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• Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3

  - by rajbk

  We continue building our report in this three part series. Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1 Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2 Adding the ReportViewer control and filter drop downs. Open the source code for index.aspx and add a ScriptManager control. This control is required for the ReportViewer control. Add a DropDownList for the categories and suppliers. Add the ReportViewer control. The markup after these steps is shown below. <div> <asp:ScriptManager ID="smScriptManager" runat="server"> </asp:ScriptManager> <div id="searchFilter"> Filter by: Category : <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlCategories" runat="server" /> and Supplier : <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlSuppliers" runat="server" /> </div> <rsweb:ReportViewer ID="rvProducts" runat="server"> </rsweb:ReportViewer> </div> The design view for index.aspx is shown below. The dropdowns will display the categories and suppliers in the database. Changing the selection in the drop downs will cause the report to be filtered by the selections in the dropdowns. You will see how to do this in the next steps.   Attaching the RDLC to the ReportViewer control by clicking on the top right of the control, going to Report Viewer tasks and selecting Products.rdlc.   Resize the ReportViewer control by dragging at the bottom right corner. I set mine to 800px x 500px. You can also set this value in source view. Defining the data sources. We will now define the Data Source used to populate the report. Go back to the “ReportViewer Tasks” and select “Choose Data Sources” Select a “New data source..” Select “Object” and name your Data Source ID “odsProducts”   In the next screen, choose “ProductRepository” as your business object. Choose “GetProductsProjected” in the next screen.   The method requires a SupplierID and CategoryID. We will set these so that our data source gets the values from the drop down lists we defined earlier. Set the parameter source to be of type “Control” and set the ControlIDs to be ddlSuppliers and ddlCategories respectively. Your screen will look like this: We are now going to define the data source for our drop downs. Select the ddlCategory drop down and pick “Choose Data Source”. Pick “Object” and give it an id “odsCategories”   In the next screen, choose “ProductRepository” Select the GetCategories() method in the next screen.   Select “CategoryName” and “CategoryID” in the next screen. We are done defining the data source for the Category drop down. Perform the same steps for the Suppliers drop down.   Select each dropdown and set the AppendDataBoundItems to true and AutoPostback to true.     The AppendDataBoundItems is needed because we are going to insert an “All“ list item with a value of empty. Go to each drop down and add this list item markup as shown below> Finally, double click on each drop down in the designer and add the following code in the code behind. This along with the “Autopostback= true” attribute refreshes the report anytime a drop down is changed. protected void ddlCategories_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { rvProducts.LocalReport.Refresh(); }   protected void ddlSuppliers_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { rvProducts.LocalReport.Refresh(); } Compile your report and run the page. You should see the report rendered. Note that the tool bar in the ReportViewer control gives you a couple of options including the ability to export the data to Excel, PDF or word.   Conclusion Through this three part series, we did the following: Created a data layer for use by our RDLC. Created an RDLC using the report wizard and define a dataset for the report. Used the report design surface to design our report including adding a chart. Used the ReportViewer control to attach the RDLC. Connected our ReportWiewer to a data source and take parameter values from the drop downlists. Used AutoPostBack to refresh the reports when the dropdown selection was changed. RDLCs allow you to create interactive reports including drill downs and grouping. For even more advanced reports you can use Microsoft® SQL Server™ Reporting Services with RDLs. With RDLs, the report is rendered on the report server instead of the web server. Another nice thing about RDLs is that you can define a parameter list for the report and it gets rendered automatically for you. RDLCs and RDLs both have their advantages and its best to compare them and choose the right one for your requirements. Download VS2010 RTM Sample project NorthwindReports.zip   Alfred Borden: Are you watching closely?

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• Enable Automatic Code First Migrations On SQL Database in Azure Web Sites

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Now that Azure supports .NET Framework 4.5, you can use all the latest and greatest available features. A common scenario is to be able to use Entity Framework Code First Migrations with a SQL Database in Azure. Prior to Code First Migrations, Entity Framework provided database initializers. While convenient for demos and prototypes, database initializers weren’t useful for much beyond that because, if you delete and re-create your entire database when the schema changes, you lose all of your operational data. This is the void that Migrations are meant to fill. For example, if you add a column to your model, Migrations will alter the database to add the column rather than blowing away the entire database and re-creating it from scratch. Azure is becoming increasingly easier to use – especially with features like Azure Web Sites. Being able to use Entity Framework Migrations in Azure makes deployment easier than ever. In this blog post, I’ll walk through enabling Automatic Code First Migrations on Azure. I’ll use the Simple Membership provider for my example. First, we’ll create a new Azure Web site called “migrationstest” including creating a new SQL Database along with it:   Next we’ll go to the web site and download the publish profile:   In the meantime, we’ve created a new MVC 4 website in Visual Studio 2012 using the “Internet Application” template. This template is automatically configured to use the Simple Membership provider. We’ll do our initial Publish to Azure by right-clicking our project and selecting “Publish…”. From the “Publish Web” dialog, we’ll import the publish profile that we downloaded in the previous step:   Once the site is published, we’ll just click the “Register” link from the default site. Since the AccountController is decorated with the [InitializeSimpleMembership] attribute, the initializer will be called and the initial database is created.   We can verify this by connecting to our SQL Database on Azure with SQL Management Studio (after making sure that our local IP address is added to the list of Allowed IP Addresses in Azure): One interesting note is that these tables got created with the default Entity Framework initializer – which is to create the database if it doesn’t already exist. However, our database did already exist! This is because there is a new feature of Entity Framework 5 where Code First will add tables to an existing database as long as the target database doesn’t contain any of the tables from the model. At this point, it’s time to enable Migrations. We’ll open the Package Manger Console and execute the command: PM> Enable-Migrations -EnableAutomaticMigrations This will enable automatic migrations for our project. Because we used the "-EnableAutomaticMigrations” switch, it will create our Configuration class with a constructor that sets the AutomaticMigrationsEnabled property set to true: 1: public Configuration() 2: { 3: AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = true; 4: } We’ll now add our initial migration: PM> Add-Migration Initial This will create a migration class call “Initial” that contains the entire model. But we need to remove all of this code because our database already exists so we are just left with empty Up() and Down() methods. 1: public partial class Initial : DbMigration 2: { 3: public override void Up() 4: { 5: } 6: 7: public override void Down() 8: { 9: } 10: } If we don’t remove this code, we’ll get an exception the first time we attempt to run migrations that tells us: “There is already an object named 'UserProfile' in the database”. This blog post by Julie Lerman fully describes this scenario (i.e., enabling migrations on an existing database). Our next step is to add the Entity Framework initializer that will automatically use Migrations to update the database to the latest version. We will add these 2 lines of code to the Application_Start of the Global.asax: 1: Database.SetInitializer(new MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion<UsersContext, Configuration>()); 2: new UsersContext().Database.Initialize(false); Note the Initialize() call will force the initializer to run if it has not been run before. At this point, we can publish again to make sure everything is still working as we are expecting. This time we’re going to specify in our publish profile that Code First Migrations should be executed:   Once we have re-published we can once again navigate to the Register page. At this point the database has not been changed but Migrations is now enabled on our SQL Database in Azure. We can now customize our model. Let’s add 2 new properties to the UserProfile class – Email and DateOfBirth: 1: [Table("UserProfile")] 2: public class UserProfile 3: { 4: [Key] 5: [DatabaseGeneratedAttribute(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] 6: public int UserId { get; set; } 7: public string UserName { get; set; } 8: public string Email { get; set; } 9: public DateTime DateOfBirth { get; set; } 10: } At this point all we need to do is simply re-publish. We’ll once again navigate to the Registration page and, because we had Automatic Migrations enabled, the database has been altered (*not* recreated) to add our 2 new columns. We can verify this by once again looking at SQL Management Studio:   Automatic Migrations provide a quick and easy way to keep your database in sync with your model without the worry of having to re-create your entire database and lose data. With Azure Web Sites you can set up automatic deployment with Git or TFS and automate the entire process to make it dead simple.

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• Book Review: Middleware Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g R5

  - by olaf.heimburger

  When you are familar with the Oracle Database and Middleware stack, chances are that you came across the Enterprise Manager. It comes in many versions for the database or the middleware and differs in its features. If meet someone who talks about Enterprise Manager, it might be possible that this person is talking about something completely different - Enterprise Manager Grid Control. Enterprise Manager Grid Control is the Oracle product for the data center that monitors all databases - and middleware components as well as operating systems. Since the database part is taken for granted, is needs some additional steps to get into the world of centralized middleware management. That's what this book is for - bringing you in the world of middleware management. The Authors This book is written by Debu Panda, former Product Management Director of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Management development team, and Arvind Maheshwari, Senior Software Development Manager of the Oracle Enterprise Manager development team. The Book Oracle Enterprise Manager conceptionally works for many different management areas. As a user you often think of managing databases with it. This is a wide area and deserves another book. The least known area is the middleware management and that's what the booked aimes for. The first 3 chapters cover the key features of Enterprise Manager Grid Control, Installing Enterprise Manager Grid Control, and Enterprise Manager Key Concepts and Subsystems. The foundation you need to understand the whole software and the following chapters. Read them in order and you are well prepared for the next 10 chapters on managing the various bits and pieces in your data center. The list of bits and pieces is always a surprise, no matter how often you open the book. You can manage Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Forms and Reports Services, SOA Suite 10g, Oracle Service Bus 10g, Oracle Internet Directory, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Identity Federation, Oracle Coherence Cluster, Non-Oracle Middleware like Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, OBM WebSphere and much much more. The chapters for these components can be read in any order you like, you only need the foundation chapters and continue with the parts in your data center. Once you are done with them, don't forget to read the last chapter, Best Practices for Managing Middleware Components using Enterprise Manager. Read it, understand it, and implement it in your organization. This will save you valueable time and budget. Recommendation This book is mainly written for the Enterprise Manager newbies and saves you a lot of time while going through the standard product documentation. All chapters are considerable short and tell exactly what need to know to get started with. Nothing more and nothing less. That's the beauty of it and why I love it. Due to its limitation it will cover everything you'd like to know, but it gets you started and interested for more insights. But that is the job of the product documentation. The Details Title Middleware Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g R5 Authors Debu Panda and Arvind Maheshwari Paperback 310 pages ISBN 13 978-1-847198-34-1

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• Download Free PowerShell Quick Reference Guides from Microsoft

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  Are you just getting started with learning PowerShell or tired of looking up less frequently used commands? Then this terrific set of PowerShell quick reference guides from Microsoft is just what you need! The first guide focuses on commonly-used Windows PowerShell commands and is available in a single .doc format document. The other guides are available as a set (six files) in .pdf format and focus on: tips, shortcuts, and common operations in Windows PowerShell 3.0, Windows PowerShell Workflow, Windows PowerShell ISE, Windows PowerShell Web Access, Server Manager for Windows Server 2012, WinRM, WMI, and WS-Man. Keep in mind that you can select all the guides or just the ones you need to download for the PowerShell 3.0 set. Windows PowerShell Quick Reference [Microsoft] Windows PowerShell 3.0 and Server Manager Quick Reference Guides [Microsoft] [via The Windows Club here and here]     

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• ODI 12c's Mapping Designer - Combining Flow Based and Expression Based Mapping

  - by Madhu Nair

  post by David Allan ODI is renowned for its declarative designer and minimal expression based paradigm. The new ODI 12c release has extended this even further to provide an extended declarative mapping designer. The ODI 12c mapper is a fusion of ODI's new declarative designer with the familiar flow based designer while retaining ODI’s key differentiators of: Minimal expression based definition, The ability to incrementally design an interface and to extract/load data from any combination of sources, and most importantly Backed by ODI’s extensible knowledge module framework. The declarative nature of the product has been extended to include an extensible library of common components that can be used to easily build simple to complex data integration solutions. Big usability improvements through consistent interactions of components and concepts all constructed around the familiar knowledge module framework provide the utmost flexibility. Here is a little taster: So what is a mapping? A mapping comprises of a logical design and at least one physical design, it may have many. A mapping can have many targets, of any technology and can be arbitrarily complex. You can build reusable mappings and use them in other mappings or other reusable mappings. In the example below all of the information from an Oracle bonus table and a bonus file are joined with an Oracle employees table before being written to a target. Some things that are cool include the one-click expression cross referencing so you can easily see what's used where within the design. The logical design in a mapping describes what you want to accomplish  (see the animated GIF here illustrating how the above mapping was designed) . The physical design lets you configure how it is to be accomplished. So you could have one logical design that is realized as an initial load in one physical design and as an incremental load in another. In the physical design below we can customize how the mapping is accomplished by picking Knowledge Modules, in ODI 12c you can pick multiple nodes (on logical or physical) and see common properties. This is useful as we can quickly compare property values across objects - below we can see knowledge modules settings on the access points between execution units side by side, in the example one table is retrieved via database links and the other is an external table. In the logical design I had selected an append mode for the integration type, so by default the IKM on the target will choose the most suitable/default IKM - which in this case is an in-built Oracle Insert IKM (see image below). This supports insert and select hints for the Oracle database (the ANSI SQL Insert IKM does not support these), so by default you will get direct path inserts with Oracle on this statement. In ODI 12c, the mapper is just that, a mapper. Design your mapping, write to multiple targets, the targets can be in the same data server, in different data servers or in totally different technologies - it does not matter. ODI 12c will derive and generate a plan that you can use or customize with knowledge modules. Some of the use cases which are greatly simplified include multiple heterogeneous targets, multi target inserts for Oracle and writing of XML. Let's switch it up now and look at a slightly different example to illustrate expression reuse. In ODI you can define reusable expressions using user functions. These can be reused across mappings and the implementations specialized per technology. So you can have common expressions across Oracle, SQL Server, Hive etc. shielding the design from the physical aspects of the generated language. Another way to reuse is within a mapping itself. In ODI 12c expressions can be defined and reused within a mapping. Rather than replicating the expression text in larger expressions you can decompose into smaller snippets, below you can see UNIT_TAX AMOUNT has been defined and is used in two downstream target columns - its used in the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT plus its used in the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT (a recording of the calculation).  You can see the columns that the expressions depend on (upstream) and the columns the expression is used in (downstream) highlighted within the mapper. Also multi selecting attributes is a convenient way to see what's being used where, below I have selected the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT in the target datastore and the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT in UNIT_CALC. You can now see many expressions at once now and understand much more at the once time without needlessly clicking around and memorizing information. Our mantra during development was to keep it simple and make the tool more powerful and do even more for the user. The development team was a fusion of many teams from Oracle Warehouse Builder, Sunopsis and BEA Aqualogic, debating and perfecting the mapper in ODI 12c. This was quite a project from supporting the capabilities of ODI in 11g to building the flow based mapping tool to support the future. I hope this was a useful insight, there is so much more to come on this topic, this is just a preview of much more that you will see of the mapper in ODI 12c.

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• VSTO Troubleshooting Quick Tips

  - by João Angelo

  If you ever find yourself troubleshooting a VSTO addin that does not load then these steps will interest you. Do not skip the basics and check the registry at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\<Application>\AddIns\<AddInName> or HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\<Product>\AddIns\<Application> because if the LoadBehavior key is not set to 3 the office application will not even try to load it on startup; Enable error alerts popups by configuring an environment variable SET VSTO_SUPPRESSDISPLAYALERTS=0 Enable logging errors to file by configuring an environment variable SET VSTO_LOGALERTS=1 Pray for an error alert popup or for an error in the log file so that you can fix its cause.  

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• Why does Ubuntu refuse to execute files from an NTFS partition?

  - by Ivan

  I mount an NTFS partition (where I've got some Linux binaries and scripts alongside with Win32 and data files) with the following fstab line: /dev/sda5 /mnt/dat ntfs-3g rw,dev,exec,auto,async,users,umask=000,uid=1000,gid=1000,locale=en_US.utf8, errors=remount-ro 0 0 All files seem to have executable attribute set then, but if I try to actually execute them, I get "Permission denied" error. Even with sudo. Even while execute (as well as read and write) permissions are granted to everyone and all the files owner is set to the user. So how do I set the system up to be able to run Linux binaries from NTFS?

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• Quick example: why coding standards must be in place

  - by DigiMortal

  One quick example why coding standards must be in place. Take a look at the following code – property names are changed but not anything else. public string Property1 { get; set; }   public string Property2 {     get;     set; }   public string Property3 {     get; set; } And yes – it is real-world example.

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• Today's Links (6/29/2011)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Event-Driven SOA: Events meet Services | Guido Schmutz Oracle ACE Director Guido Schmutz shows you how to achieve extreme loose coupling within a Service-Oriented Architecture by using event-driven interactions. Misconceptions About Software Architecture | Sanjeev Kumar A concise, to-the-point, and informative article by Sanjeev Kumar. Good Leaders Acknowledge What Can't Be Done - Jeffrey Pfeffer - Harvard Business Review "None of us likes to admit to bad decisions," says Jeffrey Pfeffer. "But imagine how much harder that is for someone who has been chosen to lead a large organization precisely because he or she is thought to have the power to see the future more clearly and chart a wise course." Suboptimal Thinking within Enterprise Architecture | James McGovern McGovern says: "We need to remember that enterprises live and thrive beyond just the current person at the helm." Boundaryless Information Flow | Richard Veryard "If all the boundaries are removed or porous, then the (extended) enterprise or ecosystem becomes like a giant sponge, in which all information permeates the whole," Veryard says. "Some people may think that's a good idea, but it's not what I'd call loose coupling." Coming to a City Near You: Oracle Business Analytics Summits | Rob Reynolds This series of events includes a Technology and Architecture track. New Date for Implementation of Sun Hands-On Course Requirement (Oracle Certification) As announced on the Oracle Certification website, Java Architect, Java Developer, Solaris System Administrator and Solaris Security Administrator certification tracks will include a new mandatory course attendance requirement. VirtualBox 4.0.10 is now available for download | Bob Netherton Netherton shares information on the new release. Updated Technical Best Practices whitepaper | Anthony Shorten The Technical Best Practices whitepaper has been updated with the latest advice. "New advice includes new installation advice, advanced settings, new security settings and advice for both Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere installations," says Shorten. Kscope 11 ADF, AIA and Business Rules | Peter Paul van de Beek Whitehorses Solution Architect Peter Paul van de Beek shares his impressions of KScope11 presentations by Markus Eisele, Sten Vesterli, and Edwin Biemond. Amazon AWS for the learning experience | Andrej Koelewijn "Using AWS changes your expectations how your internal data center should operate," says Koelewijn. BPMN is dead, long live BPEL! (SOA Partner Community Blog) Jürgen Kress shares information -- including a long list of speakers -- for the SOA & BPM Integration Days 2011 conference, October 12th & 13th 2011 in Düsseldorf. InfoQ: HTML5 and the Dawn of Rich Mobile Web Applications James Pearce introduces cross-platform web apps development using HTML5 and web frameworks, such as jQTouch, jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, outlining what makes a good framework. InfoQ: Interview and Book Excerpt: CMMI for Development "Frameworks like TOGAF are used to define an architecture that aligns IT assets and resources to support key business needs and processes of key stakeholders," says SEI's Mike Konrad. "But the individual application systems, capabilities, services, networks, and other IT assets and infrastructure still need to be acquired, developed, or sustained." InfoQ: Architecting a Cloud-Scale Identity Fabric | Eric Olden "The most cited reason for not moving to the cloud is concern about security," says Olden. "In particular, managing user identity and access in the cloud is a tough problem to solve and a big security concern for organizations."

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• Trabajando el redireccionamiento de usuarios/Working with user redirect methods

  - by Jason Ulloa

  La protección de las aplicaciones es un elemento que no se puede dejar por fuera cuando se elabora un sistema. Cada parte o elemento de código que protege nuetra aplicación debe ser cuidadosamente seleccionado y elaborado. Una de las cosas comunes con las que nos topamos en asp.net cuando deseamos trabajar con usuarios, es con la necesidad de poder redireccionarlos a los distintos elementos o páginas dependiendo del rol. Pues precisamente eso es lo que haremos, vamos a trabajar con el Web.config de nuestra aplicación y le añadiremos unas pequeñas líneas de código para lograr dar un poco mas de seguridad al sistema y sobre todo lograr el redireccionamiento. Así que veamos como logramos lo deseado: Como bien sabemos el web.config nos permite manejar muchos elementos dentro de asp.net, muchos de ellos relacionados con la seguridad, asi como tambien nos brinda la posibilidad de poder personalizar los elementos para poder adaptarlo a nuestras necesidades. Así que, basandonos en el principio de que podemos personalizar el web.config, entonces crearemos una sección personalizada, que será la que utilicemos para manejar el redireccionamiento: Nuestro primer paso será ir a nuestro web.config y buscamos las siguientes líneas: <configuration>     <configSections>  </sectionGroup>             </sectionGroup>         </sectionGroup> Y luego de ellas definiremos una nueva sección  <section name="loginRedirectByRole" type="crabit.LoginRedirectByRoleSection" allowLocation="true" allowDefinition="Everywhere" /> El section name corresponde al nombre de nuestra nueva sección Type corresponde al nombre de la clase (que pronto realizaremos) y que será la encargada del Redirect Como estamos trabajando dentro de la seccion de configuración una vez definidad nuestra sección personalizada debemos cerrar esta sección  </configSections> Por lo que nuestro web.config debería lucir de la siguiente forma <configuration>     <configSections>  </sectionGroup>             </sectionGroup>         </sectionGroup> <section name="loginRedirectByRole" type="crabit.LoginRedirectByRoleSection" allowLocation="true" allowDefinition="Everywhere" /> </configSections> Anteriormente definimos nuestra sección, pero esta sería totalmente inútil sin el Metodo que le da vida. En nuestro caso el metodo loginRedirectByRole, este metodo lo definiremos luego del </configSections> último que cerramos: <loginRedirectByRole>     <roleRedirects>       <add role="Administrador" url="~/Admin/Default.aspx" />       <add role="User" url="~/User/Default.aspx" />     </roleRedirects>   </loginRedirectByRole> Como vemos, dentro de nuestro metodo LoginRedirectByRole tenemos el elemento add role. Este elemento será el que posteriormente le indicará a la aplicación hacia donde irá el usuario cuando realice un login correcto. Así que, veamos un poco esta configuración: add role="Administrador" corresponde al nombre del Role que tenemos definidio, pueden existir tantos elementos add role como tengamos definidos en nuestra aplicación. El elemento URL indica la ruta o página a la que será dirigido un usuario una vez logueado y dentro de la aplicación. Como vemos estamos utilizando el ~ para indicar que es una ruta relativa. Con esto hemos terminado la configuración de nuestro web.config, ahora veamos a fondo el código que se encargará de leer estos elementos y de utilziarlos: Para nuestro ejemplo, crearemos una nueva clase denominada LoginRedirectByRoleSection, recordemos que esta clase es la que llamamos en el elemento TYPE definido en la sección de nuestro web.config. Una vez creada la clase, definiremos algunas propiedades, pero antes de ello le indicaremos a nuestra clase que debe heredar de configurationSection, esto para poder obtener los elementos del web.config.  Inherits ConfigurationSection Ahora nuestra primer propiedad   <ConfigurationProperty("roleRedirects")> _         Public Property RoleRedirects() As RoleRedirectCollection             Get                 Return DirectCast(Me("roleRedirects"), RoleRedirectCollection)             End Get             Set(ByVal value As RoleRedirectCollection)                 Me("roleRedirects") = value             End Set         End Property     End Class Esta propiedad será la encargada de obtener todos los roles que definimos en la metodo personalizado de nuestro web.config Nuestro segundo paso será crear una segunda clase (en la misma clase LoginRedirectByRoleSection) a esta clase la llamaremos RoleRedirectCollection y la heredaremos de ConfigurationElementCollection y definiremos lo siguiente Public Class RoleRedirectCollection         Inherits ConfigurationElementCollection         Default Public ReadOnly Property Item(ByVal index As Integer) As RoleRedirect             Get                 Return DirectCast(BaseGet(index), RoleRedirect)             End Get         End Property         Default Public ReadOnly Property Item(ByVal key As Object) As RoleRedirect             Get                 Return DirectCast(BaseGet(key), RoleRedirect)             End Get         End Property         Protected Overrides Function CreateNewElement() As ConfigurationElement             Return New RoleRedirect()         End Function         Protected Overrides Function GetElementKey(ByVal element As ConfigurationElement) As Object             Return DirectCast(element, RoleRedirect).Role         End Function     End Class Nuevamente crearemos otra clase esta vez llamada RoleRedirect y en este caso la heredaremos de ConfigurationElement. Nuestra nueva clase debería lucir así: Public Class RoleRedirect         Inherits ConfigurationElement         <ConfigurationProperty("role", IsRequired:=True)> _         Public Property Role() As String             Get                 Return DirectCast(Me("role"), String)             End Get             Set(ByVal value As String)                 Me("role") = value             End Set         End Property         <ConfigurationProperty("url", IsRequired:=True)> _         Public Property Url() As String             Get                 Return DirectCast(Me("url"), String)             End Get             Set(ByVal value As String)                 Me("url") = value             End Set         End Property     End Class Una vez que nuestra clase madre esta lista, lo unico que nos queda es un poc de codigo en la pagina de login de nuestro sistema (por supuesto, asumo que estan utilizando  los controles de login que por defecto tiene asp.net). Acá definiremos nuestros dos últimos metodos  Protected Sub ctllogin_LoggedIn(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles ctllogin.LoggedIn         RedirectLogin(ctllogin.UserName)     End Sub El procedimiento loggeding es parte del control login de asp.net y se desencadena en el momento en que el usuario hace loguin correctametne en nuestra aplicación Este evento desencadenará el siguiente procedimiento para redireccionar.     Private Sub RedirectLogin(ByVal username As String)         Dim roleRedirectSection As crabit.LoginRedirectByRoleSection = DirectCast(ConfigurationManager.GetSection("loginRedirectByRole"), crabit.LoginRedirectByRoleSection)         For Each roleRedirect As crabit.RoleRedirect In roleRedirectSection.RoleRedirects             If Roles.IsUserInRole(username, roleRedirect.Role) Then                 Response.Redirect(roleRedirect.Url)             End If         Next     End Sub   Con esto, nuestra aplicación debería ser capaz de redireccionar sin problemas y manejar los roles.  Además, tambien recordar que nuestro ejemplo se basa en la utilización del esquema de bases de datos que por defecto nos proporcionada asp.net.

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• Start/Stop Window Service from ASP.NET page

  - by kaushalparik27

  Last week, I needed to complete one task on which I am going to blog about in this entry. The task is "Create a control panel like webpage to control (Start/Stop) Window Services which are part of my solution installed on computer where the main application is hosted". Here are the important points to accomplish:[1] You need to add System.ServiceProcess reference in your application. This namespace holds ServiceController Class to access the window service.[2] You need to check the status of the window services before you explicitly start or stop it.[3] By default, IIS application runs under ASP.NET account which doesn't have access rights permission to window service. So, Very Important part of the solution is: Impersonation. You need to impersonate the application/part of the code with the User Credentials which is having proper rights and permission to access the window service. If you try to access window service it will generate "access denied" error.The alternatives are: You can either impersonate whole application by adding Identity tag in web.cofig as:        <identity impersonate="true" userName="" password=""/>This tag will be under System.Web section. the "userName" and "password" will be the credentials of the user which is having rights to access the window service. But, this would not be a wise and good solution; because you may not impersonate whole website like this just to have access window service (which is going to be a small part of code).Second alternative is: Only impersonate part of code where you need to access the window service to start or stop it. I opted this one. But, to be fair; I am really unaware of the code part for impersonation. So, I just googled it and injected the code in my solution in a separate class file named as "Impersonate" with required static methods. In Impersonate class; impersonateValidUser() is the method to impersonate a part of code and undoImpersonation() is the method to undo the impersonation. Below is one example:  You need to provide domain name (which is "." if you are working on your home computer), username and password of appropriate user to impersonate.[4] Here, it is very important to note that: You need to have to store the Access Credentials (username and password) which you are going to user for impersonation; to some secured and encrypted format. I have used Machinekey Encryption to store the value encrypted value inside database.[5] So now; The real part is to start or stop a window service. You are almost done; because ServiceController class has simple Start() and Stop() methods to start or stop a window service. A ServiceController class has parametrized constructor that takes name of the service as parameter.Code to Start the window service: Code to Stop the window service: Isn't that too easy! ServiceController made it easy :) I have attached a working example with this post here to start/stop "SQLBrowser" service where you need to provide proper credentials who have permission to access to window service.  hope it would helps./.

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• Box2D body rotation with setTransform

  - by thobens

  I' having a problem rotating a body with setTransform(), The body has multiple sensors that should rotate with the player. The rotation works but it rotates around the bodys local 0,0 position instead of the center. Note that the game is in a top-down perspective and the player can go in four different directions, thus I need to rotate him immediately (in one tick) in 90 degrees steps. Up: Down: I can't find a way to set the rotation center. Here's the code I use to rotate it: float angle = direction * 90 * MathUtils.degRad; // direction is an int value from 0 to 3 body.setTransform(body.getPosition(), angle); I also tried body.getLocalCenter().set() and bc.body.getMassData().center.set() but it didn't seem to have any effect. How can I rotate the body around its center?

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• Configuring Expert Search in Communicator 14 and SharePoint 2010

  Communicator 14 provides functionality to be able to search for contacts not just by name, but by skill.  For example a customer service agent at an airline can search for other agents with Travel Advisory experience by typing the search criteria into the Communicator search box and performing a search by keyword.  The search results will return users who have specified that skill in their profile on their SharePoint My Site.  This is actually pretty easy to configure, Ill show you how. Create Search and People Search Results Pages in SharePoint Communicator 14 Expert Search works by using the SharePoint 2010 Search Service to search SharePoint for user profiles with matching keywords.  This requires that you have an Enterprise Search site in your site collection which includes the search service and also the People Results pages.  The easiest way to do this is to create a Search Center site in your site collection. Note: I get an error when trying to create an Enterprise Search site in a Team Site in the SharePoint 2010 RTM bits, so I created it as a site collection that is evident in the URLs you see below. In the screenshots below, you can see that the URL of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection is http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx, and the URL of the People Search Results page is http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx. Point Communications Server 14 to Search and People Search Results Pages For Communicator 14 to be able to perform an Expert Search, you need to configure Communications Server 14 to point to the Search Service and People Search Results page URLs. From a server with the OCS Core bits installed, fire up the Communications Server Management Shell and type Get-CsClientPolicy. Scroll down to the bottom of the output, were interested in setting the values of: SPSearchInternalURL SPSearchExternalURL SPSearchCenterInternalURL SPSearchCenterExternalURL SPSearchInternalURL and SPSearchExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection, while SPSearchCenterInternalURL and SPSearchCenterExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the people search results pages. Well use the Communications Server Management Shell to set the values of these CS policy properties. For simplicity, Im only going to set the internal URLs here. Set-CsClientPolicy SPSearchInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx     -SPSearchCenterInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx Log out and back into Communicator.  You can verify that these settings were applied by running the Get-CsClientPolicy cmdlet again from the Communications Server Management Shell. However, theres another super-secret ninja trick to verify that the settings were applied: Find the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray Hold down the Ctrl button Click (left) the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray do not depress the Ctrl button You should now see an extra menu item called Configuration Information, click it. Scroll down and locate the Expert Search URL and SharePoint Search Center URL keys and verify that their values correspond to those you set using the Set-CsClientPolicy PowerShell cmdlet. Configure a Sharepoint User Profile Import Im not going to provide detailed steps here except to say that you need to configure the SharePoint 2010 User Profile  Service Application to import user account details from Active Directory on a scheduled basis. This is a critical step because there are several user profile properties e.g. SipAddress that are only populated by a user profile import.  When performing an Expert Search, Communicator can only render results for users who have a SipAddress specified. Add Skills to User Profiles Navigate to your My Site and click on My Profile.  This page allows you to set many contact details that are searchable in SharePoint.  Were particularly interested in the Ask Me About property of a users profile.  Expert Search searches against this property to find users with matching skills. Configure a SharePoint Search Crawl Ensure that you have a scheduled job to crawl your Local SharePoint Sites content source.  Depending on how you have this configured, it will also crawl the My Site site collection and add user properties such as Ask Me About to the search index. Thats It! SharePoint 2010 provides new social and collaboration features to help users find other users with similar skills or interests. Expert Search extends this functionality directly into Microsoft Communicator 14, allowing you to interact with the users directly from the search results. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Binding for a Collection

  - by nmarun

  Yes, my yet another post on Model Binding (previous one is here), but this one uses features presented in MVC 2. How I got to writing this blog? Well, I’m on a project where we’re doing some MVC things for a shopping cart. Let me show you what I was working with. Below are my model classes: 1: public class Product 2: { 3: public int Id { get; set; } 4: public string Name { get; set; } 5: public int Quantity { get; set; } 6: public decimal UnitPrice { get; set; } 7: } 8:   9: public class Totals 10: { 11: public decimal SubTotal { get; set; } 12: public decimal Tax { get; set; } 13: public decimal Total { get; set; } 14: } 15:   16: public class Basket 17: { 18: public List<Product> Products { get; set; } 19: public Totals Totals { get; set;} 20: } The view looks as below:  1: <h2>Shopping Cart</h2> 2:   3: <% using(Html.BeginForm()) { %> 4: 5: <h3>Products</h3> 6: <% for (int i = 0; i < Model.Products.Count; i++) 7: { %> 8: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;">Id</div> 9: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;"> 10: <%= Html.TextBox("ID", Model.Products[i].Id) %> 11: </div> 12: <div style="clear:both;"></div> 13: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;">Name</div> 14: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;"> 15: <%= Html.TextBox("Name", Model.Products[i].Name) %> 16: </div> 17: <div style="clear:both;"></div> 18: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;">Quantity</div> 19: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;"> 20: <%= Html.TextBox("Quantity", Model.Products[i].Quantity)%> 21: </div> 22: <div style="clear:both;"></div> 23: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;">Unit Price</div> 24: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;"> 25: <%= Html.TextBox("UnitPrice", Model.Products[i].UnitPrice)%> 26: </div> 27: <div style="clear:both;"><hr /></div> 28: <% } %> 29: 30: <h3>Totals</h3> 31: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;">Sub Total</div> 32: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;"> 33: <%= Html.TextBox("SubTotal", Model.Totals.SubTotal)%> 34: </div> 35: <div style="clear:both;"></div> 36: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;">Tax</div> 37: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;"> 38: <%= Html.TextBox("Tax", Model.Totals.Tax)%> 39: </div> 40: <div style="clear:both;"></div> 41: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;">Total</div> 42: <div style="width: 100px;float:left;"> 43: <%= Html.TextBox("Total", Model.Totals.Total)%> 44: </div> 45: <div style="clear:both;"></div> 46: <p /> 47: <input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit" /> 48: <% } %> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Nothing fancy, just a bunch of div’s containing textboxes and a submit button. Just make note that the textboxes have the same name as the property they are going to display. Yea, yea, I know. I’m displaying unit price as a textbox instead of a label, but that’s beside the point (and trust me, this will not be how it’ll look on the production site!!). The way my controller works is that initially two dummy products are added to the basked object and the Totals are calculated based on what products were added in what quantities and their respective unit price. So when the page loads in edit mode, where the user can change the quantity and hit the submit button. In the ‘post’ version of the action method, the Totals get recalculated and the new total will be displayed on the screen. Here’s the code: 1: public ActionResult Index() 2: { 3: Product product1 = new Product 4: { 5: Id = 1, 6: Name = "Product 1", 7: Quantity = 2, 8: UnitPrice = 200m 9: }; 10:   11: Product product2 = new Product 12: { 13: Id = 2, 14: Name = "Product 2", 15: Quantity = 1, 16: UnitPrice = 150m 17: }; 18:   19: List<Product> products = new List<Product> { product1, product2 }; 20:   21: Basket basket = new Basket 22: { 23: Products = products, 24: Totals = ComputeTotals(products) 25: }; 26: return View(basket); 27: } 28:   29: [HttpPost] 30: public ActionResult Index(Basket basket) 31: { 32: basket.Totals = ComputeTotals(basket.Products); 33: return View(basket); 34: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } That’s that. Now I run the app, I see two products with the totals section below them. I look at the view source and I see that the input controls have the right ID, the right name and the right value as well. 1: <input id="ID" name="ID" type="text" value="1" /> 2: <input id="Name" name="Name" type="text" value="Product 1" /> 3: ... 4: <input id="ID" name="ID" type="text" value="2" /> 5: <input id="Name" name="Name" type="text" value="Product 2" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } So just as a regular user would do, I change the quantity value of one of the products and hit the submit button. The ‘post’ version of the Index method gets called and I had put a break-point on line 32 in the above snippet. When I hovered my mouse on the ‘basked’ object, happily assuming that the object would be all bound and ready for use, I was surprised to see both basket.Products and basket.Totals were null. Huh? A little research and I found out that the reason the DefaultModelBinder could not do its job is because of a naming mismatch on the input controls. What I mean is that when you have to bind to a custom .net type, you need more than just the property name. You need to pass a qualified name to the name property of the input control. I modified my view and the emitted code looked as below: 1: <input id="Product_Name" name="Product.Name" type="text" value="Product 1" /> 2: ... 3: <input id="Product_Name" name="Product.Name" type="text" value="Product 2" /> 4: ... 5: <input id="Totals_SubTotal" name="Totals.SubTotal" type="text" value="550" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now, I update the quantity and hit the submit button and I see that the Totals object is populated, but the Products list is still null. Once again I went: ‘Hmm.. time for more research’. I found out that the way to do this is to provide the name as: 1: <%= Html.TextBox(string.Format("Products[{0}].ID", i), Model.Products[i].Id) %> 2: <!-- this will be rendered as --> 3: <input id="Products_0__ID" name="Products[0].ID" type="text" value="1" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } It was only now that I was able to see both the products and the totals being properly bound in the ‘post’ action method. Somehow, I feel this is kinda ‘clunky’ way of doing things. Seems like people at MS felt in a similar way and offered us a much cleaner way to solve this issue. The simple solution is that instead of using a Textbox, we can either use a TextboxFor or an EditorFor helper method. This one directly spits out the name of the input property as ‘Products[0].ID and so on. Cool right? I totally fell for this and changed my UI to contain EditorFor helper method. At this point, I ran the application, changed the quantity field and pressed the submit button. Of course my basket object parameter in my action method was correctly bound after these changes. I let the app complete the rest of the lines in the action method. When the page finally rendered, I did see that the quantity was changed to what I entered before the post. But, wait a minute, the totals section did not reflect the changes and showed the old values. My status: COMPLETELY PUZZLED! Just to recap, this is what my ‘post’ Index method looked like: 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ActionResult Index(Basket basket) 3: { 4: basket.Totals = ComputeTotals(basket.Products); 5: return View(basket); 6: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } A careful debug confirmed that the basked.Products[0].Quantity showed the updated value and the ComputeTotals() method also returns the correct totals. But still when I passed this basket object, it ended up showing the old totals values only. I began playing a bit with the code and my first guess was that the input controls got their values from the ModelState object. For those who don’t know, the ModelState is a temporary storage area that ASP.NET MVC uses to retain incoming attempted values plus binding and validation errors. Also, the fact that input controls populate the values using data taken from: Previously attempted values recorded in the ModelState["name"].Value.AttemptedValue Explicitly provided value (<%= Html.TextBox("name", "Some value") %>) ViewData, by calling ViewData.Eval("name") FYI: ViewData dictionary takes precedence over ViewData's Model properties – read more here. These two indicators led to my guess. It took me quite some time, but finally I hit this post where Brad brilliantly explains why this is the preferred behavior. My guess was right and I, accordingly modified my code to reflect the following way: 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ActionResult Index(Basket basket) 3: { 4: // read the following posts to see why the ModelState 5: // needs to be cleared before passing it the view 6: // http://forums.asp.net/t/1535846.aspx 7: // http://forums.asp.net/p/1527149/3687407.aspx 8: if (ModelState.IsValid) 9: { 10: ModelState.Clear(); 11: } 12:   13: basket.Totals = ComputeTotals(basket.Products); 14: return View(basket); 15: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } What this does is that in the case where your ModelState IS valid, it clears the dictionary. This enables the values to be read from the model directly and not from the ModelState. So the verdict is this: If you need to pass other parameters (like html attributes and the like) to your input control, use 1: <%= Html.TextBox(string.Format("Products[{0}].ID", i), Model.Products[i].Id) %> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Since, in EditorFor, there is no direct and simple way of passing this information to the input control. If you don’t have to pass any such ‘extra’ piece of information to the control, then go the EditorFor way. The code used in the post can be found here.

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• Migrating SQL Server Databases – The DBA’s Checklist (Part 2)

  - by Sadequl Hussain

  Continuing from Part 1  , our Migration Checklist continues: Step 5: Update statistics It is always a good idea to update the statistics of the database that you have just installed or migrated. To do this, run the following command against the target database: sp_updatestats The sp_updatestats system stored procedure runs the UPDATE STATISTICS command against every user and system table in the database.  However, a word of caution: running the sp_updatestats against a database with a compatibility level below 90 (SQL Server 2005) will reset the automatic UPDATE STATISTICS settings for every index and statistics of every table in the database. You may therefore want to change the compatibility mode before you run the command. Another thing you should remember to do is to ensure the new database has its AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS and AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS properties set to ON. You can do so using the ALTER DATABASE command or from the SSMS. Step 6: Set database options You may have to change the state of a database after it has been restored. If the database was changed to single-user or read-only mode before backup, the restored copy will also retain these settings. This may not be an issue when you are manually restoring from Enterprise Manager or the Management Studio since you can change the properties. However, this is something to be mindful of if the restore process is invoked by an automated job or script and the database needs to be written to immediately after restore. You may want to check the database’s status programmatically in such cases. Another important option you may want to set for the newly restored / attached database is PAGE_VERIFY. This option specifies how you want SQL Server to ensure the physical integrity of the data. It is a new option from SQL Server 2005 and can have three values: CHECKSUM (default for SQL Server 2005 and latter databases), TORN_PAGE_DETECTION (default when restoring a pre-SQL Server 2005 database) or NONE. Torn page detection was itself an option for SQL Server 2000 databases. From SQL Server 2005, when PAGE_VERIFY is set to CHECKSUM, the database engine calculates the checksum for a page’s contents and writes it to the page header before storing it in disk. When the page is read from the disk, the checksum is computed again and compared with the checksum stored in the header.  Torn page detection works much like the same way in that it stores a bit in the page header for every 512 byte sector. When data is read from the page, the torn page bits stored in the header is compared with the respective sector contents. When PAGE_VERIFY is set to NONE, SQL Server does not perform any checking, even if torn page data or checksums are present in the page header.  This may not be something you would want to set unless there is a very specific reason.  Microsoft suggests using the CHECKSUM page verify option as this offers more protection. Step 7: Map database users to logins A common database migration issue is related to user access. Windows and SQL Server native logins that existed in the source instance and had access to the database may not be present in the destination. Even if the logins exist in the destination, the mapping between the user accounts and the logins will not be automatic. You can use a special system stored procedure called sp_change_users_login to address these situations. The procedure needs to be run against the newly attached or restored database and can accept four parameters. Depending on what you want to do, you may be using less than four though. The first parameter, @Action, can take three values. When you specify @Action = ‘Report’, the system will provide you with a list of database users which are not mapped to any login. If you want to map a database user to an existing SQL Server login, the value for @Action will be ‘Update_One’. In this case, you will only need to provide the database user name and the login it will map to. So if your newly restored database has a user account called “bob” and there is already a SQL Server login with the same name and you want to map the user to the login, you will execute a query like the following: sp_change_users_login         @Action = ‘Update_One’,         @UserNamePattern = ‘bob’,         @LoginName = ‘bob’ If the login does not exist, you can instruct SQL Server to create the login with the same name. In this case you will need to provide a password for the login and the value of the @Action parameter will be ‘Auto_Fix’. If the login already exists, it will be automatically mapped to the user account. Unfortunately sp_change_users_login system stored procedure cannot be used to map database users to trusted logins (Windows accounts) in SQL Server. You will need to follow a manual process to re-map the database user accounts.  Continues…

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• Scaling-out Your Services by Message Bus based WCF Transport Extension &ndash; Part 1 &ndash; Background

  - by Shaun

  Cloud computing gives us more flexibility on the computing resource, we can provision and deploy an application or service with multiple instances over multiple machines. With the increment of the service instances, how to balance the incoming message and workload would become a new challenge. Currently there are two approaches we can use to pass the incoming messages to the service instances, I would like call them dispatcher mode and pulling mode.   Dispatcher Mode The dispatcher mode introduces a role which takes the responsible to find the best service instance to process the request. The image below describes the sharp of this mode. There are four clients communicate with the service through the underlying transportation. For example, if we are using HTTP the clients might be connecting to the same service URL. On the server side there’s a dispatcher listening on this URL and try to retrieve all messages. When a message came in, the dispatcher will find a proper service instance to process it. There are three mechanism to find the instance: Round-robin: Dispatcher will always send the message to the next instance. For example, if the dispatcher sent the message to instance 2, then the next message will be sent to instance 3, regardless if instance 3 is busy or not at that moment. Random: Dispatcher will find a service instance randomly, and same as the round-robin mode it regardless if the instance is busy or not. Sticky: Dispatcher will send all related messages to the same service instance. This approach always being used if the service methods are state-ful or session-ful. But as you can see, all of these approaches are not really load balanced. The clients will send messages at any time, and each message might take different process duration on the server side. This means in some cases, some of the service instances are very busy while others are almost idle. For example, if we were using round-robin mode, it could be happened that most of the simple task messages were passed to instance 1 while the complex ones were sent to instance 3, even though instance 1 should be idle. This brings some problem in our architecture. The first one is that, the response to the clients might be longer than it should be. As it’s shown in the figure above, message 6 and 9 can be processed by instance 1 or instance 2, but in reality they were dispatched to the busy instance 3 since the dispatcher and round-robin mode. Secondly, if there are many requests came from the clients in a very short period, service instances might be filled by tons of pending tasks and some instances might be crashed. Third, if we are using some cloud platform to host our service instances, for example the Windows Azure, the computing resource is billed by service deployment period instead of the actual CPU usage. This means if any service instance is idle it is wasting our money! Last one, the dispatcher would be the bottleneck of our system since all incoming messages must be routed by the dispatcher. If we are using HTTP or TCP as the transport, the dispatcher would be a network load balance. If we wants more capacity, we have to scale-up, or buy a hardware load balance which is very expensive, as well as scaling-out the service instances. Pulling Mode Pulling mode doesn’t need a dispatcher to route the messages. All service instances are listening to the same transport and try to retrieve the next proper message to process if they are idle. Since there is no dispatcher in pulling mode, it requires some features on the transportation. The transportation must support multiple client connection and server listening. HTTP and TCP doesn’t allow multiple clients are listening on the same address and port, so it cannot be used in pulling mode directly. All messages in the transportation must be FIFO, which means the old message must be received before the new one. Message selection would be a plus on the transportation. This means both service and client can specify some selection criteria and just receive some specified kinds of messages. This feature is not mandatory but would be very useful when implementing the request reply and duplex WCF channel modes. Otherwise we must have a memory dictionary to store the reply messages. I will explain more about this in the following articles. Message bus, or the message queue would be best candidate as the transportation when using the pulling mode. First, it allows multiple application to listen on the same queue, and it’s FIFO. Some of the message bus also support the message selection, such as TIBCO EMS, RabbitMQ. Some others provide in memory dictionary which can store the reply messages, for example the Redis. The principle of pulling mode is to let the service instances self-managed. This means each instance will try to retrieve the next pending incoming message if they finished the current task. This gives us more benefit and can solve the problems we met with in the dispatcher mode. The incoming message will be received to the best instance to process, which means this will be very balanced. And it will not happen that some instances are busy while other are idle, since the idle one will retrieve more tasks to make them busy. Since all instances are try their best to be busy we can use less instances than dispatcher mode, which more cost effective. Since there’s no dispatcher in the system, there is no bottleneck. When we introduced more service instances, in dispatcher mode we have to change something to let the dispatcher know the new instances. But in pulling mode since all service instance are self-managed, there no extra change at all. If there are many incoming messages, since the message bus can queue them in the transportation, service instances would not be crashed. All above are the benefits using the pulling mode, but it will introduce some problem as well. The process tracking and debugging become more difficult. Since the service instances are self-managed, we cannot know which instance will process the message. So we need more information to support debug and track. Real-time response may not be supported. All service instances will process the next message after the current one has done, if we have some real-time request this may not be a good solution. Compare with the Pros and Cons above, the pulling mode would a better solution for the distributed system architecture. Because what we need more is the scalability, cost-effect and the self-management.   WCF and WCF Transport Extensibility Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. In the .NET world WCF is the best way to implement the service. In this series I’m going to demonstrate how to implement the pulling mode on top of a message bus by extending the WCF. I don’t want to deep into every related field in WCF but will highlight its transport extensibility. When we implemented an RPC foundation there are many aspects we need to deal with, for example the message encoding, encryption, authentication and message sending and receiving. In WCF, each aspect is represented by a channel. A message will be passed through all necessary channels and finally send to the underlying transportation. And on the other side the message will be received from the transport and though the same channels until the business logic. This mode is called “Channel Stack” in WCF, and the last channel in the channel stack must always be a transport channel, which takes the responsible for sending and receiving the messages. As we are going to implement the WCF over message bus and implement the pulling mode scaling-out solution, we need to create our own transport channel so that the client and service can exchange messages over our bus. Before we deep into the transport channel, let’s have a look on the message exchange patterns that WCF defines. Message exchange pattern (MEP) defines how client and service exchange the messages over the transportation. WCF defines 3 basic MEPs which are datagram, Request-Reply and Duplex. Datagram: Also known as one-way, or fire-forgot mode. The message sent from the client to the service, and no need any reply from the service. The client doesn’t care about the message result at all. Request-Reply: Very common used pattern. The client send the request message to the service and wait until the reply message comes from the service. Duplex: The client sent message to the service, when the service processing the message it can callback to the client. When callback the service would be like a client while the client would be like a service. In WCF, each MEP represent some channels associated. MEP Channels Datagram IInputChannel, IOutputChannel Request-Reply IRequestChannel, IReplyChannel Duplex IDuplexChannel And the channels are created by ChannelListener on the server side, and ChannelFactory on the client side. The ChannelListener and ChannelFactory are created by the TransportBindingElement. The TransportBindingElement is created by the Binding, which can be defined as a new binding or from a custom binding. For more information about the transport channel mode, please refer to the MSDN document. The figure below shows the transport channel objects when using the request-reply MEP. And this is the datagram MEP. And this is the duplex MEP. After investigated the WCF transport architecture, channel mode and MEP, we finally identified what we should do to extend our message bus based transport layer. They are: Binding: (Optional) Defines the channel elements in the channel stack and added our transport binding element at the bottom of the stack. But we can use the build-in CustomBinding as well. TransportBindingElement: Defines which MEP is supported in our transport and create the related ChannelListener and ChannelFactory. This also defines the scheme of the endpoint if using this transport. ChannelListener: Create the server side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelListener to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelListener for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. ChannelFactory: Create the client side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelFactory to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelFactory for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. Channels: Based on the MEPs we want to support, we need to implement the channels accordingly. For example, if we want our transport support Request-Reply mode we should implement IRequestChannel and IReplyChannel. In this series I will implement all 3 MEPs listed above one by one. Scaffold: In order to make our transport extension works we also need to implement some scaffold stuff. For example we need some classes to send and receive message though out message bus. We also need some codes to read and write the WCF message, etc.. These are not necessary but would be very useful in our example.   Message Bus There is only one thing remained before we can begin to implement our scaling-out support WCF transport, which is the message bus. As I mentioned above, the message bus must have some features to fulfill all the WCF MEPs. In my company we will be using TIBCO EMS, which is an enterprise message bus product. And I have said before we can use any message bus production if it’s satisfied with our requests. Here I would like to introduce an interface to separate the message bus from the WCF. This allows us to implement the bus operations by any kinds bus we are going to use. The interface would be like this. 1: public interface IBus : IDisposable 2: { 3: string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null); 4:  5: void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo); 6:  7: BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo); 8: } There are only three methods for the bus interface. Let me explain one by one. The SendRequest method takes the responsible for sending the request message into the bus. The parameters description are: message: The WCF message content. fromClient: Indicates if this message was came from the client. from: The channel ID that this message was sent from. The channel ID will be generated when any kinds of channel was created, which will be explained in the following articles. to: The channel ID that this message should be received. In Request-Reply and Duplex MEP this is necessary since the reply message must be received by the channel which sent the related request message. The SendReply method takes the responsible for sending the reply message. It’s very similar as the previous one but no “from” parameter. This is because it’s no need to reply a reply message again in any MEPs. The Receive method takes the responsible for waiting for a incoming message, includes the request message and specified reply message. It returned a BusMessage object, which contains some information about the channel information. The code of the BusMessage class is 1: public class BusMessage 2: { 3: public string MessageID { get; private set; } 4: public string From { get; private set; } 5: public string ReplyTo { get; private set; } 6: public string Content { get; private set; } 7:  8: public BusMessage(string messageId, string fromChannelId, string replyToChannelId, string content) 9: { 10: MessageID = messageId; 11: From = fromChannelId; 12: ReplyTo = replyToChannelId; 13: Content = content; 14: } 15: } Now let’s implement a message bus based on the IBus interface. Since I don’t want you to buy and install the TIBCO EMS or any other message bus products, I will implement an in process memory bus. This bus is only for test and sample purpose. It can only be used if the service and client are in the same process. Very straightforward. 1: public class InProcMessageBus : IBus 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity> _queue; 4: private readonly object _lock; 5:  6: public InProcMessageBus() 7: { 8: _queue = new ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity>(); 9: _lock = new object(); 10: } 11:  12: public string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null) 13: { 14: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, from, to); 15: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 16: return entity.ID.ToString(); 17: } 18:  19: public void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo) 20: { 21: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, null, replyTo); 22: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 23: } 24:  25: public BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo) 26: { 27: InProcMessageEntity e = null; 28: while (true) 29: { 30: lock (_lock) 31: { 32: var entity = _queue 33: .Where(kvp => kvp.Value.FromClient == fromClient && (kvp.Value.To == replyTo || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(kvp.Value.To))) 34: .FirstOrDefault(); 35: if (entity.Key != Guid.Empty && entity.Value != null) 36: { 37: _queue.TryRemove(entity.Key, out e); 38: } 39: } 40: if (e == null) 41: { 42: Thread.Sleep(100); 43: } 44: else 45: { 46: return new BusMessage(e.ID.ToString(), e.From, e.To, e.Content); 47: } 48: } 49: } 50:  51: public void Dispose() 52: { 53: } 54: } The InProcMessageBus stores the messages in the objects of InProcMessageEntity, which can take some extra information beside the WCF message itself. 1: public class InProcMessageEntity 2: { 3: public Guid ID { get; set; } 4: public string Content { get; set; } 5: public bool FromClient { get; set; } 6: public string From { get; set; } 7: public string To { get; set; } 8:  9: public InProcMessageEntity() 10: : this(string.Empty, false, string.Empty, string.Empty) 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public InProcMessageEntity(string content, bool fromClient, string from, string to) 15: { 16: ID = Guid.NewGuid(); 17: Content = content; 18: FromClient = fromClient; 19: From = from; 20: To = to; 21: } 22: }   Summary OK, now I have all necessary stuff ready. The next step would be implementing our WCF message bus transport extension. In this post I described two scaling-out approaches on the service side especially if we are using the cloud platform: dispatcher mode and pulling mode. And I compared the Pros and Cons of them. Then I introduced the WCF channel stack, channel mode and the transport extension part, and identified what we should do to create our own WCF transport extension, to let our WCF services using pulling mode based on a message bus. And finally I provided some classes that need to be used in the future posts that working against an in process memory message bus, for the demonstration purpose only. In the next post I will begin to implement the transport extension step by step.   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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• Task-It Webinar - Source Code

  Last week I presented a webinar called "Building a real-world application with RadControls for Silverlight 4". For those that didn't get to see the webinar, you can view it here: Building a read-world application with RadControls for Silverlight 4 Since the webinar I've received several requests asking if I could post the source code for the simple application I showed demonstrating some of the techniques used in the development of Task-It, such as MVVM, Commands and Internationalization. This source code is now available for downloadhere. After downloading the source: Extract it to the location of your choice on your hard-drive Open the solution Right-click ModuleProject.Web and selecte 'Set as StartUp Project'. Right-click ProjectTestPage.aspx and selected 'Set as Start Page' Create a database in SQL Server called WebinarProject. Navigate to the Database folder under the WebinarProject directory and run the .sql script against your WebinarProject database. The last two steps are necessary only for the Tasks page to work properly (using WCF RIA Services). Now some notes about each page: Code-behind This is not the way I recommend coding a line-of-business application in Silverlight, but simply wanted to show how the code-behind approach would look. Command This page introduces MVVM and Commands. You'll notice in the XAML that the Command property of theRadMenuItem and the Button are both bound to a SaveCommand. That comes from the view model. If you look in the code- behind of the user control you'll see that an instance of a CommandViewModel is instantiated and set as the DataContext of the UserControl.There is also a listener for the view model's SaveCompleted event. When this is fired, it tells the view (UserControl) to display the MessageBox. Internationalization This sample is similar to the previous one, but instead of using hard-coded strings in the UI, the strings are obtained via binding toview model properties. The view model gets the strings from the .resx files (Strings.resx or Strings.de.resx) under Assets/Resources. If you uncomment the call to ShowGerman() in App.xaml.cs's Application_Startup method and re-run the application, you will see the UI in German. Note that this code, which sets the CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture on the current thread to "de" (German) is for testing purposes only. RadWindow Once again, very similar to the previous example.The difference is that we are now using a RadWindow to display the 'Saved' message instead of a MessageBox. The advantage here is that we do not have to hold on to a reference to the view model in our code behind so that we can get the 'Saved' message from it. The RadWindow's DataContext is now also bound to the view model, so within its XAML we can bind directly to properties in the view model. Much nicer, and cleaner. One other thing I introduced in this example is the use of spacer Rectangles. Rather than setting a width and/or height on the rectangles for spacing, I am now referencing a style in my ResourceDictionary called StandardSpacerStyle. I like doing this better than using margins or padding because now I have a reusable way to create space between elements, the Rectangle does not show (because I have not set its Fill color), and I can change my spacing throughout the user interface in one place if I'd like. Tasks This page is quite a bit different than the other four. It is a very simple, stripped-down version of the Tasks page in the Task-It application. The Tasks.xaml UserControl has a ContentControl, and the Content of that control is set based on whether we are looking at the list of tasks or editing a task. So it displays one of two child UserControls, which are called List and Details. List has the RadGridView, Details has the form. In the code-behind of the Tasks UserControl I am once again setting its DataContext to a view model class. The nice thing is, whichever child UserControl is being displayed (List or Details) inherits its DataContext from its parent control (Tasks), so I do not have to explicitly set it. The List UserControl simply displays a RadGridView whose ItemsSource is bound to a property in the view model called Tasks, and its SelectedItem property is bound to a property in the view model called SelectedItem. The SelectedItem binding must be TwoWay so that the view is notified when the SelectedItem changes in the view model, and the view model is notified when something changes in the view (like when a user changes the Name and/or DueDate in the form). You'll also notice that the form's TextBox and RadDatePicker are also TwoWay bound to the SelectedItem property in the view model. You can experiment with the binding by removing TwoWay and see how changes in the form do not show up in the RadGridView. So here we have an example of two different views (List and Details) that are both bound to the same view model...and actually, so is the Tasks UserControl, so it is really three views. WCF RIA Services By the way, I am using WCF RIA Services to retrieve data for the RadGridView and save the data when the user clicks the Save button in the form. I created a really simple ADO.NET Entity Data Model in WebinarProject.Web called DataModel.edmx. I also created a simple Domain Data Service called DataService that has methods for retrieving data, inserting, updating and deleting. However I am only using the retrieval and update methods in this sample. Note that I do not currently have any validation in place on the form, as I wanted to keep the sample as simple as possible. Wrap up Technically, I should move the calls to WCF RIA Services out of the view model and put them into a separate layer, but this works for now, and that is a topic for another day! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• How to create managed properties at site collection level in SharePoint2013

  - by ybbest

  In SharePoint2013, you can create managed properties at site collection. Today, I’d like to show you how to do so through PowerShell. 1. Define your managed properties and crawled properties and managed property Type in an external csv file. PowerShell script will read this file and create the managed and the mapping. 2. As you can see I also defined variant Type, this is because you need the variant type to create the crawled property. In order to have the crawled properties, you need to do a full crawl and also make sure you have data populated for your custom column. However, if you do not want to a full crawl to create those crawled properties, you can create them yourself by using the PowerShell; however you need to make sure the crawled properties you created have the same name if created by a full crawl. Managed properties type: Text = 1 Integer = 2 Decimal = 3 DateTime = 4 YesNo = 5 Binary = 6 Variant Type: Text = 31 Integer = 20 Decimal = 5 DateTime = 64 YesNo = 11 3. You can use the following script to create your managed properties at site collection level, the differences for creating managed property at site collection level is to pass in the site collection id. param( [string] $siteUrl="http://SP2013/", [string] $searchAppName = "Search Service Application", $ManagedPropertiesList=(IMPORT-CSV ".\ManagedProperties.csv") ) Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue $searchapp = $null function AppendLog { param ([string] $msg, [string] $msgColor) $currentDateTime = Get-Date $msg = $msg + " --- " + $currentDateTime if (!($logOnly -eq $True)) { # write to console Write-Host -f $msgColor $msg } # write to log file Add-Content $logFilePath $msg } $scriptPath = Split-Path $myInvocation.MyCommand.Path $logFilePath = $scriptPath + "\CreateManagedProperties_Log.txt" function CreateRefiner {param ([string] $crawledName, [string] $managedPropertyName, [Int32] $variantType, [Int32] $managedPropertyType,[System.GUID] $siteID) $cat = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataCategory –Identity SharePoint -SearchApplication $searchapp $crawledproperty = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataCrawledProperty -Name $crawledName -SearchApplication $searchapp -SiteCollection $siteID if($crawledproperty -eq $null) { Write-Host AppendLog "Creating Crawled Property for $managedPropertyName" Yellow $crawledproperty = New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataCrawledProperty -SearchApplication $searchapp -VariantType $variantType -SiteCollection $siteID -Category $cat -PropSet "00130329-0000-0130-c000-000000131346" -Name $crawledName -IsNameEnum $false } $managedproperty = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Identity $managedPropertyName -SearchApplication $searchapp -SiteCollection $siteID -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue if($managedproperty -eq $null) { Write-Host AppendLog "Creating Managed Property for $managedPropertyName" Yellow $managedproperty = New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Name $managedPropertyName -Type $managedPropertyType -SiteCollection $siteID -SearchApplication $searchapp -Queryable:$true -Retrievable:$true -FullTextQueriable:$true -RemoveDuplicates:$false -RespectPriority:$true -IncludeInMd5:$true } $mappedProperty = $crawledproperty.GetMappedManagedProperties() | ?{$_.Name -eq $managedProperty.Name } if($mappedProperty -eq $null) { Write-Host AppendLog "Creating Crawled -> Managed Property mapping for $managedPropertyName" Yellow New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataMapping -CrawledProperty $crawledproperty -ManagedProperty $managedproperty -SearchApplication $searchapp -SiteCollection $siteID } $mappedProperty = $crawledproperty.GetMappedManagedProperties() | ?{$_.Name -eq $managedProperty.Name } #Get-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledPropertyMapping -ManagedProperty $managedproperty } $searchapp = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication $searchAppName $site= Get-SPSite $siteUrl $siteId=$site.id Write-Host "Start creating Managed properties" $i = 1 FOREACH ($property in $ManagedPropertiesList) { $propertyName=$property.managedPropertyName $crawledName=$property.crawledName $managedPropertyType=$property.managedPropertyType $variantType=$property.variantType Write-Host $managedPropertyType Write-Host "Processing managed property $propertyName $($i)..." $i++ CreateRefiner $crawledName $propertyName $variantType $managedPropertyType $siteId Write-Host "Managed property created " $propertyName } Key Concepts Crawled Properties: Crawled properties are discovered by the search index service component when crawling content. Managed Properties: Properties that are part of the Search user experience, which means they are available for search results, advanced search, and so on, are managed properties. Mapping Crawled Properties to Managed Properties: To make a crawled property available for the Search experience—to make it available for Search queries and display it in Advanced Search and search results—you must map it to a managed property. References Administer search in SharePoint 2013 Preview Managing Metadata New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataCrawledProperty New-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty Remove-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty Overview of crawled and managed properties in SharePoint 2013 Preview Remove-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty SharePoint 2013 – Search Service Application

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• wcf web service in post method, object properties are null, although the object is not null

  - by Abdalhadi Kolayb

  i have this problem in post method when i send object parameter to the method, then the object is not null, but all its properties have the default values. here is data module: [DataContract] public class Products { [DataMember(Order = 1)] public int ProdID { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string ProdName { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public float PrpdPrice { get; set; } } and here is the interface: [OperationContract] [WebInvoke( Method = "POST", UriTemplate = "AddProduct", ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest, RequestFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] string AddProduct([MessageParameter(Name = "prod")]Products prod); public string AddProduct(Products prod) { ProductsList.Add(prod); return "return string"; } here is the json request: Content-type:application/json {"prod":[{"ProdID": 111,"ProdName": "P111","PrpdPrice": 111}]} but in the server the object received: {"prod":[{"ProdID": 0,"ProdName": NULL,"PrpdPrice": 0}]}

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• Item 2, Scott Myers Effective C++ question

  - by user619818

  In Item2 on page 16, (Prefer consts, enums, and inlines to #defines), Scott says: 'Also, though good compilers won't set aside storage for const objects of integer types'. I don't understand this. If I define a const object, eg const int myval = 5; then surely the compiler must set aside some memory (of int size) to store the value 5? Or is const data stored in some special way? This is more a question of computer storage I suppose. Basically, how does the computer store const objects so that no storage is set aside?

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• Plan Caching and Query Memory Part I – When not to use stored procedure or other plan caching mechanisms like sp_executesql or prepared statement

  - by sqlworkshops

    The most common performance mistake SQL Server developers make: SQL Server estimates memory requirement for queries at compilation time. This mechanism is fine for dynamic queries that need memory, but not for queries that cache the plan. With dynamic queries the plan is not reused for different set of parameters values / predicates and hence different amount of memory can be estimated based on different set of parameter values / predicates. Common memory allocating queries are that perform Sort and do Hash Match operations like Hash Join or Hash Aggregation or Hash Union. This article covers Sort with examples. It is recommended to read Plan Caching and Query Memory Part II after this article which covers Hash Match operations.   When the plan is cached by using stored procedure or other plan caching mechanisms like sp_executesql or prepared statement, SQL Server estimates memory requirement based on first set of execution parameters. Later when the same stored procedure is called with different set of parameter values, the same amount of memory is used to execute the stored procedure. This might lead to underestimation / overestimation of memory on plan reuse, overestimation of memory might not be a noticeable issue for Sort operations, but underestimation of memory will lead to spill over tempdb resulting in poor performance.   This article covers underestimation / overestimation of memory for Sort. Plan Caching and Query Memory Part II covers underestimation / overestimation for Hash Match operation. It is important to note that underestimation of memory for Sort and Hash Match operations lead to spill over tempdb and hence negatively impact performance. Overestimation of memory affects the memory needs of other concurrently executing queries. In addition, it is important to note, with Hash Match operations, overestimation of memory can actually lead to poor performance.   To read additional articles I wrote click here.   In most cases it is cheaper to pay for the compilation cost of dynamic queries than huge cost for spill over tempdb, unless memory requirement for a stored procedure does not change significantly based on predicates.   The best way to learn is to practice. To create the below tables and reproduce the behavior, join the mailing list by using this link: www.sqlworkshops.com/ml and I will send you the table creation script. Most of these concepts are also covered in our webcasts: www.sqlworkshops.com/webcasts   Enough theory, let’s see an example where we sort initially 1 month of data and then use the stored procedure to sort 6 months of data.   Let’s create a stored procedure that sorts customers by name within certain date range.   --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com create proc CustomersByCreationDate @CreationDateFrom datetime, @CreationDateTo datetime as begin       declare @CustomerID int, @CustomerName varchar(48), @CreationDate datetime       select @CustomerName = c.CustomerName, @CreationDate = c.CreationDate from Customers c             where c.CreationDate between @CreationDateFrom and @CreationDateTo             order by c.CustomerName       option (maxdop 1)       end go Let’s execute the stored procedure initially with 1 month date range.   set statistics time on go --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-31' go The stored procedure took 48 ms to complete.     The stored procedure was granted 6656 KB based on 43199.9 rows being estimated.       The estimated number of rows, 43199.9 is similar to actual number of rows 43200 and hence the memory estimation should be ok.       There was no Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.      Now let’s execute the stored procedure with 6 month date range. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go The stored procedure took 679 ms to complete.      The stored procedure was granted 6656 KB based on 43199.9 rows being estimated.      The estimated number of rows, 43199.9 is way different from the actual number of rows 259200 because the estimation is based on the first set of parameter value supplied to the stored procedure which is 1 month in our case. This underestimation will lead to sort spill over tempdb, resulting in poor performance.      There was Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.    To monitor the amount of data written and read from tempdb, one can execute select num_of_bytes_written, num_of_bytes_read from sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) before and after the stored procedure execution, for additional information refer to the webcast: www.sqlworkshops.com/webcasts.     Let’s recompile the stored procedure and then let’s first execute the stored procedure with 6 month date range.  In a production instance it is not advisable to use sp_recompile instead one should use DBCC FREEPROCCACHE (plan_handle). This is due to locking issues involved with sp_recompile, refer to our webcasts for further details.   exec sp_recompile CustomersByCreationDate go --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go Now the stored procedure took only 294 ms instead of 679 ms.    The stored procedure was granted 26832 KB of memory.      The estimated number of rows, 259200 is similar to actual number of rows of 259200. Better performance of this stored procedure is due to better estimation of memory and avoiding sort spill over tempdb.      There was no Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.       Now let’s execute the stored procedure with 1 month date range.   --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-31' go The stored procedure took 49 ms to complete, similar to our very first stored procedure execution.     This stored procedure was granted more memory (26832 KB) than necessary memory (6656 KB) based on 6 months of data estimation (259200 rows) instead of 1 month of data estimation (43199.9 rows). This is because the estimation is based on the first set of parameter value supplied to the stored procedure which is 6 months in this case. This overestimation did not affect performance, but it might affect performance of other concurrent queries requiring memory and hence overestimation is not recommended. This overestimation might affect performance Hash Match operations, refer to article Plan Caching and Query Memory Part II for further details.    Let’s recompile the stored procedure and then let’s first execute the stored procedure with 2 day date range. exec sp_recompile CustomersByCreationDate go --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-02' go The stored procedure took 1 ms.      The stored procedure was granted 1024 KB based on 1440 rows being estimated.      There was no Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.      Now let’s execute the stored procedure with 6 month date range. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go   The stored procedure took 955 ms to complete, way higher than 679 ms or 294ms we noticed before.      The stored procedure was granted 1024 KB based on 1440 rows being estimated. But we noticed in the past this stored procedure with 6 month date range needed 26832 KB of memory to execute optimally without spill over tempdb. This is clear underestimation of memory and the reason for the very poor performance.      There was Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler. Unlike before this was a Multiple pass sort instead of Single pass sort. This occurs when granted memory is too low.      Intermediate Summary: This issue can be avoided by not caching the plan for memory allocating queries. Other possibility is to use recompile hint or optimize for hint to allocate memory for predefined date range.   Let’s recreate the stored procedure with recompile hint. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com drop proc CustomersByCreationDate go create proc CustomersByCreationDate @CreationDateFrom datetime, @CreationDateTo datetime as begin       declare @CustomerID int, @CustomerName varchar(48), @CreationDate datetime       select @CustomerName = c.CustomerName, @CreationDate = c.CreationDate from Customers c             where c.CreationDate between @CreationDateFrom and @CreationDateTo             order by c.CustomerName       option (maxdop 1, recompile)       end go Let’s execute the stored procedure initially with 1 month date range and then with 6 month date range. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-30' exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go The stored procedure took 48ms and 291 ms in line with previous optimal execution times.      The stored procedure with 1 month date range has good estimation like before.      The stored procedure with 6 month date range also has good estimation and memory grant like before because the query was recompiled with current set of parameter values.      The compilation time and compilation CPU of 1 ms is not expensive in this case compared to the performance benefit.     Let’s recreate the stored procedure with optimize for hint of 6 month date range.   --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com drop proc CustomersByCreationDate go create proc CustomersByCreationDate @CreationDateFrom datetime, @CreationDateTo datetime as begin       declare @CustomerID int, @CustomerName varchar(48), @CreationDate datetime       select @CustomerName = c.CustomerName, @CreationDate = c.CreationDate from Customers c             where c.CreationDate between @CreationDateFrom and @CreationDateTo             order by c.CustomerName       option (maxdop 1, optimize for (@CreationDateFrom = '2001-01-01', @CreationDateTo ='2001-06-30'))       end go Let’s execute the stored procedure initially with 1 month date range and then with 6 month date range.   --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-30' exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go The stored procedure took 48ms and 291 ms in line with previous optimal execution times.    The stored procedure with 1 month date range has overestimation of rows and memory. This is because we provided hint to optimize for 6 months of data.      The stored procedure with 6 month date range has good estimation and memory grant because we provided hint to optimize for 6 months of data.       Let’s execute the stored procedure with 12 month date range using the currently cashed plan for 6 month date range. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-12-31' go The stored procedure took 1138 ms to complete.      2592000 rows were estimated based on optimize for hint value for 6 month date range. Actual number of rows is 524160 due to 12 month date range.      The stored procedure was granted enough memory to sort 6 month date range and not 12 month date range, so there will be spill over tempdb.      There was Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.      As we see above, optimize for hint cannot guarantee enough memory and optimal performance compared to recompile hint.   This article covers underestimation / overestimation of memory for Sort. Plan Caching and Query Memory Part II covers underestimation / overestimation for Hash Match operation. It is important to note that underestimation of memory for Sort and Hash Match operations lead to spill over tempdb and hence negatively impact performance. Overestimation of memory affects the memory needs of other concurrently executing queries. In addition, it is important to note, with Hash Match operations, overestimation of memory can actually lead to poor performance.   Summary: Cached plan might lead to underestimation or overestimation of memory because the memory is estimated based on first set of execution parameters. It is recommended not to cache the plan if the amount of memory required to execute the stored procedure has a wide range of possibilities. One can mitigate this by using recompile hint, but that will lead to compilation overhead. However, in most cases it might be ok to pay for compilation rather than spilling sort over tempdb which could be very expensive compared to compilation cost. The other possibility is to use optimize for hint, but in case one sorts more data than hinted by optimize for hint, this will still lead to spill. On the other side there is also the possibility of overestimation leading to unnecessary memory issues for other concurrently executing queries. In case of Hash Match operations, this overestimation of memory might lead to poor performance. When the values used in optimize for hint are archived from the database, the estimation will be wrong leading to worst performance, so one has to exercise caution before using optimize for hint, recompile hint is better in this case. I explain these concepts with detailed examples in my webcasts (www.sqlworkshops.com/webcasts), I recommend you to watch them. The best way to learn is to practice. To create the above tables and reproduce the behavior, join the mailing list at www.sqlworkshops.com/ml and I will send you the relevant SQL Scripts.     Register for the upcoming 3 Day Level 400 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 Performance Monitoring & Tuning Hands-on Workshop in London, United Kingdom during March 15-17, 2011, click here to register / Microsoft UK TechNet.These are hands-on workshops with a maximum of 12 participants and not lectures. For consulting engagements click here.     Disclaimer and copyright information:This article refers to organizations and products that may be the trademarks or registered trademarks of their various owners. Copyright of this article belongs to R Meyyappan / www.sqlworkshops.com. You may freely use the ideas and concepts discussed in this article with acknowledgement (www.sqlworkshops.com), but you may not claim any of it as your own work. This article is for informational purposes only; you use any of the suggestions given here entirely at your own risk.   R Meyyappan [email protected] LinkedIn: http://at.linkedin.com/in/rmeyyappan

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• International Radio Operators Alphabet in F# &amp; Silverlight &ndash; Part 2

  - by MarkPearl

  So the brunt of my my very complex F# code has been done. Now it’s just putting the Silverlight stuff in. The first thing I did was add a new project to my solution. I gave it a name and VS2010 did the rest of the magic in creating the .Web project etc. In this instance because I want to take the MVVM approach and make use of commanding I have decided to make the frontend a Silverlight4 project. I now need move my F# code into a proper Silverlight Library. Warning – when you create the Silverlight Library VS2010 will ask you whether you want it to be based on Silverlight3 or Silverlight4. I originally went for Silverlight4 only to discover when I tried to compile my solution that I was given an error… Error 12 F# runtime for Silverlight version v4.0 is not installed. Please go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=177463 to download and install matching.. After asking around I discovered that the Silverlight4 F# runtime is not available yet. No problem, the suggestion was to change the F# Silverlight Library to a Silverlight3 project however when going to the properties of the project file – even though I changed it to Silverlight3, VS2010 did not like it and kept reverting it to a Silverlight4 project. After a few minutes of scratching my head I simply deleted Silverlight4 F# Library project and created a new F# Silverlight Library project in Silverlight3 and VS2010 was happy. Now that the project structure is set up, rest is fairly simple. You need to add the Silverlight Library as a reference to the C# Silverlight Front End. Then setup your views, since I was following the MVVM pattern I made a Views & ViewModel folder and set up the relevant View and ViewModels. The MainPageViewModel file looks as follows using System; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Ink; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes; using System.Collections.ObjectModel; namespace IROAFrontEnd.ViewModels { public class MainPageViewModel : ViewModelBase { private string _iroaString; private string _inputCharacters; public string InputCharacters { get { return _inputCharacters; } set { if (_inputCharacters != value) { _inputCharacters = value; OnPropertyChanged("InputCharacters"); } } } public string IROAString { get { return _iroaString; } set { if (_iroaString != value) { _iroaString = value; OnPropertyChanged("IROAString"); } } } public ICommand MySpecialCommand { get { return new MyCommand(this); } } public class MyCommand : ICommand { readonly MainPageViewModel _myViewModel; public MyCommand(MainPageViewModel myViewModel) { _myViewModel = myViewModel; } public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged; public bool CanExecute(object parameter) { return true; } public void Execute(object parameter) { var result = ModuleMain.ConvertCharsToStrings(_myViewModel.InputCharacters); var newString = ""; foreach (var Item in result) { newString += Item + " "; } _myViewModel.IROAString = newString.Trim(); } } } } One of the features I like in Silverlight4 is the new commanding. You will notice in my I have put the code under the command execute to reference to my F# module. At the moment this could be cleaned up even more, but will suffice for now.. public void Execute(object parameter) { var result = ModuleMain.ConvertCharsToStrings(_myViewModel.InputCharacters); var newString = ""; foreach (var Item in result) { newString += Item + " "; } _myViewModel.IROAString = newString.Trim(); } I then needed to set the view up. If we have a look at the MainPageView.xaml the xaml code will look like the following…. Nothing to fancy, but battleship grey for now… take careful note of the binding of the command in the button to MySpecialCommand which was created in the ViewModel. <UserControl x:Class="IROAFrontEnd.Views.MainPageView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition/> <RowDefinition/> <RowDefinition/> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <TextBox Grid.Row="0" Text="{Binding InputCharacters, Mode=TwoWay}"/> <Button Grid.Row="1" Command="{Binding MySpecialCommand}"> <TextBlock Text="Generate"/> </Button> <TextBlock Grid.Row="2" Text="{Binding IROAString}"/> </Grid> </UserControl> Finally in the App.xaml.cs file we need to set the View and link it to the ViewModel. private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e) { var myView = new MainPageView(); var myViewModel = new MainPageViewModel(); myView.DataContext = myViewModel; this.RootVisual = myView; }   Once this is done – hey presto – it worked. I typed in some “Test Input” and clicked the generate button and the correct Radio Operators Alphabet was generated. And that’s the end of my first very basic F# Silverlight application.

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• List of available whitepapers as at 04 May 2010

  - by Anthony Shorten

  The following table lists the whitepapers available, from My Oracle Support, for any Oracle Utilities Application Framework based product: KB Id Document Title Contents 559880.1 ConfigLab Design Guidelines Whitepaper outlining how to design and implement a ConfigLab solution. 560367.1 Technical Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products Whitepaper summarizing common technical best practices used by partners, implementation teams and customers.  560382.1 Performance Troubleshooting Guideline Series A set of whitepapers on tracking performance at each tier in the framework. The individual whitepapers are as follows: Concepts - General Concepts and Performance Troublehooting processes Client Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the browser client with common issues and resolutions. Network Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the network with common issues and resolutions. Web Application Server Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the Web Application Server with common issues and resolutions. Server Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the Operating system with common issues and resolutions. Database Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the database with common issues and resolutions. Batch Troubleshooting - General troubleshooting of the background processing component of the product with common issues and resolutions. 560401.1 Software Configuration Management Series  A set of whitepapers on how to manage customization (code and data) using the tools provided with the framework. The individual whitepapers are as follows: Concepts - General concepts and introduction. Environment Management - Principles and techniques for creating and managing environments. Version Management - Integration of Version control and version management of configuration items.  Release Management - Packaging configuration items into a release.  Distribution - Distribution and installation of  releases across environments  Change Management - Generic change management processes for product implementations. Status Accounting -Status reporting techniques using product facilities.  Defect Management -Generic defect management processes for product implementations. Implementing Single Fixes - Discussion on the single fix architecture and how to use it in an implementation. Implementing Service Packs - Discussion on the service packs and how to use them in an implementation. Implementing Upgrades - Discussion on the the upgrade process and common techniques for minimizing the impact of upgrades. 773473.1 Oracle Utilities Application Framework Security Overview Whitepaper summarizing the security facilities in the framework. Updated for OUAF 4.0.1 774783.1 LDAP Integration for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products Whitepaper summarizing how to integrate an external LDAP based security repository with the framework.  789060.1 Oracle Utilities Application Framework Integration Overview Whitepaper summarizing all the various common integration techniques used with the product (with case studies). 799912.1 Single Sign On Integration for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products Whitepaper outlining a generic process for integrating an SSO product with the framework. 807068.1 Oracle Utilities Application Framework Architecture Guidelines This whitepaper outlines the different variations of architecture that can be considered. Each variation will include advice on configuration and other considerations. 836362.1 Batch Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products This whitepaper oulines the common and best practices implemented by sites all over the world. Updated for OUAF 4.0.1 856854.1 Technical Best Practices V1 Addendum  Addendum to Technical Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products containing only V1.x specific advice. 942074.1 XAI Best Practices This whitepaper outlines the common integration tasks and best practices for the Web Services Integration provided by the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. Updated for OUAF 4.0.1 970785.1 Oracle Identity Manager Integration Overview This whitepaper outlines the principals of the prebuilt intergration between Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products and Orade Identity Manager used to provision user and user group secuity information 1068958.1 Production Environment Configuration Guidelines (New!) Whitepaper outlining common production level settings for the products

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• Center Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Sometimes it can be difficult to center a picture in a document just by dragging it dragging it around. Today we show you how to center pictures, images, and other objects perfectly in Word and PowerPoint. Note: For this tutorial we’re using Office 2010, but the steps are nearly identical in 2007. Centering a Picture in Word First let’s insert a picture into our document.  Click the Insert tab, and then click Picture. Once you select the picture you want, it will be added to your document.  Usually, pictures are added wherever your curser was in the document, so in a blank document it will be added at the top left. Also notice Picture Tools show up in the Ribbon after inserting an image. Note: The following menu items are available in Picture Tools Format tab which is displayed when you select the object or image you’re working with. How do we align the picture just like we want?  Click Position to get some quick placement options, including centered in the middle of the document or on the top.    However, for more advanced placement, we can use the Align tool.  If Word isn’t maximized, you may only see the icon without the “Align” label. Notice the tools were grayed out in the menu by default.  To be able to change the Alignment, we need to first change the text wrap settings. Click the Wrap Text button, and any option other than “In Line with Text”.  Your choice will depend on the document you’re writing, just choose the option that works best in the document.   Now, select the Align tools again.  You can now position your image precisely with these options. Align Center will position your picture in the center of the page widthwise. Align Middle will put the picture in the middle of the page height-wise. This works the same with textboxes.  Simply click the Align button in the Format tab, and you can center it in the page. And if you’d like to align several objects together, simply select them all, click Group, and then select Group from the menu.   Now, in the align tools, you can center the whole group on your page for a heading, or whatever you want to use the pictures for. These steps also work the same with Office 2007. Center objects in PowerPoint This works similar in PowerPoint, except that pictures are automatically set for square wrapping automatically, so you don’t have to change anything.  Simply insert the picture or other object of your choice, click Align, and choose the option you want. Additionally, if one object is already aligned like you want, drag another object near it and you will see a Smart Guide to help you align or center the second object with the first.  This only works with shapes in PowerPoint 2010 beta, but will work with pictures, textboxes, and media in the final release this summer. Conclusion These are good methods for centering images and objects in Word and PowerPoint.  From designing perfect headers to emphasizing your message in a PowerPoint presentation, this is something we’ve found useful and hope you will too. Since we’re talking about Office here, it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft has announced the Technology Guarantee Program for Office 2010. Essentially what this means is, if you purchase a version of Office 2007 between March 5th and September 30th of this year, when Office 2010 is released you’ll be able to upgrade to it for free! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteAdd More Functions To Office 2007 By Installing Add-InsCustomize Your Welcome Picture Choices in Windows VistaEasily Rotate Pictures In Word 2007Add Effects To Your Pictures in Word 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox)

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