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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 20, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 20, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET MVC Extensibility: ASP.NET MVC Extensibility.ASP.NET MVC Starter: Tekpub's ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Starter Site, as put together by Rob Conery in Episode 15 of Mastering ASP.NET MVC (http://tekpub.com/production/starter)AzureDemo: An internal Azure demo and test bed for some projects. After demo is complete this project will be closed.Basic Sprite Sheet Creator: A basic c# program to create sprite sheets. CodeDefender: Protect your .Net codes easily with this smart obfuscator!Crawlr: Tema 2 projectDocument Session Manager - Visual Studio addin: Document Session Manager is a Visual Studio 2008 addin for saving and restoring the list of opened documents (xml files, source files, winforms, et...Esferatec.Text.RegularExpressions: assembly to build regular expression patternsFIFA World Cup 2010 Mobile Sticker Checklist: FIFA World Cup 2010 Mobile Sticker Checklist is a small application for Windows Mobile developed in CF 3.5 to keep tracking of your sticker album. ...Finia.net: 追忆 游乐网·幻之大地FusspawnsAI: Fusspawns UT AI is a small test engine for a classic ut remote bot api. intending to improve ut's ai to a god like level without cheating bots(bots...G.A.E.T.: This is a Graphical Asymmetric Encryption Tool based on R.S.A. algorithm with the help of Java Language.Even though, this may be a small applicatio...ItzyBitzySpider: Webcrawler project from computer science at UCN.JingQiao.Ads: My DDD NTier Architecture example project.Managed Meizu SDK Demo: In this project we are sharing the source code to demonstrate the usage of managed SDK for Meizu cell phones, currently for M8. With the help of th...MaxxUtils.MaxxTagger: MaxxTagger: An Mp3 Tag Editor.. Add /Edit/Remove MP3 ID3 V1 and 2.3 Tags like Title, Artist, Album, Album Art, Genre. Besides tag editing, it also ...Maya Project Management: The Maya Project Management is a clone of RedMine with all its functions and plug-in support, using the following technologies: Microsoft .net Fra...MessageBoxLib: A simple, robust library for Xbox 360 and Windows development using the XNA Game Studio that makes using the Guide class's message box functionalit...MyWSAT - ASP.NET Membership Administration Tool: MyWSAT aka ASP.NET WSAT is a WebForms based website Starter Kit for the ASP.NET Membership Provider. It is a feature rich application that takes ca...OntologyCreator: this is my thesis and it is not finished yetPOS for .Net Handheld Products Service Object: POS for .Net Service Object Handheld Products Bar Code ScannerPostBinder: PostBinder is a small helper library that deserializes ASP.NET requests into C# classes. This eliminates having to write repeated hand wiring co...PostSharp for ASP.NET Web Sites: Adds support for PostSharp 2.0 on ASP.NET Web Sites.Rapid Dictionary: * Rapid Dictionary is a Translation Dictionary initialized by language learning network http://wordsteps.com. * Dictionary developed in C# and Co...ROrganizer: If you feel your movie files are kept in messy way, try out the ROrganizer which helps you rearrange them.RoRoWoBlog: 萝萝窝个人博客开源项目SPGroupDeflector - Explicitly deny groups to webs within your Site Collection: Secure webs within your MOSS or WSS Portal by explicitly denying access to specific users in SharePoint groups.SSIS ShapeFileSource: SSIS ShapeFileSource imports ESRI Shapefiles, and the associated attribute file (.dbf). The component based on the free Shapefile C Library.StoreManagement: University assignment. The task is to build an application that can perform basic CRUD operations on a property and use an arbitrary database. ...Surfium: TODO ;-)TaskCleaner: This is a Windows Forms project created to kill some running process in order to enhace the performance of Windows execution. Sometimes it is desi...The Expert Calendar: The Expert Calendar is a MOSS 2007 webpart which allows to connect to a Event Item List and display event items in a small design customizable cale...Visual Studio Find Results Window Tweak: This is a Visual Studio 2010 add-in which enables you to adjust the format of the Find Results Window. It is written in C#, .NET 4.0 and requires ...Weightlifting Sinclair coeficient calculator: Weightlifting Sinclair coeficient calculator for competitors (for Windows Mobile platform)Windows Azure Web Storage Explorer: Windows Azure Web Storage Explorer makes it easier for developers to browse and manage Blobs, Queues and Tables from Windows Azure Storage account....New Releases#SNMP - C# Based Open Source SNMP for .NET and Mono: CatPaw (5.0) Beta 1: SNMP v3 support in snmpd is complete.ASP.Net MVC Crud with JqGrid: Mvc Crud with JqGrid 0.3.0: Fairly major reworking of the GenericDataGrid (with alot of work from James). Most noticeable is the replacing of Edit and Delete with action butt...Basic Sprite Sheet Creator: Sprite Tool v1.1: Fixed the progress bar, it now correctly displays text and progress. Also download will now come with an installer and an executable so you don't h...Basic Sprite Sheet Creator: Sprite Tool Version 1.0: Program used to make basic sprite sheets. please visit http://coderplex.blogspot.com for more infoBraintree Client Library: Braintree-1.2.1: Escape all XMLCodeDefender: CodeDefender v0.1: Protect your .Net exe and dll files with this smart tool.ColinTesting: test: testColinTesting: test2: test2ColinTesting: test3: test3ColinTesting: test4: test4ColinTesting: test6: test6CycleMania Starter Kit EAP - ASP.NET 4 Problem - Design - Solution: Cyclemania 0.08.63: See Source Code tab for recent change history.Document Session Manager - Visual Studio addin: Release v0.45948: Release v0.45948DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.04.00: Major Highlights Fixed issue where portal settings were not saved per portal. Fixed issue with importing page templates. Fixed issue with...DotNetNuke® Postgres Data Provider: DNN PG Provider 01.00.00 Beta2: Fixes problems with deprecated datatype money in Postgres. Upgrades DotnetNuke code base to 04.09.05 It comes with a patch for the DotNetNuke insta...FIFA World Cup 2010 Mobile Sticker Checklist: FIFA World Cup 2010 Mobile Sticker Checklist v0.1b: FIFA World Cup 2010 Mobile Sticker Checklist v0.1b First beta release. Requires Microsoft Compact Framework 3.5. It was tested on an HTC Touch Viva...FIFA World Cup 2010 Mobile Sticker Checklist: FIFA World Cup 2010 Mobile Sticker Checklist v0.2b: FIFA World Cup 2010 Mobile Sticker Checklist v0.2b Second beta release. Requires Microsoft Compact Framework 3.5. It was tested on an HTC Touch Viv...Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.2: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.2(supports .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 RTM) Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) Showcase Application Samples Found...G.A.E.T.: Graphical Asymmetric Encryption Tool: User Interface The GAET User Interface is a window with five buttons. Each button is explained the following sections. Each button has a functional...HTML Ruby: 6.21.7: As long as I don't find anything else that I can improve, this will be submitted to Mozilla for review tomorrow. Added back process inserted conten...IBCSharp: IBCSharp 1.03: What IBCSharp 1.03.zip unzips to: http://i43.tinypic.com/24ffbqr.png Note: The above solution has MSTest, Typemock Isolator, and Microsoft CHESS c...LogikBug's IoC Container: Second Release: This project is dependent upon Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation and must be referenced when referencing LogikBug.Injection. Click here to view d...Managed Meizu SDK Demo: Library and Demo: Library and DemoMaxxUtils.MaxxTagger: MaxxUtils.MaxxTagger: Version: 1.0.0 (Beta) Instructions: Unzip the files to a folder and then dbl click on the exe. Known Issues: 1. When u copy or move a folde...OrthoLab: Cellule: Compile with Autodesk Maya 2008 32bit and 2010 64bit.OWASP Code Crawler: OWASP Code Crawler 2.7: Code Crawler 2.7 DescriptionIn terms of functionality there is not much new stuff in this release. We transplanted the new engine. Code Crawler is ...PerceptiveMCAPI - A .NET wrapper for the MailChimp Api: V1.2.3 PerceptiveMCAPI .Net Wrapper [Beta 2]: PerceptiveMCAPI – v 1.2.3 Change logFunctionality through MailChimp API announce v1.2.5 on 15-Feb-2010 .NET Wrapper New wrapper directives; api_Me...POS for .Net Handheld Products Service Object: POS for .Net Handhelp Products Service Object: The Service Object contained herein is a work in progress. This Service Object's is written as VS 2008 C# Project. The Target Platform is x86. ...PostSharp for ASP.NET Web Sites: R1: First release.Rich Ajax empowered Web/Cloud Applications: 6.4 beta 2c: A revisiov to the first fully featured version of Visual webGui offering web/cloud development tool that puts all ASP.NET Ajax limits behind with e...Should: Beta - 1.0: This is the initial release of the Should assertions extensions.Shrinkr: v1.0: First public release.Site Directory for SharePoint 2010 (from Microsoft Consulting Services, UK): v1.2: Address a bug found in v1.1 relating to the Delete Site Listings job not incrementing the 'Site Missing Count' for some SharePoint sites.Software Localization Tool: SharpSLT 1.0: New functions Backup before saving Delete entries Undo deletion Added more comments in the codeSPGroupDeflector - Explicitly deny groups to webs within your Site Collection: SPGroupDeflector: Download the source code, the wsp solution package, and Setup.docSSIS ShapeFileSource: Version 0.1: Short Preview of SSIS ShapeFileSource ComponentStarter Kit Mytrip.Mvc.Entity: Mytrip.Mvc.Entity 1.0: Warning Install MySql Connector/Net 6.3 MySQL Membership MSSQL Membership XML Membership UserManager FileManager Localization Captcha ...Surfium: Linux Expo Prebuild: First public releaseTaskCleaner: Initial Working Version: In this version we have all the features listed in the project description working fine. Built under Framework 3.5.Text to HTML: 0.4.5.0: CambiosSustitución de los siguientes caracteres: Anteriores: " < > ¡ © º ¿ Á Ä É Í Ñ Ó Ö Ú Ü ß á ä é í ñ ó ö ú ü € Nuevos: & ´ ≈ ¦ • ¸ ˆ ↓ ð … ∫ ...TS3QueryLib.Net: TS3QueryLib.Net Version 0.21.16.0: This release contains a bugfix for a bug that caused connection problems when connecting using an IP for some cases. So it's strongly recommended t...Tweety - Twitter Client: Tweety - 0.96: Form activation from system tray improved. General fixes. General code refactor.Web/Cloud Applications Development Framework | Visual WebGui: 6.4 Beta 2c: A revision to the first fully featured version of Visual webGui offering unique developer/designer interface and enhanced extensibility and customi...Windows Azure - PHP contributions: PhpAzureExtensions (Azure Drives) - 0.2.0: Extension for use with Windows Azure SDK 1.1! Breaking changes! Documentation can be found at http://phpazurecontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=A...WoW Character Viewer: Viewer (40545): New setup build for 40545.Xrns2XMod: Xrns2XMod 0.0.5.3: Major Source code optimization: >> Separated logical code of xm/mod conversion from renoiseSong xml. Now all necessary renoise song data code is st...XsltDb - DotNetNuke XSLT module: 01.00.99: callable tag is introduced - create javascript ajax functions more easy import/export bug is fixed mdo:ajax checkbox processing is now the same...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryIndustrial DashboardIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterFarseer Physics EngineBlogEngine.NETPHPExcelCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleTweetSharp

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• How to find and fix performance problems in ORM powered applications

  - by FransBouma

  Once in a while we get requests about how to fix performance problems with our framework. As it comes down to following the same steps and looking into the same things every single time, I decided to write a blogpost about it instead, so more people can learn from this and solve performance problems in their O/R mapper powered applications. In some parts it's focused on LLBLGen Pro but it's also usable for other O/R mapping frameworks, as the vast majority of performance problems in O/R mapper powered applications are not specific for a certain O/R mapper framework. Too often, the developer looks at the wrong part of the application, trying to fix what isn't a problem in that part, and getting frustrated that 'things are so slow with <insert your favorite framework X here>'. I'm in the O/R mapper business for a long time now (almost 10 years, full time) and as it's a small world, we O/R mapper developers know almost all tricks to pull off by now: we all know what to do to make task ABC faster and what compromises (because there are almost always compromises) to deal with if we decide to make ABC faster that way. Some O/R mapper frameworks are faster in X, others in Y, but you can be sure the difference is mainly a result of a compromise some developers are willing to deal with and others aren't. That's why the O/R mapper frameworks on the market today are different in many ways, even though they all fetch and save entities from and to a database. I'm not suggesting there's no room for improvement in today's O/R mapper frameworks, there always is, but it's not a matter of 'the slowness of the application is caused by the O/R mapper' anymore. Perhaps query generation can be optimized a bit here, row materialization can be optimized a bit there, but it's mainly coming down to milliseconds. Still worth it if you're a framework developer, but it's not much compared to the time spend inside databases and in user code: if a complete fetch takes 40ms or 50ms (from call to entity object collection), it won't make a difference for your application as that 10ms difference won't be noticed. That's why it's very important to find the real locations of the problems so developers can fix them properly and don't get frustrated because their quest to get a fast, performing application failed. Performance tuning basics and rules Finding and fixing performance problems in any application is a strict procedure with four prescribed steps: isolate, analyze, interpret and fix, in that order. It's key that you don't skip a step nor make assumptions: these steps help you find the reason of a problem which seems to be there, and how to fix it or leave it as-is. Skipping a step, or when you assume things will be bad/slow without doing analysis will lead to the path of premature optimization and won't actually solve your problems, only create new ones. The most important rule of finding and fixing performance problems in software is that you have to understand what 'performance problem' actually means. Most developers will say "when a piece of software / code is slow, you have a performance problem". But is that actually the case? If I write a Linq query which will aggregate, group and sort 5 million rows from several tables to produce a resultset of 10 rows, it might take more than a couple of milliseconds before that resultset is ready to be consumed by other logic. If I solely look at the Linq query, the code consuming the resultset of the 10 rows and then look at the time it takes to complete the whole procedure, it will appear to me to be slow: all that time taken to produce and consume 10 rows? But if you look closer, if you analyze and interpret the situation, you'll see it does a tremendous amount of work, and in that light it might even be extremely fast. With every performance problem you encounter, always do realize that what you're trying to solve is perhaps not a technical problem at all, but a perception problem. The second most important rule you have to understand is based on the old saying "Penny wise, Pound Foolish": the part which takes e.g. 5% of the total time T for a given task isn't worth optimizing if you have another part which takes a much larger part of the total time T for that same given task. Optimizing parts which are relatively insignificant for the total time taken is not going to bring you better results overall, even if you totally optimize that part away. This is the core reason why analysis of the complete set of application parts which participate in a given task is key to being successful in solving performance problems: No analysis -> no problem -> no solution. One warning up front: hunting for performance will always include making compromises. Fast software can be made maintainable, but if you want to squeeze as much performance out of your software, you will inevitably be faced with the dilemma of compromising one or more from the group {readability, maintainability, features} for the extra performance you think you'll gain. It's then up to you to decide whether it's worth it. In almost all cases it's not. The reason for this is simple: the vast majority of performance problems can be solved by implementing the proper algorithms, the ones with proven Big O-characteristics so you know the performance you'll get plus you know the algorithm will work. The time taken by the algorithm implementing code is inevitable: you already implemented the best algorithm. You might find some optimizations on the technical level but in general these are minor. Let's look at the four steps to see how they guide us through the quest to find and fix performance problems. Isolate The first thing you need to do is to isolate the areas in your application which are assumed to be slow. For example, if your application is a web application and a given page is taking several seconds or even minutes to load, it's a good candidate to check out. It's important to start with the isolate step because it allows you to focus on a single code path per area with a clear begin and end and ignore the rest. The rest of the steps are taken per identified problematic area. Keep in mind that isolation focuses on tasks in an application, not code snippets. A task is something that's started in your application by either another task or the user, or another program, and has a beginning and an end. You can see a task as a piece of functionality offered by your application.  Analyze Once you've determined the problem areas, you have to perform analysis on the code paths of each area, to see where the performance problems occur and which areas are not the problem. This is a multi-layered effort: an application which uses an O/R mapper typically consists of multiple parts: there's likely some kind of interface (web, webservice, windows etc.), a part which controls the interface and business logic, the O/R mapper part and the RDBMS, all connected with either a network or inter-process connections provided by the OS or other means. Each of these parts, including the connectivity plumbing, eat up a part of the total time it takes to complete a task, e.g. load a webpage with all orders of a given customer X. To understand which parts participate in the task / area we're investigating and how much they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task, analysis of each participating task is essential. Start with the code you wrote which starts the task, analyze the code and track the path it follows through your application. What does the code do along the way, verify whether it's correct or not. Analyze whether you have implemented the right algorithms in your code for this particular area. Remember we're looking at one area at a time, which means we're ignoring all other code paths, just the code path of the current problematic area, from begin to end and back. Don't dig in and start optimizing at the code level just yet. We're just analyzing. If your analysis reveals big architectural stupidity, it's perhaps a good idea to rethink the architecture at this point. For the rest, we're analyzing which means we collect data about what could be wrong, for each participating part of the complete application. Reviewing the code you wrote is a good tool to get deeper understanding of what is going on for a given task but ultimately it lacks precision and overview what really happens: humans aren't good code interpreters, computers are. We therefore need to utilize tools to get deeper understanding about which parts contribute how much time to the total task, triggered by which other parts and for example how many times are they called. There are two different kind of tools which are necessary: .NET profilers and O/R mapper / RDBMS profilers. .NET profiling .NET profilers (e.g. dotTrace by JetBrains or Ants by Red Gate software) show exactly which pieces of code are called, how many times they're called, and the time it took to run that piece of code, at the method level and sometimes even at the line level. The .NET profilers are essential tools for understanding whether the time taken to complete a given task / area in your application is consumed by .NET code, where exactly in your code, the path to that code, how many times that code was called by other code and thus reveals where hotspots are located: the areas where a solution can be found. Importantly, they also reveal which areas can be left alone: remember our penny wise pound foolish saying: if a profiler reveals that a group of methods are fast, or don't contribute much to the total time taken for a given task, ignore them. Even if the code in them is perhaps complex and looks like a candidate for optimization: you can work all day on that, it won't matter.  As we're focusing on a single area of the application, it's best to start profiling right before you actually activate the task/area. Most .NET profilers support this by starting the application without starting the profiling procedure just yet. You navigate to the particular part which is slow, start profiling in the profiler, in your application you perform the actions which are considered slow, and afterwards you get a snapshot in the profiler. The snapshot contains the data collected by the profiler during the slow action, so most data is produced by code in the area to investigate. This is important, because it allows you to stay focused on a single area. O/R mapper and RDBMS profiling .NET profilers give you a good insight in the .NET side of things, but not in the RDBMS side of the application. As this article is about O/R mapper powered applications, we're also looking at databases, and the software making it possible to consume the database in your application: the O/R mapper. To understand which parts of the O/R mapper and database participate how much to the total time taken for task T, we need different tools. There are two kind of tools focusing on O/R mappers and database performance profiling: O/R mapper profilers and RDBMS profilers. For O/R mapper profilers, you can look at LLBLGen Prof by hibernating rhinos or the Linq to Sql/LLBLGen Pro profiler by Huagati. Hibernating rhinos also have profilers for other O/R mappers like NHibernate (NHProf) and Entity Framework (EFProf) and work the same as LLBLGen Prof. For RDBMS profilers, you have to look whether the RDBMS vendor has a profiler. For example for SQL Server, the profiler is shipped with SQL Server, for Oracle it's build into the RDBMS, however there are also 3rd party tools. Which tool you're using isn't really important, what's important is that you get insight in which queries are executed during the task / area we're currently focused on and how long they took. Here, the O/R mapper profilers have an advantage as they collect the time it took to execute the query from the application's perspective so they also collect the time it took to transport data across the network. This is important because a query which returns a massive resultset or a resultset with large blob/clob/ntext/image fields takes more time to get transported across the network than a small resultset and a database profiler doesn't take this into account most of the time. Another tool to use in this case, which is more low level and not all O/R mappers support it (though LLBLGen Pro and NHibernate as well do) is tracing: most O/R mappers offer some form of tracing or logging system which you can use to collect the SQL generated and executed and often also other activity behind the scenes. While tracing can produce a tremendous amount of data in some cases, it also gives insight in what's going on. Interpret After we've completed the analysis step it's time to look at the data we've collected. We've done code reviews to see whether we've done anything stupid and which parts actually take place and if the proper algorithms have been implemented. We've done .NET profiling to see which parts are choke points and how much time they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task we're investigating. We've performed O/R mapper profiling and RDBMS profiling to see which queries were executed during the task, how many queries were generated and executed and how long they took to complete, including network transportation. All this data reveals two things: which parts are big contributors to the total time taken and which parts are irrelevant. Both aspects are very important. The parts which are irrelevant (i.e. don't contribute significantly to the total time taken) can be ignored from now on, we won't look at them. The parts which contribute a lot to the total time taken are important to look at. We now have to first look at the .NET profiler results, to see whether the time taken is consumed in our own code, in .NET framework code, in the O/R mapper itself or somewhere else. For example if most of the time is consumed by DbCommand.ExecuteReader, the time it took to complete the task is depending on the time the data is fetched from the database. If there was just 1 query executed, according to tracing or O/R mapper profilers / RDBMS profilers, check whether that query is optimal, uses indexes or has to deal with a lot of data. Interpret means that you follow the path from begin to end through the data collected and determine where, along the path, the most time is contributed. It also means that you have to check whether this was expected or is totally unexpected. My previous example of the 10 row resultset of a query which groups millions of rows will likely reveal that a long time is spend inside the database and almost no time is spend in the .NET code, meaning the RDBMS part contributes the most to the total time taken, the rest is compared to that time, irrelevant. Considering the vastness of the source data set, it's expected this will take some time. However, does it need tweaking? Perhaps all possible tweaks are already in place. In the interpret step you then have to decide that further action in this area is necessary or not, based on what the analysis results show: if the analysis results were unexpected and in the area where the most time is contributed to the total time taken is room for improvement, action should be taken. If not, you can only accept the situation and move on. In all cases, document your decision together with the analysis you've done. If you decide that the perceived performance problem is actually expected due to the nature of the task performed, it's essential that in the future when someone else looks at the application and starts asking questions you can answer them properly and new analysis is only necessary if situations changed. Fix After interpreting the analysis results you've concluded that some areas need adjustment. This is the fix step: you're actively correcting the performance problem with proper action targeted at the real cause. In many cases related to O/R mapper powered applications it means you'll use different features of the O/R mapper to achieve the same goal, or apply optimizations at the RDBMS level. It could also mean you apply caching inside your application (compromise memory consumption over performance) to avoid unnecessary re-querying data and re-consuming the results. After applying a change, it's key you re-do the analysis and interpretation steps: compare the results and expectations with what you had before, to see whether your actions had any effect or whether it moved the problem to a different part of the application. Don't fall into the trap to do partly analysis: do the full analysis again: .NET profiling and O/R mapper / RDBMS profiling. It might very well be that the changes you've made make one part faster but another part significantly slower, in such a way that the overall problem hasn't changed at all. Performance tuning is dealing with compromises and making choices: to use one feature over the other, to accept a higher memory footprint, to go away from the strict-OO path and execute queries directly onto the RDBMS, these are choices and compromises which will cross your path if you want to fix performance problems with respect to O/R mappers or data-access and databases in general. In most cases it's not a big issue: alternatives are often good choices too and the compromises aren't that hard to deal with. What is important is that you document why you made a choice, a compromise: which analysis data, which interpretation led you to the choice made. This is key for good maintainability in the years to come. Most common performance problems with O/R mappers Below is an incomplete list of common performance problems related to data-access / O/R mappers / RDBMS code. It will help you with fixing the hotspots you found in the interpretation step. SELECT N+1: (Lazy-loading specific). Lazy loading triggered performance bottlenecks. Consider a list of Orders bound to a grid. You have a Field mapped onto a related field in Order, Customer.CompanyName. Showing this column in the grid will make the grid fetch (indirectly) for each row the Customer row. This means you'll get for the single list not 1 query (for the orders) but 1+(the number of orders shown) queries. To solve this: use eager loading using a prefetch path to fetch the customers with the orders. SELECT N+1 is easy to spot with an O/R mapper profiler or RDBMS profiler: if you see a lot of identical queries executed at once, you have this problem. Prefetch paths using many path nodes or sorting, or limiting. Eager loading problem. Prefetch paths can help with performance, but as 1 query is fetched per node, it can be the number of data fetched in a child node is bigger than you think. Also consider that data in every node is merged on the client within the parent. This is fast, but it also can take some time if you fetch massive amounts of entities. If you keep fetches small, you can use tuning parameters like the ParameterizedPrefetchPathThreshold setting to get more optimal queries. Deep inheritance hierarchies of type Target Per Entity/Type. If you use inheritance of type Target per Entity / Type (each type in the inheritance hierarchy is mapped onto its own table/view), fetches will join subtype- and supertype tables in many cases, which can lead to a lot of performance problems if the hierarchy has many types. With this problem, keep inheritance to a minimum if possible, or switch to a hierarchy of type Target Per Hierarchy, which means all entities in the inheritance hierarchy are mapped onto the same table/view. Of course this has its own set of drawbacks, but it's a compromise you might want to take. Fetching massive amounts of data by fetching large lists of entities. LLBLGen Pro supports paging (and limiting the # of rows returned), which is often key to process through large sets of data. Use paging on the RDBMS if possible (so a query is executed which returns only the rows in the page requested). When using paging in a web application, be sure that you switch server-side paging on on the datasourcecontrol used. In this case, paging on the grid alone is not enough: this can lead to fetching a lot of data which is then loaded into the grid and paged there. Keep note that analyzing queries for paging could lead to the false assumption that paging doesn't occur, e.g. when the query contains a field of type ntext/image/clob/blob and DISTINCT can't be applied while it should have (e.g. due to a join): the datareader will do DISTINCT filtering on the client. this is a little slower but it does perform paging functionality on the data-reader so it won't fetch all rows even if the query suggests it does. Fetch massive amounts of data because blob/clob/ntext/image fields aren't excluded. LLBLGen Pro supports field exclusion for queries. You can exclude fields (also in prefetch paths) per query to avoid fetching all fields of an entity, e.g. when you don't need them for the logic consuming the resultset. Excluding fields can greatly reduce the amount of time spend on data-transport across the network. Use this optimization if you see that there's a big difference between query execution time on the RDBMS and the time reported by the .NET profiler for the ExecuteReader method call. Doing client-side aggregates/scalar calculations by consuming a lot of data. If possible, try to formulate a scalar query or group by query using the projection system or GetScalar functionality of LLBLGen Pro to do data consumption on the RDBMS server. It's far more efficient to process data on the RDBMS server than to first load it all in memory, then traverse the data in-memory to calculate a value. Using .ToList() constructs inside linq queries. It might be you use .ToList() somewhere in a Linq query which makes the query be run partially in-memory. Example: var q = from c in metaData.Customers.ToList() where c.Country=="Norway" select c; This will actually fetch all customers in-memory and do an in-memory filtering, as the linq query is defined on an IEnumerable<T>, and not on the IQueryable<T>. Linq is nice, but it can often be a bit unclear where some parts of a Linq query might run. Fetching all entities to delete into memory first. To delete a set of entities it's rather inefficient to first fetch them all into memory and then delete them one by one. It's more efficient to execute a DELETE FROM ... WHERE query on the database directly to delete the entities in one go. LLBLGen Pro supports this feature, and so do some other O/R mappers. It's not always possible to do this operation in the context of an O/R mapper however: if an O/R mapper relies on a cache, these kind of operations are likely not supported because they make it impossible to track whether an entity is actually removed from the DB and thus can be removed from the cache. Fetching all entities to update with an expression into memory first. Similar to the previous point: it is more efficient to update a set of entities directly with a single UPDATE query using an expression instead of fetching the entities into memory first and then updating the entities in a loop, and afterwards saving them. It might however be a compromise you don't want to take as it is working around the idea of having an object graph in memory which is manipulated and instead makes the code fully aware there's a RDBMS somewhere. Conclusion Performance tuning is almost always about compromises and making choices. It's also about knowing where to look and how the systems in play behave and should behave. The four steps I provided should help you stay focused on the real problem and lead you towards the solution. Knowing how to optimally use the systems participating in your own code (.NET framework, O/R mapper, RDBMS, network/services) is key for success as well as knowing what's going on inside the application you built. I hope you'll find this guide useful in tracking down performance problems and dealing with them in a useful way.  

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• lxc containers hangs after upgrade to 13.10

  - by doug123

  I have 3 lxc containers. They were all working fine on 12.10 and I upgraded the containers with do-release-upgrade on the containers to 13.04 and 13.10 and that worked great. Then I upgraded the host to 13.04 and then 13.10 and now the 3 containers hang with this: >lxc-start -n as1 -l DEBUG -o $(tty) lxc-start 1383145786.513 INFO lxc_start_ui - using rcfile /var/lib/lxc/as1/config lxc-start 1383145786.513 WARN lxc_log - lxc_log_init called with log already initialized lxc-start 1383145786.513 INFO lxc_apparmor - aa_enabled set to 1 lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/2' (5/6) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/13' (7/8) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/14' (9/10) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/15' (11/12) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/17' (13/14) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/18' (15/16) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/19' (17/18) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/20' (19/20) lxc-start 1383145786.514 INFO lxc_conf - tty's configured lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_start - sigchild handler set lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - opening /dev/tty for console peer lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - using '/dev/tty' as console lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - 6242 got SIGWINCH fd 25 lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - set winsz dstfd:22 cols:177 rows:53 lxc-start 1383145786.514 INFO lxc_start - 'as1' is initialized lxc-start 1383145786.522 DEBUG lxc_start - Not dropping cap_sys_boot or watching utmp lxc-start 1383145786.524 DEBUG lxc_conf - mac address of host interface 'vethB4L35W' changed to private fe:7c:96:a0:ae:29 lxc-start 1383145786.525 DEBUG lxc_conf - instanciated veth 'vethB4L35W/vethVC61K2', index is '26' lxc-start 1383145786.529 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'memory.limit_in_bytes' set to '20G' lxc-start 1383145786.529 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'cpuset.cpus' set to '12-23' lxc-start 1383145786.529 INFO lxc_cgroup - cgroup has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.555 DEBUG lxc_conf - move 'eth0' to '6249' lxc-start 1383145786.555 INFO lxc_conf - 'as1' hostname has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.575 DEBUG lxc_conf - 'eth0' has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - network has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .44 42 252:0 / / rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/mapper/limitorderbook1-root rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .52 44 0:5 / /dev rw,relatime - devtmpfs udev rw,size=32961632k,nr_inodes=8240408,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .61 52 0:11 / /dev/pts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - devpts devpts rw,mode=600,ptmxmode=000 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev/pts. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .68 44 0:15 / /run rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=6594456k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .69 68 0:18 / /run/lock rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=5120k . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/lock. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .72 68 0:19 / /run/shm rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime - tmpfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/shm. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .73 68 0:21 / /run/user rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=102400k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/user. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .76 44 0:14 / /sys rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - sysfs sysfs rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .77 76 0:16 / /sys/fs/cgroup rw,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=4k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .78 77 0:20 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuset,clone_children . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .79 77 0:23 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpu . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .80 77 0:24 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuacct . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .81 77 0:25 / /sys/fs/cgroup/memory rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,memory . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/memory. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .82 77 0:26 / /sys/fs/cgroup/devices rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,devices . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/devices. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .83 77 0:27 / /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,freezer . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .84 77 0:28 / /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,blkio . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .85 77 0:29 / /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,perf_event . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .94 77 0:30 / /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,hugetlb . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .95 77 0:31 / /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - cgroup systemd rw,name=systemd . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .96 76 0:17 / /sys/fs/fuse/connections rw,relatime - fusectl none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/fuse/connections. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .98 76 0:6 / /sys/kernel/debug rw,relatime - debugfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/debug. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .101 76 0:10 / /sys/kernel/security rw,relatime - securityfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/security. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .102 76 0:22 / /sys/fs/pstore rw,relatime - pstore none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/pstore. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .103 44 0:3 / /proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - proc proc rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /proc. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .104 44 9:2 / /data rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/md2 rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /data. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .105 44 8:1 / /boot rw,relatime - ext2 /dev/sda1 rw,errors=continue . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /boot. lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted '/data/srv/lxc/as1' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//dev/pts', type 'devpts' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//proc', type 'proc' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//sys', type 'sysfs' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//run', type 'tmpfs' lxc-start 1383145786.576 INFO lxc_conf - mount points have been setup lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - console has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - 8 tty(s) has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - rootfs path is ./data/srv/lxc/as1., mount is ./usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc. lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_apparmor - I am 1, /proc/self points to 1 lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - created '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc/lxc_putold' directory lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - mountpoint for old rootfs is '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc/lxc_putold' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - pivot_root syscall to '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc' successful lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/dev/pts' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run/lock' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run/shm' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run/user' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/cpu' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/memory' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/devices' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/freezer' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/blkio' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/fuse/connections' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/kernel/debug' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/kernel/security' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/pstore' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/proc' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/data' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/boot' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/dev' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold' lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - created new pts instance lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_conf - drop capability 'sys_boot' (22) lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_conf - capabilities have been setup lxc-start 1383145786.578 NOTICE lxc_conf - 'as1' is setup. lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'memory.limit_in_bytes' set to '20G' lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'cpuset.cpus' set to '12-23' lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_cgroup - cgroup has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_apparmor - setting up apparmor lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_apparmor - changed apparmor profile to lxc-container-default lxc-start 1383145786.578 NOTICE lxc_start - exec'ing '/sbin/init' lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .15 20 0:14 / /sys rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - sysfs sysfs rw . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .16 20 0:3 / /proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - proc proc rw . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /proc. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .17 20 0:5 / /dev rw,relatime - devtmpfs udev rw,size=32961632k,nr_inodes=8240408,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .18 17 0:11 / /dev/pts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - devpts devpts rw,mode=600,ptmxmode=000 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev/pts. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .19 20 0:15 / /run rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=6594456k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .20 1 252:0 / / rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/mapper/limitorderbook1-root rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .22 15 0:16 / /sys/fs/cgroup rw,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=4k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .23 15 0:17 / /sys/fs/fuse/connections rw,relatime - fusectl none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/fuse/connections. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .24 15 0:6 / /sys/kernel/debug rw,relatime - debugfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/debug. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .25 15 0:10 / /sys/kernel/security rw,relatime - securityfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/security. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .26 19 0:18 / /run/lock rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=5120k . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/lock. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .27 19 0:19 / /run/shm rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime - tmpfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/shm. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .28 22 0:20 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuset,clone_children . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .29 19 0:21 / /run/user rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=102400k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/user. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .30 15 0:22 / /sys/fs/pstore rw,relatime - pstore none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/pstore. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .31 22 0:23 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpu . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .32 22 0:24 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuacct . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .33 22 0:25 / /sys/fs/cgroup/memory rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,memory . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/memory. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .34 22 0:26 / /sys/fs/cgroup/devices rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,devices . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/devices. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .35 22 0:27 / /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,freezer . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .36 22 0:28 / /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,blkio . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .37 22 0:29 / /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,perf_event . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .38 22 0:30 / /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,hugetlb . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .39 20 9:2 / /data rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/md2 rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /data. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .40 20 8:1 / /boot rw,relatime - ext2 /dev/sda1 rw,errors=continue . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /boot. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .41 22 0:31 / /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - cgroup systemd rw,name=systemd . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd. lxc-start 1383145786.579 NOTICE lxc_start - '/sbin/init' started with pid '6249' lxc-start 1383145786.579 WARN lxc_start - invalid pid for SIGCHLD <4>init: ureadahead main process (7) terminated with status 5 <4>init: console-font main process (94) terminated with status 1 And it will just sit there like that for hours at least. The container becomes pingable but I can't ssh and if I try lxc-console -n as1 I get a blank screen. If I do lxc-stop -n as1 or ^C in the window where it has hung I get: ^CTERM environment variable not set. <4>init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process (192) terminated with status 1 <4>init: hwclock-save main process (187) terminated with status 70 * Asking all remaining processes to terminate... ...done. * All processes ended within 1 seconds... ...done. * Deactivating swap... ...fail! mount: cannot mount block device /dev/md2 read-only * Will now restart But after 20 minutes it hasn't restarted. Any ideas why these containers are hanging?

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• The Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• CLSF & CLK 2013 Trip Report by Jeff Liu

  - by jamesmorris

  This is a contributed post from Jeff Liu, lead XFS developer for the Oracle mainline Linux kernel team. Recently, I attended both the China Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop (CLSF), and the China Linux Kernel conference (CLK), which were held in Shanghai. Here are the highlights for both events. CLSF - 17th October XFS update (led by Jeff Liu) XFS keeps rapid progress with a lot of changes, especially focused on the infrastructure/performance improvements as well as  new feature development.  This can be reflected with a sample statistics among XFS/Ext4+JBD2/Btrfs via: # git diff --stat --minimal -C -M v3.7..v3.12-rc4 -- fs/xfs|fs/ext4+fs/jbd2|fs/btrfs XFS: 141 files changed, 27598 insertions(+), 19113 deletions(-) Ext4+JBD2: 39 files changed, 10487 insertions(+), 5454 deletions(-) Btrfs: 70 files changed, 19875 insertions(+), 8130 deletions(-) What made up those changes in XFS? Self-describing metadata(CRC32c). This is a new feature and it contributed about 70% code changes, it can be enabled via `mkfs.xfs -m crc=1 /dev/xxx` for v5 superblock. Transaction log space reservation improvements. With this change, we can calculate the log space reservation at mount time rather than runtime to reduce the the CPU overhead. User namespace support. So both XFS and USERNS can be enabled on kernel configuration begin from Linux 3.10. Thanks Dwight Engen's efforts for this thing. Split project/group quota inodes. Originally, project quota can not be enabled with group quota at the same time because they were share the same quota file inode, now it works but only for v5 super block. i.e, CRC enabled. CONFIG_XFS_WARN, an new lightweight runtime debugger which can be deployed in production environment. Readahead log object recovery, this change can speed up the log replay progress significantly. Speculative preallocation inode tracking, clearing and throttling. The main purpose is to deal with inodes with post-EOF space due to speculative preallocation, support improved quota management to free up a significant amount of unwritten space when at or near EDQUOT. It support backgroup scanning which occurs on a longish interval(5 mins by default, tunable), and on-demand scanning/trimming via ioctl(2). Bitter arguments ensued from this session, especially for the comparison between Ext4 and Btrfs in different areas, I have to spent a whole morning of the 1st day answering those questions. We basically agreed on XFS is the best choice in Linux nowadays because: Stable, XFS has a good record in stability in the past 10 years. Fengguang Wu who lead the 0-day kernel test project also said that he has observed less error than other filesystems in the past 1+ years, I own it to the XFS upstream code reviewer, they always performing serious code review as well as testing. Good performance for large/small files, XFS does not works very well for small files has already been an old story for years. Best choice (maybe) for distributed PB filesystems. e.g, Ceph recommends delopy OSD daemon on XFS because Ext4 has limited xattr size. Best choice for large storage (>16TB). Ext4 does not support a single file more than around 15.95TB. Scalability, any objection to XFS is best in this point? :) XFS is better to deal with transaction concurrency than Ext4, why? The maximum size of the log in XFS is 2038MB compare to 128MB in Ext4. Misc. Ext4 is widely used and it has been proved fast/stable in various loads and scenarios, XFS just need more customers, and Btrfs is still on the road to be a manhood. Ceph Introduction (Led by Li Wang) This a hot topic.  Li gave us a nice introduction about the design as well as their current works. Actually, Ceph client has been included in Linux kernel since 2.6.34 and supported by Openstack since Folsom but it seems that it has not yet been widely deployment in production environment. Their major work is focus on the inline data support to separate the metadata and data storage, reduce the file access time, i.e, a file access need communication twice, fetch the metadata from MDS and then get data from OSD, and also, the small file access is limited by the network latency. The solution is, for the small files they would like to store the data at metadata so that when accessing a small file, the metadata server can push both metadata and data to the client at the same time. In this way, they can reduce the overhead of calculating the data offset and save the communication to OSD. For this feature, they have only run some small scale testing but really saw noticeable improvements. Test environment: Intel 2 CPU 12 Core, 64GB RAM, Ubuntu 12.04, Ceph 0.56.6 with 200GB SATA disk, 15 OSD, 1 MDS, 1 MON. The sequence read performance for 1K size files improved about 50%. I have asked Li and Zheng Yan (the core developer of Ceph, who also worked on Btrfs) whether Ceph is really stable and can be deployed at production environment for large scale PB level storage, but they can not give a positive answer, looks Ceph even does not spread over Dreamhost (subject to confirmation). From Li, they only deployed Ceph for a small scale storage(32 nodes) although they'd like to try 6000 nodes in the future. Improve Linux swap for Flash storage (led by Shaohua Li) Because of high density, low power and low price, flash storage (SSD) is a good candidate to partially replace DRAM. A quick answer for this is using SSD as swap. But Linux swap is designed for slow hard disk storage, so there are a lot of challenges to efficiently use SSD for swap. SWAPOUT swap_map scan swap_map is the in-memory data structure to track swap disk usage, but it is a slow linear scan. It will become a bottleneck while finding many adjacent pages in the use of SSD. Shaohua Li have changed it to a cluster(128K) list, resulting in O(1) algorithm. However, this apporoach needs restrictive cluster alignment and only enabled for SSD. IO pattern In most cases, the swap io is in interleaved pattern because of mutiple reclaimers or a free cluster is shared by all reclaimers. Even though block layer can merge interleaved IO to some extent, but we cannot count on it completely. Hence the per-cpu cluster is added base on the previous change, it can help reclaimer do sequential IO and the block layer will be easier to merge IO. TLB flush: If we're reclaiming one active page, we should first move the page from active lru list to inactive lru list, and then reclaim the page from inactive lru to swap it out. During the process, we need to clear PTE twice: first is 'A'(ACCESS) bit, second is 'P'(PRESENT) bit. Processors need to send lots of ipi which make the TLB flush really expensive. Some works have been done to improve this, including rework smp_call_functiom_many() or remove the first TLB flush in x86, but there still have some arguments here and only parts of works have been pushed to mainline. SWAPIN: Page fault does iodepth=1 sync io, but it's a little waste if only issue a page size's IO. The obvious solution is doing swap readahead. But the current in-kernel swap readahead is arbitary(always 8 pages), and it always doesn't perform well for both random and sequential access workload. Shaohua introduced a new flag for madvise(MADV_WILLNEED) to do swap prefetch, so the changes happen in userspace API and leave the in-kernel readahead unchanged(but I think some improvement can also be done here). SWAP discard As we know, discard is important for SSD write throughout, but the current swap discard implementation is synchronous. He changed it to async discard which allow discard and write run in the same time. Meanwhile, the unit of discard is also optimized to cluster. Misc: lock contention For many concurrent swapout and swapin , the lock contention such as anon_vma or swap_lock is high, so he changed the swap_lock to a per-swap lock. But there still have some lock contention in very high speed SSD because of swapcache address_space lock. Zproject (led by Bob Liu) Bob gave us a very nice introduction about the current memory compression status. Now there are 3 projects(zswap/zram/zcache) which all aim at smooth swap IO storm and promote performance, but they all have their own pros and cons. ZSWAP It is implemented based on frontswap API and it uses a dynamic allocater named Zbud to allocate free pages. Zbud means pairs of zpages are "buddied" and it can only store at most two compressed pages in one page frame, so the max compress ratio is 50%. Each page frame is lru-linked and can do shink in memory pressure. If the compressed memory pool reach its limitation, shink or reclaim happens. It decompress the page frame into two new allocated pages and then write them to real swap device, but it can fail when allocating the two pages. ZRAM Acts as a compressed ramdisk and used as swap device, and it use zsmalloc as its allocator which has high density but may have fragmentation issues. Besides, page reclaim is hard since it will need more pages to uncompress and free just one page. ZRAM is preferred by embedded system which may not have any real swap device. Now both ZRAM and ZSWAP are in driver/staging tree, and in the mm community there are some disscussions of merging ZRAM into ZSWAP or viceversa, but no agreement yet. ZCACHE Handles file page compression but it is removed out of staging recently. From industry (led by Tang Jie, LSI) An LSI engineer introduced several new produces to us. The first is raid5/6 cards that it use full stripe writes to improve performance. The 2nd one he introduced is SandForce flash controller, who can understand data file types (data entropy) to reduce write amplification (WA) for nearly all writes. It's called DuraWrite and typical WA is 0.5. What's more, if enable its Dynamic Logical Capacity function module, the controller can do data compression which is transparent to upper layer. LSI testing shows that with this virtual capacity enables 1x TB drive can support up to 2x TB capacity, but the application must monitor free flash space to maintain optimal performance and to guard against free flash space exhaustion. He said the most useful application is for datebase. Another thing I think it's worth to mention is that a NV-DRAM memory in NMR/Raptor which is directly exposed to host system. Applications can directly access the NV-DRAM via a memory address - using standard system call mmap(). He said that it is very useful for database logging now. This kind of NVM produces are beginning to appear in recent years, and it is said that Samsung is building a research center in China for related produces. IMHO, NVM will bring an effect to current os layer especially on file system, e.g. its journaling may need to redesign to fully utilize these nonvolatile memory. OCFS2 (led by Canquan Shen) Without a doubt, HuaWei is the biggest contributor to OCFS2 in the past two years. They have posted 46 upstream patches and 39 patches have been merged. Their current project is based on 32/64 nodes cluster, but they also tried 128 nodes at the experimental stage. The major work they are working is to support ATS (atomic test and set), it can be works with DLM at the same time. Looks this idea is inspired by the vmware VMFS locking, i.e, http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/05/vmfs-locking-uncovered.html CLK - 18th October 2013 Improving Linux Development with Better Tools (Andi Kleen) This talk focused on how to find/solve bugs along with the Linux complexity growing. Generally, we can do this with the following kind of tools: Static code checkers tools. e.g, sparse, smatch, coccinelle, clang checker, checkpatch, gcc -W/LTO, stanse. This can help check a lot of things, simple mistakes, complex problems, but the challenges are: some are very slow, false positives, may need a concentrated effort to get false positives down. Especially, no static checker I found can follow indirect calls (“OO in C”, common in kernel): struct foo_ops { int (*do_foo)(struct foo *obj); } foo->do_foo(foo); Dynamic runtime checkers, e.g, thread checkers, kmemcheck, lockdep. Ideally all kernel code would come with a test suite, then someone could run all the dynamic checkers. Fuzzers/test suites. e.g, Trinity is a great tool, it finds many bugs, but needs manual model for each syscall. Modern fuzzers around using automatic feedback, but notfor kernel yet: http://taviso.decsystem.org/making_software_dumber.pdf Debuggers/Tracers to understand code, e.g, ftrace, can dump on events/oops/custom triggers, but still too much overhead in many cases to run always during debug. Tools to read/understand source, e.g, grep/cscope work great for many cases, but do not understand indirect pointers (OO in C model used in kernel), give us all “do_foo” instances: struct foo_ops { int (*do_foo)(struct foo *obj); } = { .do_foo = my_foo }; foo>do_foo(foo); That would be great to have a cscope like tool that understands this based on types/initializers XFS: The High Performance Enterprise File System (Jeff Liu) [slides] I gave a talk for introducing the disk layout, unique features, as well as the recent changes.   The slides include some charts to reflect the performances between XFS/Btrfs/Ext4 for small files. About a dozen users raised their hands when I asking who has experienced with XFS. I remembered that when I asked the same question in LinuxCon/Japan, only 3 people raised their hands, but they are Chris Mason, Ric Wheeler, and another attendee. The attendee questions were mainly focused on stability, and comparison with other file systems. Linux Containers (Feng Gao) The speaker introduced us that the purpose for those kind of namespaces, include mount/UTS/IPC/Network/Pid/User, as well as the system API/ABI. For the userspace tools, He mainly focus on the Libvirt LXC rather than us(LXC). Libvirt LXC is another userspace container management tool, implemented as one type of libvirt driver, it can manage containers, create namespace, create private filesystem layout for container, Create devices for container and setup resources controller via cgroup. In this talk, Feng also mentioned another two possible new namespaces in the future, the 1st is the audit, but not sure if it should be assigned to user namespace or not. Another is about syslog, but the question is do we really need it? In-memory Compression (Bob Liu) Same as CLSF, a nice introduction that I have already mentioned above. Misc There were some other talks related to ACPI based memory hotplug, smart wake-affinity in scheduler etc., but my head is not big enough to record all those things. -- Jeff Liu

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• Building a jQuery Plug-in to make an HTML Table scrollable

  - by Rick Strahl

  Today I got a call from a customer and we were looking over an older application that uses a lot of tables to display financial and other assorted data. The application is mostly meta-data driven with lots of layout formatting automatically driven through meta data rather than through explicit hand coded HTML layouts. One of the problems in this apps are tables that display a non-fixed amount of data. The users of this app don't want to use paging to see more data, but instead want to display overflow data using a scrollbar. Many of the forms are very densely populated, often with multiple data tables that display a few rows of data in the UI at the most. This sort of layout does not lend itself well to paging, but works much better with scrollable data. Unfortunately scrollable tables are not easily created. HTML Tables are mangy beasts as anybody who's done any sort of Web development knows. Tables are finicky when it comes to styling and layout, and they have many funky quirks, especially when it comes to scrolling both of the table rows themselves or even the child columns. There's no built-in way to make tables scroll and to lock headers while you do, and while you can embed a table (or anything really) into a scrolling div with something like this: <div style="position:relative; overflow: hidden; overflow-y: scroll; height: 200px; width: 400px;"> <table id="table" style="width: 100%" class="blackborder" > <thead> <tr class="gridheader"> <th>Column 1</th> <th>Column 2</th> <th>Column 3</th> <th >Column 4</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> … </tbody> </table> </div> </div> that won't give a very satisfying visual experience: Both the header and body scroll which looks odd. You lose context as soon as the header scrolls off the top and when you reach the bottom of the list the bottom outline of the table shows which also looks off. The the side bar shows all the way down the length of the table yet another visual miscue. In a pinch this will work, but it's ugly. What's out there? Before we go further here you should know that there are a few capable grid plug-ins out there already. Among them: Flexigrid (can work of any table as well as with AJAX data) jQuery Scrollable Table Plug-in (feature similar to what I need but not quite) jqGrid (mostly an Ajax Grid which is very powerful and works very well) But in the end none of them fit the bill of what I needed in this situation. All of these require custom CSS and some of them are fairly complex to restyle. Others are AJAX only or work better with AJAX loaded data. However, I need to actually try (as much as possible) to maintain the original styling of the tables without requiring extensive re-styling. Building the makeTableScrollable() Plug-in To make a table scrollable requires rearranging the table a bit. In the plug-in I built I create two <div> tags and split the table into two: one for the table header and one for the table body. The bottom <div> tag then contains only the table's row data and can be scrolled while the header stays fixed. Using jQuery the basic idea is pretty simple: You create the divs, copy the original table into the bottom, then clone the table, clear all content append the <thead> section, into new table and then copy that table into the second header <div>. Easy as pie, right? Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that as it's tricky to get the width of the table right to account for the scrollbar (by adding a small column) and making sure the borders properly line up for the two tables. A lot of style settings have to be made to ensure the table is a fixed size, to remove and reattach borders, to add extra space to allow for the scrollbar and so forth. The end result of my plug-in is a table with a scrollbar. Using the same table I used earlier the result looks like this: To create it, I use the following jQuery plug-in logic to select my table and run the makeTableScrollable() plug-in against the selector: $("#table").makeTableScrollable( { cssClass:"blackborder"} ); Without much further ado, here's the short code for the plug-in: (function ($) { $.fn.makeTableScrollable = function (options) { return this.each(function () { var $table = $(this); var opt = { // height of the table height: "250px", // right padding added to support the scrollbar rightPadding: "10px", // cssclass used for the wrapper div cssClass: "" } $.extend(opt, options); var $thead = $table.find("thead"); var $ths = $thead.find("th"); var id = $table.attr("id"); var cssClass = $table.attr("class"); if (!id) id = "_table_" + new Date().getMilliseconds().ToString(); $table.width("+=" + opt.rightPadding); $table.css("border-width", 0); // add a column to all rows of the table var first = true; $table.find("tr").each(function () { var row = $(this); if (first) { row.append($("<th>").width(opt.rightPadding)); first = false; } else row.append($("<td>").width(opt.rightPadding)); }); // force full sizing on each of the th elemnts $ths.each(function () { var $th = $(this); $th.css("width", $th.width()); }); // Create the table wrapper div var $tblDiv = $("<div>").css({ position: "relative", overflow: "hidden", overflowY: "scroll" }) .addClass(opt.cssClass); var width = $table.width(); $tblDiv.width(width).height(opt.height) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper") .css("border-top", "none"); // Insert before $tblDiv $tblDiv.insertBefore($table); // then move the table into it $table.appendTo($tblDiv); // Clone the div for header var $hdDiv = $tblDiv.clone(); $hdDiv.empty(); var width = $table.width(); $hdDiv.attr("style", "") .css("border-bottom", "none") .width(width) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper_header"); // create a copy of the table and remove all children var $newTable = $($table).clone(); $newTable.empty() .attr("id", $table.attr("id") + "_header"); $thead.appendTo($newTable); $hdDiv.insertBefore($tblDiv); $newTable.appendTo($hdDiv); $table.css("border-width", 0); }); } })(jQuery); Oh sweet spaghetti code :-) The code starts out by dealing the parameters that can be passed in the options object map: height The height of the full table/structure. The height of the outside wrapper container. Defaults to 200px. rightPadding The padding that is added to the right of the table to account for the scrollbar. Creates a column of this width and injects it into the table. If too small the rightmost column might get truncated. if too large the empty column might show. cssClass The CSS class of the wrapping container that appears to wrap the table. If you want a border around your table this class should probably provide it since the plug-in removes the table border. The rest of the code is obtuse, but pretty straight forward. It starts by creating a new column in the table to accommodate the width of the scrollbar and avoid clipping of text in the rightmost column. The width of the columns is explicitly set in the header elements to force the size of the table to be fixed and to provide the same sizing when the THEAD section is moved to a new copied table later. The table wrapper div is created, formatted and the table is moved into it. The new wrapper div is cloned for the header wrapper and configured. Finally the actual table is cloned and cleared of all elements. The original table's THEAD section is then moved into the new table. At last the new table is added to the header <div>, and the header <div> is inserted before the table wrapper <div>. I'm always amazed how easy jQuery makes it to do this sort of re-arranging, and given of what's happening the amount of code is rather small. Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary A word of warning: I make no guarantees about the code above. It's a first cut and I provided this here mainly to demonstrate the concepts of decomposing and reassembling an HTML layout :-) which jQuery makes so nice and easy. I tested this component against the typical scenarios we plan on using it for which are tables that use a few well known styles (or no styling at all). I suspect if you have complex styling on your <table> tag that things might not go so well. If you plan on using this plug-in you might want to minimize your styling of the table tag and defer any border formatting using the class passed in via the cssClass parameter, which ends up on the two wrapper div's that wrap the header and body rows. There's also no explicit support for footers. I rarely if ever use footers (when not using paging that is), so I didn't feel the need to add footer support. However, if you need that it's not difficult to add - the logic is the same as adding the header. The plug-in relies on a well-formatted table that has THEAD and TBODY sections along with TH tags in the header. Note that ASP.NET WebForm DataGrids and GridViews by default do not generate well-formatted table HTML. You can look at my Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView post for more info on how to get a GridView to render properly. The plug-in has no dependencies other than jQuery. Even with the limitations in mind I hope this might be useful to some of you. I know I've already identified a number of places in my own existing applications where I will be plugging this in almost immediately. Resources Download Sample and Plug-in code Latest version in the West Wind Web & AJAX Toolkit Repository © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery  HTML  ASP.NET  

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• Ancillary Objects: Separate Debug ELF Files For Solaris

  - by Ali Bahrami

  We introduced a new object ELF object type in Solaris 11 Update 1 called the Ancillary Object. This posting describes them, using material originally written during their development, the PSARC arc case, and the Solaris Linker and Libraries Manual. ELF objects contain allocable sections, which are mapped into memory at runtime, and non-allocable sections, which are present in the file for use by debuggers and observability tools, but which are not mapped or used at runtime. Typically, all of these sections exist within a single object file. Ancillary objects allow them to instead go into a separate file. There are different reasons given for wanting such a feature. One can debate whether the added complexity is worth the benefit, and in most cases it is not. However, one important case stands out — customers with very large 32-bit objects who are not ready or able to make the transition to 64-bits. We have customers who build extremely large 32-bit objects. Historically, the debug sections in these objects have used the stabs format, which is limited, but relatively compact. In recent years, the industry has transitioned to the powerful but verbose DWARF standard. In some cases, the size of these debug sections is large enough to push the total object file size past the fundamental 4GB limit for 32-bit ELF object files. The best, and ultimately only, solution to overly large objects is to transition to 64-bits. However, consider environments where: Hundreds of users may be executing the code on large shared systems. (32-bits use less memory and bus bandwidth, and on sparc runs just as fast as 64-bit code otherwise). Complex finely tuned code, where the original authors may no longer be available. Critical production code, that was expensive to qualify and bring online, and which is otherwise serving its intended purpose without issue. Users in these risk adverse and/or high scale categories have good reasons to push 32-bits objects to the limit before moving on. Ancillary objects offer these users a longer runway. Design The design of ancillary objects is intended to be simple, both to help human understanding when examining elfdump output, and to lower the bar for debuggers such as dbx to support them. The primary and ancillary objects have the same set of section headers, with the same names, in the same order (i.e. each section has the same index in both files). A single added section of type SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY is added to both objects, containing information that allows a debugger to identify and validate both files relative to each other. Given one of these files, the ancillary section allows you to identify the other. Allocable sections go in the primary object, and non-allocable ones go into the ancillary object. A small set of non-allocable objects, notably the symbol table, are copied into both objects. As noted above, most sections are only written to one of the two objects, but both objects have the same section header array. The section header in the file that does not contain the section data is tagged with the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag to indicate its placeholder status. Compiler writers and others who produce objects can set the SUNW_SHF_PRIMARY section header flag to mark non-allocable sections that should go to the primary object rather than the ancillary. If you don't request an ancillary object, the Solaris ELF format is unchanged. Users who don't use ancillary objects do not pay for the feature. This is important, because they exist to serve a small subset of our users, and must not complicate the common case. If you do request an ancillary object, the runtime behavior of the primary object will be the same as that of a normal object. There is no added runtime cost. The primary and ancillary object together represent a logical single object. This is facilitated by the use of a single set of section headers. One can easily imagine a tool that can merge a primary and ancillary object into a single file, or the reverse. (Note that although this is an interesting intellectual exercise, we don't actually supply such a tool because there's little practical benefit above and beyond using ld to create the files). Among the benefits of this approach are: There is no need for per-file symbol tables to reflect the contents of each file. The same symbol table that would be produced for a standard object can be used. The section contents are identical in either case — there is no need to alter data to accommodate multiple files. It is very easy for a debugger to adapt to these new files, and the processing involved can be encapsulated in input/output routines. Most of the existing debugger implementation applies without modification. The limit of a 4GB 32-bit output object is now raised to 4GB of code, and 4GB of debug data. There is also the future possibility (not currently supported) to support multiple ancillary objects, each of which could contain up to 4GB of additional debug data. It must be noted however that the 32-bit DWARF debug format is itself inherently 32-bit limited, as it uses 32-bit offsets between debug sections, so the ability to employ multiple ancillary object files may not turn out to be useful. Using Ancillary Objects (From the Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide) By default, objects contain both allocable and non-allocable sections. Allocable sections are the sections that contain executable code and the data needed by that code at runtime. Non-allocable sections contain supplemental information that is not required to execute an object at runtime. These sections support the operation of debuggers and other observability tools. The non-allocable sections in an object are not loaded into memory at runtime by the operating system, and so, they have no impact on memory use or other aspects of runtime performance no matter their size. For convenience, both allocable and non-allocable sections are normally maintained in the same file. However, there are situations in which it can be useful to separate these sections. To reduce the size of objects in order to improve the speed at which they can be copied across wide area networks. To support fine grained debugging of highly optimized code requires considerable debug data. In modern systems, the debugging data can easily be larger than the code it describes. The size of a 32-bit object is limited to 4 Gbytes. In very large 32-bit objects, the debug data can cause this limit to be exceeded and prevent the creation of the object. To limit the exposure of internal implementation details. Traditionally, objects have been stripped of non-allocable sections in order to address these issues. Stripping is effective, but destroys data that might be needed later. The Solaris link-editor can instead write non-allocable sections to an ancillary object. This feature is enabled with the -z ancillary command line option. $ ld ... -z ancillary[=outfile] ...By default, the ancillary file is given the same name as the primary output object, with a .anc file extension. However, a different name can be provided by providing an outfile value to the -z ancillary option. When -z ancillary is specified, the link-editor performs the following actions. All allocable sections are written to the primary object. In addition, all non-allocable sections containing one or more input sections that have the SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY section header flag set are written to the primary object. All remaining non-allocable sections are written to the ancillary object. The following non-allocable sections are written to both the primary object and ancillary object. .shstrtab The section name string table. .symtab The full non-dynamic symbol table. .symtab_shndx The symbol table extended index section associated with .symtab. .strtab The non-dynamic string table associated with .symtab. .SUNW_ancillary Contains the information required to identify the primary and ancillary objects, and to identify the object being examined. The primary object and all ancillary objects contain the same array of sections headers. Each section has the same section index in every file. Although the primary and ancillary objects all define the same section headers, the data for most sections will be written to a single file as described above. If the data for a section is not present in a given file, the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag is set, and the sh_size field is 0. This organization makes it possible to acquire a full list of section headers, a complete symbol table, and a complete list of the primary and ancillary objects from either of the primary or ancillary objects. The following example illustrates the underlying implementation of ancillary objects. An ancillary object is created by adding the -z ancillary command line option to an otherwise normal compilation. The file utility shows that the result is an executable named a.out, and an associated ancillary object named a.out.anc. $ cat hello.c #include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { (void) printf("hello, world\n"); return (0); } $ cc -g -zancillary hello.c $ file a.out a.out.anc a.out: ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1 [FPU], dynamically linked, not stripped, ancillary object a.out.anc a.out.anc: ELF 32-bit LSB ancillary 80386 Version 1, primary object a.out $ ./a.out hello worldThe resulting primary object is an ordinary executable that can be executed in the usual manner. It is no different at runtime than an executable built without the use of ancillary objects, and then stripped of non-allocable content using the strip or mcs commands. As previously described, the primary object and ancillary objects contain the same section headers. To see how this works, it is helpful to use the elfdump utility to display these section headers and compare them. The following table shows the section header information for a selection of headers from the previous link-edit example. Index Section Name Type Primary Flags Ancillary Flags Primary Size Ancillary Size 13 .text PROGBITS ALLOC EXECINSTR ALLOC EXECINSTR SUNW_ABSENT 0x131 0 20 .data PROGBITS WRITE ALLOC WRITE ALLOC SUNW_ABSENT 0x4c 0 21 .symtab SYMTAB 0 0 0x450 0x450 22 .strtab STRTAB STRINGS STRINGS 0x1ad 0x1ad 24 .debug_info PROGBITS SUNW_ABSENT 0 0 0x1a7 28 .shstrtab STRTAB STRINGS STRINGS 0x118 0x118 29 .SUNW_ancillary SUNW_ancillary 0 0 0x30 0x30 The data for most sections is only present in one of the two files, and absent from the other file. The SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag is set when the data is absent. The data for allocable sections needed at runtime are found in the primary object. The data for non-allocable sections used for debugging but not needed at runtime are placed in the ancillary file. A small set of non-allocable sections are fully present in both files. These are the .SUNW_ancillary section used to relate the primary and ancillary objects together, the section name string table .shstrtab, as well as the symbol table.symtab, and its associated string table .strtab. It is possible to strip the symbol table from the primary object. A debugger that encounters an object without a symbol table can use the .SUNW_ancillary section to locate the ancillary object, and access the symbol contained within. The primary object, and all associated ancillary objects, contain a .SUNW_ancillary section that allows all the objects to be identified and related together. $ elfdump -T SUNW_ancillary a.out a.out.anc a.out: Ancillary Section: .SUNW_ancillary index tag value [0] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [1] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1 a.out [2] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [3] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1a3 a.out.anc [4] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [5] ANC_SUNW_NULL 0 a.out.anc: Ancillary Section: .SUNW_ancillary index tag value [0] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [1] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1 a.out [2] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [3] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1a3 a.out.anc [4] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [5] ANC_SUNW_NULL 0 The ancillary sections for both objects contain the same number of elements, and are identical except for the first element. Each object, starting with the primary object, is introduced with a MEMBER element that gives the file name, followed by a CHECKSUM that identifies the object. In this example, the primary object is a.out, and has a checksum of 0x8724. The ancillary object is a.out.anc, and has a checksum of 0xfbe2. The first element in a .SUNW_ancillary section, preceding the MEMBER element for the primary object, is always a CHECKSUM element, containing the checksum for the file being examined. The presence of a .SUNW_ancillary section in an object indicates that the object has associated ancillary objects. The names of the primary and all associated ancillary objects can be obtained from the ancillary section from any one of the files. It is possible to determine which file is being examined from the larger set of files by comparing the first checksum value to the checksum of each member that follows. Debugger Access and Use of Ancillary Objects Debuggers and other observability tools must merge the information found in the primary and ancillary object files in order to build a complete view of the object. This is equivalent to processing the information from a single file. This merging is simplified by the primary object and ancillary objects containing the same section headers, and a single symbol table. The following steps can be used by a debugger to assemble the information contained in these files. Starting with the primary object, or any of the ancillary objects, locate the .SUNW_ancillary section. The presence of this section identifies the object as part of an ancillary group, contains information that can be used to obtain a complete list of the files and determine which of those files is the one currently being examined. Create a section header array in memory, using the section header array from the object being examined as an initial template. Open and read each file identified by the .SUNW_ancillary section in turn. For each file, fill in the in-memory section header array with the information for each section that does not have the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag set. The result will be a complete in-memory copy of the section headers with pointers to the data for all sections. Once this information has been acquired, the debugger can proceed as it would in the single file case, to access and control the running program. Note - The ELF definition of ancillary objects provides for a single primary object, and an arbitrary number of ancillary objects. At this time, the Oracle Solaris link-editor only produces a single ancillary object containing all non-allocable sections. This may change in the future. Debuggers and other observability tools should be written to handle the general case of multiple ancillary objects. ELF Implementation Details (From the Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide) To implement ancillary objects, it was necessary to extend the ELF format to add a new object type (ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY), a new section type (SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY), and 2 new section header flags (SHF_SUNW_ABSENT, SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY). In this section, I will detail these changes, in the form of diffs to the Solaris Linker and Libraries manual. Part IV ELF Application Binary Interface Chapter 13: Object File Format Object File Format Edit Note: This existing section at the beginning of the chapter describes the ELF header. There's a table of object file types, which now includes the new ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY type. e_type Identifies the object file type, as listed in the following table. NameValueMeaning ET_NONE0No file type ET_REL1Relocatable file ET_EXEC2Executable file ET_DYN3Shared object file ET_CORE4Core file ET_LOSUNW0xfefeStart operating system specific range ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY0xfefeAncillary object file ET_HISUNW0xfefdEnd operating system specific range ET_LOPROC0xff00Start processor-specific range ET_HIPROC0xffffEnd processor-specific range Sections Edit Note: This overview section defines the section header structure, and provides a high level description of known sections. It was updated to define the new SHF_SUNW_ABSENT and SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flags and the new SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY section. ... sh_type Categorizes the section's contents and semantics. Section types and their descriptions are listed in Table 13-5. sh_flags Sections support 1-bit flags that describe miscellaneous attributes. Flag definitions are listed in Table 13-8. ... Table 13-5 ELF Section Types, sh_type NameValue . . . SHT_LOSUNW0x6fffffee SHT_SUNW_ancillary0x6fffffee . . . ... SHT_LOSUNW - SHT_HISUNW Values in this inclusive range are reserved for Oracle Solaris OS semantics. SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY Present when a given object is part of a group of ancillary objects. Contains information required to identify all the files that make up the group. See Ancillary Section. ... Table 13-8 ELF Section Attribute Flags NameValue . . . SHF_MASKOS0x0ff00000 SHF_SUNW_NODISCARD0x00100000 SHF_SUNW_ABSENT0x00200000 SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY0x00400000 SHF_MASKPROC0xf0000000 . . . ... SHF_SUNW_ABSENT Indicates that the data for this section is not present in this file. When ancillary objects are created, the primary object and any ancillary objects, will all have the same section header array, to facilitate merging them to form a complete view of the object, and to allow them to use the same symbol tables. Each file contains a subset of the section data. The data for allocable sections is written to the primary object while the data for non-allocable sections is written to an ancillary file. The SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag is used to indicate that the data for the section is not present in the object being examined. When the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag is set, the sh_size field of the section header must be 0. An application encountering an SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section can choose to ignore the section, or to search for the section data within one of the related ancillary files. SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY The default behavior when ancillary objects are created is to write all allocable sections to the primary object and all non-allocable sections to the ancillary objects. The SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flag overrides this behavior. Any output section containing one more input section with the SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flag set is written to the primary object without regard for its allocable status. ... Two members in the section header, sh_link, and sh_info, hold special information, depending on section type. Table 13-9 ELF sh_link and sh_info Interpretation sh_typesh_linksh_info . . . SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY The section header index of the associated string table. 0 . . . Special Sections Edit Note: This section describes the sections used in Solaris ELF objects, using the types defined in the previous description of section types. It was updated to define the new .SUNW_ancillary (SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY) section. Various sections hold program and control information. Sections in the following table are used by the system and have the indicated types and attributes. Table 13-10 ELF Special Sections NameTypeAttribute . . . .SUNW_ancillarySHT_SUNW_ancillaryNone . . . ... .SUNW_ancillary Present when a given object is part of a group of ancillary objects. Contains information required to identify all the files that make up the group. See Ancillary Section for details. ... Ancillary Section Edit Note: This new section provides the format reference describing the layout of a .SUNW_ancillary section and the meaning of the various tags. Note that these sections use the same tag/value concept used for dynamic and capabilities sections, and will be familiar to anyone used to working with ELF. In addition to the primary output object, the Solaris link-editor can produce one or more ancillary objects. Ancillary objects contain non-allocable sections that would normally be written to the primary object. When ancillary objects are produced, the primary object and all of the associated ancillary objects contain a SHT_SUNW_ancillary section, containing information that identifies these related objects. Given any one object from such a group, the ancillary section provides the information needed to identify and interpret the others. This section contains an array of the following structures. See sys/elf.h. typedef struct { Elf32_Word a_tag; union { Elf32_Word a_val; Elf32_Addr a_ptr; } a_un; } Elf32_Ancillary; typedef struct { Elf64_Xword a_tag; union { Elf64_Xword a_val; Elf64_Addr a_ptr; } a_un; } Elf64_Ancillary; For each object with this type, a_tag controls the interpretation of a_un. a_val These objects represent integer values with various interpretations. a_ptr These objects represent file offsets or addresses. The following ancillary tags exist. Table 13-NEW1 ELF Ancillary Array Tags NameValuea_un ANC_SUNW_NULL0Ignored ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM1a_val ANC_SUNW_MEMBER2a_ptr ANC_SUNW_NULL Marks the end of the ancillary section. ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM Provides the checksum for a file in the c_val element. When ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM precedes the first instance of ANC_SUNW_MEMBER, it provides the checksum for the object from which the ancillary section is being read. When it follows an ANC_SUNW_MEMBER tag, it provides the checksum for that member. ANC_SUNW_MEMBER Specifies an object name. The a_ptr element contains the string table offset of a null-terminated string, that provides the file name. An ancillary section must always contain an ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM before the first instance of ANC_SUNW_MEMBER, identifying the current object. Following that, there should be an ANC_SUNW_MEMBER for each object that makes up the complete set of objects. Each ANC_SUNW_MEMBER should be followed by an ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM for that object. A typical ancillary section will therefore be structured as: TagMeaning ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum of this object ANC_SUNW_MEMBERName of object #1 ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum for object #1 . . . ANC_SUNW_MEMBERName of object N ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum for object N ANC_SUNW_NULL An object can therefore identify itself by comparing the initial ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM to each of the ones that follow, until it finds a match. Related Other Work The GNU developers have also encountered the need/desire to support separate debug information files, and use the solution detailed at http://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Separate-Debug-Files.html. At the current time, the separate debug file is constructed by building the standard object first, and then copying the debug data out of it in a separate post processing step, Hence, it is limited to a total of 4GB of code and debug data, just as a single object file would be. They are aware of this, and I have seen online comments indicating that they may add direct support for generating these separate files to their link-editor. It is worth noting that the GNU objcopy utility is available on Solaris, and that the Studio dbx debugger is able to use these GNU style separate debug files even on Solaris. Although this is interesting in terms giving Linux users a familiar environment on Solaris, the 4GB limit means it is not an answer to the problem of very large 32-bit objects. We have also encountered issues with objcopy not understanding Solaris-specific ELF sections, when using this approach. The GNU community also has a current effort to adapt their DWARF debug sections in order to move them to separate files before passing the relocatable objects to the linker. The details of Project Fission can be found at http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/DebugFission. The goal of this project appears to be to reduce the amount of data seen by the link-editor. The primary effort revolves around moving DWARF data to separate .dwo files so that the link-editor never encounters them. The details of modifying the DWARF data to be usable in this form are involved — please see the above URL for details.

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• Red Gate Coder interviews: Robin Hellen

  - by Michael Williamson

  Robin Hellen is a test engineer here at Red Gate, and is also the latest coder I’ve interviewed. We chatted about debugging code, the roles of software engineers and testers, and why Vala is currently his favourite programming language. How did you get started with programming?It started when I was about six. My dad’s a professional programmer, and he gave me and my sister one of his old computers and taught us a bit about programming. It was an old Amiga 500 with a variant of BASIC. I don’t think I ever successfully completed anything! It was just faffing around. I didn’t really get anywhere with it.But then presumably you did get somewhere with it at some point.At some point. The PC emerged as the dominant platform, and I learnt a bit of Visual Basic. I didn’t really do much, just a couple of quick hacky things. A bit of demo animation. Took me a long time to get anywhere with programming, really.When did you feel like you did start to get somewhere?I think it was when I started doing things for someone else, which was my sister’s final year of university project. She called up my dad two days before she was due to submit, saying “We need something to display a graph!”. Dad says, “I’m too busy, go talk to your brother”. So I hacked up this ugly piece of code, sent it off and they won a prize for that project. Apparently, the graph, the bit that I wrote, was the reason they won a prize! That was when I first felt that I’d actually done something that was worthwhile. That was my first real bit of code, and the ugliest code I’ve ever written. It’s basically an array of pre-drawn line elements that I shifted round the screen to draw a very spikey graph.When did you decide that programming might actually be something that you wanted to do as a career?It’s not really a decision I took, I always wanted to do something with computers. And I had to take a gap year for uni, so I was looking for twelve month internships. I applied to Red Gate, and they gave me a job as a tester. And that’s where I really started having to write code well. To a better standard that I had been up to that point.How did you find coming to Red Gate and working with other coders?I thought it was really nice. I learnt so much just from other people around. I think one of the things that’s really great is that people are just willing to help you learn. Instead of “Don’t you know that, you’re so stupid”, it’s “You can just do it this way”.If you could go back to the very start of that internship, is there something that you would tell yourself?Write shorter code. I have a tendency to write massive, many-thousand line files that I break out of right at the end. And then half-way through a project I’m doing something, I think “Where did I write that bit that does that thing?”, and it’s almost impossible to find. I wrote some horrendous code when I started. Just that principle, just keep things short. Even if looks a bit crazy to be jumping around all over the place all of the time, it’s actually a lot more understandable.And how do you hold yourself to that?Generally, if a function’s going off my screen, it’s probably too long. That’s what I tell myself, and within the team here we have code reviews, so the guys I’m with at the moment are pretty good at pulling me up on, “Doesn’t that look like it’s getting a bit long?”. It’s more just the subjective standard of readability than anything.So you’re an advocate of code review?Yes, definitely. Both to spot errors that you might have made, and to improve your knowledge. The person you’re reviewing will say “Oh, you could have done it that way”. That’s how we learn, by talking to others, and also just sharing knowledge of how your project works around the team, or even outside the team. Definitely a very firm advocate of code reviews.Do you think there’s more we could do with them?I don’t know. We’re struggling with how to add them as part of the process without it becoming too cumbersome. We’ve experimented with a few different ways, and we’ve not found anything that just works.To get more into the nitty gritty: how do you like to debug code?The first thing is to do it in my head. I’ll actually think what piece of code is likely to have caused that error, and take a quick look at it, just to see if there’s anything glaringly obvious there. The next thing I’ll probably do is throw in print statements, or throw some exceptions from various points, just to check: is it going through the code path I expect it to? A last resort is to actually debug code using a debugger.Why is the debugger the last resort?Probably because of the environments I learnt programming in. VB and early BASIC didn’t have much of a debugger, the only way to find out what your program was doing was to add print statements. Also, because a lot of the stuff I tend to work with is non-interactive, if it’s something that takes a long time to run, I can throw in the print statements, set a run off, go and do something else, and look at it again later, rather than trying to remember what happened at that point when I was debugging through it. So it also gives me the record of what happens. I hate just sitting there pressing F5, F5, continually. If you’re having to find out what your code is doing at each line, you’ve probably got a very wrong mental model of what your code’s doing, and you can find that out just as easily by inspecting a couple of values through the print statements.If I were on some codebase that you were also working on, what should I do to make it as easy as possible to understand?I’d say short and well-named methods. The one thing I like to do when I’m looking at code is to find out where a value comes from, and the more layers of indirection there are, particularly DI [dependency injection] frameworks, the harder it is to find out where something’s come from. I really hate that. I want to know if the value come from the user here or is a constant here, and if I can’t find that out, that makes code very hard to understand for me.As a tester, where do you think the split should lie between software engineers and testers?I think the split is less on areas of the code you write and more what you’re designing and creating. The developers put a structure on the code, while my major role is to say which tests we should have, whether we should test that, or it’s not worth testing that because it’s a tiny function in code that nobody’s ever actually going to see. So it’s not a split in the code, it’s a split in what you’re thinking about. Saying what code we should write, but alternatively what code we should take out.In your experience, do the software engineers tend to do much testing themselves?They tend to control the lowest layer of tests. And, depending on how the balance of people is in the team, they might write some of the higher levels of test. Or that might go to the testers. I’m the only tester on my team with three other developers, so they’ll be writing quite a lot of the actual test code, with input from me as to whether we should test that functionality, whereas on other teams, where it’s been more equal numbers, the testers have written pretty much all of the high level tests, just because that’s the best use of resource.If you could shuffle resources around however you liked, do you think that the developers should be writing those high-level tests?I think they should be writing them occasionally. It helps when they have an understanding of how testing code works and possibly what assumptions we’ve made in tests, and they can say “actually, it doesn’t work like that under the hood so you’ve missed this whole area”. It’s one of those agile things that everyone on the team should be at least comfortable doing the various jobs. So if the developers can write test code then I think that’s a very good thing.So you think testers should be able to write production code?Yes, although given most testers skills at coding, I wouldn’t advise it too much! I have written a few things, and I did make a few changes that have actually gone into our production code base. They’re not necessarily running every time but they are there. I think having that mix of skill sets is really useful. In some ways we’re using our own product to test itself, so being able to make those changes where it’s not working saves me a round-trip through the developers. It can be really annoying if the developers have no time to make a change, and I can’t touch the code.If the software engineers are consistently writing tests at all levels, what role do you think the role of a tester is?I think on a team like that, those distinctions aren’t quite so useful. There’ll be two cases. There’s either the case where the developers think they’ve written good tests, but you still need someone with a test engineer mind-set to go through the tests and validate that it’s a useful set, or the correct set for that code. Or they won’t actually be pure developers, they’ll have that mix of test ability in there.I think having slightly more distinct roles is useful. When it starts to blur, then you lose that view of the tests as a whole. The tester job is not to create tests, it’s to validate the quality of the product, and you don’t do that just by writing tests. There’s more things you’ve got to keep in your mind. And I think when you blur the roles, you start to lose that end of the tester.So because you’re working on those features, you lose that holistic view of the whole system?Yeah, and anyone who’s worked on the feature shouldn’t be testing it. You always need to have it tested it by someone who didn’t write it. Otherwise you’re a bit too close and you assume “yes, people will only use it that way”, but the tester will come along and go “how do people use this? How would our most idiotic user use this?”. I might not test that because it might be completely irrelevant. But it’s coming in and trying to have a different set of assumptions.Are you a believer that it should all be automated if possible?Not entirely. So an automated test is always better than a manual test for the long-term, but there’s still nothing that beats a human sitting in front of the application and thinking “What could I do at this point?”. The automated test is very good but they follow that strict path, and they never check anything off the path. The human tester will look at things that they weren’t expecting, whereas the automated test can only ever go “Is that value correct?” in many respects, and it won’t notice that on the other side of the screen you’re showing something completely wrong. And that value might have been checked independently, but you always find a few odd interactions when you’re going through something manually, and you always need to go through something manually to start with anyway, otherwise you won’t know where the important bits to write your automation are.When you’re doing that manual testing, do you think it’s important to do that across the entire product, or just the bits that you’ve touched recently?I think it’s important to do it mostly on the bits you’ve touched, but you can’t ignore the rest of the product. Unless you’re dealing with a very, very self-contained bit, you’re almost always encounter other bits of the product along the way. Most testers I know, even if they are looking at just one path, they’ll keep open and move around a bit anyway, just because they want to find something that’s broken. If we find that your path is right, we’ll go out and hunt something else.How do you think this fits into the idea of continuously deploying, so long as the tests pass?With deploying a website it’s a bit different because you can always pull it back. If you’re deploying an application to customers, when you’ve released it, it’s out there, you can’t pull it back. Someone’s going to keep it, no matter how hard you try there will be a few installations that stay around. So I’d always have at least a human element on that path. With websites, you could probably automate straight out, or at least straight out to an internal environment or a single server in a cloud of fifty that will serve some people. But I don’t think you should release to everyone just on automated tests passing.You’ve already mentioned using BASIC and C# — are there any other languages that you’ve used?I’ve used a few. That’s something that has changed more recently, I’ve become familiar with more languages. Before I started at Red Gate I learnt a bit of C. Then last year, I taught myself Python which I actually really enjoyed using. I’ve also come across another language called Vala, which is sort of a C#-like language. It’s basically a pre-processor for C, but it has very nice syntax. I think that’s currently my favourite language.Any particular reason for trying Vala?I have a completely Linux environment at home, and I’ve been looking for a nice language, and C# just doesn’t cut it because I won’t touch Mono. So, I was looking for something like C# but that was useable in an open source environment, and Vala’s what I found. C#’s got a few features that Vala doesn’t, and Vala’s got a few features where I think “It would be awesome if C# had that”.What are some of the features that it’s missing?Extension methods. And I think that’s the only one that really bugs me. I like to use them when I’m writing C# because it makes some things really easy, especially with libraries that you can’t touch the internals of. It doesn’t have method overloading, which is sometimes annoying.Where it does win over C#?Everything is non-nullable by default, you never have to check that something’s unexpectedly null.Also, Vala has code contracts. This is starting to come in C# 4, but the way it works in Vala is that you specify requirements in short phrases as part of your function signature and they stick to the signature, so that when you inherit it, it has exactly the same code contract as the base one, or when you inherit from an interface, you have to match the signature exactly. Just using those makes you think a bit more about how you’re writing your method, it’s not an afterthought when you’ve got contracts from base classes given to you, you can’t change it. Which I think is a lot nicer than the way C# handles it. When are those actually checked?They’re checked both at compile and run-time. The compile-time checking isn’t very strong yet, it’s quite a new feature in the compiler, and because it compiles down to C, you can write C code and interface with your methods, so you can bypass that compile-time check anyway. So there’s an extra runtime check, and if you violate one of the contracts at runtime, it’s game over for your program, there’s no exception to catch, it’s just goodbye!One thing I dislike about C# is the exceptions. You write a bit of code and fifty exceptions could come from any point in your ten lines, and you can’t mentally model how those exceptions are going to come out, and you can’t even predict them based on the functions you’re calling, because if you’ve accidentally got a derived class there instead of a base class, that can throw a completely different set of exceptions. So I’ve got no way of mentally modelling those, whereas in Vala they’re checked like Java, so you know only these exceptions can come out. You know in advance the error conditions.I think Raymond Chen on Old New Thing says “the only thing you know when you throw an exception is that you’re in an invalid state somewhere in your program, so just kill it and be done with it!”You said you’ve also learnt bits of Python. How did you find that compared to Vala and C#?Very different because of the dynamic typing. I’ve been writing a website for my own use. I’m quite into photography, so I take photos off my camera, post-process them, dump them in a file, and I get a webpage with all my thumbnails. So sort of like Picassa, but written by myself because I wanted something to learn Python with. There are some things that are really nice, I just found it really difficult to cope with the fact that I’m not quite sure what this object type that I’m passed is, I might not ever be sure, so it can randomly blow up on me. But once I train myself to ignore that and just say “well, I’m fairly sure it’s going to be something that looks like this, so I’ll use it like this”, then it’s quite nice.Any particular features that you’ve appreciated?I don’t like any particular feature, it’s just very straightforward to work with. It’s very quick to write something in, particularly as you don’t have to worry that you’ve changed something that affects a different part of the program. If you have, then that part blows up, but I can get this part working right now.If you were doing a big project, would you be willing to do it in Python rather than C# or Vala?I think I might be willing to try something bigger or long term with Python. We’re currently doing an ASP.NET MVC project on C#, and I don’t like the amount of reflection. There’s a lot of magic that pulls values out, and it’s all done under the scenes. It’s almost managed to put a dynamic type system on top of C#, which in many ways destroys the language to me, whereas if you’re already in a dynamic language, having things done dynamically is much more natural. In many ways, you get the worst of both worlds. I think for web projects, I would go with Python again, whereas for anything desktop, command-line or GUI-based, I’d probably go for C# or Vala, depending on what environment I’m in.It’s the fact that you can gain from the strong typing in ways that you can’t so much on the web app. Or, in a web app, you have to use dynamic typing at some point, or you have to write a hell of a lot of boilerplate, and I’d rather use the dynamic typing than write the boilerplate.What do you think separates great programmers from everyone else?Probably design choices. Choosing to write it a piece of code one way or another. For any given program you ask me to write, I could probably do it five thousand ways. A programmer who is capable will see four or five of them, and choose one of the better ones. The excellent programmer will see the largest proportion and manage to pick the best one very quickly without having to think too much about it. I think that’s probably what separates, is the speed at which they can see what’s the best path to write the program in. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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• You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down.  Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you.  :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer:  “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields.  You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well.  Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET,  sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast!  Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe.  Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible.  Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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• Use Extension method to write cleaner code

  - by Fredrik N

  This blog post will show you step by step to refactoring some code to be more readable (at least what I think). Patrik Löwnedahl gave me some of the ideas when we where talking about making code much cleaner. The following is an simple application that will have a list of movies (Normal and Transfer). The task of the application is to calculate the total sum of each movie and also display the price of each movie. class Program { enum MovieType { Normal, Transfer } static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Normal) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } else if (movie == MovieType.Transfer) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } } } private static IEnumerable<MovieType> GetMovies() { return new List<MovieType>() { MovieType.Normal, MovieType.Transfer, MovieType.Normal }; } } .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; } In the code above I’m using an enum, a good way to add types (isn’t it ;)). I also use one foreach loop to calculate the price, the loop has a condition statement to check what kind of movie is added to the list of movies. I want to reuse the foreach only to increase performance and let it do two things (isn’t that smart of me?! ;)). First of all I can admit, I’m not a big fan of enum. Enum often results in ugly condition statements and can be hard to maintain (if a new type is added we need to check all the code in our app to see if we use the enum somewhere else). I don’t often care about pre-optimizations when it comes to write code (of course I have performance in mind). I rather prefer to use two foreach to let them do one things instead of two. So based on what I don’t like and Martin Fowler’s Refactoring catalog, I’m going to refactoring this code to what I will call a more elegant and cleaner code. First of all I’m going to use Split Loop to make sure the foreach will do one thing not two, it will results in two foreach (Don’t care about performance here, if the results will results in bad performance, you can refactoring later, but computers are so fast to day, so iterating through a list is not often so time consuming.) Note: The foreach actually do four things, will come to is later. var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Normal) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } } foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Transfer) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } } .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; } To remove the condition statement we can use the Where extension method added to the IEnumerable<T> and is located in the System.Linq namespace: foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m == MovieType.Normal)) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m == MovieType.Transfer)) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } .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; } The above code will still do two things, calculate the total price, and display the price of the movie. I will not take care of it at the moment, instead I will focus on the enum and try to remove them. One way to remove enum is by using the Replace Conditional with Polymorphism. So I will create two classes, one base class called Movie, and one called MovieTransfer. The Movie class will have a property called Price, the Movie will now hold the price:   public class Movie { public virtual int Price { get { return 2; } } } public class MovieTransfer : Movie { public override int Price { get { return 3; } } } .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; } The following code has no enum and will use the new Movie classes instead: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is Movie)) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += movie.Price; Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is MovieTransfer)) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += movie.Price; Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } } private static IEnumerable<Movie> GetMovies() { return new List<Movie>() { new Movie(), new MovieTransfer(), new Movie() }; } } .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; }   If you take a look at the foreach now, you can see it still actually do two things, calculate the price and display the price. We can do some more refactoring here by using the Sum extension method to calculate the total price of the movies:   static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is Movie)) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is MovieTransfer)) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } .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 when the Movie object will hold the price, there is no need to use two separate foreach to display the price of the movies in the list, so we can use only one instead: foreach (var movie in movies) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); .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; } If we want to increase the Maintainability index we can use the Extract Method to move the Sum of the prices into two separate methods. The name of the method will explain what we are doing: static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); foreach (var movie in movies) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovie(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); } .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 to the last thing, I love the ForEach method of the List<T>, but the IEnumerable<T> doesn’t have it, so I created my own ForEach extension, here is the code of the ForEach extension method: public static class LoopExtensions { public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) { Contract.Requires(values != null); Contract.Requires(action != null); foreach (var v in values) action(v); } } .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; } I will now replace the foreach by using this ForEach method: static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); movies.ForEach(m => Console.WriteLine(m.Price)); } .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; } The ForEach on the movies will now display the price of the movie, but maybe we want to display the name of the movie etc, so we can use Extract Method by moving the lamdba expression into a method instead, and let the method explains what we are displaying: movies.ForEach(DisplayMovieInfo); private static void DisplayMovieInfo(Movie movie) { Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } .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 the refactoring is done! Here is the complete code:   class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); movies.ForEach(DisplayMovieInfo); } private static void DisplayMovieInfo(Movie movie) { Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovie(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static IEnumerable<Movie> GetMovies() { return new List<Movie>() { new Movie(), new MovieTransfer(), new Movie() }; } } public class Movie { public virtual int Price { get { return 2; } } } public class MovieTransfer : Movie { public override int Price { get { return 3; } } } pulbic static class LoopExtensions { public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) { Contract.Requires(values != null); Contract.Requires(action != null); foreach (var v in values) action(v); } } .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; } I think the new code is much cleaner than the first one, and I love the ForEach extension on the IEnumerable<T>, I can use it for different kind of things, for example: movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .ForEach(DoSomething); .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; } By using the Where and ForEach extension method, some if statements can be removed and will make the code much cleaner. But the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What would you have done different, what do you think will make the first example in the blog post look much cleaner than my results, comments are welcome! If you want to know when I will publish a new blog post, you can follow me on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fredrikn

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• Code Contracts: Unit testing contracted code

  - by DigiMortal

  Code contracts and unit tests are not replacements for each other. They both have different purpose and different nature. It does not matter if you are using code contracts or not – you still have to write tests for your code. In this posting I will show you how to unit test code with contracts. In my previous posting about code contracts I showed how to avoid ContractExceptions that are defined in code contracts runtime and that are not accessible for us in design time. This was one step further to make my randomizer testable. In this posting I will complete the mission. Problems with current code This is my current code. public class Randomizer {     public static int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max)     {         Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>(             min < max,             "Min must be less than max"         );           Contract.Ensures(             Contract.Result<int>() >= min &&             Contract.Result<int>() <= max,             "Return value is out of range"         );           var rnd = new Random();         return rnd.Next(min, max);     } } As you can see this code has some problems: randomizer class is static and cannot be instantiated. We cannot move this class between components if we need to, GetRandomFromRangeContracted() is not fully testable because we cannot currently affect random number generator output and therefore we cannot test post-contract. Now let’s solve these problems. Making randomizer testable As a first thing I made Randomizer to be class that must be instantiated. This is simple thing to do. Now let’s solve the problem with Random class. To make Randomizer testable I define IRandomGenerator interface and RandomGenerator class. The public constructor of Randomizer accepts IRandomGenerator as argument. public interface IRandomGenerator {     int Next(int min, int max); }   public class RandomGenerator : IRandomGenerator {     private Random _random = new Random();       public int Next(int min, int max)     {         return _random.Next(min, max);     } } And here is our Randomizer after total make-over. public class Randomizer {     private IRandomGenerator _generator;       private Randomizer()     {         _generator = new RandomGenerator();     }       public Randomizer(IRandomGenerator generator)     {         _generator = generator;     }       public int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max)     {         Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>(             min < max,             "Min must be less than max"         );           Contract.Ensures(             Contract.Result<int>() >= min &&             Contract.Result<int>() <= max,             "Return value is out of range"         );           return _generator.Next(min, max);     } } It seems to be inconvenient to instantiate Randomizer now but you can always use DI/IoC containers and break compiled dependencies between the components of your system. Writing tests for randomizer IRandomGenerator solved problem with testing post-condition. Now it is time to write tests for Randomizer class. Writing tests for contracted code is not easy. The main problem is still ContractException that we are not able to access. Still it is the main exception we get as soon as contracts fail. Although pre-conditions are able to throw exceptions with type we want we cannot do much when post-conditions will fail. We have to use Contract.ContractFailed event and this event is called for every contract failure. This way we find ourselves in situation where supporting well input interface makes it impossible to support output interface well and vice versa. ContractFailed is nasty hack and it works pretty weird way. Although documentation sais that ContractFailed is good choice for testing contracts it is still pretty painful. As a last chance I got tests working almost normally when I wrapped them up. Can you remember similar solution from the times of Visual Studio 2008 unit tests? Cannot understand how Microsoft was able to mess up testing again. [TestClass] public class RandomizerTest {     private Mock<IRandomGenerator> _randomMock;     private Randomizer _randomizer;     private string _lastContractError;       public TestContext TestContext { get; set; }       public RandomizerTest()     {         Contract.ContractFailed += (sender, e) =>         {             e.SetHandled();             e.SetUnwind();               throw new Exception(e.FailureKind + ": " + e.Message);         };     }       [TestInitialize()]     public void RandomizerTestInitialize()     {         _randomMock = new Mock<IRandomGenerator>();         _randomizer = new Randomizer(_randomMock.Object);         _lastContractError = string.Empty;     }       #region InputInterfaceTests     [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_min_is_not_less_than_max()     {         try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(100, 10);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }     }       [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_min_is_equal_to_max()     {         try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(10, 10);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }     }       [TestMethod]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_work_when_min_is_less_than_max()     {         int minValue = 10;         int maxValue = 100;         int returnValue = 50;           _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(minValue, maxValue))             .Returns(returnValue)             .Verifiable();           var result = _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue);           _randomMock.Verify();         Assert.AreEqual<int>(returnValue, result);     }     #endregion       #region OutputInterfaceTests     [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_return_value_is_less_than_min()     {         int minValue = 10;         int maxValue = 100;         int returnValue = 7;           _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(10, 100))             .Returns(returnValue)             .Verifiable();           try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }           _randomMock.Verify();     }       [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_return_value_is_more_than_max()     {         int minValue = 10;         int maxValue = 100;         int returnValue = 102;           _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(10, 100))             .Returns(returnValue)             .Verifiable();           try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }           _randomMock.Verify();     }     #endregion        } Although these tests are pretty awful and contain hacks we are at least able now to make sure that our code works as expected. Here is the test list after running these tests. Conclusion Code contracts are very new stuff in Visual Studio world and as young technology it has some problems – like all other new bits and bytes in the world. As you saw then making our contracted code testable is easy only to the point when pre-conditions are considered. When we start dealing with post-conditions we will end up with hacked tests. I hope that future versions of code contracts will solve error handling issues the way that testing of contracted code will be easier than it is right now.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 24, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 24, 2013Popular ReleasesX-tee.NET: X-tee.NET 1.0.4: Few code generation bug fixes.VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 32 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) This release has been tested with Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013, using TortoiseSVN 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8. It should also still work with Visual Studio 2005, but I couldn't find anyone to test it in VS2005. Build 32 (beta) changelogNew: Added Visual Studio 2013 support New: Added Visual Studio 2012 support New: Added SVN 1.8 support New: Added 'Ch...ABCat: ABCat v.2.0.1a: ?????????? ???????? ? ?????????? ?????? ???? ??? Win7. ????????? ?????? ????????? ?? ???????. ????? ?????, ???? ????? ???????? ????????? ?????????? ????????? "?? ??????? ????? ???????????? ?????????? ??????...", ?? ?????????? ??????? ? ?????????? ?????? Microsoft SQL Ce ?? ????????? ??????: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17876. ???????? ?????? x64 ??? x86 ? ??????????? ?? ?????? ???????????? ???????. ??? ??????? ????????? ?? ?????????? ?????? Entity Framework, ? ???? ...NB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module: NB_Store v2.3.8 Rel3: vv2.3.8 Rel3 updates the version number in the ManagerMenuDefault.xml. Simply update the version setting in the Back Office to 02.03.08 if you have already installed Rel2. v2.3.8 Is now DNN6 and DNN7 compatible NOTE: NB_Store v2.3.8 is NOT compatible with DNN5. SOURCE CODE : https://github.com/leedavi/NB_Store (Source code has been moved to GitHub, due to issues with codeplex SVN and the inability to move easily to GIT on codeplex)patterns & practices: Data Access Guidance: Data Access Guidance 2013: This is the 2013 release of Data Access Guidance. The documentation for this RI is also available on MSDN: Data Access for Highly-Scalable Solutions: Using SQL, NoSQL, and Polyglot Persistence: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn271399.aspxMedia Companion: Media Companion MC3.584b: IMDB changes fixed. Fixed* mc_com.exe - Fixed to using new profile entries. * Movie - fixed rename movie and folder if use foldername selected. * Movie - Alt Edit Movie, trailer url check if changed and confirm valid. * Movie - Fixed IMDB poster scraping * Movie - Fixed outline and Plot scraping, including removal of Hyperlink's. * Movie Poster refactoring, attempts to catch gdi+ errors Revision HistoryTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v7.2 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: Added "Check for Update" button Hopefully fixed Windows XP issue You can now backspace in Item stack fieldsDirectXTex texture processing library: October 2013: October 21, 2013 Updated for Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 SDK RTM PremultiplyAlpha updated with new 'flags' parameter and to use sRGB correct blending Fixed colorspace conversion issue with DirectCompute compressor when compressing for BC7 SRGBSimple Injector: Simple Injector v2.3.6: This patch releases fixes one bug concerning resolving open generic types that contain nested generic type arguments. Nested generic types were handled incorrectly in certain cases. This affects RegisterOpenGeneric and RegisterDecorator. (work item 20332)Virtual Wifi Hotspot for Windows 7 & 8: Virtual Router Plus 2.6.0: Virtual Router Plus 2.6.0Fast YouTube Downloader: Fast YouTube Downloader 2.3.0: Fast YouTube DownloaderMagick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.7.101: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.7.1. Breaking changes: - Renamed Matrix classes: MatrixColor = ColorMatrix and MatrixConvolve = ConvolveMatrix. - Renamed Depth method with Channels parameter to BitDepth and changed the other method into a property.VidCoder: 1.5.9 Beta: Added Rip DVD and Rip Blu-ray AutoPlay actions for Windows: now you can have VidCoder start up and scan a disc when you insert it. Go to Start -> AutoPlay to set it up. Added error message for Windows XP users rather than letting it crash. Removed "quality" preset from list for QSV as it currently doesn't offer much improvement. Changed installer to ignore version number when copying files over. Should reduce the chances of a bug from me forgetting to increment a version number. Fixed ...MSBuild Extension Pack: October 2013: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack October 2013 release provides a collection of over 480 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GUI...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.49: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageTeam.org links NEW: Added Support for "ImgNext.com" links NEW: Added Support for "HostUrImage.com" links NEW: Added Support for "3XVintage.com" linksmyCollections: Version 2.8.7.0: New in this version : Added Public Rating Added Collection Number Added Order by Collection Number Improved XBMC integrations Play on music item will now launch default player. Settings are now saved in database. Tooltip now display sort information. Fix Issue with Stars on card view. Fix Bug with PDF Export. Fix Bug with technical information's. Fix HotMovies Provider. Improved Performance on Save. Bug FixingMoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.3.1: Release 1.11.3.1 ================ = New Features = ================ Added markers for Copper Cache, Silver Cache and the Enchanted Sword. ============= = Bug Fixes = ============= Use Official Colors now no longer tries to change the Draw Wires option instead. World reading was breaking for people with a stock 1.2 Terraria version. Changed world name reading so it does not crash the program if you load MoreTerra while Terraria is saving the world. =================== = Feature Removal = =...patterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: Cloud Design Patterns: 1st drop of Cloud Design Patterns project. It contains 14 patterns with 6 related guidance.Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 and v1.3 beta 2 Support for Windows 8.1 RTM and VS2013 RTM Xaml: New property: AutoLoadPluginTypes to help control which stock plugins are loaded by default (requires AutoLoadPlugins = true). Support for SystemMediaTransportControls on Windows 8.1 JS: Support for visual markers in the timeline. JS: Support for markers collection and markerreached event. JS: New ChaptersPlugin to automatically populate timeline with chapter tracks. JS: Audio an...Json.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 8: Fix - Fixed not writing string quotes when QuoteName is falseNew ProjectsActive shape models for .net: Library to find Facial critical points (contour, nose, eyes, mouth) based on active shape models(wrapper for code.google.com/p/asmlibrary). Not support 64bit.Benson's Project: The Task1 project in ASP.NET calculates the sum of two numbers entered in two textboxes and give the output by label when the button "calculate sum" is clicked.cassan: asp.net mvc 4.5 build boostrap3 websiteCoreRG: This project is a Free GNU, its to fast development.Fractals Explorer: A Windows Phone 7 application for exploring a simple collection of fractals.GingerFight: Some test gameGirapong: Girapong is a game for Windows Phone that consist of an original approach to handle the classical sort of games like Pong, using the accelerometer of the phone.Headlight: -KeyWielder: Simple token generatorMDIContainer: MDIContainer extends WPF to support MDI. It displays your user control as window in a container.MocuGame Library: The MocuGame Library is a set of JavaScript classes made for handling every part of making an HTML5-based game, from audio, to graphics, to input.multi: Make creating multi machine environments simple. MvvmCrystalTool: Library for easy work with MVVM pattern in WP8PeerBlock For Android: PeerBlock For Android lets you control who your phone 'talks to' on the Internet. By selecting appropriate lists of 'known bad' computers, you can block...Pescar2013-Shop-Kristo-Giselle-Grecia: Tp para presentarlo el 10/10 PHP to Dynamics CRM 2011 Online: Connect you PHP webSite to Dynamics CRM 2011 Online throw WebServices. You can: - Create Entities - Update Entities - Delete Entities - Use Fetch QueriesProductive Production: Core functionality for a system to manage the entry of production in a manufacturing environment. The intent will be to provide some base functionality and intProject Of DreamTeam: Space Invaders windows phone / windowsTVShows-EF5: Proyecto básico de integración con diferentes tecnologías.Validation Engine: Validation Engine for WinForms. Engine provides powerful, flexible and easy to use rule based validation for your application. DevExpress and Net.Spring ready.WCF Events: Vis Stud 2010 C# WCF events Demo Solution??? ?, ??? ?.: ??? ?, ??? ?.

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• C#/.NET Fundamentals: Choosing the Right Collection Class

  - by James Michael Hare

  The .NET Base Class Library (BCL) has a wide array of collection classes at your disposal which make it easy to manage collections of objects. While it's great to have so many classes available, it can be daunting to choose the right collection to use for any given situation. As hard as it may be, choosing the right collection can be absolutely key to the performance and maintainability of your application! This post will look at breaking down any confusion between each collection and the situations in which they excel. We will be spending most of our time looking at the System.Collections.Generic namespace, which is the recommended set of collections. The Generic Collections: System.Collections.Generic namespace The generic collections were introduced in .NET 2.0 in the System.Collections.Generic namespace. This is the main body of collections you should tend to focus on first, as they will tend to suit 99% of your needs right up front. It is important to note that the generic collections are unsynchronized. This decision was made for performance reasons because depending on how you are using the collections its completely possible that synchronization may not be required or may be needed on a higher level than simple method-level synchronization. Furthermore, concurrent read access (all writes done at beginning and never again) is always safe, but for concurrent mixed access you should either synchronize the collection or use one of the concurrent collections. So let's look at each of the collections in turn and its various pros and cons, at the end we'll summarize with a table to help make it easier to compare and contrast the different collections. The Associative Collection Classes Associative collections store a value in the collection by providing a key that is used to add/remove/lookup the item. Hence, the container associates the value with the key. These collections are most useful when you need to lookup/manipulate a collection using a key value. For example, if you wanted to look up an order in a collection of orders by an order id, you might have an associative collection where they key is the order id and the value is the order. The Dictionary<TKey,TVale> is probably the most used associative container class. The Dictionary<TKey,TValue> is the fastest class for associative lookups/inserts/deletes because it uses a hash table under the covers. Because the keys are hashed, the key type should correctly implement GetHashCode() and Equals() appropriately or you should provide an external IEqualityComparer to the dictionary on construction. The insert/delete/lookup time of items in the dictionary is amortized constant time - O(1) - which means no matter how big the dictionary gets, the time it takes to find something remains relatively constant. This is highly desirable for high-speed lookups. The only downside is that the dictionary, by nature of using a hash table, is unordered, so you cannot easily traverse the items in a Dictionary in order. The SortedDictionary<TKey,TValue> is similar to the Dictionary<TKey,TValue> in usage but very different in implementation. The SortedDictionary<TKey,TValye> uses a binary tree under the covers to maintain the items in order by the key. As a consequence of sorting, the type used for the key must correctly implement IComparable<TKey> so that the keys can be correctly sorted. The sorted dictionary trades a little bit of lookup time for the ability to maintain the items in order, thus insert/delete/lookup times in a sorted dictionary are logarithmic - O(log n). Generally speaking, with logarithmic time, you can double the size of the collection and it only has to perform one extra comparison to find the item. Use the SortedDictionary<TKey,TValue> when you want fast lookups but also want to be able to maintain the collection in order by the key. The SortedList<TKey,TValue> is the other ordered associative container class in the generic containers. Once again SortedList<TKey,TValue>, like SortedDictionary<TKey,TValue>, uses a key to sort key-value pairs. Unlike SortedDictionary, however, items in a SortedList are stored as an ordered array of items. This means that insertions and deletions are linear - O(n) - because deleting or adding an item may involve shifting all items up or down in the list. Lookup time, however is O(log n) because the SortedList can use a binary search to find any item in the list by its key. So why would you ever want to do this? Well, the answer is that if you are going to load the SortedList up-front, the insertions will be slower, but because array indexing is faster than following object links, lookups are marginally faster than a SortedDictionary. Once again I'd use this in situations where you want fast lookups and want to maintain the collection in order by the key, and where insertions and deletions are rare. The Non-Associative Containers The other container classes are non-associative. They don't use keys to manipulate the collection but rely on the object itself being stored or some other means (such as index) to manipulate the collection. The List<T> is a basic contiguous storage container. Some people may call this a vector or dynamic array. Essentially it is an array of items that grow once its current capacity is exceeded. Because the items are stored contiguously as an array, you can access items in the List<T> by index very quickly. However inserting and removing in the beginning or middle of the List<T> are very costly because you must shift all the items up or down as you delete or insert respectively. However, adding and removing at the end of a List<T> is an amortized constant operation - O(1). Typically List<T> is the standard go-to collection when you don't have any other constraints, and typically we favor a List<T> even over arrays unless we are sure the size will remain absolutely fixed. The LinkedList<T> is a basic implementation of a doubly-linked list. This means that you can add or remove items in the middle of a linked list very quickly (because there's no items to move up or down in contiguous memory), but you also lose the ability to index items by position quickly. Most of the time we tend to favor List<T> over LinkedList<T> unless you are doing a lot of adding and removing from the collection, in which case a LinkedList<T> may make more sense. The HashSet<T> is an unordered collection of unique items. This means that the collection cannot have duplicates and no order is maintained. Logically, this is very similar to having a Dictionary<TKey,TValue> where the TKey and TValue both refer to the same object. This collection is very useful for maintaining a collection of items you wish to check membership against. For example, if you receive an order for a given vendor code, you may want to check to make sure the vendor code belongs to the set of vendor codes you handle. In these cases a HashSet<T> is useful for super-quick lookups where order is not important. Once again, like in Dictionary, the type T should have a valid implementation of GetHashCode() and Equals(), or you should provide an appropriate IEqualityComparer<T> to the HashSet<T> on construction. The SortedSet<T> is to HashSet<T> what the SortedDictionary<TKey,TValue> is to Dictionary<TKey,TValue>. That is, the SortedSet<T> is a binary tree where the key and value are the same object. This once again means that adding/removing/lookups are logarithmic - O(log n) - but you gain the ability to iterate over the items in order. For this collection to be effective, type T must implement IComparable<T> or you need to supply an external IComparer<T>. Finally, the Stack<T> and Queue<T> are two very specific collections that allow you to handle a sequential collection of objects in very specific ways. The Stack<T> is a last-in-first-out (LIFO) container where items are added and removed from the top of the stack. Typically this is useful in situations where you want to stack actions and then be able to undo those actions in reverse order as needed. The Queue<T> on the other hand is a first-in-first-out container which adds items at the end of the queue and removes items from the front. This is useful for situations where you need to process items in the order in which they came, such as a print spooler or waiting lines. So that's the basic collections. Let's summarize what we've learned in a quick reference table.  Collection Ordered? Contiguous Storage? Direct Access? Lookup Efficiency Manipulate Efficiency Notes Dictionary No Yes Via Key Key: O(1) O(1) Best for high performance lookups. SortedDictionary Yes No Via Key Key: O(log n) O(log n) Compromise of Dictionary speed and ordering, uses binary search tree. SortedList Yes Yes Via Key Key: O(log n) O(n) Very similar to SortedDictionary, except tree is implemented in an array, so has faster lookup on preloaded data, but slower loads. List No Yes Via Index Index: O(1) Value: O(n) O(n) Best for smaller lists where direct access required and no ordering. LinkedList No No No Value: O(n) O(1) Best for lists where inserting/deleting in middle is common and no direct access required. HashSet No Yes Via Key Key: O(1) O(1) Unique unordered collection, like a Dictionary except key and value are same object. SortedSet Yes No Via Key Key: O(log n) O(log n) Unique ordered collection, like SortedDictionary except key and value are same object. Stack No Yes Only Top Top: O(1) O(1)* Essentially same as List<T> except only process as LIFO Queue No Yes Only Front Front: O(1) O(1) Essentially same as List<T> except only process as FIFO   The Original Collections: System.Collections namespace The original collection classes are largely considered deprecated by developers and by Microsoft itself. In fact they indicate that for the most part you should always favor the generic or concurrent collections, and only use the original collections when you are dealing with legacy .NET code. Because these collections are out of vogue, let's just briefly mention the original collection and their generic equivalents: ArrayList A dynamic, contiguous collection of objects. Favor the generic collection List<T> instead. Hashtable Associative, unordered collection of key-value pairs of objects. Favor the generic collection Dictionary<TKey,TValue> instead. Queue First-in-first-out (FIFO) collection of objects. Favor the generic collection Queue<T> instead. SortedList Associative, ordered collection of key-value pairs of objects. Favor the generic collection SortedList<T> instead. Stack Last-in-first-out (LIFO) collection of objects. Favor the generic collection Stack<T> instead. In general, the older collections are non-type-safe and in some cases less performant than their generic counterparts. Once again, the only reason you should fall back on these older collections is for backward compatibility with legacy code and libraries only. The Concurrent Collections: System.Collections.Concurrent namespace The concurrent collections are new as of .NET 4.0 and are included in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace. These collections are optimized for use in situations where multi-threaded read and write access of a collection is desired. The concurrent queue, stack, and dictionary work much as you'd expect. The bag and blocking collection are more unique. Below is the summary of each with a link to a blog post I did on each of them. ConcurrentQueue Thread-safe version of a queue (FIFO). For more information see: C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue ConcurrentStack Thread-safe version of a stack (LIFO). For more information see: C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue ConcurrentBag Thread-safe unordered collection of objects. Optimized for situations where a thread may be bother reader and writer. For more information see: C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentBag and BlockingCollection ConcurrentDictionary Thread-safe version of a dictionary. Optimized for multiple readers (allows multiple readers under same lock). For more information see C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentDictionary BlockingCollection Wrapper collection that implement producers & consumers paradigm. Readers can block until items are available to read. Writers can block until space is available to write (if bounded). For more information see C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentBag and BlockingCollection Summary The .NET BCL has lots of collections built in to help you store and manipulate collections of data. Understanding how these collections work and knowing in which situations each container is best is one of the key skills necessary to build more performant code. Choosing the wrong collection for the job can make your code much slower or even harder to maintain if you choose one that doesn’t perform as well or otherwise doesn’t exactly fit the situation. Remember to avoid the original collections and stick with the generic collections.  If you need concurrent access, you can use the generic collections if the data is read-only, or consider the concurrent collections for mixed-access if you are running on .NET 4.0 or higher.   Tweet Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Collecitons,Generic,Concurrent,Dictionary,List,Stack,Queue,SortedList,SortedDictionary,HashSet,SortedSet

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• Create excel files with GemBox.Spreadsheet .NET component

  - by hajan

  Generating excel files from .NET code is not always a very easy task, especially if you need to make some formatting or you want to do something very specific that requires extra coding. I’ve recently tried the GemBox Spreadsheet and I would like to share my experience with you. First of all, you can install GemBox Spreadsheet library from VS.NET 2010 Extension manager by searching in the gallery: Go in the Online Gallery tab (as in the picture bellow) and write GemBox in the Search box on top-right of the Extension Manager, so you will get the following result: Click Download on GemBox.Spreadsheet and you will be directed to product website. Click on the marked link then you will get to the following page where you have the component download link Once you download it, install the MSI file. Open the installation folder and find the Bin folder. There you have GemBox.Spreadsheet.dll in three folders each for different .NET Framework version. Now, lets move to Visual Studio.NET. 1. Create sample ASP.NET Web Application and give it a name. 2. Reference The GemBox.Spreadsheet.dll file in your project So you don’t need to search for the dll file in your disk but you can simply find it in the .NET tab in ‘Add Reference’ window and you have all three versions. I chose the version for 4.0.30319 runtime. Next, I will retrieve data from my Pubs database. I’m using Entity Framework. Here is the code (read the comments in it):             //get data from pubs database, tables: authors, titleauthor, titles             pubsEntities context = new pubsEntities();             var authorTitles = (from a in context.authors                                join tl in context.titleauthor on a.au_id equals tl.au_id                                join t in context.titles on tl.title_id equals t.title_id                                select new AuthorTitles                                {                                     Name = a.au_fname,                                     Surname = a.au_lname,                                     Title = t.title,                                     Price = t.price,                                     PubDate = t.pubdate                                }).ToList();             //using GemBox library now             ExcelFile myExcelFile = new ExcelFile();             ExcelWorksheet excWsheet = myExcelFile.Worksheets.Add("Hajan's worksheet");             excWsheet.Cells[0, 0].Value = "Pubs database Authors and Titles";             excWsheet.Cells[0, 0].Style.Borders.SetBorders(MultipleBorders.Bottom,System.Drawing.Color.Red,LineStyle.Thin);             excWsheet.Cells[0, 1].Style.Borders.SetBorders(MultipleBorders.Bottom, System.Drawing.Color.Red, LineStyle.Thin);                                      int numberOfColumns = 5; //the number of properties in the authorTitles we have             //for each column             for (int c = 0; c < numberOfColumns; c++)             {                 excWsheet.Columns[c].Width = 25 * 256; //set the width to each column                             }             //header row cells             excWsheet.Rows[2].Cells[0].Value = "Name";             excWsheet.Rows[2].Cells[1].Value = "Surname";             excWsheet.Rows[2].Cells[2].Value = "Title";             excWsheet.Rows[2].Cells[3].Value = "Price";             excWsheet.Rows[2].Cells[4].Value = "PubDate";             //bind authorTitles in the excel worksheet             int currentRow = 3;             foreach (AuthorTitles at in authorTitles)             {                 excWsheet.Rows[currentRow].Cells[0].Value = at.Name;                 excWsheet.Rows[currentRow].Cells[1].Value = at.Surname;                 excWsheet.Rows[currentRow].Cells[2].Value = at.Title;                 excWsheet.Rows[currentRow].Cells[3].Value = at.Price;                 excWsheet.Rows[currentRow].Cells[4].Value = at.PubDate;                 currentRow++;             }             //stylizing my excel file look             CellStyle style = new CellStyle(myExcelFile);             style.HorizontalAlignment = HorizontalAlignmentStyle.Left;             style.VerticalAlignment = VerticalAlignmentStyle.Center;             style.Font.Color = System.Drawing.Color.DarkRed;             style.WrapText = true;             style.Borders.SetBorders(MultipleBorders.Top                 | MultipleBorders.Left | MultipleBorders.Right                 | MultipleBorders.Bottom, System.Drawing.Color.Black,                 LineStyle.Thin);                                 //pay attention on this, we set created style on the given (firstRow, firstColumn, lastRow, lastColumn)             //in my example:             //firstRow = 2; firstColumn = 0; lastRow = authorTitles.Count+1; lastColumn = numberOfColumns-1; variable             excWsheet.Cells.GetSubrangeAbsolute(3, 0, authorTitles.Count+2, numberOfColumns-1).Style = style;             //save my excel file             myExcelFile.SaveXls(Server.MapPath(".") + @"/myFile.xls"); The AuthorTitles class: public class AuthorTitles {     public string Name { get; set; }     public string Surname { get; set; }     public string Title { get; set; }     public decimal? Price { get; set; }     public DateTime PubDate { get; set; } } The excel file will be generated in the root of your ASP.NET Web Application. The result is: There is a lot more you can do with this library. A set of good examples you have in the GemBox.Spreadsheet Samples Explorer application which comes together with the installation and you can find it by default in Start –> All Programs –> GemBox Software –> GemBox.Spreadsheet Samples Explorer. Hope this was useful for you. Best Regards, Hajan

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• Synchronize Data between a Silverlight ListBox and a User Control

  - by psheriff

  One of the great things about XAML is the powerful data-binding capabilities. If you load up a list box with a collection of objects, you can display detail data about each object without writing any C# or VB.NET code. Take a look at Figure 1 that shows a collection of Product objects in a list box. When you click on a list box you bind the current Product object selected in the list box to a set of controls in a user control with just a very simple Binding statement in XAML.  Figure 1: Synchronizing a ListBox to a User Control is easy with Data Binding Product and Products Classes To illustrate this data binding feature I am going to just create some local data instead of using a WCF service. The code below shows a Product class that has three properties, namely, ProductId, ProductName and Price. This class also has a constructor that takes 3 parameters and allows us to set the 3 properties in an instance of our Product class. C#public class Product{  public Product(int productId, string productName, decimal price)  {    ProductId = productId;    ProductName = productName;    Price = price;  }   public int ProductId { get; set; }  public string ProductName { get; set; }  public decimal Price { get; set; }} VBPublic Class Product  Public Sub New(ByVal _productId As Integer, _                 ByVal _productName As String, _                 ByVal _price As Decimal)    ProductId = _productId    ProductName = _productName    Price = _price  End Sub   Private mProductId As Integer  Private mProductName As String  Private mPrice As Decimal   Public Property ProductId() As Integer    Get      Return mProductId    End Get    Set(ByVal value As Integer)      mProductId = value    End Set  End Property   Public Property ProductName() As String    Get      Return mProductName    End Get    Set(ByVal value As String)      mProductName = value    End Set  End Property   Public Property Price() As Decimal    Get      Return mPrice    End Get    Set(ByVal value As Decimal)      mPrice = value    End Set  End PropertyEnd Class To fill up a list box you need a collection class of Product objects. The code below creates a generic collection class of Product objects. In the constructor of the Products class I have hard-coded five product objects and added them to the collection. In a real-world application you would get your data through a call to service to fill the list box, but for simplicity and just to illustrate the data binding, I am going to just hard code the data. C#public class Products : List<Product>{  public Products()  {    this.Add(new Product(1, "Microsoft VS.NET 2008", 1000));    this.Add(new Product(2, "Microsoft VS.NET 2010", 1000));    this.Add(new Product(3, "Microsoft Silverlight 4", 1000));    this.Add(new Product(4, "Fundamentals of N-Tier eBook", 20));    this.Add(new Product(5, "ASP.NET Security eBook", 20));  }} VBPublic Class Products  Inherits List(Of Product)   Public Sub New()    Me.Add(New Product(1, "Microsoft VS.NET 2008", 1000))    Me.Add(New Product(2, "Microsoft VS.NET 2010", 1000))    Me.Add(New Product(3, "Microsoft Silverlight 4", 1000))    Me.Add(New Product(4, "Fundamentals of N-Tier eBook", 20))    Me.Add(New Product(5, "ASP.NET Security eBook", 20))  End SubEnd Class The Product Detail User Control Below is a user control (named ucProduct) that is used to display the product detail information seen in the bottom portion of Figure 1. This is very basic XAML that just creates a text block and a text box control for each of the three properties in the Product class. Notice the {Binding Path=[PropertyName]} on each of the text box controls. This means that if the DataContext property of this user control is set to an instance of a Product class, then the data in the properties of that Product object will be displayed in each of the text boxes. <UserControl x:Class="SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS.ucProduct"  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"  HorizontalAlignment="Left"  VerticalAlignment="Top">  <Grid Margin="4">    <Grid.RowDefinitions>      <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />      <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />      <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />    </Grid.RowDefinitions>    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>      <ColumnDefinition MinWidth="120" />      <ColumnDefinition />    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>    <TextBlock Grid.Row="0"               Grid.Column="0"               Text="Product Id" />    <TextBox Grid.Row="0"             Grid.Column="1"             Text="{Binding Path=ProductId}" />    <TextBlock Grid.Row="1"               Grid.Column="0"               Text="Product Name" />    <TextBox Grid.Row="1"             Grid.Column="1"             Text="{Binding Path=ProductName}" />    <TextBlock Grid.Row="2"               Grid.Column="0"               Text="Price" />    <TextBox Grid.Row="2"             Grid.Column="1"             Text="{Binding Path=Price}" />  </Grid></UserControl> Synchronize ListBox with User Control You are now ready to fill the list box with the collection class of Product objects and then bind the SelectedItem of the list box to the Product detail user control. The XAML below is the complete code for Figure 1. <UserControl x:Class="SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS.MainPage"  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"  xmlns:src="clr-namespace:SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS"  VerticalAlignment="Top"  HorizontalAlignment="Left">  <UserControl.Resources>    <src:Products x:Key="productCollection" />  </UserControl.Resources>  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"        Margin="4"        Background="White">    <Grid.RowDefinitions>      <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />      <RowDefinition Height="*" />    </Grid.RowDefinitions>    <ListBox x:Name="lstData"             Grid.Row="0"             BorderBrush="Black"             BorderThickness="1"             ItemsSource="{Binding                   Source={StaticResource productCollection}}"             DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" />    <src:ucProduct x:Name="prodDetail"                   Grid.Row="1"                   DataContext="{Binding ElementName=lstData,                                          Path=SelectedItem}" />  </Grid></UserControl> The first step to making this happen is to reference the Silverlight project (SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS) where the Product and Products classes are located. I added this namespace and assigned it a namespace prefix of “src” as shown in the line below: xmlns:src="clr-namespace:SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS" Next, to use the data from an instance of the Products collection, you create a UserControl.Resources section in the XAML and add a tag that creates an instance of the Products class and assigns it a key of “productCollection”.   <UserControl.Resources>    <src:Products x:Key="productCollection" />  </UserControl.Resources> Next, you bind the list box to this productCollection object using the ItemsSource property. You bind the ItemsSource of the list box to the static resource named productCollection. You can then set the DisplayMemberPath attribute of the list box to any property of the Product class that you want. In the XAML below I used the ProductName property. <ListBox x:Name="lstData"         ItemsSource="{Binding             Source={StaticResource productCollection}}"         DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" /> You now need to create an instance of the ucProduct user contol below the list box. You do this by once again referencing the “src” namespace and typing in the name of the user control. You then set the DataContext property on this user control to a binding. The binding uses the ElementName attribute to bind to the list box name, in this case “lstData”. The Path of the data is SelectedItem. These two attributes together tell Silverlight to bind the DataContext to the selected item of the list box. That selected item is a Product object. So, once this is bound, the bindings on each text box in the user control are updated and display the current product information. <src:ucProduct x:Name="prodDetail"               DataContext="{Binding ElementName=lstData,                                      Path=SelectedItem}" /> Summary Once you understand the basics of data binding in XAML, you eliminate a lot code that is otherwise needed to move data into controls and out of controls back into an object. Connecting two controls together is easy by just binding using the ElementName and Path properties of the Binding markup extension. Another good tip out of this blog is use user controls and set the DataContext of the user control to have all of the data on the user control update through the bindings. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code (in both VB and C#) at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "SL – Synchronize List Box Data with User Control" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free eBook on "Fundamentals of N-Tier".

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin &ndash; #3 &ndash; Make Evolvability inevitable

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/04/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin-ndash-3-ndash-make-evolvability-inevitable.aspxThe easier something to measure the more likely it will be produced. Deviations between what is and what should be can be readily detected. That´s what automated acceptance tests are for. That´s what sprint reviews in Scrum are for. It´s no small wonder our software looks like it looks. It has all the traits whose conformance with requirements can easily be measured. And it´s lacking traits which cannot easily be measured. Evolvability (or Changeability) is such a trait. If an operation is correct, if an operation if fast enough, that can be checked very easily. But whether Evolvability is high or low, that cannot be checked by taking a measure or two. Evolvability might correlate with certain traits, e.g. number of lines of code (LOC) per function or Cyclomatic Complexity or test coverage. But there is no threshold value signalling “evolvability too low”; also Evolvability is hardly tangible for the customer. Nevertheless Evolvability is of great importance - at least in the long run. You can get away without much of it for a short time. Eventually, though, it´s needed like any other requirement. Or even more. Because without Evolvability no other requirement can be implemented. Evolvability is the foundation on which all else is build. Such fundamental importance is in stark contrast with its immeasurability. To compensate this, Evolvability must be put at the very center of software development. It must become the hub around everything else revolves. Since we cannot measure Evolvability, though, we cannot start watching it more. Instead we need to establish practices to keep it high (enough) at all times. Chefs have known that for long. That´s why everybody in a restaurant kitchen is constantly seeing after cleanliness. Hygiene is important as is to have clean tools at standardized locations. Only then the health of the patrons can be guaranteed and production efficiency is constantly high. Still a kitchen´s level of cleanliness is easier to measure than software Evolvability. That´s why important practices like reviews, pair programming, or TDD are not enough, I guess. What we need to keep Evolvability in focus and high is… to continually evolve. Change must not be something to avoid but too embrace. To me that means the whole change cycle from requirement analysis to delivery needs to be gone through more often. Scrum´s sprints of 4, 2 even 1 week are too long. Kanban´s flow of user stories across is too unreliable; it takes as long as it takes. Instead we should fix the cycle time at 2 days max. I call that Spinning. No increment must take longer than from this morning until tomorrow evening to finish. Then it should be acceptance checked by the customer (or his/her representative, e.g. a Product Owner). For me there are several resasons for such a fixed and short cycle time for each increment: Clear expectations Absolute estimates (“This will take X days to complete.”) are near impossible in software development as explained previously. Too much unplanned research and engineering work lurk in every feature. And then pervasive interruptions of work by peers and management. However, the smaller the scope the better our absolute estimates become. That´s because we understand better what really are the requirements and what the solution should look like. But maybe more importantly the shorter the timespan the more we can control how we use our time. So much can happen over the course of a week and longer timespans. But if push comes to shove I can block out all distractions and interruptions for a day or possibly two. That´s why I believe we can give rough absolute estimates on 3 levels: Noon Tonight Tomorrow Think of a meeting with a Product Owner at 8:30 in the morning. If she asks you, how long it will take you to implement a user story or bug fix, you can say, “It´ll be fixed by noon.”, or you can say, “I can manage to implement it until tonight before I leave.”, or you can say, “You´ll get it by tomorrow night at latest.” Yes, I believe all else would be naive. If you´re not confident to get something done by tomorrow night (some 34h from now) you just cannot reliably commit to any timeframe. That means you should not promise anything, you should not even start working on the issue. So when estimating use these four categories: Noon, Tonight, Tomorrow, NoClue - with NoClue meaning the requirement needs to be broken down further so each aspect can be assigned to one of the first three categories. If you like absolute estimates, here you go. But don´t do deep estimates. Don´t estimate dozens of issues; don´t think ahead (“Issue A is a Tonight, then B will be a Tomorrow, after that it´s C as a Noon, finally D is a Tonight - that´s what I´ll do this week.”). Just estimate so Work-in-Progress (WIP) is 1 for everybody - plus a small number of buffer issues. To be blunt: Yes, this makes promises impossible as to what a team will deliver in terms of scope at a certain date in the future. But it will give a Product Owner a clear picture of what to pull for acceptance feedback tonight and tomorrow. Trust through reliability Our trade is lacking trust. Customers don´t trust software companies/departments much. Managers don´t trust developers much. I find that perfectly understandable in the light of what we´re trying to accomplish: delivering software in the face of uncertainty by means of material good production. Customers as well as managers still expect software development to be close to production of houses or cars. But that´s a fundamental misunderstanding. Software development ist development. It´s basically research. As software developers we´re constantly executing experiments to find out what really provides value to users. We don´t know what they need, we just have mediated hypothesises. That´s why we cannot reliably deliver on preposterous demands. So trust is out of the window in no time. If we switch to delivering in short cycles, though, we can regain trust. Because estimates - explicit or implicit - up to 32 hours at most can be satisfied. I´d say: reliability over scope. It´s more important to reliably deliver what was promised then to cover a lot of requirement area. So when in doubt promise less - but deliver without delay. Deliver on scope (Functionality and Quality); but also deliver on Evolvability, i.e. on inner quality according to accepted principles. Always. Trust will be the reward. Less complexity of communication will follow. More goodwill buffer will follow. So don´t wait for some Kanban board to show you, that flow can be improved by scheduling smaller stories. You don´t need to learn that the hard way. Just start with small batch sizes of three different sizes. Fast feedback What has been finished can be checked for acceptance. Why wait for a sprint of several weeks to end? Why let the mental model of the issue and its solution dissipate? If you get final feedback after one or two weeks, you hardly remember what you did and why you did it. Resoning becomes hard. But more importantly youo probably are not in the mood anymore to go back to something you deemed done a long time ago. It´s boring, it´s frustrating to open up that mental box again. Learning is harder the longer it takes from event to feedback. Effort can be wasted between event (finishing an issue) and feedback, because other work might go in the wrong direction based on false premises. Checking finished issues for acceptance is the most important task of a Product Owner. It´s even more important than planning new issues. Because as long as work started is not released (accepted) it´s potential waste. So before starting new work better make sure work already done has value. By putting the emphasis on acceptance rather than planning true pull is established. As long as planning and starting work is more important, it´s a push process. Accept a Noon issue on the same day before leaving. Accept a Tonight issue before leaving today or first thing tomorrow morning. Accept a Tomorrow issue tomorrow night before leaving or early the day after tomorrow. After acceptance the developer(s) can start working on the next issue. Flexibility As if reliability/trust and fast feedback for less waste weren´t enough economic incentive, there is flexibility. After each issue the Product Owner can change course. If on Monday morning feature slices A, B, C, D, E were important and A, B, C were scheduled for acceptance by Monday evening and Tuesday evening, the Product Owner can change her mind at any time. Maybe after A got accepted she asks for continuation with D. But maybe, just maybe, she has gotten a completely different idea by then. Maybe she wants work to continue on F. And after B it´s neither D nor E, but G. And after G it´s D. With Spinning every 32 hours at latest priorities can be changed. And nothing is lost. Because what got accepted is of value. It provides an incremental value to the customer/user. Or it provides internal value to the Product Owner as increased knowledge/decreased uncertainty. I find such reactivity over commitment economically very benefical. Why commit a team to some workload for several weeks? It´s unnecessary at beast, and inflexible and wasteful at worst. If we cannot promise delivery of a certain scope on a certain date - which is what customers/management usually want -, we can at least provide them with unpredecented flexibility in the face of high uncertainty. Where the path is not clear, cannot be clear, make small steps so you´re able to change your course at any time. Premature completion Customers/management are used to premeditating budgets. They want to know exactly how much to pay for a certain amount of requirements. That´s understandable. But it does not match with the nature of software development. We should know that by now. Maybe there´s somewhere in the world some team who can consistently deliver on scope, quality, and time, and budget. Great! Congratulations! I, however, haven´t seen such a team yet. Which does not mean it´s impossible, but I think it´s nothing I can recommend to strive for. Rather I´d say: Don´t try this at home. It might hurt you one way or the other. However, what we can do, is allow customers/management stop work on features at any moment. With spinning every 32 hours a feature can be declared as finished - even though it might not be completed according to initial definition. I think, progress over completion is an important offer software development can make. Why think in terms of completion beyond a promise for the next 32 hours? Isn´t it more important to constantly move forward? Step by step. We´re not running sprints, we´re not running marathons, not even ultra-marathons. We´re in the sport of running forever. That makes it futile to stare at the finishing line. The very concept of a burn-down chart is misleading (in most cases). Whoever can only think in terms of completed requirements shuts out the chance for saving money. The requirements for a features mostly are uncertain. So how does a Product Owner know in the first place, how much is needed. Maybe more than specified is needed - which gets uncovered step by step with each finished increment. Maybe less than specified is needed. After each 4–32 hour increment the Product Owner can do an experient (or invite users to an experiment) if a particular trait of the software system is already good enough. And if so, she can switch the attention to a different aspect. In the end, requirements A, B, C then could be finished just 70%, 80%, and 50%. What the heck? It´s good enough - for now. 33% money saved. Wouldn´t that be splendid? Isn´t that a stunning argument for any budget-sensitive customer? You can save money and still get what you need? Pull on practices So far, in addition to more trust, more flexibility, less money spent, Spinning led to “doing less” which also means less code which of course means higher Evolvability per se. Last but not least, though, I think Spinning´s short acceptance cycles have one more effect. They excert pull-power on all sorts of practices known for increasing Evolvability. If, for example, you believe high automated test coverage helps Evolvability by lowering the fear of inadverted damage to a code base, why isn´t 90% of the developer community practicing automated tests consistently? I think, the answer is simple: Because they can do without. Somehow they manage to do enough manual checks before their rare releases/acceptance checks to ensure good enough correctness - at least in the short term. The same goes for other practices like component orientation, continuous build/integration, code reviews etc. None of that is compelling, urgent, imperative. Something else always seems more important. So Evolvability principles and practices fall through the cracks most of the time - until a project hits a wall. Then everybody becomes desperate; but by then (re)gaining Evolvability has become as very, very difficult and tedious undertaking. Sometimes up to the point where the existence of a project/company is in danger. With Spinning that´s different. If you´re practicing Spinning you cannot avoid all those practices. With Spinning you very quickly realize you cannot deliver reliably even on your 32 hour promises. Spinning thus is pulling on developers to adopt principles and practices for Evolvability. They will start actively looking for ways to keep their delivery rate high. And if not, management will soon tell them to do that. Because first the Product Owner then management will notice an increasing difficulty to deliver value within 32 hours. There, finally there emerges a way to measure Evolvability: The more frequent developers tell the Product Owner there is no way to deliver anything worth of feedback until tomorrow night, the poorer Evolvability is. Don´t count the “WTF!”, count the “No way!” utterances. In closing For sustainable software development we need to put Evolvability first. Functionality and Quality must not rule software development but be implemented within a framework ensuring (enough) Evolvability. Since Evolvability cannot be measured easily, I think we need to put software development “under pressure”. Software needs to be changed more often, in smaller increments. Each increment being relevant to the customer/user in some way. That does not mean each increment is worthy of shipment. It´s sufficient to gain further insight from it. Increments primarily serve the reduction of uncertainty, not sales. Sales even needs to be decoupled from this incremental progress. No more promises to sales. No more delivery au point. Rather sales should look at a stream of accepted increments (or incremental releases) and scoup from that whatever they find valuable. Sales and marketing need to realize they should work on what´s there, not what might be possible in the future. But I digress… In my view a Spinning cycle - which is not easy to reach, which requires practice - is the core practice to compensate the immeasurability of Evolvability. From start to finish of each issue in 32 hours max - that´s the challenge we need to accept if we´re serious increasing Evolvability. Fortunately higher Evolvability is not the only outcome of Spinning. Customer/management will like the increased flexibility and “getting more bang for the buck”.

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• XNA Screen Manager problem with transitions

  - by NexAddo

  I'm having issues using the game statemanagement example in the game I am developing. I have no issues with my first three screens transitioning between one another. I have a main menu screen, a splash screen and a high score screen that cycle: mainMenuScreen->splashScreen->highScoreScreen->mainMenuScreen The screens change every 15 seconds. Transition times public MainMenuScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.0); currentCreditAmount = Global.CurrentCredits; } public SplashScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); } public HighScoreScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); } public GamePlayScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); } When a user inserts credits they can play the game after pressing start mainMenuScreen->splashScreen->highScoreScreen->(loops forever) || || || ===========Credits In============= || Start || \/ LoadingScreen || Start || \/ GamePlayScreen During each of these transitions, between screens, the same code is used, which exits(removes) all current active screens and respects transitions, then adds the new screen to the screen manager: foreach (GameScreen screen in ScreenManager.GetScreens()) screen.ExitScreen(); //AddScreen takes a new screen to manage and the controlling player ScreenManager.AddScreen(new NameOfScreenHere(), null); Each screen is removed from the ScreenManager with ExitScreen() and using this function, each screen transition is respected. The problem I am having is with my gamePlayScreen. When the current game is finished and the transition is complete for the gamePlayScreen, it should be removed and the next screens should be added to the ScreenManager. GamePlayScreen Code Snippet private void FinishCurrentGame() { AudioManager.StopSounds(); this.UnloadContent(); if (Global.SaveDevice.IsReady) Stats.Save(); if (HighScoreScreen.IsInHighscores(timeLimit)) { foreach (GameScreen screen in ScreenManager.GetScreens()) screen.ExitScreen(); Global.TimeRemaining = timeLimit; ScreenManager.AddScreen(new BackgroundScreen(), null); ScreenManager.AddScreen(new MessageBoxScreen("Enter your Initials", true), null); } else { foreach (GameScreen screen in ScreenManager.GetScreens()) screen.ExitScreen(); ScreenManager.AddScreen(new BackgroundScreen(), null); ScreenManager.AddScreen(new MainMenuScreen(), null); } } The problem is that when isExiting is set to true by screen.ExitScreen() for the gamePlayScreen, the transition never completes the transition and removes the screen from the ScreenManager. Every other screen that I use the same technique to add and remove each screen fully transitions On/Off and is removed at the appropriate time from the ScreenManager, but noy my GamePlayScreen. Has anyone that has used the GameStateManagement example experienced this issue or can someone see the mistake I am making? EDIT This is what I tracked down. When the game is done, I call foreach (GameScreen screen in ScreenManager.GetScreens()) screen.ExitScreen(); to start the transition off process for the gameplay screen. At this point there is only 1 screen on the ScreenManager stack. The gamePlay screen gets isExiting set to true and starts to transition off. Right after the above call to ExitScreen() I add a background screen and menu screen to the screenManager: ScreenManager.AddScreen(new background(), null); ScreenManager.AddScreen(new Menu(), null); The count of the ScreenManager is now 3. What I noticed while stepping through the updates for GameScreen and ScreenManager, the gameplay screen never gets to the point where the transistion process finishes so the ScreenManager can remove it from the stack. This anomaly does not happen to any of my other screens when I switch between them. Screen Manager Code #region File Description //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // ScreenManager.cs // // Microsoft XNA Community Game Platform // Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- #endregion #define DEMO #region Using Statements using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Collections.Generic; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using PerformanceUtility.GameDebugTools; #endregion namespace GameStateManagement { /// <summary> /// The screen manager is a component which manages one or more GameScreen /// instances. It maintains a stack of screens, calls their Update and Draw /// methods at the appropriate times, and automatically routes input to the /// topmost active screen. /// </summary> public class ScreenManager : DrawableGameComponent { #region Fields List<GameScreen> screens = new List<GameScreen>(); List<GameScreen> screensToUpdate = new List<GameScreen>(); InputState input = new InputState(); SpriteBatch spriteBatch; SpriteFont font; Texture2D blankTexture; bool isInitialized; bool getOut; bool traceEnabled; #if DEBUG DebugSystem debugSystem; Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); bool debugTextEnabled; #endif #endregion #region Properties /// <summary> /// A default SpriteBatch shared by all the screens. This saves /// each screen having to bother creating their own local instance. /// </summary> public SpriteBatch SpriteBatch { get { return spriteBatch; } } /// <summary> /// A default font shared by all the screens. This saves /// each screen having to bother loading their own local copy. /// </summary> public SpriteFont Font { get { return font; } } public Rectangle ScreenRectangle { get { return new Rectangle(0, 0, GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width, GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height); } } /// <summary> /// If true, the manager prints out a list of all the screens /// each time it is updated. This can be useful for making sure /// everything is being added and removed at the right times. /// </summary> public bool TraceEnabled { get { return traceEnabled; } set { traceEnabled = value; } } #if DEBUG public bool DebugTextEnabled { get { return debugTextEnabled; } set { debugTextEnabled = value; } } public DebugSystem DebugSystem { get { return debugSystem; } } #endif #endregion #region Initialization /// <summary> /// Constructs a new screen manager component. /// </summary> public ScreenManager(Game game) : base(game) { // we must set EnabledGestures before we can query for them, but // we don't assume the game wants to read them. //TouchPanel.EnabledGestures = GestureType.None; } /// <summary> /// Initializes the screen manager component. /// </summary> public override void Initialize() { base.Initialize(); #if DEBUG debugSystem = DebugSystem.Initialize(Game, "Fonts/MenuFont"); #endif isInitialized = true; } /// <summary> /// Load your graphics content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Load content belonging to the screen manager. ContentManager content = Game.Content; spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); font = content.Load<SpriteFont>(@"Fonts\menufont"); blankTexture = content.Load<Texture2D>(@"Textures\Backgrounds\blank"); // Tell each of the screens to load their content. foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) { screen.LoadContent(); } } /// <summary> /// Unload your graphics content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // Tell each of the screens to unload their content. foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) { screen.UnloadContent(); } } #endregion #region Update and Draw /// <summary> /// Allows each screen to run logic. /// </summary> public override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { #if DEBUG debugSystem.TimeRuler.StartFrame(); debugSystem.TimeRuler.BeginMark("Update", Color.Blue); if (debugTextEnabled && getOut == false) { debugSystem.FpsCounter.Visible = true; debugSystem.TimeRuler.Visible = true; debugSystem.TimeRuler.ShowLog = true; getOut = true; } else if (debugTextEnabled == false) { getOut = false; debugSystem.FpsCounter.Visible = false; debugSystem.TimeRuler.Visible = false; debugSystem.TimeRuler.ShowLog = false; } #endif // Read the keyboard and gamepad. input.Update(); // Make a copy of the master screen list, to avoid confusion if // the process of updating one screen adds or removes others. screensToUpdate.Clear(); foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) screensToUpdate.Add(screen); bool otherScreenHasFocus = !Game.IsActive; bool coveredByOtherScreen = false; // Loop as long as there are screens waiting to be updated. while (screensToUpdate.Count > 0) { // Pop the topmost screen off the waiting list. GameScreen screen = screensToUpdate[screensToUpdate.Count - 1]; screensToUpdate.RemoveAt(screensToUpdate.Count - 1); // Update the screen. screen.Update(gameTime, otherScreenHasFocus, coveredByOtherScreen); if (screen.ScreenState == ScreenState.TransitionOn || screen.ScreenState == ScreenState.Active) { // If this is the first active screen we came across, // give it a chance to handle input. if (!otherScreenHasFocus) { screen.HandleInput(input); otherScreenHasFocus = true; } // If this is an active non-popup, inform any subsequent // screens that they are covered by it. if (!screen.IsPopup) coveredByOtherScreen = true; } } // Print debug trace? if (traceEnabled) TraceScreens(); #if DEBUG debugSystem.TimeRuler.EndMark("Update"); #endif } /// <summary> /// Prints a list of all the screens, for debugging. /// </summary> void TraceScreens() { List<string> screenNames = new List<string>(); foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) screenNames.Add(screen.GetType().Name); Debug.WriteLine(string.Join(", ", screenNames.ToArray())); } /// <summary> /// Tells each screen to draw itself. /// </summary> public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { #if DEBUG debugSystem.TimeRuler.StartFrame(); debugSystem.TimeRuler.BeginMark("Draw", Color.Yellow); #endif foreach (GameScreen screen in screens) { if (screen.ScreenState == ScreenState.Hidden) continue; screen.Draw(gameTime); } #if DEBUG debugSystem.TimeRuler.EndMark("Draw"); #endif #if DEMO SpriteBatch.Begin(); SpriteBatch.DrawString(font, "DEMO - NOT FOR RESALE", new Vector2(20, 80), Color.White); SpriteBatch.End(); #endif } #endregion #region Public Methods /// <summary> /// Adds a new screen to the screen manager. /// </summary> public void AddScreen(GameScreen screen, PlayerIndex? controllingPlayer) { screen.ControllingPlayer = controllingPlayer; screen.ScreenManager = this; screen.IsExiting = false; // If we have a graphics device, tell the screen to load content. if (isInitialized) { screen.LoadContent(); } screens.Add(screen); } /// <summary> /// Removes a screen from the screen manager. You should normally /// use GameScreen.ExitScreen instead of calling this directly, so /// the screen can gradually transition off rather than just being /// instantly removed. /// </summary> public void RemoveScreen(GameScreen screen) { // If we have a graphics device, tell the screen to unload content. if (isInitialized) { screen.UnloadContent(); } screens.Remove(screen); screensToUpdate.Remove(screen); } /// <summary> /// Expose an array holding all the screens. We return a copy rather /// than the real master list, because screens should only ever be added /// or removed using the AddScreen and RemoveScreen methods. /// </summary> public GameScreen[] GetScreens() { return screens.ToArray(); } /// <summary> /// Helper draws a translucent black fullscreen sprite, used for fading /// screens in and out, and for darkening the background behind popups. /// </summary> public void FadeBackBufferToBlack(float alpha) { Viewport viewport = GraphicsDevice.Viewport; spriteBatch.Begin(); spriteBatch.Draw(blankTexture, new Rectangle(0, 0, viewport.Width, viewport.Height), Color.Black * alpha); spriteBatch.End(); } #endregion } } Game Screen Parent of GamePlayScreen #region File Description //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // GameScreen.cs // // Microsoft XNA Community Game Platform // Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- #endregion #region Using Statements using System; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; //using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Touch; using System.IO; #endregion namespace GameStateManagement { /// <summary> /// Enum describes the screen transition state. /// </summary> public enum ScreenState { TransitionOn, Active, TransitionOff, Hidden, } /// <summary> /// A screen is a single layer that has update and draw logic, and which /// can be combined with other layers to build up a complex menu system. /// For instance the main menu, the options menu, the "are you sure you /// want to quit" message box, and the main game itself are all implemented /// as screens. /// </summary> public abstract class GameScreen { #region Properties /// <summary> /// Normally when one screen is brought up over the top of another, /// the first screen will transition off to make room for the new /// one. This property indicates whether the screen is only a small /// popup, in which case screens underneath it do not need to bother /// transitioning off. /// </summary> public bool IsPopup { get { return isPopup; } protected set { isPopup = value; } } bool isPopup = false; /// <summary> /// Indicates how long the screen takes to /// transition on when it is activated. /// </summary> public TimeSpan TransitionOnTime { get { return transitionOnTime; } protected set { transitionOnTime = value; } } TimeSpan transitionOnTime = TimeSpan.Zero; /// <summary> /// Indicates how long the screen takes to /// transition off when it is deactivated. /// </summary> public TimeSpan TransitionOffTime { get { return transitionOffTime; } protected set { transitionOffTime = value; } } TimeSpan transitionOffTime = TimeSpan.Zero; /// <summary> /// Gets the current position of the screen transition, ranging /// from zero (fully active, no transition) to one (transitioned /// fully off to nothing). /// </summary> public float TransitionPosition { get { return transitionPosition; } protected set { transitionPosition = value; } } float transitionPosition = 1; /// <summary> /// Gets the current alpha of the screen transition, ranging /// from 1 (fully active, no transition) to 0 (transitioned /// fully off to nothing). /// </summary> public float TransitionAlpha { get { return 1f - TransitionPosition; } } /// <summary> /// Gets the current screen transition state. /// </summary> public ScreenState ScreenState { get { return screenState; } protected set { screenState = value; } } ScreenState screenState = ScreenState.TransitionOn; /// <summary> /// There are two possible reasons why a screen might be transitioning /// off. It could be temporarily going away to make room for another /// screen that is on top of it, or it could be going away for good. /// This property indicates whether the screen is exiting for real: /// if set, the screen will automatically remove itself as soon as the /// transition finishes. /// </summary> public bool IsExiting { get { return isExiting; } protected internal set { isExiting = value; } } bool isExiting = false; /// <summary> /// Checks whether this screen is active and can respond to user input. /// </summary> public bool IsActive { get { return !otherScreenHasFocus && (screenState == ScreenState.TransitionOn || screenState == ScreenState.Active); } } bool otherScreenHasFocus; /// <summary> /// Gets the manager that this screen belongs to. /// </summary> public ScreenManager ScreenManager { get { return screenManager; } internal set { screenManager = value; } } ScreenManager screenManager; public KeyboardState KeyboardState { get {return Keyboard.GetState();} } /// <summary> /// Gets the index of the player who is currently controlling this screen, /// or null if it is accepting input from any player. This is used to lock /// the game to a specific player profile. The main menu responds to input /// from any connected gamepad, but whichever player makes a selection from /// this menu is given control over all subsequent screens, so other gamepads /// are inactive until the controlling player returns to the main menu. /// </summary> public PlayerIndex? ControllingPlayer { get { return controllingPlayer; } internal set { controllingPlayer = value; } } PlayerIndex? controllingPlayer; /// <summary> /// Gets whether or not this screen is serializable. If this is true, /// the screen will be recorded into the screen manager's state and /// its Serialize and Deserialize methods will be called as appropriate. /// If this is false, the screen will be ignored during serialization. /// By default, all screens are assumed to be serializable. /// </summary> public bool IsSerializable { get { return isSerializable; } protected set { isSerializable = value; } } bool isSerializable = true; #endregion #region Initialization /// <summary> /// Load graphics content for the screen. /// </summary> public virtual void LoadContent() { } /// <summary> /// Unload content for the screen. /// </summary> public virtual void UnloadContent() { } #endregion #region Update and Draw /// <summary> /// Allows the screen to run logic, such as updating the transition position. /// Unlike HandleInput, this method is called regardless of whether the screen /// is active, hidden, or in the middle of a transition. /// </summary> public virtual void Update(GameTime gameTime, bool otherScreenHasFocus, bool coveredByOtherScreen) { this.otherScreenHasFocus = otherScreenHasFocus; if (isExiting) { // If the screen is going away to die, it should transition off. screenState = ScreenState.TransitionOff; if (!UpdateTransition(gameTime, transitionOffTime, 1)) { // When the transition finishes, remove the screen. ScreenManager.RemoveScreen(this); } } else if (coveredByOtherScreen) { // If the screen is covered by another, it should transition off. if (UpdateTransition(gameTime, transitionOffTime, 1)) { // Still busy transitioning. screenState = ScreenState.TransitionOff; } else { // Transition finished! screenState = ScreenState.Hidden; } } else { // Otherwise the screen should transition on and become active. if (UpdateTransition(gameTime, transitionOnTime, -1)) { // Still busy transitioning. screenState = ScreenState.TransitionOn; } else { // Transition finished! screenState = ScreenState.Active; } } } /// <summary> /// Helper for updating the screen transition position. /// </summary> bool UpdateTransition(GameTime gameTime, TimeSpan time, int direction) { // How much should we move by? float transitionDelta; if (time == TimeSpan.Zero) transitionDelta = 1; else transitionDelta = (float)(gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds / time.TotalMilliseconds); // Update the transition position. transitionPosition += transitionDelta * direction; // Did we reach the end of the transition? if (((direction < 0) && (transitionPosition <= 0)) || ((direction > 0) && (transitionPosition >= 1))) { transitionPosition = MathHelper.Clamp(transitionPosition, 0, 1); return false; } // Otherwise we are still busy transitioning. return true; } /// <summary> /// Allows the screen to handle user input. Unlike Update, this method /// is only called when the screen is active, and not when some other /// screen has taken the focus. /// </summary> public virtual void HandleInput(InputState input) { } public KeyboardState currentKeyState; public KeyboardState lastKeyState; public bool IsKeyHit(Keys key) { if (currentKeyState.IsKeyDown(key) && lastKeyState.IsKeyUp(key)) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// This is called when the screen should draw itself. /// </summary> public virtual void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { } #endregion #region Public Methods /// <summary> /// Tells the screen to serialize its state into the given stream. /// </summary> public virtual void Serialize(Stream stream) { } /// <summary> /// Tells the screen to deserialize its state from the given stream. /// </summary> public virtual void Deserialize(Stream stream) { } /// <summary> /// Tells the screen to go away. Unlike ScreenManager.RemoveScreen, which /// instantly kills the screen, this method respects the transition timings /// and will give the screen a chance to gradually transition off. /// </summary> public void ExitScreen() { if (TransitionOffTime == TimeSpan.Zero) { // If the screen has a zero transition time, remove it immediately. ScreenManager.RemoveScreen(this); } else { // Otherwise flag that it should transition off and then exit. isExiting = true; } } #endregion #region Helper Methods /// <summary> /// A helper method which loads assets using the screen manager's /// associated game content loader. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T">Type of asset.</typeparam> /// <param name="assetName">Asset name, relative to the loader root /// directory, and not including the .xnb extension.</param> /// <returns></returns> public T Load<T>(string assetName) { return ScreenManager.Game.Content.Load<T>(assetName); } #endregion } }

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• Using the Data Form Web Part (SharePoint 2010) Site Agnostically!

  - by David Jacobus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/djacobus/archive/2013/10/24/154465.aspxAs a Developer whom has worked closely with web designers (Power users) in a SharePoint environment, I have come across the issue of making the Data Form Web Part reusable across the site collection! In SharePoint 2007 it was very easy and this blog pointed the way to make it happen: Josh Gaffey's Blog. In SharePoint 2010 something changed! This method failed except for using a Data Form Web Part that pointed to a list in the Site Collection Root! I am making this discussion relative to a developer whom creates a solution (WSP) with all the artifacts embedded and the user shouldn’t have any involvement in the process except to activate features. The Scenario: 1. A Power User creates a Data Form Web Part using SharePoint Designer 2010! It is a great web part the uses all the power of SharePoint Designer and XSLT (Conditional formatting, etc.). 2. Other Users in the site collection want to use that specific web part in sub sites in the site collection. Pointing to a list with the same name, not at the site collection root! The Issues: 1. The Data Form Web Part Data Source uses a List ID (GUID) to point to the specific list. Which means a list in a sub site will have a list with a new GUID different than the one which was created with SharePoint Designer! Obviously, the List needs to be the same List (Fields, Content Types, etc.) with different data. 2. How can we make this web part site agnostic, and dependent only on the lists Name? I had this problem come up over and over and decided to put my solution forward! The Solution: 1. Use the XSL of the Data Form Web Part Created By the Power User in SharePoint Designer! 2. Extend the OOTB Data Form Web Part to use this XSL and Point to a List by name. The solution points to a hybrid solution that requires some coding (Developer) and the XSL (Power User) artifacts put together in a Visual Studio SharePoint Solution. Here are the solution steps in summary: 1. Create an empty SharePoint project in Visual Studio 2. Create a Module and Feature and put the XSL file created by the Power User into it a. Scope the feature to web 3. Create a Feature Receiver to Create the List. The same list from which the Data Form Web Part was created with by the Power User. a. Scope the feature to web 4. Create a Web Part extending the Data Form Web a. Point the Data Form Web Part to point to the List by Name b. Point the Data Form Web Part XSL link to the XSL added using the Module feature c. Scope The feature to Site i. This is because all web parts are in the site collection web part gallery. So in a Narrative Summary: We are creating a list in code which has the same name and (site Columns) as the list from which the Power User created the Data Form Web Part Using SharePoint Designer. We are creating a Web Part in code which extends the OOTB Data Form Web Part to point to a list by name and use the XSL created by the Power User. Okay! Here are the steps with images and code! At the end of this post I will provide a link to the code for a solution which works in any site! I want to TOOT the HORN for the power of this solution! It is the mantra a use with all my clients! What is a basic skill a SharePoint Developer: Create an application that uses the data from a SharePoint list and make that data visible to the user in a manner which meets requirements! Create an Empty SharePoint 2010 Project Here I am naming my Project DJ.DataFormWebPart Create a Code Folder Copy and paste the Extension and Utilities classes (Found in the solution provided at the end of this post) Change the Namespace to match this project The List to which the Data Form Web Part which was used to make the XSL by the Power User in SharePoint Designer is now going to be created in code! If already in code, then all the better! Here I am going to create a list in the site collection root and add some data to it! For the purpose of this discussion I will actually create this list in code before using SharePoint Designer for simplicity! So here I create the List and deploy it within this solution before I do anything else. I will use a List I created before for demo purposes. Footer List is used within the footer of my master page. Add a new Feature: Here I name the Feature FooterList and add a Feature Event Receiver: Here is the code for the Event Receiver: I have a previous blog post about adding lists in code so I will not take time to narrate this code: using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Security.Permissions; using Microsoft.SharePoint; using DJ.DataFormWebPart.Code; namespace DJ.DataFormWebPart.Features.FooterList { /// <summary> /// This class handles events raised during feature activation, deactivation, installation, uninstallation, and upgrade. /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// The GUID attached to this class may be used during packaging and should not be modified. /// </remarks> [Guid("a58644fd-9209-41f4-aa16-67a53af7a9bf")] public class FooterListEventReceiver : SPFeatureReceiver { SPWeb currentWeb = null; SPSite currentSite = null; const string columnGroup = "DJ"; const string ctName = "FooterContentType"; // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised after a feature has been activated. public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { using (SPWeb spWeb = properties.GetWeb() as SPWeb) { using (SPSite site = new SPSite(spWeb.Site.ID)) { using (SPWeb rootWeb = site.OpenWeb(site.RootWeb.ID)) { //add the fields addFields(rootWeb); //add content type SPContentType testCT = rootWeb.ContentTypes[ctName]; // we will not create the content type if it exists if (testCT == null) { //the content type does not exist add it addContentType(rootWeb, ctName); } if ((spWeb.Lists.TryGetList("FooterList") == null)) { //create the list if it dosen't to exist CreateFooterList(spWeb, site); } } } } } #region ContentType public void addFields(SPWeb spWeb) { Utilities.addField(spWeb, "Link", SPFieldType.URL, false, columnGroup); Utilities.addField(spWeb, "Information", SPFieldType.Text, false, columnGroup); } private static void addContentType(SPWeb spWeb, string name) { SPContentType myContentType = new SPContentType(spWeb.ContentTypes["Item"], spWeb.ContentTypes, name) { Group = columnGroup }; spWeb.ContentTypes.Add(myContentType); addContentTypeLinkages(spWeb, myContentType); myContentType.Update(); } public static void addContentTypeLinkages(SPWeb spWeb, SPContentType ct) { Utilities.addContentTypeLink(spWeb, "Link", ct); Utilities.addContentTypeLink(spWeb, "Information", ct); } private void CreateFooterList(SPWeb web, SPSite site) { Guid newListGuid = web.Lists.Add("FooterList", "Footer List", SPListTemplateType.GenericList); SPList newList = web.Lists[newListGuid]; newList.ContentTypesEnabled = true; var footer = site.RootWeb.ContentTypes[ctName]; newList.ContentTypes.Add(footer); newList.ContentTypes.Delete(newList.ContentTypes["Item"].Id); newList.Update(); var view = newList.DefaultView; //add all view fields here //view.ViewFields.Add("NewsTitle"); view.ViewFields.Add("Link"); view.ViewFields.Add("Information"); view.Update(); } } } Basically created a content type with two site columns Link and Information. I had to change some code as we are working at the SPWeb level and need Content Types at the SPSite level! I’ll use a new Site Collection for this demo (Best Practice) keep old artifacts from impinging on development: Next we will add this list to the root of the site collection by deploying this solution, add some data and then use SharePoint Designer to create a Data Form Web Part. The list has been added, now let’s add some data: Okay let’s add a Data Form Web Part in SharePoint Designer. Create a new web part page in the site pages library: I will name it TestWP.aspx and edit it in advanced mode: Let’s add an empty Data Form Web Part to the web part zone: Click on the web part to add a data source: Choose FooterList in the Data Source menu: Choose appropriate fields and select insert as multiple item view: Here is what it look like after insertion: Let’s add some conditional formatting if the information filed is not blank: Choose Create (right side) apply formatting: Choose the Information Field and set the condition not null: Click Set Style: Here is the result: Okay! Not flashy but simple enough for this demo. Remember this is the job of the Power user! All we want from this web part is the XLS-Style Sheet out of SharePoint Designer. We are going to use it as the XSL for our web part which we will be creating next. Let’s add a web part to our project extending the OOTB Data Form Web Part. Add new item from the Visual Studio add menu: Choose Web Part: Change WebPart to DataFormWebPart (Oh well my namespace needs some improvement, but it will sure make it readily identifiable as an extended web part!) Below is the code for this web part: using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts; using Microsoft.SharePoint; using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls; using System.Text; namespace DJ.DataFormWebPart.DataFormWebPart { [ToolboxItemAttribute(false)] public class DataFormWebPart : Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.DataFormWebPart { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { base.OnInit(e); this.ChromeType = PartChromeType.None; this.Title = "FooterListDF"; try { //SPSite site = SPContext.Current.Site; SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web; SPList list = web.Lists.TryGetList("FooterList"); if (list != null) { string queryList1 = "<Query><Where><IsNotNull><FieldRef Name='Title' /></IsNotNull></Where><OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Title' Ascending='True' /></OrderBy></Query>"; uint maximumRowList1 = 10; SPDataSource dataSourceList1 = GetDataSource(list.Title, web.Url, list, queryList1, maximumRowList1); this.DataSources.Add(dataSourceList1); this.XslLink = web.Url + "/Assests/Footer.xsl"; this.ParameterBindings = BuildDataFormParameters(); this.DataBind(); } } catch (Exception ex) { this.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl("ERROR: " + ex.Message)); } } private SPDataSource GetDataSource(string dataSourceId, string webUrl, SPList list, string query, uint maximumRow) { SPDataSource dataSource = new SPDataSource(); dataSource.UseInternalName = true; dataSource.ID = dataSourceId; dataSource.DataSourceMode = SPDataSourceMode.List; dataSource.List = list; dataSource.SelectCommand = "" + query + ""; Parameter listIdParam = new Parameter("ListID"); listIdParam.DefaultValue = list.ID.ToString( "B").ToUpper(); Parameter maximumRowsParam = new Parameter("MaximumRows"); maximumRowsParam.DefaultValue = maximumRow.ToString(); QueryStringParameter rootFolderParam = new QueryStringParameter("RootFolder", "RootFolder"); dataSource.SelectParameters.Add(listIdParam); dataSource.SelectParameters.Add(maximumRowsParam); dataSource.SelectParameters.Add(rootFolderParam); dataSource.UpdateParameters.Add(listIdParam); dataSource.DeleteParameters.Add(listIdParam); dataSource.InsertParameters.Add(listIdParam); return dataSource; } private string BuildDataFormParameters() { StringBuilder parameters = new StringBuilder("<ParameterBindings><ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_apos\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/><ParameterBinding Name=\"UserID\" Location=\"CAMLVariable\" DefaultValue=\"CurrentUserName\"/><ParameterBinding Name=\"Today\" Location=\"CAMLVariable\" DefaultValue=\"CurrentDate\"/>"); parameters.Append("<ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_firstrow\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/>"); parameters.Append("<ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_nextpagedata\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/>"); parameters.Append("<ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_adhocmode\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/>"); parameters.Append("<ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_adhocfiltermode\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/>"); parameters.Append("</ParameterBindings>"); return parameters.ToString(); } } } The OnInit method we use to set the list name and the XSL Link property of the Data Form Web Part. We do not have the link to XSL in our Solution so we will add the XSL now: Add a Module in the Visual Studio add menu: Rename Sample.txt in the module to footer.xsl and then copy the XSL from SharePoint Designer Look at elements.xml to where the footer.xsl is being provisioned to which is Assets/footer.xsl, make sure the Web parts xsl link is pointing to this url: Okay we are good to go! Let’s check our features and package: DataFormWebPart should be scoped to site and have the web part: The Footer List feature should be scoped to web and have the Assets module (Okay, I see, a spelling issue but it won’t affect this demo) If everything is correct we should be able to click a couple of sub site feature activations and have our list and web part in a sub site. (In fact this solution can be activated anywhere) Here is the list created at SubSite1 with new data It. Next let’s add the web part on a test page and see if it works as expected: It does! So we now have a repeatable way to use a WSP to move a Data Form Web Part around our sites! Here is a link to the code: DataFormWebPart Solution

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 04, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 04, 2011Popular ReleasesyoutubeFisher: YouTubeFisher v3.0 Beta: Adding support for more video formats including the Super HD (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrrHs2bnHPA) Minor change related to the video title due to change in YouTube pageSnippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3.1: Snippet Designer 1.3.1 for Visual Studio 2010This is a bug fix release. Change logFixed bug where Snippet Designer would fail if you had the most recent Productivity Power Tools installed Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in non-english locales Fixed bug where opening a new .snippet file would fail in non-english localesChiave File Encryption: Chiave 1.0: Final Relase for Chave 1.0 Stable: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.2 to 1.0: ==================== Added: > Added Icon Overlay for Windows 7 Taskbar Icon. >Added Thumbnail Toolbar buttons to make the navigation easier...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.6.3: Fixes some bugs in the previous releaseNetwork Monitor Decryption Expert: NMDecrypt 2.3: The NMDecryption Expert has been updated. In general these changes are: Updated Logging Support for multiple sessions that use the same cert with Session ID resuse. Fixed some bugs with IPv6 traffic and tunneled traffic Updated Version Info Made changes for assignment to Outercurve Foundation See the release blog for more information.DirectQ: Release 1.8.7 (RC1): Release candidate 1 of 1.8.7Chirpy - VS Add In For Handling Js, Css, DotLess, and T4 Files: Margogype Chirpy (ver 2.0): Chirpy loves Americans. Chirpy hates Americanos.ASP.NET: Sprite and Image Optimization Preview 3: The ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization framework is designed to decrease the amount of time required to request and display a page from a web server by performing a variety of optimizations on the page’s images. This is the third preview of the feature and works with ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 3, and ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) projects. The binaries are also available via NuGet: AspNetSprites-Core AspNetSprites-WebFormsControl AspNetSprites-MvcAndRazorHelper It includes the foll...Document.Editor: 2011.9: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.9: New Templates System New Plug-in System New Replace dialog New reset settings Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsTortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 2.0: TortoiseHg 2.0 is a complete rewrite of TortoiseHg 1.1, switching from PyGtk to PyQtSandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.2.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. NOTE: The included help file and the online help have not been completely updated to reflect all changes in this release. A refresh will be issue...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Microsoft Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2554: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, we have added 4 new protocol parsers and updated 79 existing parsers in the NetworkMonitor_Pa...Image Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 1: Prepare to have your minds blown. This is the first preview of what will eventually become 39613. There are still a lot of rough edges and plenty of areas still under construction, but for your basic needs, it should be relativly stable. Note: You will need the .NET Framework 4 installed to use this version. Below is a status report of where this release is in terms of the overall goal for version 3. If you're feeling a bit technically ambitious and want to check out some of the features th...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 1.1: updated GetAllJsonObjects() method and GetAllProperties() methods to JsonObject and Properties propertiesFacebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 1.0: Refer to http://computerbeacon.net for Documentation and Tutorial New features:added FQL support added Expires property to Api object added support for publishing to a user's friend / Facebook Page added support for posting and removing comments on posts added support for adding and removing likes on posts and comments added static methods for Page class added support for Iframe Application Tab of Facebook Page added support for obtaining the user's country, locale and age in If...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.1: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager small improvements for some helpers and AjaxDropdown has Data like the Lookup except it's value gets reset and list refilled if any element from data gets changedManaged Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 3: This release aims .net 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0. Accordingly, there are two solutions files. The assemblies are named System.ComponentModel.Composition.Codeplex.dll as a way to avoid clashing with the version shipped with the 4th version of the framework. Introduced CompositionOptions to container instantiation CompositionOptions.DisableSilentRejection makes MEF throw an exception on composition errors. Useful for diagnostics Support for open generics Support for attribute-less registr...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.6 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.4: Version: 2.0.0.4 (Milestone 4): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...VidCoder: 0.8.2: Updated auto-naming to handle seconds and frames ranges as well. Deprecated the {chapters} token for auto-naming in favor of {range}. Allowing file drag to preview window and enabling main window shortcut keys to work no matter what window is focused. Added option in config to enable giving custom names to audio tracks. (Note that these names will only show up certain players like iTunes or on the iPod. Players that support custom track names normally may not show them.) Added tooltips ...New Projects.NET Serial To TCP proxy server: serial2tcp written to share your hardware serial ports as TCP port. You can easily turn your physical PC into terminal server. View session input/output or send commands to the physical port. Very useful when automating work with embedded devices. Developed in C#.Amazon SES SMTP: The C# code for a simple SMTP Server that forwards emails to Amazon Simple Email Service, either by acting as a SmartHost behind IIS SMTP Server or as a standalone SMTP server. It can be run in the background as either a Windows Service or a Console/Windows Application Azure Membership, Role, and Profile Providers: Complete ASP.NET solution that uses the Azure Table Storage and Azure Blob storage as a data source for a custom Membership, Role, and Profile providers. Developed in C# on the .NET 4 framework using Azure SDK V1.3. Helps you get up and running with Azure in no time. MIT license.CRM 2011 Code Snippets for Visual Studio: A set of JavaScript and C# code snippets to facilitate common Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 development for Visual Studio 2010.DDRMenu: DDRMenu is a templated menu provider for DotNetNuke that can produce any menu style you wish. In particular it comes with templates to upgrade a standard DNNMenu or SolPartMenu to provide true hyperlinks, SEO friendliness and animated transitions.Entity Framework CTP5 Extensions Library: The ADO.NET Entity Framework Extensions library contains a set of utility classes with additional functionality to Entity Framework CTP5.eTrader Pro: An easy-to-use, lightweight and customisable e-commerce solution developed in ASP.NET and SQL Server. Build an online shop in no time. Skin using ASP.NET themes. Localised for English and Spanish with integral CMS, order management and e-marketing tools.euler 12 problem: euler 12 problemeuler 19 problem: euler 19 problemeuler23: euler 23eXed: eXed (eXtended XML editor) is an XSD-based XML editor, i.e. it assumes that you have a working XSD file. The XSD is used to improve your editing experience, provide you with dynamic help, and validation. It is therefore not for those who want to write an XML file from scratch.FIM PowerShell Workflow Activity: The FIM WF Activity for PowerShell makes is easy to use PowerShell inside FIM workflows. The activity is also a good example of using diagnostic tracing inside FIM WF.FremyCompany Math Equation Editor: A WPF Component that can import MathML and LaTeX to be edited in a WYSIWYG word processor. It is intended to allow both visual and computer-comprehensive (formula in programming language) exportation. Scope and functionnalites are intended to be expanded over time.Geenie OS: A New Cosmos OSGeoBot: Monitoring and ControllingiRODS .NET: To be populated laterLicensePlateRecognition: A software for recognizing a car license plate number.LINQ for .NET 2.0: Backport of LINQ and Linq.Dynamic to the .NET Framework 2.0. The sources used to port it are taken from the mono project. http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources-stable/ It requires Visual Studio 2010 to compile. It won't compile on Visual Studio 2005.mobilestandards: MobileStandards project-creating a web2.0 BannerMy MVC store Implementation: My implementation of MVC music storeOrchard Localization JP: Localizing Project of Orchard. This project is intended to host localizing project to Japanes. Orchard ???????????。 ??????????、???????????????????。 ???????????。Paragon: Expands the basic functionality of the .NET Framework. It takes into consider basic defensive coding practices and reduces the common coding tasks.Project Unity: Research and EUA, spamming across the Halo-AA and Blam Game Engines, developed by Bungie LLC. This Project is NOT endorsed/supported by Bungie, Gearbox, Microsogy Game Studios In any way.Rabbit Framework: A lightweight framework for building dynamic web sites using ASP.NET Web Pages.ScrollableList: Just to make the project looking betterSharePoint Kerberos Buddy: The SharePoint Kerberos Buddy provides an intelligent client application that examines a mixed tier SharePoint environment locating commonly misconfigured Kerberos configuration elements. The application can detect errors on SharePoint, SSAS, SSRS, and on the client.SMI 2.0: This project is the creation of the next generation of the SMI app (previously written in VB6).SPChainGang: SPChainGang is a custom application aimed to simplify scanning, reporting, and fixing broken links in a SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 farm. SPProperties: SPProperties is a console app (command-line) that allows listing all properties of an SPWeb (property bag) and adding or updating properties. Relates to SharePoint site properties.State Machine DSL: State Machine DSL is extension to Visual Studio 2010 to provide simple and visualized way of programming state machines. It uses T4 Text Templates for code generation.tBrowser: Browser based on the IEuMoveDocType: uMoveDocType attempts to intelligently move your selected Umbraco Doc Type to a new parent.Virtual 8085: Virtual 8085 is a tool which enables students to run programs written in 8085 assembly language on a personal computer instead of a microprocessor kit. Virtual 8085 do not actually simulate the real hardware of Intel 8085, but it interprets the 8085 assembly language programs.WinAppTranslate: WinAppTranslate or WAT, Helps Visual Studio Programmers to translate Windows Applications. It is not based on the framework localization program… and it is a console application to run via VS post builds ????: ??????

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 28, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 28, 2011Popular ReleasesCoding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.4.3: Fix for prompts not returning the appbarMosaic Project: Mosaic Alpha build 261: - Fixed crash when pinning applications in x64 OS - Added Hub to video widget. It shows videos from Video library (only .wmv and .avi). Can work slow if there are too much files. - Fixed some issues with scrolling - Fixed bug with html widgets - Fixed bug in Gmail widget - Added html today widget missed in previous release - Now Mosaic saves running widgets if you restarting from optionsEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.9 BETA: 2.4.9 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.2 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in some of th....NET Reflector Add-Ins: Reflector V7 Add-Ins: All the add-ins compiled for Reflector V7TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v4.1 [4.0 Bug Fixes]: Version 4.1 ChangelogChanged how users will Open Player files (This change makes it much easier) This allowed me to remove the "Current player file" labels that were present Changed file control icons Added submit bug button Various Bug Fixes Fixed crashes related to clicking on buffs before a character is loaded Fixed crashes related to selecting "No Buff" when choosing a new buff Fixed crashes related to clicking on a "Max" button on the buff tab before a character is loaded Cor...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta8: ??AcDown???????????????，?????????????????????。????????????????????，??Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、?????，???????????、???????。 AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 AcDown???????C#??，?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ??v3.0 Beta8 ?? ??????????????? ???????????????(??????????) ???????...BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.5: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.5 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.2 for IIS 7: This release contains all the functionality available in 62183 plus the following additions: Command Line Support via PowerShell - now it is possible to manage and script PHP installations on IIS by using Windows PowerShell. More information is available at Managing PHP installations with PHP Manager command line. Detection and alert when using local PHP handler - if a web site or a directory has a local copy of PHP handler mapping then the configuration changes made on upper configuration ...MiniTwitter: 1.71: MiniTwitter 1.71 ???? ?? OAuth ???????????? ????????、??????????????????? ???????????????????????SizeOnDisk: 1.0.10.0: Fix: issue 327: size format error when save settings Fix: some UI bindings trouble (sorting, refresh) Fix: user settings file deletion when corrupted Feature: TreeView virtualization (better speed with many folders) Feature: New file type DataGrid column Feature: In KByte view, show size of file < 1024B and > 0 with 3 decimal Feature: New language: Italian Task: Cleanup for speedRawr: Rawr 4.2.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: HD-Trailer.net Downloader 1.86: This version implements a new config flag "ConsiderTheatricalandNumberedTrailersasIdentical" that for the purposes of Exclusions only Teaser Trailer and one Trailer (named Trailer, Theatrical Traler Trailer No. 1, Trailer 1, Trailer No. 2, etc) will be downloaded. This also includes a bug fix where the .nfo file did not include the -trailer if configured for XBMC.N2 CMS: 2.2: * Web platform installer support available ** Nuget support available What's newDinamico Templates (beta) - an MVC3 & Razor based template pack using the template-first! development paradigm Boilerplate CSS & HTML5 Advanced theming with css comipilation (concrete, dark, roadwork, terracotta) Template-first! development style Content, news, listing, slider, image sizes, search, sitemap, globalization, youtube, google map Display Tokens - replaces text tokens with rendered content (usag...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram v0.5 Beta: New in this release: New components: Ammeter (meter) Voltmeter (meter) Undo/redo functionality for placing/moving components Choose resolution when exporting PNG image New logoMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.23: XML input file can now specify both JS and CSS output files in the same XML file. Don't output octal escsape sequences in string literals for strict-mode scripts. Expand expression optimizations to handle more instances of logical-not being smaller. Properly handle comments that look like conditional comments but aren't because no @cc_on statement has been encountered. CSS Important comments should start on a new line, and CSS hacks should not have the ! in them. Various other smaller updates.KinectNUI: Jun 25 Alpha Release: Initial public version. No installer needed, just run the EXE.Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.5: Update June 24th Made compatible with the new tiles found in Terraria 1.0.5Kinect Earth Move: KinectEarthMove sample code: Sample code releasedThis is a sample code for Kinect for Windows SDK beta, which was demonstrated on Channel 9 Kinect for Windows SKD beta launch event on June 17 2011. Using color image and skeleton data from Kinect and user in front of Kinect can manipulate the earth between his/her hands.patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 12 - June 22, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Minor code changes. New "Introduction" chapter. New "Modularity" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Updated "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To ins...DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.00.00 Beta: Beta 1 (Build 2300) includes many important enhancements to the user experience. The control panel has been updated for easier access to the most important features and additional forms have been adapted to the new pattern. This release also includes many bug fixes that make it more stable than previous CTP releases. Beta ForumsNew ProjectsAI4CAD-3D: AI4CAD-3D bir 3 boyutlu tasarim ve ince ve kaba insaat metraj programidir.Beginner 2D game Dev -MokoNa: learning to make 2D games from ground up cae2rampage: A top down XNA-based multipalyer game.CamelWiki: Simple wiki software written in Perl using POD as markup language. CamelWiki can use MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite as database backend. DmPoster: An assistant to help us to post danmaku to bilibili.tv website. ????? bilibili.tv ?????????。 It's developed in C#. ????? C#。EasyDP: EasyDP is an open source Silverlight application to upload and manage one's display pictures in a website. It can be integrated to websites not limited to ASP.NET. It posts images up with generic HTTP form data thus it can communicate with HTTP handler written in any server-side programming language.E-Commerce TCP: Projeto E-Commerce para a cadeira de TCP da UFRGS. Semestre 01/2011.Encounter: a host-guest interaction energy calculator: Encounter is a simple program for calculating the interaction energy between two molecules using the output from a GAUSSIAN two-component counterpoise correction calculation. The Counterpoise Correction arises due to the Basis Set Superposition Error in quantum modeling.Excel add-in for regular expressions: Match, replace, and search character strings in Excel using the C++0x <regex> library.FlvBugger: ?Flv????????，???????????????????，????????。Frontdesk: Frontdesk is a form creator and autoresponder program designed in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2. It contains a custom member/security implementation, admin area, and lots of flexibility in form & autoresponder creation. It uses an integrated WYSIWYG editor & form field drag-and-drop.His2012: his2012ixbShop: ???????? Open-source e-commerce platformJBot: PL: Program sieciowy JBot jest chatterbotem. EN: Network program JBot is chatterbot.JungleSoft_Lux: luxKillstone PaRSS: Killstone PaRSS is a jQuery Plugin that parses an RSS feed and appends the items from the feed to a UL or OL on your webpage.Killstone PHP Framework: A simple PHP framework that helps organize your PHP application in a Model / View / Controller pattern.Orchard-PhotoTag-FamilyTree: This is an Orchard Module that allows you to tag a photo. It comes with a widget and a Page type. In addition to tagging photo's you can create a family tree/org chart to drill down into. (I originally built this for a family reunion).ResX DSL: ResX DSL is a Domain Specific Language created with Visual Studio DSL Tools. It helps to define a ResX DSL-Model with multi-language and multi-typed Ressources and generates with T4-Templates an ordinary Resx-File as well as a Proxy-Class with a given Ressources-Set.Self-Tracking Entity Generator for WPF and Silverlight: An Entity Framework project item to generate self-tracking entity classes for WPF and Silverlight applications.SharePoint 2010 Print List Ribbon Button: SharePoint 2010 Print List button on Top Ribbon for Calendar listStocks Application: This is technical demo to apply F-Sharp (F#) language in real world application. This application is close to real world enterprise application (with very optimal solutions, at least in 2011). The function of this application is to get Stock Quote Data and Historical Stock Prices from Yahoo Finance The Smart Shopping List: The Smart Shopping List makes it easier to keep track of your purchasesUmbraco Flickr API Search - XSLT Extension: An Umbraco XSLT Extension Package that enables calling the Flickr API to retrieve photos from a tag(s), user, group, and text search. The underlying engine is built off of the FlickrNET library (http://www.codeplex.com/FlickrNet).WASTLib: WASTLib is the acronim of Web Application Security Testing Library. Its main purpose is to easly create security tests for your web application. WinPanel: WinPanel ist ein nachgemachtes GNOME-Panel, dass auf Windows läuft. Es wird in Visual Basic 2010 Express programmiert.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 13, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 13, 2011Popular ReleasesTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksNuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues listEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.0: 2.4.0This release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 - Upd...Sterling Isolated Storage Database with LINQ for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7: Sterling OODB v1.0: Note: use this changeset to download the source example that has been extended to show database generation, backup, and restore in the desktop example. Welcome to the Sterling 1.0 RTM. This version is not backwards-compatible with previous versions of Sterling. Sterling is also available via NuGet. This product has been used and tested in many applications and contains a full suite of unit tests. You can refer to the User's Guide for complete documentation, and use the unit tests as guide...PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5.1: Changes from the previous version * Use dynamic layout to better fit text in other languages * Includes French and Spanish localizations Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0.5.1-setup.exe" (reccomended) 2. Down...Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.6.1: This release is a bug fixing release. Most importantly, issues have been seen around WPF 4.0 applications not always showing up in the app chooser. Hopefully, they are fixed now. I thought this issue warranted a minor release since more and more people are going WPF 4.0 and I don't want anyone to have any problems. Dan Hanan also contributes again with several usability features. Thanks Dan! Happy Snooping! p.s. By request, I am also attaching a .zip file ... so that people can install it ...RIBA - Rich Internet Business Application for Silverlight: Preview of MVVM Framework Source + Tutorials: This is a first public release of the MVVM Framework which is part of the final RIBA application. The complete RIBA example LOB application has yet to be published. Further Documentation on the MVVM part can be found on the Blog, http://www.SilverlightBlog.Net and in the downloadable source ( mvvm/doc/ ). Please post all issues and suggestions in the issue tracker.SharePoint Learning Kit: 1.5: SharePoint Learning Kit 1.5 has the following new functionality: *Support for SharePoint 2010 *E-Learning Actions can be localised *Two New Document Library Edit Options *Automatically add the Assignment List Web Part to the Web Part Gallery *Various Bug Fixes for the Drop Box There are 2 downloads for this release SLK-1.5-2010.zip for SharePoint 2010 SLK-1.5-2007.zip for SharePoint 2007 (WSS3 & MOSS 2007)Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.3 (BETA): This is fourth BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. For more information about this release see the following blog posts: Facebook C# SDK - Writing your first Facebook Application Facebook C# SDK v5 Beta Internals Facebook C# SDK V5.0.0 (BETA) Released We have spend time trying ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.161: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release adds a new Twitter List network importer, makes some minor feature improvements, and fixes a few bugs. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Installation StepsFollow these steps to install and use the template: Download the Zip file. Unzip it into any folder. Use WinZip or a similar program, or just right-click the Zip file...WCF Data Services Toolkit: WCF Data Services Toolkit: The source code and binary releases of the WCF Data Services Toolkit. For simplicity, the source code download doesn't include any of the MSTest files. If you want those, you can pull the code down via MercurialyoutubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Video capturing improved Supports YouTube's new layout (january 2011) Internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details. Webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 28785b7248052465ea0738a7775e8e8744d84c27fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.5: AutoChat now allows up to 6 items. Items with nr. 7-0 will be removed! News page url's are now opened in the default browser Added a context menu to the system tray icon (thanks to Alex Banagos) AutoChat now allows configuring the Chat Keys and the Modifier Key The recent files list now supports compact and full mode Fix: Swapped mouse buttons are now properly detected Fix: Sometimes the Play button was pressed while still greyed out Champion: Karma Note: You can also run the u...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.2: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2362-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.19 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...IronRuby: 1.1.2: IronRuby 1.1.2 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. In this release we fixed several major issues: - problems that blocked Gem installation in certain cases - regex syntax: the parser was replaced with a new one that is much more compatible with Ruby 1.9.2 - cras...New ProjectsAbstract | .NET DDD abstraction for infra-structure (Data, Blobs, Queues): In the last few years we have seen many tools abstract access to infra-structures. They are all very different - what makes it difficult for you to move from Azure or to Azure. Abstract makes migration easier by standardising access to these infra-structures.Apex APRS: Apex APRS is a new APRS client application that is unlike any other. Key Features: Online and offline-cached map viewing from multiple popular sources Fast, simple, intuitive & powerful user interface Customizable Notification System: Customizable Notification SystemDaniel Singleton for C++: An elegant solution for C++ singletons using dependency declaration to control lifetime. One object created during any execution, lazy-init, thread safety... nice and compact.Deduplicator: Deduplicator helps to organize your file system. Create one folder organized by choice containing unique files. To be used for photo's, mp3's or any other binary format. Deduplicator is released yet, user interface is limited and some hardcoding is still in placeDigitypon (ASP.NET MVC 3): Digitypon will be a new web application specialized to be used by those who want to set an e-newspaper or an e-magazine. The main difference among other CMSs is that Digitypon’s workflow is a virtualized way of how employees of printed matters (newspaperes, magazinews) work.EdgeJournalImporter: Import journal files written on the Entourage (Pocket) Edge into Microsoft OneNote 2007+FlatFileSerializer: Serialize and deserialize flat file records from and to self defined classes using Attributes.Google Chart Helper: Controls to insert Google Charts to your web application. No Javascript code to do. We do it for you !How to display records from MySQL 5.1 database in asp.net using VB.net or CSharp: How to display records from MySQl 5.1+ database in asp.net with vb.net or C# code.HTTP Filer: HTTP Filer is a utility that allow users to share files and documents over http protocol. This utility was designed especially for Windows Phone users to send files from computer to their phone easily without send emails with attachments or upload files to an internet server.ibamonitoring: Source code for the avian point-count data collection web site www.ibamonitoring.org.JoPack Ultra Light Packaging for large teams: JoPack is an opensource ultra light package management software – that is targeted for simplifying development with large teams sharing volatile assemblies across several solutions. Latest project source code can be found on project home site: http://code.google.com/p/jo-pack/ L-System Turtle Based Fractal Tool (L-Fractal Tool): A tool to help you play with L-System turtle graphic based fractal curves( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system) This tool helps you look into some of the well known curves & lets you define new patterns & production rules to build your own. Have a fun-fractal day !mailer: mailer is a application to mail. It's developed in Python.NJamb: A C# DSL for more rigorous tests: NJamb is a C# syntax for tests and DDD specifications. It makes them more readable, faster to write, and more rigorous. Its Linq-style expressions can assert preconditions and postconditions. IntelliSense makes the syntax almost foolproof. And, it's designed to be extended.NUpdater: NUpdater makes it easier for .NET Framework developers to add auto-updating capability to their software. Putting together numerous patching capabilities, this library is an all-around updater. Developed in C# with CLS compliance (this library is fully compatible with Mono).Perihelia - The .NET & Silverlight Socket Project: Perihelia is an open-source socket framework. The framework includes (or will include) all the necessities you need to satisfy your networking needs. Windows and WPF applications are currently supported, and Silverlight applications will be supported soon.PLogger: PLogger is a light, fast configuration-less file appender logger build using a parallel pipeline architecture. It is much easier and faster to set up and use then Log4Net or the enterprise libraryQuasar: Quasar is a professional .Net utility library which adds sugar on .net framework.Sectors Game Engine: Sectors is a XNA-based 2.5D (Doom-like) game engine with console and scripting support for Windows.SharePoint 2010 Server-Side-Scanner WebPart - embDocumentInhalator: embDocumentInhalator makes it possible for SharePoint 2010 users to scan documents from scanners attached directly to the server. For developers it may help to see the relationship between the individual components required. SIAJUR: Projeto Web para controle de documentossvcutil2: svcutil2 generates Wcf client proxies from Wsdl2 documents.TemporalMemoryNetwork: TemporalMemoryNetwork is a research project exploring how dynamical systems can store and represent patterns that occur through time.WebDAV#: This project aims to implement WebDAV support for .NET, both for client software as well as software hosting their own WebDAV server. The project will start with the server portion. The project will be developed in C# 3.5 for .NET 3.5 and 4.0.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 17, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 17, 2012Popular ReleasesAutoSPEditor: AutoSPEditor Installer: Installs the current version of the AutoSPEditor using ClickOnce. Your application will be updated automatically.Javascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.6: Upgraded to the latest stable branch of v8 (/tags/3.9.18), and switched to using their scons build system. We no longer include v8 source code as part of this project's source code. Simultaneous multithreaded use of v8 now supported (v8 Isolates), although different contexts may not share objects or call each other. 64-bit .Net 4.0 DLL now included. (Download now includes x86 and x64 for both .Net 3.5 and .Net 4.0.)MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0.6: This release should be more stable there were a few bug fixes including the x64 issue as well as an error popping up when MyRouter started this was caused by a NULL valuePulse: Pulse Beta 4: This version is still in development but should include: Logging and error handling have been greatly improved. If you run into an error or Pulse crashes make sure to check the Log folder for a recently modified log file so you can report the details of the issue A bunch of new features for the Wallbase.cc provider. Cleaner separation between inputs, downloading and output. Input and downloading are fairly clean now but outputs are still mixed up in the mix which I'm trying to resolve ...Google Books Downloader for Windows: Google Books Downloader-2.0.0.0.: Google Books DownloaderFinestra Virtual Desktops: 2.5.4501: This is a very minor update release. Please see the information about the 2.5 and 2.5.4500 releases for more information on recent changes. This update did not even have an automatic update triggered for it. Adds error checking and reporting to all threads, not only those with message loopsAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.9.2: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.0 Release Candidate: Your feedback is welcome - and this is your last chance to get your fixes in for this version! Includes installer for both Feature Server extension and Desktop extension, enhanced functionality for the Desktop tools, and enhanced built-in Javascript Editor for the Feature Server component. This release candidate includes fixes to beta 4 that accommodate domain users for setting up the Server Component, and fixes for reporting/uploading references tracked in the revision table. See Code In-P...C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.6: 20 Issue trackers are closed and a lot of bugs too Localize view is now MVVM and delete is working. Added the unused flag (take care that it goes to true only when displaying screen elements) Backstage - new input/output format choice control for the conversion Backstage - Add display, behaviour and register file type options in the extended options dialog Explorer list view has been transformed to a custom control. New group header, colunms order and size are saved Single insta...Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 Consumer Prv: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Preview Release v1.2.1Minor updates to setup experience: Check for WebPI before install Dependency Check updated to support the following VS 11 and VS 2010 SKUs Ultimate, Premium, Professional and Express Certs Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Preview Release v1.2.0 Please download this for Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 functionality on Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The core features of the toolkit include:...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 3.0: ships with JSON Toolkit v3.0, offering parse speed up to 10 times of last version supports Facebook's new auth dialog supports new extend access token endpoint new example Page Tab app filter Graph Api connections using dates fixed bugs in Page Tab appsCODE Framework: 4.0.20312.0: This version includes significant improvements in the WPF system (and the WPF MVVM/MVC system). This includes new styles for Metro controls and layouts. Improved color handling. It also includes an improved theme/style swapping engine down to active (open) views. There also are various other enhancements and small fixes throughout the entire framework.ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.4: 3/12/2012 Jacob Slusser Added support for annotations. Issues Fixed with this Release Issue # Title 25012 25012 25018 25018 25023 25023 25014 25014 Visual Studio ALM Quick Reference Guidance: v3 - For Visual Studio 11: RELEASE README Welcome to the BETA release of the Quick Reference Guide preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Documentation ...AvalonDock: AvalonDock 2.0.0345: Welcome to early alpha release of AvalonDock 2.0 I've completely rewritten AvalonDock in order to take full advantage of the MVVM pattern. New version also boost a lot of new features: 1) Deep separation between model and layout. 2) Full WPF binding support thanks to unified logical tree between main docking manager, auto-hide windows and floating windows. 3) Support for Aero semi-maximized windows feature. 4) Support for multiple panes in the same floating windows. For a short list of new f...Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets: Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets 2.2.2: Changes Added Start Menu Item for Easy Startup Added Link to Getting Started Document Added Ability to Persist Subscription Data to Disk Fixed Get-Deployment to not throw on empty slot Simplified numerous default values for cmdlets Breaking Changes: -SubscriptionName is now mandatory in Set-Subscription. -DefaultStorageAccountName and -DefaultStorageAccountKey parameters were removed from Set-Subscription. Instead, when adding multiple accounts to a subscription, each one needs to be added ...IronPython: 2.7.2.1: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm happy to announce the final release IronPython 2.7.2. This release includes everything from IronPython 54498 and 62475 as well. Like all IronPython 2.7-series releases, .NET 4 is required to install it. Installing this release will replace any existing IronPython 2.7-series installation. Unlike previous releases, the assemblies for all supported platforms are included in the installer as well as the zip package, in the "Platforms" directory. IronPython 2...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.2.0.0: Breaking changes: When upgrade from previous versions, MUST reset the all the content type templates, otherwise the content manager might get a compile error. New features Integrate with Windows azure. See: http://wiki.kooboo.com/?wiki=Kooboo CMS on Azure Complete solution to deploy on load balance servers. See: http://wiki.kooboo.com/?wiki=Kooboo CMS load balance Update Jquery and Jquery ui to the lastest version(Jquery 1.71, Jquery UI 1.8.16). Tree style text content editing. See:h...Extensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx): Rxx 1.3: Please read the latest release notes for details about what's new. Related Work Items Content SummaryRxx provides the following features. See the Documentation for details. Many IObservable<T> extension methods and IEnumerable<T> extension methods. Many wrappers that convert asynchronous Framework Class Library APIs into observables. Many useful types such as ListSubject<T>, DictionarySubject<T>, CommandSubject, ViewModel, ObservableDynamicObject, Either<TLeft, TRight>, Maybe<T>, Scala...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.47: Properly output escaped characters in CSS identifiers throw an EOF error when parsing a CSS selector that doesn't end in a declaration block chased down a stack-overflow issue with really large JS sources. Needed to flatten out the AST tree for adjacent expression statements that the application merges into a single expression statement, or that already contain large, comma-separated expressions in the original source. fix issue #17569: tie together the -debug switch with the DEBUG defi...New ProjectsCOBOL Bubble Sort: The famous Bubble Sort algorithm using COBOLCross Site Media Dashboard (webpart) for SharePoint video content: View video content in easy to configure dashboard structure. Supports a vast range of video formatsDataObjects.Net Samples: DataObjects.Net SamplesDev Tracking Tool: Dev Tracking Tool is thought to help software developers keeping track of their activities in a fast way, and use these informations for later update of tasks in other informatic systems (i.e.: tracking tasks in TFS and/or other tracking tools).Governance Checklist - Create/manage your Governance Checklist: Governance Checklist - Create/manage your Governance Checklist. SharePoint Governance Checklist generated as a starting point however you can update to your own criteria. Visual Guages to show the status of your governance progresslibspotify.NET - a managed interop library for libspotify: libspotify.NET is a simple interop wrapper library for libspotify written in C#. It enables .NET developers to write applications that can browse, search, and stream digital music from the Spotify platform. This project is compatible with libspotify API version 10.1.16. Requires libspotify.dll, a Spotify premium account, and an application API key. More info on the libspotify API at http://developer.spotify.com/en/libspotify/overview/ Media.Net: All-In-One Media Player for Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.MisTutoriales: MisTutoriales Ejemplos de programación.mobile video: mobile videoMugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit makes it easier to develop Silverlight, WPF and WP7 applications using the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern. It is very easy to use. It combines the pattern of DI (dependency injection) and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel).Project SIMPLE Orca: SIMPLE makes it easier for non-programmers to create simple applications. You'll no longer have to learn an entire language in order to create that simple application you've been stressing over. S imple And I deal M acroed P rogramming L anguage For E aseRelational data Transfer Application: Relational data Transfer Application helps to move data scenarios from One relational database to other Relational database without moving entire tables. Basically this applciation moves a given data row along with its relational data to destination database. rGUI: rGUI is an open source .NET front-end for Robocopy written in C#. It is designed for users already familiar with the Robocopy command-line switches and what they do, but who want the command parameters presented in a visual way.S#: Spontaneous Sharp: A mix of very easy to use c# libraries, born out of spontaneous needs to simplify a large number of programming tasks in .NET C#.SDF - Smart Document Framework: Smart Document Framework offers an alternative to the FlowDocument which provides a simpler rendering engine and allows for better pagination.Shatong: Shatong SystemSPD 2007 Custom Activity Pause Until CheckOut = None: This activity can be added to the beginning of a SharePoint Designer 2007 workflow to pause the workflow until the item is no longer checked out (soft or hard checkout)Spontaneous XNA Library (SXL): Yet another XNA Library that has arisen from various spontaneous needs. Hopefully it can be as helpful to others as it has been to me.TeaFiles.Net - time series storage: TeaFiles.Net is an API for TeaFiles that makes it easy to store and exchange time series data between .Net programs and C++, Python, R and other applications. Written in C#. Find more details about the file specification, other APIs and tools at discretelogics.comTypePipe: TypePipe allows you to modify existing CLR types using a simple, expression-based API. Modifications from several tools and libraries (AOP, IoC etc.) can be combined. Types are generated via Reflection.Emit or user-defined back-ends.UCB_12_1: This is a research projectUCB_12_2: UCB_12_2UCB_12_3: UCB_12_3UCB_12_4: UCB_12_4UCB_12_Common: UCB_12_CommonVG Task Manager: task manager demo project created by Vivek Gupta.WP7 Map Control: Lightweight universal map control for Windows Phone 7xRM#: xRM# is focused on boosting productivity while developing JavaScript customizations for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. xRM# provided a platform to scribble code in C# and translating them to JavaScript snippet for xRM customizations. Developers can benefit from structural and coherent flow of using existing C# coding guidelines. Pseudo data types, IntelliSense and Code Documentation reduce code look-ups and increase productivity. xRM# also supports deploying generated scripts as minified ver...

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 01, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 01, 2011Popular ReleasesAgFx Windows Phone Application Data Caching Framework: AgFx November Update: This update is primarily a bug fix release, which provides a number of stability and performance enhancements to AgFx. Available as a NuGet package here. Release Notes Fix IsoStore exceptions during shutdown (Changelist 81729) Thread safety and sequencings issues (Changelists 78682,79252, 80707) Fix landscape layout issue in auth sample Fix async keyword collision Supporting overlapping/multiple notifications for Load requestsiTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.4.4322: Added German (unverified, apologies if incorrect) Properly source invariant resources with correct resIDs Replaced obsolete lyric providers with working providers Fix Pseudolater to correctly morph every third char Fix null reference in CatalogBaseDevpad: 4.6: Whats new for Devpad 4.6: New Recent Files New Run in Safari Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWindows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: Microsoft.Activities v1.8.8: Microsoft.Activities Overview How do I install Microsoft.Activities? Updates in this release9318Technical Analysis Engine for .NET: Technical Analysis Engine 1.25: What's new in the 1.25 release (2011-11-01): - Added Williams %R indicator - Added Moving Average Envelopes indicatorBF3Rcon.NET: BF3Rcon 3.0: This release is targeted for RCON documentation based on R3. Everything should be beta stable, but it's alpha because I haven't been able to fully test it. When a stable release is ready, a proper changelog will be kept. Important Edit: There's one method that will keep this from working in Mono. GeneratePasswordHash uses void HashAlgorithm.Dispose(), which isn't in Mono. This will have to be changed to Clear() in the next release. If anyone needs a Mono version of this immediately, you can...BoxWorld: BoxWorld_2011.10.30: BoxWorld - 8.0.1110.30 This is the initial release of BoxWorld. I'd recommend downloading the installer as it contains the compiled code and everything all nicely contained. By default, you end up with this directory structure: C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Data C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Interface C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Source In the root you have the compiled EXE files, one for the main release, one for the LITE release ...VidCoder: 1.2.1: Fixed a couple regressions: video encoder was blank in queue and crashes with the High Profile preset when opening the Settings window. Fixed problem with auto-update introduced in 1.2.0. If you have 1.2.0 you will need to update manually to get this.AssaultCube Reloaded: Release 2.3: THE RELEASE YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR! IT CAN NOW BE CONSIDERED STABLE Linux has Debian 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, download the Linux package. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for linux (source included) If you are using Windows and require the source code, download the source package!Koober: Koober - The Ebook Creator 0.2: The official release of Koober as Open source. Koober is a ebook creator for Windows, and Koob Reader is the reader.A Microblog API (SINA weibo.com open API in C#, .Net???????API): AMicroblogAPI v1.0: AMicroBlogAPI is a C# implementation, a strong-typed deep encapsulation, a easy-to-use .net wrapper of SINA microblog API v1.0. App developers no longer need to parse various HTTP responses -- all responses are parsed into strong types; No longer need to construt the request query strings -- just simply gives the values of parameters; No longer need to implement the OAuth -- a single call could logs the user on. In this release (AMicroblogAPI v1.0), all basic data APIs are implemented. For ...patterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Media Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Now the the SMinimum and SMaximum par...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngNew ProjectsarlTH: "Airport Link Thailand" Application for Windows Phone 7.1Audio Tags Editor For Excel: The purpose of the project is to create a tool to edit tags of audio files through the excel application. The program is an Excel add-in.AW Load Tester: AW Load Tester is a simple and easy to use website load tester that very closely mimics a regular users browsing session on your website. Many popular load tester only download HTML. AW Load Tester downloads all the related items on a page simultaneously. AzMan - Be Good Do Right !: The AzMan is a collection of reusable software components designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges. http://bbs.fengshupo.com/BestWayWP7UI: The User interface of best wat wp7 applicationCheckout Subsystem Optimizer: Checkout Subsystem OptimizerDBScripter - Library for scripting SQL Server database objects: This project is library that allows users to script SQL Server database objects. Library uses dynamic management views for extracting data about databases objects. This library could be used in various situations. The most interesting areas are comparing database objects and generation database documentation. For both cases examples have been prepared.Dependency Checker: Dependency Checker is a utility for verifying that a set of prerequisites is present on a machine. The set of dependencies is defined in a configuration file. For more information, see http://dependencychecker.codeplex.com/documentation DibTer: DibTer is a brand new CMS for ASP.NET Mainly features are NHibernate MVC JQuery HTML5Dynamics CRM Entity Based Stress Tool: Entity Based Stress Tool, is command line program that creates configurable server agents in order to stress a defined entity at a defined Message/Stage. This tool allows CRM Application Stressing, Plugin Stressing, and enlaborate an execution report.Edinger: Edinger is a simple text editor.FreeboxHDVideoPlayer: FreeboxHDVideoPlayer makes it easier for free.fr french ISP users to play and manage videos stored on the HDD of the Freebox HD. FreeboxHDVideoPlayer simplifie, pour les utilisateurs de free.fr, la lecture et la gestion des vidéos stockées sur le disque du boitier Freebox HD.guglex - google docs xtraz: my studying project for asp.net mvc 3. now displaying spreadsheet rows in card viewIP-Camera MJPEG HTTP Web-Server Emulator: Turns web-camera into IP-camera with mjpeg streaming and access it over network. Usage of i-Lids (Imagery Library for Intelligent Detection Systems) and other data for surveillance systems development. Sends WMV, folder with images, web-camera data over the wire.LIM: LIM is .net software for archive manage.Luminji.CorWeb: luminji's company web.Map Generator: Map Generator for your Civ/Col/Roguelike games in VB.NET.Microformat Parsers for .NET: Microformat's Parsers for .NET helps you to collect information you run into on the web, that is stored by means of microformats. It's written in C# 3.0.Mini Rx: Mini Rx provides LINQ like queries over events for C# and F# using extension methods, somewhat like the Reactive Extensions (Rx) but in a lightweight open source package with one non-strong named assembly.MVC Music Store by NNT: Demo Music Store Follow tut from Microsoft. Team Explorer VS 2010 .NET 4PHP MySQL Web Site Creator: PHP MySQL Web Site Creator helps you create a basic template for your web site using a UI form. I creates all PHP, CSS, HTML basic pages to connect to MySQL database.PQLRD: Paco KLk!Project Web And Application: Project MobileStore in ASP use ASP.NET MVC 3RoboZip: RoboZip combines MS Robocopy and Zip-functionality. Create a job and RoboZip will zip all files (from a list of filetypes) within a time span in the past. The zip file name can contain date and time values of the time period it covers. It's developed in C#. The zip component is the DotNetZip Library from http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com. The logging is done using Apache log4net from http://logging.apache.org/log4net. The idea here is not to only present the code, but also to document how the de...Scriptster Gearbox: Scriptster Gearbox is a full C# scripting system based on Scriptster (also on CodePlex). It is aimed at Visual Studio developers and power users who need to automate the sorts of things that DOS is generally good at, but which using C# can make more powerful and more familiar.Technical Analysis Engine for .NET: Technical Analysis Engine is a .NET based library for technical analysis. It is fast, free, easy to use and provides functionality for financial market analysis.ValidationDSL: A Fluent validation engine with ease to use and reusable around the multi-tenant applicationsWebFormsUtilities: WebFormsUtilities is a collection of tools that assist in using MVC/MVP functionality to webforms in an unobtrusive manner. This differs from a hybrid MVC/WebForms page in that you can use methods like UpdateModel() or TryValidateModel() in a WebForms Page class.Wen - WPF 3D Navigator: Control the camera and the lights of a WPF 3D application without any code modification.WindStudios: WindStudiosWrite My Expect Statement: Have Rhino Mocks automatically generate your expect() and return() statements for you.zion xtraz: some basic helpful classes for use in every project

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• MonologFX: FLOSS JavaFX Dialogs for the Taking

  - by HecklerMark

  Some time back, I was searching for basic dialog functionality within JavaFX and came up empty. After finding a decent open-source offering on GitHub that almost fit the bill, I began using it...and immediately began thinking of ways to "do it differently."  :-)  Having a weekend to kill, I ended up creating DialogFX and releasing it on GitHub (hecklerm/DialogFX) for anyone who might find it useful. Shortly thereafter, it was incorporated into JFXtras (jfxtras.org) as well. Today I'm sharing a different, more flexible and capable JavaFX dialog called MonologFX that I've been developing and refining over the past few months. The summary of its progression thus far is pretty well captured in the README.md file I posted with the project on GitHub: After creating the DialogFX library for JavaFX, I received several suggestions and requests for additional or different functionality, some of which ran counter to the interfaces and/or intent of the DialogFX "way of doing things". Great ideas, but not completely compatible with the existing functionality. Wanting to incorporate these capabilities, I started over...incorporating some parts of DialogFX into the new MonologFX, as I called it, but taking it in a different direction when it seemed sensible to do so. In the meantime, the OpenJFX team has released dialog code that will be refined and eventually incorporated into JavaFX and OpenJFX. Rather than just scrap the MonologFX code or hoard it, I'm releasing it here on GitHub with the hope that someone may find it useful, interesting, or entertaining. You may never need it, but regardless, MonologFX is there for the taking. Things of Note So, what are some features of MonologFX? Four kinds of dialog boxes: ACCEPT (check mark icon), ERROR (red 'x'), INFO (blue "i"), and QUESTION (blue question mark) Button alignment configurable by developer: LEFT, RIGHT, or CENTER Skins/stylesheets support Shortcut key/mnemonics support (Alt-<key>) Ability to designate default (RETURN-key) and cancel (ESCAPE-key) buttons Built-in button types and labels for OK, CANCEL, ABORT, RETRY, IGNORE, YES, and NO Custom button types: CUSTOM1, CUSTOM2, CUSTOM3 Internationalization (i18n) built in. Currently, files are provided for English/US and Spanish/Spain locales; please share others and I'll add them! Icon support for your buttons, with or without text labels Fully Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), with latest source code & .jar always available at GitHub Quick Usage Overview Having an intense distaste for rough edges and gears flying when things break (!), I've tried to provide defaults for everything and "fail-safes" to avoid messy outcomes if some property isn't specified, etc. This also feeds the goal of making MonologFX as easy to use as possible, while retaining the library's full flexibility. Or at least that's the plan.  :-) You can hand-assemble your buttons and dialogs, but I've also included Builder classes to help move that along as well. Here are a couple examples:         MonologFXButton mlb = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .defaultButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_apply.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.OK)                .build();         MonologFXButton mlb2 = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .cancelButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_cancel.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.CANCEL)                .build();         MonologFX mono = MonologFXBuilder.create()                .modal(true)                .message("Welcome to MonologFX! Please feel free to try it out and share your thoughts.")                .titleText("Important Announcement")                .button(mlb)                .button(mlb2)                .buttonAlignment(MonologFX.ButtonAlignment.CENTER)                .build();         MonologFXButton.Type retval = mono.showDialog();         MonologFXButton mlb = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .defaultButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_apply.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.YES)                .build();         MonologFXButton mlb2 = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .cancelButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_cancel.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.NO)                .build();         MonologFX mono = MonologFXBuilder.create()                .modal(true)                .type(MonologFX.Type.QUESTION)                .message("Welcome to MonologFX! Does this look like it might be useful?")                .titleText("Important Announcement")                .button(mlb)                .button(mlb2)                .buttonAlignment(MonologFX.ButtonAlignment.RIGHT)                .build(); Extra Credit Thanks to everyone who offered ideas for improvement and/or extension to the functionality contained within DialogFX. The JFXtras team welcomed it into the fold, and while I doubt there will be a need to include MonologFX in JFXtras, team members Gerrit Grunwald & Jose Peredas Llamas volunteered templates and i18n expertise to make MonologFX what it is. Thanks for the push, guys! Where to Get (Git!) It If you'd like to check it out, point your browser to the MonologFX repository on GitHub. Full source code is there, along with the current .jar file. Please give it a try and share your thoughts! I'd love to hear from you. All the best,Mark

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• How to Run Low-Cost Minecraft on a Raspberry Pi for Block Building on the Cheap

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  We’ve shown you how to run your own blocktastic personal Minecraft server on a Windows/OSX box, but what if you crave something lighter weight, more energy efficient, and always ready for your friends? Read on as we turn a tiny Raspberry Pi machine into a low-cost Minecraft server you can leave on 24/7 for around a penny a day. Why Do I Want to Do This? There’s two aspects to this tutorial, running your own Minecraft server and specifically running that Minecraft server on a Raspberry Pi. Why would you want to run your own Minecraft server? It’s a really great way to extend and build upon the Minecraft play experience. You can leave the server running when you’re not playing so friends and family can join and continue building your world. You can mess around with game variables and introduce mods in a way that isn’t possible when you’re playing the stand-alone game. It also gives you the kind of control over your multiplayer experience that using public servers doesn’t, without incurring the cost of hosting a private server on a remote host. While running a Minecraft server on its own is appealing enough to a dedicated Minecraft fan, running it on the Raspberry Pi is even more appealing. The tiny little Pi uses so little resources that you can leave your Minecraft server running 24/7 for a couple bucks a year. Aside from the initial cost outlay of the Pi, an SD card, and a little bit of time setting it up, you’ll have an always-on Minecraft server at a monthly cost of around one gumball. What Do I Need? For this tutorial you’ll need a mix of hardware and software tools; aside from the actual Raspberry Pi and SD card, everything is free. 1 Raspberry Pi (preferably a 512MB model) 1 4GB+ SD card This tutorial assumes that you have already familiarized yourself with the Raspberry Pi and have installed a copy of the Debian-derivative Raspbian on the device. If you have not got your Pi up and running yet, don’t worry! Check out our guide, The HTG Guide to Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, to get up to speed. Optimizing Raspbian for the Minecraft Server Unlike other builds we’ve shared where you can layer multiple projects over one another (e.g. the Pi is more than powerful enough to serve as a weather/email indicator and a Google Cloud Print server at the same time) running a Minecraft server is a pretty intense operation for the little Pi and we’d strongly recommend dedicating the entire Pi to the process. Minecraft seems like a simple game, with all its blocky-ness and what not, but it’s actually a pretty complex game beneath the simple skin and required a lot of processing power. As such, we’re going to tweak the configuration file and other settings to optimize Rasbian for the job. The first thing you’ll need to do is dig into the Raspi-Config application to make a few minor changes. If you’re installing Raspbian fresh, wait for the last step (which is the Raspi-Config), if you already installed it, head to the terminal and type in “sudo raspi-config” to launch it again. One of the first and most important things we need to attend to is cranking up the overclock setting. We need all the power we can get to make our Minecraft experience enjoyable. In Raspi-Config, select option number 7 “Overclock”. Be prepared for some stern warnings about overclocking, but rest easy knowing that overclocking is directly supported by the Raspberry Pi foundation and has been included in the configuration options since late 2012. Once you’re in the actual selection screen, select “Turbo 1000MhHz”. Again, you’ll be warned that the degree of overclocking you’ve selected carries risks (specifically, potential corruption of the SD card, but no risk of actual hardware damage). Click OK and wait for the device to reset. Next, make sure you’re set to boot to the command prompt, not the desktop. Select number 3 “Enable Boot to Desktop/Scratch”  and make sure “Console Text console” is selected. Back at the Raspi-Config menu, select number 8 “Advanced Options’. There are two critical changes we need to make in here and one option change. First, the critical changes. Select A3 “Memory Split”: Change the amount of memory available to the GPU to 16MB (down from the default 64MB). Our Minecraft server is going to ruin in a GUI-less environment; there’s no reason to allocate any more than the bare minimum to the GPU. After selecting the GPU memory, you’ll be returned to the main menu. Select “Advanced Options” again and then select A4 “SSH”. Within the sub-menu, enable SSH. There is very little reason to keep this Pi connected to a monitor and keyboard, by enabling SSH we can remotely access the machine from anywhere on the network. Finally (and optionally) return again to the “Advanced Options” menu and select A2 “Hostname”. Here you can change your hostname from “raspberrypi” to a more fitting Minecraft name. We opted for the highly creative hostname “minecraft”, but feel free to spice it up a bit with whatever you feel like: creepertown, minecraft4life, or miner-box are all great minecraft server names. That’s it for the Raspbian configuration tab down to the bottom of the main screen and select “Finish” to reboot. After rebooting you can now SSH into your terminal, or continue working from the keyboard hooked up to your Pi (we strongly recommend switching over to SSH as it allows you to easily cut and paste the commands). If you’ve never used SSH before, check out how to use PuTTY with your Pi here. Installing Java on the Pi The Minecraft server runs on Java, so the first thing we need to do on our freshly configured Pi is install it. Log into your Pi via SSH and then, at the command prompt, enter the following command to make a directory for the installation: sudo mkdir /java/ Now we need to download the newest version of Java. At the time of this publication the newest release is the OCT 2013 update and the link/filename we use will reflect that. Please check for a more current version of the Linux ARMv6/7 Java release on the Java download page and update the link/filename accordingly when following our instructions. At the command prompt, enter the following command: sudo wget --no-check-certificate http://www.java.net/download/jdk8/archive/b111/binaries/jdk-8-ea-b111-linux-arm-vfp-hflt-09_oct_2013.tar.gz Once the download has finished successfully, enter the following command: sudo tar zxvf jdk-8-ea-b111-linux-arm-vfp-hflt-09_oct_2013.tar.gz -C /opt/ Fun fact: the /opt/ directory name scheme is a remnant of early Unix design wherein the /opt/ directory was for “optional” software installed after the main operating system; it was the /Program Files/ of the Unix world. After the file has finished extracting, enter: sudo /opt/jdk1.8.0/bin/java -version This command will return the version number of your new Java installation like so: java version "1.8.0-ea" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0-ea-b111) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 25.0-b53, mixed mode) If you don’t see the above printout (or a variation thereof if you’re using a newer version of Java), try to extract the archive again. If you do see the readout, enter the following command to tidy up after yourself: sudo rm jdk-8-ea-b111-linux-arm-vfp-hflt-09_oct_2013.tar.gz At this point Java is installed and we’re ready to move onto installing our Minecraft server! Installing and Configuring the Minecraft Server Now that we have a foundation for our Minecraft server, it’s time to install the part that matter. We’ll be using SpigotMC a lightweight and stable Minecraft server build that works wonderfully on the Pi. First, grab a copy of the the code with the following command: sudo wget http://ci.md-5.net/job/Spigot/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/Spigot-Server/target/spigot.jar This link should remain stable over time, as it points directly to the most current stable release of Spigot, but if you have any issues you can always reference the SpigotMC download page here. After the download finishes successfully, enter the following command: sudo /opt/jdk1.8.0/bin/java -Xms256M -Xmx496M -jar /home/pi/spigot.jar nogui Note: if you’re running the command on a 256MB Pi change the 256 and 496 in the above command to 128 and 256, respectively. Your server will launch and a flurry of on-screen activity will follow. Be prepared to wait around 3-6 minutes or so for the process of setting up the server and generating the map to finish. Future startups will take much less time, around 20-30 seconds. Note: If at any point during the configuration or play process things get really weird (e.g. your new Minecraft server freaks out and starts spawning you in the Nether and killing you instantly), use the “stop” command at the command prompt to gracefully shutdown the server and let you restart and troubleshoot it. After the process has finished, head over to the computer you normally play Minecraft on, fire it up, and click on Multiplayer. You should see your server: If your world doesn’t popup immediately during the network scan, hit the Add button and manually enter the address of your Pi. Once you connect to the server, you’ll see the status change in the server status window: According to the server, we’re in game. According to the actual Minecraft app, we’re also in game but it’s the middle of the night in survival mode: Boo! Spawning in the dead of night, weaponless and without shelter is no way to start things. No worries though, we need to do some more configuration; no time to sit around and get shot at by skeletons. Besides, if you try and play it without some configuration tweaks first, you’ll likely find it quite unstable. We’re just here to confirm the server is up, running, and accepting incoming connections. Once we’ve confirmed the server is running and connectable (albeit not very playable yet), it’s time to shut down the server. Via the server console, enter the command “stop” to shut everything down. When you’re returned to the command prompt, enter the following command: sudo nano server.properties When the configuration file opens up, make the following changes (or just cut and paste our config file minus the first two lines with the name and date stamp): #Minecraft server properties #Thu Oct 17 22:53:51 UTC 2013 generator-settings= #Default is true, toggle to false allow-nether=false level-name=world enable-query=false allow-flight=false server-port=25565 level-type=DEFAULT enable-rcon=false force-gamemode=false level-seed= server-ip= max-build-height=256 spawn-npcs=true white-list=false spawn-animals=true texture-pack= snooper-enabled=true hardcore=false online-mode=true pvp=true difficulty=1 player-idle-timeout=0 gamemode=0 #Default 20; you only need to lower this if you're running #a public server and worried about loads. max-players=20 spawn-monsters=true #Default is 10, 3-5 ideal for Pi view-distance=5 generate-structures=true spawn-protection=16 motd=A Minecraft Server In the server status window, seen through your SSH connection to the pi, enter the following command to give yourself operator status on your Minecraft server (so that you can use more powerful commands in game, without always returning to the server status window). op [your minecraft nickname] At this point things are looking better but we still have a little tweaking to do before the server is really enjoyable. To that end, let’s install some plugins. The first plugin, and the one you should install above all others, is NoSpawnChunks. To install the plugin, first visit the NoSpawnChunks webpage and grab the download link for the most current version. As of this writing the current release is v0.3. Back at the command prompt (the command prompt of your Pi, not the server console–if your server is still active shut it down) enter the following commands: cd /home/pi/plugins sudo wget http://dev.bukkit.org/media/files/586/974/NoSpawnChunks.jar Next, visit the ClearLag plugin page, and grab the latest link (as of this tutorial, it’s v2.6.0). Enter the following at the command prompt: sudo wget http://dev.bukkit.org/media/files/743/213/Clearlag.jar Because the files aren’t compressed in a .ZIP or similar container, that’s all there is to it: the plugins are parked in the plugin directory. (Remember this for future plugin downloads, the file needs to be whateverplugin.jar, so if it’s compressed you need to uncompress it in the plugin directory.) Resart the server: sudo /opt/jdk1.8.0/bin/java -Xms256M -Xmx496M -jar /home/pi/spigot.jar nogui Be prepared for a slightly longer startup time (closer to the 3-6 minutes and much longer than the 30 seconds you just experienced) as the plugins affect the world map and need a minute to massage everything. After the spawn process finishes, type the following at the server console: plugins This lists all the plugins currently active on the server. You should see something like this: If the plugins aren’t loaded, you may need to stop and restart the server. After confirming your plugins are loaded, go ahead and join the game. You should notice significantly snappier play. In addition, you’ll get occasional messages from the plugins indicating they are active, as seen below: At this point Java is installed, the server is installed, and we’ve tweaked our settings for for the Pi.  It’s time to start building with friends!     

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