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• Finding open contiguous blocks of time for every day of a month, fast

  - by Chris

  I am working on a booking availability system for a group of several venues, and am having a hard time generating the availability of time blocks for days in a given month. This is happening server-side in PHP, but the concept itself is language agnostic -- I could be doing this in JS or anything else. Given a venue_id, month, and year (6/2012 for example), I have a list of all events occurring in that range at that venue, represented as unix timestamps start and end. This data comes from the database. I need to establish what, if any, contiguous block of time of a minimum length (different per venue) exist on each day. For example, on 6/1 I have an event between 2:00pm and 7:00pm. The minimum time is 5 hours, so there's a block open there from 9am - 2pm and another between 7pm and 12pm. This would continue for the 2nd, 3rd, etc... every day of June. Some (most) of the days have nothing happening at all, some have 1 - 3 events. The solution I came up with works, but it also takes waaaay too long to generate the data. Basically, I loop every day of the month and create an array of timestamps for each 15 minutes of that day. Then, I loop the time spans of events from that day by 15 minutes, marking any "taken" timeslot as false. Remaining, I have an array that contains timestamp of free time vs. taken time: //one day's array after processing through loops (not real timestamps) array( 12345678=>12345678, // <--- avail 12345878=>12345878, 12346078=>12346078, 12346278=>false, // <--- not avail 12346478=>false, 12346678=>false, 12346878=>false, 12347078=>12347078, // <--- avail 12347278=>12347278 ) Now I would need to loop THIS array to find continuous time blocks, then check to see if they are long enough (each venue has a minimum), and if so then establish the descriptive text for their start and end (i.e. 9am - 2pm). WHEW! By the time all this looping is done, the user has grown bored and wandered off to Youtube to watch videos of puppies; it takes ages to so examine 30 or so days. Is there a faster way to solve this issue? To summarize the problem, given time ranges t1 and t2 on day d, how can I determine the remaining time left in d that is longer than the minimum time block m. This data is assembled on demand via AJAX as the user moves between calendar months. Results are cached per-page-load, so if the user goes to July a second time, the data that was generated the first time would be reused. Any other details that would help, let me know. Edit Per request, the database structure (or the part that is relevant here) *events* id (bigint) title (varchar) *event_times* id (bigint) event_id (bigint) venue_id (bigint) start (bigint) end (bigint) *venues* id (bigint) name (varchar) min_block (int) min_start (varchar) max_start (varchar)

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• Defined variables and arrays vs functions in php

  - by Frank Presencia Fandos

  Introduction I have some sort of values that I might want to access several times each page is loaded. I can take two different approaches for accessing them but I'm not sure which one is 'better'. Three already implemented examples are several options for the Language, URI and displaying text that I describe here: Language Right now it is configured in this way: lang() is a function that returns different values depending on the argument. Example: lang("full") returns the current language, "English", while lang() returns the abbreviation of the current language, "en". There are many more options, like lang("select"), lang("selectact"), etc that return different things. The code is too long and irrelevant for the case so if anyone wants it just ask for it. Url The $Url array also returns different values depending on the request. The whole array is fully defined in the beginning of the page and used to get shorter but accurate links of the current page. Example: $Url['full'] would return "http://mypage.org/path/to/file.php?page=1" and $Url['file'] would return "file.php". It's useful for action="" within the forms and many other things. There are more values for $Url['folder'], $Url['file'], etc. Same thing about the code, if wanted, just request it. Text [You can skip this section] There's another array called $Text that is defined in the same way than $Url. The whole array is defined at the beginning, making a mysql call and defining all $Text[$i] for current page with a while loop. I'm not sure if this is more efficient than multiple calls for a single mysql cell. Example: $Text['54'] returns "This is just a test array!" which this could perfectly be implemented with a function like text(54). Question With the 3 examples you can see that I use different methods to do almost the same function (no pun intended), but I'm not sure which one should become the standard one for my code. I could create a function called url() and other called text() to output what I want. I think that working with functions in those cases is better, but I'm not sure why. So I'd really appreciate your opinions and advice. Should I mix arrays and functions in the way I described or should I just use funcions? Please, base your answer in this: The source needs to be readable and reusable by other developers Resource consumption (processing, time and memory). The shorter the code the better. The more you explain the reasons the better. Thank you PS, now I know the differences between $Url and $Uri.

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• c++ recursion with arrays

  - by Sam

  I have this project that I'm working on for a class, and I'm not looking for the answer, but maybe just a few tips since I don't feel like I'm using true recursion. The problem involves solving the game of Hi Q or "peg solitaire" where you want the end result to be one peg remaining (it's played with a triangular board and one space is open at the start.) I've represented the board with a simple array, each index being a spot and having a value of 1 if it has a peg, and 0 if it doesn't and also the set of valid moves with a 2 dimensional array that is 36, 3 (each move set contains 3 numbers; the peg you're moving, the peg it hops over, and the destination index.) So my problem is that in my recursive function, I'm using a lot of iteration to determine things like which space is open (or has a value of 0) and which move to use based on which space is open by looping through the arrays. Secondly, I don't understand how you would then backtrack with recursion, in the event that an incorrect move was made and you wanted to take that move back in order to choose a different one. This is what I have so far; the "a" array represents the board, the "b" array represents the moves, and the "c" array was my idea of a reminder as to which moves I used already. The functions used are helper functions that basically just loop through the arrays to find an empty space and corresponding move. : void solveGame(int a[15], int b[36][3], int c[15][3]){ int empSpace; int moveIndex; int count = 0; if(pegCount(a) < 2){ return; } else{ empSpace = findEmpty(a); moveIndex = chooseMove( a, b, empSpace); a[b[moveIndex][0]] = 0; a[b[moveIndex][1]] = 0; a[b[moveIndex][2]] = 1; c[count][0] = b[moveIndex][0]; c[count][1] = b[moveIndex][1]; c[count][2] = b[moveIndex][2]; solveGame(a,b,c); } }

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• Lithium: Run filter after find() to format output

  - by Housni

  I wanted to specify the output of a field from within my model so I added a date key to my $_schema: models/Tags.php <?php protected $_schema = array( 'id' => array('type' => 'integer', 'key' => 'primary'), 'title' => array('type' => 'string'), 'created' => array('type' => 'integer', 'date' => 'F jS, Y - g:i a'), 'modified' => array('type' => 'integer') ); ?> I store my time as an unsigned integer in the db (output of time()). I want my base model to format any field that has the date key for output. I thought the best place to do that would be right after a find: extensions/data/Model.php <?php static::applyFilter('find', function($self, $params, $chain) { $schema = $self::schema(); $entity = $chain->next($self, $params, $chain); foreach ($schema as $field => $options) { if (array_key_exists('date', $options)) { //format as a date $params['data'][$field] = $entity->formatDate($field, $options['date']); } } return $entity; }); public function formatdate($entity, $field, $format, $timezone = 'Asia/Colombo') { $dt = new \DateTime(); $tz = new \DateTimeZone($timezone); $dt->setTimestamp($entity->$field); $dt->setTimezone($tz); return $dt->format($format); } ?> This doesn't seem to be working. When I execute a find all, this filter seems to get hit twice. The first time, $entity contains a count() of the results and only on the second hit does it contain the Records object. What am I doing wrong? How do I alter this so that simply doing <?= $tag->created; ?> in my view will format the date the way I want? This, essentially, needs to be an 'after filter', of sorts. EDIT If I can find a way to access the current model entity object (not the full namespaced path, $self contains that), I can probably solve my problem.

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• Inventory count in CakePHP

  - by metrobalderas

  We are developing an inventory tracking system. Basically we've got an order table in which orders are placed. When an order is payed, the status changes from 0 to 1. This table has multiple children in another table order_items. This is the main structure. CREATE TABLE order( id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, user_id INT UNSIGNED, status INT(1), total INT UNSIGNED ); CREATE TABLE order_items( id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, order_id INT UNSIGNED, article_id INT UNSIGNED, size enum('s', 'm', 'l', 'xl'), quantity INT UNSIGNED ); Now, we've got a stocks table with similar architecture for the acquisitions. This is the structure. CREATE TABLE stock( id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, article_id INT UNSIGNED ); CREATE TABLE stock_items( id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, stock_id INT UNSIGNED, size enum('s', 'm', 'l', 'xl'), quantity INT(2) ); The main difference is that stocks has no status field. What we are looking for is a way to sum each article size from stock_items, then sum each article size from order_items where Order.status = 1 and substract both these items to find our current inventory. This is the table we want to get from a single query: Size | Stocks | Sales | Available s | 10 | 3 | 7 m | 15 | 13 | 2 l | 7 | 4 | 3 Initially we thought abouth using complex find conditions, but perhaps that's the wrong approach. Also, since it's not a direct join, it turns out to be quite hard. This is the code we have to retrieve the stock's total for each item. function stocks_total($id){ $find = $this->StockItem->find('all', array( 'conditions' => array( 'StockItem.stock_id' => $this->find('list', array('conditions' => array('Stock.article_id' => $id))) ), 'fields' => array_merge( array( 'SUM(StockItem.cantidad) as total' ), array_keys($this->StockItem->_schema) ), 'group' => 'StockItem.size', 'order' => 'FIELD(StockItem.size, \'s\', \'m\' ,\'l\' ,\'xl\') ASC' )); return $find; } Thanks.

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• Drupal menu permissions question

  - by Luke

  I'm creating an admin module for my client that gives then access to some administration functionality concerning their content. I'm starting off my adding some permissions in my module by implementing hook_perm: function mymodule_perm() { return array( 'manage projects', ); } I can then create my menu by adding to the admin section that already exists: function mymodule_menu() { $items['admin/projects'] = array( 'title' => 'Projects', 'description' => 'Manage your projects.', 'page callback' => 'manage_projects_overview', 'access callback' => 'user_access', 'access arguments' => array('manage projects'), 'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM, 'weight' => -100, ); $items['admin/projects/add'] = array( 'title' => 'Add project', 'access arguments' => array('manage projects'), 'page callback' => 'mymodule_projects_add', 'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM, 'weight' => 1, ); return $items; } This will add a Projects section to the Administration area with an Add project sub section. All good. The behavior I want is that my client can only see the Projects section when they log in. I've accomplished this by ticking the "manage projects" permission for authenticated users. Now to give my client actual access to the Administration area I also need to tick "access administration pages" under the "system module" in the users permissions section. This works great, when I log in as my client I can only see the Projects section in the Administration area. There is one thing though, I my Navigation menu shown in the left column I can see the following items: - Administer - Projects - Content management - Site building - Site configuration - User management I was expecting only the see Administer and Projects, not the other ones. When I click e.g. Content Management I get a Content Management titled page with no options. Same for Site Building, Site Configuration and User Management. What's really odd is that Reports is not being shown which is also a top level Administration section. Why are these other items, besides my Projects section, being shown and how can I make them stop from appearing if I'm not logged in as administrator?

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• Line Graph CGPoints from NSMutableArray

  - by Mattog1456

  I have been trying to adapt the code from the accelerometer example such that when the user depresses a uibutton a point is added to a line graph. Working on the converting two floats, which are the result of calculate as below into a CGPoint and converting the CGPoint into an NSValue and then adding this to a NSMutableArray with the following -(IBAction)calculate:(id)sender { self.points = [NSMutableArray array]; CGPoint pt = CGPointMake(d, c); [self.points addObject:[NSValue valueWithCGPoint:pt]]; NSLog(@"%@", NSStringFromCGPoint(pt)); NSLog(@"%@", [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d points", self.points.count ]); } But for some reason I am only getting one object stored in the array, it seems everytime push the calculate button the object pt gets overwritten, on the plus side it has the correct x,y coords. Any ideas on this one? UPDATE Removed self.points = [NSMutableArray array]; and placed it in view did load, also set the first points to 0,0. so that is working ok. Now the next problem is that I have a Graph subclass where the CG Drawing is taking place. I am trying to figure out a simple way to be able to access the above NSMutableArray which is in a ViewController class from the graph class. Am so close to the end but am really stuck, any help would be great. Still trying to draw a line graph on a UIView which is on a UIScrollview. The draw rect method is in the UIView Subclass and everything is working there, I have gridlines and labels on the axis and I can draw manually onto it. But the problem I have is that I cannot read the NSMutableArray of the CGPoints, which are the x and y coords. The ViewController performs a calculation and the results are written to the NSMutable array and this is all working fine as well, I can see the CGpoints and their values being written with NSLogs in the ViewController. I have tried various ways to set the NSMutableArray up as a global but to no avail, everything runs but while I can see the points being written in the ViewController they are just not visible to the UIView Subclass. I have also tried to use the addObserver and observeValueForKeyPath methods and once again while everything runs the subclass cannot see the array. Any ideas, suggestions, tips or thoughts would be great

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• XNA 4.0 draw a cube with DrawUserIndexedPrimitives method [on hold]

  - by Leggy7

  EDIT Since I read what Mark H suggested (thanks a lot, I found it very useful) I think my question can become clearer structured this way: Using XNA 4.0, I'm trying to draw a cube. Im using this method: GraphicsDevice.DrawUserIndexedPrimitives<VertexPositionColor>( PrimitiveType.LineList, primitiveList, 0, // vertex buffer offset to add to each element of the index buffer 8, // number of vertices in pointList lineListIndices, // the index buffer 0, // first index element to read 7 // number of primitives to draw ); I got the code sample from this page which simply draw a serie of triangles. I want to modify this code in order to draw a cube. I was able to slitghly move the camera so I can have the perception of solidity, I set the vertex array to contain the 8 points defining a cube. But I can't fully understand how many primitives I have to draw (last parameter) for each of PrimitiveType. So, I wasn't able to draw the cube (just some of the edges in a non-defined order). More in detail: to build the vertex index list, the sample used // Initialize an array of indices of type short. lineListIndices = new short[(points * 2) - 2]; // Populate the array with references to indices in the vertex buffer for (int i = 0; i < points - 1; i++) { lineListIndices[i * 2] = (short)(i); lineListIndices[(i * 2) + 1] = (short)(i + 1); } I'm ashamed to say I cannot do the same in the case of a cube. what has to be the size of the lineListIndices? how should I populate it? In which order? And how do these things change when I use a different PrimitiveType? In the code sample there are also another couple of calls which I cannot fully understand, which are: // Initialize the vertex buffer, allocating memory for each vertex. vertexBuffer = new VertexBuffer(graphics.GraphicsDevice, vertexDeclaration, points, BufferUsage.None); // Set the vertex buffer data to the array of vertices. vertexBuffer.SetData<VertexPositionColor>(pointList); and vertexDeclaration = new VertexDeclaration(new VertexElement[] { new VertexElement(0, VertexElementFormat.Vector3, VertexElementUsage.Position, 0), new VertexElement(12, VertexElementFormat.Color, VertexElementUsage.Color, 0) } ); that is, for VertexBuffer and VertexDeclaration I could not find and significant (monkey-like) guide. I reported them too because I think they could be involded in understanding things. I think I also have to understand something related to the order the vertexes are stored in the array. But actually I have no clue of what I should learn to have this function drawing a cube. So, if anybody could point me to the right direction, it wil be appreciated. Hope to have made myself clear this time

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• mysql_query() returns returns true, but mysql_num_rows() and mysql_fetch_array() give "not a valid r

  - by zlance4012

  Here is the code in question: -----From index.php----- require_once('includes/DbConnector.php'); // Create an object (instance) of the DbConnector $connector = new DbConnector(); // Execute the query to retrieve articles $query1 = "SELECT id, title FROM articles ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 0,5"; $result = $connector-query($query1); echo "vardump1:"; var_dump($result); echo "\n"; /(!line 17!)/ echo "Number of rows in the result of the query:".mysql_num_rows($result)."\n"; // Get an array containing the results. // Loop for each item in that array while ($row = $connector-fetchArray($result)){ echo ' '; echo $row['title']; echo ' '; -----end index.php----- -----included DbConnector.php----- $settings = SystemComponent::getSettings(); // Get the main settings from the array we just loaded $host = $settings['dbhost']; $db = $settings['dbname']; $user = $settings['dbusername']; $pass = $settings['dbpassword']; // Connect to the database $this-link = mysql_connect($host, $user, $pass); mysql_select_db($db); register_shutdown_function(array(&$this, 'close')); } //end constructor //* Function: query, Purpose: Execute a database query * function query($query) { echo "Query Statement: ".$query."\n"; $this-theQuery = $query; return mysql_query($query, $this-link) or die(mysql_error()); } //* Function: fetchArray, Purpose: Get array of query results * function fetchArray($result) { echo "<|"; var_dump($result); echo "| \n"; /(!line 50!)/$res= mysql_fetch_array($result) or die(mysql_error()); echo $res['id']."-".$res['title']."-".$res['imagelink']."-".$res['text']; return $res; } -----end DbConnector.php----- -----Output----- Query Statement: SELECT id, title FROM articles ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 0,5 vardump1:bool(true) PHP Error Message Warning: mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /path to/index.php on line 17 Number of rows in the result of the query: <|bool(true) | PHP Error Message Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /path to/DbConnector.php on line 50

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• SimpleMembership, Membership Providers, Universal Providers and the new ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 4 templates

  - by Jon Galloway

  The ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template adds some new, very useful features which are built on top of SimpleMembership. These changes add some great features, like a much simpler and extensible membership API and support for OAuth. However, the new account management features require SimpleMembership and won't work against existing ASP.NET Membership Providers. I'll start with a summary of top things you need to know, then dig into a lot more detail. Summary: SimpleMembership has been designed as a replacement for traditional the previous ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system SimpleMembership solves common problems people ran into with the Membership provider system and was designed for modern user / membership / storage needs SimpleMembership integrates with the previous membership system, but you can't use a MembershipProvider with SimpleMembership The new ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template AccountController requires SimpleMembership and is not compatible with previous MembershipProviders You can continue to use existing ASP.NET Role and Membership providers in ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 - just not with the ASP.NET MVC 4 AccountController The existing ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system remains supported as is part of the ASP.NET core ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms does not use SimpleMembership; it implements OAuth on top of ASP.NET Membership The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) is not compatible with SimpleMembership The following is the result of a few conversations with Erik Porter (PM for ASP.NET MVC) to make sure I had some the overall details straight, combined with a lot of time digging around in ILSpy and Visual Studio's assembly browsing tools. SimpleMembership: The future of membership for ASP.NET The ASP.NET Membership system was introduces with ASP.NET 2.0 back in 2005. It was designed to solve common site membership requirements at the time, which generally involved username / password based registration and profile storage in SQL Server. It was designed with a few extensibility mechanisms - notably a provider system (which allowed you override some specifics like backing storage) and the ability to store additional profile information (although the additional  profile information was packed into a single column which usually required access through the API). While it's sometimes frustrating to work with, it's held up for seven years - probably since it handles the main use case (username / password based membership in a SQL Server database) smoothly and can be adapted to most other needs (again, often frustrating, but it can work). The ASP.NET Web Pages and WebMatrix efforts allowed the team an opportunity to take a new look at a lot of things - e.g. the Razor syntax started with ASP.NET Web Pages, not ASP.NET MVC. The ASP.NET Web Pages team designed SimpleMembership to (wait for it) simplify the task of dealing with membership. As Matthew Osborn said in his post Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages: With the introduction of ASP.NET WebPages and the WebMatrix stack our team has really be focusing on making things simpler for the developer. Based on a lot of customer feedback one of the areas that we wanted to improve was the built in security in ASP.NET. So with this release we took that time to create a new built in (and default for ASP.NET WebPages) security provider. I say provider because the new stuff is still built on the existing ASP.NET framework. So what do we call this new hotness that we have created? Well, none other than SimpleMembership. SimpleMembership is an umbrella term for both SimpleMembership and SimpleRoles. Part of simplifying membership involved fixing some common problems with ASP.NET Membership. Problems with ASP.NET Membership ASP.NET Membership was very obviously designed around a set of assumptions: Users and user information would most likely be stored in a full SQL Server database or in Active Directory User and profile information would be optimized around a set of common attributes (UserName, Password, IsApproved, CreationDate, Comment, Role membership...) and other user profile information would be accessed through a profile provider Some problems fall out of these assumptions. Requires Full SQL Server for default cases The default, and most fully featured providers ASP.NET Membership providers (SQL Membership Provider, SQL Role Provider, SQL Profile Provider) require full SQL Server. They depend on stored procedure support, and they rely on SQL Server cache dependencies, they depend on agents for clean up and maintenance. So the main SQL Server based providers don't work well on SQL Server CE, won't work out of the box on SQL Azure, etc. Note: Cory Fowler recently let me know about these Updated ASP.net scripts for use with Microsoft SQL Azure which do support membership, personalization, profile, and roles. But the fact that we need a support page with a set of separate SQL scripts underscores the underlying problem. Aha, you say! Jon's forgetting the Universal Providers, a.k.a. System.Web.Providers! Hold on a bit, we'll get to those... Custom Membership Providers have to work with a SQL-Server-centric API If you want to work with another database or other membership storage system, you need to to inherit from the provider base classes and override a bunch of methods which are tightly focused on storing a MembershipUser in a relational database. It can be done (and you can often find pretty good ones that have already been written), but it's a good amount of work and often leaves you with ugly code that has a bunch of System.NotImplementedException fun since there are a lot of methods that just don't apply. Designed around a specific view of users, roles and profiles The existing providers are focused on traditional membership - a user has a username and a password, some specific roles on the site (e.g. administrator, premium user), and may have some additional "nice to have" optional information that can be accessed via an API in your application. This doesn't fit well with some modern usage patterns: In OAuth and OpenID, the user doesn't have a password Often these kinds of scenarios map better to user claims or rights instead of monolithic user roles For many sites, profile or other non-traditional information is very important and needs to come from somewhere other than an API call that maps to a database blob What would work a lot better here is a system in which you were able to define your users, rights, and other attributes however you wanted and the membership system worked with your model - not the other way around. Requires specific schema, overflow in blob columns I've already mentioned this a few times, but it bears calling out separately - ASP.NET Membership focuses on SQL Server storage, and that storage is based on a very specific database schema. SimpleMembership as a better membership system As you might have guessed, SimpleMembership was designed to address the above problems. Works with your Schema As Matthew Osborn explains in his Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages post, SimpleMembership is designed to integrate with your database schema: All SimpleMembership requires is that there are two columns on your users table so that we can hook up to it – an “ID” column and a “username” column. The important part here is that they can be named whatever you want. For instance username doesn't have to be an alias it could be an email column you just have to tell SimpleMembership to treat that as the “username” used to log in. Matthew's example shows using a very simple user table named Users (it could be named anything) with a UserID and Username column, then a bunch of other columns he wanted in his app. Then we point SimpleMemberhip at that table with a one-liner: WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseFile("SecurityDemo.sdf", "Users", "UserID", "Username", true); No other tables are needed, the table can be named anything we want, and can have pretty much any schema we want as long as we've got an ID and something that we can map to a username. Broaden database support to the whole SQL Server family While SimpleMembership is not database agnostic, it works across the SQL Server family. It continues to support full SQL Server, but it also works with SQL Azure, SQL Server CE, SQL Server Express, and LocalDB. Everything's implemented as SQL calls rather than requiring stored procedures, views, agents, and change notifications. Note that SimpleMembership still requires some flavor of SQL Server - it won't work with MySQL, NoSQL databases, etc. You can take a look at the code in WebMatrix.WebData.dll using a tool like ILSpy if you'd like to see why - there places where SQL Server specific SQL statements are being executed, especially when creating and initializing tables. It seems like you might be able to work with another database if you created the tables separately, but I haven't tried it and it's not supported at this point. Note: I'm thinking it would be possible for SimpleMembership (or something compatible) to run Entity Framework so it would work with any database EF supports. That seems useful to me - thoughts? Note: SimpleMembership has the same database support - anything in the SQL Server family - that Universal Providers brings to the ASP.NET Membership system. Easy to with Entity Framework Code First The problem with with ASP.NET Membership's system for storing additional account information is that it's the gate keeper. That means you're stuck with its schema and accessing profile information through its API. SimpleMembership flips that around by allowing you to use any table as a user store. That means you're in control of the user profile information, and you can access it however you'd like - it's just data. Let's look at a practical based on the AccountModel.cs class in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project. Here I'm adding a Birthday property to the UserProfile class. [Table("UserProfile")] public class UserProfile { [Key] [DatabaseGeneratedAttribute(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] public int UserId { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } public DateTime Birthday { get; set; } } Now if I want to access that information, I can just grab the account by username and read the value. var context = new UsersContext(); var username = User.Identity.Name; var user = context.UserProfiles.SingleOrDefault(u => u.UserName == username); var birthday = user.Birthday; So instead of thinking of SimpleMembership as a big membership API, think of it as something that handles membership based on your user database. In SimpleMembership, everything's keyed off a user row in a table you define rather than a bunch of entries in membership tables that were out of your control. How SimpleMembership integrates with ASP.NET Membership Okay, enough sales pitch (and hopefully background) on why things have changed. How does this affect you? Let's start with a diagram to show the relationship (note: I've simplified by removing a few classes to show the important relationships): So SimpleMembershipProvider is an implementaiton of an ExtendedMembershipProvider, which inherits from MembershipProvider and adds some other account / OAuth related things. Here's what ExtendedMembershipProvider adds to MembershipProvider: The important thing to take away here is that a SimpleMembershipProvider is a MembershipProvider, but a MembershipProvider is not a SimpleMembershipProvider. This distinction is important in practice: you cannot use an existing MembershipProvider (including the Universal Providers found in System.Web.Providers) with an API that requires a SimpleMembershipProvider, including any of the calls in WebMatrix.WebData.WebSecurity or Microsoft.Web.WebPages.OAuth.OAuthWebSecurity. However, that's as far as it goes. Membership Providers still work if you're accessing them through the standard Membership API, and all of the core stuff  - including the AuthorizeAttribute, role enforcement, etc. - will work just fine and without any change. Let's look at how that affects you in terms of the new templates. Membership in the ASP.NET MVC 4 project templates ASP.NET MVC 4 offers six Project Templates: Empty - Really empty, just the assemblies, folder structure and a tiny bit of basic configuration. Basic - Like Empty, but with a bit of UI preconfigured (css / images / bundling). Internet - This has both a Home and Account controller and associated views. The Account Controller supports registration and login via either local accounts and via OAuth / OpenID providers. Intranet - Like the Internet template, but it's preconfigured for Windows Authentication. Mobile - This is preconfigured using jQuery Mobile and is intended for mobile-only sites. Web API - This is preconfigured for a service backend built on ASP.NET Web API. Out of these templates, only one (the Internet template) uses SimpleMembership. ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template The Basic template has configuration in place to use ASP.NET Membership with the Universal Providers. You can see that configuration in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template's web.config: <profile defaultProvider="DefaultProfileProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultProfileProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </profile> <membership defaultProvider="DefaultMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultMembershipProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordAttemptWindow="10" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </membership> <roleManager defaultProvider="DefaultRoleProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultRoleProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </roleManager> <sessionState mode="InProc" customProvider="DefaultSessionProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultSessionProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultSessionStateProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" /> </providers> </sessionState> This means that it's business as usual for the Basic template as far as ASP.NET Membership works. ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template The Internet template has a few things set up to bootstrap SimpleMembership: \Models\AccountModels.cs defines a basic user account and includes data annotations to define keys and such \Filters\InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs creates the membership database using the above model, then calls WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection which verifies that the underlying tables are in place and marks initialization as complete (for the application's lifetime) \Controllers\AccountController.cs makes heavy use of OAuthWebSecurity (for OAuth account registration / login / management) and WebSecurity. WebSecurity provides account management services for ASP.NET MVC (and Web Pages) WebSecurity can work with any ExtendedMembershipProvider. There's one in the box (SimpleMembershipProvider) but you can write your own. Since a standard MembershipProvider is not an ExtendedMembershipProvider, WebSecurity will throw exceptions if the default membership provider is a MembershipProvider rather than an ExtendedMembershipProvider. Practical example: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application using the Internet application template Install the Microsoft ASP.NET Universal Providers for LocalDB NuGet package Run the application, click on Register, add a username and password, and click submit You'll get the following execption in AccountController.cs::Register: To call this method, the "Membership.Provider" property must be an instance of "ExtendedMembershipProvider". This occurs because the ASP.NET Universal Providers packages include a web.config transform that will update your web.config to add the Universal Provider configuration I showed in the Basic template example above. When WebSecurity tries to use the configured ASP.NET Membership Provider, it checks if it can be cast to an ExtendedMembershipProvider before doing anything else. So, what do you do? Options: If you want to use the new AccountController, you'll either need to use the SimpleMembershipProvider or another valid ExtendedMembershipProvider. This is pretty straightforward. If you want to use an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider in ASP.NET MVC 4, you can't use the new AccountController. You can do a few things: Replace  the AccountController.cs and AccountModels.cs in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project with one from an ASP.NET MVC 3 application (you of course won't have OAuth support). Then, if you want, you can go through and remove other things that were built around SimpleMembership - the OAuth partial view, the NuGet packages (e.g. the DotNetOpenAuthAuth package, etc.) Use an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template and add in a Universal Providers NuGet package. Then copy in the AccountController and AccountModel classes. Create an ASP.NET MVC 3 project and upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 using the steps shown in the ASP.NET MVC 4 release notes. None of these are particularly elegant or simple. Maybe we (or just me?) can do something to make this simpler - perhaps a NuGet package. However, this should be an edge case - hopefully the cases where you'd need to create a new ASP.NET but use legacy ASP.NET Membership Providers should be pretty rare. Please let me (or, preferably the team) know if that's an incorrect assumption. Membership in the ASP.NET 4.5 project template ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms took a different approach which builds off ASP.NET Membership. Instead of using the WebMatrix security assemblies, Web Forms uses Microsoft.AspNet.Membership.OpenAuth assembly. I'm no expert on this, but from a bit of time in ILSpy and Visual Studio's (very pretty) dependency graphs, this uses a Membership Adapter to save OAuth data into an EF managed database while still running on top of ASP.NET Membership. Note: There may be a way to use this in ASP.NET MVC 4, although it would probably take some plumbing work to hook it up. How does this fit in with Universal Providers (System.Web.Providers)? Just to summarize: Universal Providers are intended for cases where you have an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider and you want to use it with another SQL Server database backend (other than SQL Server). It doesn't require agents to handle expired session cleanup and other background tasks, it piggybacks these tasks on other calls. Universal Providers are not really, strictly speaking, universal - at least to my way of thinking. They only work with databases in the SQL Server family. Universal Providers do not work with Simple Membership. The Universal Providers packages include some web config transforms which you would normally want when you're using them. What about the Web Site Administration Tool? Visual Studio includes tooling to launch the Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) to configure users and roles in your application. WSAT is built to work with ASP.NET Membership, and is not compatible with Simple Membership. There are two main options there: Use the WebSecurity and OAuthWebSecurity API to manage the users and roles Create a web admin using the above APIs Since SimpleMembership runs on top of your database, you can update your users as you would any other data - via EF or even in direct database edits (in development, of course)

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• Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release

  - by Jon Galloway

  ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesSummary for lazy readers: Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download on the Visual Studio site and on MSDN subscriber downloads) Visual Studio 2013 installs side by side with Visual Studio 2012 and supports round-tripping between Visual Studio versions, so you can try it out without committing to a switch Visual Studio 2013 ships with the new version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0 The new releases ASP.NET focuses on One ASP.NET, so core features and web tools work the same across the platform (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application) New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system, and a new identity system Visual Studio 2013 is an incredible editor for web files, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, LESS, Coffeescript, Handlebars, Angular, Ember, Knockdown, etc. Top links: Visual Studio 2013 content on the ASP.NET site are in the standard new releases area: http://www.asp.net/vnext ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release Notes Short intro videos on the new Visual Studio web editor features from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 post on the official .NET Web Development and Tools Blog Scott Guthrie's post: Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework Okay, for those of you who are still with me, let's dig in a bit. Quick web dev notes on downloading and installing Visual Studio 2013 I found Visual Studio 2013 to be a pretty fast install. According to Brian Harry's release post, installing over pre-release versions of Visual Studio is supported.  I've installed the release version over pre-release versions, and it worked fine. If you're only going to be doing web development, you can speed up the install if you just select Web Developer tools. Of course, as a good Microsoft employee, I'll mention that you might also want to install some of those other features, like the Store apps for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but they do download and install a lot of other stuff (e.g. the Windows Phone SDK sets up Hyper-V and downloads several GB's of VM's). So if you're planning just to do web development for now, you can pick just the Web Developer Tools and install the other stuff later. If you've got a fast internet connection, I recommend using the web installer instead of downloading the ISO. The ISO includes all the features, whereas the web installer just downloads what you're installing. Visual Studio 2013 development settings and color theme When you start up Visual Studio, it'll prompt you to pick some defaults. These are totally up to you -whatever suits your development style - and you can change them later. As I said, these are completely up to you. I recommend either the Web Development or Web Development (Code Only) settings. The only real difference is that Code Only hides the toolbars, and you can switch between them using Tools / Import and Export Settings / Reset. Web Development settings Web Development (code only) settings Usually I've just gone with Web Development (code only) in the past because I just want to focus on the code, although the Standard toolbar does make it easier to switch default web browsers. More on that later. Color theme Sigh. Okay, everyone's got their favorite colors. I alternate between Light and Dark depending on my mood, and I personally like how the low contrast on the window chrome in those themes puts the emphasis on my code rather than the tabs and toolbars. I know some people got pretty worked up over that, though, and wanted the blue theme back. I personally don't like it - it reminds me of ancient versions of Visual Studio that I don't want to think about anymore. So here's the thing: if you install Visual Studio Ultimate, it defaults to Blue. The other versions default to Light. If you use Blue, I won't criticize you - out loud, that is. You can change themes really easily - either Tools / Options / Environment / General, or the smart way: ctrl+q for quick launch, then type Theme and hit enter. Signing in During the first run, you'll be prompted to sign in. You don't have to - you can click the "Not now, maybe later" link at the bottom of that dialog. I recommend signing in, though. It's not hooked in with licensing or tracking the kind of code you write to sell you components. It is doing good things, like  syncing your Visual Studio settings between computers. More about that here. So, you don't have to, but I sure do. Overview of shiny new things in ASP.NET land There are a lot of good new things in ASP.NET. I'll list some of my favorite here, but you can read more on the ASP.NET site. One ASP.NET You've heard us talk about this for a while. The idea is that options are good, but choice can be a burden. When you start a new ASP.NET project, why should you have to make a tough decision - with long-term consequences - about how your application will work? If you want to use ASP.NET Web Forms, but have the option of adding in ASP.NET MVC later, why should that be hard? It's all ASP.NET, right? Ideally, you'd just decide that you want to use ASP.NET to build sites and services, and you could use the appropriate tools (the green blocks below) as you needed them. So, here it is. When you create a new ASP.NET application, you just create an ASP.NET application. Next, you can pick from some templates to get you started... but these are different. They're not "painful decision" templates, they're just some starting pieces. And, most importantly, you can mix and match. I can pick a "mostly" Web Forms template, but include MVC and Web API folders and core references. If you've tried to mix and match in the past, you're probably aware that it was possible, but not pleasant. ASP.NET MVC project files contained special project type GUIDs, so you'd only get controller scaffolding support in a Web Forms project if you manually edited the csproj file. Features in one stack didn't work in others. Project templates were painful choices. That's no longer the case. Hooray! I just did a demo in a presentation last week where I created a new Web Forms + MVC + Web API site, built a model, scaffolded MVC and Web API controllers with EF Code First, add data in the MVC view, viewed it in Web API, then added a GridView to the Web Forms Default.aspx page and bound it to the Model. In about 5 minutes. Sure, it's a simple example, but it's great to be able to share code and features across the whole ASP.NET family. Authentication In the past, authentication was built into the templates. So, for instance, there was an ASP.NET MVC 4 Intranet Project template which created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application that was preconfigured for Windows Authentication. All of that authentication stuff was built into each template, so they varied between the stacks, and you couldn't reuse them. You didn't see a lot of changes to the authentication options, since they required big changes to a bunch of project templates. Now, the new project dialog includes a common authentication experience. When you hit the Change Authentication button, you get some common options that work the same way regardless of the template or reference settings you've made. These options work on all ASP.NET frameworks, and all hosting environments (IIS, IIS Express, or OWIN for self-host) The default is Individual User Accounts: This is the standard "create a local account, using username / password or OAuth" thing; however, it's all built on the new Identity system. More on that in a second. The one setting that has some configuration to it is Organizational Accounts, which lets you configure authentication using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, or Office 365. Identity There's a new identity system. We've taken the best parts of the previous ASP.NET Membership and Simple Identity systems, rolled in a lot of feedback and made big enhancements to support important developer concerns like unit testing and extensiblity. I've written long posts about ASP.NET identity, and I'll do it again. Soon. This is not that post. The short version is that I think we've finally got just the right Identity system. Some of my favorite features: There are simple, sensible defaults that work well - you can File / New / Run / Register / Login, and everything works. It supports standard username / password as well as external authentication (OAuth, etc.). It's easy to customize without having to re-implement an entire provider. It's built using pluggable pieces, rather than one large monolithic system. It's built using interfaces like IUser and IRole that allow for unit testing, dependency injection, etc. You can easily add user profile data (e.g. URL, twitter handle, birthday). You just add properties to your ApplicationUser model and they'll automatically be persisted. Complete control over how the identity data is persisted. By default, everything works with Entity Framework Code First, but it's built to support changes from small (modify the schema) to big (use another ORM, store your data in a document database or in the cloud or in XML or in the EXIF data of your desktop background or whatever). It's configured via OWIN. More on OWIN and Katana later, but the fact that it's built using OWIN means it's portable. You can find out more in the Authentication and Identity section of the ASP.NET site (and lots more content will be going up there soon). New Bootstrap based project templates The new project templates are built using Bootstrap 3. Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a front-end framework that brings a lot of nice benefits: It's responsive, so your projects will automatically scale to device width using CSS media queries. For example, menus are full size on a desktop browser, but on narrower screens you automatically get a mobile-friendly menu. The built-in Bootstrap styles make your standard page elements (headers, footers, buttons, form inputs, tables etc.) look nice and modern. Bootstrap is themeable, so you can reskin your whole site by dropping in a new Bootstrap theme. Since Bootstrap is pretty popular across the web development community, this gives you a large and rapidly growing variety of templates (free and paid) to choose from. Bootstrap also includes a lot of very useful things: components (like progress bars and badges), useful glyphicons, and some jQuery plugins for tooltips, dropdowns, carousels, etc.). Here's a look at how the responsive part works. When the page is full screen, the menu and header are optimized for a wide screen display: When I shrink the page down (this is all based on page width, not useragent sniffing) the menu turns into a nice mobile-friendly dropdown: For a quick example, I grabbed a new free theme off bootswatch.com. For simple themes, you just need to download the boostrap.css file and replace the /content/bootstrap.css file in your project. Now when I refresh the page, I've got a new theme: Scaffolding The big change in scaffolding is that it's one system that works across ASP.NET. You can create a new Empty Web project or Web Forms project and you'll get the Scaffold context menus. For release, we've got MVC 5 and Web API 2 controllers. We had a preview of Web Forms scaffolding in the preview releases, but they weren't fully baked for RTM. Look for them in a future update, expected pretty soon. This scaffolding system wasn't just changed to work across the ASP.NET frameworks, it's also built to enable future extensibility. That's not in this release, but should also hopefully be out soon. Project Readme page This is a small thing, but I really like it. When you create a new project, you get a Project_Readme.html page that's added to the root of your project and opens in the Visual Studio built-in browser. I love it. A long time ago, when you created a new project we just dumped it on you and left you scratching your head about what to do next. Not ideal. Then we started adding a bunch of Getting Started information to the new project templates. That told you what to do next, but you had to delete all of that stuff out of your website. It doesn't belong there. Not ideal. This is a simple HTML file that's not integrated into your project code at all. You can delete it if you want. But, it shows a lot of helpful links that are current for the project you just created. In the future, if we add new wacky project types, they can create readme docs with specific information on how to do appropriately wacky things. Side note: I really like that they used the internal browser in Visual Studio to show this content rather than popping open an HTML page in the default browser. I hate that. It's annoying. If you're doing that, I hope you'll stop. What if some unnamed person has 40 or 90 tabs saved in their browser session? When you pop open your "Thanks for installing my Visual Studio extension!" page, all eleventy billion tabs start up and I wish I'd never installed your thing. Be like these guys and pop stuff Visual Studio specific HTML docs in the Visual Studio browser. ASP.NET MVC 5 The biggest change with ASP.NET MVC 5 is that it's no longer a separate project type. It integrates well with the rest of ASP.NET. In addition to that and the other common features we've already looked at (Bootstrap templates, Identity, authentication), here's what's new for ASP.NET MVC. Attribute routing ASP.NET MVC now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers. This supports some pretty complex, customized routing scenarios, and it allows you to keep your route information right with your controller actions if you'd like. Here's a controller that includes an action whose method name is Hiding, but I've used AttributeRouting to configure it to /spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo public class SampleController : Controller { [Route("spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo")] public string Hiding() { return "You found me!"; } } I enable that in my RouteConfig.cs, and I can use that in conjunction with my other MVC routes like this: public class RouteConfig { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes(); routes.MapRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); } } You can read more about Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 here. Filter enhancements There are two new additions to filters: Authentication Filters and Filter Overrides. Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorized requests. Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features. Attribute Routing ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article. OAuth 2.0 ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN (discussed below). This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson. Lots more There's a huge list of other features, including CORS (cross-origin request sharing), IHttpActionResult, IHttpRequestContext, and more. I think the best overview is in the release notes. OWIN and Katana I've written about OWIN and Katana recently. I'm a big fan. OWIN is the Open Web Interfaces for .NET. It's a spec, like HTML or HTTP, so you can't install OWIN. The benefit of OWIN is that it's a community specification, so anyone who implements it can plug into the ASP.NET stack, either as middleware or as a host. Katana is the Microsoft implementation of OWIN. It leverages OWIN to wire up things like authentication, handlers, modules, IIS hosting, etc., so ASP.NET can host OWIN components and Katana components can run in someone else's OWIN implementation. Howard Dierking just wrote a cool article in MSDN magazine describing Katana in depth: Getting Started with the Katana Project. He had an interesting example showing an OWIN based pipeline which leveraged SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and NancyFx components in the same stack. If this kind of thing makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, don't worry, but keep an eye on it. You're going to see some cool things happen as a result of ASP.NET becoming more and more pluggable. Visual Studio Web Tools Okay, this stuff's just crazy. Visual Studio has been adding some nice web dev features over the past few years, but they've really cranked it up for this release. Visual Studio is by far my favorite code editor for all web files: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and lots of popular libraries. Stop thinking of Visual Studio as a big editor that you only use to write back-end code. Stop editing HTML and CSS in Notepad (or Sublime, Notepad++, etc.). Visual Studio starts up in under 2 seconds on a modern computer with an SSD. Misspelling HTML attributes or your CSS classes or jQuery or Angular syntax is stupid. It doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a silly person who wastes time. Browser Link Browser Link is a real-time, two-way connection between Visual Studio and all connected browsers. It's only attached when you're running locally, in debug, but it applies to any and all connected browser, including emulators. You may have seen demos that showed the browsers refreshing based on changes in the editor, and I'll agree that's pretty cool. But it's really just the start. It's a two-way connection, and it's built for extensiblity. That means you can write extensions that push information from your running application (in IE, Chrome, a mobile emulator, etc.) back to Visual Studio. Mads and team have showed off some demonstrations where they enabled edit mode in the browser which updated the source HTML back on the browser. It's also possible to look at how the rendered HTML performs, check for compatibility issues, watch for unused CSS classes, the sky's the limit. New HTML editor The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Here's a 3 minute tour from Mads Kristensen. The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Lots more Visual Studio web dev features That's just a sampling - there's a ton of great features for JavaScript editing, CSS editing, publishing, and Page Inspector (which shows real-time rendering of your page inside Visual Studio). Here are some more short videos showing those features. Lots, lots more Okay, that's just a summary, and it's still quite a bit. Head on over to http://asp.net/vnext for more information, and download Visual Studio 2013 now to get started!

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

  - by ScottGu

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

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 29, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 29, 2011Popular Releasespatterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 2.2.0.1: In this version: Custom Icons - now you can change the icons of the bookmarks. By default, whenever an image is added, the icon is automatically changed to a thumbnail of the picture. This can be turned off in the settings (Options... > Settings) Ability to remove items from the 'Recent' category Bugfixes - 'Choose' button in 'Edit Bookmark' now works Another bug fix: another problem in the 'Edit Bookmark' windowMedia Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.Image Converter: Image Converter 0.3: New Features: - English and German support Technical Improvements: - Microsoft All Rules using Code Analysis Planned Features for future release: 1. Unit testing 2. Command line interface 3. Automatic UpdatesAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...DotNetNuke® Events: 05.02.01: This release fixes any know bugs from any previous version. Events 05.02.01 will work for any DNN version 5.5.0 and up. Full details on the changes can be found at http://dnnevents.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)BUG FIXESAdded validation around category cookie RSS feed was missing an explicit close of the file when writing. Fixed. Added extra security into detail view .ICS Files did not include correct line folding. Fixed Cha...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.33: Add JSParser.ParseExpression method to parse JavaScript expressions rather than source-elements. Add -strict switch (CodeSettings.StrictMode) to force input code to ECMA5 Strict-mode (extra error-checking, "use strict" at top). Fixed bug when MinifyCode setting was set to false but RemoveUnneededCode was left it's default value of true.Path Copy Copy: 8.0: New version that mostly adds lots of requested features: 11340 11339 11338 11337 This version also features a more elaborate Settings UI that has several tabs. I tried to add some notes to better explain the use and purpose of the various options. The Path Copy Copy documentation is also on the way, both to explain how to develop custom plugins and to explain how to pre-configure options if you're a network admin. Stay tuned.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Fixed: Issue with partial thrust Cl...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngDevForce Application Framework: DevForce AF 2.0.3 RTW: PrerequisitesWPF 4.0 Silverlight 4.0 DevForce 2010 6.1.3.1 Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies API Documentation Source code License.txt Requirements.txt Release HighlightsNew: EventAggregator event forwarding New: EntityManagerInterceptor<T> to intercept EntityManger events New: IHarnessAware to allow for ViewModel setup when executed inside of the Development Harness New: Improved design time stability New: Support for add-in development New: CoroutineFns.To...NicAudio: NicAudio 2.0.5: Minor change to accept special DTS stereo modes (LtRt, AB,...)NDepend TFS 2010 integration: version 0.5.0 beta 1: Only the activity and the VS plugin are avalaible right now. They basically work. Data types that are logged into tfs reports are subject to change. This is no big deal since data is not yet sent into the warehouse.Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.5 – September 2011 Upgraded the tools tools to support the Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW Update SQL Azure only scenarios to use ASP.NET Universal Providers (through the System.Web.Providers v1.0.1 NuGet package) Changed Shared Access Signature service interface to support more operations Refactored Blobs API to have a similar interface and usage to that provided by the Windows Azure SDK Stor...DotNetNuke® FAQ: 05.00.00: FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) 05.00.00 will work for any DNN version 5.6.1 and up. It is the first version which is rewritten in C#. The scope of this update is to fix all known issues and improve user interface. Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)BUG FIXESManage Categories button text was not localized Edit/Add FAQ Entry: button text was not localized ENHANCEMENTSAdded an option to select the control for category display: Listbox with checkboxes (flat category ...SiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.0.921.340): Added CodePlex and PayPal links New iconNew ProjectsAsynk: Asynk is a framework/application that allows existing applications to easily be extended with an offloaded asynchronous worker layer. Asynk is developed using C#.Blob Tower Defense: 3D tower defense game for Windows Phone 7. School project for Brno University of Technology, computer graphics class.Booz: Booz is... An extended version of the boo shell (booish2 to be precise). Offers additional commands like cd, md, ls etc. I hope this shell can be used to take the position of/surpass the native windows shell in the near future.CIMS: a sanction infomation system for sencience and technology of hustCrystalDot - Icon Collection / Pack (LGPL): .Net / Mono freundliche Varainte der Crystal-Icons von Everaldo Icon collection / pack for .NET and Mono designed by Everaldo - KDE style http://www.everaldo.com/crystal/dotetes: dotetes adalah teka teki silang tool dikembangkan dengan bahasa c#Emoe': This Project is a Windows Phone 7.1 application.Equation Inversion: Visual Studion 2008 Add-in for equation inversions.Exploring VMR Features on WEC7: This is the sample application helps you to do alpha blending the bitmap on camera streaming in Windows Embedded Compact 7 using Directshow video Renderer (VMR). It is a VS2008 based smart device project developed on C++. I have explained the sample application in the following blog link. http://www.e-consystems.com/blog/windowsce/?p=759 EzValidation: Custom validation extensions for ASP.NET MVC 3. Includes server and client side model based validation attributes for: -- Equal To -- Not Equal To -- Greater Than -- Greater Than or Equal To -- Less Than -- Less Than or Equal To Supports validating against: -- Another Model Field -- A Specific Value -- Current Date/Yesterday/Tomorrow (for Dates and Strings) Download & Install via NuGet "package-install ezvalidation"Flu.net: Flu.net is a tool that helps you creating your own fluent syntax for .NET Framework applications in a declarative fashion. It is aimed for infrastructures and other open-source projects use.For Chess Endgames: King vs. King Opposition Calculator: You must input the locations of 2 kings on a chessboard, and whose turn it is to move. The calculator will display which king has the opposition, and how it can be used or maintained.GameTrakXNA: This project aims to create a simple library to use the unique GameTrak controller within XNA and Flash.Google Speech Recognition Example: Google Speech Recognition contains a working example of application that uses google speech recognition API. App contains all necessary dlls to record, decode and send your voice request to google service and recieve a text representation of what you've said. It's developed in C#Interval Mandelbrot Explorer: Explore the Mandelbrot set using interval arithmetic.ISD training tasks: ISD training examples and tasksiTunesControlBar: The iTunesControlBar helps user control their iTunes Application while it is minimized. iTunesControlBar resides at the top of the screen, invisible when not used, and allows playback and volume control, library searches and media information without the need to bring up iTunes.iTurtle: A bunch of Powerscripts to automate server management in AD environment.M26WC - Mono 2.6 Wizard Control: Wizard which runs under Mono2.6 A fork of: http://aerowizard.codeplex.com/Microsoft Help Viewer 2: Help Viewer 2 is the help runtime for both Visual Studio 11 help and Windows 8 help. The code in this project will help you use and understand the HV2 runtime API.MONTRASEC: Monitoring Trafficking in human beings and Sexual Exploitation of Children: benchmarking for member state and EU reporting, turning the SIAMSECT templates into a user-friendly interface and reporting tool. MTF.NET Runtime: Managed Task Framework .NET Runtime The MTF.NET runtime software and resulting assemblies are required to run applications built using the Managed Task Framework.NET Professional (Visual Studio 2010 extension) software design editor. The MTF.NET team are committed to continuously improving the core MTF.NET runtime and ensuring it is always available free and fully transparent. Pandoras Box: A greenfield inversion of control project utilising the power and flexibility of expressions and preferring convention over configuration.Pass the Puzzle: Pass the Puzzle is a frantic word-guessing party game. The game displays a few letters, and the players must come up with words containing those letters. But beware: if the timer goes off, you lose! It is based on the folk party game Pass the Parcel and is written in C#.PerCiGal: Percigal is a project for the development of applications for managing your personal media library. It consists in - a windows application to use at home to catalog movies, TV series, cast and books, with the support of the Internet for information retrieval; - a web interface for viewing and cataloging everywhere your media; - an application for smartphones. Project Flying Carpet: Este jogo é um projeto para a cadeira Projeto de Jogos: Motores Jogos do curso de Jogos Digitais da Unisinos.proxy browser: sed leo Latin's Butterfly....Python Multiple Dispatch: Multiple dispatch (AKA multimethods) for Python 3 via a metaclass and type annotations.reDune: ?????????? ???? ? ????? «????????? ? ???????? ???????». ???????? ?? Dune2000 ?? Westwood ? Electronic Arts.Rereadable: Keep page from internet for read it latter.ServStop: ServStop is a .NET application that makes it easy to stop several system services at once. Now you don't have to change startup types or stop them one at a time. It has a simple list-based interface with the ability to save and load lists of user services to stop. Written in C#.SharePoint 2010 Audience Membership Workflow Activity (Full Trust): A simple SharePoint 2010 workflow activity / workflow condition to check whether the user initiating the workflow is a member of a specified audience. Farm-level .wsp solution, written in C#. Once installed, the workflow activity can be used in SharePoint Designer 2010 declarative workflows.SQL Server® to Firebird DB converter: Converts Microsoft SQL Server® database into Firebird database including entire structure and datastegitest: test projectSystem.Threading.Joins: The Joins project provides asynchronous concurrency semantics based on join calculus and modeled after the Microsoft Research C? (C Omega) project.TestAndroidGame: try dev a TestAndroidGametetribricks: block game Topographic Explorer: A project to import, convert, explore, manipulate, and save topographical maps. Looking to use C# and WPF.Trading: Under construction!!!Trombone: Trombone makes it easier for Windows Mobile Professional users to automate status reply through SMS. It's developed in Visual C# 2008.Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group: Repository for source code for the Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group's web site. The Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group is using the Community Kit for SharePoint. This project will house any modifications that are specific to our user group.World of Tanks RU tiny stats collection utilty.: Tiny utility to load players stats for World of Tanks RU server. Results saved to comma separated file.WS-Discovery Proxy: Attempt at creating general purpose WS-Discovery Proxy.Yamaha Tu?n Tr?c: This application is used to manage information for Yamaha Tu?n Tr?c

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• Connection Reset on MySQL query

  - by sunwukung

  OK, I'm flummoxed.(i've asked this question over on Stack too - but I need to get it fixed so I'm asking here too - any help is GREATLY appreciated) I'm trying to execute a query on a database (locally) and I keep getting a connection reset error. I've been using the method below in a generic DAO class to build a query string and pass to Zend_Db API. public function insert($params) { $loop = false; $keys = $values = ''; foreach($params as $k => $v){ if($loop == true){ $keys .= ','; $values .= ','; } $keys .= $this->db->quoteIdentifier($k); $values .= $this->db->quote($v); $loop = true; } $sql = "INSERT INTO " . $this->table_name . " ($keys) VALUES ($values)"; //formatResult returns an array of info regarding the status and any result sets of the query //I've commented that method call out anyway, so I don't think it's that try { $this->db->query($sql); return $this->formatResult(array( true, 'New record inserted into: '.$this->table_name )); }catch(PDOException $e) { return $this->formatResult($e); } } So far, this has worked fine - the errors have been occurring since we generated new tables to record user input. The insert string looks like this: INSERT INTO tablename(`id`,`title`,`summary`,`description`,`keywords`,`type_id`,`categories`) VALUES ('5539','Sample Title','Sample content',' \'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In et pellentesque mauris. Curabitur hendrerit, leo id ultrices pellentesque, est purus mattis ligula, vitae imperdiet neque ligula bibendum sapien. Curabitur aliquet nisi et odio pharetra tincidunt. Phasellus sed iaculis nisl. Fusce commodo mauris et purus vehicula dictum. Nulla feugiat molestie accumsan. Donec fermentum libero in risus tempus elementum aliquam et magna. Fusce vitae sem metus. Aenean commodo pharetra risus, nec pellentesque augue ullamcorper nec. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nullam vel elit libero. Vestibulum in turpis nunc.\'','this,is,a,sample,array',1,'category title') Here are the parameters it's getting before assembling the query (var_dump): array 'id' => string '1' (length=4) 'title' => string 'Sample Title' (length=12) 'summary' => string 'Sample content' (length=14) 'description' => string '<p>'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In et pellentesque mauris. Curabitur hendrerit, leo id ultrices pellentesque, est purus mattis ligula, vitae imperdiet neque ligula bibendum sapien. Curabitur aliquet nisi et odio pharetra tincidunt. Phasellus sed iaculis nisl. Fusce commodo mauris et purus vehicula dictum. Nulla feugiat molestie accumsan. Donec fermentum libero in risus tempus elementum aliquam et magna. Fusce vitae sem metus. Aenean commodo pharetra risus, nec pellentesque augue'... (length=677) 'keywords' => string 'this,is,a,sample,array' (length=22) 'type_id' => int 1 'categories' => string 'category title' (length=43) The next port of call was checking the limits on the table, since it seems to insert if the length of "description" is around the 300 mark (it varies between 310 - 330). The field limit is set to VARCHAR(1500) and the validation on this field won't allow anything past bigger than 1200 with HTML, 800 without. The real kicker is that if I take this sql string and execute it via the command line, it works fine - so I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong. I've tried extending the server parameters i.e. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1964554/unexpected-connection-reset-a-php-or-an-apache-issue So, in a nutshell, I'm stumped. Any ideas?

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• Splitting a raidctl mirror safely

  - by milkfilk

  I have a Sun T5220 server with the onboard LSI card and two disks that were in a RAID 1 mirror. The data is not important right now but we had a failed disk and are trying to understand how to do this for real if we had to recover from a failure. The initial situation looked like this: # raidctl -l c1t0d0 Volume Size Stripe Status Cache RAID Sub Size Level Disk ---------------------------------------------------------------- c1t0d0 136.6G N/A DEGRADED OFF RAID1 0.1.0 136.6G GOOD N/A 136.6G FAILED Green light on the 0.0.0 disk. Find / lights up the 0.1.0 disk. So I know I have a bad drive and which one it is. Server still boots obviously. First, we tried putting a new disk in. This disk came from an unknown source. Format would not see it, cfgadm -al would not see it so raidctl -l would not see it. I figure it's bad. We tried another disk from another spare server: # raidctl -c c1t1d0 c1t0d0 (where t1 is my good disk - 0.1.0) Disk has occupied space. Also the different syntax options don't change anything: # raidctl -C "0.1.0 0.0.0" -r 1 1 Disk has occupied space. # raidctl -C "0.1.0 0.0.0" 1 Disk has occupied space. Ok. Maybe this is because the disk from the spare server had a RAID 1 on it already. Aha, I can see another volume in raidctl: # raidctl -l Controller: 1 Volume:c1t1d0 (this is my server's root mirror) Volume:c1t132d0 (this is the foreign root mirror) Disk: 0.0.0 Disk: 0.1.0 ... No problem. I don't care about the data, I'll just delete the foreign mirror. # raidctl -d c1t132d0 (warning about data deletion but it works) At this point, /usr/bin/ binaries freak out. By that I mean, ls -l /usr/bin/which shows 1.4k but cat /usr/bin/which gives me a newline. Great, I just blew away the binaries (ie: binaries in mem still work)? I bounce the box. It all comes back fine. WTF. Anyway, back to recreating my mirror. # raidctl -l Controller: 1 Volume:c1t1d0 (this is my server's root mirror) Disk: 0.0.0 Disk: 0.1.0 ... Man says that you can delete a mirror and it will split it. Ok, I'll delete the root mirror. # raidctl -d c1t0d0 Array in use. (this might not be the exact error) I googled this and found of course you can't do this (even with -f) while booted off the mirror. Ok. I boot cdrom -s and deleted the volume. Now I have one disk that has a type of "LSI-Logical-Volume" on c1t1d0 (where my data is) and a brand new "Hitachi 146GB" on c1t0d0 (what I'm trying to mirror to): (booted off the CD) # raidctl -c c1t1d0 c1t0d0 (man says it's source destination for mirroring) Illegal Array Layout. # raidctl -C "0.1.0 0.0.0" -r 1 1 (alt syntax per man) Illegal Array Layout. # raidctl -C "0.1.0 0.0.0" 1 (assumes raid1, no help) Illegal Array Layout. Same size disks, same manufacturer but I did delete the volume instead of throwing in a blank disk and waiting for it to resync. Maybe this was a critical error. I tried selecting the type in format for my good disk to be a plain 146gb disk but it resets the partition table which I'm pretty sure would wipe the data (bad if this was production). Am I boned? Anyone have experience with breaking and resyncing a mirror? There's nothing on Google about "Illegal Array Layout" so here's my contrib to the search gods.

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• How to troubleshoot a PHP script that causes a Segmenation Fault?

  - by johnlai2004

  I posted this on stackoverflow.com as well because I'm not sure if this is a programming problem or a server problem. I'm using ubuntu 9.10, apache2, mysql5 and php5. I've noticed an unusual problem with some of my php programs. Sometimes when visiting a page like profile.edit.php, the browser throws a dialogue box asking to download profile.edit.php page. When I download it, there's nothing in the file. profile.edit.php is supposed to be a web form that edits user information. I've noticed this on some of my other php pages as well. I look in my apache error logs, and I see a segmentation fault message: [Mon Mar 08 15:40:10 2010] [notice] child pid 480 exit signal Segmentation fault (11) And also, the issue may or may not appear depending on which server I deploy my application too. Additonal Details This doesn't happen all the time though. It only happens sometimes. For example, profile.edit.php will load properly. But as soon as I hit the save button (form action="profile.edit.php?save=true"), then the page asks me to download profile.edit.php. Could it be that sometimes my php scripts consume too much resources? Sample code Upon save action, my profile.edit.php includes a data_access_object.php file. I traced the code in data_access_object.php to this line here if($params[$this->primaryKey]) { $q = "UPDATE $this->tableName SET ".implode(', ', $fields)." WHERE ".$this->primaryKey." = ?$this->primaryKey"; $this->bind($this->primaryKey, $params[$this->primaryKey], $this->tblFields[$this->primaryKey]['mysqlitype']); } else { $q = "INSERT $this->tableName SET ".implode(', ', $fields); } // Code executes perfectly up to this point // echo 'print this'; exit; // if i uncomment this line, profile.edit.php will actually show 'print this'. If I leave it commented, the browser will ask me to download profile.edit.php if(!$this->execute($q)){ $this->errorSave = -3; return false;} // When I jumped into the function execute(), every line executed as expected, right up to the return statement. And if it helps, here's the function execute($sql) in data_access_object.php function execute($sql) { // find all list types and explode them // eg. turn ?listId into ?listId0,?listId1,?listId2 $arrListParam = array_bubble_up('arrayName', $this->arrBind); foreach($arrListParam as $listName) if($listName) { $explodeParam = array(); $arrList = $this->arrBind[$listName]['value']; foreach($arrList as $key=>$val) { $newParamName = $listName.$key; $this->bind($newParamName,$val,$this->arrBind[$listName]['type']); $explodeParam[] = '?'.$newParamName; } $sql = str_replace("?$listName", implode(',',$explodeParam), $sql); } // replace all ?varName with ? for syntax compliance $sqlParsed = preg_replace('/\?[\w\d_\.]+/', '?', $sql); $this->stmt->prepare($sqlParsed); // grab all the parameters from the sql to create bind conditions preg_match_all('/\?[\w\d_\.]+/', $sql, $matches); $matches = $matches[0]; // store bind conditions $types = ''; $params = array(); foreach($matches as $paramName) { $types .= $this->arrBind[str_replace('?', '', $paramName)]['type']; $params[] = $this->arrBind[str_replace('?', '', $paramName)]['value']; } $input = array('types'=>$types) + $params; // bind it if(!empty($types)) call_user_func_array(array($this->stmt, 'bind_param'), $input); $stat = $this->stmt->execute(); if($GLOBALS['DEBUG_SQL']) echo '<p style="font-weight:bold;">SQL error after execution:</p> ' . $this->stmt->error.'<p>&nbsp;</p>'; $this->arrBind = array(); return $stat; }

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• Intel Rapid Storage / Smart Response SSD caching issue

  - by goober

  Background Recently built my own PC. It works! Almost. It's been a while since getting into the guts of these things, so I'm familiar but may be missing something simple. FYI, I don't care about blowing the OS away -- it's brand new and we can go back from scratch as many times as necessary. Goal / Issue I'd like to use the SSD to take advantage of Intel's Smart Response technology (allows the SSD to act as a cache for HDDs) I would like the SSD cache to act as a cache for my HDDs, which I would like to be in a RAID1 array (so I get the speed from the SSD and the redundancy from the RAID1) However, Windows only sees the drive in device manager (not as a drive), so I'm unsure what to do about that. Related: as far as I know, for this to work, the drives all have to be in a single RAID array (i.e. a RAID0 pairing of the SSD and the RAID1 HDD array). However, when attempting this at the BIOS level, I am told there is not enough space for an array. Steps so Far Moved the SSD onto the Intel controller (I'd had it on the Marvel 6.0 controller instead of the Intel controller, so the BIOS was only seeing it in a strange way) Updated the BIOS of the motherboard to the latest version Reinstalled Intel's RST (iRST?) software several times, as some forums reported it working after reinstalling 3 times (which does not inspire confidence). Checked Intel storage: it does see the SSD as a physical, non-RAID device. However, it says no space exists if I try to create an array. Checked the BIOS: it does not show up in the boot order, but is an option that can be selected under boot options. Tried the firmware update for that model. Issue: the firmware CD doesn't detect a drive; maybe the Intel storage controller is making it difficult? moved the ssd to the marvel controller. The firmware update cd appeared to hang while searching for drives. swapped out the SATA cable for the manufacturer's and moved back to the intel storage controller. Noticed at this point that in the Intel RST software, a device DOES show up in addition to the RAID set -- only shown as a "60 GB internal disk". Windows doesn't appear to see it as a drive, but it does still show in device manager. Move SSD to port from 0-3 on MOBO and set SATA mode to IDE (after disconnecting RAID1 config) to allow the firmware update to work. Firmware was already at the latest version. Next Steps ? Components involved ASUS P8Z68-V PRO motherboard (Intel Z68 Chipset) Intel i7 2600k Processor 2 x 1TB 7200 RPM HDDs 64 GB Crucial M4 SSD (M4-CT064M4SSD2) For Reference -- Storage Configuration Intel 3 gbps Intel 3gbps Intel 6gbps Marvel 6gbps +----------+ +----------+ +----------+ +----------+ | | <----+ | | +-+ | | | |----------| | |----------| |-|--------| |----------| | | | | + | | | | | | +----------+ | +--|-------+ +-|--------+ +----------+ | | | + v v | 1 TB HDD 64 GB SSD + +> 1 TB HDD For Reference -- Intel RST (v10.8.0.1003) Screenshot Don't mind the "rebuilding" -- knocked a power cable out at one point; it's doing its job, not an indicator of a bad HDD. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance for any help!

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• linux raid 1: right after replacing and syncing one drive, the other disk fails - understanding what is going on with mdstat/mdadm

  - by devicerandom

  We have an old RAID 1 Linux server (Ubuntu Lucid 10.04), with four partitions. A few days ago /dev/sdb failed, and today we noticed /dev/sda had pre-failure ominous SMART signs (~4000 reallocated sector count). We replaced /dev/sdb this morning and rebuilt the RAID on the new drive, following this guide: http://www.howtoforge.com/replacing_hard_disks_in_a_raid1_array Everything went smooth until the very end. When it looked like it was finishing to synchronize the last partition, the other old one failed. At this point I am very unsure of the state of the system. Everything seems working and the files seem to be all accessible, just as if it synchronized everything, but I'm new to RAID and I'm worried about what is going on. The /proc/mdstat output is: Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md3 : active raid1 sdb4[2](S) sda4[0] 478713792 blocks [2/1] [U_] md2 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[2](F) 244140992 blocks [2/1] [_U] md1 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[2](F) 244140992 blocks [2/1] [_U] md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[2](F) 9764800 blocks [2/1] [_U] unused devices: <none> The order of [_U] vs [U_]. Why aren't they consistent along all the array? Is the first U /dev/sda or /dev/sdb? (I tried looking on the web for this trivial information but I found no explicit indication) If I read correctly for md0, [_U] should be /dev/sda1 (down) and /dev/sdb1 (up). But if /dev/sda has failed, how can it be the opposite for md3 ? I understand /dev/sdb4 is now spare because probably it failed to synchronize it 100%, but why does it show /dev/sda4 as up? Shouldn't it be [__]? Or [_U] anyway? The /dev/sda drive now cannot even be accessed by SMART anymore apparently, so I wouldn't expect it to be up. What is wrong with my interpretation of the output? I attach also the outputs of mdadm --detail for the four partitions: /dev/md0: Version : 00.90 Creation Time : Fri Jan 21 18:43:07 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 9764800 (9.31 GiB 10.00 GB) Used Dev Size : 9764800 (9.31 GiB 10.00 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 0 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Tue Nov 5 17:27:33 2013 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 1 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : a3b4dbbd:859bf7f2:bde36644:fcef85e2 Events : 0.7704 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 0 0 0 removed 1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1 2 8 1 - faulty spare /dev/sda1 /dev/md1: Version : 00.90 Creation Time : Fri Jan 21 18:43:15 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 244140992 (232.83 GiB 250.00 GB) Used Dev Size : 244140992 (232.83 GiB 250.00 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 1 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Tue Nov 5 17:39:06 2013 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 1 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : 8bcd5765:90dc93d5:cc70849c:224ced45 Events : 0.1508280 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 0 0 0 removed 1 8 18 1 active sync /dev/sdb2 2 8 2 - faulty spare /dev/sda2 /dev/md2: Version : 00.90 Creation Time : Fri Jan 21 18:43:19 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 244140992 (232.83 GiB 250.00 GB) Used Dev Size : 244140992 (232.83 GiB 250.00 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 2 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Tue Nov 5 17:46:44 2013 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 1 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : 2885668b:881cafed:b8275ae8:16bc7171 Events : 0.2289636 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 0 0 0 removed 1 8 19 1 active sync /dev/sdb3 2 8 3 - faulty spare /dev/sda3 /dev/md3: Version : 00.90 Creation Time : Fri Jan 21 18:43:22 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 478713792 (456.54 GiB 490.20 GB) Used Dev Size : 478713792 (456.54 GiB 490.20 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 3 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Tue Nov 5 17:19:20 2013 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 1 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 4 0 active sync /dev/sda4 1 0 0 1 removed 2 8 20 - spare /dev/sdb4 The active sync on /dev/sda4 baffles me. I am worried because if tomorrow morning I have to replace /dev/sda, I want to be sure what should I sync with what and what is going on. I am also quite baffled by the fact /dev/sda decided to fail exactly when the raid finished resyncing. I'd like to understand what is really happening. Thanks a lot for your patience and help. Massimo

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• ie7 innerhtml strange display problem

  - by thoraniann

  Hello, I am having a strange problem with ie7 (ie8 in compatibility mode). I have div containers where I am updating values using javascript innhtml to update the values. This works fine in Firefox and ie8. In ie7 the values do not update but if a click on the values and highlight them then they update, also if a change the height of the browser then on the next update the values get updated correctly. I have figured out that if I change the position property of the outer div container from relative to static then the updates work correctly. The page can be viewed here http://islendingasogur.net/test/webmap_html_test.html In internet explorer 8 with compatibility turned on you can see that the timestamp in the gray box only gets updated one time, after that you see no changes. The timestamp in the lower right corner gets updated every 10 seconds. But if you highlight the text in the gray box then the updated timestamp values appears! Here is the page: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache"/> <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"/> <meta http-equiv="expires" content="Mon, 22 Jul 2002 11:12:01 GMT"/> <title>innerhtml problem</title> <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- var alarm_off_color = '#00ff00'; var alarm_low_color = '#ffff00'; var alarm_lowlow_color = '#ff0000'; var group_id_array = new Array(); var var_alarm_array = new Array(); var timestamp_color = '#F3F3F3'; var timestamp_alarm_color = '#ff00ff'; group_id_array[257] = 0; function updateParent(var_array, group_array) { //Update last update time var time_str = "Last Reload Time: "; var currentTime = new Date(); var hours = currentTime.getHours(); var minutes = currentTime.getMinutes(); var seconds = currentTime.getSeconds(); if(minutes < 10) {minutes = "0" + minutes;} if(seconds < 10) {seconds = "0" + seconds;} time_str += hours + ":" + minutes + ":" + seconds; document.getElementById('div_last_update_time').innerHTML = time_str; //alert(time_str); alarm_var = 0; //update group values for(i1 = 0; i1 < var_array.length; ++i1) { if(document.getElementById(var_array[i1][0])) { document.getElementById(var_array[i1][0]).innerHTML = unescape(var_array[i1][1]); if(var_array[i1][2]==0) {document.getElementById(var_array[i1][0]).style.backgroundColor=alarm_off_color} else if(var_array[i1][2]==1) {document.getElementById(var_array[i1][0]).style.backgroundColor=alarm_low_color} else if(var_array[i1][2]==2) {document.getElementById(var_array[i1][0]).style.backgroundColor=alarm_lowlow_color} //check if alarm is new var_id = var_array[i1][3]; if(var_array[i1][2]==1 && var_array[i1][4]==0) { alarm_var = 1; } else if(var_array[i1][2]==2 && var_array[i1][4]==0) { alarm_var = 1; } } } //Update group timestamp and box alarm color for(i1 = 0; i1 < group_array.length; ++i1) { if(document.getElementById(group_array[i1][0])) { //set timestamp for group document.getElementById(group_array[i1][0]).innerHTML = group_array[i1][1]; if(group_array[i1][4] != -1) { //set data update error status current_timestamp_color = timestamp_color; if(group_array[i1][4] == 1) {current_timestamp_color = timestamp_alarm_color;} document.getElementById(group_array[i1][0]).style.backgroundColor = current_timestamp_color; } } } } function update_map(map_id) { document.getElementById('webmap_update').src = 'webmap_html_test_sub.html?first_time=1&map_id='+map_id; } --> </script> <style type="text/css"> body { margin:0; border:0; padding:0px;background:#eaeaea;font-family:verdana, arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; } A:active { color: #000000;} A:link { color: #000000;} A:visited { color: #000000;} A:hover { color: #000000;} #div_header { /*position: absolute;*/ background: #ffffff; width: 884px; height: 60px; display: block; float: left; font-size: 14px; text-align: left; /*overflow: visible;*/ } #div_container{ background: #ffffff;border-left:1px solid #000000; border-right:1px solid #000000; border-bottom:1px solid #000000; float: left; width: 884px;} #div_image_container{ position: relative; width: 884px; height: 549px; background: #ffffff; font-family:arial, verdana, arial, sans-serif; /*display: block;*/ float:none!important; float/**/:left; border:1px solid #00ff00; padding: 0px; } .div_group_box{ position: absolute; width: -2px; height: -2px; background: #FFFFFF; opacity: 1; filter: alpha(opacity=100); border:1px solid #000000; font-size: 2px; z-index: 0; padding: 0px; } .div_group_container{ position: absolute; opacity: 1; filter: alpha(opacity=100); z-index: 5; /*display: block;*/ /*border:1px solid #000000;*/ } .div_group_container A:active {text-decoration: none; display: block;} .div_group_container A:link { color: #000000;text-decoration: none; display: block;} .div_group_container A:visited { color: #000000;text-decoration: none; display: block;} .div_group_container A:hover { color: #000000;text-decoration: none; display: block;} .div_group_header{ background: #17B400; border:1px solid #000000;font-size: 12px; color: #FFFFFF; padding-top: 1px; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; text-align: center; } .div_var_name_container{ color: #000000;background: #FFFFFF; border-left:1px solid #000000; border-top:0px solid #000000; border-bottom:0px solid #000000;font-size: 12px; float: left; display: block; text-align: left; } .div_var_name{ padding-top: 1px; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; display: block; } .div_var_value_container{ color: #000000;background: #FFFFFF; border-left:1px solid #000000; border-right:1px solid #000000; border-top:0px solid #000000; border-bottom:0px solid #000000;font-size: 12px; float: left; text-align: center; } .div_var_value{ padding-top: 1px; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; } .div_var_unit_container{ color: #000000;background: #FFFFFF; border-right:1px solid #000000; border-top:0px solid #000000; border-bottom:0px solid #000000;font-size: 12px; float: left; text-align: left; } .div_var_unit{ padding-top: 1px; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; } .div_timestamp{ float: none; color: #000000;background: #F3F3F3; border:1px solid #000000;font-size: 12px; padding-top: 1px; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; text-align: center; clear: left; z-index: 100; position: relative; } #div_last_update_time{ height: 14px; width: 210px; text-align: right; padding: 1px; font-size: 10px; float: right; } .copyright{ height: 14px; width: 240px; text-align: left; color: #777; padding: 1px; font-size: 10px; float: left; } a img { border: 1px solid #000000; } .clearer { clear: both; display: block; height: 1px; margin-bottom: -1px; font-size: 1px; line-height: 1px; } </style> </head> <body onload="update_map(1)"> <div id="div_container"><div id="div_header"></div><div class="clearer"></div><div id="div_image_container"><img id="map" src="Images/maps/0054_gardabaer.jpg" title="My map" alt="" align="left" border="0" usemap ="#_area_links" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;" /> <div id="group_container_257" class="div_group_container" style="visibility:visible; top:10px; left:260px; cursor: pointer;"> <div class="div_group_header" style="clear:right">Site</div> <div class="div_var_name_container"> <div id="group_name_257_var_8" class="div_var_name" >variable 1</div> <div id="group_name_257_var_7" class="div_var_name" style="border-top:1px solid #000000;">variable 2</div> <div id="group_name_257_var_9" class="div_var_name" style="border-top:1px solid #000000;">variable 3</div> </div> <div class="div_var_value_container"> <div id="group_value_257_var_8" class="div_var_value" >0</div> <div id="group_value_257_var_7" class="div_var_value" style="border-top:1px solid #000000;">0</div> <div id="group_value_257_var_9" class="div_var_value" style="border-top:1px solid #000000;">0</div> </div> <div class="div_var_unit_container"> <div id="group_unit_257_var_8" class="div_var_unit" >N/A</div> <div id="group_unit_257_var_7" class="div_var_unit" style="border-top:1px solid #000000;">N/A</div> <div id="group_unit_257_var_9" class="div_var_unit" style="border-top:1px solid #000000;">N/A</div> </div> <div id="group_257_timestamp" class="div_timestamp" style="">-</div> </div> </div><div class="clearer"></div><div class="copyright">© Copyright</div><div id="div_last_update_time">-</div> </div> <iframe id="webmap_update" style="display:none;" width="0" height="0"></iframe></body> </html> The divs with class div_var_value, div_timestamp & div_last_update_time all get updated by the javascript function. The div "div_image_container" is the one that is causing this it seems, atleast if I change the position property for it from relative to static the values get updated correctly This is the page that updates the values: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Loader</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- window.onload = doLoad; function refresh() { //window.location.reload( false ); var _random_num = Math.floor(Math.random()*1100); window.location.search="?map_id=54&first_time=0&t="+_random_num; } var var_array = new Array(); var timestamp_array = new Array(); var_array[0] = Array('group_value_257_var_9','41.73',-1, 9, 0); var_array[1] = Array('group_value_257_var_7','62.48',-1, 7, 0); var_array[2] = Array('group_value_257_var_8','4.24',-1, 8, 0); var current_time = new Date(); var current_time_str = current_time.getHours(); current_time_str += ':'+current_time.getMinutes(); current_time_str += ':'+current_time.getSeconds(); timestamp_array[0] = Array('group_257_timestamp',current_time_str,'box_group_container_206',-1, -1); //timestamp_array[0] = Array('group_257_timestamp','11:33:16 23.Nov','box_group_container_257',-1, -1); window.parent.updateParent(var_array, timestamp_array); function doLoad() { setTimeout( "refresh()", 10*1000 ); } //--> </script> </head> <body> </body> </html> I edited the post and added a link to the webpage in question, I have also tested the webpage in internet explorer 7 and this error does not appear there. I have only seen this error in ie8 with compatibility turned on. If anybody has seen this before and has a fix, I would be very grateful. Thanks.

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• Screen Scraping Twitter

  - by BRADINO

  I got an email today asking for help to scrape Twitter. In particular, to be able to login. So I am going to show everyone, NOT to encourage anyone to violate Twitters terms of use but as an educational blog post about how PHP and cURL can be used to post variables and store cookies. Again, I am using the cScrape class I wrote, which you can download. Step 1 First go to twitter.com and look at the source code of the login to get the form field names and the form post location. You will see that the form posts to https://twitter.com/session and the username and password fields are session[username_or_email] and session[password] respectively. Step 2 Now you are ready to login. So using the fetch function in the Scrape class you create an associative array to contain the form values you want to post. The other thing you will need to do is uncomment the lines for CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE and CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR. Cookies will be required to stay logged in and scrape around. The paths to the cookie files need to be writable by your app. Also you will need to uncomment the line about CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION. $data = array('session[username_or_email]' => "bradino", 'session[password]' => "secret"); $scrape->fetch('https://twitter.com/sessions',$data); Step 1.5 Oops that didn't work. All I got back was 403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Ahhh I see another variable called authenticity_token I bet Twitter was looking for that. So let's back up and first hit twitter.com to get the authenticity_token variable, and then make the login post request with that variable included in our array of parameters. $scrape->fetch('https://twitter.com'); $data = array('session[username_or_email]' => "bradino", 'session[password]' => "secret"); $data['authenticity_token'] = $scrape->fetchBetween('name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="','"',$scrape->result); $scrape->fetch('https://twitter.com/sessions',$data); echo $scrape->result; So that's basically it. Now you are logged in and can scrape around and request other pages as you normally would. Sorry it wasn't a longer post. I really do enjoy this kind of stuff so if anyone has a request, hit me up. Errors? 1) Make sure that you are properly parsing the token variable 2) Make sure that you uncommented the lines about CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE and CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, those options need to be enabled and be sure the path set is writable by your application 3) Make sure that the path to the cookie file is writable and that it is getting data written to it 4) If you get a message about being redirected you need to uncomment the line about CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, that option needs to be enabled true

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• Understanding EDI 997

  - by VishnuTiwariBlog

  Hi Guys, This is for the EDI starter. Below is the complete detail of EDI 997 segment and element details. 997 Functional Acknowledgment Transaction Layout:   No. Seg ID Name Description Example M/O 010 ST Transaction Set Header To indicate the start of a transaction set and to assign a control number ST*997*382823~   M ST01   Code uniquely identifying a Transaction Set   M ST02   Identifying control number that must be unique within the transaction set functional group assigned by the originator for a transaction set   M 020 AK1 Functional Group Response Header To start acknowledgment of a functional group AK1*QM*2459823 M        AK101   Code identifying a group of application related transaction sets IN Invoice Information (810) SH Ship Notice/Manifest (856)     AK102   Assigned number originated and maintained by the sender     030 AK2 Transaction Set Response Header To start acknowledgment of a single transaction set AK2*856*001 M AK201   Code uniquely identifying a Transaction Set 810 Invoice 856 Ship Notice/Manifest   M AK202   Identifying control number that must be unique within the transaction set functional group assigned by the originator for a transaction set   M 040 AK3 Data Segment Note To report errors in a data segment and identify the location of the data segment AK3*TD3*9 O AK301 Segment ID Code Code defining the segment ID of the data segment in error (See Appendix A - Number 77)     AK302 Segment Position in Transaction Set The numerical count position of this data segment from the start of the transaction set: the transaction set header is count position 1     050 AK4 Data Element Note To report errors in a data element or composite data structure and identify the location of the data element AK4*2**2 O AK401 Position in Segment Code indicating the relative position of a simple data element, or the relative position of a composite data structure combined with the relative position of the component data element within the composite data structure, in error; the count starts with 1 for the simple data element or composite data structure immediately following the segment ID     AK402 Element Position in Segment This is used to indicate the relative position of a simple data element, or the relative position of a composite data structure with the relative position of the component within the composite data structure, in error; in the data segment the count starts with 1 for the simple data element or composite data structure immediately following the segment ID     AK403 Data Element Syntax Error Code Code indicating the error found after syntax edits of a data element 1 Mandatory Data Element Missing 2 Conditional Required Data Element Missing 3 Too Many Data Elements 4 Data Element Too Short 5 Data Element Too Long 6 Invalid Character in Data Element 7 Invalid Code Value 8 Invalid Date 9 Invalid Time 10 Exclusion Condition Violated     AK404 Copy of Bad Data Element This is a copy of the data element in error     060 AK5 AK5 Transaction Set Response Trailer To acknowledge acceptance or rejection and report errors in a transaction set AK5*A~ AK5*R*5~ M AK501 Transaction Set Acknowledgment Code Code indicating accept or reject condition based on the syntax editing of the transaction set A Accepted E Accepted But Errors Were Noted R Rejected     AK502 Transaction Set Syntax Error Code Code indicating error found based on the syntax editing of a transaction set 1 Transaction Set Not Supported 2 Transaction Set Trailer Missing 3 Transaction Set Control Number in Header and Trailer Do Not Match 4 Number of Included Segments Does Not Match Actual Count 5 One or More Segments in Error 6 Missing or Invalid Transaction Set Identifier 7 Missing or Invalid Transaction Set Control Number     070 AK9 Functional Group Response Trailer To acknowledge acceptance or rejection of a functional group and report the number of included transaction sets from the original trailer, the accepted sets, and the received sets in this functional group AK9*A*1*1*1~ AK9*R*1*1*0~ M AK901 Functional Group Acknowledge Code Code indicating accept or reject condition based on the syntax editing of the functional group A Accepted E Accepted, But Errors Were Noted. R Rejected     AK902 Number of Transaction Sets Included Total number of transaction sets included in the functional group or interchange (transmission) group terminated by the trailer containing this data element     AK903 Number of Received Transaction Sets Number of Transaction Sets received     AK904 Number of Accepted Transaction Sets Number of accepted Transaction Sets in a Functional Group     AK905 Functional Group Syntax Error Code Code indicating error found based on the syntax editing of the functional group header and/or trailer 1 Functional Group Not Supported 2 Functional Group Version Not Supported 3 Functional Group Trailer Missing 4 Group Control Number in the Functional Group Header and Trailer Do Not Agree 5 Number of Included Transaction Sets Does Not Match Actual Count 6 Group Control Number Violates Syntax     080 SE Transaction Set Trailer To indicate the end of the transaction set and provide the count of the transmitted segments (including the beginning (ST) and ending (SE) segments) SE*9*223~ M SE01 Number of Included Segments Total number of segments included in a transaction set including ST and SE segments     SE02 Transaction Set Control Number Identifying control number that must be unique within the transaction set functional group assigned by the originator for a transaction set

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• Understanding EDI 997.

  - by VishnuTiwariBlog

  Hi Guys, This is for the EDI starter. Below is the complete detail of EDI 997 segment and element details. 997 Functional Acknowledgment Transaction Layout: No. Seg ID Name Description Example M/O 010 ST Transaction Set Header To indicate the start of a transaction set and to assign a control number ST*997*382823~   M ST01   Code uniquely identifying a Transaction Set   M ST02   Identifying control number that must be unique within the transaction set functional group assigned by the originator for a transaction set   M 020 AK1 Functional Group Response Header To start acknowledgment of a functional group AK1*QM*2459823 M        AK101   Code identifying a group of application related transaction sets IN Invoice Information (810) SH Ship Notice/Manifest (856)     AK102   Assigned number originated and maintained by the sender     030 AK2 Transaction Set Response Header To start acknowledgment of a single transaction set AK2*856*001 M AK201   Code uniquely identifying a Transaction Set 810 Invoice 856 Ship Notice/Manifest   M AK202   Identifying control number that must be unique within the transaction set functional group assigned by the originator for a transaction set   M 040 AK3 Data Segment Note To report errors in a data segment and identify the location of the data segment AK3*TD3*9 O AK301 Segment ID Code Code defining the segment ID of the data segment in error (See Appendix A - Number 77)     AK302 Segment Position in Transaction Set The numerical count position of this data segment from the start of the transaction set: the transaction set header is count position 1     050 AK4 Data Element Note To report errors in a data element or composite data structure and identify the location of the data element AK4*2**2 O AK401 Position in Segment Code indicating the relative position of a simple data element, or the relative position of a composite data structure combined with the relative position of the component data element within the composite data structure, in error; the count starts with 1 for the simple data element or composite data structure immediately following the segment ID     AK402 Element Position in Segment This is used to indicate the relative position of a simple data element, or the relative position of a composite data structure with the relative position of the component within the composite data structure, in error; in the data segment the count starts with 1 for the simple data element or composite data structure immediately following the segment ID     AK403 Data Element Syntax Error Code Code indicating the error found after syntax edits of a data element 1 Mandatory Data Element Missing 2 Conditional Required Data Element Missing 3 Too Many Data Elements 4 Data Element Too Short 5 Data Element Too Long 6 Invalid Character in Data Element 7 Invalid Code Value 8 Invalid Date 9 Invalid Time 10 Exclusion Condition Violated     AK404 Copy of Bad Data Element This is a copy of the data element in error     060 AK5 AK5 Transaction Set Response Trailer To acknowledge acceptance or rejection and report errors in a transaction set AK5*A~ AK5*R*5~ M AK501 Transaction Set Acknowledgment Code Code indicating accept or reject condition based on the syntax editing of the transaction set A Accepted E Accepted But Errors Were Noted R Rejected     AK502 Transaction Set Syntax Error Code Code indicating error found based on the syntax editing of a transaction set 1 Transaction Set Not Supported 2 Transaction Set Trailer Missing 3 Transaction Set Control Number in Header and Trailer Do Not Match 4 Number of Included Segments Does Not Match Actual Count 5 One or More Segments in Error 6 Missing or Invalid Transaction Set Identifier 7 Missing or Invalid Transaction Set Control Number     070 AK9 Functional Group Response Trailer To acknowledge acceptance or rejection of a functional group and report the number of included transaction sets from the original trailer, the accepted sets, and the received sets in this functional group AK9*A*1*1*1~ AK9*R*1*1*0~ M AK901 Functional Group Acknowledge Code Code indicating accept or reject condition based on the syntax editing of the functional group A Accepted E Accepted, But Errors Were Noted. R Rejected     AK902 Number of Transaction Sets Included Total number of transaction sets included in the functional group or interchange (transmission) group terminated by the trailer containing this data element     AK903 Number of Received Transaction Sets Number of Transaction Sets received     AK904 Number of Accepted Transaction Sets Number of accepted Transaction Sets in a Functional Group     AK905 Functional Group Syntax Error Code Code indicating error found based on the syntax editing of the functional group header and/or trailer 1 Functional Group Not Supported 2 Functional Group Version Not Supported 3 Functional Group Trailer Missing 4 Group Control Number in the Functional Group Header and Trailer Do Not Agree 5 Number of Included Transaction Sets Does Not Match Actual Count 6 Group Control Number Violates Syntax     080 SE Transaction Set Trailer To indicate the end of the transaction set and provide the count of the transmitted segments (including the beginning (ST) and ending (SE) segments) SE*9*223~ M SE01 Number of Included Segments Total number of segments included in a transaction set including ST and SE segments     SE02 Transaction Set Control Number Identifying control number that must be unique within the transaction set functional group assigned by the originator for a transaction set

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• Windows Azure Use Case: Web Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx  Description: Many applications have a requirement to be located outside of the organization’s internal infrastructure control. For instance, the company website for a brick-and-mortar retail company may want to post not only static but interactive content to be available to their external customers, and not want the customers to have access inside the organization’s firewall. There are also cases of pure web applications used for a great many of the internal functions of the business. This allows for remote workers, shared customer/employee workloads and data and other advantages. Some firms choose to host these web servers internally, others choose to contract out the infrastructure to an “ASP” (Application Service Provider) or an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company. In any case, the design of these applications often resembles the following: In this design, a server (or perhaps more than one) hosts the presentation function (http or https) access to the application, and this same system may hold the computational aspects of the program. Authorization and Access is controlled programmatically, or is more open if this is a customer-facing application. Storage is either placed on the same or other servers, hosted within an RDBMS or NoSQL database, or a combination of the options, all coded into the application. High-Availability within this scenario is often the responsibility of the architects of the application, and by purchasing more hosting resources which must be built, licensed and configured, and manually added as demand requires, although some IaaS providers have a partially automatic method to add nodes for scale-out, if the architecture of the application supports it. Disaster Recovery is the responsibility of the system architect as well. Implementation: In a Windows Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment, many of these architectural considerations are designed into the system. The Azure “Fabric” (not to be confused with the Azure implementation of Application Fabric - more on that in a moment) is designed to provide scalability. Compute resources can be added and removed programmatically based on any number of factors. Balancers at the request-level of the Fabric automatically route http and https requests. The fabric also provides High-Availability for storage and other components. Disaster recovery is a shared responsibility between the facilities (which have the ability to restore in case of catastrophic failure) and your code, which should build in recovery. In a Windows Azure-based web application, you have the ability to separate out the various functions and components. Presentation can be coded for multiple platforms like smart phones, tablets and PC’s, while the computation can be a single entity shared between them. This makes the applications more resilient and more object-oriented, and lends itself to a SOA or Distributed Computing architecture. It is true that you could code up a similar set of functionality in a traditional web-farm, but the difference here is that the components are built into the very design of the architecture. The API’s and DLL’s you call in a Windows Azure code base contains components as first-class citizens. For instance, if you need storage, it is simply called within the application as an object.  Computation has multiple options and the ability to scale linearly. You also gain another component that you would either have to write or bolt-in to a typical web-farm: the Application Fabric. This Windows Azure component provides communication between applications or even to on-premise systems. It provides authorization in either person-based or claims-based perspectives. SQL Azure provides relational storage as another option, and can also be used or accessed from on-premise systems. It should be noted that you can use all or some of these components individually. Resources: Design Strategies for Scalable Active Server Applications - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972349.aspx  Physical Tiers and Deployment  - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658120.aspx

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• SQL SERVER – Weekend Project – Experimenting with ACID Transactions, SQL Compliant, Elastically Scalable Database

  - by pinaldave

  Database technology is huge and big world. I like to explore always beyond what I know and share the learning. Weekend is the best time when I sit around download random software on my machine which I like to call as a lab machine (it is a pretty old laptop, hardly a quality as lab machine) and experiment it. There are so many free betas available for download that it’s hard to keep track and even harder to find the time to play with very many of them.  This blog is about one you shouldn’t miss if you are interested in the learning various relational databases. NuoDB just released their Beta 7.  I had already downloaded their Beta 6 and yesterday did the same for 7.   My impression is that they are onto something very very interesting.  In fact, it might be something really promising in terms of database elasticity, scale and operational cost reduction. The folks at NuoDB say they are working on the world’s first “emergent” database which they tout as a brand new transitional database that is intended to dramatically change what’s possible with OLTP.  It is SQL compliant, guarantees ACID transactions, yet scales elastically on heterogeneous and decentralized cloud-based resources. Interesting note for sure, making me explore more. Based on what I’ve seen so far, they are solving the architectural challenge that exists between elastic, cloud-based compute infrastructures designed to scale out in response to workload requirements versus the traditional relational database management system’s architecture of central control. Here’s my experience with the NuoDB Beta 6 so far: First they pretty much threw away all the features you’d associate with existing RDBMS architectures except the SQL and ACID transactions which they were smart to keep.  It looks like they have incorporated a number of the big ideas from various algorithms, systems and techniques to achieve maximum DB scalability. From a user’s perspective, the NuoDB Beta software behaves like any other traditional SQL database and seems to offer all the benefits users have come to expect from standards-based SQL solutions. One of the interesting feature is that one can run a transactional node and a storage node on my Windows laptop as well on other platforms – indeed interesting for sure. It’s quite amazing to see a database elastically scale across machine boundaries. So, one of the basic NuoDB concepts is that as you need to scale out, you can easily use more inexpensive hardware when/where you need it.  This is unlike what we have traditionally done to scale a database for an application – we replace the hardware with something more powerful (faster CPU and Disks). This is where I started to feel like NuoDB is on to something that has the potential to elastically scale on commodity hardware while reducing operational expense for a big OLTP database to a degree we’ve never seen before. NuoDB is able to fully leverage the cloud in an asynchronous and highly decentralized manner – while providing both SQL compliance and ACID transactions. Basically what NuoDB is doing is so new that it is all hard to believe until you’ve experienced it in action.  I will keep you up to date as I test the NuoDB Beta 7 but if you are developing a web-scale application or have an on-premise app you are thinking of moving to the cloud, testing this beta is worth your time. If you do try it, let me know what you think.  Before I say anything more, I am going to do more experiments and more test on this product and compare it with other existing similar products. For me it was a weekend worth spent on learning something new. I encourage you to download Beta 7 version and share your opinions here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Is there a low carbon future for the retail industry?

  - by user801960

  Recently Oracle published a report in conjunction with The Future Laboratory and a global panel of experts to highlight the issue of energy use in modern industry and the serious need to reduce carbon emissions radically by 2050.  Emissions must be cut by 80-95% below the levels in 1990 – but what can the retail industry do to keep up with this? There are three key aspects to the retail industry where carbon emissions can be cut:  manufacturing, transport and IT.  Manufacturing Naturally, manufacturing is going to be a big area where businesses across all industries will be forced to make considerable savings in carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.  Many retailers of all sizes will use third party factories and will have little control over specific environmental impacts from the factory, but retailers can reduce environmental impact at the factories by managing orders more efficiently – better planning for stock requirements means economies of scale both in terms of finance and the environment. The John Lewis Partnership has made detailed commitments to reducing manufacturing and packaging waste on both its own-brand products and products it sources from third party suppliers. It aims to divert 95 percent of its operational waste from landfill by 2013, which is a huge logistics challenge.  The John Lewis Partnership’s website provides a large amount of information on its responsibilities towards the environment. Transport Similarly to manufacturing, tightening up on logistical planning for stock distribution will make savings on carbon emissions from haulage.  More accurate supply and demand analysis will mean less stock re-allocation after initial distribution, and better warehouse management will mean more efficient stock distribution.  UK grocery retailer Morrisons has introduced double-decked trailers to its haulage fleet and adjusted distribution logistics accordingly to reduce the number of kilometers travelled by the fleet.  Morrisons measures route planning efficiency in terms of cases moved per kilometre and has, over the last two years, increased the number of cases per kilometre by 12.7%.  See Morrisons Corporate Responsibility report for more information. IT IT infrastructure is often initially overlooked by businesses when considering environmental efficiency.  Datacentres and web servers often need to run 24/7 to handle both consumer orders and internal logistics, and this both requires a lot of energy and puts out a lot of heat.  Many businesses are lowering environmental impact by reducing IT system fragmentation in their offices, while an increasing number of businesses are outsourcing their datacenters to cloud-based services.  Using centralised datacenters reduces the power usage at smaller offices, while using cloud based services means the datacenters can be based in a more environmentally friendly location.  For example, Facebook is opening a massive datacentre in Sweden – close to the Arctic Circle – to reduce the need for artificial cooling methods.  In addition, moving to a cloud-based solution makes IT services more easily scaleable, reducing redundant IT systems that would still use energy.  In store, the UK’s Carbon Trust reports that on average, lighting accounts for 25% of a retailer’s electricity costs, and for grocery retailers, up to 50% of their electricity bill comes from refrigeration units.  On a smaller scale, retailers can invest in greener technologies in store and in their offices.  The report concludes that widely shared objectives of energy security, reduced emissions and continued economic growth are dependent on the development of a smart grid capable of delivering energy efficiency and demand response, as well as integrating renewable and variable sources of energy. The report is available to download from http://emeapressoffice.oracle.com/imagelibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=1766I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the report.   

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