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• New Feature in ODI 11.1.1.6: ODI for Big Data

  - by Julien Testut

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} By Ananth Tirupattur Starting with Oracle Data Integrator 11.1.1.6.0, ODI is offering a solution to process Big Data. This post provides an overview of this feature. With all the buzz around Big Data and before getting into the details of ODI for Big Data, I will provide a brief introduction to Big Data and Oracle Solution for Big Data. So, what is Big Data? Big data includes: structured data (this includes data from relation data stores, xml data stores), semi-structured data (this includes data from weblogs) unstructured data (this includes data from text blob, images) Traditionally, business decisions are based on the information gathered from transactional data. For example, transactional Data from CRM applications is fed to a decision system for analysis and decision making. Products such as ODI play a key role in enabling decision systems. However, with the emergence of massive amounts of semi-structured and unstructured data it is important for decision system to include them in the analysis to achieve better decision making capability. While there is an abundance of opportunities for business for gaining competitive advantages, process of Big Data has challenges. The challenges of processing Big Data include: Volume of data Velocity of data - The high Rate at which data is generated Variety of data In order to address these challenges and convert them into opportunities, we would need an appropriate framework, platform and the right set of tools. Hadoop is an open source framework which is highly scalable, fault tolerant system, for storage and processing large amounts of data. Hadoop provides 2 key services, distributed and reliable storage called Hadoop Distributed File System or HDFS and a framework for parallel data processing called Map-Reduce. Innovations in Hadoop and its related technology continue to rapidly evolve, hence therefore, it is highly recommended to follow information on the web to keep up with latest information. Oracle's vision is to provide a comprehensive solution to address the challenges faced by Big Data. Oracle is providing the necessary Hardware, software and tools for processing Big Data Oracle solution includes: Big Data Appliance Oracle NoSQL Database Cloudera distribution for Hadoop Oracle R Enterprise- R is a statistical package which is very popular among data scientists. ODI solution for Big Data Oracle Loader for Hadoop for loading data from Hadoop to Oracle. Further details can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/big-data-appliance/overview/index.html ODI Solution for Big Data: ODI’s goal is to minimize the need to understand the complexity of Hadoop framework and simplify the adoption of processing Big Data seamlessly in an enterprise. ODI is providing the capabilities for an integrated architecture for processing Big Data. This includes capability to load data in to Hadoop, process data in Hadoop and load data from Hadoop into Oracle. ODI is expanding its support for Big Data by providing the following out of the box Knowledge Modules (KMs). IKM File to Hive (LOAD DATA).Load unstructured data from File (Local file system or HDFS ) into Hive IKM Hive Control AppendTransform and validate structured data on Hive IKM Hive TransformTransform unstructured data on Hive IKM File/Hive to Oracle (OLH)Load processed data in Hive to Oracle RKM HiveReverse engineer Hive tables to generate models Using the Loading KM you can map files (local and HDFS files) to the corresponding Hive tables. For example, you can map weblog files categorized by date into a corresponding partitioned Hive table schema. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Using the Hive control Append KM you can validate and transform data in Hive. In the below example, two source Hive tables are joined and mapped to a target Hive table. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} The Hive Transform KM facilitates processing of semi-structured data in Hive. In the below example, the data from weblog is processed using a Perl script and mapped to target Hive table. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Using the Oracle Loader for Hadoop (OLH) KM you can load data from Hive table or HDFS to a corresponding table in Oracle. OLH is available as a standalone product. ODI greatly enhances OLH capability by generating the configuration and mapping files for OLH based on the configuration provided in the interface and KM options. ODI seamlessly invokes OLH when executing the scenario. In the below example, a HDFS file is mapped to a table in Oracle. Development and Deployment:The following diagram illustrates the development and deployment of ODI solution for Big Data. Using the ODI Studio on your development machine create and develop ODI solution for processing Big Data by connecting to a MySQL DB or Oracle database on a BDA machine or Hadoop cluster. Schedule the ODI scenarios to be executed on the ODI agent deployed on the BDA machine or Hadoop cluster. ODI Solution for Big Data provides several exciting new capabilities to facilitate the adoption of Big Data in an enterprise. You can find more information about the Oracle Big Data connectors on OTN. You can find an overview of all the new features introduced in ODI 11.1.1.6 in the following document: ODI 11.1.1.6 New Features Overview

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• Network Restructure Method for Double-NAT network

  - by Adrian

  Due to a series of poor network design decisions (mostly) made many years ago in order to save a few bucks here and there, I have a network that is decidedly sub-optimally architected. I'm looking for suggestions to improve this less-than-pleasant situation. We're a non-profit with a Linux-based IT department and a limited budget. (Note: None of the Windows equipment we have runs does anything that talks to the Internet nor do we have any Windows admins on staff.) Key points: We have a main office and about 12 remote sites that essentially double NAT their subnets with physically-segregated switches. (No VLANing and limited ability to do so with current switches) These locations have a "DMZ" subnet that are NAT'd on an identically assigned 10.0.0/24 subnet at each site. These subnets cannot talk to DMZs at any other location because we don't route them anywhere except between server and adjacent "firewall". Some of these locations have multiple ISP connections (T1, Cable, and/or DSLs) that we manually route using IP Tools in Linux. These firewalls all run on the (10.0.0/24) network and are mostly "pro-sumer" grade firewalls (Linksys, Netgear, etc.) or ISP-provided DSL modems. Connecting these firewalls (via simple unmanaged switches) is one or more servers that must be publically-accessible. Connected to the main office's 10.0.0/24 subnet are servers for email, tele-commuter VPN, remote office VPN server, primary router to the internal 192.168/24 subnets. These have to be access from specific ISP connections based on traffic type and connection source. All our routing is done manually or with OpenVPN route statements Inter-office traffic goes through the OpenVPN service in the main 'Router' server which has it's own NAT'ing involved. Remote sites only have one server installed at each site and cannot afford multiple servers due to budget constraints. These servers are all LTSP servers several 5-20 terminals. The 192.168.2/24 and 192.168.3/24 subnets are mostly but NOT entirely on Cisco 2960 switches that can do VLAN. The remainder are DLink DGS-1248 switches that I am not sure I trust well enough to use with VLANs. There is also some remaining internal concern about VLANs since only the senior networking staff person understands how it works. All regular internet traffic goes through the CentOS 5 router server which in turns NATs the 192.168/24 subnets to the 10.0.0.0/24 subnets according to the manually-configured routing rules that we use to point outbound traffic to the proper internet connection based on '-host' routing statements. I want to simplify this and ready All Of The Things for ESXi virtualization, including these public-facing services. Is there a no- or low-cost solution that would get rid of the Double-NAT and restore a little sanity to this mess so that my future replacement doesn't hunt me down? Basic Diagram for the main office: These are my goals: Public-facing Servers with interfaces on that middle 10.0.0/24 network to be moved in to 192.168.2/24 subnet on ESXi servers. Get rid of the double NAT and get our entire network on one single subnet. My understanding is that this is something we'll need to do under IPv6 anyway, but I think this mess is standing in the way.

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• Optimizing AES modes on Solaris for Intel Westmere

  - by danx

  Optimizing AES modes on Solaris for Intel Westmere Review AES is a strong method of symmetric (secret-key) encryption. It is a U.S. FIPS-approved cryptographic algorithm (FIPS 197) that operates on 16-byte blocks. AES has been available since 2001 and is widely used. However, AES by itself has a weakness. AES encryption isn't usually used by itself because identical blocks of plaintext are always encrypted into identical blocks of ciphertext. This encryption can be easily attacked with "dictionaries" of common blocks of text and allows one to more-easily discern the content of the unknown cryptotext. This mode of encryption is called "Electronic Code Book" (ECB), because one in theory can keep a "code book" of all known cryptotext and plaintext results to cipher and decipher AES. In practice, a complete "code book" is not practical, even in electronic form, but large dictionaries of common plaintext blocks is still possible. Here's a diagram of encrypting input data using AES ECB mode: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ AESKey-->(AES Encryption) AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | \/ \/ CipherTextOutput CipherTextOutput Block 1 Block 2 What's the solution to the same cleartext input producing the same ciphertext output? The solution is to further process the encrypted or decrypted text in such a way that the same text produces different output. This usually involves an Initialization Vector (IV) and XORing the decrypted or encrypted text. As an example, I'll illustrate CBC mode encryption: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ IV >----->(XOR) +------------->(XOR) +---> . . . . | | | | | | | | \/ | \/ | AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | | | | | | \/ | \/ | CipherTextOutput ------+ CipherTextOutput -------+ Block 1 Block 2 The steps for CBC encryption are: Start with a 16-byte Initialization Vector (IV), choosen randomly. XOR the IV with the first block of input plaintext Encrypt the result with AES using a user-provided key. The result is the first 16-bytes of output cryptotext. Use the cryptotext (instead of the IV) of the previous block to XOR with the next input block of plaintext Another mode besides CBC is Counter Mode (CTR). As with CBC mode, it also starts with a 16-byte IV. However, for subsequent blocks, the IV is just incremented by one. Also, the IV ix XORed with the AES encryption result (not the plain text input). Here's an illustration: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ AESKey-->(AES Encryption) AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | \/ \/ IV >----->(XOR) IV + 1 >---->(XOR) IV + 2 ---> . . . . | | | | \/ \/ CipherTextOutput CipherTextOutput Block 1 Block 2 Optimization Which of these modes can be parallelized? ECB encryption/decryption can be parallelized because it does more than plain AES encryption and decryption, as mentioned above. CBC encryption can't be parallelized because it depends on the output of the previous block. However, CBC decryption can be parallelized because all the encrypted blocks are known at the beginning. CTR encryption and decryption can be parallelized because the input to each block is known--it's just the IV incremented by one for each subsequent block. So, in summary, for ECB, CBC, and CTR modes, encryption and decryption can be parallelized with the exception of CBC encryption. How do we parallelize encryption? By interleaving. Usually when reading and writing data there are pipeline "stalls" (idle processor cycles) that result from waiting for memory to be loaded or stored to or from CPU registers. Since the software is written to encrypt/decrypt the next data block where pipeline stalls usually occurs, we can avoid stalls and crypt with fewer cycles. This software processes 4 blocks at a time, which ensures virtually no waiting ("stalling") for reading or writing data in memory. Other Optimizations Besides interleaving, other optimizations performed are Loading the entire key schedule into the 128-bit %xmm registers. This is done once for per 4-block of data (since 4 blocks of data is processed, when present). The following is loaded: the entire "key schedule" (user input key preprocessed for encryption and decryption). This takes 11, 13, or 15 registers, for AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256, respectively The input data is loaded into another %xmm register The same register contains the output result after encrypting/decrypting Using SSSE 4 instructions (AESNI). Besides the aesenc, aesenclast, aesdec, aesdeclast, aeskeygenassist, and aesimc AESNI instructions, Intel has several other instructions that operate on the 128-bit %xmm registers. Some common instructions for encryption are: pxor exclusive or (very useful), movdqu load/store a %xmm register from/to memory, pshufb shuffle bytes for byte swapping, pclmulqdq carry-less multiply for GCM mode Combining AES encryption/decryption with CBC or CTR modes processing. Instead of loading input data twice (once for AES encryption/decryption, and again for modes (CTR or CBC, for example) processing, the input data is loaded once as both AES and modes operations occur at in the same function Performance Everyone likes pretty color charts, so here they are. I ran these on Solaris 11 running on a Piketon Platform system with a 4-core Intel Clarkdale processor @3.20GHz. Clarkdale which is part of the Westmere processor architecture family. The "before" case is Solaris 11, unmodified. Keep in mind that the "before" case already has been optimized with hand-coded Intel AESNI assembly. The "after" case has combined AES-NI and mode instructions, interleaved 4 blocks at-a-time. « For the first table, lower is better (milliseconds). The first table shows the performance improvement using the Solaris encrypt(1) and decrypt(1) CLI commands. I encrypted and decrypted a 1/2 GByte file on /tmp (swap tmpfs). Encryption improved by about 40% and decryption improved by about 80%. AES-128 is slighty faster than AES-256, as expected. The second table shows more detail timings for CBC, CTR, and ECB modes for the 3 AES key sizes and different data lengths. » The results shown are the percentage improvement as shown by an internal PKCS#11 microbenchmark. And keep in mind the previous baseline code already had optimized AESNI assembly! The keysize (AES-128, 192, or 256) makes little difference in relative percentage improvement (although, of course, AES-128 is faster than AES-256). Larger data sizes show better improvement than 128-byte data. Availability This software is in Solaris 11 FCS. It is available in the 64-bit libcrypto library and the "aes" Solaris kernel module. You must be running hardware that supports AESNI (for example, Intel Westmere and Sandy Bridge, microprocessor architectures). The easiest way to determine if AES-NI is available is with the isainfo(1) command. For example, $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu No special configuration or setup is needed to take advantage of this software. Solaris libraries and kernel automatically determine if it's running on AESNI-capable machines and execute the correctly-tuned software for the current microprocessor. Summary Maximum throughput of AES cipher modes can be achieved by combining AES encryption with modes processing, interleaving encryption of 4 blocks at a time, and using Intel's wide 128-bit %xmm registers and instructions. References "Block cipher modes of operation", Wikipedia Good overview of AES modes (ECB, CBC, CTR, etc.) "Advanced Encryption Standard", Wikipedia "Current Modes" describes NIST-approved block cipher modes (ECB,CBC, CFB, OFB, CCM, GCM)

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• Massive Silverlight Giveaway! DevExpress , Syncfusion, Crypto Obfuscator and SL Spy!

  - by mbcrump

  Oh my, have we grown! Maybe I should change the name to Multiple Silverlight Giveaways. So far, my Silverlight giveaways have been such a success that I’m going to be able to give away more than one Silverlight product every month. Last month, we gave away 3 great products. 1) ComponentOne Silverlight Controls 2)  ComponentOne XAP Optimizer (with obfuscation) and 3) Silverlight Spy. This month, we will give away 4 great Silverlight products and have 4 different winners. This way the Silverlight community can grow with more than just one person winning all the prizes. This month we will be giving away: DevExpress Silverlight Controls – Over 50+ Silverlight Controls Syncfusion User Interface Edition - Create stunning line of business silverlight applications with a wide range of components including a high performance grid, docking manager, chart, gauge, scheduler and much more. Crypto Obfuscator – Works for all .NET including Silverlight/Windows Phone 7. Silverlight Spy – provides a license EVERY month for this giveaway. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of one of the products listed above! 4 winners will be announced on April 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. – Use Google Reader, email or whatever is best for you.  Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump . Register here: http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit each of the vendors sites because they made this possible. MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DevExpress Silverlight Controls Let’s take a quick look at some of the software that is provided in this giveaway. Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark for the DevExpress Silverlight Controls: The Live Demos of the Silverlight Controls is located here. Great Video Tutorials of the Silverlight Controls are here. One thing that I liked about the DevExpress is how easy it was to find demos of each control. After you install the controls the following Program Group appears complete with “demos” that include full-source.   So, the first question that you may ask is, “What is included?” Here is the official list below. I wanted to show several of the controls that I think developers will use the most. The Book – Very rich animation between switching pages. Very easy to add your own images and custom text. The Menu – This is another control that just looked great. You can easily add images to the menu items with a few lines of XAML. The Window / Dialog Box – You can use this control to make a very beautiful “Wizard” to help your users navigate between pages. This is useful in setup or installation. Calculator – This would be useful for any type of Banking app. Also a first that I’ve seen from a 3rd party Control company. DatePicker – This controls feels a lot smoother than the one provided by Microsoft. It also provides the ability to “Clear” the selection. Overall the DevExpress Silverlight Controls feature a lot of quality controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. If you win the contest you can simply enter your registration key and continue using the product without reinstalling. Syncfusion User Interface Edition Before we get started with the Syncfusion User Interface Edition, here is a couple of links to bookmark. The Live Demos can be found here. You can download a demo of it now at http://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/evalstart. After you install the Syncfusion, you can view the dashboard to run locally installed samples. You may also download the documentation to your local machine if needed. Since the name of the package is “User Interface Edition”, I decided to share several samples that struck me as “awesome”. Dashboard Gauges – I was very impressed with the various gauges they have included. The digital clock also looks very impressive. Diagram – The diagrams are also very easy to build. In the sample project below you can drag/drop the shapes onto the content pane. More complex lines like the Bezier lines are also easy to create using Syncfusion. Scheduling – Another strong component was the Scheduling with built-in support for Themes. Tools – If all of that wasn’t enough, it also comes with a nice pack of essential tools. Syncfusion has a nice variety of Silverlight Controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. Crypto Obfuscator The following feature set is what is important to me in an Obfuscator since I am a Silverlight/WP7 Developer: And thankfully this is what you get in Crypto Obfuscator. You can download a trial version right now if you want to go ahead and play with it. Let’s spend a few moments taking a look at the application. After you have installed Crypto Obfuscator you will see the following screen: After you click on Assemblies you have the option to add your .XAP file in: I went ahead and loaded my .xap file from a Silverlight Application. At this point, you can simply save your project and hit “Obfuscate” and your done. You don’t have to mess with any of the other settings if you don’t want too. Of course, you can change the settings and add obfuscation rules, watermarks and signing if you wish.  After Obfuscation, it looks like this in .NET Reflector: I was trying to browse through methods and it actually crashed Reflector. This confirms the level of protection the obfuscator is providing. If this were a commercial application that my team built, I would have a huge smile on my face right now. Crypto Obfuscator is a great product and I hope you will spend the time learning more about it. Silverlight Spy Silverlight Spy is a runtime inspector tool that will tell you pretty much everything that is going on with the application. Basically, you give it a URL that contains a Silverlight application and you can explore the element tree, events, xaml and so much more. This has already been reviewed on MichaelCrump.net. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win one of the four prizes available! Subscribe to my feed

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• Building dynamic OLAP data marts on-the-fly

  - by DrJohn

  At the forthcoming SQLBits conference, I will be presenting a session on how to dynamically build an OLAP data mart on-the-fly. This blog entry is intended to clarify exactly what I mean by an OLAP data mart, why you may need to build them on-the-fly and finally outline the steps needed to build them dynamically. In subsequent blog entries, I will present exactly how to implement some of the techniques involved. What is an OLAP data mart? In data warehousing parlance, a data mart is a subset of the overall corporate data provided to business users to meet specific business needs. Of course, the term does not specify the technology involved, so I coined the term "OLAP data mart" to identify a subset of data which is delivered in the form of an OLAP cube which may be accompanied by the relational database upon which it was built. To clarify, the relational database is specifically create and loaded with the subset of data and then the OLAP cube is built and processed to make the data available to the end-users via standard OLAP client tools. Why build OLAP data marts? Market research companies sell data to their clients to make money. To gain competitive advantage, market research providers like to "add value" to their data by providing systems that enhance analytics, thereby allowing clients to make best use of the data. As such, OLAP cubes have become a standard way of delivering added value to clients. They can be built on-the-fly to hold specific data sets and meet particular needs and then hosted on a secure intranet site for remote access, or shipped to clients' own infrastructure for hosting. Even better, they support a wide range of different tools for analytical purposes, including the ever popular Microsoft Excel. Extension Attributes: The Challenge One of the key challenges in building multiple OLAP data marts based on the same 'template' is handling extension attributes. These are attributes that meet the client's specific reporting needs, but do not form part of the standard template. Now clearly, these extension attributes have to come into the system via additional files and ultimately be added to relational tables so they can end up in the OLAP cube. However, processing these files and filling dynamically altered tables with SSIS is a challenge as SSIS packages tend to break as soon as the database schema changes. There are two approaches to this: (1) dynamically build an SSIS package in memory to match the new database schema using C#, or (2) have the extension attributes provided as name/value pairs so the file's schema does not change and can easily be loaded using SSIS. The problem with the first approach is the complexity of writing an awful lot of complex C# code. The problem of the second approach is that name/value pairs are useless to an OLAP cube; so they have to be pivoted back into a proper relational table somewhere in the data load process WITHOUT breaking SSIS. How this can be done will be part of future blog entry. What is involved in building an OLAP data mart? There are a great many steps involved in building OLAP data marts on-the-fly. The key point is that all the steps must be automated to allow for the production of multiple OLAP data marts per day (i.e. many thousands, each with its own specific data set and attributes). Now most of these steps have a great deal in common with standard data warehouse practices. The key difference is that the databases are all built to order. The only permanent database is the metadata database (shown in orange) which holds all the metadata needed to build everything else (i.e. client orders, configuration information, connection strings, client specific requirements and attributes etc.). The staging database (shown in red) has a short life: it is built, populated and then ripped down as soon as the OLAP Data Mart has been populated. In the diagram below, the OLAP data mart comprises the two blue components: the Data Mart which is a relational database and the OLAP Cube which is an OLAP database implemented using Microsoft Analysis Services (SSAS). The client may receive just the OLAP cube or both components together depending on their reporting requirements.  So, in broad terms the steps required to fulfil a client order are as follows: Step 1: Prepare metadata Create a set of database names unique to the client's order Modify all package connection strings to be used by SSIS to point to new databases and file locations. Step 2: Create relational databases Create the staging and data mart relational databases using dynamic SQL and set the database recovery mode to SIMPLE as we do not need the overhead of logging anything Execute SQL scripts to build all database objects (tables, views, functions and stored procedures) in the two databases Step 3: Load staging database Use SSIS to load all data files into the staging database in a parallel operation Load extension files containing name/value pairs. These will provide client-specific attributes in the OLAP cube. Step 4: Load data mart relational database Load the data from staging into the data mart relational database, again in parallel where possible Allocate surrogate keys and use SSIS to perform surrogate key lookup during the load of fact tables Step 5: Load extension tables & attributes Pivot the extension attributes from their native name/value pairs into proper relational tables Add the extension attributes to the views used by OLAP cube Step 6: Deploy & Process OLAP cube Deploy the OLAP database directly to the server using a C# script task in SSIS Modify the connection string used by the OLAP cube to point to the data mart relational database Modify the cube structure to add the extension attributes to both the data source view and the relevant dimensions Remove any standard attributes that not required Process the OLAP cube Step 7: Backup and drop databases Drop staging database as it is no longer required Backup data mart relational and OLAP database and ship these to the client's infrastructure Drop data mart relational and OLAP database from the build server Mark order complete Start processing the next order, ad infinitum. So my future blog posts and my forthcoming session at the SQLBits conference will all focus on some of the more interesting aspects of building OLAP data marts on-the-fly such as handling the load of extension attributes and how to dynamically alter the structure of an OLAP cube using C#.

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• External File Upload Optimizations for Windows Azure

  - by rgillen

  [Cross posted from here: http://rob.gillenfamily.net/post/External-File-Upload-Optimizations-for-Windows-Azure.aspx] I’m wrapping up a bit of the work we’ve been doing on data movement optimizations for cloud computing and the latest set of data yielded some interesting points I thought I’d share. The work done here is not really rocket science but may, in some ways, be slightly counter-intuitive and therefore seemed worthy of posting. Summary: for those who don’t like to read detailed posts or don’t have time, the synopsis is that if you are uploading data to Azure, block your data (even down to 1MB) and upload in parallel. Set your block size based on your source file size, but if you must choose a fixed value, use 1MB. Following the above will result in significant performance gains… upwards of 10x-24x and a reduction in overall file transfer time of upwards of 90% (eg, uploading a 1GB file averaged 46.37 minutes prior to optimizations and averaged 1.86 minutes afterwards). Detail: For those of you who want more detail, or think that the claims at the end of the preceding paragraph are over-reaching, what follows is information and code supporting these claims. As the title would indicate, these tests were run from our research facility pointing to the Azure cloud (specifically US North Central as it is physically closest to us) and do not represent intra-cloud results… we have performed intra-cloud tests and the overall results are similar in notion but the data rates are significantly different as well as the tipping points for the various block sizes… this will be detailed separately). We started by building a very simple console application that would loop through a directory and upload each file to Azure storage. This application used the shipping storage client library from the 1.1 version of the azure tools. The only real variation from the client library is that we added code to collect and record the duration (in ms) and size (in bytes) for each file transferred. The code is available here. We then created a directory that had a collection of files for the following sizes: 2KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 512KB, 1MB, 5MB, 10MB, 25MB, 50MB, 100MB, 250MB, 500MB, 750MB, and 1GB (50 files for each size listed). These files contained randomly-generated binary data and do not benefit from compression (a separate discussion topic). Our file generation tool is available here. The baseline was established by running the application described above against the directory containing all of the data files. This application uploads the files in a random order so as to avoid transferring all of the files of a given size sequentially and thereby spreading the affects of periodic Internet delays across the collection of results.  We then ran some scripts to split the resulting data and generate some reports. The raw data collected for our non-optimized tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. For each file size, we calculated the average upload time (and standard deviation) and the average transfer rate (and standard deviation). As you likely are aware, transferring data across the Internet is susceptible to many transient delays which can cause anomalies in the resulting data. It is for this reason that we randomized the order of source file processing as well as executed the tests 50x for each file size. We expect that these steps will yield a sufficiently balanced set of results. Once the baseline was collected and analyzed, we updated the test harness application with some methods to split the source file into user-defined block sizes and then to upload those blocks in parallel (using the PutBlock() method of Azure storage). The parallelization was handled by simply relying on the Parallel Extensions to .NET to provide a Parallel.For loop (see linked source for specific implementation details in Program.cs, line 173 and following… less than 100 lines total). Once all of the blocks were uploaded, we called PutBlockList() to assemble/commit the file in Azure storage. For each block transferred, the MD5 was calculated and sent ensuring that the bits that arrived matched was was intended. The timer for the blocked/parallelized transfer method wraps the entire process (source file splitting, block transfer, MD5 validation, file committal). A diagram of the process is as follows: We then tested the affects of blocking & parallelizing the transfers by running the updated application against the same source set and did a parameter sweep on the block size including 256KB, 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, and 4MB (our assumption was that anything lower than 256KB wasn’t worth the trouble and 4MB is the maximum size of a block supported by Azure). The raw data for the parallel tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. This data was processed and then compared against the single-threaded / non-optimized transfer numbers and the results were encouraging. The Excel version of the results is available here. Two semi-obvious points need to be made prior to reviewing the data. The first is that if the block size is larger than the source file size you will end up with a “negative optimization” due to the overhead of attempting to block and parallelize. The second is that as the files get smaller, the clock-time cost of blocking and parallelizing (overhead) is more apparent and can tend towards negative optimizations. For this reason (and is supported in the raw data provided in the linked worksheet) the charts and dialog below ignore source file sizes less than 1MB. (click chart for full size image) The chart above illustrates some interesting points about the results: When the block size is smaller than the source file, performance increases but as the block size approaches and then passes the source file size, you see decreasing benefit to the point of negative gains (see the values for the 1MB file size) For some of the moderately-sized source files, small blocks (256KB) are best As the size of the source file gets larger (see values for 50MB and up), the smallest block size is not the most efficient (presumably due, at least in part, to the increased number of blocks, increased number of individual transfer requests, and reassembly/committal costs). Once you pass the 250MB source file size, the difference in rate for 1MB to 4MB blocks is more-or-less constant The 1MB block size gives the best average improvement (~16x) but the optimal approach would be to vary the block size based on the size of the source file.    (click chart for full size image) The above is another view of the same data as the prior chart just with the axis changed (x-axis represents file size and plotted data shows improvement by block size). It again highlights the fact that the 1MB block size is probably the best overall size but highlights the benefits of some of the other block sizes at different source file sizes. This last chart shows the change in total duration of the file uploads based on different block sizes for the source file sizes. Nothing really new here other than this view of the data highlights the negative affects of poorly choosing a block size for smaller files.   Summary What we have found so far is that blocking your file uploads and uploading them in parallel results in significant performance improvements. Further, utilizing extension methods and the Task Parallel Library (.NET 4.0) make short work of altering the shipping client library to provide this functionality while minimizing the amount of change to existing applications that might be using the client library for other interactions.   Related Resources Source code for upload test application Source code for random file generator ODatas feed of raw data from non-optimized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets 2KB Uploads 32KB Uploads 64KB Uploads 128KB Uploads 256KB Uploads 512KB Uploads 1MB Uploads 5MB Uploads 10MB Uploads 25MB Uploads 50MB Uploads 100MB Uploads 250MB Uploads 500MB Uploads 750MB Uploads 1GB Uploads Raw Data OData feeds of raw data from blocked/parallelized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets Raw Data 256KB Blocks 512KB Blocks 1MB Blocks 2MB Blocks 4MB Blocks Excel worksheet showing summarizations and comparisons

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• Building an OpenStack Cloud for Solaris Engineering, Part 1

  - by Dave Miner

  One of the signature features of the recently-released Solaris 11.2 is the OpenStack cloud computing platform.  Over on the Solaris OpenStack blog the development team is publishing lots of details about our version of OpenStack Havana as well as some tips on specific features, and I highly recommend reading those to get a feel for how we've leveraged Solaris's features to build a top-notch cloud platform.  In this and some subsequent posts I'm going to look at it from a different perspective, which is that of the enterprise administrator deploying an OpenStack cloud.  But this won't be just a theoretical perspective: I've spent the past several months putting together a deployment of OpenStack for use by the Solaris engineering organization, and now that it's in production we'll share how we built it and what we've learned so far.In the Solaris engineering organization we've long had dedicated lab systems dispersed among our various sites and a home-grown reservation tool for developers to reserve those systems; various teams also have private systems for specific testing purposes.  But as a developer, it can still be difficult to find systems you need, especially since most Solaris changes require testing on both SPARC and x86 systems before they can be integrated.  We've added virtual resources over the years as well in the form of LDOMs and zones (both traditional non-global zones and the new kernel zones).  Fundamentally, though, these were all still deployed in the same model: our overworked lab administrators set up pre-configured resources and we then reserve them.  Sounds like pretty much every traditional IT shop, right?  Which means that there's a lot of opportunity for efficiencies from greater use of virtualization and the self-service style of cloud computing.  As we were well into development of OpenStack on Solaris, I was recruited to figure out how we could deploy it to both provide more (and more efficient) development and test resources for the organization as well as a test environment for Solaris OpenStack.At this point, let's acknowledge one fact: deploying OpenStack is hard.  It's a very complex piece of software that makes use of sophisticated networking features and runs as a ton of service daemons with myriad configuration files.  The web UI, Horizon, doesn't often do a good job of providing detailed errors.  Even the command-line clients are not as transparent as you'd like, though at least you can turn on verbose and debug messaging and often get some clues as to what to look for, though it helps if you're good at reading JSON structure dumps.  I'd already learned all of this in doing a single-system Grizzly-on-Linux deployment for the development team to reference when they were getting started so I at least came to this job with some appreciation for what I was taking on.  The good news is that both we and the community have done a lot to make deployment much easier in the last year; probably the easiest approach is to download the OpenStack Unified Archive from OTN to get your hands on a single-system demonstration environment.  I highly recommend getting started with something like it to get some understanding of OpenStack before you embark on a more complex deployment.  For some situations, it may in fact be all you ever need.  If so, you don't need to read the rest of this series of posts!In the Solaris engineering case, we need a lot more horsepower than a single-system cloud can provide.  We need to support both SPARC and x86 VM's, and we have hundreds of developers so we want to be able to scale to support thousands of VM's, though we're going to build to that scale over time, not immediately.  We also want to be able to test both Solaris 11 updates and a release such as Solaris 12 that's under development so that we can work out any upgrade issues before release.  One thing we don't have is a requirement for extremely high availability, at least at this point.  We surely don't want a lot of down time, but we can tolerate scheduled outages and brief (as in an hour or so) unscheduled ones.  Thus I didn't need to spend effort on trying to get high availability everywhere.The diagram below shows our initial deployment design.  We're using six systems, most of which are x86 because we had more of those immediately available.  All of those systems reside on a management VLAN and are connected with a two-way link aggregation of 1 Gb links (we don't yet have 10 Gb switching infrastructure in place, but we'll get there).  A separate VLAN provides "public" (as in connected to the rest of Oracle's internal network) addresses, while we use VxLANs for the tenant networks. One system is more or less the control node, providing the MySQL database, RabbitMQ, Keystone, and the Nova API and scheduler as well as the Horizon console.  We're curious how this will perform and I anticipate eventually splitting at least the database off to another node to help simplify upgrades, but at our present scale this works.I had a couple of systems with lots of disk space, one of which was already configured as the Automated Installation server for the lab, so it's just providing the Glance image repository for OpenStack.  The other node with lots of disks provides Cinder block storage service; we also have a ZFS Storage Appliance that will help back-end Cinder in the near future, I just haven't had time to get it configured in yet.There's a separate system for Neutron, which is our Elastic Virtual Switch controller and handles the routing and NAT for the guests.  We don't have any need for firewalling in this deployment so we're not doing so.  We presently have only two tenants defined, one for the Solaris organization that's funding this cloud, and a separate tenant for other Oracle organizations that would like to try out OpenStack on Solaris.  Each tenant has one VxLAN defined initially, but we can of course add more.  Right now we have just a single /24 network for the floating IP's, once we get demand up to where we need more then we'll add them.Finally, we have started with just two compute nodes; one is an x86 system, the other is an LDOM on a SPARC T5-2.  We'll be adding more when demand reaches the level where we need them, but as we're still ramping up the user base it's less work to manage fewer nodes until then.My next post will delve into the details of building this OpenStack cloud's infrastructure, including how we're using various Solaris features such as Automated Installation, IPS packaging, SMF, and Puppet to deploy and manage the nodes.  After that we'll get into the specifics of configuring and running OpenStack itself.

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• Hosting and consuming WCF services without configuration files

  - by martinsj

  In this post, I'll demonstrate how to configure both the host and the client in code without the need for configuring services i the <system.serviceModel> section of the config-file. In fact, you don't need a  <system.serviceModel> section at all. What you'll do need (and want) sometimes, is the Uri of the service in the configuration file. Configuring the Uri of the the service is actually only needed for the client or when self-hosting, not when hosting in IIS. So, exactly What do we need to configure? The binding type and the binding constraints The metadata behavior Debug behavior You can of course configure even more, and even more if you want to, WCF is after all the king of configuration… As an example I'll be hosting and consuming a service that removes most of the default constraints for WCF-services, using a BasicHttpBinding. Of course, in regards to security, it is probably better to have some constraints on the server, but this is only a demonstration. The ServerConfig class in the code beneath is a static helper class that will be used in the examples. In this post, I’ll be using this helper-class for all configuration, for both the server and the client. In WCF, the  client and the server have both their own WCF-configuration. With this piece of code, they will be sharing the same configuration. 1: public static class ServiceConfig 2: { 3: public static Binding DefaultBinding 4: { 5: get 6: { 7: var binding = new BasicHttpBinding(); 8: Configure(binding); 9: return binding; 10: } 11: } 12:  13: public static void Configure(HttpBindingBase binding) 14: { 15: if (binding == null) 16: { 17: throw new ArgumentException("Argument 'binding' cannot be null. Cannot configure binding."); 18: } 19:  20: binding.SendTimeout = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 30, 0); // 30 minute timeout 21: binding.MaxBufferSize = Int32.MaxValue; 22: binding.MaxBufferPoolSize = 2147483647; 23: binding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = Int32.MaxValue; 24: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxArrayLength = Int32.MaxValue; 25: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxBytesPerRead = Int32.MaxValue; 26: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxDepth = Int32.MaxValue; 27: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxNameTableCharCount = Int32.MaxValue; 28: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxStringContentLength = Int32.MaxValue; 29: } 30:  31: public static ServiceMetadataBehavior ServiceMetadataBehavior 32: { 33: get 34: { 35: return new ServiceMetadataBehavior 36: { 37: HttpGetEnabled = true, 38: MetadataExporter = {PolicyVersion = PolicyVersion.Policy15} 39: }; 40: } 41: } 42:  43: public static ServiceDebugBehavior ServiceDebugBehavior 44: { 45: get 46: { 47: var smb = new ServiceDebugBehavior(); 48: Configure(smb); 49: return smb; 50: } 51: } 52:  53:  54: public static void Configure(ServiceDebugBehavior behavior) 55: { 56: if (behavior == null) 57: { 58: throw new ArgumentException("Argument 'behavior' cannot be null. Cannot configure debug behavior."); 59: } 60: 61: behavior.IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true; 62: } 63: } Configuring the server There are basically two ways to host a WCF service, in IIS and self-hosting. When hosting a WCF service in a production environment using SOA architecture, you'll be most likely hosting it in IIS. When testing the service in integration tests, it's very handy to be able to self-host services in the unit-tests. In fact, you can share the the WCF configuration for self-hosted services and services hosted in IIS. And that is exactly what you want to do, testing the same configurations for test and production environments.   Configuring when Self-hosting When self-hosting, in order to start the service, you'll have to instantiate the ServiceHost class, configure the  service and open it. 1: // Create the service-host. 2: var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(MyService), endpoint); 3:  4: // Configure the binding 5: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IMyService), ServiceConfig.DefaultBinding, endpoint); 6:  7: // Configure metadata behavior 8: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(ServiceConfig.ServiceMetadataBehavior); 9:  10: // Configure debgug behavior 11: ServiceConfig.Configure((ServiceDebugBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors[typeof(ServiceDebugBehavior)]); 12: 13: // Start listening to the service 14: host.Open(); 15:  Configuring when hosting in IIS When you create a WCF service application with the wizard in Visual Studio, you'll end up with bits and pieces of code in order to get the service running: Svc-file with codebehind. A interface to the service Web.config In order to get rid of the configuration in the <system.serviceModel> section, which the wizard has generated for us, we must tell the service that we have a factory that will create the service for us. We do this by changing the markup for the svc-file: 1: <%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="Namespace.MyService" Factory="Namespace.ServiceHostFactory" %> The markup tells IIS that we have a factory called ServiceHostFactory for this service. The service factory has a method we can override which will be called when someone asks IIS for the service. There are overloads we can override: 1: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase CreateServiceHost(string constructorString, Uri[] baseAddresses) 2: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) 3:  In this example, we'll be using the last one, so our implementation looks like this: 1: public class ServiceHostFactory : System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceHostFactory 2: { 3:  4: protected override System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) 5: { 6: var host = base.CreateServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddresses); 7: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(ServiceConfig.ServiceMetadataBehavior); 8: ServiceConfig.Configure((ServiceDebugBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors[typeof(ServiceDebugBehavior)]); 9: return host; 10: } 11: } 12:  1: public class ServiceHostFactory : System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceHostFactory 2: { 3: 4: protected override System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) 5: { 6: var host = base.CreateServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddresses); 7: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(ServiceConfig.ServiceMetadataBehavior); 8: ServiceConfig.Configure((ServiceDebugBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors[typeof(ServiceDebugBehavior)]); 9: return host; 10: } 11: } 12: As you can see, we are using the same configuration helper we used when self-hosting. Now, when you have a factory, the <system.serviceModel> section of the configuration can be removed, because the section will be ignored when the service has a custom factory. If you want to configure something else in the config-file, one could configure in some other section.   Configuring the client Microsoft has helpfully created a ChannelFactory class in order to create a proxy client. When using this approach, you don't have generate those awfull proxy classes for the client. If you share the contracts with the server in it's own assembly like in the layer diagram under, you can share the same piece of code. The contracts in WCF are the interface to the service and if any, the datacontracts (custom types) the service depends on. Using the ChannelFactory with our configuration helper-class is very simple: 1: var identity = EndpointIdentity.CreateDnsIdentity("localhost"); 2: var endpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(endPoint, identity); 3: var factory = new ChannelFactory<IMyService>(DeployServiceConfig.DefaultBinding, endpointAddress); 4: using (var myService = new factory.CreateChannel()) 5: { 6: myService.Hello(); 7: } 8: factory.Close();   Happy configuration!

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• Introduction to Human Workflow 11g

  - by agiovannetti

  Human Workflow is a component of SOA Suite just like BPEL, Mediator, Business Rules, etc. The Human Workflow component allows you to incorporate human intervention in a business process. You can use Human Workflow to create a business process that requires a manager to approve purchase orders greater than $10,000; or a business process that handles article reviews in which a group of reviewers need to vote/approve an article before it gets published. Human Workflow can handle the task assignment and routing as well as the generation of notifications to the participants. There are three common patterns or usages of Human Workflow: 1) Approval Scenarios: manage documents and other transactional data through approval chains . For example: approve expense report, vacation approval, hiring approval, etc. 2) Reviews by multiple users or groups: group collaboration and review of documents or proposals. For example, processing a sales quote which is subject to review by multiple people. 3) Case Management: workflows around work management or case management. For example, processing a service request. This could be routed to various people who all need to modify the task. It may also incorporate ad hoc routing which is unknown at design time. SOA 11g Human Workflow includes the following features: Assignment and routing of tasks to the correct users or groups. Deadlines, escalations, notifications, and other features required for ensuring the timely performance of a task. Presentation of tasks to end users through a variety of mechanisms, including a Worklist application. Organization, filtering, prioritization and other features required for end users to productively perform their tasks. Reports, reassignments, load balancing and other features required by supervisors and business owners to manage the performance of tasks. Human Workflow Architecture The Human Workflow component is divided into 3 modules: the service interface, the task definition and the client interface module. The Service Interface handles the interaction with BPEL and other components. The Client Interface handles the presentation of task data through clients like the Worklist application, portals and notification channels. The task definition module is in charge of managing the lifecycle of a task. Who should get the task assigned? What should happen next with the task? When must the task be completed? Should the task be escalated?, etc Stages and Participants When you create a Human Task you need to specify how the task is assigned and routed. The first step is to define the stages and participants. A stage is just a logical group. A participant can be a user, a group of users or an application role. The participants indicate the type of assignment and routing that will be performed. Stages can be sequential or in parallel. You can combine them to create any usage you require. See diagram below: Assignment and Routing There are different ways a task can be assigned and routed: Single Approver: task is assigned to a single user, group or role. For example, a vacation request is assigned to a manager. If the manager approves or rejects the request, the employee is notified with the decision. If the task is assigned to a group then once one of managers acts on it, the task is completed. Parallel : task is assigned to a set of people that must work in parallel. This is commonly used for voting. For example, a task gets approved once 50% of the participants approve it. You can also set it up to be a unanimous vote. Serial : participants must work in sequence. The most common scenario for this is management chain escalation. FYI (For Your Information) : task is assigned to participants who can view it, add comments and attachments, but can not modify or complete the task. Task Actions The following is the list of actions that can be performed on a task: Claim : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, then the task must be claimed first to be able to act on it. Escalate : if the participant is not able to complete a task, he/she can escalate it. The task is reassigned to his/her manager (up one level in a hierarchy). Pushback : the task is sent back to the previous assignee. Reassign :if the participant is a manager, he/she can delegate a task to his/her reports. Release : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, it can be released if the user who claimed the task cannot complete the task. Any of the other assignees can claim and complete the task. Request Information and Submit Information : use when the participant needs to supply more information or to request more information from the task creator or any of the previous assignees. Suspend and Resume :if a task is not relevant, it can be suspended. A suspension is indefinite. It does not expire until Resume is used to resume working on the task. Withdraw : if the creator of a task does not want to continue with it, for example, he wants to cancel a vacation request, he can withdraw the task. The business process determines what happens next. Renew : if a task is about to expire, the participant can renew it. The task expiration date is extended one week. Notifications Human Workflow provides a mechanism for sending notifications to participants to alert them of changes on a task. Notifications can be sent via email, telephone voice message, instant messaging (IM) or short message service (SMS). Notifications can be sent when the task status changes to any of the following: Assigned/renewed/delegated/reassigned/escalated Completed Error Expired Request Info Resume Suspended Added/Updated comments and/or attachments Updated Outcome Withdraw Other Actions (e.g. acquiring a task) Here is an example of an email notification: Worklist Application Oracle BPM Worklist application is the default user interface included in SOA Suite. It allows users to access and act on tasks that have been assigned to them. For example, from the Worklist application, a loan agent can review loan applications or a manager can approve employee vacation requests. Through the Worklist Application users can: Perform authorized actions on tasks, acquire and check out shared tasks, define personal to-do tasks and define subtasks. Filter tasks view based on various criteria. Work with standard work queues, such as high priority tasks, tasks due soon and so on. Work queues allow users to create a custom view to group a subset of tasks in the worklist, for example, high priority tasks, tasks due in 24 hours, expense approval tasks and more. Define custom work queues. Gain proxy access to part of another user's tasks. Define custom vacation rules and delegation rules. Enable group owners to define task dispatching rules for shared tasks. Collect a complete workflow history and audit trail. Use digital signatures for tasks. Run reports like Unattended tasks, Tasks productivity, etc. Here is a screenshoot of what the Worklist Application looks like. On the right hand side you can see the tasks that have been assigned to the user and the task's detail. References Introduction to SOA Suite 11g Human Workflow Webcast Note 1452937.2 Human Workflow Information Center Using the Human Workflow Service Component 11.1.1.6 Human Workflow Samples Human Workflow APIs Java Docs

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• Oracle B2B - Synchronous Request Reply

  - by cdwright

  Introduction So first off, let me say I didn't create this demo (although I did modify it some). I got it from a member of the B2B development technical staff. Since it came with only a simple readme file, I thought I would take some time and write a more detailed explanation about how it works. Beginning with Oracle SOA Suite PS5 (11.1.1.6), B2B supports synchronous request reply over http using the b2b/syncreceiver servlet. I’m attaching the demo to this blog which includes a SOA composite archive that needs to be deployed using JDeveloper, a B2B repository with two agreements that need to be deployed using the B2B console, and a test xml file that gets sent to the b2b/syncreceiver servlet using your favorite SOAP test tool (I'm using Firefox Poster here). You can download the zip file containing the demo here. The demo works by sending the sample xml request file (req.xml) to http://<b2bhost>:8001/b2b/syncreceiver using the SOAP test tool.  The syncreceiver servlet keeps the socket connection open between itself and the test tool so that it can synchronously send the reply message back. When B2B receives the inbound request message, it is passed to the SOA composite through the default B2B Fabric binding. A simple reply is created in BPEL and returned to B2B which then sends the message back to the test tool using that same socket connection. I’ll show you the B2B configuration first, then we’ll look at the soa composite. Configuring B2B No additional configuration necessary in order to use the syncreceiver servlet. It is already running when you start SOA. After importing the GC_SyncReqRep.zip repository file into B2B, you’ll have the typical GlobalChips host trading partner and the Acme remote trading partner. Document Management The repository contains two very simple custom XML document definitions called Orders and OrdersResponse. In order to determine the trading partner agreement needed to process the inbound Orders document, you need to know two things about it; what is it and where it came from. So let’s look at how B2B identifies the appropriate document definition for the message. The XSD’s for these two document definitions themselves are not particularly interesting. Whenever you're dealing with custom XML documents, B2B identifies the appropriate document definition for each XML message using an XPath Identification Expression. The expression is entered for each of these document definitions under the document administration tab in the B2B console. The full XPATH expression for the Orders document is  //*[local-name()='shiporder']/*[local-name()='shipto']/*[local-name()='name']/text(). You can see this path in the XSD diagram below and how it uniquely identifies this message. The OrdersReponse document is identified in the same way. The XPath expression for it is //*[local-name()='Response']/*[local-name()='Status']/text(). You can see how it’s path differs uniquely identifying the reply from the request. Trading Partner Profile The trading partner profiles are very simple too. For GlobalChips, a generic identifier is being used to identify the sender of the response document using the host trading partner name. For Acme, a generic identifier is also being used to identify the sender of the inbound request using the remote trading partner name. The document types are added for the remote trading partner as usual. So the remote trading partner Acme is the sender of the Orders document, and it is the receiver of the OrdersResponse document. For the remote trading partner only, there needs to be a dummy channel which gets used in the outbound response agreement. The channel is not actually used. It is just a necessary place holder that needs to be there when creating the agreement. Trading Partner Agreement The agreements are equally simple. There is no validation and translation is not an option for a custom XML document type. For the InboundAgreement (request) the document definition is set to OrdersDef. In the Agreement Parameters section the generic identifiers have been added for the host and remote trading partners. That’s all that is needed for the inbound transaction. For the OutboundAgreement (response), the document definition is set to OrdersResponseDef and the generic identifiers for the two trading partners are added. The remote trading partner dummy delivery channel is also added to the agreement. SOA Composite Import the SOA composite archive into JDeveloper as an EJB JAR file. Open the composite and you should have a project that looks like this. In the composite, open the b2bInboundSyncSvc exposed service and advance through the setup wizard. Select your Application Server Connection and advance to the Operations window. Notice here that the B2B binding is set to Receive. It is not set for Synchronous Request Reply. Continue advancing through the wizard as you normally would and select finish at the end. Now open BPELProcess1 in the composite. The BPEL process is set as a Synchronous Request Reply as you can see below. The while loop is there just to give the process something to do. The actual reply message is prepared in the assignResponseValues assignment followed by an Invoke of the B2B binding. Open the replyResponse Invoke and go to the properties tab. You’ll see that the fromTradingPartnerId, toTradingPartner, documentTypeName, and documentProtocolRevision properties have been set. Testing the Configuration To test the configuration, I used Firefox Poster. Enter the URL for the b2b/syncreceiver servlet and browse for the req.xml file that contains the test request message. In the Headers tab, add the property ‘from’ and give it the value ‘Acme’. This is how B2B will know where the message is coming from and it will use that information along with the document type name to find the right trading partner agreement. Now post the message. You should get back a response with a status of ‘200 OK’. That’s all there is to it.

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• iptables rule(s) to send openvpn traffic from clients over an sshuttle tunnel?

  - by Sam Martin

  I have an Ubuntu 12.04 box with OpenVPN. The VPN is working as expected -- clients can connect, browse the Web, etc. The OpenVPN server IP is 10.8.0.1 on tun0. On that same box, I can use sshuttle to tunnel into another network to access a Web server on 10.10.0.9. sshuttle does its magic using the following iptables commands: iptables -t nat -N sshuttle-12300 iptables -t nat -F sshuttle-12300 iptables -t nat -I OUTPUT 1 -j sshuttle-12300 iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING 1 -j sshuttle-12300 iptables -t nat -A sshuttle-12300 -j REDIRECT --dest 10.10.0.0/24 -p tcp --to-ports 12300 -m ttl ! --ttl 42 iptables -t nat -A sshuttle-12300 -j RETURN --dest 127.0.0.0/8 -p tcp Is it possible to forward traffic from OpenVPN clients over the sshuttle tunnel to the remote Web server? I'd ultimately like to be able to set up any complicated tunneling on the server, and have relatively "dumb" clients (iPad, etc.) be able to access the remote servers via OpenVPN. Below is a basic diagram of the scenario: [Edit: added output from the OpenVPN box] $ sudo iptables -nL -v -t nat Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT 1498 packets, 252K bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 1512 253K sshuttle-12300 all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 322 packets, 58984 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 584 packets, 43241 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 587 43421 sshuttle-12300 all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 Chain POSTROUTING (policy ACCEPT 589 packets, 43595 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 1175 76298 MASQUERADE all -- * eth0 10.8.0.0/24 0.0.0.0/0 Chain sshuttle-12300 (2 references) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 17 1076 REDIRECT tcp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 10.10.0.0/24 TTL match TTL != 42 redir ports 12300 0 0 RETURN tcp -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 127.0.0.0/8 $ sudo iptables -nL -v -t filter Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 97493 packets, 30M bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 131K 109M ACCEPT all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED 1370 89160 ACCEPT all -- * * 10.8.0.0/24 0.0.0.0/0 0 0 REJECT all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 reject-with icmp-port-unreachable [Edit 2: more OpenVPN server output] $ netstat -r Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface default 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 10.8.0.0 10.8.0.2 255.255.255.0 UG 0 0 0 tun0 10.8.0.2 * 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 tun0 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 [Edit 3: still more debug output] IP forwarding appears to be enabled correctly on the OpenVPN server: # find /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/ -name forwarding -ls -execdir cat {} \; 18926 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 5 13:31 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/forwarding 1 18954 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 5 13:31 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/default/forwarding 1 18978 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 5 13:31 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth0/forwarding 1 19003 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 5 13:31 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/lo/forwarding 1 19028 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 5 13:31 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/tun0/forwarding 1 Client routing table: $ netstat -r Routing tables Internet: Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire 0/1 10.8.0.5 UGSc 8 48 tun0 default 192.168.1.1 UGSc 2 1652 en1 10.8.0.1/32 10.8.0.5 UGSc 1 0 tun0 10.8.0.5 10.8.0.6 UHr 13 0 tun0 10.10.0/24 10.8.0.5 UGSc 0 0 tun0 <snip> Traceroute from client: $ traceroute 10.10.0.9 traceroute to 10.10.0.9 (10.10.0.9), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 10.8.0.1 (10.8.0.1) 5.403 ms 1.173 ms 1.086 ms 2 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 4.693 ms 2.110 ms 1.990 ms 3 l100.my-verizon-garbage (client-ext-ip) 7.453 ms 7.089 ms 6.248 ms 4 * * * 5 10.10.0.9 (10.10.0.9) 14.915 ms !N * 6.620 ms !N

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• Notes on implementing Visual Studio 2010 Navigate To

  - by cyberycon

  One of the many neat functions added to Visual Studio in VS 2010 was the Navigate To feature. You can find it by clicking Edit, Navigate To, or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl, (yes, that's control plus the comma key). This pops up the Navigate To dialog that looks like this: As you type, Navigate To starts searching through a number of different search providers for your term. The entries in the list change as you type, with most providers doing some kind of fuzzy or at least substring matching. If you have C#, C++ or Visual Basic projects in your solution, all symbols defined in those projects are searched. There's also a file search provider, which displays all matching filenames from projects in the current solution as well. And, if you have a Visual Studio package of your own, you can implement a provider too. Micro Focus (where I work) provide the Visual COBOL language inside Visual Studio (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ef9bc810-c133-4581-9429-b01420a9ea40 ), and we wanted to provide this functionality too. This post provides some notes on the things I discovered mainly through trial and error, but also with some kind help from devs inside Microsoft. The expectation of Navigate To is that it searches across the whole solution, not just the current project. So in our case, we wanted to search for all COBOL symbols inside all of our Visual COBOL projects inside the solution. So first of all, here's the Microsoft documentation on Navigate To: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee844862.aspx . It's the reference information on the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Language.NavigateTo.Interfaces Namespace, and it lists all the interfaces you will need to implement to create your own Navigate To provider. Navigate To uses Visual Studio's latest mechanism for integrating external functionality and services, Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). MEF components don't require any registration with COM or any other registry entries to be found by Visual Studio. Visual Studio looks in several well-known locations for manifest files (extension.vsixmanifest). It then uses reflection to scan for MEF attributes on classes in the assembly to determine which functionality the assembly provides. MEF itself is actually part of the .NET framework, and you can learn more about it here: http://mef.codeplex.com/. To get started with Visual Studio and MEF you could do worse than look at some of the editor examples on the VSX page http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vsx . I've also written a small application to help with switching between development and production MEF assemblies, which you can find on Codeproject: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/MEF_Switch.aspx. The Navigate To interfaces Back to Navigate To, and summarizing the MSDN reference documentation, you need to implement the following interfaces: INavigateToItemProviderFactoryThis is Visual Studio's entry point to your Navigate To implementation, and you must decorate your implementation with the following MEF export attribute: [Export(typeof(INavigateToItemProviderFactory))]  INavigateToItemProvider Your INavigateToItemProviderFactory needs to return your implementation of INavigateToItemProvider. This class implements StartSearch() and StopSearch(). StartSearch() is the guts of your provider, and we'll come back to it in a minute. This object also needs to implement IDisposeable(). INavigateToItemDisplayFactory Your INavigateToItemProvider hands back NavigateToItems to the NavigateTo framework. But to give you good control over what appears in the NavigateTo dialog box, these items will be handed back to your INavigateToItemDisplayFactory, which must create objects implementing INavigateToItemDisplay  INavigateToItemDisplay Each of these objects represents one result in the Navigate To dialog box. As well as providing the description and name of the item, this object also has a NavigateTo() method that should be capable of displaying the item in an editor when invoked. Carrying out the search The lifecycle of your INavigateToItemProvider is the same as that of the Navigate To dialog. This dialog is modal, which makes your implementation a little easier because you know that the user can't be changing things in editors and the IDE while this dialog is up. But the Navigate To dialog DOES NOT run on the main UI thread of the IDE – so you need to be aware of that if you want to interact with editors or other parts of the IDE UI. When the user invokes the Navigate To dialog, your INavigateToItemProvider gets sent a TryCreateNavigateToItemProvider() message. Instantiate your INavigateToItemProvider and hand this back. The sequence diagram below shows what happens next. Your INavigateToItemProvider will get called with StartSearch(), and passed an INavigateToCallback. StartSearch() is an asynchronous request – you must return from this method as soon as possible, and conduct your search on a separate thread. For each match to the search term, instantiate a NavigateToItem object and send it to INavigateToCallback.AddItem(). But as the user types in the Search Terms field, NavigateTo will invoke your StartSearch() method repeatedly with the changing search term. When you receive the next StartSearch() message, you have to abandon your current search, and start a new one. You can't rely on receiving a StopSearch() message every time. Finally, when the Navigate To dialog box is closed by the user, you will get a Dispose() message – that's your cue to abandon any uncompleted searches, and dispose any resources you might be using as part of your search. While you conduct your search invoke INavigateToCallback.ReportProgress() occasionally to provide feedback about how close you are to completing the search. There does not appear to be any particular requirement to how often you invoke ReportProgress(), and you report your progress as the ratio of two integers. In my implementation I report progress in terms of the number of symbols I've searched over the total number of symbols in my dictionary, and send a progress report every 16 symbols. Displaying the Results The Navigate to framework invokes INavigateToItemDisplayProvider.CreateItemDisplay() once for each result you passed to the INavigateToCallback. CreateItemDisplay() is passed the NavigateToItem you handed to the callback, and must return an INavigateToItemDisplay object. NavigateToItem is a sealed class which has a few properties, including the name of the symbol. It also has a Tag property, of type object. This enables you to stash away all the information you will need to create your INavigateToItemDisplay, which must implement an INavigateTo() method to display a symbol in an editor IDE when the user double-clicks an entry in the Navigate To dialog box. Since the tag is of type object, it is up to you, the implementor, to decide what kind of object you store in here, and how it enables the retrieval of other information which is not included in the NavigateToItem properties. Some of the INavigateToItemDisplay properties are self-explanatory, but a couple of them are less obvious: Additional informationThe string you return here is displayed inside brackets on the same line as the Name property. In English locales, Visual Studio includes the preposition "of". If you look at the first line in the Navigate To screenshot at the top of this article, Book_WebRole.Default is the additional information for textBookAuthor, and is the namespace qualified type name the symbol appears in. For procedural COBOL code we display the Program Id as the additional information DescriptionItemsYou can use this property to return any textual description you want about the item currently selected. You return a collection of DescriptionItem objects, each of which has a category and description collection of DescriptionRun objects. A DescriptionRun enables you to specify some text, and optional formatting, so you have some control over the appearance of the displayed text. The DescriptionItems property is displayed at the bottom of the Navigate To dialog box, with the Categories on the left and the Descriptions on the right. The Visual COBOL implementation uses it to display more information about the location of an item, making it easier for the user to know disambiguate duplicate names (something there can be a lot of in large COBOL applications). Summary I hope this article is useful for anyone implementing Navigate To. It is a fantastic navigation feature that Microsoft have added to Visual Studio, but at the moment there still don't seem to be any examples on how to implement it, and the reference information on MSDN is a little brief for anyone attempting an implementation.

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• How to use Public IP in case of two ISP when two differs from each other

  - by user1471995

  Please bare with my long explanation but this is important to explain the actual problem. Please also pardon my knowledge with PFsense as i am new to this. I have single PFSense box with 3 Ethernet adapter. Before moving to configuration for these, i want to let you know i have two Ethernet based Internet Leased Line Connectivity let's call them ISP A and ISP B. Then last inetrface is LAN which is connected to network switch. Typical network diagram ISP A ----- PFSense ----> Switch ---- > Servers ISP B ----- ISP A (Initially Purchased) WAN IP:- 113.193.X.X /29 Gateway IP :- 113.193.X.A and other 4 usable public IP in same subnet(So the gateway for those IP are also same). ISP B (Recently Purchased) WAN IP:- 115.115.X.X /30 Gateway IP :- 115.115.X.B and other 5 usable public IP in different subnet(So the gateway for those IP is different), for example if 115.119.X.X2 is one of the IP from that list then the gateway for this IP is 115.119.X.X1. Configuration for 3 Interfaces Interface : WAN Network Port : nfe0 Type : Static IP Address : 113.193.X.X /29 Gateway : 113.193.X.A Interface : LAN Network Port : vr0 Type : Static IP Address : 192.168.1.1 /24 Gateway : None Interface : RELWAN Network Port : rl0 Type : Static IP Address : 115.115.X.X /30 (I am not sure of the subnet) Gateway : 115.115.X.B To use Public IP from ISP A i have done following steps a) Created Virtual IP using either ARP or IP Alias. b) Using Firewall: NAT: Port Forward i have created specific natting from one public IP to my internal Lan private IP for example :- WAN TCP/UDP * * 113.193.X.X1 53 (DNS) 192.168.1.5 53 (DNS) WAN TCP/UDP * * 113.193.X.X1 80 (HTTP) 192.168.1.5 80 (HTTP) WAN TCP * * 113.193.X.X2 80 (HTTP) 192.168.1.7 80 (HTTP) etc., c) Current state for Firewall: NAT: Outbound is Manual and whatever default rule are defined for the WAN those are only present. d) If this section in relevant then for Firewall: Rules at WAN tab then following default rule has been generated. * RFC 1918 networks * * * * * Block private networks * Reserved/not assigned by IANA * * * * * * To use Public IP from ISP B i have done following steps a) Created Virtual IP using either ARP or IP Alias. b) Using Firewall: NAT: Port Forward i have created specific natting from one public IP to my internal Lan private IP for example :- RELWAN TCP/UDP * * 115.119.116.X.X1 80 (HTTP) 192.168.1.11 80 (HTTP) c) Current state for Firewall: NAT: Outbound is Manual and whatever default rule are defined for the RELWAN those are only present. d) If this section in relevant then for Firewall: Rules at RELWAN tab then following default rule has been generated. * RFC 1918 networks * * * * * * Reserved/not assigned by IANA * * * * * * Last thing before my actual query is to make you aware that to have multiple Wan setup i have done following steps a) Under System: Gateways at Groups Tab i have created new group as following MultipleGateway WANGW, RELWAN Tier 2,Tier 1 Multiple Gateway Test b) Then Under Firewall: Rules at LAN tab i have created a rule for internal traffic as follows * LAN net * * * MultipleGateway none c) This setup works if unplug first ISP traffic start routing using ISP 2 and vice-versa. Now my main query and problem is i am not able to use public IP address allocated by ISP B, i have tried many small tweaks but not successful in anyone. The notable difference between the two ISP is a) In case of ISP A there Public usable IP address are on same subnet so the gateway used for the WAN ip is same for the other public IP address. b) In case of ISP B there public usable IP address are on different subnet so the obvious the gateway IP for them is different from WAN gateway's IP. Please let me know how to use ISP B public usable IP address, in future also i am going to rely for more IPs from ISP B only.

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• Poor home office network performance and cannot figure out where the issue is

  - by Jeff Willener

  This is the most bizarre issue. I have worked with small to mid size networks for quite a long time and can say I'm comfortable connecting hardware. Where you will start to lose me is with managed switches and firewalls. To start, let me describe my network (sigh, shouldn't but I MUST solve this). 1) Comcast Cable Internet 2) Motorola SURFboard eXtreme Cable Modem. a) Model: SB6120 b) DOCSIS 3.0 and 2.0 support c) IPv4 and IPv6 support 3-A) Cisco Small Business RV220W Wireless N Firewall a) Latest firmware b) Model: RV220W-A-K9-NA c) WAN Port to Modem (2) d) vlan 1: work e) vlan 2: everything else. 3-B) D-Link DIR-615 Draft 802.11 N Wireless Router a) Latest firmware b) WAN Port to Modem (2) 4) Servers connected directly to firewall a) If firewall 3-A, then vlan 1 b) CAT5e patch cables c) Dell PowerEdge 1400SC w/ 10/100 integrated NIC (Domain Controller, DNS, former DHCP) d) Dell PowerEdge 400SC w/ 10/100/1000 integrated NIC (VMWare Server) 4) Linksys EZXS88W unmanaged Workgroup 10/100 Switch a) If firewall 3-A, then vlan 2 b) 25' CAT5e patch cable to firewall (3-A or 3-B) c) Connects xBox 360, Blu-Ray player, PC at TV 5) Office equipment connected directly to firewall a) If firewall 3-A, then vlan 1 b) ~80' CAT6 or CAT5e patch cable to firewall (3-A or 3-B) c) Connects 1) Dell Latitude laptop 10/100/1000 2) Dell Inspiron laptop 10/100 3) Dell Workstation 10/100/1000 (Pristine host, VMWare Workstation 7.x with many bridged VM's) 4) Brother Laser Printer 10/100 5) Epson All-In-One Workforce 310 10/100 5-A) NetGear FS116 unmanaged 10/100 switch a) I've had this switch for a long time and never had issues. 5-B) NetGear GS108 unmanaged 10/100/1000 switch a) Bought new for this issue and returned. 5-C) Linksys SE2500 unmanaged 10/100/1000 switch a) Bought new for this issue and returned. 5-D) TP-Link TL-SG10008D unmanaged 10/100/1000 a) Bought new for this issue and still have. 6) VLan 1 Wireless Connections (on same subnet if 3-B) a) Any of those at 5c b) HP Laptop 7) VLan 2 Wireless Connection (on same subnet if 3-B) a) IPad, IPod b) Compaq Laptop c) Epson Wireless Printer Shew, without hosting a diagram I hope that paints a good picture. The Issue The breakdown here is at item 5. No matter what I do I cannot have a switch at 5 and have to run everything wireless regardless of router. Issues related to using a switch (point 5 above) SpeedTest is good. Poor throughput to other devices if can communicate at all. Usually cannot ping other devices even on the same switch although, when able, ping times are good. Eventual lose of connectivity and can "sometimes" be restored by unplugging everything for several days, not minutes or hours but we're talking a week if at all. Directly connect to computer gives good internet connection however throughput to other devices connected to firewall is at best horrible. Yet printing doesn't seem to be an issue as long as they are connected via wireless. I have to force the RV220W to 1000Mb on the respective port if using a Gig Switch Issues related to using wireless in place of a switch (point 5 above) Poor throughput to other devices if can communicate. SpeedTest is good. Bottom line Internet speeds are awesome. By the way, Comcast went WAY above and beyond to make sure it was not them. They rewired EVERYTHING which did solve internet drops. Computer to computer connections are garbage Cannot get switch at 5 to work, yet other at 4 has never had an issue. Direct connection, bypass switch, is good for DHCP and internet. DNS must be on server, not firewall. Cisco insists its my switches but as you can see I have used four and two different cables with the same result. My gut feeling is something is happening with routing. But I'm not smart enough to know that answer. I run a lot of VM's at 5-c-3, could that cause it? What's different compared to my previous house is I have introduced Gigabit hardware (firewall/switches/computers). Some of my computers might have IPv6 turned on if I haven't turned it off already. I'm truly at a loss and hope anyone has some crazy idea how to solve this. Bottom line, I need a switch in my office behind the firewall. I've changed everything. The real crux is I will find a working solution and, again, after days it will stop working. So this means I cannot isolate if its a computer since I have to use them. Oh and a solution is not throwing more money at this. I'm well into $1k already. Yah, lame.

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• Can't ping other machines at Linux VPN PPTP server's local lan from outside

  - by Marco Sanchez

  Before anything else, hello guys, this is the first time I ask for something here so I hope someone can give me a hand, please look at the following network diagram: --------------------------------------------------------------- VPN Server Webserver (SuSE SLES11) | | | ------- VPN LAN -------- | Router with Unique IP (With Port Forwarding rules set and VPN through enabled) | PPTP connection over Internet | Workstation (PC or Laptop with Windows) --------------------------------------------------------------- So the idea is for the workstation to connect to the PPTP Server and then be able to access a Web Application on the Webserver, right now I have the PPTP server configured and the VPN works, I can connect to the SLES11 server with no problems from the workstation and I can ping it and everything works fine but if I try to ping the Webserver from the workstation, I can't reach it, I'm making a mistake somewhere but I don't see where, please note that I'm not a network expert and thus I'd greatly appreciate some specific guidance. Here is some info related to the IPs --------------------------------------------------------------- *** SLES11 VPN Server has 2 Network cards: -- eth0 (Internal Network) IP: 192.168.210.5 MASK: 255.55.255.0 -- eth1 (External Network) IP: 192.168.1.105 MASK: 255.55.255.0 *** Webserver has 1 network card -- eth0 (Internal Network) IP: 192.168.210.221 MASK: 255.55.255.0 *** Workstation -- IP info once connection has been established to the VPN PPP adapter Test VPN Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Test VPN Connection Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.210.110(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.255 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0 DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 189.209.208.181 (Defined as part of the PPTP Server options config script) 189.209.127.244 Primary WINS Server . . . . . . . : 192.168.210.220 (Defined as part of the PPTP Server options config script) NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled --------------------------------------------------------------- I also defined the following within IP tables: ------------------------------------------------------------- iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 1723 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p gre -j ACCEPT ------------------------------------------------------------- If you need any piece of information from the PPTP server scripts please let me know, the thing is that I can actually connect to the VPN server and access its services and everything but after that I can't reach any other computer on that LAN. Any help would be greatly appreciated and thanks in advance

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• ASP.NET MVC Paging/Sorting/Filtering using the MVCContrib Grid and Pager

  - by rajbk

  This post walks you through creating a UI for paging, sorting and filtering a list of data items. It makes use of the excellent MVCContrib Grid and Pager Html UI helpers. A sample project is attached at the bottom. Our UI will eventually look like this. The application will make use of the Northwind database. The top portion of the page has a filter area region. The filter region is enclosed in a form tag. The select lists are wired up with jQuery to auto post back the form. The page has a pager region at the top and bottom of the product list. The product list has a link to display more details about a given product. The column headings are clickable for sorting and an icon shows the sort direction. Strongly Typed View Models The views are written to expect strongly typed objects. We suffix these strongly typed objects with ViewModel since they are designed specifically for passing data down to the view.  The following listing shows the ProductViewModel. This class will be used to hold information about a Product. We use attributes to specify if the property should be hidden and what its heading in the table should be. This metadata will be used by the MvcContrib Grid to render the table. Some of the properties are hidden from the UI ([ScaffoldColumn(false)) but are needed because we will be using those for filtering when writing our LINQ query. public ActionResult Index( string productName, int? supplierID, int? categoryID, GridSortOptions gridSortOptions, int? page) {   var productList = productRepository.GetProductsProjected();   // Set default sort column if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(gridSortOptions.Column)) { gridSortOptions.Column = "ProductID"; }   // Filter on SupplierID if (supplierID.HasValue) { productList = productList.Where(a => a.SupplierID == supplierID); }   // Filter on CategoryID if (categoryID.HasValue) { productList = productList.Where(a => a.CategoryID == categoryID); }   // Filter on ProductName if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(productName)) { productList = productList.Where(a => a.ProductName.Contains(productName)); }   // Create all filter data and set current values if any // These values will be used to set the state of the select list and textbox // by sending it back to the view. var productFilterViewModel = new ProductFilterViewModel(); productFilterViewModel.SelectedCategoryID = categoryID ?? -1; productFilterViewModel.SelectedSupplierID = supplierID ?? -1; productFilterViewModel.Fill();   // Order and page the product list var productPagedList = productList .OrderBy(gridSortOptions.Column, gridSortOptions.Direction) .AsPagination(page ?? 1, 10);     var productListContainer = new ProductListContainerViewModel { ProductPagedList = productPagedList, ProductFilterViewModel = productFilterViewModel, GridSortOptions = gridSortOptions };   return View(productListContainer); } The following diagram shows the rest of the key ViewModels in our design. We have a container class called ProductListContainerViewModel which has nested classes. The ProductPagedList is of type IPagination<ProductViewModel>. The MvcContrib expects the IPagination<T> interface to determine the page number and page size of the collection we are working with. You convert any IEnumerable<T> into an IPagination<T> by calling the AsPagination extension method in the MvcContrib library. It also creates a paged set of type ProductViewModel. The ProductFilterViewModel class will hold information about the different select lists and the ProductName being searched on. It will also hold state of any previously selected item in the lists and the previous search criteria (you will recall that this type of state information was stored in Viewstate when working with WebForms). With MVC there is no state storage and so all state has to be fetched and passed back to the view. The GridSortOptions is a type defined in the MvcContrib library and is used by the Grid to determine the current column being sorted on and the current sort direction. The following shows the view and partial views used to render our UI. The Index view expects a type ProductListContainerViewModel which we described earlier. <%Html.RenderPartial("SearchFilters", Model.ProductFilterViewModel); %> <% Html.RenderPartial("Pager", Model.ProductPagedList); %> <% Html.RenderPartial("SearchResults", Model); %> <% Html.RenderPartial("Pager", Model.ProductPagedList); %> The View contains a partial view “SearchFilters” and passes it the ProductViewFilterContainer. The SearchFilter uses this Model to render all the search lists and textbox. The partial view “Pager” uses the ProductPageList which implements the interface IPagination. The “Pager” view contains the MvcContrib Pager helper used to render the paging information. This view is repeated twice since we want the pager UI to be available at the top and bottom of the product list. The Pager partial view is located in the Shared directory so that it can be reused across Views. The partial view “SearchResults” uses the ProductListContainer model. This partial view contains the MvcContrib Grid which needs both the ProdctPagedList and GridSortOptions to render itself. The Controller Action An example of a request like this: /Products?productName=test&supplierId=29&categoryId=4. The application receives this GET request and maps it to the Index method of the ProductController. Within the action we create an IQueryable<ProductViewModel> by calling the GetProductsProjected() method. /// <summary> /// This method takes in a filter list, paging/sort options and applies /// them to an IQueryable of type ProductViewModel /// </summary> /// <returns> /// The return object is a container that holds the sorted/paged list, /// state for the fiters and state about the current sorted column /// </returns> public ActionResult Index( string productName, int? supplierID, int? categoryID, GridSortOptions gridSortOptions, int? page) {   var productList = productRepository.GetProductsProjected();   // Set default sort column if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(gridSortOptions.Column)) { gridSortOptions.Column = "ProductID"; }   // Filter on SupplierID if (supplierID.HasValue) { productList.Where(a => a.SupplierID == supplierID); }   // Filter on CategoryID if (categoryID.HasValue) { productList = productList.Where(a => a.CategoryID == categoryID); }   // Filter on ProductName if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(productName)) { productList = productList.Where(a => a.ProductName.Contains(productName)); }   // Create all filter data and set current values if any // These values will be used to set the state of the select list and textbox // by sending it back to the view. var productFilterViewModel = new ProductFilterViewModel(); productFilterViewModel.SelectedCategoryID = categoryID ?? -1; productFilterViewModel.SelectedSupplierID = supplierID ?? -1; productFilterViewModel.Fill();   // Order and page the product list var productPagedList = productList .OrderBy(gridSortOptions.Column, gridSortOptions.Direction) .AsPagination(page ?? 1, 10);     var productListContainer = new ProductListContainerViewModel { ProductPagedList = productPagedList, ProductFilterViewModel = productFilterViewModel, GridSortOptions = gridSortOptions };   return View(productListContainer); } The supplier, category and productname filters are applied to this IQueryable if any are present in the request. The ProductPagedList class is created by applying a sort order and calling the AsPagination method. Finally the ProductListContainerViewModel class is created and returned to the view. You have seen how to use strongly typed views with the MvcContrib Grid and Pager to render a clean lightweight UI with strongly typed views. You also saw how to use partial views to get data from the strongly typed model passed to it from the parent view. The code also shows you how to use jQuery to auto post back. The sample is attached below. Don’t forget to change your connection string to point to the server containing the Northwind database. NorthwindSales_MvcContrib.zip My name is Kobayashi. I work for Keyser Soze.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 26, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 26, 2010New Projectsaion-gamecp: Aion Gamecp for aion Private server based on Aion UniqueAzure Email Queuer: Azure Email Queuer makes it easier for Developers Programming in the Cloud to Queue Emails to keep the UI Thread Clear for Requests. Developed w...BIG1: Bob and Ian's Game. Written using XNA Game Studio Express. Basically an update of David Braben and Ian Bell's classic game "Elite." This is a nonco...CMS7: CMS7 The CMS7 is composed of three module. (1)Main CMS Business (2)Process Customization (3)Role/Department CustomizationCoreSharp Networking Core: A simple to use framework to develop efficient client/server application. The framework is part of my project at school and I hope it will benefit ...Fullscreen Countdown: Small and basic countdown application. The countdown window can be resized to fit any size to display the minutes elapsed. Developped in C#, .NET F...IRC4N00bz: Learning sockets, events, delegates, SQL, and IRC commands all in one big project! It's written in C# (Csharp) and hope you find it helpfull, or ev...LjSystem: This project is a collection of my extensions to the BCLMP3 Tags Management: A software to manage the tags of MP3 filesnetone: All net in oneNext Dart (Dublin Area Rapid Transport): The shows the times of the next darts from a given station. It is a windows application that updates automatically and so is easier to use than th...PChat - An OCDotNet.Org Presentation: PChat is a multithreaded pinnable chat server and client. It is designed to be a demonstration of Visual Studio 2010 MVC 2, for ocdotnet.org Use...Pittsburgh Code Camp iPhone App: The Pittsburgh Code Camp iPhone Application is meant as a demonstration of the creation of an iPhone application while at the same time providing t...Radical: Radical is an infrastructure frameworkRadioAutomation: Windows application for radio automation.SilverSynth - Digital Audio Synthesis for Silverlight: SilverSynth is a digial audio synthesis library for Silverlight developers to create synthesized wave forms from code. It supports synthesis of sin...SkeinLibManaged: This implementation of the Skein Cryptographic Hash function is written entirely in Managed CSharp. It is posted here to share with the world at l...SpecExplorerEval: We are checking out spec explorer and presenting on its useSPOJemu: This is a SPOJ emulator. It allows you to define tests in xml and then check your application if it's working as you expected.The C# Skype Chat bot: A Skype bot in C# for managing Skype chats.VS 2010 Architecture Layers Patterns: Architecture layers patterns toolbox items for layers diagrams.Yakiimo3D: Mostly DirectX 11 programming tutorials.代码生成器: Project DetailsNew ReleasesArkSwitch: ArkSwitch v1.1.1: This release fixes a crash that occurs when certain processes with multiple primary windows are encountered.BTP Tools: CSB, CUV and HCSB e-Sword files 2010-02-26: include csb.bbl csb+.bbl csb.cmt csbc.dct cuv.bbl cuv+.bbl cuv.cmt cuvc.dct hcsb+.bbl hcsbc.dct files for e-Sword 8.0BubbleBurst: BubbleBurst v1.1: This is the second release of BubbleBurst, the subject of the book Advanced MVVM. This release contains a minor fix that was added after the book ...DevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: Social Budgeting Web Software, alpha 3b: Alpha 3b simplifies and strengthens state management. With the exception of linked lists, the internal mechanics of addins have not been improved...Dragonrealms PvpStance plugin for Genie: 1.0.0.4: This updated is needed now that the DR server move broke the "profile soandso pvp" syntax. This version will capture the pvp stance out of the full...FastCode: FastCode 1.0: Definitions <integerType> : byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, ulond <floatType> : float, double, decimal Base types extensions Intege...Fullscreen Countdown: Fullscreen Countdown 1.0: First versionIRC4N00bz: IRC4N00bz_02252010.zip: I'm calling it a night. Here's the dll for where I'm at so far. It works, just lakcs some abilities. Anything not included can be pulled from th...Labrado: Labrado MiniTimer: Labrado MiniTimer is a convenient timer tool designed and implemented for GMAT test preparation.LINQ to VFP: LinqToVfp (v1.0.17.1): Cleaned up WCF Data Service Expression Tree. (details...) This build requires IQToolkit v0.17b.Microsoft Health Common User Interface: Release 8.0.200.000: This is version 8.0 of the Microsoft® Health Common User Interface Control Toolkit. The scope and requirements of this release are based on materia...Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query Funky Dev Build (RC1+): The "Funk Dev Build" bit is that I added a couple of features I think are pretty cool. It is a "dev" build but I class it as stable. Find Object...Neovolve: Neovolve.BlogEngine.Extensions 1.2: Updated extensions to work with BE 1.6. Updated Snippets extension to better handle excluded tags and fixed regex bug. Added SyntaxHighlighter exte...Neovolve: Neovolve.BlogEngine.Web 1.1: Update to support BE version 1.6 Neovolve.BlogEngine.Web 1.1 contains a redirector module that translates Community Server url formats into BlogEn...Next Dart (Dublin Area Rapid Transport): 1.0: There are 2 files NextDart 1.0.zip This contains just the files. Extract it to a folder and run NextDart.exe. NextDart 1.0 Intaller.zip This c...Powershell4SQL: Version 1.2: Changes from version 1.1 Added additional attributes to simplify syntax. Server and Database become optional. Defaulted to (local) and 'master' ...Radical: Radical (Desktop) 1.0: First stable dropRaidTracker: Raid Tracker: a few tweaksRaiser's Edge API Developer Toolkit: Alpha Release 1: This is an untested, alpha release. Contains RE API Toolkit built using 7.85 Dlls and 7.91 Dlls.SharePoint Enhanced Calendar by ArtfulBits: ArtfulBits.EnhancedCalendar v1.3: New Features: Simple to activate mechanism added (add Enhanced Calendar Web Part on the same page as standard calendar) Support for any type of S...Silverlight 4.0 Com Library for SQL Server Access: Version 1.0: This is the intial alpha release. It includes ExecuteQuery, ExecuteNonQuery and ExecuteScalar routines. See roadmap section of home page for detai...Silverlight HTML 5 Canvas: SLCanvas 1.1: This release enables <canvas renderMethod="auto" onload="runme(this)"></canvas> or <canvas renderMethod="Silverlight" onload="runme(this)"></ca...SilverSynth - Digital Audio Synthesis for Silverlight: SilverSynth 1.0: Source code including demo application.StringDefs: StringDefs Alpha Release 1.01: In this release of the Library few namespaces are added.STSDev 2008: STSDev 2008 2.1: Update to the StsDev 2008 project to correct Manifest Building issues.Text to HTML: 0.4.0.2: Cambios de la versión:Correcciones menores en el sistema de traducción. Controlada la excepción aparecida al suprimir los archivos de idioma. A...The Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: Release 4 - Friendly User Release (Pre-Beta): Release 4 - Friendly User Release (Pre-Beta) This version of the code has much of the design that we plan to go forward with for Mix and utilizes a...TreeSizeNet: TreeSizeNet 0.10.2: - Assemblies merged in one executableVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30225.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30225.1: Automatic drop of latest buildVS 2010 Architecture Layers Patterns: VS 2010 RC Architecture Layers Patterns v1.0: Architecture layers patterns toolbox items based on the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition for the layer diagram designer of Vi...Yakiimo3D: DirectX11 BitonicSortCPU Source and Binary: DirectX11 BitonicSortCPU sample source and binary.Yakiimo3D: DirectX11 MandelbrotGPU Source and Binary: DirectX11 MandelbrotGPU source and binary.Most Popular ProjectsVSLabOSIS Interop TestsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrBlogEngine.NETSLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality ToolkitInfoServiceSharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLRCommon Context AdaptersNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModulejQuery Library for SharePoint Web Servicespatterns & practices – Enterprise Library

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• How about a new platform for your next API&hellip; a CMS?

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2014/05/22/how-about-a-new-platform-for-your-next-apihellip-a.aspxSay what? I’m seeing a type of API emerge which serves static or long-lived resources, which are mostly read-only and have a controlled process to update the data that gets served. Think of something like an app configuration API, where you want a central location for changeable settings. You could use this server side to store database connection strings and keep all your instances in sync, or it could be used client side to push changes out to all users (and potentially driving A/B or MVT testing). That’s a good candidate for a RESTful API which makes proper use of HTTP expiration and validation caching to minimise traffic, but really you want a front end UI where you can edit the current config that the API returns and publish your changes. Sound like a Content Mangement System would be a good fit? I’ve been looking at that and it’s a great fit for this scenario. You get a lot of what you need out of the box, the amount of custom code you need to write is minimal, and you get a whole lot of extra stuff from using CMS which is very useful, but probably not something you’d build if you had to put together a quick UI over your API content (like a publish workflow, fine-grained security and an audit trail). You typically use a CMS for HTML resources, but it’s simple to expose JSON instead – or to do content negotiation to support both, so you can open a resource in a browser and see a nice visual representation, or request it with: Accept=application/json and get the same content rendered as JSON for the app to use. Enter Umbraco Umbraco is an open source .NET CMS that’s been around for a while. It has very good adoption, a lively community and a good release cycle. It’s easy to use, has all the functionality you need for a CMS-driven API, and it’s scalable (although you won’t necessarily put much scale on the CMS layer). In the rest of this post, I’ll build out a simple app config API using Umbraco. We’ll define the structure of the configuration resource by creating a new Document Type and setting custom properties; then we’ll build a very simple Razor template to return configuration documents as JSON; then create a resource and see how it looks. And we’ll look at how you could build this into a wider solution. If you want to try this for yourself, it’s ultra easy – there’s an Umbraco image in the Azure Website gallery, so all you need to to is create a new Website, select Umbraco from the image and complete the installation. It will create a SQL Azure website to store all the content, as well as a Website instance for editing and accessing content. They’re standard Azure resources, so you can scale them as you need. The default install creates a starter site for some HTML content, which you can use to learn your way around (or just delete). 1. Create Configuration Document Type In Umbraco you manage content by creating and modifying documents, and every document has a known type, defining what properties it holds. We’ll create a new Document Type to describe some basic config settings. In the Settings section from the left navigation (spanner icon), expand Document Types and Master, hit the ellipsis and select to create a new Document Type: This will base your new type off the Master type, which gives you some existing properties that we’ll use – like the Page Title which will be the resource URL. In the Generic Properties tab for the new Document Type, you set the properties you’ll be able to edit and return for the resource: Here I’ve added a text string where I’ll set a default cache lifespan, an image which I can use for a banner display, and a date which could show the user when the next release is due. This is the sort of thing that sits nicely in an app config API. It’s likely to change during the life of the product, but not very often, so it’s good to have a centralised place where you can make and publish changes easily and safely. It also enables A/B and MVT testing, as you can change the response each client gets based on your set logic, and their apps will behave differently without needing a release. 2. Define the response template Now we’ve defined the structure of the resource (as a document), in Umbraco we can define a C# Razor template to say how that resource gets rendered to the client. If you only want to provide JSON, it’s easy to render the content of the document by building each property in the response (Umbraco uses dynamic objects so you can specify document properties as object properties), or you can support content negotiation with very little effort. Here’s a template to render the document as HTML or JSON depending on the Accept header, using JSON.NET for the API rendering: @inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage @using Newtonsoft.Json @{ Layout = null; } @if(UmbracoContext.HttpContext.Request.Headers["accept"] != null &amp;&amp; UmbracoContext.HttpContext.Request.Headers["accept"] == "application/json") { Response.ContentType = "application/json"; @Html.Raw(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new { cacheLifespan = CurrentPage.cacheLifespan, bannerImageUrl = CurrentPage.bannerImage, nextReleaseDate = CurrentPage.nextReleaseDate })) } else { <h1>App configuration</h1> <p>Cache lifespan: <b>@CurrentPage.cacheLifespan</b></p> <p>Banner Image: </p> <img src="@CurrentPage.bannerImage"> <p>Next Release Date: <b>@CurrentPage.nextReleaseDate</b></p> } That’s a rough-and ready example of what you can do. You could make it completely generic and just render all the document’s properties as JSON, but having a specific template for each resource gives you control over what gets sent out. And the templates are evaluated at run-time, so if you need to change the output – or extend it, say to add caching response headers – you just edit the template and save, and the next client request gets rendered from the new template. No code to build and ship. 3. Create the content With your document type created, in  the Content pane you can create a new instance of that document, where Umbraco gives you a nice UI to input values for the properties we set up on the Document Type: Here I’ve set the cache lifespan to an xs:duration value, uploaded an image for the banner and specified a release date. Each property gets the appropriate input control – text box, file upload and date picker. At the top of the page is the name of the resource – myapp in this example. That specifies the URL for the resource, so if I had a DNS entry pointing to my Umbraco instance, I could access the config with a URL like http://static.x.y.z.com/config/myapp. The setup is all done now, so when we publish this resource it’ll be available to access.  4. Access the resource Now if you open  that URL in the browser, you’ll see the HTML version rendered: - complete with the  image and formatted date. Umbraco lets you save changes and preview them before publishing, so the HTML view could be a good way of showing editors their changes in a usable view, before they confirm them. If you browse the same URL from a REST client, specifying the Accept=application/json request header, you get this response:   That’s the exact same resource, with a managed UI to publish it, being accessed as HTML or JSON with a tiny amount of effort. 5. The wider landscape If you have fairy stable content to expose as an API, I think  this approach is really worth considering. Umbraco scales very nicely, but in a typical solution you probably wouldn’t need it to. When you have additional requirements, like logging API access requests - but doing it out-of-band so clients aren’t impacted, you can put a very thin API layer on top of Umbraco, and cache the CMS responses in your API layer:   Here the API does a passthrough to CMS, so the CMS still controls the content, but it caches the response. If the response is cached for 1 minute, then Umbraco only needs to handle 1 request per minute (multiplied by the number of API instances), so if you need to support 1000s of request per second, you’re scaling a thin, simple API layer rather than having to scale the more complex CMS infrastructure (including the database). This diagram also shows an approach to logging, by asynchronously publishing a message to a queue (Redis in this case), which can be picked up later and persisted by a different process. Does it work? Beautifully. Using Azure, I spiked the solution above (including the Redis logging framework which I’ll blog about later) in half a day. That included setting up different roles in Umbraco to demonstrate a managed workflow for publishing changes, and a couple of document types representing different resources. Is it maintainable? We have three moving parts, which are all managed resources in Azure –  an Azure Website for Umbraco which may need a couple of instances for HA (or may not, depending on how long the content can be cached), a message queue (Redis is in preview in Azure, but you can easily use Service Bus Queues if performance is less of a concern), and the Web Role for the API. Two of the components are off-the-shelf, from open source projects, and the only custom code is the API which is very simple. Does it scale? Pretty nicely. With a single Umbraco instance running as an Azure Website, and with 4x instances for my API layer (Standard sized Web Roles), I got just under 4,000 requests per second served reliably, with a Worker Role in the background saving the access logs. So we had a nice UI to publish app config changes, with a friendly Web preview and a publishing workflow, capable of supporting 14 million requests in an hour, with less than a day’s effort. Worth considering if you’re publishing long-lived resources through your API.

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• Top tweets SOA Partner Community – October 2013

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity Ronald Luttikhuizen ?My latest upload: SOA Made Simple | Introduction to SOA on @slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/rluttikhuizen/soa-made-simple-introduction-to-soa … via @SlideShare OTNArchBeat ?ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for October 4, 2013 #cloud #linux #oaam #soa http://pub.vitrue.com/y4SK Lucas Jellema ?My blog article shows news on the new SOA Suite 12c release - as it was publicly available during #oow13 see: http://technology.amis.nl/2013/09/27/oow13-soa-suite-12c/ … Yogesh Sontakke ?Introducing OER's new Express Workflows - Simplified Lifecycle Management. Blog post: http://bit.ly/16JKHCf @soacommunity #soagovernance SrinivasPadmanabhuni ?"@OTNArchBeat: SOA and User Interfaces - by @soacommunity @HajoNormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg et al #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/KmOp " SOA Community ?SOA and User-Interfaces http://servicetechmag.com/I76/0913-2 article published part of #industrialSOA at Service Technology Magazine #soacommunity Estafet Limited ?@Estafet win @UKOUG Middleware Partner of the Year 2013 Yogesh Sontakke ?RT @VikasAatOracle: #Oracle #B2B - written by experts #soa #soacommunity #oraclesoa - time to get a copy ! @SOAScott Danilo Schmiedel ?Thanks a lot to Juergen @soacommunity for the super interesting and well-organized Partner Advisory Council yesterday! Such a Great Value! OTNArchBeat ?Case management supporting re-landscaping application portfolios | @leonsmiers http://pub.vitrue.com/MC5j Samantha Searle ?Apply for the #GartnerBPM 2014 Excellence Awards - find out how via this link http://ow.ly/ptaNQ #Gartner #bpm #process #entarch #cio OTNArchBeat ?SOA and User Interfaces - by @soacommunity @hajonormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg et al #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/KmOp Dain Hansen ?Hybrid #cloud is on the rise, but is the IT department's culture standing in the way? http://add.vc/eJN #CloudIntegration #OracleSOA OTNArchBeat #SOASuite 11g ps6 - Download your log files directly from the Enterprise Manager | @whitehorsenl http://pub.vitrue.com/KrJ2 Whitehorses ?Whiteblog: SOA Suite 11g ps6 - Download your log files directly from the Enterprise Manager (http://goo.gl/2Gqiax ) Rajesh Raheja ?Cloud integration session recap #oow13 http://blog.raastech.com/2013/09/recap-of-real-world-cloud-integration.html?m=1 … Vikas Anand ?@Ahmed_Aboulnaga thanks for the excellent summary and kind words. #oow13 #cloud #oraclesoa http://blog.raastech.com/2013/09/recap-of-real-world-cloud-integration.html?m=1 … Luis Augusto Weir ?REST is also SOA. Check it out http://www.soa4u.co.uk/2013/09/restful-is-also-soa.html?m=1 … #soacommunity Graham ?“@OracleBPM & @soacommunity: 5 Ways to Modernize Applications with BPM #AppAdvantage" #oracleday http://bit.ly/15yC6e3 SOA Community ?#ACED director asked me for BPM references in FSI - ever visited my #SOACommunity workspace? https://beehiveonline.oracle.com/teamcollab/overview/SOA_Community_Workspace … #soacommunity #bpm OracleBlogs ?SOA Community Newsletter September 2013 http://ow.ly/2Aj6oK OTNArchBeat ?OOW13: First glimpses of the new #SOASuite12c | @LucasJellema http://pub.vitrue.com/2YgX sbernhardt ?Just published new blog entry on OOW 2013 wrap up. http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/oracle-open-world-2013-wrap-up/ … #oow13 @OC_WIRE @soacommunity Emiel Paasschens ?Home with family after an overwhelming #OOW week in San Francisco with lot of info & meetings. Special thanx to @OracleBelux & @soacommunity Robert van Mölken ?Had a awesome week at #OOW13 in SF. Highlights were the @soacommunity Wine tour, @OracleBelux meet-ups and @OracleSOA CAB. Thanks to all :) SOA Community ?The place Oracle Fusion middleware comes from - Oracle 200 - TKs office - next Oracle 100 - SOA & BPM #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/qibFOQVbRo Oracle BPM ?5 Ways to Modernize Applications with BPM #AppAdvantage http://pub.vitrue.com/l2dn Simon Haslam ?Ha ha - how did we miss that! RT @lucasjellema: Post conference announcement of a new middleware appliance? #oow13 pic.twitter.com/3NvcjPfjXb OTNArchBeat ?The OTNArchBeat Daily is out! http://paper.li/OTNArchBeat/1329828521 … ? Top stories today via @lucasjellema @myfear @TylerJewell Packt Publishing ?Get 50% off ALL our DRM-free eBooks - this weekend only! Go to http://www.packtpub.com/ and use code BIG50, as often as you like! #BIG50 OracleBlogs ?Global Perspective: ACE Director from EMEA Weighs in on AppAdvantage http://ow.ly/2Afek2 orclateamsoa ?#orclateamsoa Blog: BPM Auditing Demystified - I've heard from a couple of customers recently asking about BPM aud... http://ow.ly/2AfbAn AMIS, Oracle & Java ?Cool #soasuite 12c feature managed file transfer - visit Dave Barry at demo point sr212 #oow #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/gb4HLbUarR SOA Community ?Let us know what was best at #OOW @soacommunity save trip home - thanks for coming to #SF ;-) see you at #OOW2014 pic.twitter.com/xbWXjRapqh Lonneke Dikmans ?Nice @dschmied is talking about the different steps in his project. He starts with explaining the user interface design #oow13 #ux #acm Lonneke Dikmans ?Saving the best for the end: managing knowledge worker processes by @dschmied and Prasen.#oow13 #acm cool stuff: adaptive case management Luis Augusto Weir ?SOA Governance is more than just OER. Requires people, processes and tools. Check it out #SOA #soacommunity http://youtu.be/Ohn06smVKVw Lonneke Dikmans ?“@OracleSOA: #oow Join us for:Enterprise SOA Infrastructure Best Practices Thu 9/26 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM Moscone West - 2020 SOA Community ?Business Process Management (BPM) 11g PS6 Awareness Course http://wp.me/p10C8u-1as Ajay Khanna ?Detect, Analyze, Act - Fast! http://wp.me/p10C8u-1ao via @soacommunity #OracleBPM Simone Geib ?It took a while, but I finally reached 500 followers. Thanks everybody and especially @soacommunity :) SOA Community ?Functional Testing Business Processes In Oracle BPM Suite 11g by Arun Pareek http://wp.me/p10C8u-1aq SOA Community Distribute the September edition of the SOA Community newsletter READ it! Didn't receive it register http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa #soacommunity SOA Community ?Detect, Analyze, Act - Fast! by Ajay Khanna http://wp.me/p10C8u-1ao Robert van Mölken ?Finalised my #OOW presentation #CON8736 and live demo on wednesday 25th at 11:45am. Also giving a short version at the SOA CAB on thursday. Rajesh Raheja ?"The AppAdvantage of Oracle Cloud & On-premises Integration" http://bit.ly/14RYHmZ SOA Community ?Additional new content SOA & BPM Partner Community http://wp.me/p10C8u-1aw Dain Hansen ?Right now #oow13 SOA, BPM - Customer Advisory Boards. 'No tweeting' says @SOASimone. Instagram of funny cats still ok. leonsmiers ?Case Management with Oracle BPM Suite our presentation on #oow13 http://www.slideshare.net/leonsmiers/oracle-open-world-2013-case-management-smiers-kitson … #capgemini @nkitson72 Mark Simpson ?Flextronics reduced cost of processing an invoice to <$1 from $7 due to BPM @OracleBPM #oow13 saving millions. Way less than industry avg. Holger Mueller ?#Siemens Shared Services CIO says that #Fusion #Middleware made the difference for #Oracle over #Workday. #Integration matters. #OOW13 oracleopenworld ?Miss any #oow13 keynotes, or simply want to rewatch? Check out the live streaming site for keynotes on demand: http://pub.vitrue.com/RG4D SOA Community ?Analyze your m2m data and act on it! Big data Pattern matching, fast data & soa #soacommunity #oow pic.twitter.com/48Q1z4ckh7 SOA Community ?Top tweets SOA Partner Community – September 2013 http://wp.me/p10C8u-1cR Simone Geib ?#oraclesoa hands on lab at #oow13 pic.twitter.com/IJJrqXIMiu Danilo Schmiedel #oow13 CON8436: Managing Knowledge Worker Processes. Come & get a free Adaptive Case Management poster @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/FRc2CSyLwb John Sim ?Great job again Jurgen @soacommunity helping bring Ace Community together! Danilo Schmiedel ?Excellent #OracleBPM Adaptive Case Management intro by @heidibuelowBPM and Prasen at the #oow13 demo ground.Last chance today @soacommunity SOA Community ?Thanks to all our #bpm #soa and #weblogic partners for the great middleware business #oow #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/dBwZ8DMHfH Whitehorses ?Thanks @soacommunity for the party tonight. Great to meet product management & see all the talented EMEA middleware specialists. #oow13 Danilo Schmiedel ?Great tool demo from Link Consulting about managing your SOA with OER #oow13 @soacommunity Torsten Winterberg ?“@soacommunity: thanks to @dschmied and @OC_WIRE for making it happen to have our case management poster as printed version hier at #oow13 Ronald Luttikhuizen ?These were the architects involved in the diagram excitement :) just after State of SOA podcast with @OTNArchBeat pic.twitter.com/5B8jIrVTA9 SOA Community ?Tanks to AVIO for the excellent #bpmn poster and the great bpm business - visit then at #OOW & get the poster pic.twitter.com/ebTg9pFY1C Dain Hansen ?Kurian introducing Oracle Platform-as-a-Service developments. #oow13 #OracleCloud pic.twitter.com/evJLTU53rx Bruce Tierney ?API Management "multi-level pie chart" at #oow13 by Oracle's Tim Hall pic.twitter.com/q12OIRdaue Dain Hansen ?This is not your Daddy's BAM @soacommunity: Is this BAM? Very cool in #soasuite 12c get a demo at sr225 pic.twitter.com/EvwqXW9U5j SOA Community ?Is this BAM? Very cool in #soasuite 12c get a demo at sr225 pic.twitter.com/LybHxyF362 SOA Community ?SOA governance by @Yogesh_Sontakke at demo point sr214 many good new features - key for soa projects #oow #soa pic.twitter.com/DFK0ummsK1 SOA Community ?Cool #soasuite 12c feature managed file transfer - visit Dave Barry at demo point sr212 #oow #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/GDKcqDGhCF SOA Community ?Adaptive Case Management demo point at #OOW visit @heidibuelowBPM get a demo and cmmn notation poster #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/T7yEyI7tdn Lonneke Dikmans ?In case you missed it: http://blog.vennster.nl/2013/09/case-management-part-1.html?spref=tw … Lucas Jellema ?SOA Suite news: Cloud Adapters RightNow and SalesForce plus SDK to develop custom cloud adapters (CY13); REST/JSON support in SB/SCA (12c) Oracle SOA ?Cloud Integration and AppAdvantage: Transform your Enterprise #soa #oow13 http://pub.vitrue.com/UfPB Dain Hansen ?Cloud Integration and AppAdvantage: Transform your Enterprise #soa #oow13 http://pub.vitrue.com/4QWA Hajo Normann ?#BigData, eventing & real time #analytics suggest timely next actions in #oracleBPM & #oracleACM; #oow13 #FastData pic.twitter.com/aFVGrTXPqu Mark Simpson ?OEP CQL engine now used in BAM12c for event stream summary computation with temporal and pattern match features to feed dashboards. #oow13 Mark Simpson ?BAM12c virtually a new product. Analytics that senses ahead of time and also compares to historical trends to guide process or case #oow13 Andrejus Baranovskis ?Enabling UI Shell 12c/11g Multitasking Behavior http://fb.me/18l9vxQfA Amit Zavery ?Oracle Fusion Middleware Empowers Business Users, EVP Thomas Kurian's session summary http://onforb.es/18Ta1jf #oow13 #oraclemiddle #oracle Vikas Anand ?#oow13 #oracleopenworld BPM on display at Middleware keynote by Thomas Kurian pic.twitter.com/PMm719S0Ui SOA Community ?BPM composer - business user empowerment #oow #soacommunity #bpmsuite pic.twitter.com/0Qgl6oVh0h SOA Community ?Model your process in BPMN - make is executable and analyze & improve them #oow #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/jkLlObDdoi Bruce Tierney ?@demed and Thomas Kurian talk mobile and cloud at #oow13 pic.twitter.com/bAAeqn5a2V Amit Zavery ?Thomas Kurian showcasing all the new features of Oracle Fusion Middleware #oraclemiddle #oow13 SOA Community ?Demo time cloud adapters in #soasuite at Thomas Kurian keynote. Build and integrate mobile apps in minutes #oow pic.twitter.com/qTnCOJLLwS SOA Community ?Soa suite cloud adapters and mobile apps by @demed at Thomas Kurian keynote #oow #oracle #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/5aMLkNH4Ng Danilo Schmiedel ?First impressions from Oracle Open World 2013 http://wp.me/p2fG8x-77 @soacommunity @OC_WIRE SOA Community ?Good morning SFO let us know if you attend #OOW & #OPN keynote - #soacommunity pic.twitter.com/hzLYGDlRgE Simon Haslam ?Had a very useful @wlscommunity PAC meeting yesterday... & probably the best swag to date! pic.twitter.com/Lqus8ysbp7 Vikas Anand ?Oracle SOA Suite - Team Blog http://bit.ly/18I1Zj7 Rajesh Raheja ?Introducing new Cloud Connectivity Adapters #soa #demopod #oow13. I'll be there Sep 23 & 24 3-6pm to meetup http://bit.ly/18I1Zj7 leonsmiers ?..and again a very successful Oracle SOA/BPM partner council on the eve of #oow13. Thanks Jurgen! @soacommunity pic.twitter.com/aM1LMlb7Yw Vikas Anand ?#oow13 #soa #oep #exalogic Canon Delivers Fast Data with Oracle Event Processing (Oracle SOA Suite) http://bit.ly/1dwPeHb #soacommunity Rolf Scheuch ?The ACM poster is a big success. Great talks and .... I am soon out of posters! #bpmcon #ACM pic.twitter.com/TriaUyXRWK Oracle SOA ?British Telecom Sucess with Oracle B2B #oow #soa #b2b http://pub.vitrue.com/1RWi leonsmiers ?(Oracle) Case Management supporting re-platforming, a pre-read before our presentation at #oow13 http://leonsmiers.blogspot.com/2013/09/case-management-supporting-re.html … #capgemini #yammer SOA & BPM Partner CommunityFor regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Twitter,SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 18, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 18, 2010New ProjectsASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Open source Content management system based on ASP.NET MVC platform.AutoFolders: AutoFolders package for Umbraco CMS This package auto creates folder structures for new and existing pages. The folders structures can be date bas...AutoPex: This project combines CCI with Pex by allowing the developer to run Pex on methods based on differences between two assemblies. Canvas VSDOC Intellisense: JavaScript VSDOC documentation for HTML5 Canvas element and 2d Context interface.CSUDH: California State University, Domguiez Hills Game projectsD-AMPS: System for Analysis of Microelectronic and Photonic StructuresDispX: Disease PredictorEmployee Info Starter Kit: This is a starter kit, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (crud) the employee info of a com...Enhanced Discussion Board for SharePoint: Provide later... publishing project to share with Malaysians firstFlowPad: Flowpad is a light, fast and easy to use flow diagram editor. It helps you quickly pour your algorithms from your mind to 'paper'. It is written us...Henge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D is a 3D physics library written in C# for XNA. It is implemented entirely in managed code and is compatible with the XBOX 360.Hybrid Windows Service: Abstracted design pattern for running a windows service interactively. Implemented as a base class to replace ServiceBase it will automatically pro...Image Cropper datatype for Umbraco: Stand alone version of the Image Cropper datatype in Umbraco. Listinator: A social wishlist application done in asp.net MVCMicrosoft Dynamics Ax User Group (AXUG) Code Repository: The goal of this project is to make it easier for customers of Microsoft Dynamics Ax to be able to share relevant source code. Code base should inc...Mobil Trials: Sebuah game sederhana yang dibuat di atas Silverlight 3.0 dengan bantuan Physics Helper 3.0 Demo : http://gameagam.co.cc/default.html Mirror link...NavigateTo Providers: This project is a collection of NavigateTo providers for Visual Studio 2010. NExtLib: NExtLib is a general-purpose extension library for .NET, which adds some useful features and addresses some alleged omissions.Nom - .NET object-mapper: Nom is a light-weight, storage-type agnostic persistence framework which is intended to provide an abstraction over both relational and non-relatio...Numerical Methods on Silverlight: Numerical Methods, Silverlight, Math Parser, Simple, EulerOpenGLViewController for Visual Basic .NET 2008: A single class in pure VB.NET code to create and control an OpenGL window by calling opengl32.dll directly without use of additional wrapper librar...RestaurantMIS: RestaurantMIS is a simple Restaurant management system developed in Visual C# 2008 with Chinese language.SmartKonnect: <project name>A WPF application for windows with shoutcast, twitter, facebook and etc.SSRS Excel file Sheet rename: SSRS wont support renaming excel reports sheet rename. This program support to generate the report and change the excel sheet nameSWENTRIZ.NET: SWENTRIZ.NET allows to build graphics of implicit functions via .NET functionality.TFT: Tropical forecast tracker is a web application. It will measure the error of the National Hurricane Center's forecast as compared to the actual tr...WCF Dynamic Client Proxy: A WCF Dynamic Client Proxy so you don't have to inherit from ClientBase all the time. The proxy also has fault tolerance so you don't have to dispo...Web.Config Role Provider: Stores ASP.NET Roles in web.config. Easy to set up and deploy. Works great for simple websites with authentication. The projects includes support ...WPF Line of Business App: Example WPF patterns for line of business applications. Includes navigation, animation, and visualization.YuBiS Framework: Silverlight and WF based a workflow RAD framework. New ReleasesASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): AtomicCms 1.0: This is the first public release of AtomicCms. To get more information about this content management system, visit website http://atomiccms.com/Blogsprajeesh.Blogspot samples: Designing Modular Smart Clients using CAL: This whitepaper provides architectural guidance for designing and implementing enterprise WPF/ silverlight client applications based on the Composi...DB Ghost Build Tools: 1.0.2: Made a change to the datetime format per dewee.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.02.03: Major HighlightsFixed the issue where LinkClick.aspx links were incorrect for child portals Fixed the issue with the PayPal URL settings. Fixed...Employee Directory webpart for sharepoint 2007 user profiles: Employee Directory Source V2.0: Features: 1. Displays a complete list of all Active Directory profiles imported by the SSP into SharePoint 2007. 2. Displays the following fields ...Enhanced Discussion Board for SharePoint: Alpha Release: Meant for those who attended my presentation. Not cleaned upESPEHA: Espeha 9 PFR: Some small issues fixedFlowPad: FlowPad 0.1: FlowPad 0.1 build. Run it to get fammiliar with major concepts of easy diagramming :)Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite BETA2: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite BETA2 Includes: - Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) - Demo Application - Samples - Foundation (Tabs, Groups, Contextu...Henge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D Source (2010-02): This is the initial 2010-02 release.Highlight: Highlight 2.5: This release is primarily a maintenance release of the library and is functionally equivalent to version 2.3 that was released in 2004.Magiq: Magiq 0.3.0: Magiq 0.3.0 contains: Magiq-to-objects: Full support to Linq-to-objects Magiq-to-sql: Full support to Linq-to-sql New features: Plugin model Bu...Microsoft Points Converter: Pre-Alpha ClickOnce Installer v0.03: This release builds on the 0.02 release by adding more thorough validation checks for the amount to convert from as well as adding several currency...Mobil Trials: Mobil Trials Source Code: Sebuah game sederhana yang dibuat di atas Silverlight 3.0 dengan bantuan Physics Helper 3.0 Game ini masih perlu dikembangkan lebih jauh lagi! Si...Numerical Methods on Silverlight: Numerical Methods on Silverlight 1.00: This a new version of Numerical Methods on Silverlight.OAuthLib: OAuthLib (1.5.0.0): Changed point is as next. 7037 Fix spell miss of RequestFactoryMedthodSharePoint Outlook Connector: Version 1.0.1.0: Now it supports simply attaching SharePoint documents feature.Sharpy: Sharpy 1.1 Alpha: This is the second Sharpy release. Only a single change has been made - the foreach function now uses IEnumerable as a source instead of IList. Th...SkinDroidCreator: SkinDroidCreator ALPHA 1: Primera releaseTan solo carga mapas, ya sea de un zip o de un directorio. Para probarlo se pueden cargar temas Metamorph o temas flasheables, ya se...SkyDrive .Net API Client: SkyDrive .Net API Client 0.8.9: SkyDrive .Net API Client assembly version 0.8.9. Changes/improvements: - Added Web Proxy support - Introduced WebDriveInfo - Introduced DownloadUrl...spikes: Salient.Web.Administration 1.0: WebAdmin is simply the built in ASP.NetWebAdministrationFiles application cleaned up with codebehinds to make customization and refactoring possibl...SSRS Excel file Sheet rename: Change SSRS excel file sheet name: Create stored procedure from the attached file in sql server 2005/2008SWENTRIZ.NET: Approach 1: First approachTortoiseSVN Addin for Visual Studio: TortoiseSVN Addin 1.0.4: Visual Studio 2005 support Custom working root bug fixingTotal Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin (.wfx): Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin 0.8.4: Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin version 0.8.4. Bug fixes: - Upgraded SkyDriveWebClient to version 0.8.9 Please do not forget to expres...UnOfficial AW Wrapper dot Net: UAWW.Net 0.1.5.85 Béta 2: Fixed and Added SomethingVr30 OS: Space Brick Break 1.1: A brick breaker. ADD Level 3, 4, 5Web.Config Role Provider: First release: Three downloads are available: A compiled dll ready to use. The schema to enable intellisense The complete source (zipped)WI Assistant: WI Assistant 2.1: This release improves the work item selection functionality. These selection methods are now supported (some require at least one item selected): ...WI Assistant: WI Assistant 2.2: Improved error handling and fix for linking several times in a row. DISCLAIMER: While I have tested this app on my TFS Server, by downloading and...ZipStorer - A Pure C# Class to Store Files in Zip: ZipStorer 2.30: Added stream-oriented methods Improved support for ePUB & Open Container Format specification (OCF) Automatic switch from Deflate to Store algo...Most Popular ProjectsRawrDotNetNuke® Community EditionASP.NET Ajax LibraryFacebook Developer ToolkitWindows 7 USB/DVD Download ToolWSPBuilder (SharePoint WSP tool)Virtual Router - Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2Json.NETPerformance Analysis of Logs (PAL) ToolQuickGraph, Graph Data Structures And Algorithms for .NetMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrSharpyBlogEngine.NETSimple SavantjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelFacebook Developer Toolkit

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• How to Reuse Your Old Wi-Fi Router as a Network Switch

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Just because your old Wi-Fi router has been replaced by a newer model doesn’t mean it needs to gather dust in the closet. Read on as we show you how to take an old and underpowered Wi-Fi router and turn it into a respectable network switch (saving your $20 in the process). Image by mmgallan. Why Do I Want To Do This? Wi-Fi technology has changed significantly in the last ten years but Ethernet-based networking has changed very little. As such, a Wi-Fi router with 2006-era guts is lagging significantly behind current Wi-Fi router technology, but the Ethernet networking component of the device is just as useful as ever; aside from potentially being only 100Mbs instead of 1000Mbs capable (which for 99% of home applications is irrelevant) Ethernet is Ethernet. What does this matter to you, the consumer? It means that even though your old router doesn’t hack it for your Wi-Fi needs any longer the device is still a perfectly serviceable (and high quality) network switch. When do you need a network switch? Any time you want to share an Ethernet cable among multiple devices, you need a switch. For example, let’s say you have a single Ethernet wall jack behind your entertainment center. Unfortunately you have four devices that you want to link to your local network via hardline including your smart HDTV, DVR, Xbox, and a little Raspberry Pi running XBMC. Instead of spending $20-30 to purchase a brand new switch of comparable build quality to your old Wi-Fi router it makes financial sense (and is environmentally friendly) to invest five minutes of your time tweaking the settings on the old router to turn it from a Wi-Fi access point and routing tool into a network switch–perfect for dropping behind your entertainment center so that your DVR, Xbox, and media center computer can all share an Ethernet connection. What Do I Need? For this tutorial you’ll need a few things, all of which you likely have readily on hand or are free for download. To follow the basic portion of the tutorial, you’ll need the following: 1 Wi-Fi router with Ethernet ports 1 Computer with Ethernet jack 1 Ethernet cable For the advanced tutorial you’ll need all of those things, plus: 1 copy of DD-WRT firmware for your Wi-Fi router We’re conducting the experiment with a Linksys WRT54GL Wi-Fi router. The WRT54 series is one of the best selling Wi-Fi router series of all time and there’s a good chance a significant number of readers have one (or more) of them stuffed in an office closet. Even if you don’t have one of the WRT54 series routers, however, the principles we’re outlining here apply to all Wi-Fi routers; as long as your router administration panel allows the necessary changes you can follow right along with us. A quick note on the difference between the basic and advanced versions of this tutorial before we proceed. Your typical Wi-Fi router has 5 Ethernet ports on the back: 1 labeled “Internet”, “WAN”, or a variation thereof and intended to be connected to your DSL/Cable modem, and 4 labeled 1-4 intended to connect Ethernet devices like computers, printers, and game consoles directly to the Wi-Fi router. When you convert a Wi-Fi router to a switch, in most situations, you’ll lose two port as the “Internet” port cannot be used as a normal switch port and one of the switch ports becomes the input port for the Ethernet cable linking the switch to the main network. This means, referencing the diagram above, you’d lose the WAN port and LAN port 1, but retain LAN ports 2, 3, and 4 for use. If you only need to switch for 2-3 devices this may be satisfactory. However, for those of you that would prefer a more traditional switch setup where there is a dedicated WAN port and the rest of the ports are accessible, you’ll need to flash a third-party router firmware like the powerful DD-WRT onto your device. Doing so opens up the router to a greater degree of modification and allows you to assign the previously reserved WAN port to the switch, thus opening up LAN ports 1-4. Even if you don’t intend to use that extra port, DD-WRT offers you so many more options that it’s worth the extra few steps. Preparing Your Router for Life as a Switch Before we jump right in to shutting down the Wi-Fi functionality and repurposing your device as a network switch, there are a few important prep steps to attend to. First, you want to reset the router (if you just flashed a new firmware to your router, skip this step). Following the reset procedures for your particular router or go with what is known as the “Peacock Method” wherein you hold down the reset button for thirty seconds, unplug the router and wait (while still holding the reset button) for thirty seconds, and then plug it in while, again, continuing to hold down the rest button. Over the life of a router there are a variety of changes made, big and small, so it’s best to wipe them all back to the factory default before repurposing the router as a switch. Second, after resetting, we need to change the IP address of the device on the local network to an address which does not directly conflict with the new router. The typical default IP address for a home router is 192.168.1.1; if you ever need to get back into the administration panel of the router-turned-switch to check on things or make changes it will be a real hassle if the IP address of the device conflicts with the new home router. The simplest way to deal with this is to assign an address close to the actual router address but outside the range of addresses that your router will assign via the DHCP client; a good pick then is 192.168.1.2. Once the router is reset (or re-flashed) and has been assigned a new IP address, it’s time to configure it as a switch. Basic Router to Switch Configuration If you don’t want to (or need to) flash new firmware onto your device to open up that extra port, this is the section of the tutorial for you: we’ll cover how to take a stock router, our previously mentioned WRT54 series Linksys, and convert it to a switch. Hook the Wi-Fi router up to the network via one of the LAN ports (consider the WAN port as good as dead from this point forward, unless you start using the router in its traditional function again or later flash a more advanced firmware to the device, the port is officially retired at this point). Open the administration control panel via  web browser on a connected computer. Before we get started two things: first,  anything we don’t explicitly instruct you to change should be left in the default factory-reset setting as you find it, and two, change the settings in the order we list them as some settings can’t be changed after certain features are disabled. To start, let’s navigate to Setup ->Basic Setup. Here you need to change the following things: Local IP Address: [different than the primary router, e.g. 192.168.1.2] Subnet Mask: [same as the primary router, e.g. 255.255.255.0] DHCP Server: Disable Save with the “Save Settings” button and then navigate to Setup -> Advanced Routing: Operating Mode: Router This particular setting is very counterintuitive. The “Operating Mode” toggle tells the device whether or not it should enable the Network Address Translation (NAT)  feature. Because we’re turning a smart piece of networking hardware into a relatively dumb one, we don’t need this feature so we switch from Gateway mode (NAT on) to Router mode (NAT off). Our next stop is Wireless -> Basic Wireless Settings: Wireless SSID Broadcast: Disable Wireless Network Mode: Disabled After disabling the wireless we’re going to, again, do something counterintuitive. Navigate to Wireless -> Wireless Security and set the following parameters: Security Mode: WPA2 Personal WPA Algorithms: TKIP+AES WPA Shared Key: [select some random string of letters, numbers, and symbols like JF#d$di!Hdgio890] Now you may be asking yourself, why on Earth are we setting a rather secure Wi-Fi configuration on a Wi-Fi router we’re not going to use as a Wi-Fi node? On the off chance that something strange happens after, say, a power outage when your router-turned-switch cycles on and off a bunch of times and the Wi-Fi functionality is activated we don’t want to be running the Wi-Fi node wide open and granting unfettered access to your network. While the chances of this are next-to-nonexistent, it takes only a few seconds to apply the security measure so there’s little reason not to. Save your changes and navigate to Security ->Firewall. Uncheck everything but Filter Multicast Firewall Protect: Disable At this point you can save your changes again, review the changes you’ve made to ensure they all stuck, and then deploy your “new” switch wherever it is needed. Advanced Router to Switch Configuration For the advanced configuration, you’ll need a copy of DD-WRT installed on your router. Although doing so is an extra few steps, it gives you a lot more control over the process and liberates an extra port on the device. Hook the Wi-Fi router up to the network via one of the LAN ports (later you can switch the cable to the WAN port). Open the administration control panel via web browser on the connected computer. Navigate to the Setup -> Basic Setup tab to get started. In the Basic Setup tab, ensure the following settings are adjusted. The setting changes are not optional and are required to turn the Wi-Fi router into a switch. WAN Connection Type: Disabled Local IP Address: [different than the primary router, e.g. 192.168.1.2] Subnet Mask: [same as the primary router, e.g. 255.255.255.0] DHCP Server: Disable In addition to disabling the DHCP server, also uncheck all the DNSMasq boxes as the bottom of the DHCP sub-menu. If you want to activate the extra port (and why wouldn’t you), in the WAN port section: Assign WAN Port to Switch [X] At this point the router has become a switch and you have access to the WAN port so the LAN ports are all free. Since we’re already in the control panel, however, we might as well flip a few optional toggles that further lock down the switch and prevent something odd from happening. The optional settings are arranged via the menu you find them in. Remember to save your settings with the save button before moving onto a new tab. While still in the Setup -> Basic Setup menu, change the following: Gateway/Local DNS : [IP address of primary router, e.g. 192.168.1.1] NTP Client : Disable The next step is to turn off the radio completely (which not only kills the Wi-Fi but actually powers the physical radio chip off). Navigate to Wireless -> Advanced Settings -> Radio Time Restrictions: Radio Scheduling: Enable Select “Always Off” There’s no need to create a potential security problem by leaving the Wi-Fi radio on, the above toggle turns it completely off. Under Services -> Services: DNSMasq : Disable ttraff Daemon : Disable Under the Security -> Firewall tab, uncheck every box except “Filter Multicast”, as seen in the screenshot above, and then disable SPI Firewall. Once you’re done here save and move on to the Administration tab. Under Administration -> Management:  Info Site Password Protection : Enable Info Site MAC Masking : Disable CRON : Disable 802.1x : Disable Routing : Disable After this final round of tweaks, save and then apply your settings. Your router has now been, strategically, dumbed down enough to plod along as a very dependable little switch. Time to stuff it behind your desk or entertainment center and streamline your cabling.     

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• BizTalk 2009 - Naming Guidelines

  - by StuartBrierley

  The following is effectively a repost of the BizTalk 2004 naming guidlines that I have previously detailed.  I have posted these again for completeness under BizTalk 2009 and to allow an element of separation in case I find some reason to amend these for BizTalk 2009. These guidlines should be universal across any version of BizTalk you may wish to apply them to. General Rules All names should be named with a Pascal convention. Project Namespaces For message schemas: [CompanyName].XML.Schemas.[FunctionalName]* Examples:  ABC.XML.Schemas.Underwriting DEF.XML.Schemas.MarshmellowTradingExchange * Donates potential for multiple levels of functional name, such as Underwriting.Dictionary.Valuation For web services: [CompanyName].Web.Services.[FunctionalName] Examples: ABC.Web.Services.OrderJellyBeans For the main BizTalk Projects: [CompanyName].BizTalk.[AssemblyType].[FunctionalName]* Examples: ABC.BizTalk.Mappings.Underwriting ABC.BizTalk.Orchestrations.Underwriting * Donates potential for multiple levels of functional name, such as Mappings.Underwriting.Valuations Assemblies BizTalk Assembly names should match the associated Project Namespace, such as ABC.BizTalk.Mappings.Underwriting. This pertains to the formal assembly name and the DLL name. The Solution name should take the name of the main project within the solution, and also therefore the namespace for that project. Although long names such as this can be unwieldy to work with, the benefits of having the full scope available when the assemblies are installed on the target server are generally judged to outweigh this inconvenience. Messaging Artifacts Artifact Standard Notes Example Schema <DescriptiveName>.xsd   .NET Type name should match, without file extension.    .NET Namespace will likely match assembly name. PurchaseOrderAcknowledge_FF.xsd  or FNMA100330_FF.xsd Property Schema <DescriptiveName>.xsd Should be named to reflect possible common usage across multiple schemas  IspecMessagePropertySchema.xsd UnderwritingOrchestrationKeys.xsd Map <SourceSchema>2<DestinationSchema>.btm Exceptions to this may be made where the source and destination schemas share the majority of the name, such as in mainframe web service maps InstructionResponse2CustomEmailRequest.btm (exception example) AccountCustomerAddressSummaryRequest2MainframeRequest.btm Orchestration <DescriptiveName>.odx   GetValuationReports.odx SendMTEDecisionResponse.odx Send/Receive Pipeline <DescriptiveName>.btp   ValidatingXMLReceivePipeline.btp FlatFileAssembler.btp Receive Port A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function.    FraudPreventionServices LetterProcessing   Receive Location A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function.  ? Do we want to include the transport type here ? Arrears Web Service Send Port Group A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function.   Customer Updates Send Port A plainly worded phrase that will clearly explain the function.    ABCProductUpdater LogLendingPolicyOutput Parties A meaningful name for a Trading Partner. If dealing with multiple entities within a Trading Partner organization, the Organization name could be used as a prefix.   Roles A meaningful name for the role that a Trading Partner plays.     Orchestration Workflow Shapes Shape Standard Notes Example Scopes <DescriptionOfContainedWork> or <DescOfcontainedWork><TxType>   Including info about transaction type may be appropriate in some situations where it adds significant documentation value to the diagram. HandleReportResponse         Receive Receive<MessageName> Typically, MessageName will be the same as the name of the message variable that is being received “into”. ReceiveReportResponse Send Send<MessageName> Typically, MessageName will be the same as the name of the message variable that is being sent. SendValuationDetailsRequest Expression <DescriptionOfEffect> Expression shapes should be named to describe the net effect of the expression, similar to naming a method.  The exception to this is the case where the expression is interacting with an external .NET component to perform a function that overlaps with existing BizTalk functionality – use closest BizTalk shape for this case. CreatePrintXML Decide <DescriptionOfDecision> A description of what will be decided in the “if” branch Report Type? Perform MF Save? If-Branch <DescriptionOfDecision> A (potentially abbreviated) description of what is being decided Mortgage Valuation Yes Else-Branch Else Else-branch shapes should always be named “Else” Else Construct Message (Assign) Create<Message> (for Construct)     <ExpressionDescription> (for expression) If a Construct shape contains a message assignment, it should be prefixed with “Create” followed by an abbreviated name of the message being assigned.    The actual message assignment shape contained should be named to describe the expression that is contained. CreateReportDataMV   which contains expression: ExtractReportData Construct Message (Transform) Create<Message> (for Construct)   <SourceSchema>2<DestSchema> (for transform) If a Construct shape contains a message transform, it should be prefixed with “Create” followed by an abbreviated name of the message being assigned.   The actual message transform shape contained should generally be named the same as the called map.  CreateReportDataMV   which contains transform: ReportDataMV2ReportDataMV                 Construct Message (containing multiple shapes)   If a Construct Message shape uses multiple assignments or transforms, the overall shape should be named to communicate the net effect, using no prefix.     Call/Start Orchestration Call<OrchestrationName>   Start<OrchestrationName>     Throw Throw<ExceptionType> The corresponding variable name for the exception type should (often) be the same name as the exception type, only camel-cased. ThrowRuleException, which references the “ruleException” variable.     Parallel <DescriptionOfParallelWork> Parallel shapes should be named by a description of what work will be done in parallel   Delay <DescriptionOfWhatWaitingFor> Delay shapes should be named by a description of what is being waited for.  POAcknowledgeTimeout Listen <DescriptionOfOutcomes> Listen shapes should be named by a description that captures (to the degree possible) all the branches of the Listen shape POAckOrTimeout FirstShippingBid Loop <DescriptionOfLoop> A (potentially abbreviated) description of what the loop is. ForEachValuationReport WhileErrorFlagTrue Role Link   See “Roles” in messaging naming conventions above.   Suspend <ReasonDescription> Describe what action an administrator must take to resume the orchestration.  More detail can be passed to error property – and should include what should be done by the administrator before resuming the orchestration. ReEstablishCreditLink Terminate <ReasonDescription> Describe why the orchestration terminated.  More detail can be passed to error property. TimeoutsExpired Call Rules Call<PolicyName> The policy name may need to be abbreviated. CallLendingPolicy Compensate Compensate or Compensate<TxName> If the shape compensates nested transactions, names should be suffixed with the name of the nested transaction – otherwise it should simple be Compensate. CompensateTransferFunds Orchestration Types Type Standard Notes Example Multi-Part Message Types <LogicalDocumentType>   Multi-part types encapsulate multiple parts.  The WSDL spec indicates “parts are a flexible mechanism for describing the logical abstract content of a message.”  The name of the multi-part type should correspond to the “logical” document type, i.e. what the sum of the parts describes. InvoiceReceipt   (which might encapsulate an invoice acknowledgement and a payment voucher.) Multi-Part Messsage Part <SchemaNameOfPart> Should be named (most often) simply for the schema (or simple type) associated with the part. InvoiceHeader Messages <SchemaName> or <MuliPartMessageTypeName> Should be named based on the corresponding schema type or multi-part message type.  If there is more than one variable of a type, name for its use within the orchestration. ReportDataMV UpdatedReportDataMV Variables <DescriptiveName>   TargetFilePath StringProcessor Port Types <FunctionDescription>PortType Should be named to suggest the nature of an endpoint, with pascal casing and suffixed with “PortType”.   If there will be more than one Port for a Port Type, the Port Type should be named according to the abstract service supplied.   The WSDL spec indicates port types are “a named set of abstract operations and the abstract messages involved” that also encapsulates the message pattern (i.e. one-way, request-response, solicit-response) that all operations on the port type adhere to. ReceiveReportResponsePortType  or CallEAEPortType (This is a two way port, so Receove or Send alone would not be appropriate.  Could have been ProcessEAERequestPortType etc....) Ports <FunctionDescription>Port Should be named to suggest a grouping of functionality, with pascal casing and suffixed with “Port.”  ReceiveReportResponsePort CallEAEPort Correlation types <DescriptiveName> Should be named based on the logical name of what is being used to correlate.  PurchaseOrderNumber Correlation sets <DescriptiveName> Should be named based on the corresponding correlation type.  If there is more than one, it should be named to reflect its specific purpose within the orchestration.   PurchaseOrderNumber Orchestration parameters <DescriptiveName> Should be named to match the caller’s names for the corresponding variables where appropriate.

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• Windows Azure Evolution &ndash; Preview Developer Portal

  - by Shaun

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

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 12, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 12, 2012Popular ReleasesKanboxAPI: KanboxAPI beta: ????? Token Info List DownloadMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.502b: It has been a slow week, but this release addresses a couple of recent bugs: Movies Multi-part Movies - Existing .nfo files that differed in name from the first part, were missed and scraped again. Trailers - MC attempted to scrape info for existing trailers. TV Shows Show Scraping - shows available only in the non-default language would not show up in the main browser. The correct language can now be selected using the TV Show Selector for a single show. General Will no longer prompt for ...NewLife XCode ??????: XCode v8.5.2012.0508、XCoder v4.7.2012.0320: X????： 1，????For .Net 4.0?? XCoder????： 1，???????，????X????，?????? XCode????： 1，Insert/Update/Delete???????????????，???SQL???? 2，IEntityOperate?????? 3，????????IEntityTree 4，????????????????? 5，?????????? 6，??????????????dycom: v1.0: DYCom ????????：Silverlight, Windows phone 7.5.NETMF_for_STM32: Beta 1 Release: First public beta release.Google Book Downloader: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 Alpha: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 Alpha. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports Cpython, IronPython, Jython and Pypy • Python editor with advanced member, signature intellisense and refactoring • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.0 RC1 Refresh 1: JayData 1.0.0 RC1 Refresh 1 JayData is a unified data access API to webSQL, indexedDB, OData, Facebook and YQL. Overview The major feature of this release is related to OData provider, FunctionImport is now generally supported. Now you can consume OData service operations (WebMethods). We extended the JaySvcUtil to generate the necessary metadata. We included many fixes, such as the Visual Studio 2010 IntelliSense optimalization (RC1 was optimized only to VS11). It's recommended to upgrade...AD Gallery: AD Gallery 1.2.7: NewsFixed a bug which caused the current thumbnail not to be highlighted Added a hook to take complete control over how descriptions are handled, take a look under Documentation for more info Added removeAllImages()51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.4.8: One Click Install from NuGet Data ChangesIncludes 42 new browser properties in both the Lite and Premium data sets. Premium Data includes many new devices including Nokia Lumia 900, BlackBerry 9220 and HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 range and Samsung Galaxy S III. Lite data includes devices released in January 2012. Changes to Version 2.1.4.81. The IsFirstTime method of the RedirectModule will now return the same value when called multiple times for the same request. This was prevent...Mugen Injection: Mugen Injection ver 2.2 (WinRT supported): Added NamedParameterAttribute, OptionalParameterAttribute. Added behaviors ICycleDependencyBehavior, IResolveUnregisteredTypeBehavior. Added WinRT support. Added support for NET 4.5. Added support for MVC 4.NShape - .Net Diagramming Framework for Industrial Applications: NShape 2.0.1: Changes in 2.0.1:Bugfixes: IRepository.Insert(Shape shape) and IRepository.Insert(IEnumerable<Shape> shapes) no longer insert shape connections. Several context menu items did display although the required permission was not granted Display did not reset the visible and active layers when changing the diagram NullReferenceException when pressing Del key and no shape was selected Changed Behavior: LayerCollection.Find("") no longer throws an exception. Improvements: Display does not rese...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.11.6: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...sb0t: sb0t 4.64: New commands added: #scribble <url> #adminscribble on #adminscribble offDocument.Editor: 2012.4: Whats new for Document.Editor 2012.4: Improved Template support Improved Options Dialog Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 5: New feature - Added ItemIsReference, ItemReferenceLoopHandling, ItemTypeNameHandling, ItemConverterType to JsonPropertyAttribute New feature - Added ItemRequired to JsonObjectAttribute New feature - Added Path to JsonWriterException Change - Improved deserializer call stack memory usage Change - Moved the PDB files out of the NuGet package into a symbols package Fix - Fixed infinite loop from an input error when reading an array and error handling is enabled Fix - Fixed base objec...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.1: 2012.05.07 Ver5.6.1 (1)????????????????(Ver5.6.0??)??? (2)HTTP?????SSL????????????（Ver5.6.0??）??? (3)HTTP?????2G??????????????????????????? (4)HTP????　?????????ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.5: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-05-06 v3.1.5 -????????：grid/grid_twogrid.aspx。 +?...SharpDevelop: SharpDevelop 4.2: Please see http://community.sharpdevelop.net/forums/t/15772.aspx for the release announcement.Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.4: Taskbar icon overlay (number of unread items) can now be switched off in preferences (Windows Vista / 7 only) Maximize button now can be toggled to be fullscreen (as befor) or only normal maximize (taskbar stays visible) in preferences List of feeds is now sorted by alphabetNew Projects3D Scene Editor: A generic 3d level editor built using XNA to speed up designing and building game levels.Attribute Based Cache using Unity Interception: Unity interception handler attribute for Caching which allows to apply boiler plate caching pattern to classes, and class members directly, without configuring them in the application configuration file. Configure your choice of Cache Provider (ObjectCache, Azure included) in the Unity IoC Container and apply the attribute to the method which you want to cache AutoCompleteBox for WinRT: None yetBAC2 Bachelor's Thesis Source Code: The source code of my Bachelor's ThesisBAMabase: It's a bamabase.BBSProject: BBSProjectBrain 2 - Game Engine: Brain 2 is a Game Engine that runs on multiple platforms.cobra-winldtp: Cobra - Windows version of Linux Desktop Testing Project (WinLDTP) - http://ldtp.freedesktop.org LDTP is a GUI test automation tool works on both Windows and Linux platform Windows GUI test automation tool written in C# and test scripts can be written in Python for now. Ruby API will be added soon.CS322: C# Programski jezikDoxBotPlugin: The DoxBotPlugin is a Plug-In for Ice-Chat9 that allows a user to use Icechat9 as both a normal IRC client and to switch on bot mode in certain channels to have DoxBotPlugin act on their behalf.dycom: DYCom??(DY Communication)???????????,?????????????????.????????????????. ??????????????????????,?????????????????。Eyes Protector: PL: Program pomagajacy w ochronie oczu przed przemeczeniem zwiazanym ze zbyt dluga praca przy komputerze. EN: ---kshell: ????Linux??????Lumia: This is Lumia project.MacroDoc: MacroDoc is an engine written in C# for composing documents from reusable pieces of structure and content.Mssql: This is Sql Server project.NETMF_for_STM32: This is the Codeplex project for NETMF for STM32 (F4 Edition). Ocular - a free, open source WYSIWYG editor for HTML: Ocular is a free C# WYSIWYG HTML editor, similar to Adobe Dreamweaver. We are always looking for contributors, so please help us!PeopleCredit: Prototype web service to maintain all employee credits.Project Server workflow: This workflow creates the project site for Basic project plan EPT when workflow task is approved.(This is the correction done over the Branching workflow provided with Project Server 2010 SDK). Workflow task is created using PSWApprovalTask Content type in Project Server Workflow Task List. Quick Reminder: PL: Program pomagajacy zapisac szybkie przypomnienia podczas pracy przy komputerze. EN: ---Random Projects: My random projects...Recommendation Engine Demo: How does the Amazon recommendation works? This is about visualizing the item to item collaborations filtering mechanism using a item-to-item matrix table. The item-to-item matrix, the vectors and the calculated data values are displayed. There are n different items and the item recommendation can display up to m items. There are implemented different item-to-item neighborhood functions. A simple max count of seen neighbor items, the Cosine Similarity and the Jaccard Index. A t...SaveSeaTurtle: Sea TurtleSharpGpx: SharpGpx implements an object model for reading and writing GPX (GPS eXchange Format).SlimDo: SlimDo is a scripting language coded in C#Spring: This is Spring.Net projectSQL Server Quick Tools Pack: SQL Server Quick Tools Pack for your sql server SuLD framework: Supported Link Discovery framework (SuLD) is a tool to discover links to multiple Linked Data datasets. Finding is supported by various features like synonym module or autocomplete.TQuery.Net: .Net??????WAAP - World of warcraft Auction house Analysis Project: A project in which we try to analyse prices and auctioneers on the various World of Warcraft Auction housesxhttp.net: The Xhttp.Net framework is a dotnet implementation of the Extended Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http://www.xhttp.org), with simple service integration, full arguments support including Base64 and DateTime, single and multiple asynchronous requests, data streaming, remote API creation from XHTTP service schemas, and a runtime plugin architecture.

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• Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 2

  - by Tarun Arora

  Welcome back, in part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies. In this blog post I’ll get into the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. Tools => Options => Test Tools Have you visited the treasures of Visual Studio Menu bar tools => Options => Test Tools lately? The options to enable disable prompts on creating, editing, deleting or running manual/automated tests can be controller from here. The default test project language and default test types created on a new test project creation could be selected/unselected from here. Ever wondered how you can change the default limit of 25 test results, this can again be changed from here. If you record a lot of Web Tests and wish for the web test recorder to start with “that” URL populated, well this again can be specified from here. If you haven’t so far, I would urge you to spend 2 minutes in the test tools options.   Test Menu => Ready Steady Test Action! The Test tools are under the Test Menu in Visual Studio, apart from being able to create a new Test and Test List you can also load an existing vsmdi file. You can also manage your test controllers from here. A solution can have one or more test setting files, but there can only be one active test settings file at any time. Again, this selection can be done from here.  You can open the various test windows from under the windows option from the test menu. If you open the Test view window you will see that you have the option to group the tests by work items, project, test type, etc. You can set these properties by right clicking a test in the test list and choosing properties from the context menu.    So, what is a vsmdi file? vsmdi stands for Visual Studio Test Metadata File. Placed under the Solution Items this file keeps track of the list of unit tests in your solution. If you open the vsmdi file as an xml file you will see a series of Test Links nested with in the list Test List tags along with the Run Configuration tag. When in visual studio you run tests, the IDE looks at the vsmdi file to see what tests need to be run. You also have the option of using the vsmdi file in your team builds to specify which tests need to run as part of the build. Refer here for a walkthrough from a fellow blogger on how to use the vsmdi file in the team builds. Web Performance Test – The Truth! In Visual Studio 2010 “Web Tests” have been renamed to “Web Performance Tests”. Apart from renaming this test type there have been several improvements to this test type in visual studio 2010. I am very active on the MSDN Visual Studio And Load Testing forum and a frequent question from many users is “Do Web Tests support Pages that run JavaScript?” I will start with a little bit of background before answering this question. Web Performance Tests operate at the HTTP Layer, but why? To enable you to generate high loads with a relatively low amount of hardware, Web performance tests are driven at the protocol layer rather than instantiating a browser.The most common source of confusion is that users do not realize Web Performance Tests work at the HTTP layer. The tool adds to that misconception. After all, you record in IE, and when running a Web test you can select which browser to use, and then the result viewer shows the results in a browser window. So that means the tests run through the browser, right? NO! The Web test engine works at the HTTP layer, and does not instantiate a browser. What does that mean? In the diagram below, you can see there are no browsers running when the engine is sending and receiving requests. Does that mean I can’t test pages that use Java script? The best example for java script generating HTTP traffic is AJAX calls. The most common example of browser plugins are Silverlight or Flash. The Web test recorder will record HTTP traffic from AJAX calls and from most (but not all) browser plugins. This means you will still be able to web performance test pages that use java script or plugin and play back the results but the playback engine will not show the java script or plug in results in the ‘browser control’. If you want to test the page behaviour as a result of the java script or plug in consider using Coded UI Tests. This page looks like it failed, when in fact it succeeded! Looking closely at the response, and subsequent requests, it is clear the operation succeeded. As stated above, the reason why the browser control is pasting this message is because java script has been disabled in this control. So, to reiterate, the web performance test recorder: - Sends and receives data at the HTTP layer. - Does NOT run a browser. - Does NOT run java script. - Does NOT host ActiveX controls or plugins. There is a great series of blog posts from Ed Glas, i would highly recommend his blog to any one performing Load/Performance testing through Visual Studio. Demo – Web Performance Test [Demo] - Visual Studio Ultimate 2010: Test Settings and Configuration   [Demo]–Visual Studio Ultimate 2010: Web Performance Test   In this short video I try and answer the following questions, Why is performance Testing important? How does Visual Studio Help you performance Test your applications? How do i record a web performance test? How do make a web performance test data driven, transaction driven, loop driven, convert to code, add validations? Best practices for recording Web Performance Tests. I have a web performance test, what next? Creating the Web Performance Test was the first step towards load testing your application. Now that we have the base test we can test the page behaviour when N-users access the page. Have you ever had the head of business call you and mention that the marketing team has done a fantastic job and are expecting increased traffic on the web site, can the website survive the weekend with that additional load? This is the perfect opportunity to capacity test your application to see how your website holds up under various levels of load, you can work the results backwards to see how much hardware you may need to scale up your application to survive the weekend. Apart from that it is always a good idea to have some benchmarks around how the application performs under light loads for short duration, under heavy load for long duration and soak test the application run a constant load for a very week or two to record the effects of constant load for really long durations, this is a great way of identifying how your application handles the default IIS application pool reset which by default is configured to once every 25 hours. These bench marks will act as the perfect yard stick to measure performance gains when you start making improvements. BUT there are some best practices! => Goal Based Load Testing Approach Since the subject is vast and there are a lot of things to measure and analyse, … it is very easy to get distracted from the real goal!  You can optimize your application once you know where the pain points are. There is no point performing a load test of 5000 users if your intranet application will only have a 100 simultaneous users, it is important to keep focussed on the real goals of the project. So the idea is to have a user story around your load testing scenarios and test realistically. So it is recommended that you follow the below outline, It is an Iterative process, refine your objectives, identify the key scenarios, what is the expected workload, key metrics you want to report, record the web performance tests, simulate load and analyse results. Is your application already deployed in Production? This is great! You can analyse the IIS Logs to understand the user behaviour… But what are IIS LOGS? The IIS logs allow you to record events for each application and Web site on the Web server. You can create separate logs for each of your applications and Web sites. Logging information in IIS goes beyond the scope of the event logging or performance monitoring features provided by Windows. The IIS logs can include information, such as who has visited your site, what the visitor viewed, and when the information was last viewed. You can use the IIS logs to identify any attempts to gain unauthorized access to your Web server. How to configure IIS LOGS? For those Ninjas who already have IIS Logs configured (by the way its on by default) and need a way to analyse the IIS Logs, can use the Windows IIS Utility – Log Parser. Log Parser is a very powerful tool that provides a generic SQL-like language on top of many types of data like IIS Logs, Event Viewer entries, XML files, CSV files, File System and others; and it allows you to export the result of the queries to many output formats such as CSV, XML, SQL Server, Charts and others; and it works well with IIS 5, 6, 7 and 7.5. Frequently used Log Parser queries. Demo – Load Test [Demo]–Visual Studio Ultimate 2010: Load Testing   In this short video I try and answer the following questions, - Types of Performance Testing? - Perform Goal driven Load Testing, analyse Test Run Result and Generate a report? Recap A quick recap of what we have covered so far,     Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, in part III of this blog series I’ll be getting into the details of Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, and the Asp.net Profiler. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. See you on in Part III   Share this post : CodeProject

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