crypto/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [crypto/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [crypto/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [crypto/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [cpuset] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [bdi-default] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [async/mgr] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [aio/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [aio/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [aio/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [aio/0] Now, I know that ps is not the best for viewing process memory usage, but that's because it tends to report more memory than is actually being used...meaning no matter how you look at it all my processes combined shouldn't be using near 122mb, even if you account for the disk cache. What's more, memory usage is growing all the time. I've had to restart my server once a week, because once my 256mb fills up it starts swapping, which it wouldn't do just for disk cache. Shouldn't there be some way for me to see the culprit?! I'm new to server admin, so please if there's something obvious I'm overlooking point it out to me. Just for good measure, the output of cat /proc/meminfo: MemTotal: 251140 kB MemFree: 124604 kB Buffers: 20536 kB Cached: 66136 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 65004 kB Inactive: 37576 kB Active(anon): 15932 kB Inactive(anon): 164 kB Active(file): 49072 kB Inactive(file): 37412 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB SwapTotal: 524284 kB SwapFree: 524284 kB Dirty: 8 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 15916 kB Mapped: 10668 kB Shmem: 188 kB Slab: 18604 kB SReclaimable: 10088 kB SUnreclaim: 8516 kB KernelStack: 536 kB PageTables: 1444 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 649852 kB Committed_AS: 64224 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 752 kB VmallocChunk: 34359737600 kB DirectMap4k: 262144 kB DirectMap2M: 0 kB EDIT: I had misinterpreted the meaning of free -m at first. But even so: the important thing is that my OS eventually begins to use swap memory if I don't restart my server, which disk caching wouldn't do. So where do I look to see what is using all this memory?

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• Where's the Swap File/Partition?

  - by chrisbunney

  I'm investigating the virtual memory configuration of a Debian based Amazon EC2 instance, and as my background isn't in system admin, I'm slightly confused by what I'm seeing. We're using MongoDB, and the monitoring server we have indicates that the Mongo process is using about 20GB of swap space, however I can't figure out where this is located on the server. As far as I can tell from using the various suggested methods from Google, there is either a much smaller amount, or none at all. top indicates that there is 1.8GB of swap memory: top - 15:35:21 up 6 days, 3:23, 1 user, load average: 1.60, 1.43, 1.37 Tasks: 47 total, 2 running, 45 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 1.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 14.7%id, 83.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.1%st Mem: 3928924k total, 2855572k used, 1073352k free, 640564k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 1887788k cached swapon -s doesn't seem to think there's any swap space: Filename Type Size Used Priority free -m doesn't think there's any swap either: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3836 3663 172 0 626 2701 -/+ buffers/cache: 336 3500 Swap: 0 0 0 And neither does vmstat: procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 0 3 0 66224 641372 2874744 0 0 21 5012 21 33 2 2 76 19 But cat /etc/fstab thinks there is a swap partition: /dev/xvda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/xvda2 /mnt ext3 defaults 0 0 /dev/xvda3 swap swap defaults 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 However df -k gives no indication of the xvda3 partition: Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 16513960 15675324 0 100% / tmpfs 1964460 8 1964452 1% /lib/init/rw udev 1914148 28 1914120 1% /dev tmpfs 1964460 4 1964456 1% /dev/shm So I really don't know what to make of this, because I appear to have a process using about 10 times more virtual memory than what might be available, and I have no idea where this virtual memory is on the system. I'm probably misinterpreting the output of the tools, so I'd be grateful if someone would be able to set me straight: What have I got wrong, what's the right interpretation, and how do you reach that interpretation? EDIT0: We use 10gen's MMS for monitoring the database, the relevant section for memory from the last data point is: "mem": { "virtual": 20749, "bits": 64, "supported": true, "mappedWithJournal": 20376, "mapped": 10188, "resident": 1219 }, This JSON is specific to the database process (I believe) rather than the system as a whole. fdisk -l /dev/xvda outputs... nothing? I tried each of the 3 xvda entries in /etc/fstab as well: root@ip:~# fdisk -l /dev/xvda1 Disk /dev/xvda1: 34.4 GB, 34359738368 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4177 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/xvda1 doesn't contain a valid partition table root@ip:~# fdisk -l /dev/xvda2 root@ip:~# fdisk -l /dev/xvda3 root@ip:~# Edit1: Output of cat /proc/meminfo for the sake of completeness: MemTotal: 3928924 kB MemFree: 726600 kB Buffers: 648368 kB Cached: 2216556 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 1945100 kB Inactive: 994016 kB Active(anon): 60476 kB Inactive(anon): 12952 kB Active(file): 1884624 kB Inactive(file): 981064 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree: 0 kB Dirty: 387180 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 73380 kB Mapped: 1188260 kB Shmem: 48 kB Slab: 149768 kB SReclaimable: 146076 kB SUnreclaim: 3692 kB KernelStack: 1104 kB PageTables: 16096 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 1964460 kB Committed_AS: 305572 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 16760 kB VmallocChunk: 34359721448 kB HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB DirectMap4k: 3932160 kB DirectMap2M: 0 kB

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• Windows 7 sometimes boots in VGA mode

  - by TuxRug

  I have an Asus G50VT-x5 laptop with nVidia GeForce9800M-GS graphics. Normally, Windows boots normally, but about 20% of the time (rough estimate), it will boot with the fallback VGA driver, maxing out at 800x600 with no Aero. I've checked the system logs and there is nothing indicating an error loading the nVidia driver. It even specifies in the logs that the Nvidia Display Driver service started successfully, even though it has booted in safe graphics mode. This has been happening for a while, but it's happening a little more often now than it was before. Since the first time my system exhibited this behavior, I have updated my graphics driver a handful of times. I used System Information for Windows to check for problems there, but the only thing that stood out was the following: Core Temperature 4486449 °C (8075639 °F) Shaders Temperature 1171513530 °C (2108724330 °F) I know this reading is incorrect, because my laptop is nowhere near the surface of the sun and my desk has not burst into flames. When it's opererating normally, I get a sane reading like [Core Temperature 58 °C (136 °F)] with no Shaders Temperature listed. All I have to do to resolve the issue is reboot. I have seen no stability issues with the graphics or anything else. A long time ago, I had an issue with this computer where my framerate would suddenly drop during a 3D game from 40fps to <1fps, but after looking at the temperature readout immediately after quitting a game, I removed the bottom panel and blew the dust out of the vent and heatsink. Since then I have no drops in framerate under any situation. I have uploaded a zip containing the SIW reports for when the problem is occurring and when the computer is operating normally. I don't have a paid account so it can only be downloaded 10 times, so please only download the reports if you think you can use them. If you try to download the reports and they are no longer available, please comment and I will re-upload them. If you want to look at the files, they are on Rapidshare. EDIT It happened again, and I looked a little deeper into the System logs. When this happens, there are a lot of errors about other device drivers unable to start. All of these errors are for PnP drivers. Also, my USB keyboard and mouse take a few moments before they actually start working, although this happens sometimes the first normal boot as well. I am quite sure this is related, so I am adding the pnp tag. Also, CHKDSK will not run on boot. Even if a check is scheduled or a volume is manually set as dirty, CHKDSK will be skipped entirely, not even leaving an entry in the System logs. I tried running CHKNTFS /D, which did not work. I then manually changed my HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager BootExecute value to the default listed on Microsoft's website. That did not work either. I ended up booting to repair mode and running CHKDSK there, which found a number of minor inconsistencies on my system drive, but none on my data drive. I have no idea if this is related. Some more information for those who don't download my SIW report file: Antivirus and Firewall are ESET Smart Security I have three different virutalization programs installed: VMware Player, Windows Virtual PC, and VirtualBox. The network adapters for these show up in the log of failed device starts. EDIT 2 I tried running sfc /scannow, which reported that it found corrupted files that could not be fixed. The CBS log is extremely cryptic. I tried booting to my install disk, launching repair mode, and doing an offline sfc from there, which produced the same result.

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• From Binary to Data Structures

  - by Cédric Menzi

  Table of Contents Introduction PE file format and COFF header COFF file header BaseCoffReader Byte4ByteCoffReader UnsafeCoffReader ManagedCoffReader Conclusion History This article is also available on CodeProject Introduction Sometimes, you want to parse well-formed binary data and bring it into your objects to do some dirty stuff with it. In the Windows world most data structures are stored in special binary format. Either we call a WinApi function or we want to read from special files like images, spool files, executables or may be the previously announced Outlook Personal Folders File. Most specifications for these files can be found on the MSDN Libarary: Open Specification In my example, we are going to get the COFF (Common Object File Format) file header from a PE (Portable Executable). The exact specification can be found here: PECOFF PE file format and COFF header Before we start we need to know how this file is formatted. The following figure shows an overview of the Microsoft PE executable format. Source: Microsoft Our goal is to get the PE header. As we can see, the image starts with a MS-DOS 2.0 header with is not important for us. From the documentation we can read "...After the MS DOS stub, at the file offset specified at offset 0x3c, is a 4-byte...". With this information we know our reader has to jump to location 0x3c and read the offset to the signature. The signature is always 4 bytes that ensures that the image is a PE file. The signature is: PE\0\0. To prove this we first seek to the offset 0x3c, read if the file consist the signature. So we need to declare some constants, because we do not want magic numbers.   private const int PeSignatureOffsetLocation = 0x3c; private const int PeSignatureSize = 4; private const string PeSignatureContent = "PE";   Then a method for moving the reader to the correct location to read the offset of signature. With this method we always move the underlining Stream of the BinaryReader to the start location of the PE signature.   private void SeekToPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // seek to the offset for the PE signagure br.BaseStream.Seek(PeSignatureOffsetLocation, SeekOrigin.Begin); // read the offset int offsetToPeSig = br.ReadInt32(); // seek to the start of the PE signature br.BaseStream.Seek(offsetToPeSig, SeekOrigin.Begin); }   Now, we can check if it is a valid PE image by reading of the next 4 byte contains the content PE.   private bool IsValidPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // read 4 bytes to get the PE signature byte[] peSigBytes = br.ReadBytes(PeSignatureSize); // convert it to a string and trim \0 at the end of the content string peContent = Encoding.Default.GetString(peSigBytes).TrimEnd('\0'); // check if PE is in the content return peContent.Equals(PeSignatureContent); }   With this basic functionality we have a good base reader class to try the different methods of parsing the COFF file header. COFF file header The COFF header has the following structure: Offset Size Field 0 2 Machine 2 2 NumberOfSections 4 4 TimeDateStamp 8 4 PointerToSymbolTable 12 4 NumberOfSymbols 16 2 SizeOfOptionalHeader 18 2 Characteristics If we translate this table to code, we get something like this:   [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public MachineType Machine; public ushort NumberOfSections; public uint TimeDateStamp; public uint PointerToSymbolTable; public uint NumberOfSymbols; public ushort SizeOfOptionalHeader; public Characteristic Characteristics; } BaseCoffReader All readers do the same thing, so we go to the patterns library in our head and see that Strategy pattern or Template method pattern is sticked out in the bookshelf. I have decided to take the template method pattern in this case, because the Parse() should handle the IO for all implementations and the concrete parsing should done in its derived classes.   public CoffHeader Parse() { using (var br = new BinaryReader(File.Open(_fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))) { SeekToPeSignature(br); if (!IsValidPeSignature(br)) { throw new BadImageFormatException(); } return ParseInternal(br); } } protected abstract CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br);   First we open the BinaryReader, seek to the PE signature then we check if it contains a valid PE signature and rest is done by the derived implementations. Byte4ByteCoffReader The first solution is using the BinaryReader. It is the general way to get the data. We only need to know which order, which data-type and its size. If we read byte for byte we could comment out the first line in the CoffHeader structure, because we have control about the order of the member assignment.   protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { CoffHeader coff = new CoffHeader(); coff.Machine = (MachineType)br.ReadInt16(); coff.NumberOfSections = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.TimeDateStamp = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.PointerToSymbolTable = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.NumberOfSymbols = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.SizeOfOptionalHeader = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.Characteristics = (Characteristic)br.ReadInt16(); return coff; }   If the structure is as short as the COFF header here and the specification will never changed, there is probably no reason to change the strategy. But if a data-type will be changed, a new member will be added or ordering of member will be changed the maintenance costs of this method are very high. UnsafeCoffReader Another way to bring the data into this structure is using a "magically" unsafe trick. As above, we know the layout and order of the data structure. Now, we need the StructLayout attribute, because we have to ensure that the .NET Runtime allocates the structure in the same order as it is specified in the source code. We also need to enable "Allow unsafe code (/unsafe)" in the project's build properties. Then we need to add the following constructor to the CoffHeader structure.   [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { unsafe { fixed (byte* packet = &data[0]) { this = *(CoffHeader*)packet; } } } }   The "magic" trick is in the statement: this = *(CoffHeader*)packet;. What happens here? We have a fixed size of data somewhere in the memory and because a struct in C# is a value-type, the assignment operator = copies the whole data of the structure and not only the reference. To fill the structure with data, we need to pass the data as bytes into the CoffHeader structure. This can be achieved by reading the exact size of the structure from the PE file.   protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { return new CoffHeader(br.ReadBytes(Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)))); }   This solution is the fastest way to parse the data and bring it into the structure, but it is unsafe and it could introduce some security and stability risks. ManagedCoffReader In this solution we are using the same approach of the structure assignment as above. But we need to replace the unsafe part in the constructor with the following managed part:   [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { IntPtr coffPtr = IntPtr.Zero; try { int size = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)); coffPtr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(size); Marshal.Copy(data, 0, coffPtr, size); this = (CoffHeader)Marshal.PtrToStructure(coffPtr, typeof(CoffHeader)); } finally { Marshal.FreeHGlobal(coffPtr); } } }     Conclusion We saw that we can parse well-formed binary data to our data structures using different approaches. The first is probably the clearest way, because we know each member and its size and ordering and we have control about the reading the data for each member. But if add member or the structure is going change by some reason, we need to change the reader. The two other solutions use the approach of the structure assignment. In the unsafe implementation we need to compile the project with the /unsafe option. We increase the performance, but we get some security risks.

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• Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

  - by Stephen Walther

  Microsoft has asked my company, Superexpert Consulting, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the Ajax Control Toolkit moving forward. In this blog entry, I discuss our strategy for improving the Ajax Control Toolkit. Why the Ajax Control Toolkit? The Ajax Control Toolkit is one of the most popular projects on CodePlex. In fact, some have argued that it is among the most successful open-source projects of all time. It consistently receives over 3,500 downloads a day (not weekends -- workdays). A mind-boggling number of developers use the Ajax Control Toolkit in their ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Why does the Ajax Control Toolkit continue to be such a popular project? The Ajax Control Toolkit fills a strong need in the ASP.NET Web Forms world. The Toolkit enables Web Forms developers to build richly interactive JavaScript applications without writing any JavaScript. For example, by taking advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit, a Web Forms developer can add modal dialogs, popup calendars, and client tabs to a web application simply by dragging web controls onto a page. The Ajax Control Toolkit is not for everyone. If you are comfortable writing JavaScript then I recommend that you investigate using jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit. However, if you are a Web Forms developer and you don’t want to get your hands dirty writing JavaScript, then the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great solution. The Ajax Control Toolkit is Vast The Ajax Control Toolkit consists of 40 controls. That’s a lot of controls (For the sake of comparison, jQuery UI consists of only 8 controls – those slackers J). Furthermore, developers expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on browsers both old and new. For example, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 9 and every version of Internet Explorer in between. People also expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. And, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with different operating systems. Yikes, that is a lot of combinations. The biggest challenge which my company faces in supporting the Ajax Control Toolkit is ensuring that the Ajax Control Toolkit works across all of these different browsers and operating systems. Testing, Testing, Testing Because we wanted to ensure that we could easily test the Ajax Control Toolkit with different browsers, the very first thing that we did was to set up a dedicated testing server. The dedicated server -- named Schizo -- hosts 4 virtual machines so that we can run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 at the same time (We also use the virtual machines to host the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari). The five developers on our team (plus me) can each publish to a separate FTP website on the testing server. That way, we can quickly test how changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit affect different browsers. QUnit Tests for the Ajax Control Toolkit Introducing regressions – introducing new bugs when trying to fix existing bugs – is the concern which prevents me from sleeping well at night. There are so many people using the Ajax Control Toolkit in so many unique scenarios, that it is difficult to make improvements to the Ajax Control Toolkit without introducing regressions. In order to avoid regressions, we decided early on that it was extremely important to build good test coverage for the 40 controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We’ve been focusing a lot of energy on building automated JavaScript unit tests which we can use to help us discover regressions. We decided to write the unit tests with the QUnit test framework. We picked QUnit because it is quickly becoming the standard unit testing framework in the JavaScript world. For example, it is the unit testing framework used by the jQuery team, the jQuery UI team, and many jQuery UI plugin developers. We had to make several enhancements to the QUnit framework in order to test the Ajax Control Toolkit. For example, QUnit does not support tests which include postbacks. We modified the QUnit framework so that it works with IFrames so we could perform postbacks in our automated tests. At this point, we have written hundreds of QUnit tests. For example, we have written 135 QUnit tests for the Accordion control. The QUnit tests are included with the Ajax Control Toolkit source code in a project named AjaxControlToolkit.Tests. You can run all of the QUnit tests contained in the project by opening the Default.aspx page. Automating the QUnit Tests across Multiple Browsers Automated tests are useless if no one ever runs them. In order for the QUnit tests to be useful, we needed an easy way to run the tests automatically against a matrix of browsers. We wanted to run the unit tests against Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari automatically. Expecting a developer to run QUnit tests against every browser after every check-in is just too much to expect. It takes 20 seconds to run the Accordion QUnit tests. We are testing against 8 browsers. That would require the developer to open 8 browsers and wait for the results after each change in code. Too much work. Therefore, we built a JavaScript Test Server. Our JavaScript Test Server project was inspired by John Resig’s TestSwarm project. The JavaScript Test Server runs our QUnit tests in a swarm of browsers (running on different operating systems) automatically. Here’s how the JavaScript Test Server works: 1. We created an ASP.NET page named RunTest.aspx that constantly polls the JavaScript Test Server for a new set of QUnit tests to run. After the RunTest.aspx page runs the QUnit tests, the RunTest.aspx records the test results back to the JavaScript Test Server. 2. We opened the RunTest.aspx page on instances of Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Google, and Safari. Now that we have the JavaScript Test Server setup, we can run all of our QUnit tests against all of the browsers which we need to support with a single click of a button. A New Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit Each Month The Ajax Control Toolkit Issue Tracker contains over one thousand five hundred open issues and feature requests. So we have plenty of work on our plates J At CodePlex, anyone can vote for an issue to be fixed. Originally, we planned to fix issues in order of their votes. However, we quickly discovered that this approach was inefficient. Constantly switching back and forth between different controls was too time-consuming. It takes time to re-familiarize yourself with a control. Instead, we decided to focus on two or three controls each month and really focus on fixing the issues with those controls. This way, we can fix sets of related issues and avoid the randomization caused by context switching. Our team works in monthly sprints. We plan to do another release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each and every month. So far, we have competed one release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which was released on April 1, 2011. We plan to release a new version in early May. Conclusion Fortunately, I work with a team of smart developers. We currently have 5 developers working on the Ajax Control Toolkit (not full-time, they are also building two very cool ASP.NET MVC applications). All the developers who work on our team are required to have strong JavaScript, jQuery, and ASP.NET MVC skills. In the interest of being as transparent as possible about our work on the Ajax Control Toolkit, I plan to blog frequently about our team’s ongoing work. In my next blog entry, I plan to write about the two Ajax Control Toolkit controls which are the focus of our work for next release.

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• TFS, G.I. Joe and Under-doing

  If I were to rank the most consistently irritating parts of my work day, using TFS would come in first by a wide margin. Even repeated network outages this week seem like a pleasant reprieve from this monolithic beast. This is not a reflexive anti-Microsoft feeling, that attitude just wouldnt work for a consultant who does .NET development. It is also not an utter dismissal of TFS as worthless; Ive seen people use it effectively on several projects. So why? Ill start with a laundry list of shortcomings. An out of the box UI for work items that is insultingly bad, a source control system that is confoundingly fragile when handling merges, folder renames and long file names, the arcane XML wizardry necessary to customize a template and a build system that adds an extra layer of oddness on top of msbuild. Im sure my legion of readers will soon point out to me how I can work around all these issues, how this is fixed in TFS 2010 or with this add-in, and how once you have everything set up, youre fine. And theyd be right, any one of these problems could be worked around. If not dirty laundry, what else? I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that TFS is so irritating to me because it represents a vision of software development that I find unappealing. To expand upon this, lets start with some wisdom from those great PSAs at the end of the G.I. Joe cartoons of the 80s: Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. In software development, Id go further and say knowing is more than half the battle. Understanding the dimensions of the problem you are trying to solve, the needs of the users, the value that your software can provide are more than half the battle. Implementation of this understanding is not easy, but it is not even possible without this knowledge. Assuming we have a fixed amount of time and mental energy for any project, why does this spell trouble for TFS? If you think about what TFS is doing, its offering you a huge array of options to track the day to day implementation of your project. From tasks, to code churn, to test coverage. All valuable metrics, but only in exchange for valuable time to get it all working. In addition, when you have a shiny toy like TFS, the temptation is to feel obligated to use it. So the push from TFS is to encourage a project manager and team to focus on process and metrics around process. You can get great visibility, and graphs to show your project stakeholders, but none of that is important if you are not implementing the right product. Not just unimportant, these activities can be harmful as they drain your time and sap your creativity away from the rest of the project. To be more concrete, lets suppose your organization has invested the time to create a template for your projects and trained people in how to use it, so there is no longer a big investment of time for each project to get up and running. First, Id challenge if that template could be specific enough to be full featured and still applicable for any project. Second, the very existence of this template would be a indication to a project manager that the success of their project was somehow directly related to fitting management of that project into this format. Again, while the capabilities are wonderful, the mirage is there; just get everything into TFS and your project will run smoothly. Ill close the loop on this first topic by proposing a thought experiment. Think of the projects youve worked on. How many times have you been chagrined to discover youve implemented the wrong feature, misunderstood how a feature should work or just plain spent too much time on a screen that nobody uses? That sounds like a really worthwhile area to invest time in improving. How about going back to these projects and thinking about how many times you wished you had optimized the state change flow of your tasks or been embarrassed to not have a code churn report linked back to the latest changeset? With thanks to the Real American Heroes, Ill move on to a more current influence, that of the developers at 37signals, and their philosophy towards software development. This philosophy, fully detailed in the books Getting Real and Rework, is a vision of software that under does the competition. This is software that is deliberately limited in functionality in order to concentrate fully on making sure ever feature that is there is awesome and needed. Why is this relevant? Well, in one of those fun seeming paradoxes in life, constraints can be a spark for creativity. Think Twitter, the small screen of an iPhone, the limitations of HTML for applications, the low memory limits of older or embedded system. As long as there is some freedom within those constraints, amazing things emerge. For project management, some of the most respected people in the industry recommend using just index cards, pens and tape. They argue that with change the constant in software development, your process should be as limited (yet rigorous) as possible. Looking at TFS, this is not a system designed to under do anybody. It is a big jumble of components and options, with every feature you could think of. Predictably this means many basic functions are hard to use. For task management, many people just use an Excel spreadsheet linked up to TFS. Not a stirring endorsement of the tooling there. TFS as a whole would be far more appealing to me if there was less of it, but better. Id cut 50% of the features to make the other half really amaze and inspire me. And thats really the heart of the matter. TFS has great promise and I want to believe it can work better. But ultimately it focuses your attention on a lot of stuff that doesnt really matter and then clamps down your creativity in a mess of forms and dialogs obscuring what does.   --- Relevant Links --- All those great G.I. Joe PSAs are on YouTube, including lots of mashed up versions. A simple Google search will get you on the right track.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Hey, Google: It’s Time to Add Multi-Window Multitasking To Android

  - by Chris Hoffman

  In 2012, Google’s Dianne Hackborn threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market if they moved forward with adding “Cornerstone” multitasking to their custom ROM. Samsung has since created their own multi-window multitasking feature. Dianne Hackborn said this “is something that needs to be done at the mainline platform level” so apps wouldn’t break. She was right — Android needs this as a standard feature and it’s time for Google to provide it. Doesn’t Android Have Multitasking? Android originally stood out from Apple’s iOS with its powerful multitasking. Applications can continue running in the background while you’re using another application. This makes Android powerful — you can even have BitTorrent clients downloading files in the background while using another app. Android still kept the design of a single app on screen at a time. This made a lot of sense when Android only ran on smartphones with small screens. Today, Android runs on everything from smaller smartphones all the way up to huge “phablets” like the Galaxy Note. Android has gone beyond phones and runs on 12-inch tablets, convertibles with keyboard docks, laptops, and even Android desktops. Android isn’t just a phone operating system. Samsung’s Multi-Window Isn’t Good Enough Samsung has tried to add value to Android by adding a multi-window feature. When you’re using a high-end phone like the Galaxy Note or Galaxy S, or a Galaxy tablet, you have the ability to run certain apps side-by-side with each other. There are big problems here. This only works on Samsung devices, and only on specific Samsung devices. To add support for this feature in a way that doesn’t break other apps, Samsung’s multi-window feature also only works with specific apps. You can’t just run any app in multi-window view, only the apps on the Multi Window bar Samsung provides. This prevents third-party apps from breaking, which is what Google was worried about with CyanogenMod’s Cornerstone feature. A feature that only works with a handful of apps on specific devices from a single manufacturer isn’t good enough. This feature needs to work on every Android device — or at least ones with suitably large screens and powerful enough internals. It needs to be an Android platform feature so application developers can ensure their apps will work properly with it on every device. Android developers shouldn’t have to add support for each manufacturer’s own multi-window feature if other manufacturers decide to copy Samsung. Floating Apps Are a Dirty Hack Floating apps also enable real multitasking. Remember that Android allows apps to run in the background while you’re using an app in the foreground. These apps can present interfaces that appear floating above the current app — think of it like using “always on top” to make a window always appear over every other app on a desktop operating system. You can install floating apps to browse the web, take notes, chat, and watch videos while using any app. Only apps specifically designed to run as floating apps will work, so you have to seek them out. Floating apps are also awkward to use because they float over the app you’re using, blocking parts of its interface. Microsoft added floating-window support to Skype for Android. You can have a video conversation and the other person’s face will always appear on your screen, even when you leave the Skype app. Microsoft is using more of Android’s multi-window multitasking power than Google is. Custom ROMs and Root-Only Tweaks Aren’t Acceptable Some custom ROMs are adding this feature to Android. Google threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market (now known as Google Play) if they added this feature because it could potentially break third-party apps. Today, other custom ROMs are working on split-screen multitasking. Samsung added their own version to their own devices. You can also get this feature by using a root-only Xposed Framework tweak known as XMultiWindow. If you have root access, you can get multi-window multitasking or any app on your device. This shouldn’t require rooting your device or installing a custom ROM. These third-party solutions often have awkward interfaces and bugs. We need an integrated, supported solution that works the same on every device. Why Multi-Window is Important Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 stands out among tablet operating systems for its powerful multitasking support, allowing you to view several apps side-by-side at the same time. Apple is also reported to be working on adding side-by-side apps to the iPad with iOS 8. On every competitor’s operating system, you’ll be able to view a web page while you write an email, watch a video while you browse the web, or chat with someone while you do anything else. But Android’s still remained frozen in time. Despite all Android’s underlying power — and despite the way Android allows apps to adapt to different screen sizes — Google is resisting adding this feature. Large-screen Android tablets like the Nexus 10 (remember that tablet Google hasn’t updated in over 18 months?) need this feature. So do huge phones, convertibles, laptops, and Android desktops. If tablets are the future of personal computing, we should be able to do more than one thing at a time on our tablets’ big screens. Microsoft, Samsung, and even Apple are realizing this — now it’s Google’s turn. Image Credit: Sergey Galyonkin on Flickr, Karlis Dambrans on Flickr

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• [GEEK SCHOOL] Network Security 4: Windows Firewall: Your System’s Best Defense

  - by Ciprian Rusen

  If you have your computer connected to a network, or directly to your Internet connection, then having a firewall is an absolute necessity. In this lesson we will discuss the Windows Firewall – one of the best security features available in Windows! The Windows Firewall made its debut in Windows XP. Prior to that, Windows system needed to rely on third-party solutions or dedicated hardware to protect them from network-based attacks. Over the years, Microsoft has done a great job with it and it is one of the best firewalls you will ever find for Windows operating systems. Seriously, it is so good that some commercial vendors have decided to piggyback on it! Let’s talk about what you will learn in this lesson. First, you will learn about what the Windows Firewall is, what it does, and how it works. Afterward, you will start to get your hands dirty and edit the list of apps, programs, and features that are allowed to communicate through the Windows Firewall depending on the type of network you are connected to. Moving on from there, you will learn how to add new apps or programs to the list of allowed items and how to remove the apps and programs that you want to block. Last but not least, you will learn how to enable or disable the Windows Firewall, for only one type of networks or for all network connections. By the end of this lesson, you should know enough about the Windows Firewall to use and manage it effectively. What is the Windows Firewall? Windows Firewall is an important security application that’s built into Windows. One of its roles is to block unauthorized access to your computer. The second role is to permit authorized data communications to and from your computer. Windows Firewall does these things with the help of rules and exceptions that are applied both to inbound and outbound traffic. They are applied depending on the type of network you are connected to and the location you have set for it in Windows, when connecting to the network. Based on your choice, the Windows Firewall automatically adjusts the rules and exceptions applied to that network. This makes the Windows Firewall a product that’s silent and easy to use. It bothers you only when it doesn’t have any rules and exceptions for what you are trying to do or what the programs running on your computer are trying to do. If you need a refresher on the concept of network locations, we recommend you to read our How-To Geek School class on Windows Networking. Another benefit of the Windows Firewall is that it is so tightly and nicely integrated into Windows and all its networking features, that some commercial vendors decided to piggyback onto it and use it in their security products. For example, products from companies like Trend Micro or F-Secure no longer provide their proprietary firewall modules but use the Windows Firewall instead. Except for a few wording differences, the Windows Firewall works the same in Windows 7 and Windows 8.x. The only notable difference is that in Windows 8.x you will see the word “app” being used instead of “program”. Where to Find the Windows Firewall By default, the Windows Firewall is turned on and you don’t need to do anything special in order for it work. You will see it displaying some prompts once in a while but they show up so rarely that you might forget that is even working. If you want to access it and configure the way it works, go to the Control Panel, then go to “System and Security” and select “Windows Firewall”. Now you will see the Windows Firewall window where you can get a quick glimpse on whether it is turned on and the type of network you are connected to: private networks or public network. For the network type that you are connected to, you will see additional information like: The state of the Windows Firewall How the Windows Firewall deals with incoming connections The active network When the Windows Firewall will notify you You can easily expand the other section and view the default settings that apply when connecting to networks of that type. If you have installed a third-party security application that also includes a firewall module, chances are that the Windows Firewall has been disabled, in order to avoid performance issues and conflicts between the two security products. If that is the case for your computer or device, you won’t be able to view any information in the Windows Firewall window and you won’t be able to configure the way it works. Instead, you will see a warning that says: “These settings are being managed by vendor application – Application Name”. In the screenshot below you can see an example of how this looks. How to Allow Desktop Applications Through the Windows Firewall Windows Firewall has a very comprehensive set of rules and most Windows programs that you install add their own exceptions to the Windows Firewall so that they receive network and Internet access. This means that you will see prompts from the Windows Firewall on occasion, generally when you install programs that do not add their own exceptions to the Windows Firewall’s list. In a Windows Firewall prompt, you are asked to select the network locations to which you allow access for that program: private networks or public networks. By default, Windows Firewall selects the checkbox that’s appropriate for the network you are currently using. You can decide to allow access for both types of network locations or just to one of them. To apply your setting press “Allow access”. If you want to block network access for that program, press “Cancel” and the program will be set as blocked for both network locations. At this step you should note that only administrators can set exceptions in the Windows Firewall. If you are using a standard account without administrator permissions, the programs that do not comply with the Windows Firewall rules and exceptions are automatically blocked, without any prompts being shown. You should note that in Windows 8.x you will never see any Windows Firewall prompts related to apps from the Windows Store. They are automatically given access to the network and the Internet based on the assumption that you are aware of the permissions they require based on the information displayed by the Windows Store. Windows Firewall rules and exceptions are automatically created for each app that you install from the Windows Store. However, you can easily block access to the network and the Internet for any app, using the instructions in the next section. How to Customize the Rules for Allowed Apps Windows Firewall allows any user with an administrator account to change the list of rules and exceptions applied for apps and desktop programs. In order to do this, first start the Windows Firewall. On the column on the left, click or tap “Allow an app or feature through Windows Firewall” (in Windows 8.x) or “Allow a program or feature through Windows Firewall” (in Windows 7). Now you see the list of apps and programs that are allowed to communicate through the Windows Firewall. At this point, the list is grayed out and you can only view which apps, features, and programs have rules that are enabled in the Windows Firewall.

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• Mocking the Unmockable: Using Microsoft Moles with Gallio

  - by Thomas Weller

  Usual opensource mocking frameworks (like e.g. Moq or Rhino.Mocks) can mock only interfaces and virtual methods. In contrary to that, Microsoft’s Moles framework can ‘mock’ virtually anything, in that it uses runtime instrumentation to inject callbacks in the method MSIL bodies of the moled methods. Therefore, it is possible to detour any .NET method, including non-virtual/static methods in sealed types. This can be extremely helpful when dealing e.g. with code that calls into the .NET framework, some third-party or legacy stuff etc… Some useful collected resources (links to website, documentation material and some videos) can be found in my toolbox on Delicious under this link: http://delicious.com/thomasweller/toolbox+moles A Gallio extension for Moles Originally, Moles is a part of Microsoft’s Pex framework and thus integrates best with Visual Studio Unit Tests (MSTest). However, the Moles sample download contains some additional assemblies to also support other unit test frameworks. They provide a Moled attribute to ease the usage of mole types with the respective framework (there are extensions for NUnit, xUnit.net and MbUnit v2 included with the samples). As there is no such extension for the Gallio platform, I did the few required lines myself – the resulting Gallio.Moles.dll is included with the sample download. With this little assembly in place, it is possible to use Moles with Gallio like that: [Test, Moled] public void SomeTest() {     ... What you can do with it Moles can be very helpful, if you need to ‘mock’ something other than a virtual or interface-implementing method. This might be the case when dealing with some third-party component, legacy code, or if you want to ‘mock’ the .NET framework itself. Generally, you need to announce each moled type that you want to use in a test with the MoledType attribute on assembly level. For example: [assembly: MoledType(typeof(System.IO.File))] Below are some typical use cases for Moles. For a more detailed overview (incl. naming conventions and an instruction on how to create the required moles assemblies), please refer to the reference material above.  Detouring the .NET framework Imagine that you want to test a method similar to the one below, which internally calls some framework method:   public void ReadFileContent(string fileName) {     this.FileContent = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(fileName); } Using a mole, you would replace the call to the File.ReadAllText(string) method with a runtime delegate like so: [Test, Moled] [Description("This 'mocks' the System.IO.File class with a custom delegate.")] public void ReadFileContentWithMoles() {     // arrange ('mock' the FileSystem with a delegate)     System.IO.Moles.MFile.ReadAllTextString = (fname => fname == FileName ? FileContent : "WrongFileName");       // act     var testTarget = new TestTarget.TestTarget();     testTarget.ReadFileContent(FileName);       // assert     Assert.AreEqual(FileContent, testTarget.FileContent); } Detouring static methods and/or classes A static method like the below… public static string StaticMethod(int x, int y) {     return string.Format("{0}{1}", x, y); } … can be ‘mocked’ with the following: [Test, Moled] public void StaticMethodWithMoles() {     MStaticClass.StaticMethodInt32Int32 = ((x, y) => "uups");       var result = StaticClass.StaticMethod(1, 2);       Assert.AreEqual("uups", result); } Detouring constructors You can do this delegate thing even with a class’ constructor. The syntax for this is not all  too intuitive, because you have to setup the internal state of the mole, but generally it works like a charm. For example, to replace this c’tor… public class ClassWithCtor {     public int Value { get; private set; }       public ClassWithCtor(int someValue)     {         this.Value = someValue;     } } … you would do the following: [Test, Moled] public void ConstructorTestWithMoles() {     MClassWithCtor.ConstructorInt32 =            ((@class, @value) => new MClassWithCtor(@class) {ValueGet = () => 99});       var classWithCtor = new ClassWithCtor(3);       Assert.AreEqual(99, classWithCtor.Value); } Detouring abstract base classes You can also use this approach to ‘mock’ abstract base classes of a class that you call in your test. Assumed that you have something like that: public abstract class AbstractBaseClass {     public virtual string SaySomething()     {         return "Hello from base.";     } }      public class ChildClass : AbstractBaseClass {     public override string SaySomething()     {         return string.Format(             "Hello from child. Base says: '{0}'",             base.SaySomething());     } } Then you would set up the child’s underlying base class like this: [Test, Moled] public void AbstractBaseClassTestWithMoles() {     ChildClass child = new ChildClass();     new MAbstractBaseClass(child)         {                 SaySomething = () => "Leave me alone!"         }         .InstanceBehavior = MoleBehaviors.Fallthrough;       var hello = child.SaySomething();       Assert.AreEqual("Hello from child. Base says: 'Leave me alone!'", hello); } Setting the moles behavior to a value of  MoleBehaviors.Fallthrough causes the ‘original’ method to be called if a respective delegate is not provided explicitly – here it causes the ChildClass’ override of the SaySomething() method to be called. There are some more possible scenarios, where the Moles framework could be of much help (e.g. it’s also possible to detour interface implementations like IEnumerable<T> and such…). One other possibility that comes to my mind (because I’m currently dealing with that), is to replace calls from repository classes to the ADO.NET Entity Framework O/R mapper with delegates to isolate the repository classes from the underlying database, which otherwise would not be possible… Usage Since Moles relies on runtime instrumentation, mole types must be run under the Pex profiler. This only works from inside Visual Studio if you write your tests with MSTest (Visual Studio Unit Test). While other unit test frameworks generally can be used with Moles, they require the respective tests to be run via command line, executed through the moles.runner.exe tool. A typical test execution would be similar to this: moles.runner.exe <mytests.dll> /runner:<myframework.console.exe> /args:/<myargs> So, the moled test can be run through tools like NCover or a scripting tool like MSBuild (which makes them easy to run in a Continuous Integration environment), but they are somewhat unhandy to run in the usual TDD workflow (which I described in some detail here). To make this a bit more fluent, I wrote a ReSharper live template to generate the respective command line for the test (it is also included in the sample download – moled_cmd.xml). - This is just a quick-and-dirty ‘solution’. Maybe it makes sense to write an extra Gallio adapter plugin (similar to the many others that are already provided) and include it with the Gallio download package, if  there’s sufficient demand for it. As of now, the only way to run tests with the Moles framework from within Visual Studio is by using them with MSTest. From the command line, anything with a managed console runner can be used (provided that the appropriate extension is in place)… A typical Gallio/Moles command line (as generated by the mentioned R#-template) looks like that: "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Moles\bin\moles.runner.exe" /runner:"%ProgramFiles%\Gallio\bin\Gallio.Echo.exe" "Gallio.Moles.Demo.dll" /args:/r:IsolatedAppDomain /args:/filter:"ExactType:TestFixture and Member:ReadFileContentWithMoles" -- Note: When using the command line with Echo (Gallio’s console runner), be sure to always include the IsolatedAppDomain option, otherwise the tests won’t use the instrumentation callbacks! -- License issues As I already said, the free mocking frameworks can mock only interfaces and virtual methods. if you want to mock other things, you need the Typemock Isolator tool for that, which comes with license costs (Although these ‘costs’ are ridiculously low compared to the value that such a tool can bring to a software project, spending money often is a considerable gateway hurdle in real life...).  The Moles framework also is not totally free, but comes with the same license conditions as the (closely related) Pex framework: It is free for academic/non-commercial use only, to use it in a ‘real’ software project requires an MSDN Subscription (from VS2010pro on). The demo solution The sample solution (VS 2008) can be downloaded from here. It contains the Gallio.Moles.dll which provides the here described Moled attribute, the above mentioned R#-template (moled_cmd.xml) and a test fixture containing the above described use case scenarios. To run it, you need the Gallio framework (download) and Microsoft Moles (download) being installed in the default locations. Happy testing…

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• Fixing a SkyDrive Sync Disaster

  - by Rick Strahl

  For a few months I've been using SkyDrive to handle some basic synching tasks for a number of folders of mine. Specifically I've been dumping a few of my development folders into sky drive so I have a live running backup. It had been working just fine until about a week ago when something went awry. Badly! The idea is that the SkyDrive should sync files, but somewhere in its sync relationship it appears that SkyDrive got confused and assumed it needed to sync back older files to my local machine from the SkyDrive server. So rather than syncing my newer files to the server SkyDrive was pushing older files back to me. Because SkyDrive is so slow actually updating data it's not unusual for SkyDrive to be far behind in syncing and apparently some files were out of date by several months. Of course this is insidious because I didn't notice it for quite some time. I'd been happily working away on my files when a few days ago I noted a bunch of files with -RasXps (my machine name) popping up in various folders. At first I thought my Git repository was giving me a fit, but eventually realized that SkyDrive was actually pushing old files into my monitored folders. To be fair SkyDrive did make backups of the existing files, but by the time I caught it there were literally a few thousand files scattered on my machine that were now updated with old files from online. Here's what some of this looks like: If you look at the directory list you see a bunch of files with a -RasXps postfix appended to them. Those are the files that SkyDrive replaced and backed up on my machine. As you can see the backed up files are actually newer than the ones it pulled from the online SkyDrive. Unless I modified the files after they were updated they all were older than the existing local files. Not exactly how I imagined my synching would work. At first I started cleaning up this mess manually. In most cases the obvious solution was to simply delete the original file and replace with the -RasXps file, but not in all files. Some scrutiny was required and besides being a pain in the ass to rename files, quite frequently I had to dig out Beyond Compare to compare a few files where it wasn't quite clear what's wrong. I quickly realized that doing this by hand would be too hard for the large number of files that got hosed. Hacking together a small .NET Utility So, I figured the easiest way to tackle this is to write a small utility app that shows me all the mangled files that have backups, allows me to compare them and then quickly select and update them, removing the -RasXps file after choosing one of the two files. What I ended up with was a quick and dirty WinForms app that allows me to pick a root folder, and then shows all the -MachineName files: I start by picking a base folder and a template to search for - typically the -MachineName. Clicking Go brings up a list of all files in that folder and its subdirectories.  The list also displays the dates for the saved (-MachineName) file and the current file on disk, along with highlighting for the newer of the two. I can right click on any file and get a context menu pop up to open the folder in Explorer, or open Beyond Compare and view the two files to compare differences which I found very helpful for a number of files where I had modified the files after SkyDrive had updated to an old one. Typically these would be the green files (of which there were thankfully few). To 'fix' files I can select any number of files in the list, then use one of the three buttons on the right to apply an operation. I can use the Saved files - that is the backup file that SkyDrive created with the -MachineName extension (-RasXps above). Or I can use the current file, which is the file with the right name on disk right now and delete the -MachineName file. Or on some occasions I can just opt to delete both of them. For some files like binaries it's often easier to just delete and them be rebuild than choosing. For the most part the process involves accepting the pink files, and checking the few green files and see if any modifications were made since the file was updated incorrectly by SkyDrive. For me luckily those are few in number. Anyways, I thought I share this utility in case anybody else runs into this issue. I've included the VS2012 solution and all the source code so you can see how it works and you can tweak it as needed. The .NET 4.5 binaries are also included if you can't compile. Be warned though!  This rough code is provided as is and makes no guarantees or claims about file safety. All three of the action buttons on the form will delete data. It's a very rough utility and there are no safeguards that ask nicely before deleting files. I highly recommend you make a backup before you have at it. This tools is very narrow in focus, but it might also work with other sync issues from other vendors. I seem to remember that I had similar issues with SugarSync at some point and it too created the -MachineName style files on sync conflicts. Hope this helps somebody out so you can avoid wasting the better part of a full work day on this… Resources Download the Source Code and Binaries for SkyDrive Rescue© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Windows  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 15, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 15, 2010New ProjectsApplication Logging Repository (ALR): The ALR is a light-weight logging framework that allows applications to log events and exceptions to a central repository.Arkane.FileProperties.DSS: Arkane.FileProperties.Dss is a library for parsing the file header of a .DSS file (as used by Olympus digital dictaphone systems) to obtain time, v...B in conTrol project: This project enables controling log-in and locking your workstation automatically, identifyng you bluetooth.DarkBook: DarkBook is a personal library project.Direct2D for Microsoft .Net: Direct2D, DirectWrite and Windows Imaging wrappers for .Net. This library allows to access Direct2D, DirectWrite and Windows Imaging Windows API f...DJ Ware: DJ Ware is an extensible music player with plugin support and innovative features to organize and explore music files. It is developed with C#, WPF...gpsMe: gpsMe is a Windows Mobile 6.x mapping solution allowing to place the user on a personnalized map. The screen requirements are VGA or WVGA but, you ...jErrorLog: jErrorLog is an error logging component for use in DotNet 2.0 or later applications. It can log error messages to any of the following: database, e...KEMET_API: Java Library (open - source). This library is a help to study egyptian hieroglyphs.Meadow: A web site project for a Swedish floorball team called Slackers. Home page built with ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX and SQL Server 2005.Mustang Math: Mustang Math makes it easier for young children to practice basic math facts on the computer. No keyboard or mouse required - just say the answer!...Net.Formats.oEmbed: oEmbed format implementation in c#. oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows...Normlize O/R Mapper: Open source O/RM tool that participates with traditional inheritance object models as well as Hibernate/nHibernate style class shells. As I have t...N-Twill Twitter Client for VB.NET: Proyecto de cliente twitter hecho con la libreria TwitterVB2 y hecho en VB.net 2008.SIQM: Spatial Information Quality Management Toolset TIMETABLEASY Web: Under developmentTweetSharp: TweetSharp is a complete .NET library for micro-blogging platforms that allows you to write short and sweet expressions that fly to Twitter, Yammer...UISandbox: UISandbox is a sample C# source code showing how to deal with plugins requiring sandbox, when those plugins must interact with WPF application inte...WinForm SharePoint Web Part Manager: The SharePoint Web Part Manager is a WinForm tool using the SharePoint object model that enables developers and power users to add, update, delete,...WoW Character Viewer: View your World of Warcraft character (or anyone else's character), using this application. Written using Visual Basic Express 2008, then ported t...Xrns2XMod: Xrns2XMod converts from Renoise format (xrns) to mod or xm, which are more compatible formats playable from xmplay or vlc.New ReleasesArkane.FileProperties.DSS: 1.0 stable release: Executables and merge module for 1.0. (See documentation.)Bluetooth Radar: Version 2.0: Add IrDA reference for Bluetooth sending using Obex Add Project icon Add Bluetooth detection mode (Auto close application is there is no blueto...BUtil: BUtil 5.0 Alpha: Backup tasks adding.... in progressChronos WPF: Chronos v1.0 RC 1: Chronos v1.0 RC 1. Development will be feature frozen after this release, only bug fixes will be allowed. Updated nRoute assembly to v0.4 (http:...clipShow: Version 2.5: Release that addresses the canonical syntax issues in search discoverd by Tschachim (thanks again!). Also, the play list and play all menu items s...DarkBook: DarkBook alpha: Hi, here comes the alpha version of Darkbook. It has all the functions already but is still in developing. I hope it's helpful for you, at least it...DirectQ: Release 1.8.3a: Improvements to 1.8.2, which will be shortly be removed. This replaces the original 1.8.3 release from earlier today which had some late-breaking ...Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio: Effect Custom Tool v1.1: Effect Custom Tool for Visual Studio is a visual studio 2008 extension that helps you generate c# classes from effect (*.fx) files for use with Xna...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.4.3: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.4.3), with general improvements. It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My...gpsMe: gpsMe v0.3: Required Hardware Windows Mobile 6 .Net Compact Framework 3.5 integrated gps device VGA or WVGA screen (normally works on others)IST435: Lab 4 - Enterprise Level CMS with DotNetNuke: Lab 4 - Enterprise Level CMS with DotNetNukeThis is the "starter kit" that you must base your Lab 4 on. This lab must be completed in-class.Mouse Jiggler: MouseJiggle-1.1: 1.1 release of Mouse Jiggler, now with x64 compatibility and the ability to start jiggling on run with the --jiggle or -j command-line switch.Mustang Math: MustangMath.exe: This is a quick and dirty "0.1" prototype to demonstrate the speech recognition idea. It starts asking you questions automatically on launch and k...MvcContrib: a Codeplex Foundation project: 2.0.36.0 for MVC2 (RTW): Please see the Change Log for a complete list of changes. MVC BootCamp Description of the releases: MvcContrib.Release.zip MvcContrib.dll MvcC...Nito.LINQ: Beta (v0.3): New features for this release: Several new supported platforms (see below). PDBs that are source-indexed to the appropriate CodePlex changeset. ...OpenIdPortableArea: 0.1.0.2 OpenIdPortableArea: OpenIdPortableArea.Release: DotNetOpenAuth.dll DotNetOpenAuth.xml MvcContrib.dll MvcContrib.xml OpenIdPortableArea.dll OpenIdPortableAre...PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Sample with Library v0.2: New version of PokeIn library with sample. v0.2 There are new features in this release and no bug detected yet.Project Tru Tiên: Elements-test V1-fix (v2): Là EL test được fix tiếp theo bản fix V1, tạm gọi đây là bản fix V2 của ELtest Trong bản fix này EL được fix thêm vụ Quest, Quest chỉnh sửa đúng t...Rule 18 - Love your clipboard: Rule 18: This is the third public beta for the first version of Rule 18. This version has been updated to support Visual Studio 2010 RTM and .NET 4.0 RTM. ...SevenZipSharp: SevenZipSharp 0.62: Added: Extraction from SFX archives. Now it is possible to unrar RAR self-extractors, unzip ZIP self-extractors, etc. Extraction from DOC, XLS, (...SharePoint Labs: SPLab3001A-FRA-Level200: SPLab3001A-FRA-Level200 This SharePoint Lab will teach the persistence object layer that SharePoint uses to centraly store configuration data and o...TTXPathNavigator: TTXPathNavigator for VS2010: Version for Visual Studio 2010turing machine simulator: SDS: SDS documentVecDraw: VecDraw_0.2.25: Alpha release for test purposesWinForm SharePoint Web Part Manager: Beta 1: First release of the WinForm SharePoitn web part manager toolXrns2XMod: Xrns2XMod 0.5.1: Mod and XM conversion format - No sample data conversion at momentZip Solution: ZipSolution 5.3: Features: 1. Added WaitMsec for visual studio support with getting access to files in post build event; 2. Added ShowTextInToolbars to app.config ...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationFarseer Physics EngineIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDotRasFacebook Developer Toolkit

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• The DOS DEBUG Environment

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I thought I would go back in time and have a look at the DEBUG command that has been available since the beginning of dawn in DOS, MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. up to today I always knew it was there, but had no clue on how to use it so for those that are interested this might be a great geek party trick to pull out when you want the awe the younger generation and want to show them what “real” programming is about. But wait, you will have to do it relatively quickly as it seems like DEBUG was finally dumped from the Windows group in Windows 7. Not to worry, pull out that Windows XP box which will get you even more geek points and you can still poke DEBUG a bit. So, for those that are interested and want to find out a bit about the history of DEBUG read the wiki link here. That all put aside, lets get our hands dirty.. How to Start DEBUG in Windows Make sure your version of Windows supports DEBUG. Open up a console window Make a directory where you want to play with debug – in my instance I called it C221 Enter the directory and type Debug You will get a response with a – as illustrated in the image below…   The commands available in DEBUG There are several commands available in DEBUG. The most common ones are A (Assemble) R (Register) T (Trace) G (Go) D (Dump or Display) U (Unassemble) E (Enter) P (Proceed) N (Name) L (Load) W (Write) H (Hexadecimal) I (Input) O (Output) Q (Quit) I am not going to cover all these commands, but what I will do is go through a few of them briefly. A is for Assemble Command (to write code) The A command translates assembly language statements into machine code. It is quite useful for writing small assembly programs. Below I have written a very basic assembly program. The code typed out is as follows mov ax,0015 mov cx,0023 sub cx,ax mov [120],al mov cl,[120]A nop R is for Register (to jump to a point in memory) The r command turns out to be one of the most frequent commands you will use in DEBUG. It allows you to view the contents of registers and to change their values. It can be used with the following combinations… R – Displays the contents of all the registers R f – Displays the flags register R register_name – Displays the contents of a specific register All three methods are illustrated in the image above T is for Trace (To execute a program step by step) The t command allows us to execute the program step by step. Before we can trace the program we need to point back to the beginning of the program. We do this by typing in r ip, which moves us back to memory point 100. We then type trace which executes the first line of code (line 100) (As shown in the image below starting from the red arrow). You can see from the above image that the register AX now contains 0015 as per our instruction mov ax,0015 You can also see that the IP points to line 0103 which has the MOV CX,0023 command If we type t again it will now execute the second line of the program which moves 23 in the cx register. Again, we can see that the line of code was executed and that the CX register now holds the value of 23. What I would like to highlight now is the section underlined in red. These are the status flags. The ones we are going to look at now are 1st (NV), 4th (PL), 5th (NZ) & 8th (NC) NV means no overflow, the alternate would be OV PL means that the sign of the previous arithmetic operation was Plus, the alternate would be NG (Negative) NZ means that the results of the previous arithmetic operation operation was Not Zero, the alternate would be ZR NC means that No final Carry resulted from the previous arithmetic operation. CY means that there was a final Carry. We could now follow this process of entering the t command until the entire program is executed line by line. G is for Go (To execute a program up to a certain line number) So we have looked at executing a program line by line, which is fine if your program is minuscule BUT totally unpractical if we have any decent sized program. A quicker way to run some lines of code is to use the G command. The ‘g’ command executes a program up to a certain specified point. It can be used in connection with the the reset IP command. You would set your initial point and then run the G command with the line you want to end on. P is for Proceed (Similar to trace but slightly more streamlined) Another command similar to trace is the proceed command. All that the p command does is if it is called and it encounters a CALL, INT or LOOP command it terminates the program execution. In the example below I modified our example program to include an int 20 at the end of it as illustrated in the image below… Then when executing the code when I encountered the int 20 command I typed the P command and the program terminated normally (illustrated below). D is for Dump (or for those more polite Display) So, we have all these assembly lines of code, but if you have ever opened up an exe or com file in a text/hex editor, it looks nothing like assembly code. The D command is a way that we can see what our code looks like in memory (or in a hex editor). If we examined the image above, we can see that Debug is storing our assembly code with each instruction following immediately after the previous one. For instance in memory address 110 we have int and 111 we have 20. If we examine the dump of memory we can see at memory point 110 CD is stored and at memory point 111 20 is stored. U is for Unassemble (or Convert Machine code to Assembly Code) So up to now we have gone through a bunch of commands, but probably one of the most useful is the U command. Let’s say we don’t understand machine code so well and so instead we want to see it in its equivalent assembly code. We can type the U command followed by the start memory point, followed by the end memory point and it will show us the assembly code equivalent of the machine code. E is for a bunch of things… The E command can be used for a bunch of things… One example is to enter data or machine code instructions directly into memory. It can also be used to display the contents of memory locations. I am not going to worry to much about it in this post. N / L / W is for Name, Load & Write So we have written out assembly code in debug, and now we want to save it to disk, or write it as a com file or load it. This is where the N, L & W command come in handy. The n command is used to give a name to the executable program file and is pretty simple to use. The w command is a bit trickier. It saves to disk all the memory between point bx and point cx so you need to specify the bx memory address and the cx memory address for it to write your code. Let’s look at an example illustrated below. You do this by calling the r command followed by the either bx or cx. We can then go to the directory where we were working and will see the new file with the name we specified. The L command is relatively simple. You would first specify the name of the file you would like to load using the N command, and then call the L command. Q is for Quit The last command that I am going to write about in this post is the Q command. Simply put, calling the Q command exits DEBUG. Commands we did not Cover Out of the standard DEBUG commands we covered A, T, G, D, U, E, P, R, N, L & W. The ones we did not cover were H, I & O – I might make mention of these in a later post, but for the basics they are not really needed. Some Useful Resources Please note this post is based on the COS2213 handouts for UNISA A Guide to DEBUG - http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/debug/debug.htm#NT

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• Creating vCard action result

  - by DigiMortal

  I added support for vCards to one of my ASP.NET MVC applications. I worked vCard support out as very simple and intelligent solution that fits perfectly to ASP.NET MVC applications. In this posting I will show you how to send vCards out as response to ASP.NET MVC request. We need three things: some vCard class, vCard action result, controller method to test vCard action result. Everything is very simple, let’s get hands on. vCard class As first thing we need vCard class. Last year I introduced vCard class that supports also images. Let’s take this class because it is easy to use and some dirty work is already done for us. NB! Take a look at ASP.NET example in the blog posting referred above. We need it later when we close the topic. Now think about how useful blogging and information sharing with others can be. With this class available at public I saved pretty much time now. :) vCardResult As we have vCard it is now time to write action result that we can use in our controllers. Here’s the code. public class vCardResult : ActionResult {     private vCard _card;       protected vCardResult() { }       public vCardResult(vCard card)     {         _card = card;     }       public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)     {         var response = context.HttpContext.Response;         response.ContentType = "text/vcard";         response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; fileName=" + _card.FirstName + " " + _card.LastName + ".vcf");           var cardString = _card.ToString();         var inputEncoding = Encoding.Default;         var outputEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("windows-1257");         var cardBytes = inputEncoding.GetBytes(cardString);           var outputBytes = Encoding.Convert(inputEncoding,                                 outputEncoding, cardBytes);           response.OutputStream.Write(outputBytes, 0, outputBytes.Length);     } } And we are done. Some notes: vCard is sent to browser as downloadable file (user can save or open it with Outlook or any other e-mail client that supports vCards), File name is made of first and last name of contact. Encoding is important because Outlook may not understand vCards otherwise (don’t know if this problem is solved in Outlook 2010). Using vCardResult in controller Now let’s tale a look at simple controller method that accepts person ID and returns vCardResult. public class ContactsController : Controller {       // ... other controller methods ...       public vCardResult vCard(int id)     {         var person = _partyRepository.GetPersonById(id);         var card = new vCard                 {                     FirstName=person.FirstName,                     LastName = person.LastName,                     StreetAddress = person.StreetAddress,                     City = person.City,                     CountryName = person.Country.Name,                       Mobile = person.Mobile,                     Phone = person.Phone,                     Email = person.Email,                 };           return new vCardResult(card);     } } Now you can run Visual Studio and check out how your vCard is moving from your web application to your e-mail client. Conclusion We took old code that worked well with ASP.NET Forms and we divided it into action result and controller method that uses vCard as bridge between our controller and action result. All functionality is located where it should be and we did nothing complex. We wrote only couple of lines of very easy code to achieve our goal. Do you understand now why I love ASP.NET MVC? :)

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• Why did Ubuntu suddenly get so slow?

  - by user101383

  12.10 has been slowing down mysteriously. Normally, in past versions, I can log in, open Firefox, and it will pop up within seconds. 12.10 is like that upon install too, though once I install my old apps, it gets very slow by Ubuntu standards. After login the hard drive will just make noise for a while before the OS will do anything. Hardware: enter description: Desktop Computer product: XPS 8300 () vendor: Dell Inc. serial: B6G2WR1 width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-2.6 dmi-2.6 vsyscall32 configuration: boot=normal chassis=desktop uuid=44454C4C-3600-1047-8032-C2C04F575231 core description: Motherboard product: 0Y2MRG vendor: Dell Inc. physical id: 0 version: A00 serial: ..CN7360419G04VQ. slot: To Be Filled By O.E.M. *cpu description: CPU product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz vendor: Intel Corp. physical id: 4 bus info: cpu@0 version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz serial: To Be Filled By O.E.M. slot: CPU 1 size: 1600MHz capacity: 1600MHz width: 64 bits clock: 100MHz capabilities: x86-64 fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid cpufreq configuration: cores=4 enabledcores=1 threads=2 *-cache:0 description: L1 cache physical id: 5 slot: L1-Cache size: 256KiB capacity: 256KiB capabilities: internal write-through unified *-cache:1 description: L2 cache physical id: 6 slot: L2-Cache size: 1MiB capacity: 1MiB capabilities: internal write-through unified *-cache:2 DISABLED description: L3 cache physical id: 7 slot: L3-Cache size: 8MiB capacity: 8MiB capabilities: internal write-back unified *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 20 slot: System board or motherboard size: 8GiB *-bank:0 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 0 serial: 7228183 slot: DIMM3 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:1 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 1 serial: 1E28183 slot: DIMM1 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:2 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 2 serial: 9E28183 slot: DIMM4 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:3 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 3 serial: 5527183 slot: DIMM2 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: Dell Inc. physical id: 0 version: A05 date: 09/21/2011 size: 64KiB capacity: 4032KiB capabilities: mca pci upgrade shadowing escd cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer int10video acpi usb zipboot biosbootspecification *-pci description: Host bridge product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1 bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pm msi pciexpress normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:40 ioport:e000(size=4096) memory:fe600000-fe6fffff ioport:d0000000(size=268435456) *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=radeon latency=0 resources: irq:44 memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:fe620000-fe63ffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:fe600000-fe61ffff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI physical id: 0.1 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.1 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:48 memory:fe640000-fe643fff *-communication description: Communication controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 16 bus info: pci@0000:00:16.0 version: 04 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=mei latency=0 resources: irq:45 memory:fe708000-fe70800f *-usb:0 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1a bus info: pci@0000:00:1a.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:fe707000-fe7073ff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1b bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:46 memory:fe700000-fe703fff *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.0 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:41 memory:fe500000-fe5fffff *-network description: Network controller product: BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 version: 01 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=bcma-pci-bridge latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:fe500000-fe503fff *-pci:2 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.3 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:42 memory:fe400000-fe4fffff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: NetLink BCM57788 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 01 serial: 18:03:73:e1:a7:71 size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=tg3 driverversion=3.123 duplex=full firmware=sb ip=192.168.1.3 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:47 memory:fe400000-fe40ffff *-usb:1 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:23 memory:fe706000-fe7063ff *-isa description: ISA bridge product: H67 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: isa bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-storage description: SATA controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage msi pm ahci_1.0 bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ahci latency=0 resources: irq:43 ioport:f070(size=8) ioport:f060(size=4) ioport:f050(size=8) ioport:f040(size=4) ioport:f020(size=32) memory:fe705000-fe7057ff *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:fe704000-fe7040ff ioport:f000(size=32) *-scsi:0 physical id: 1 logical name: scsi0 capabilities: emulated *-disk description: ATA Disk product: Hitachi HUA72201 vendor: Hitachi physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: JP4O serial: JPW9J0HD21BTZC size: 931GiB (1TB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 sectorsize=512 signature=000641dc *-volume:0 description: EXT4 volume vendor: Linux physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 logical name: / version: 1.0 serial: 4e3d91b7-fd38-4f44-a9e9-ba3c39b926ec size: 585GiB capacity: 585GiB capabilities: primary journaled extended_attributes large_files huge_files dir_nlink recover extents ext4 ext2 initialized configuration: created=2012-10-21 16:26:50 filesystem=ext4 lastmountpoint=/ modified=2012-10-29 18:12:08 mount.fstype=ext4 mount.options=rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered mounted=2012-10-29 18:12:08 state=mounted *-volume:1 description: Extended partition physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 logical name: /dev/sda2 size: 7823MiB capacity: 7823MiB capabilities: primary extended partitioned partitioned:extended *-logicalvolume description: Linux swap / Solaris partition physical id: 5 logical name: /dev/sda5 capacity: 7823MiB capabilities: nofs *-volume:2 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 3 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,3 logical name: /dev/sda3 version: 3.1 serial: 84a92aae-347b-7940-a2d1-f4745b885ef2 size: 337GiB capacity: 337GiB capabilities: primary bootable ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2012-10-21 18:43:39 filesystem=ntfs modified_by_chkdsk=true mounted_on_nt4=true resize_log_file=true state=dirty upgrade_on_mount=true *-scsi:1 physical id: 2 logical name: scsi1 capabilities: emulated *-cdrom description: DVD-RAM writer product: DVDRWBD DH-12E3S vendor: PLDS physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/cdrom logical name: /dev/cdrw logical name: /dev/dvd logical name: /dev/dvdrw logical name: /dev/sr0 version: MD11 capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc *-scsi:2 physical id: 3 bus info: usb@2:1.8 logical name: scsi6 capabilities: emulated scsi-host configuration: driver=usb-storage *-disk:0 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdb configuration: sectorsize=512 *-disk:1 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.1 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.1 logical name: /dev/sdc configuration: sectorsize=512 *-disk:2 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.2 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.2 logical name: /dev/sdd configuration: sectorsize=512 *-disk:3 description: SCSI Disk product: MS/MS-Pro vendor: Generic- physical id: 0.0.3 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.3 logical name: /dev/sde version: 1.03 serial: 3 capabilities: removable configuration: sectorsize=512 *-medium physical id: 0 logical name: /dev/sde

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• Using Sitecore RenderingContext Parameters as MVC controller action arguments

  - by Kyle Burns

  I have been working with the Technical Preview of Sitecore 6.6 on a project and have been for the most part happy with the way that Sitecore (which truly is an MVC implementation unto itself) has been expanded to support ASP.NET MVC. That said, getting up to speed with the combined platform has not been entirely without stumbles and today I want to share one area where Sitecore could have really made things shine from the "it just works" perspective. A couple days ago I was asked by a colleague about the usage of the "Parameters" field that is defined on Sitecore's Controller Rendering data template. Based on the standard way that Sitecore handles a field named Parameters, I was able to deduce that the field expected key/value pairs separated by the "&" character, but beyond that I wasn't sure and didn't see anything from a documentation perspective to guide me, so it was time to dig and find out where the data in the field was made available. My first thought was that it would be really nice if Sitecore handled the parameters in this field consistently with the way that ASP.NET MVC handles the various parameter collections on the HttpRequest object and automatically maps them to parameters of the action method executing. Being the hopeful sort, I configured a name/value pair on one of my renderings, added a parameter with matching name to the controller action and fired up the bugger to see... that the parameter was not populated. Having established that the field's value was not going to be presented to me the way that I had hoped it would, the next assumption that I would work on was that Sitecore would handle this field similar to how they handle other similar data and would plug it into some ambient object that I could reference from within the controller method. After a considerable amount of guessing, testing, and cracking code open with Redgate's Reflector (a must-have companion to Sitecore documentation), I found that the most direct way to access the parameter was through the ambient RenderingContext object using code similar to: string myArgument = string.Empty; var rc = Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull; if (rc != null) {     var parms = rc.Rendering.Parameters;     myArgument = parms["myArgument"]; } At this point, we know how this field is used out of the box from Sitecore and can provide information from Sitecore's Content Editor that will be available when the controller action is executing, but it feels a little dirty. In order to properly test the action method I would have to do a lot of setup work and possible use an isolation framework such as Pex and Moles to get at a value that my action method is dependent upon. Notice I said that my method is dependent upon the value but in order to meet that dependency I've accepted another dependency upon Sitecore's RenderingContext.  I'm a big believer in, when possible, ensuring that any piece of code explicitly advertises dependencies using the method signature, so I found myself still wanting this to work the same as if the parameters were in the request route, querystring, or form by being able to add a myArgument parameter to the action method and have this parameter populated by the framework. Lucky for us, the ASP.NET MVC framework is extremely flexible and provides some easy to grok and use extensibility points. ASP.NET MVC is able to provide information from the request as input parameters to controller actions because it uses objects which implement an interface called IValueProvider and have been registered to service the application. The most basic statement of responsibility for an IValueProvider implementation is "I know about some data which is indexed by key. If you hand me the key for a piece of data that I know about I give you that data". When preparing to invoke a controller action, the framework queries registered IValueProvider implementations with the name of each method argument to see if the ValueProvider can supply a value for the parameter. (the rest of this post will assume you're working along and make a lot more sense if you do) Let's pull Sitecore out of the equation for a second to simplify things and create an extremely simple IValueProvider implementation. For this example, I first create a new ASP.NET MVC3 project in Visual Studio, selecting "Internet Application" and otherwise taking defaults (I'm assuming that anyone reading this far in the post either already knows how to do this or will need to take a quick run through one of the many available basic MVC tutorials such as the MVC Music Store). Once the new project is created, go to the Index action of HomeController.  This action sets a Message property on the ViewBag to "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!" and invokes the View, which has been coded to display the Message. For our example, we will remove the hard coded message from this controller (although we'll leave it just as hard coded somewhere else - this is sample code). For the first step in our exercise, add a string parameter to the Index action method called welcomeMessage and use the value of this argument to set the ViewBag.Message property. The updated Index action should look like: public ActionResult Index(string welcomeMessage) {     ViewBag.Message = welcomeMessage;     return View(); } This represents the entirety of the change that you will make to either the controller or view.  If you run the application now, the home page will display and no message will be presented to the user because no value was supplied to the Action method. Let's now write a ValueProvider to ensure this parameter gets populated. We'll start by creating a new class called StaticValueProvider. When the class is created, we'll update the using statements to ensure that they include the following: using System.Collections.Specialized; using System.Globalization; using System.Web.Mvc; With the appropriate using statements in place, we'll update the StaticValueProvider class to implement the IValueProvider interface. The System.Web.Mvc library already contains a pretty flexible dictionary-like implementation called NameValueCollectionValueProvider, so we'll just wrap that and let it do most of the real work for us. The completed class looks like: public class StaticValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider;     public StaticValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var parameters = new NameValueCollection();         parameters.Add("welcomeMessage", "Hello from the value provider!");         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(parameters, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);     }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } Notice that the only entry in the collection matches the name of the argument to our HomeController's Index action.  This is the important "secret sauce" that will make things work. We've got our new value provider now, but that's not quite enough to be finished. Mvc obtains IValueProvider instances using factories that are registered when the application starts up. These factories extend the abstract ValueProviderFactory class by initializing and returning the appropriate implementation of IValueProvider from the GetValueProvider method. While I wouldn't do so in production code, for the sake of this example, I'm going to add the following class definition within the StaticValueProvider.cs source file: public class StaticValueProviderFactory : ValueProviderFactory {     public override IValueProvider GetValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         return new StaticValueProvider(controllerContext);     } } Now that we have a factory, we can register it by adding the following line to the end of the Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs: ValueProviderFactories.Factories.Add(new StaticValueProviderFactory()); If you've done everything right to this point, you should be able to run the application and be presented with the home page reading "Hello from the value provider!". Now that you have the basics of the IValueProvider down, you have everything you need to enhance your Sitecore MVC implementation by adding an IValueProvider that exposes values from the ambient RenderingContext's Parameters property. I'll provide the code for the IValueProvider implementation (which should look VERY familiar) and you can use the work we've already done as a reference to create and register the factory: public class RenderingContextValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider = null;     public RenderingContextValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var collection = new NameValueCollection();         var rc = RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull;         if (rc != null && rc.Rendering != null)         {             foreach(var parameter in rc.Rendering.Parameters)             {                 collection.Add(parameter.Key, parameter.Value);             }         }         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(collection, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);         }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } In this post I've discussed the MVC IValueProvider used to map data to controller action method arguments and how this can be integrated into your Sitecore 6.6 MVC solution.

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• Resolving data redundancy up front

  - by okeofs

  Introduction As all of us do when confronted with a problem, the resource of choice is to ‘Google it’. This is where the plot thickens. Recently I was asked to stage data from numerous databases which were to be loaded into a data warehouse. To make a long story short, I was looking for a manner in which to obtain the table names from each database, to ascertain potential overlap.   As the source data comes from a SQL database created from dumps of a third party product,  one could say that there were +/- 95 tables for each database.   Yes I know that first instinct is to use the system stored procedure “exec sp_msforeachdb 'select "?" AS db, * from [?].sys.tables'”. However, if one stops to think about this, it would be nice to have all the results in a temporary or disc based  table; which in itself , implies additional labour. This said,  I decided to ‘re-invent’ the wheel. The full code sample may be found at the bottom of this article.   Define a few temporary tables and variables   declare @SQL varchar(max); declare @databasename varchar(75) /* drop table ##rawdata3 drop table #rawdata1 drop table #rawdata11 */ -- A temp table to hold the names of my databases CREATE TABLE #rawdata1 (    database_name varchar(50) ,    database_size varchar(50),    remarks Varchar(50) )     --A temp table with the same database names as above, HOWEVER using an --Identity number (recNO) as a loop variable. --You will note below that I loop through until I reach 25 (see below) as at --that point the system databases, the reporting server database etc begin. --1- 24 are user databases. These are really what I was looking for. --Whilst NOT the best solution,it works and the code was meant as a quick --and dirty. CREATE TABLE #rawdata11 (    recNo int identity(1,1),    database_name varchar(50) ,    database_size varchar(50),    remarks Varchar(50) )   --My output table showing the database name and table name CREATE TABLE ##rawdata3 (    database_name varchar(75) ,    table_name varchar(75), )   Insert the database names into a temporary table I pull the database names using the system stored procedure sp_databases   INSERT INTO #rawdata1 EXEC sp_databases Go   Insert the results from #rawdata1 into a table containing a record number  #rawdata11 so that I can LOOP through the extract   INSERT into #rawdata11 select * from  #rawdata1   We now declare 3 more variables:  @kounter is used to keep track of our position within the loop. @databasename is used to keep track of the’ current ‘ database name being used in the current pass of the loop;  as inorder to obtain the tables for that database we  need to issue a ‘USE’ statement, an insert command and other related code parts. This is the challenging part. @sql is a varchar(max) variable used to contain the ‘USE’ statement PLUS the’ insert ‘ code statements. We now initalize @kounter to 1 .   declare @kounter int; declare @databasename varchar(75); declare @sql varchar(max); set @kounter = 1   The Loop The astute reader will remember that the temporary table #rawdata11 contains our  database names  and each ‘database row’ has a record number (recNo). I am only interested in record numbers under 25. I now set the value of the temporary variable @DatabaseName (see below) .Note that I used the row number as a part of the predicate. Now, knowing the database name, I can create dynamic T-SQL to be executed using the sp_sqlexec stored procedure (see the code in red below). Finally, after all the tables for that given database have been placed in temporary table ##rawdata3, I increment the counter and continue on. Note that I used a global temporary table to ensure that the result set persists after the termination of the run. At some stage, I plan to redo this part of the code, as global temporary tables are not really an ideal solution.    WHILE (@kounter < 25)  BEGIN  select @DatabaseName = database_name from #rawdata11 where recNo = @kounter  set @SQL = 'Use ' + @DatabaseName + ' Insert into ##rawdata3 ' + + ' SELECT table_catalog,Table_name FROM information_schema.tables' exec sp_sqlexec  @Sql  SET @kounter  = @kounter + 1  END   The full code extract   Here is the full code sample.   declare @SQL varchar(max); declare @databasename varchar(75) /* drop table ##rawdata3 drop table #rawdata1 drop table #rawdata11 */ CREATE TABLE #rawdata1 (    database_name varchar(50) ,    database_size varchar(50),    remarks Varchar(50) ) CREATE TABLE #rawdata11 (    recNo int identity(1,1),    database_name varchar(50) ,    database_size varchar(50),    remarks Varchar(50) ) CREATE TABLE ##rawdata3 (    database_name varchar(75) ,    table_name varchar(75), )   INSERT INTO #rawdata1 EXEC sp_databases go INSERT into #rawdata11 select * from  #rawdata1 declare @kounter int; declare @databasename varchar(75); declare @sql varchar(max); set @kounter = 1 WHILE (@kounter < 25)  BEGIN  select @databasename = database_name from #rawdata11 where recNo = @kounter  set @SQL = 'Use ' + @DatabaseName + ' Insert into ##rawdata3 ' + + ' SELECT table_catalog,Table_name FROM information_schema.tables' exec sp_sqlexec  @Sql  SET @kounter  = @kounter + 1  END    select * from ##rawdata3  where table_name like '%SalesOrderHeader%'

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 4

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Explain the characteristics of memory systems Describe the memory hierarchy Discuss cache memory principles Discuss issues relevant to cache design Describe the cache organization of the Pentium Computer Memory Systems There are key characteristics of memory… Location – internal or external Capacity – expressed in terms of bytes Unit of Transfer – the number of bits read out of or written into memory at a time Access Method – sequential, direct, random or associative From a users perspective the two most important characteristics of memory are… Capacity Performance – access time, memory cycle time, transfer rate The trade off for memory happens along three axis… Faster access time, greater cost per bit Greater capacity, smaller cost per bit Greater capacity, slower access time This leads to people using a tiered approach in their use of memory   As one goes down the hierarchy, the following occurs… Decreasing cost per bit Increasing capacity Increasing access time Decreasing frequency of access of the memory by the processor The use of two levels of memory to reduce average access time works in principle, but only if conditions 1 to 4 apply. A variety of technologies exist that allow us to accomplish this. Thus it is possible to organize data across the hierarchy such that the percentage of accesses to each successively lower level is substantially less than that of the level above. A portion of main memory can be used as a buffer to hold data temporarily that is to be read out to disk. This is sometimes referred to as a disk cache and improves performance in two ways… Disk writes are clustered. Instead of many small transfers of data, we have a few large transfers of data. This improves disk performance and minimizes processor involvement. Some data designed for write-out may be referenced by a program before the next dump to disk. In that case the data is retrieved rapidly from the software cache rather than slowly from disk. Cache Memory Principles Cache memory is substantially faster than main memory. A caching system works as follows.. When a processor attempts to read a word of memory, a check is made to see if this in in cache memory… If it is, the data is supplied, If it is not in the cache, a block of main memory, consisting of a fixed number of words is loaded to the cache. Because of the phenomenon of locality of references, when a block of data is fetched into the cache, it is likely that there will be future references to that same memory location or to other words in the block. Elements of Cache Design While there are a large number of cache implementations, there are a few basic design elements that serve to classify and differentiate cache architectures… Cache Addresses Cache Size Mapping Function Replacement Algorithm Write Policy Line Size Number of Caches Cache Addresses Almost all non-embedded processors support virtual memory. Virtual memory in essence allows a program to address memory from a logical point of view without needing to worry about the amount of physical memory available. When virtual addresses are used the designer may choose to place the cache between the MMU (memory management unit) and the processor or between the MMU and main memory. The disadvantage of virtual memory is that most virtual memory systems supply each application with the same virtual memory address space (each application sees virtual memory starting at memory address 0), which means the cache memory must be completely flushed with each application context switch or extra bits must be added to each line of the cache to identify which virtual address space the address refers to. Cache Size We would like the size of the cache to be small enough so that the overall average cost per bit is close to that of main memory alone and large enough so that the overall average access time is close to that of the cache alone. Also, larger caches are slightly slower than smaller ones. Mapping Function Because there are fewer cache lines than main memory blocks, an algorithm is needed for mapping main memory blocks into cache lines. The choice of mapping function dictates how the cache is organized. Three techniques can be used… Direct – simplest technique, maps each block of main memory into only one possible cache line Associative – Each main memory block to be loaded into any line of the cache Set Associative – exhibits the strengths of both the direct and associative approaches while reducing their disadvantages For detailed explanations of each approach – read the text book (page 148 – 154) Replacement Algorithm For associative and set associating mapping a replacement algorithm is needed to determine which of the existing blocks in the cache must be replaced by a new block. There are four common approaches… LRU (Least recently used) FIFO (First in first out) LFU (Least frequently used) Random selection Write Policy When a block resident in the cache is to be replaced, there are two cases to consider If no writes to that block have happened in the cache – discard it If a write has occurred, a process needs to be initiated where the changes in the cache are propagated back to the main memory. There are several approaches to achieve this including… Write Through – all writes to the cache are done to the main memory as well at the point of the change Write Back – when a block is replaced, all dirty bits are written back to main memory The problem is complicated when we have multiple caches, there are techniques to accommodate for this but I have not summarized them. Line Size When a block of data is retrieved and placed in the cache, not only the desired word but also some number of adjacent words are retrieved. As the block size increases from very small to larger sizes, the hit ratio will at first increase because of the principle of locality, which states that the data in the vicinity of a referenced word are likely to be referenced in the near future. As the block size increases, more useful data are brought into cache. The hit ratio will begin to decrease as the block becomes even bigger and the probability of using the newly fetched information becomes less than the probability of using the newly fetched information that has to be replaced. Two specific effects come into play… Larger blocks reduce the number of blocks that fit into a cache. Because each block fetch overwrites older cache contents, a small number of blocks results in data being overwritten shortly after they are fetched. As a block becomes larger, each additional word is farther from the requested word and therefore less likely to be needed in the near future. The relationship between block size and hit ratio is complex, and no set approach is judged to be the best in all circumstances.   Pentium 4 and ARM cache organizations The processor core consists of four major components: Fetch/decode unit – fetches program instruction in order from the L2 cache, decodes these into a series of micro-operations, and stores the results in the L2 instruction cache Out-of-order execution logic – Schedules execution of the micro-operations subject to data dependencies and resource availability – thus micro-operations may be scheduled for execution in a different order than they were fetched from the instruction stream. As time permits, this unit schedules speculative execution of micro-operations that may be required in the future Execution units – These units execute micro-operations, fetching the required data from the L1 data cache and temporarily storing results in registers Memory subsystem – This unit includes the L2 and L3 caches and the system bus, which is used to access main memory when the L1 and L2 caches have a cache miss and to access the system I/O resources

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