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  • Communication Between Your PC and Azure VM via Windows Azure Connect

    - by Shaun
    With the new release of the Windows Azure platform there are a lot of new features available. In my previous post I introduced a little bit about one of them, the remote desktop access to azure virtual machine. Now I would like to talk about another cool stuff – Windows Azure Connect.   What’s Windows Azure Connect I would like to quote the definition of the Windows Azure Connect in MSDN With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IP-sec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. IP-sec protects communications over Internet Protocol (IP) networks through the use of cryptographic security services. There’s an image available at the MSDN as well that I would like to forward here As we can see, using the Windows Azure Connect the Worker Role 1 and Web Role 1 are connected with the development machines and database servers which some of them are inside the organization some are not. With the Windows Azure Connect, the roles deployed on the cloud could consume the resource which located inside our Intranet or anywhere in the world. That means the roles can connect to the local database, access the local shared resource such as share files, folders and printers, etc.   Difference between Windows Azure Connect and AppFabric It seems that the Windows Azure Connect are duplicated with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Both of them are aiming to solve the problem on how to communication between the resource in the cloud and inside the local network. The table below lists the differences in my understanding. Category Windows Azure Connect Windows Azure AppFabric Purpose An IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure roles. An application service running on the cloud. Connectivity IP-sec, Domain-joint Net Tcp, Http, Https Components Windows Azure Connect Driver Service Bus, Access Control, Caching Usage Azure roles connect to local database server Azure roles use local shared files,  folders and printers, etc. Azure roles join the local AD. Expose the local service to Internet. Move the authorization process to the cloud. Integrate with existing identities such as Live ID, Google ID, etc. with existing local services. Utilize the distributed cache.   And also some scenarios on which of them should be used. Scenario Connect AppFabric I have a service deployed in the Intranet and I want the people can use it from the Internet.   Y I have a website deployed on Azure and need to use a database which deployed inside the company. And I don’t want to expose the database to the Internet. Y   I have a service deployed in the Intranet and is using AD authorization. I have a website deployed on Azure which needs to use this service. Y   I have a service deployed in the Intranet and some people on the Internet can use it but need to be authorized and authenticated.   Y I have a service in Intranet, and a website deployed on Azure. This service can be used from Internet and that website should be able to use it as well by AD authorization for more functionalities. Y Y   How to Enable Windows Azure Connect OK we talked a lot information about the Windows Azure Connect and differences with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Now let’s see how to enable and use the Windows Azure Connect. First of all, since this feature is in CTP stage we should apply before use it. On the Windows Azure Portal we can see our CTP features status under Home, Beta Program page. You can send the apply to join the Beta Programs to Microsoft in this page. After a few days the Microsoft will send an email to you (the email of your Live ID) when it’s available. In my case we can see that the Windows Azure Connect had been activated by Microsoft and then we can click the Connect button on top, or we can click the Virtual Network item from the left navigation bar.   The first thing we need, if it’s our first time to enter the Connect page, is to enable the Windows Azure Connect. After that we can see our Windows Azure Connect information in this page.   Add a Local Machine to Azure Connect As we explained below the Windows Azure Connect can make an IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure role instances. So that we firstly add a local machine into our Azure Connect. To do this we will click the Install Local Endpoint button on top and then the portal will give us an URL. Copy this URL to the machine we want to add and it will download the software to us. This software will be installed in the local machines which we want to join the Connect. After installed there will be a tray-icon appeared to indicate this machine had been joint our Connect. The local application will be refreshed to the Windows Azure Platform every 5 minutes but we can click the Refresh button to let it retrieve the latest status at once. Currently my local machine is ready for connect and we can see my machine in the Windows Azure Portal if we switched back to the portal and selected back Activated Endpoints node.   Add a Windows Azure Role to Azure Connect Let’s create a very simple azure project with a basic ASP.NET web role inside. To make it available on Windows Azure Connect we will open the azure project property of this role from the solution explorer in the Visual Studio, and select the Virtual Network tab, check the Activate Windows Azure Connect. The next step is to get the activation token from the Windows Azure Portal. In the same page there is a button named Get Activation Token. Click this button then the portal will display the token to me. We copied this token and pasted to the box in the Visual Studio tab. Then we deployed this application to azure. After completed the deployment we can see the role instance was listed in the Windows Azure Portal - Virtual Connect section.   Establish the Connect Group The final task is to create a connect group which contains the machines and role instances need to be connected each other. This can be done in the portal very easy. The machines and instances will NOT be connected until we created the group for them. The machines and instances can be used in one or more groups. In the Virtual Connect section click the Groups and Roles node from the left side navigation bar and clicked the Create Group button on top. This will bring up a dialog to us. What we need to do is to specify a group name, description; and then we need to select the local computers and azure role instances into this group. After the Azure Fabric updated the group setting we can see the groups and the endpoints in the page. And if we switch back to the local machine we can see that the tray-icon have been changed and the status turned connected. The Windows Azure Connect will update the group information every 5 minutes. If you find the status was still in Disconnected please right-click the tray-icon and select the Refresh menu to retrieve the latest group policy to make it connected.   Test the Azure Connect between the Local Machine and the Azure Role Instance Now our local machine and azure role instance had been connected. This means each of them can communication to others in IP level. For example we can open the SQL Server port so that our azure role can connect to it by using the machine name or the IP address. The Windows Azure Connect uses IPv6 to connect between the local machines and role instances. You can get the IP address from the Windows Azure Portal Virtual Network section when select an endpoint. I don’t want to take a full example for how to use the Connect but would like to have two very simple tests. The first one would be PING.   When a local machine and role instance are connected through the Windows Azure Connect we can PING any of them if we opened the ICMP protocol in the Filewall setting. To do this we need to run a command line before test. Open the command window on the local machine and the role instance, execute the command as following netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMPv6" dir=in action=allow enable=yes protocol=icmpv6 Thanks to Jason Chen, Patriek van Dorp, Anton Staykov and Steve Marx, they helped me to enable  the ICMPv6 setting. For the full discussion we made please visit here. You can use the Remote Desktop Access feature to logon the azure role instance. Please refer my previous blog post to get to know how to use the Remote Desktop Access in Windows Azure. Then we can PING the machine or the role instance by specifying its name. Below is the screen I PING my local machine from my azure instance. We can use the IPv6 address to PING each other as well. Like the image following I PING to my role instance from my local machine thought the IPv6 address.   Another example I would like to demonstrate here is folder sharing. I shared a folder in my local machine and then if we logged on the role instance we can see the folder content from the file explorer window.   Summary In this blog post I introduced about another new feature – Windows Azure Connect. With this feature our local resources and role instances (virtual machines) can be connected to each other. In this way we can make our azure application using our local stuff such as database servers, printers, etc. without expose them to Internet.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Best of "The Moth" 2010

    - by Daniel Moth
    It is the time again (like in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) to look back at my blog for the past year and identify areas of interest that seem to be more prominent than others. After doing so, representative posts follow in my top 5 list (in random order). 1. This was the year where I had to move for the first time since 2004 my blog engine (blogger.com –> dasBlog), host provider (zen –> godaddy), web server technology and OS (apache on Linux –> IIS on Windows Server). My goal was not to break any permalinks or the look and feel of this website. A series of posts covered how I achieved that goal, culminating in a tool for others to use if they wanted to do the same: Tool to convert blogger.com content to dasBlog. Going forward I aim to be sharing more small code utilities like that one… 2. At work I am known for being fairly responsive on email, and more importantly never dropping email balls on the floor. This is due to my email processing system, which I shared here: Processing Email in Outlook. I will be sharing more tips with regards to making the best of the Office products. 3. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the year people will remember as the one where Microsoft finally fights back in the mobile space. Even though the new platform means my Windows Mobile book sales will dwindle :-), I am ecstatic about Windows Phone 7 both as a consumer and as a developer. On the release day, to get you started I shared the top 10 Windows Phone 7 developer resources. I will be sharing my tips from my experience in writing code for and consuming this new platform… 4. For my HPC developer friends using Visual Studio, I shared Slides and code for MPI Cluster Debugger and also gave you all the links you need for getting started with Dryad and DryadLINQ from MSR. Expect more from me on cluster development in the coming year… 5. Still in the HPC space, but actually also in the game and even mainstream development, the big disruption and opportunity comes in the form of GPGPU and, on the Microsoft platform, (currently) DirectCompute. Expect more from me on gpgpu development in the coming year… Subscribe via the link on the left to stay tuned for 2011… I wish you a very Happy New Year (with whatever definition of happiness works for you)! Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 139: Mark Heckler and José Pereda on JES based Energy Monitoring @MkHeck @JPeredaDnr

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Interview with Mark Heckler and José Pereda on using JavaSE Embedded with the Java Embedded Suite on a RaspberryPI along with a JavaFX client to monitor an energy production system and their JavaOne Tutorial- Java Embedded EXTREME MASHUPS: Building self-powering sensor nets for the IoT Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Java Virtual Developer Day Session Videos Available JavaFX Maven Plugin 2.0 Released JavaFX Scene Builder 1.1 build b28 FXForm 2 release 0.2.2 OpenJDK8/Zero cross compile build for Foundation model HSAIL-based GPU offload: the Quest for Java Performance Begins Progress on Moving to Gradle Java EE 7 Launch Keynote Replay Java EE 7 Technical Breakouts Replay Java EE 7 support in NetBeans 7.3.1 Java EE 7 support in Eclipse 4.3 Java Magazine - May/June Events Jul 16-19, Uberconf, Denver, USA Jul 22-24, JavaOne Shanghai, China Jul 29-31, JVM Language Summit, Santa Clara Sep 11-12, JavaZone, Oslo, Norway Sep 19-20, Strange Loop, St. Louis Sep 22-26 JavaOne San Francisco 2013, USA Feature Interview Mark Heckler is an Oracle Corporation Java/Middleware/Core Tech Engineer with development experience in numerous environments. He has worked for and with key players in the manufacturing, emerging markets, retail, medical, telecom, and financial industries to develop and deliver critical capabilities on time and on budget. Currently, he works primarily with large government customers using Java throughout the stack and across the enterprise. He also participates in open-source development at every opportunity, being a JFXtras project committer and developer of DialogFX, MonologFX, and various other projects. When Mark isn't working with Java, he enjoys writing about his experiences at the Java Jungle website (https://blogs.oracle.com/javajungle/) and on Twitter (@MkHeck). José Pereda is a Structural Engineer working in the School of Engineers in the University of Valladolid in Spain for more than 15 years, and his passion is related to applying programming to solve real problems. Being involved with Java since 1999, José shares his time between JavaFX and the Embedded world, developing commercial applications and open source projects (https://github.com/jperedadnr), and blogging (http://jperedadnr.blogspot.com.es/) or tweeting (@JPeredaDnr) of both. What’s Cool AquaFX 0.1 - Mac OS X skin for JavaFX by Claudine Zillmann DromblerFX adds a docking framework Part 2 of Gerrit’s taming the Nashorn for writing JavaFX apps in Javascript Tool from mihosoft called JSelect for quickly switching JDKs Apache Maven Javadoc Plugin 2.9.1 Released Proposal: Java Concurrency Stress tests (jcstress) Slide-free Code-driven session at SV JUG JavaOne approvals/rejects gone out

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  • Java Spotlight Episode 58: Peter Korn and Ofir Leitner on ME Accessibility

    - by Roger Brinkley
    Tweet Interview with Peter Korn and Ofir Leitner on Mobile and Embedded Accessibility. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Java EE Developer Advocate. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Announcing Oracle WebLogic 12c Geronimo 3 beta - Another Apache project now compatible with Java EE 6 NetBeans 7.1 RC1 is out JavaFX links of the weeks JavaFX videos on Parleys: Nicolas Lorain's Introduction to JavaFX 2.0 from JavaOne 2011 & Richard Bair on JavaFX Architecture and Programming Model Events Dec 4, SOUJava Geek Bike Ride 2011, Sao Paulo  Dec 5-7, UKOUG, Birmingham, UK Dec 6-8, Java One Brazil, Sao Paulo Dec 9 UAIJUG, Uberlandia Dec 9 CEJUG, Fortaleza/CE Dec 10 GUJAVA, Florianopolis Dec 10 ALJUG, Maceio/AL Dec 11 Javaneiros, Campo Grande/MS Dec 12 GOJAVA, Goiania/GO Dec 13 RioJUG, Rio de Janeiro Feature interview Peter Korn is Oracle's Accessibility Principal – their senior individual contributor on accessibility. He is also Technical Manager of the AEGIS project, leading an EC-funded €12.6m investment building accessibility into future mainstream ICT (FP7-ICT224348). Mr. Korn co-developed and co-implemented the Java Accessibility API, and developed the Java Access Bridge for Windows. He helped design the open source GNOME Accessibility architecture found on most modern UNIX and GNU/Linux systems, and consulted on accessibility support for OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other applications. Prior to Sun/Oracle, Peter co-developed the outSPOKEN for Windows screen reader. Mr. Korn represented Sun/Oracle on TEITAC for the Section 508/255 refresh, co-led the OASIS ODF Accessibility subcommittee, and sits on INCITS V2 where he is contributing to ISO 13066: defining AT-IT interoperability standards including specifically the Java Accessibility API. Ofir Leitner is the architect of one of LWUIT's key features - the HTMLComponent which allows rendering HTML within LWUIT applications and to embed web-flows inside apps. Ofir is also responsible for LWUIT's bidirectional and RTL support and for the accessibility work that is being done these days in LWUIT. Mail Bag What's Cool Devoxx 2011 (Alexis) Eclipsecon Europe Talk by Andrew Overholt: IcedTea & IcedTea-Web Geek bike ride & Rio 500 Twitter followers @JavaSpotlight Show Transcripts Transcript for this show is available here when available.

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  • Windows Azure Evolution &ndash; Preview Developer Portal

    - by Shaun
    With the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June, there are many new features and updates in windows azure platform. In the coming several posts I will try to cover some of them. And in the first post here I would like to just have a quick walkthrough of the new preview developer portal.   History of the Developer Portal If you have been working with windows azure since 2009 or 2010, you should remember the first version of the developer portal. It was built in HTML with very limited features. I have the impression when I was using is old one. The layout is not that attractive and you have very limited features. On November, 2010 alone with the SDK 1.3 release, the developer portal was getting a big jump. In order to give more usability and features this it turned to be built on Silverlight. Hence it runs like a desktop application with many windows, lists, commands and context menus. From 2010 till now many features were involved into this portal, such as the remote desktop, co-admin, virtual connect, VM role, etc.. And the portal itself became more and more complicated. But it brought some problems by using the Silverlight. The first one is the browser capability. As you know in most mobile and tablet device the browser doesn’t allow the rich content plugin, such as Flash and Silverlight. This means people cannot open and configure their azure services from their iPad, iPhone and Windows Phone, etc., even though what they need may just be restart a hosted service, or view the status of their databases. Another problem is the performance. Silverlight provides rich experience to the users, but also needs more bandwidth. So in this upgrade the preview developer portal will be back to use HTML, with JavaScript, as a mobile friendly, cross browser, interactively web site.   Preview Portal vs. Silverlight Portal Before I started to talk about the new preview portal I’d better highlight that, this preview portal is a PREVIEW version, which means even though you can do almost all features that already in the old one, as long as some cool new features I will mention in the coming several posts, there are something still under developed and migrated. So sometimes you need to switch back to the old one. For example, in preview portal there is no co-admin manage function, no remote desktop function and the SQL database manage function will take you back to the old SQL Azure Manage Portal. But as Microsoft said these missing features will be moved in the preview portal in the couple of next few months. Since the public URL of the developer portal, https://windows.azure.com/, had been changed to point to this preview one, you need to click to preview button on top of the page and click the “Take me to the previous portal” link.   Overview There are four parts in the preview portal. On the top is the header which shows the account you are currently logging in. If you click on the header it will show the top menu of windows azure, where you can navigate to the windows azure home page, the price information page, community and account, etc.. The navigation bar is on the left hand side, with the categories listed below. ALL ITEMS All items in your windows azure account, includes the web sites, services, databases, etc.. WEB SITES The web sites in your windows azure account. It will only show the web sites you have. The linked resources will be shown if you drill down into a web site. VIRTUAL MACHINES The virtual machines that you had been deployed to azure. CLOUD SERVICES All windows azure hosted services in your account. SQL DATABASES All SQL databases (SQL Azure) in your account. STORAGE All windows azure storage services in your account. NETWORKS The virtual network (Windows Azure Connect) you had been created. The available items will be listed in the main part of the page based on which category your currently selected. If there’s no item it will show the link to you to quick create. At the bottom of the page there will be the command and information bar. Based on what is selected and what is performed by the user, it will show the related information and commands. For example, in the image below when I was creating a new web site, the information bar told me that my web site is being provisioned; and there are two commands in the command bar. And once it ready the command bar will show some commands that I can do to my new web site. The “Web Sites” is a new feature introduced alone with this upgrade. It gives us an easier and quicker way to establish a website from the scratch or from some existing library. I will introduce it more details in the coming next post. Also in the command bar you can create a service by clicking the NEW button. It will slide the creation panel up to you.   Where’s My Hosted Services The Windows Azure Hosted Services had been renamed to the Cloud Services. Create a new service would be very easy. Just click the NEW button at the bottom of the page, and select the CLOUD SERVICE and QIUICK CREATE. This will create a blank hosted service without deployment and certificate. It just needs you to specify the service URL and the affinity/region. Then the service will be shown in the list. If you clicked the item all information will be shown in the main part. Since there’s no package deployed to this service so currently we cannot see any information about it. But we can upload the package by using the command at the bottom. And as you can see, we could manage the configuration, instances, certificates and we can scale up and down (change the VM size), in and out (increase and decrease the instance count) to our service. Assuming I had created an ASP.NET MVC 3 web role project in Visual Studio and completed the package. Then I can click the UPLOAD button in this page to deploy my package. In the popping up window I just specify my deployment name, package file and configure file. Also I can check the box below so that it will NOT warn me if only one instance of this deployment. Once we clicked the OK button our package will be uploaded and provisioned by the platform. After a while we can see the service was ready from the information bar. We can have the basic information about this service and deployment if we to the dashboard page. For example the usage overview diagram, status, URL, public IP address, etc.. In the configure page we can view and change the CSCFG content such as the monitor setting, connection strings, OS family. In scale page we can increase and decrease the count of the instances. And in the instances page we can view all instances status. And, if your services is using some SQL databases and storages they will be shown as the linked resources under the linked resources page. And you can manage the certificates of this service as well under the certificates page.   How About My Storage Services The storage service can be managed by clicking into the STORAGES link in the navigation bar. And we can create a new storage service from the NEW button. After specify the storage name and region it will be previsioned by the platform. If you want to copy or manage the storage key you can just click the Manage Keys button at the bottom, which is very easy. What I want to highlight here is that, you can monitor your storage service by enabling the monitor configuration. Click the storage item in the list and navigate to the configure page. As you can see in the page you can enable the monitoring for blob, table and queue. And you can also enable the logging when any requests come to the storage. But as the tooltip shown in the page, enabling the monitoring and logging will increase the usage of the storage, which means increase the bill of them. So make sure you enable them properly.   And My SQL Databases (SQL Azure) The last thing I want to quick introduce is the SQL databases, which was formally named SQL Azure. You can create a new SQL Database Server and a new database by clicking the ADD button under the SQL Database navigation item. In the popping up windows just specify the database name, the edition, size, collation and the server. You can select an existing SQL Database Server if you have, or cerate a new one. If you selected to create a new server, there will be another step you need to do, which is specify the server login, password and the region. Once it ready you can mange your databases as well as the servers in the portal. In a particular server you can update the firewall settings in its Configure page. So, What Else There are some other area on the preview portal I didn’t cover, such as the virtual machines, virtual network and web sites. Regarding the virtual machines and web sites I will talk about them in the future separated post. Regarding the virtual network, it the Windows Azure Connect we are familiar with. But as I mention in the beginning of this post, the preview portal is still under developed. Some features are not available here. For example, you cannot manage the co-admin of your subscriptions, you cannot open the remote desktop on your hosted services, and you cannot navigate to the Windows Azure Service Bus, Access Control and Caching, which formally named Windows Azure AppFabric directly. In these cases you need to navigate back to the old portal. So in the coming several months we might need to use both these two sites.   Summary In this post I quick introduced the new windows azure developer portal. Since it had been rearranged and renamed I demonstrated some features that existing in the old portal, such as how to create and deploy a hosted service, how to provision a storage service and SQL database. All features in the old portal had been, is being and will be migrated into this new portal, but some of them were in a different category and page we need to figure out.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Windows Azure Evolution &ndash; TFS Integration (WAWS Part 2)

    - by Shaun
    So this is the fourth blog post about the new features of Windows Azure and the second part of Windows Azure Web Sites. But this is not just focus on the WAWS since the function I’m going to introduce is available in both Windows Azure Web Sites and Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. hosted service). In the previous post I talked about the Windows Azure Web Sites and how to use its gallery to build a WordPress personal blog without coding. Besides the gallery we can create an empty web site and upload our website from vary approaches. And one of the highlighted feature here is that, we can make our web site integrated with a source control service, such as TFS and Git, so that it will be deployed automatically once a new commit or build available.   Create New Empty Web Site In the developer portal when creating a new web site, we can select QUICK CREATE item. This will create an empty web site with only one shared instance without any database associated. Let’s specify the URL, region and subscription and click OK. After a few seconds our website will be ready. And now we can click the BROWSE button to open this empty website. As you can see there is a welcome page available in my website even thought I didn’t upload or deploy anything. This means even though the website will be charged even before anything was deployed, similar as the cloud service (hosted service). It is because once we created a website, Windows Azure platform had arranged a hosting process (w3wp.exe) in the group of virtual machines.   Create Project in TFS Preview Service and Setup Link Currently the Windows Azure Web Sites can integrate with TFS and Git as its deployment source, and it only support the Microsoft TFS Preview Service for now. I will not deep into how to use the TFS preview service in this post but once we click into the website we had just created and then clicked the “Set up TFS publishing”, there will be a dialog helping us to connect to this service. If you don’t have an account you can click the link shown below to request one. Assuming we have already had an account of TFS service then we need to create a new project firstly. Go to your TFS service website and create a new project, giving the project name, description and the process template. Then, back to the developer portal and clicked the “Set up TFS publishing” link. In the popping up window I will provide my TFS service URL and click the “Authorize now” link. Click “Accept” button to allow my windows azure to connect to my TFS service. Then it will be back to the developer portal and list all projects in my account. Just select the one I had just created and click OK. Then our website is linking to the TFS project I specified and finally it will show similar like this below. This means the web site had been linked to the TFS successfully.   Work with TFS Preview Service in VS2010 In the figure above there are some links to guide us how to connect to the TFS server through Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 RC. If you are using Visual Studio 2012 RC, you don’t need any extension. But if you are using Visual Studio 2010 you must have SP1 and KB2581206 installed. To connect to my TFS service just open the Visual Studio and in the Team Explorer, we can add a new TFS server and paste the URL of my TFS service from the developer portal. And select the project I had just created, then it will be listed in my Team Explorer. Now let’s start to build our website. Since the website we are going to build will be deployed to WAWS, it’s NOT a cloud service, NOT a web role. So in this case we need to create a normal ASP.NET web application. For example, an ASP.NET MVC 3 web application. Next, right click on the solution and select “Add Solution to Source Control”, select the project I had just created. Then check my code in. Once the check-in finished we can see that there is a build running in the TFS server. And if we back to the developer portal, we will see in our web site deployment page there’s a deployment running. In fact, once we linked our web site to our TFS then it will create a new build definition in our TFS project. It will be triggered by each check-in and deploy to the web site we linked automatically. So that when our code had been compiled it will be published to our web site from our TFS server. Once the build and deployment finished we can see it’s now active on our developer portal. Now we can see the web site that created from my Visual Studio and deployed by my TFS.   Continue Deployment through VS and TFS A big benefit when using TFS publishing is the continue deployment. Now if I changed some code in my Visual Studio, for example update some text on the home page and check in my changes, then it will trigger an new build and deploy to my WAWS automatically. And even more, if we wanted to rollback to a previous version we can just select an existing deployment listed in the portal and click REDEPLOY at the bottom.   Q&A: Can Web Site use Storage work with a Worker Role? Stacy asked a question in my previous post, which was “can a web site use Windows Azure Storage and furthermore working with a worker role”. Since the web site is deployed on the windows azure virtual machines in data center, it must be able to use all windows azure features such as the storage, SQL databases, CDN, etc.. But since when using web site we normally have a standard ASP.NET web application, PHP website or NodeJS, the windows azure SDK was not referenced by default. But we can add them by ourselves. In our sample project let’s right click on my MVC project and clicked the “Manage NuGet packages”. And in the dialog I will search windows azure packages and select the “Windows Azure Storage” to install. Then we will have the assemblies to access windows azure storage such as tables, queues and blobs. Since I have a storage account already, let’s have a quick demo, just to list all blobs in a container. The code would be like this. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6: using Microsoft.WindowsAzure; 7: using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient; 8:  9: namespace WAASTFSDemo.Controllers 10: { 11: public class HomeController : Controller 12: { 13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to Windows Azure!"; 16:  17: var credentials = new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey("[STORAGE_ACCOUNT]", "[STORAGE_KEY]"); 18: var account = new CloudStorageAccount(credentials, false); 19: var client = account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 20: var container = client.GetContainerReference("shared"); 21: ViewBag.Blobs = container.ListBlobs().Select(b => b.Uri.AbsoluteUri); 22:  23: return View(); 24: } 25:  26: public ActionResult About() 27: { 28: return View(); 29: } 30: } 31: } 1: @{ 2: ViewBag.Title = "Home Page"; 3: } 4:  5: <h2>@ViewBag.Message</h2> 6: <p> 7: To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>. 8: </p> 9: <div> 10: <ul> 11: @foreach (var blob in ViewBag.Blobs) 12: { 13: <li>@blob</li> 14: } 15: </ul> 16: </div> And then just check in the code, it will be deployed to my web site. Finally we can see the blobs in my storage.   This is just an example but it proves that web sites can connect to storage, table, blob and queue as well. So the answer to Stacy should be “yes”. The web site can use queue storage to work with worker role.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to integrate with TFS from Windows Azure Web Sites. You can see our website can be built, uploaded and deployed automatically by TFS service. All we need to do is to provide the TFS name and select the project. Not only the Windows Azure Web Site, in this upgrade the Windows Azure Cloud Services (hosted service) can be published through TFS as well. Very similar as what we have shown below. But currently, only Microsoft TFS Service Preview can be integrated with Windows Azure. But I think in the future we can link the TFS in our enterprise and some 3rd party TFS such as CodePlex to Windows Azure.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 24, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 24, 2010New ProjectsC++ Sparse Matrix Package: This is a package containing sparse matrix operations like multiplication, addition, Cholesky decomposition, inversions and so on. It is a simple, ...Change Password Web Part for FBA-ADAM User: This web part enables users to change ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode) password from within a SharePoint Site Collection. It is compatible ...DAMAJ Investigator: The Purpose (Mission) The purpose of this project is to build a tool to help developers do rationale investigations. The tool should synthesize...DotNetWinService: DotNetWinService offers a very simple framework to declaratively implement scheduled task inside a Windows Service.internshipgameloft: <project name> makes it easier for <target user group> to <activity>. You'll no longer have to <activity>. It's developed in <programming language>.JavaScript Grid: JavaScript grid make it easiser to display tabular data on web pages. Main benefits 1 - Smart scrolling: you can handle scrolling events to load...Mirror Testing Software: Program určený pre správu zariadenia na testovanie automobilových zrkadiel po opustení výrobnej linky. (tiež End of Line Tester). Vývoj prebieha v ...NPipeline: NPipeline is a .NET port of the Apache Commons Pipeline components. It is a lightweight set of utilities that make it simple to implement paralleli...Portable Contacts: .net implementation of the Portable Contacts 1.0 Draft C specification Random Projects: Some projects that I will be doing from now and on to next year.SmartInspect Unity Interception Extension: This a library to integrate and use the SmartInspect logging tool with the Unity dependency injection and AOP framework. Various attributes help yo...Table2Class: Table2Class is a solution to create .NET class files (in C# or VB.NET) from tables in database (Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL databases)UploadTransform: A project for the uploading and trasnformation of client data to a database backend Wikiplexcontrib: This is the contrib project for wikiplex.zevenseas Notifier: Little project that displays a notification on every page within a WebApplication of SharePoint. The message of the notification is centrally manag...New ReleasesAcceptance Test Excel Addin: 1.0.0.1: Fixed two bugs: 1) highlight incorrectly when data table has filter 2) crash when named range is invalidC++ Sparse Matrix Package: v1.0: Initial release. Read the README.txt file for more information.Change Password Web Part for FBA-ADAM User: Change Password Web Part for FBA-ADAM User: Usage Instruction Add following in your web.config under <appSettings> <add key="AdamServerName" value="Your Server Name" /> <add key="AdamSourc...CollectAndCrop: spring release: This release includes the YUI compressor for .net http://yuicompressor.codeplex.com/ There are 2 new properties: CompressCss a boolean that turns...EnhSim: Release v1.9.8.0: Release v1.9.8.0Flame Shock dots can now produce critical strikes Flame Shock dots are now affected by spell haste Searing Totem and Magma Totem we...EPiServer CMS Page Type Builder: Page Type Builder 1.2 Beta 1: First release that targets EPiServer CMS version 6. While it is most likely stable further testing is needed.EPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the server: EPPlus 2.6.0.1: EPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the server New Features Improved performance. Named ranges Font-styling added to charts and ...Image Ripper: Image Ripper: Fetch HD photos from specific web galleries like a charm.IronRuby: 1.0 RC4: The IronRuby team is pleased to announce version 1.0 RC4! As IronRuby approaches the final 1.0, these RCs will contain crucial bug fixes and enhanc...IST435: AJAX Demo: Demo of AJAX Control Toolkit extenders.IST435: Representing Friendships: This sample is a quick'n'dirty demo of how you can implement the general concept of setting up Friendships among users based on the Membership Fram...JavaScript Grid: Initial release: Initial release contains all source codes and two exampleskdar: KDAR 0.0.17: KDAR - Kernel Debugger Anti Rootkit - npfs.sys, msfs.sys, mup.sys checks added - fastfat.sys FAST I/O table check addedMicrosoft - DDD NLayerApp .NET 4.0 Example (Microsoft Spain): V0.6 - N-Layer DDD Sample App: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Unity Application Block 1.2 - October 2008 http://www.microsoft.com/...Mytrip.Mvc: Mytrip 1.0 preview 2: Article Manager Blog Manager EF Membership(.NET Framework 4) User Manager File Manager Localization Captcha ClientValidation ThemeNetBuildConfigurator: Using NetBuildConfigurator Screencast: A demo and Screencast of using BuildConfigurator.NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.120: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis version provi...NoteExpress User Tools (NEUT) - Do it by ourselves!: NoteExpress User Tools 1.9.0: 1.9.0 测试版本：NoteExpress 2.5.0.1147 #针对1147的改动Open NFe: DANFe v1.9.7: Envio de e-mailpatterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: Code drop 2: This is the first step in taking a-Expense to Windows Azure. Highlights of this release are: Use of SQL Azure as the backend store for applicatio...patterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: Music Store sample application: Music Store is the sample application included in the Web Client Guidance project. We modified it so it now has a real data access layer, uses most...Quick Anime Renamer: Quick Anime Renamer v0.2: Quick Anime Renamer v0.2 - updated 3/23/2010Fixed some painting errorsFixed tab orderRandom Projects: Simple Chat Script: This contains chat commands for CONSTRUCTION serversRapidshare Episode Downloader: RED v0.8.1: - Fixed numerous bugs - Added Next Episode feature - Made episode checking run in background thread - Extended both API's to be more versatile - Pr...Rapidshare Episode Downloader: RED v0.8.2: - Fixed the list to update air date automatically when checking for episodes availabilitySelection Maker: Selection Maker 1.3: New Features:Now the ListView can show Icon of files. Better performance while showing files in ListViewSprite Sheet Packer: 2.2 Release: Made generation of map file optional in sspack and UI Fixed bug with image/map files being locked after first build requiring a restart to build ...Table Storage Backup & Restore for Windows Azure: TableStorageBackup: Table Storage Backup & RestoreTable2Class: Table2Class v1.0: Download do Solution do Visual Studio 2008 com os seguintes projetos: Table2Class.ClassMaker Projeto Windows Form que contempla o Class Maker. Ta...VBScript Login Script Creator: Login Script Creator 1.5: Removed IE7 option. Removed Internet Explorer temporary internet files option. Added overlay option. Added additional redirects for My Photos, My ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30323.0: Automatic drop of latest buildXAML Code Snippets addin for Visual Studio 2010: First release: This version targets Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. Please consider this release as a Beta. Also provide feedback so that it can be improve...Zeta Long Paths: Release 2010-03-24: Added functions to get file owner, creation time, last access time, last write time.ZZZ CMS: Release 3.0.0: With mobile version of frontend.Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesFarseer Physics EngineBlogEngine.NETLINQ to TwitterFacebook Developer ToolkitNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModulePHPExcelTable2Classpatterns & practices: Composite WPF and Silverlight

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  • DocumentDB - Another Azure NoSQL Storage Service

    - by Shaun
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2014/08/25/documentdb---another-azure-nosql-storage-service.aspxMicrosoft just released a bunch of new features for Azure on 22nd and one of them I was interested in most is DocumentDB, a document NoSQL database service on the cloud.   Quick Look at DocumentDB We can try DocumentDB from the new azure preview portal. Just click the NEW button and select the item named DocumentDB to create a new account. Specify the name of the DocumentDB, which will be the endpoint we are going to use to connect later. Select the capacity unit, resource group and subscription. In resource group section we can select which region our DocumentDB will be located. Same as other azure services select the same location with your consumers of the DocumentDB, for example the website, web services, etc.. After several minutes the DocumentDB will be ready. Click the KEYS button we can find the URI and primary key, which will be used when connecting. Now let's open Visual Studio and try to use the DocumentDB we had just created. Create a new console application and install the DocumentDB .NET client library from NuGet with the keyword "DocumentDB". You need to select "Include Prerelase" in NuGet Package Manager window since this library was not yet released. Next we will create a new database and document collection under our DocumentDB account. The code below created an instance of DocumentClient with the URI and primary key we just copied from azure portal, and create a database and collection. And it also prints the document and collection link string which will be used later to insert and query documents. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var endpoint = new Uri("https://shx.documents.azure.com:443/"); 4: var key = "LU2NoyS2fH0131TGxtBE4DW/CjHQBzAaUx/mbuJ1X77C4FWUG129wWk2oyS2odgkFO2Xdif9/ZddintQicF+lA=="; 5:  6: var client = new DocumentClient(endpoint, key); 7: Run(client).Wait(); 8:  9: Console.WriteLine("done"); 10: Console.ReadKey(); 11: } 12:  13: static async Task Run(DocumentClient client) 14: { 15:  16: var database = new Database() { Id = "testdb" }; 17: database = await client.CreateDatabaseAsync(database); 18: Console.WriteLine("database link = {0}", database.SelfLink); 19:  20: var collection = new DocumentCollection() { Id = "testcol" }; 21: collection = await client.CreateDocumentCollectionAsync(database.SelfLink, collection); 22: Console.WriteLine("collection link = {0}", collection.SelfLink); 23: } Below is the result from the console window. We need to copy the collection link string for future usage. Now if we back to the portal we will find a database was listed with the name we specified in the code. Next we will insert a document into the database and collection we had just created. In the code below we pasted the collection link which copied in previous step, create a dynamic object with several properties defined. As you can see we can add some normal properties contains string, integer, we can also add complex property for example an array, a dictionary and an object reference, unless they can be serialized to JSON. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var endpoint = new Uri("https://shx.documents.azure.com:443/"); 4: var key = "LU2NoyS2fH0131TGxtBE4DW/CjHQBzAaUx/mbuJ1X77C4FWUG129wWk2oyS2odgkFO2Xdif9/ZddintQicF+lA=="; 5:  6: var client = new DocumentClient(endpoint, key); 7:  8: // collection link pasted from the result in previous demo 9: var collectionLink = "dbs/AAk3AA==/colls/AAk3AP6oFgA=/"; 10:  11: // document we are going to insert to database 12: dynamic doc = new ExpandoObject(); 13: doc.firstName = "Shaun"; 14: doc.lastName = "Xu"; 15: doc.roles = new string[] { "developer", "trainer", "presenter", "father" }; 16:  17: // insert the docuemnt 18: InsertADoc(client, collectionLink, doc).Wait(); 19:  20: Console.WriteLine("done"); 21: Console.ReadKey(); 22: } the insert code will be very simple as below, just provide the collection link and the object we are going to insert. 1: static async Task InsertADoc(DocumentClient client, string collectionLink, dynamic doc) 2: { 3: var document = await client.CreateDocumentAsync(collectionLink, doc); 4: Console.WriteLine(await JsonConvert.SerializeObjectAsync(document, Formatting.Indented)); 5: } Below is the result after the object had been inserted. Finally we will query the document from the database and collection. Similar to the insert code, we just need to specify the collection link so that the .NET SDK will help us to retrieve all documents in it. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var endpoint = new Uri("https://shx.documents.azure.com:443/"); 4: var key = "LU2NoyS2fH0131TGxtBE4DW/CjHQBzAaUx/mbuJ1X77C4FWUG129wWk2oyS2odgkFO2Xdif9/ZddintQicF+lA=="; 5:  6: var client = new DocumentClient(endpoint, key); 7:  8: var collectionLink = "dbs/AAk3AA==/colls/AAk3AP6oFgA=/"; 9:  10: SelectDocs(client, collectionLink); 11:  12: Console.WriteLine("done"); 13: Console.ReadKey(); 14: } 15:  16: static void SelectDocs(DocumentClient client, string collectionLink) 17: { 18: var docs = client.CreateDocumentQuery(collectionLink + "docs/").ToList(); 19: foreach(var doc in docs) 20: { 21: Console.WriteLine(doc); 22: } 23: } Since there's only one document in my collection below is the result when I executed the code. As you can see all properties, includes the array was retrieve at the same time. DocumentDB also attached some properties we didn't specified such as "_rid", "_ts", "_self" etc., which is controlled by the service.   DocumentDB Benefit DocumentDB is a document NoSQL database service. Different from the traditional database, document database is truly schema-free. In a short nut, you can save anything in the same database and collection if it could be serialized to JSON. We you query the document database, all sub documents will be retrieved at the same time. This means you don't need to join other tables when using a traditional database. Document database is very useful when we build some high performance system with hierarchical data structure. For example, assuming we need to build a blog system, there will be many blog posts and each of them contains the content and comments. The comment can be commented as well. If we were using traditional database, let's say SQL Server, the database schema might be defined as below. When we need to display a post we need to load the post content from the Posts table, as well as the comments from the Comments table. We also need to build the comment tree based on the CommentID field. But if were using DocumentDB, what we need to do is to save the post as a document with a list contains all comments. Under a comment all sub comments will be a list in it. When we display this post we just need to to query the post document, the content and all comments will be loaded in proper structure. 1: { 2: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 3: "title": "xxxxx", 4: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 5: "postedOn": "08/25/2014 13:55", 6: "comments": 7: [ 8: { 9: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 10: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 11: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:00", 12: "commentedBy": "xxx" 13: }, 14: { 15: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 16: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 17: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:10", 18: "commentedBy": "xxx", 19: "comments": 20: [ 21: { 22: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 23: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 24: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:18", 25: "commentedBy": "xxx", 26: "comments": 27: [ 28: { 29: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 30: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 31: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 18:22", 32: "commentedBy": "xxx", 33: } 34: ] 35: }, 36: { 37: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 38: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 39: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 15:02", 40: "commentedBy": "xxx", 41: } 42: ] 43: }, 44: { 45: "id": "xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx", 46: "content": "xxxxx, xxxxxxxxx. xxxxxx, xx, xxxx.", 47: "commentedOn": "08/25/2014 14:30", 48: "commentedBy": "xxx" 49: } 50: ] 51: }   DocumentDB vs. Table Storage DocumentDB and Table Storage are all NoSQL service in Microsoft Azure. One common question is "when we should use DocumentDB rather than Table Storage". Here are some ideas from me and some MVPs. First of all, they are different kind of NoSQL database. DocumentDB is a document database while table storage is a key-value database. Second, table storage is cheaper. DocumentDB supports scale out from one capacity unit to 5 in preview period and each capacity unit provides 10GB local SSD storage. The price is $0.73/day includes 50% discount. For storage service the highest price is $0.061/GB, which is almost 10% of DocumentDB. Third, table storage provides local-replication, geo-replication, read access geo-replication while DocumentDB doesn't support. Fourth, there is local emulator for table storage but none for DocumentDB. We have to connect to the DocumentDB on cloud when developing locally. But, DocumentDB supports some cool features that table storage doesn't have. It supports store procedure, trigger and user-defined-function. It supports rich indexing while table storage only supports indexing against partition key and row key. It supports transaction, table storage supports as well but restricted with Entity Group Transaction scope. And the last, table storage is GA but DocumentDB is still in preview.   Summary In this post I have a quick demonstration and introduction about the new DocumentDB service in Azure. It's very easy to interact through .NET and it also support REST API, Node.js SDK and Python SDK. Then I explained the concept and benefit of  using document database, then compared with table storage.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • 2 Birds, 1 Stone: Enabling M2M and Mobility in Healthcare

    - by Eric Jensen
    Jim Connors has created a video showcase of a comprehensive healthcare solution, connecting a mobile application directly to an embedded patient monitoring system. In the demo, Jim illustrates how you can easily build solutions on top of the Java embedded platform, using Oracle products like Berkeley DB and Database Mobile Server. Jim is running Apache Tomcat on an embedded device, using Berkeley DB as the data store. BDB is transparently linked to an Oracle Database backend using  Database Mobile Server. Information protection is important in healthcare, so it is worth pointing out that these products offer strong data encryption, for storage as well as transit. In his video, Jim does a great job of demystifying M2M. What's compelling about this demo is that uses a solution architecture that enterprise developers are already comfortable and familiar with: a Java apps server with a database backend. The additional pieces used to embed this solution are Oracle Berkeley DB and Database Mobile Server. It functions transparently, from the perspective of Java apps developers. This means that organizations who understand Java apps (basically everyone) can use this technology to develop embedded M2M products. The potential uses for this technology in healthcare alone are immense; any device that measures and records some aspect of the patient could be linked, securely and directly, to the medical records database. Breathing, circulation, other vitals, sensory perception, blood tests, x-rats or CAT scans. The list goes on and on. In this demo case, it's a testament to the power of the Java embedded platform that they are able to easily interface the device, called a Pulse Oximeter, with the web application. If Jim had stopped there, it would've been a cool demo. But he didn't; he actually saved the most awesome part for the end! At 9:52 Jim drops a bombshell: He's also created an Android app, something a doctor would use to view patient health data from his mobile device. The mobile app is seamlessly integrated into the rest of the system, using the device agent from Oracle's Database Mobile Server. In doing so, Jim has really showcased the full power of this solution: the ability to build M2M solutions that integrate seamlessly with mobile applications. In closing, I want to point out that this is not a hypothetical demo using beta or even v1.0 products. Everything in Jim's demo is available today. What's more, every product shown is mature, and already in production at many customer sites, albeit not in the innovative combination Jim has come up with. If your customers are in the market for these type of solutions (and they almost certainly are) I encourage you to download the components and try it out yourself! All the Oracle products showcased in this video are available for evaluation download via Oracle Technology Network.

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  • Windows Azure Evolution - Web Sites (aka Antares) Part 1

    - by Shaun
    This is the 3rd post of my Windows Azure Evolution series, focus on the new features and enhancement which was alone with the Windows Azure Platform Upgrade June 2012, announced at the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June. In the first post I introduced the new preview developer portal and how to works for the existing features such as cloud services, storages and SQL databases. In the second one I talked about the Windows Azure .NET SDK 1.7 on the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC on Windows 8. From this one I will begin to introduce some new features. Now let’s have a look on the first one of them, Windows Azure Web Sites.   Overview Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), as known as Antares, was a new feature still in preview stage in this upgrade. It allows people to quickly and easily deploy websites to a highly scalable cloud environment, uses the languages and open source apps of the choice then deploy such as FTP, Git and TFS. It also can be integrated with Windows Azure services like SQL Database, Caching, CDN and Storage easily. After read its introduction we may have a question: since we can deploy a website from both cloud service web role and web site, what’s the different between them? So, let’s have a quick compare.   CLOUD SERVICE WEB SITE OS Windows Server Windows Server Virtualization Windows Azure Virtual Machine Windows Azure Virtual Machine Host IIS IIS Platform ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, WCF ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, PHP Language C#, VB.NET C#, VB.NET, PHP Database SQL Database SQL Database, MySQL Architecture Multi layered, background worker, message queuing, etc.. Simple website with backend database. VS Project Windows Azure Cloud Service ASP.NET Web Form, ASP.NET MVC, etc.. Out-of-box Gallery (none) Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress, etc.. Deployment Package upload, Visual Studio publish FTP, Git, TFS, WebMatrix Compute Mode Dedicate VM Shared Across VMs, Dedicate VM Scale Scale up, scale out Scale up, scale out As you can see, there are many difference between the cloud service and web site, but the main point is that, the cloud service focus on those complex architecture web application. For example, if you want to build a website with frontend layer, middle business layer and data access layer, with some background worker process connected through the message queue, then you should better use cloud service, since it provides full control of your code and application. But if you just want to build a personal blog or a  business portal, then you can use the web site. Since the web site have many galleries, you can create them even without any coding and configuration. David Pallmann have an awesome figure explains the benefits between the could service, web site and virtual machine.   Create a Personal Blog in Web Site from Gallery As I mentioned above, one of the big feature in WAWS is to build a website from an existing gallery, which means we don’t need to coding and configure. What we need to do is open the windows azure developer portal and click the NEW button, select WEB SITE and FROM GALLERY. In the popping up windows there are many websites we can choose to use. For example, for personal blog there are Orchard CMS, WordPress; for CMS there are DotNetNuke, Drupal 7, mojoPortal. Let’s select WordPress and click the next button. The next step is to configure the web site. We will need to specify the DNS name and select the subscription and region. Since the WordPress uses MySQL as its backend database, we also need to create a MySQL database as well. Windows Azure Web Sites utilize ClearDB to host the MySQL databases. You cannot create a MySQL database directly from SQL Databases section. Finally, since we selected to create a new MySQL database we need to specify the database name and region in the last step. Also we need to accept the ClearDB’s terms as well. Then windows azure platform will download the WordPress codes and deploy the MySQL database and website. Then it will be ready to use. Select the website and click the BROWSE button, the WordPress administration page will be shown. After configured the WordPress here is my personal web blog on the cloud. It took me no more than 10 minutes to establish without any coding.   Monitor, Configure, Scale and Linked Resources Let’s click into the website I had just created in the portal and have a look on what we can do. In the website details page where are five sections. - Dashboard The overall information about this website, such as the basic usage status, public URL, compute mode, FTP address, subscription and links that we can specify the deployment credentials, TFS and Git publish setting, etc.. - Monitor Some status information such as the CPU usage, memory usage etc., errors, etc.. We can add more metrics by clicking the ADD METRICS button and the bottom as well. - Configure Here we can set the configurations of our website such as the .NET and PHP runtime version, diagnostics settings, application settings and the IIS default documents. - Scale This is something interesting. In WAWS there are two compute mode or called web site mode. One is “shared”, which means our website will be shared with other web sites in a group of windows azure virtual machines. Each web site have its own process (w3wp.exe) with some sandbox technology to isolate from others. When we need to scaling-out our web site in shared mode, we actually increased the working process count. Hence in shared mode we cannot specify the virtual machine size since they are shared across all web sites. This is a little bit different than the scaling mode of the cloud service (hosted service web role and worker role). The other mode called “dedicate”, which means our web site will use the whole windows azure virtual machine. This is the same hosting behavior as cloud service web role. In web role it will be deployed on the virtual machines we specified and all of them are only used by us. In web sites dedicate mode, it’s the same. In this mode when we scaling-out our web site we will use more virtual machines, and each of them will only host our own website. And we can specify the virtual machine size in this mode. In the developer portal we can select which mode we are using from the scale section. In shared mode we can only specify the instance count, but in dedicate mode we can specify the instance size as well as the instance count. - Linked Resource The MySQL database created alone with the creation of our WordPress web site is a linked resource. We can add more linked resources in this section.   Pricing For the web site itself, since this feature is in preview period if you are using shared mode, then you will get free up to 10 web sites. But if you are using dedicate mode, the price would be the virtual machines you are using. For example, if you are using dedicate and configured two middle size virtual machines then you will pay $230.40 per month. If there is SQL Database linked to your web site then they will be charged separately based on the Pay-As-You-Go price. For example a 1GB web edition database costs $9.99 per month. And the bandwidth will be charged as well. For example 10GB outbound data transfer costs $1.20 per month. For more information about the pricing please have a look at the windows azure pricing page.   Summary Windows Azure Web Sites gives us easier and quicker way to create, develop and deploy website to window azure platform. Comparing with the cloud service web role, the WAWS have many out-of-box gallery we can use directly. So if you just want to build a blog, CMS or business portal you don’t need to learn ASP.NET, you don’t need to learn how to configure DotNetNuke, you don’t need to learn how to prepare PHP and MySQL. By using WAWS gallery you can establish a website within 10 minutes without any lines of code. But in some cases we do need to code by ourselves. We may need to tweak the layout of our pages, or we may have a traditional ASP.NET or PHP web application which needed to migrated to the cloud. Besides the gallery WAWS also provides many features to download, upload code. It also provides the feature to integrate with some version control services such as TFS and Git. And it also provides the deploy approaches through FTP and Web Deploy. In the next post I will demonstrate how to use WebMatrix to download and modify the website, and how to use TFS and Git to deploy automatically one our code changes committed.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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

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

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  • How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions

    - by Eric Z Goodnight
    Have a huge folder of images needing tweaks? A few hundred adjustments may seem like a big, time consuming job—but read one to see how Photoshop can do repetitive tasks automatically, even if you don’t know how to program! Photoshop Actions are a simple way to program simple routines in Photoshop, and are a great time saver, allowing you to re-perform tasks over and over, saving you minutes or hours, depending on the job you have to work on. See how any bunch of images and even some fairly complicated photo tweaking can be done automatically to even hundreds of images at once. When Can I use Photoshop Actions? Photoshop actions are a way of recording the tools, menus, and keys pressed while using the program. Each time you use a tool, adjust a color, or use the brush, it can be recorded and played back over any file Photoshop can open. While it isn’t perfect and can get very confused if not set up correctly, it can automate editing hundreds of images, saving you hours and hours if you have big jobs with complex edits. The image illustrated above is a template for a polaroid-style picture frame. If you had several hundred images, it would actually be a simple matter to use Photoshop Actions to create hundreds of new images inside the frame in almost no time at all. Let’s take a look at how a simple folder of images and some Image editing automation can turn lots of work into a simple and easy job. Creating a New Action Actions is a default part of the “Essentials” panel set Photoshop begins with as a default. If you can’t see the panel button under the “History” button, you can find Actions by going to Window > Actions or pressing Alt + F9. Click the in the Actions Panel, pictured in the previous illustration on the left. Choose to create a “New Set” in order to begin creating your own custom Actions. Name your action set whatever you want. Names are not relevant, you’ll simply want to make it obvious that you have created it. Click OK. Look back in the layers panel. You’ll see your new Set of actions has been added to the list. Click it to highlight it before going on. Click the again to create a “New Action” in your new set. If you care to name your action, go ahead. Name it after whatever it is you’re hoping to do—change the canvas size, tint all your pictures blue, send your image to the printer in high quality, or run multiple filters on images. The name is for your own usage, so do what suits you best. Note that you can simplify your process by creating shortcut keys for your actions. If you plan to do hundreds of edits with your actions, this might be a good idea. If you plan to record an action to use every time you use Photoshop, this might even be an invaluable step. When you create a new Action, Photoshop automatically begins recording everything you do. It does not record the time in between steps, but rather only the data from each step. So take your time when recording and make sure you create your actions the way you want them. The square button stops recording, and the circle button starts recording again. With these basics ready, we can take a look at a sample Action. Recording a Sample Action Photoshop will remember everything you input into it when it is recording, even specific photographs you open. So begin recording your action when your first photo is already open. Once your first image is open, click the record button. If you’re already recording, continue on. Using the File > Place command to insert the polaroid image can be easier for Actions to deal with. Photoshop can record with multiple open files, but it often gets confused when you try it. Keep your recordings as simple as possible to ensure your success. When the image is placed in, simply press enter to render it. Select your background layer in your layers panel. Your recording should be following along with no trouble. Double click this layer. Double clicking your background layer will create a new layer from it. Allow it to be renamed “Layer 0” and press OK. Move the “polaroid” layer to the bottom by selecting it and dragging it down below “Layer 0” in the layers panel. Right click “Layer 0” and select “Create Clipping Mask.” The JPG image is cropped to the layer below it. Coincidentally, all actions described here are being recorded perfectly, and are reproducible. Cursor actions, like the eraser, brush, or bucket fill don’t record well, because the computer uses your mouse movements and coordinates, which may need to change from photo to photo. Click the to set your Photograph layer to a “Screen” blending mode. This will make the image disappear when it runs over the white parts of the polaroid image. With your image layer (Layer 0) still selected, navigate to Edit > Transform > Scale. You can use the mouse to resize your Layer 0, but Actions work better with absolute numbers. Visit the Width and Height adjustments in the top options panel. Click the chain icon to link them together, and adjust them numerically. Depending on your needs, you may need to use more or less than 30%. Your image will resize to your specifications. Press enter to render, or click the check box in the top right of your application. + Click on your bottom layer, or “polaroid” in this case. This creates a selection of the bottom layer. Navigate to Image > Crop in order to crop down to your bottom layer selection Your image is now resized to your bottommost layer, and Photoshop is still recording to that effect. For additional effect, we can navigate to Image > Image Rotation > Arbitrary to rotate our image by a small tilt. Choosing 3 degrees clockwise , we click OK to render our choice. Our image is rotated, and this step is recorded. Photoshop will even record when you save your files. With your recording still going, find File > Save As. You can easily tell Photoshop to save in a new folder, other than the one you have been working in, so that your files aren’t overwritten. Navigate to any folder you wish, but do not change the filename. If you change the filename, Photoshop will record that name, and save all your images under whatever you type. However, you can change your filetype without recording an absolute filename. Use the pulldown tab and select a different filetype—in this instance, PNG. Simply click “Save” to create a new PNG based on your actions. Photoshop will record the destination and the change in filetype. If you didn’t edit the name of your file, it will always use the variable filename of any image you open. (This is very important if you want to edit hundreds of images at once!) Click File > Close or the red “X” in the corner to close your filetype. Photoshop can record that as well. Since we have already saved our image as a JPG, click “NO” to not overwrite your original image. Photoshop will also record your choice of “NO” for subsequent images. In your Actions panel, click the stop button to complete your action. You can always click the record button to add more steps later, if you want. This is how your new action looks with its steps expanded. Curious how to put it into effect? Read on to see how simple it is to use that recording you just made. Editing Lots of Images with Your New Action Open a large number of images—as many as you care to work with. Your action should work immediately with every image on screen, although you may have to test and re-record, depending on how you did. Actions don’t require any programming knowledge, but often can get confused or work in a counter-intuitive way. Record your action until it is perfect. If it works once without errors, it’s likely to work again and again! Find the “Play” button in your Actions Panel. With your custom action selected, click “Play” and your routine will edit, save, and close each file for you. Keep bashing “Play” for each open file, and it will keep saving and creating new files until you run out of work you need to do. And in mere moments, a complicated stack of work is done. Photoshop actions can be very complicated, far beyond what is illustrated here, and can even be combined with scripts and other actions, creating automated creation of potentially very complex files, or applying filters to an entire portfolio of digital photos. Have questions or comments concerning Graphics, Photos, Filetypes, or Photoshop? Send your questions to [email protected], and they may be featured in a future How-To Geek Graphics article. Image Credits: All images copyright Stephanie Pragnell and author Eric Z Goodnight, protected under Creative Commons. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Smart Taskbar Is a Thumb Friendly Android Task Launcher Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free Need Tech Support? Call the Star Wars Help Desk! [Video Classic] Reclaim Vertical UI Space by Adding a Toolbar to the Left or Right Side of Firefox Androidify Turns You into an Android-style Avatar

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  • Does using GCC specific builtins qualify as incorporation within a project?

    - by DavidJFelix
    I understand that linking to a program licensed under the GPL requires that you release the source of your program under the GPL as well, while the LGPL does not require this. The terminology of the (L)GPL is very clear about this. #include "gpl_program.h" means you'd have to license GPL, because you're linking to GPL licensed code. And #include "lgpl_program.h" means you're free to license however you want, so that it doesn't explicitly prohibit linking to LGPL source. Now, my question about what isn't clear is: [begin question] GCC is GPL licensed, compiling with GCC, does not constitute "integration" into your program, as the GPL puts it; does using builtin functions (which are specific to GCC) constitute "incorporation" even though you haven't explicitly linked to this GPL licensed code? My intuition tells me that this isn't the intention, but legality isn't always intuitive. I'm not actually worried, but I'm curious if this could be considered the case. [end question] [begin aside] The reason for my equivocation is that GCC builtins like __builtin_clzl() or __builtin_expect() are an API technically and could be implemented in another way. For example, many builtins were replicated by LLVM and the argument could be made that it's not implementation specific to GCC. However, many builtins have no parallel and when compiled will link GPL licensed code in GCC and will not compile on other compilers. If you make the argument here that the API could be replicated by another compiler, couldn't you make that identical claim about any program you link to, so long as you don't distribute that source? I understand that I'm being a legal snake about this, but it strikes me as odd that the GPL isn't more specific. I don't see this as a reasonable ploy for proprietary software creators to bypass the GPL, as they'd have to bundle the GPL software to make it work, removing their plausible deniability. However, isn't it possible that if builtins don't constitute linking, then open source proponents who oppose the GPL could simply write a BSD/MIT/Apache/Apple licensed product that links to a GPL'd program and claim that they intend to write a non-GPL interface that is identical to the GPL one, preserving their BSD license until it's actually compiled? [end aside] Sorry for the aside, I didn't think many people would follow why I care about this if I'm not facing any legal trouble or implications. Don't worry too much about the hypotheticals there, I'm just extrapolating what either answer to my actual question could imply.

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  • ArchBeat Facebook Friday: Top 10 Posts - August 8-14, 2014

    - by Bob Rhubart-Oracle
    5,307 people pay attention to the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page. Here are the Top 10 posts from that page for the last seven days, August 8-14, 2014. Podcast: ODTUG Kscope 2014: Anatomy of a User Conference - Part 3 There is more to a great user conference than a shared interest in Oracle products. In the final segment of this 3-part OTN ArchBeat Podcast panelists Danny Bryant , Chet "ORACLENERD" Justice, Cameron Lackpour, Debra Lilley, and Mike Riley discuss the nature and importance of community Oracle SOA Suite 12c: The LDAP Adapter quick and easy | Maarten Smeets Maarten Smeets' how-to post describes the installation and configuration of an LDAP server and browser (ApacheDS and Apache Directory Studio). Process level Exception Handling in BPM12c | Abhishek Mittal When an exception occurs while running a process flow you have two choices: 1) retry running the flow object that caused that process flow or 2) move the process instance to the next flow object in the main process flow. Abhishek Mittal shows you how to do both. Building a Responsive WebCenter Portal Application | JayJay Zheng Oracle ACE JayJay Zheng's article addresses the essentials of responsive web design, shows you how to design and develop a responsive WebCenter Portal application, and reviews key development considerations. Cloud Control authorization with Active Directory | Jeroen Gouma Jeroen Gouma takes you step-by-step through the user authortization process in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. Video: CIOs Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions | Jessica Keyes The CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions author Jessica Keyes talks about why input from users and developers is essential to CIOs who want to avoid being escorted out of the building by security guards. Read A CIO's Guide to Oracle Cloud Computing, a sample chapter from the book. Twitter Tuesday - Top 10 @ArchBeat Tweets - August 5-11, 2014 @OTNArchBeat followers from across the galaxy have spoken! Here are the Top 10 tweets for the past seven days. Topics include: Hyperion, OBIEE, ODI, Oracle MAF, and SOA Suite. Recap: Fusion Middleware Summer Camps - Lisbon 2014 | Simon Haslam Oracle ACE Director Simon Haslam's recap of his experience at the Oracle Fusion Middleware Summer Camp in Lisbon, Portugal will make you wish you had been there. WebLogic Data Source Connection Labeling | Steve Felts The connection labeling feature was added in WLS release 10.3.6, and enhanced in release WLS 12.1.3. This post by Steve Felts describes two new connection properties that can be configured on the data source descriptor. Why Mobile Apps <3 REST/JSON | Martin Jarvis Martin Jarvis explores the preference for REST and JSON over SOAP and XML for mobile web services.

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  • Advice for moving from custom domain hosted on blogspot to new custom domain on hosting provider [closed]

    - by Chan
    Need some advice :) a) Facts: 1. Currently, we have a blog www.thebigbigsky.net hosted on blogspot.com. The site has been up for around a year and google had cached some of the posts. 2. The idea for setting up the blog was to promote/share articles/write-up about personal development and self-growth, and also to offer counseling services related to them. 3. There is another subdomain - chinese.thebigbigsky.net hosting similar blog posts but in Chinese. This is hosted on blogspot as well. b) What we want to do: 1. We did some research on the internet and understood that, to make a website more popular, it is better to have a domain name that is related to the content of the site. Hence, in our case, a domain name containing "personal development" would be more ideal and easier for people to remember. 2. Hence, we are thinking to move away from blogspot to a meaningful new domain (example: personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com) and move all contents there. The new domain will be hosted on a hosting provider e.g. hostgator.com c) Here are the steps we have in mind: 1. Register the new domain (example: personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com) 2. Get a hosting provider hostgator.com 3. Setup a new site based on Wordpress, import all contents from existing blog to this new site - personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com. 4. Switch current blog back to thebigbigsky.blogspot.com 5. Switch DNS of www.thebigbigsky.net to point to the new site on hostgator.com 6. On hostgator.com, setup permanent redirect 301 of www.thebigbigsky.net to point to personaldevelopmetnwithxyz.com by following the tutorial mentioned here - http://www.blogbloke.com/migrating-redirecting-blogger-wordpress-htaccess-apache-best-method/ Questions: 1. Will it have major impact on the current google pagerank or SEO of thebigbigsky.net? As the site is not that popular, we assumed that the impact would not be a major one. 2. Is the domain personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com considered too long? (For SEO etc) 3. Steps c.4 and c.5 above - Will this work for our case? 4. How about the subdomain - chinese.thebigbigsky.net? We would like keep it as separate blog with the domain e.g. chinese.personaldevelopmentwithxyz.com 5. We added "facebook comments" to the existing post on www.thebigtbigsky.net and would not want to lose it. Will the comments still be there after we moved to the new domain? 6. Any better idea to do it? :) Thank you very much! regards, -chan

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  • AJAX event, prevents other page actions

    - by cobaltduck
    Here's a fairly average scenario, using JSF as an example, but this same concept I have observed in ASP.NET, Apache Wicket, and other frameworks with ajax capabilities. <h:inputText id="text1" value="#{myBacker.myBean.myStringVar}" styleClass="goodCSS"> <f:ajax event="change" listener="#{myBacker.text1ChangeEventMethod}" update="someOtherField" /> </h:inputText> <h:selectBooleanCheckbox id="check1" value="#{myBacker.myBean.myBoolVar}" /> Let's suppose that the 'text1ChangeEventListener' is essential to 'someOtherField' and perhaps toggles its disabled attribute, or changes its available options, based on the value of 'myStringVar.' The particulars aren't important, let's just accept that for some reason we need an ajax call when the 'text1' value is changed. So Jane User is working her way down the form. She arrives at the 'text1' field and types some value. The cursor focus is still in the text field, as she moves her mouse to the 'check1' box and clicks. It appears to her that nothing has happened. She clicks again, and this time the checkbox highlights and the icon indicating a selection appears in the box. Jane has to do several entries in the form today, and sees this happen every time, and it becomes very frustrating for her. Likewise, Jeff Admin is also perusing this form, and begins to type in 'text1.' He then realizes he doesn't really want to enter this data, and so moves his mouse to the "cancel" button elsewhere on the page, and clicks. Nothing seems to happen. Jeff clicks again, and after confirming he really does want to cancel, is returned to the home page. Jeff scratches his head. The problem is simply that the first thing the system does after 'text1' looses focus is run the listener and perform the ajax operation. It may only take a fraction of a second, but still, you can click other buttons all you want, but until that ajax has finished, everything else is ignored. I've spent the morning searching and reading, and it seems no one else has even noticed this. I could find not one article, blog, past question here or at SO, or anyting that addresses this obvious and glaring deficiency in ajax. So first of all, am I truly alone in thinking this is a big problem? Second, does anyone have a solution?

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  • Make Your Menu Item Highlighted

    - by Shaun
    When I was working on the TalentOn project (Promotion in MSDN Chinese) I was asked to implement a functionality that makes the top menu items highlighted when the currently viewing page was in that section. This might be a common scenario in the web application development I think.   Simple Example When thinking about the solution of the highlighted menu items the biggest problem would be how to define the sections (menu item) and the pages it belongs to rather than making the menu highlighted. With the ASP.NET MVC framework we can use the controller – action infrastructure for us to achieve it. Each controllers would have a related menu item on the master page normally. The menu item would be highlighted if any of the views under this controller are being shown. Some specific menu items would be highlighted of that action was invoked, for example the home page, the about page, etc. The check rule can be specified on-demand. For example I can define the action LogOn and Register of Account controller should make the Account menu item highlighted while the ChangePassword should make the Profile menu item highlighted. I’m going to use the HtmlHelper to render the highlight-able menu item. The key point is that I need to pass the predication to check whether the current view belongs to this menu item which means this menu item should be highlighted or not. Hence I need a delegate as its parameter. The simplest code would be like this. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6: using System.Web.Mvc.Html; 7:  8: namespace ShaunXu.Blogs.HighlighMenuItem 9: { 10: public static class HighlightMenuItemHelper 11: { 12: public static MvcHtmlString HighlightMenuItem(this HtmlHelper helper, 13: string text, string controllerName, string actionName, object routeData, object htmlAttributes, 14: string highlightText, object highlightHtmlAttributes, 15: Func<HtmlHelper, bool> highlightPredicate) 16: { 17: var shouldHighlight = highlightPredicate.Invoke(helper); 18: if (shouldHighlight) 19: { 20: return helper.ActionLink(string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(highlightText) ? text : highlightText, 21: actionName, controllerName, routeData, highlightHtmlAttributes == null ? htmlAttributes : highlightHtmlAttributes); 22: } 23: else 24: { 25: return helper.ActionLink(text, actionName, controllerName, routeData, htmlAttributes); 26: } 27: } 28: } 29: } There are 3 groups of the parameters: the first group would be the same as the in-build ActionLink method parameters. It has the link text, controller name and action name, etc passed in so that I can render a valid linkage for the menu item. The second group would be more focus on the highlight link text and Html attributes. I will use them to render the highlight menu item. The third group, which contains one parameter, would be a predicate that tells me whether this menu item should be highlighted or not based on the user’s definition. And then I changed my master page of the sample MVC application. I let the Home and About menu highlighted only when the Index and About action are invoked. And I added a new menu named Account which should be highlighted for all actions/views under its Account controller. So my master would be like this. 1: <div id="menucontainer"> 2:  3: <ul id="menu"> 4: <li><% 1: : Html.HighlightMenuItem( 2: "Home", "Home", "Index", null, null, 3: "[Home]", null, 4: helper => helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString() == "Home" 5: && helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"].ToString() == "Index")%></li> 5:  6: <li><% 1: : Html.HighlightMenuItem( 2: "About", "Home", "About", null, null, 3: "[About]", null, 4: helper => helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString() == "Home" 5: && helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"].ToString() == "About")%></li> 7:  8: <li><% 1: : Html.HighlightMenuItem( 2: "Account", "Account", "LogOn", null, null, 3: "[Account]", null, 4: helper => helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString() == "Account")%></li> 9: 10: </ul> 11:  12: </div> Note: You need to add the import section for the namespace “ShaunXu.Blogs.HighlighMenuItem” to make the extension method I created below available. So let’s see the result. When the home page was shown the Home menu was highlighted since at this moment it was controller = Home and action = Index. And if I clicked the About menu you can see it turned highlighted as now the action was About. And if I navigated to the register page the Account menu was highlighted since it should be like that when any actions under the Account controller was invoked.   Fluently Language Till now it’s a fully example for the highlight menu item but not perfect yet. Since the most common scenario would be: highlighted when the action invoked, or highlighted when any action was invoked under this controller, we can created 2 shortcut method so for them so that normally the developer will be no need to specify the delegation. Another place we can improve would be, to make the method more user-friendly, or I should say developer-friendly. As you can see when we want to add a highlight menu item we need to specify 8 parameters and we need to remember what they mean. In fact we can make the method more “fluently” so that the developer can have the hints when using it by the Visual Studio IntelliSense. Below is the full code for it. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6: using System.Web.Mvc.Html; 7:  8: namespace Ethos.Xrm.HR 9: { 10: #region Helper 11:  12: public static class HighlightActionMenuHelper 13: { 14: public static IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterCreated HighlightActionMenu(this HtmlHelper helper) 15: { 16: return new HighlightActionMenuProvider(helper); 17: } 18: } 19:  20: #endregion 21:  22: #region Interfaces 23:  24: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterCreated 25: { 26: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterOn On(string actionName, string controllerName); 27: } 28:  29: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterOn 30: { 31: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterWith With(string text, object routeData, object htmlAttributes); 32: } 33:  34: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterWith 35: { 36: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhen(Func<HtmlHelper, bool> predicate); 37: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhenControllerMatch(); 38: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhenControllerAndActionMatch(); 39: } 40:  41: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen 42: { 43: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(object highlightHtmlAttributes, string highlightText); 44: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(object highlightHtmlAttributes); 45: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(string cssClass, string highlightText); 46: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(string cssClass); 47: } 48:  49: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle 50: { 51: MvcHtmlString ToActionLink(); 52: } 53:  54: #endregion 55:  56: public class HighlightActionMenuProvider : 57: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterCreated, 58: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterOn, IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterWith, 59: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen, IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle 60: { 61: private HtmlHelper _helper; 62:  63: private string _controllerName; 64: private string _actionName; 65: private string _text; 66: private object _routeData; 67: private object _htmlAttributes; 68:  69: private Func<HtmlHelper, bool> _highlightPredicate; 70:  71: private string _highlightText; 72: private object _highlightHtmlAttributes; 73:  74: public HighlightActionMenuProvider(HtmlHelper helper) 75: { 76: _helper = helper; 77: } 78:  79: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterOn On(string actionName, string controllerName) 80: { 81: _actionName = actionName; 82: _controllerName = controllerName; 83: return this; 84: } 85:  86: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterWith With(string text, object routeData, object htmlAttributes) 87: { 88: _text = text; 89: _routeData = routeData; 90: _htmlAttributes = htmlAttributes; 91: return this; 92: } 93:  94: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhen(Func<HtmlHelper, bool> predicate) 95: { 96: _highlightPredicate = predicate; 97: return this; 98: } 99:  100: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhenControllerMatch() 101: { 102: return HighlightWhen((helper) => 103: { 104: return helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString().ToLower() == _controllerName.ToLower(); 105: }); 106: } 107:  108: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhenControllerAndActionMatch() 109: { 110: return HighlightWhen((helper) => 111: { 112: return helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString().ToLower() == _controllerName.ToLower() && 113: helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"].ToString().ToLower() == _actionName.ToLower(); 114: }); 115: } 116:  117: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(object highlightHtmlAttributes, string highlightText) 118: { 119: _highlightText = highlightText; 120: _highlightHtmlAttributes = highlightHtmlAttributes; 121: return this; 122: } 123:  124: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(object highlightHtmlAttributes) 125: { 126: return ApplyHighlighStyle(highlightHtmlAttributes, _text); 127: } 128:  129: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(string cssClass, string highlightText) 130: { 131: return ApplyHighlighStyle(new { @class = cssClass }, highlightText); 132: } 133:  134: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(string cssClass) 135: { 136: return ApplyHighlighStyle(new { @class = cssClass }, _text); 137: } 138:  139: public MvcHtmlString ToActionLink() 140: { 141: if (_highlightPredicate.Invoke(_helper)) 142: { 143: // should be highlight 144: return _helper.ActionLink(_highlightText, _actionName, _controllerName, _routeData, _highlightHtmlAttributes); 145: } 146: else 147: { 148: // should not be highlight 149: return _helper.ActionLink(_text, _actionName, _controllerName, _routeData, _htmlAttributes); 150: } 151: } 152: } 153: } So in the master page when I need the highlight menu item I can “tell” the helper how it should be, just like this. 1: <li> 2: <% 1: : Html.HighlightActionMenu() 2: .On("Index", "Home") 3: .With(SiteMasterStrings.Home, null, null) 4: .HighlightWhenControllerMatch() 5: .ApplyHighlighStyle(new { style = "background:url(../../Content/Images/topmenu_bg.gif) repeat-x;text-decoration:none;color:#feffff;" }) 6: .ToActionLink() %> 3: </li> While I’m typing the code the IntelliSense will advise me that I need a highlight action menu, on the Index action of the Home controller, with the “Home” as its link text and no need the additional route data and Html attributes, and it should be highlighted when the controller was “Home”, and if it’s highlighted the style should be like this and finally render it to me. This is something we call “Fluently Language”. If you had been using Moq you will see that’s very development-friendly, document-ly and easy to read.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to implement a highlight menu item in ASP.NET MVC by using its controller – action infrastructure. We can see the ASP.NET MVC helps us to organize our web application better. And then I also told a little bit more on the “Fluently Language” and showed how it will make our code better and easy to be used.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Windows Phone 7 Development Updates &ndash; March 8th 2011

    - by Nikita Polyakov
    Here are the latest update from the Windows Phone 7 Developer Worlds that went live this month. Here are some of the latest numbers: Windows Phone Marketplace currently offers more than 9,000 quality apps and games and enjoys a base of over 32,000 registered developers, delivering an average of 100 new apps every day. There have been over 1 million downloads of the developers tools for Windows Phone 7. Trial version help you sell more Trials result in higher sales by the numbers: Users like trials  - paid apps with trial functionality are downloaded 70 times more than paid apps that don’t Nearly 1 out of 10 trial apps downloaded convert to a purchase and generate 10 times more revenue on average than paid apps that don’t include trial functionality. Trial downloads convert to paid downloads quickly. More than half of trial downloads that convert to a sale do so within the 1st 24 hours of trial download, and mostly within 2 hours of trial download. Microsoft Ad Control is gaining traction By the numbers - ad supported Windows Phone 7 apps are: Roughly ¼ of all registered U.S. WP7 developers have downloaded the free Ad SDK for Silverlight and XNA Of ad funded apps, over 95 percent use the free Microsoft Advertising Ad Control Monthly impressions from our Ad Exchange has continued to grow by double digits – impressions increased by 376 percent since January Ad Control, the first wave of “How Do I” videos are now available on MSDN: Create an Ad in a Windows Phone 7 XNA Game App Register Ad-Enabled Windows Phone 7 Apps Measure Ad Performance of Windows Phone 7 Apps Boarder International App submission for Free Apps through Yalla Apps As of today you can start submitting your free applications in developer markets that are currently not covered by Microsoft. To submit your Free application if you DO NOT belong to one of the Marketplace supported countries, go to: Yalla Apps Marketplace Policy Updates: Free App Marketplace Submission upped to 100 and other news Microsoft has been revisiting a few of our Marketplace policies based on feedback from developers to reduce friction and cost, word for word: 1. We have raised the limit on the number of certifications that can be performed for FREE apps at no cost to the registered developer from five to 100. This was a common request from developers which we are glad to implement after building alternate methods to ensure that users can find and download high quality apps. 2. We have converted policy 5.6 - related to the inclusion of contact information for support - from a mandatory to an optional policy. This is still a strongly recommended best practice, but we recognized and responded to developer feedback that this policy was creating excessive drag on the certification process for developers without commensurate user benefit for all apps. 3. We also understand the desire for clarification with regard to our policy on applications distributed under open source licenses.  The Marketplace Application Provider Agreement (APA) already permits applications under the BSD, MIT, Apache Software License 2.0 and Microsoft Public License.  We plan to update the APA shortly to clarify that we also permit applications under the Eclipse Public License, the Mozilla Public License and other, similar licenses and we continue to explore the possibility of accommodating additional OSS licenses. Enjoy and happy coding! Official Blog Post for reference.

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  • JUDCon 2013 Trip Report

    - by reza_rahman
    JUDCon (JBoss Users and Developers Conference) 2013 was held in historic Boston on June 9-11 at the Hynes Convention Center. JUDCon is the largest get together for the JBoss community, has gone global in recent years but has it's roots in Boston. The JBoss folks graciously accepted a Java EE 7 talk from me and actually referenced my talk in their own sessions. I am proud to say this is my third time speaking at JUDCon/the Red Hat Summit over the years (this was the first time on behalf of Oracle). I had great company with many of the rock stars of the JBoss ecosystem speaking such as Lincoln Baxter, Jay Balunas, Gavin King, Mark Proctor, Andrew Lee Rubinger, Emmanuel Bernard and Pete Muir. Notably missing from JUDCon were Bill Burke, Burr Sutter, Aslak Knutsen and Dan Allen. Topics included Java EE, Forge, Arquillian, AeroGear, OpenShift, WildFly, Errai/GWT, NoSQL, Drools, jBPM, OpenJDK, Apache Camel and JBoss Tools/Eclipse. My session titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond" went very well and it was a full house. This is our main talk covering the changes in JMS 2, the Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356), the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), JAX-RS 2, JPA 2.1, JTA 1.2, JSF 2.2, Java Batch, Bean Validation 1.1, Java EE Concurrency and the rest of the APIs in Java EE 7. I also briefly talked about the possibilities for Java EE 8. The slides for the talk are here: JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond from reza_rahman Besides presenting my talk, it was great to catch up with the JBoss gang and attend a few interesting sessions. On Sunday night I went to one of my favorite hangouts in Boston - the exalted Middle East Club as Rolling Stone refers to it (other cool spots in an otherwise pretty boring town is "the Church"). As contradictory as it might sound to the uninitiated, the Middle East Club is possibly the best place in Boston to simultaneously get great Middle Eastern (primarily Lebanese) food and great underground metal. For folks with a bit more exposure, this is probably not contradictory at all given bands like Acrassicauda and documentaries like Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Luckily for me they were featuring a few local Thrash metal bands from the greater Boston area. It wasn't too bad considering it was primarily amateur twenty-something guys (although I'm not sure I'm a qualified critic any more since I all but stopped playing about at that age). It's great Boston has the Middle East as an incubator to keep the rock, metal, folk, jazz, blues and indie scene alive. I definitely enjoyed JUDCon/Boston and hope to be part of the conference next year again.

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-10-11

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Whiteboards, not red carpets. OTN Architect Day Los Angeles. Oct 25. Free event. Yes, it's TinselTown, but the stars at this event are experts in the use of Oracle technologies in today's architectures. This free event includes a full slate of technical sessions and peer interaction covering cloud computing, SOA, and engineered systems—and lunch is on us. Register now. Thursday October 25, 2012, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048 JDeveloper extensions where? | Peter Paul van de Beek "Where does the downloaded stuff go after you installed JDeveloper extensions, like SOA Composite Editor, Oracle BPM Studio, or AIA Service Constructor?" Peter Paul van de Beek has the answer. Using Apache Derby Database with WebLogic (the express way) | Frank Munz Another technical how-to video from Dr. Frank Munz. Compensation Hello World | Ronald van Luttikhuizen Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen's post addresses several question that came up during the "Effective Fault Handling in SOA Suite 11g" session that he and fellow Oracle ACE Guido Schmutz presented at Oracle OpenWorld. Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: OAM and OIM 11g Academies Looking for technical how-to content covering Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager? The people behind the Oracle Middleware Security blog have indexed relevant blog posts into what they call "Academies." "These indexes," the blog explains, "contain the articles we've written that we believe provide long lasting guidance on OAM and OIM. Posts covered in these series include articles on key aspects of OAM and OIM 11g, best practice architectural guidance, integrations, and customizations." Maximum Availability Whitepaper for IDM 11gR2 | Oracle Fusion Middleware Security The Oracle Fusion Middelware A-Team shares an overview of and a link to a new white paper: "Identity Management 11.1.2 Enterprise Deployment Blueprint." Thought for the Day "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are sure and the intelligent are full of doubt." — Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872 – February 2, 1970) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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  • Azure &ndash; Part 5 &ndash; Repository Pattern for Table Service

    - by Shaun
    In my last post I created a very simple WCF service with the user registration functionality. I created an entity for the user data and a DataContext class which provides some methods for operating the entities such as add, delete, etc. And in the service method I utilized it to add a new entity into the table service. But I didn’t have any validation before registering which is not acceptable in a real project. So in this post I would firstly add some validation before perform the data creation code and show how to use the LINQ for the table service.   LINQ to Table Service Since the table service utilizes ADO.NET Data Service to expose the data and the managed library of ADO.NET Data Service supports LINQ we can use it to deal with the data of the table service. Let me explain with my current example: I would like to ensure that when register a new user the email address should be unique. So I need to check the account entities in the table service before add. If you remembered, in my last post I mentioned that there’s a method in the TableServiceContext class – CreateQuery, which will create a IQueryable instance from a given type of entity. So here I would create a method under my AccountDataContext class to return the IQueryable<Account> which named Load. 1: public class AccountDataContext : TableServiceContext 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _storageAccount; 4:  5: public AccountDataContext(CloudStorageAccount storageAccount) 6: : base(storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, storageAccount.Credentials) 7: { 8: _storageAccount = storageAccount; 9:  10: var tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(_storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, 11: _storageAccount.Credentials); 12: tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist("Account"); 13: } 14:  15: public void Add(Account accountToAdd) 16: { 17: AddObject("Account", accountToAdd); 18: SaveChanges(); 19: } 20:  21: public IQueryable<Account> Load() 22: { 23: return CreateQuery<Account>("Account"); 24: } 25: } The method returns the IQueryable<Account> so that I can perform the LINQ operation on it. And back to my service class, I will use it to implement my validation. 1: public bool Register(string email, string password) 2: { 3: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 4: var accountToAdd = new Account(email, password) { DateCreated = DateTime.Now }; 5: var accountContext = new AccountDataContext(storageAccount); 6:  7: // validation 8: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 9: .Where(a => a.Email == accountToAdd.Email) 10: .Count(); 11: if (accountNumber > 0) 12: { 13: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Your account {0} had been used.", accountToAdd.Email)); 14: } 15:  16: // create entity 17: try 18: { 19: accountContext.Add(accountToAdd); 20: return true; 21: } 22: catch (Exception ex) 23: { 24: Trace.TraceInformation(ex.ToString()); 25: } 26: return false; 27: } I used the Load method to retrieve the IQueryable<Account> and use Where method to find the accounts those email address are the same as the one is being registered. If it has I through an exception back to the client side. Let’s run it and test from my simple client application. Oops! Looks like we encountered an unexpected exception. It said the “Count” is not support by the ADO.NET Data Service LINQ managed library. That is because the table storage managed library (aka. TableServiceContext) is based on the ADO.NET Data Service and it supports very limit LINQ operation. Although I didn’t find a full list or documentation about which LINQ methods it supports I could even refer a page on msdn here. It gives us a roughly summary of which query operation the ADO.NET Data Service managed library supports and which doesn't. As you see the Count method is not in the supported list. Not only the query operation, there inner lambda expression in the Where method are limited when using the ADO.NET Data Service managed library as well. For example if you added (a => !a.DateDeleted.HasValue) in the Where method to exclude those deleted account it will raised an exception said "Invalid Input". Based on my experience you should always use the simple comparison (such as ==, >, <=, etc.) on the simple members (such as string, integer, etc.) and do not use any shortcut methods (such as string.Compare, string.IsNullOrEmpty etc.). 1: // validation 2: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 3: .Where(a => a.Email == accountToAdd.Email) 4: .ToList() 5: .Count; 6: if (accountNumber > 0) 7: { 8: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Your account {0} had been used.", accountToAdd.Email)); 9: } We changed the a bit and try again. Since I had created an account with my mail address so this time it gave me an exception said that the email had been used, which is correct.   Repository Pattern for Table Service The AccountDataContext takes the responsibility to save and load the account entity but only for that specific entity. Is that possible to have a dynamic or generic DataContext class which can operate any kinds of entity in my system? Of course yes. Although there's no typical database in table service we can threat the entities as the records, similar with the data entities if we used OR Mapping. As we can use some patterns for ORM architecture here we should be able to adopt the one of them - Repository Pattern in this example. We know that the base class - TableServiceContext provide 4 methods for operating the table entities which are CreateQuery, AddObject, UpdateObject and DeleteObject. And we can create a relationship between the enmity class, the table container name and entity set name. So it's really simple to have a generic base class for any kinds of entities. Let's rename the AccountDataContext to DynamicDataContext and make the type of Account as a type parameter if it. 1: public class DynamicDataContext<T> : TableServiceContext where T : TableServiceEntity 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _storageAccount; 4: private string _entitySetName; 5:  6: public DynamicDataContext(CloudStorageAccount storageAccount) 7: : base(storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, storageAccount.Credentials) 8: { 9: _storageAccount = storageAccount; 10: _entitySetName = typeof(T).Name; 11:  12: var tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(_storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, 13: _storageAccount.Credentials); 14: tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist(_entitySetName); 15: } 16:  17: public void Add(T entityToAdd) 18: { 19: AddObject(_entitySetName, entityToAdd); 20: SaveChanges(); 21: } 22:  23: public void Update(T entityToUpdate) 24: { 25: UpdateObject(entityToUpdate); 26: SaveChanges(); 27: } 28:  29: public void Delete(T entityToDelete) 30: { 31: DeleteObject(entityToDelete); 32: SaveChanges(); 33: } 34:  35: public IQueryable<T> Load() 36: { 37: return CreateQuery<T>(_entitySetName); 38: } 39: } I saved the name of the entity type when constructed for performance matter. The table name, entity set name would be the same as the name of the entity class. The Load method returned a generic IQueryable instance which supports the lazy load feature. Then in my service class I changed the AccountDataContext to DynamicDataContext and that's all. 1: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); Run it again and register another account. The DynamicDataContext now can be used for any entities. For example, I would like the account has a list of notes which contains 3 custom properties: Account Email, Title and Content. We create the note entity class. 1: public class Note : TableServiceEntity 2: { 3: public string AccountEmail { get; set; } 4: public string Title { get; set; } 5: public string Content { get; set; } 6: public DateTime DateCreated { get; set; } 7: public DateTime? DateDeleted { get; set; } 8:  9: public Note() 10: : base() 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public Note(string email) 15: : base(email, string.Format("{0}_{1}", email, Guid.NewGuid().ToString())) 16: { 17: AccountEmail = email; 18: } 19: } And no need to tweak the DynamicDataContext we can directly go to the service class to implement the logic. Notice here I utilized two DynamicDataContext instances with the different type parameters: Note and Account. 1: public class NoteService : INoteService 2: { 3: public void Create(string email, string title, string content) 4: { 5: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 6: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); 7: var noteContext = new DynamicDataContext<Note>(storageAccount); 8:  9: // validate - email must be existed 10: var accounts = accountContext.Load() 11: .Where(a => a.Email == email) 12: .ToList() 13: .Count; 14: if (accounts <= 0) 15: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("The account {0} does not exsit in the system please register and try again.", email)); 16:  17: // save the note 18: var noteToAdd = new Note(email) { Title = title, Content = content, DateCreated = DateTime.Now }; 19: noteContext.Add(noteToAdd); 20: } 21: } And updated our client application to test the service. I didn't implement any list service to show all notes but we can have a look on the local SQL database if we ran it at local development fabric.   Summary In this post I explained a bit about the limited LINQ support for the table service. And then I demonstrated about how to use the repository pattern in the table service data access layer and make the DataContext dynamically. The DynamicDataContext I created in this post is just a prototype. In fact we should create the relevant interface to make it testable and for better structure we'd better separate the DataContext classes for each individual kind of entity. So it should have IDataContextBase<T>, DataContextBase<T> and for each entity we would have class AccountDataContext<Account> : IDataContextBase<Account>, DataContextBase<Account> { … } class NoteDataContext<Note> : IDataContextBase<Note>, DataContextBase<Note> { … }   Besides the structured data saving and loading, another common scenario would be saving and loading some binary data such as images, files. In my next post I will show how to use the Blob Service to store the bindery data - make the account be able to upload their logo in my example.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • How to deal with malicious domain redirections?

    - by user359650
    It is possible for anybody to buy a domain name containing negative terms and point it to someone's website in order to damage their reputation. For instance someone could buy the domain child-pornography.com and point it to the address 64.34.119.12 which is the address behind stackoverflow.com and people navigating to the domain in question would end up visualizing content from StackExchange which would be detrimental to StackExchange's image. To illustrate this, I added the entry 64.34.119.12 child-pornography.com to my /etc/hosts file and tested. Here is what I obtained: I personally found this user experience terrible as someone could think that Stack Exchange are in favor of child pornography and awaiting support from the community to create a Q&A site about it. I tested with other websites and experienced other behaviors that I would categorize as follows: 1 - Useful 404 page (happens with stackoverflow.com): For me the worst way of handling this as the image of the targeted website is directly associated with the offending domain. The more useful the 404 page, the bigger the impression that the targeted website would be willing to help with child pornography. 2 - Redirection (happens with microsoft.com): For instance when accessing child-pornography.com you get redirected to www.microsoft.com. It isn't as bad as above as the offending domain name never appears alongside the targeted website's content, but still bad in my opinion as it gives the impression the targeted website bought the offending domain and redirected it to their website to get more traffic. 3 - Server error (happens with lemonde.fr): You get an error from the webserver which page doesn't contain any content that can be associated with the targeted website (e.g. default Apache 404 page, completely blank page). I believe that is good as the identify of the targeted website isn't revealed. Above are the various behaviors I experienced, but I also thought about a fourth way of dealing with this which is described below. 4 - Disclaimer page (haven't found any website implementing that technique): Display a message such as : "You ended here because someone bought and linked the child-pornography.com domain to our website. We do not own this domain and do not associate ourselves with it. This request has been logged by our servers and we will raise this issue with the competent authorities to have this domain taken down. If you want to access our website, please click here." The good thing about this method is that it can be implemented at application layer (good if you don't have control over web server which happens with some hosting solutions), allows you to protect yourself from any liability, and offer the visitor to be redirected to your own website. Which of the above options would you implement to deal with malicious domain linking (IMO only options 3 and 4 are worth considering) ?

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  • How exactly is Google Webmaster Tools measuring "Site Performance"?

    - by Rémi
    I've been working for two months now on improving our response time (mainly server side) on a new forum (a brand new product on a technical point of view) we've launched in Germany a few month ago and I'm a lot surprised by the results I get. I monitor our response time using Apache logs and our own implementation of Boomerang beacon. Using my stats, I can see that our new product responds in about 680 ms where our old product was responding in about 1050 ms. On the other side, Google Webmaster Tool tells us that our pages have an average reponse time of about 1500 ms today where it was 700 three months ago with our old product. I've figured that GWT was taking client side metrics into account so I've added some measures on our Boomerang beacon and everything looks just fine. I've also ran some random pages on ySlow and Google's Page Speed and everything looks better than it was before. We event have a 82% on Google's Page Speed tool which is quite cool for a site with some ads in it :) Lately, we have signed a deal with Akamai to use two of their products : CDN for our static files (we were using another CDN before but it wasn't very effective) and RMA to improve Networks routes. We have also introduced a new agressive cache mecanism to ensure that most of the pages served to crawlers are cached by our memcache grid. After checking my metrics, it seems that this changes have improved from 650ms to about 500ms, which is good (still not great but it is definitly an improvement). But webmaster tools continues to report an increasing average response time where we see it decreasing in the same time. Have you ever had the same kind of wierd behavior on your sites while doing performance improvements ? Do you have any idea how to monitor the same thing Google does with Site Performance in Google Webmaster Tools so that we could improve our site and constantly check if it is what Google wants ? Edit 2011/07/26 : Thanks for your answers guys ! Nevertheless, I was not precise enough. The main issue we have is not with the Site Performance page but with the Crawl Stats one for now. We probably found an issue on our side with some very slow pages (around 3000 ms !!) and we are trying to fix them. I'll keep you posted as soon I'll have some infos. Thanks again !

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  • Server-infrastructure recommendations

    - by Tim van Elsloo
    Here's the thing: I need a cheap, fast, reliable infrastructure that can dynamically scale (like Amazon S3: cloud-storage). I'm thinking of 3 different type of 'servers'. Application-server Should be able to run CentOS (or another light Linux-distr.) Should be able to run Apache Should be able to run PHP Should be able to run GD (so it does rely on it's cpu). Should be extremely reliable and fast. Database-server Should be able to run MySQL Should be able to... well, do nothing else :P. Should be extremely reliable and fast. Storage-server Should be able to run some kind of file-transfer-deamon (like FTP, CouchDB, etc.) Should be able to do nothing else. Should be extremely reliable and fast. So technically, by transferring all static data to 2 different servers/services, the application-server can totally focus on the webpages. My questions: What services do you recommend? Which is cheaper, faster and more reliable: using my own server, or using some cloud-storage/cloud-computing-service (like Amazon S3, CloudFiles, etc.)? How can I prevent bandwidth abuse (such as dos-attacks causing the bill to be extremely high)? What's the difference between "including CDN" and "excluding CDN"? It seems the price doesn't differ at CloudFiles? Do you have to pay "including CDN" + "excluding CDN" when you decide to enable the delivery-network? Or have you only got to pay "including CDN"? Should I use my own nameserver too or can I use my domain-hoster's nameservers? What are the minimum software specifications of a nameserver. Can I write some software myself? Does anyone have a good protocol-description? I hope you can answer my questions. Answers I shouldn't write my own nameserver-software. Instead, I should use something like bind. (http://osspro.com/2010/05/04/linux-create-your-own-domain-name-server-dns/).

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  • Unable to connect to mail server via IMAP and roundcube

    - by mrhatter
    I am having trouble getting the final parts of my mail server up and working. I followed this tutorial to get everything set up on the mail server side. I have installed roundcube for webmail and configured it but it is saying "error connecting, connection refused" when attempting to connect to it using IMAP. This is thorough the "test imap" section of its installer. Also it is giving me an error message about perissions for it's log and temp folders but that's not as important as acutally getting mail to work. I have also tried connecting to the mail server using thunderbird however it cannot establish a connection either and I know my login information is correct. I know that the databases are working correctly based on the roundcube installer telling me that they have been "successfully initialized". Here are my firewall rules -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 25 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 465 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 487 -j ACCEPT -A OUTPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 993 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -j DROP Which I set up in iptables. I have modified them from what I used in this tutorial I'm not sure what to try next. Any help would be wonderful! I am using Ubuntu 14.04 server, apache 2.4.7, roundcube 1.0.1, and the latest versions of dovecot and postfix. The email databases are contained in mysql. I am running this on a VPS server. UPDATE: I have changed from iptables to using ufw. I have run the following commands to set up a basic firewall with ufw. ufw default deny ufw allow ssh ufw allow http ufw allow https ufw allow imap ufw allow imaps ufw allow smtp I then used telnet to check all of the mail ports. But Port 993 isnt working even though ufw says both 993 and 993/tcp are open. What am I missing?

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