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• Metro: Grouping Items in a ListView Control

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The purpose of this blog entry is to explain how you can group list items when displaying the items in a WinJS ListView control. In particular, you learn how to group a list of products by product category. Displaying a grouped list of items in a ListView control requires completing the following steps: Create a Grouped data source from a List data source Create a Grouped Header Template Declare the ListView control so it groups the list items Creating the Grouped Data Source Normally, you bind a ListView control to a WinJS.Binding.List object. If you want to render list items in groups, then you need to bind the ListView to a grouped data source instead. The following code – contained in a file named products.js — illustrates how you can create a standard WinJS.Binding.List object from a JavaScript array and then return a grouped data source from the WinJS.Binding.List object by calling its createGrouped() method: (function () { "use strict"; // Create List data source var products = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { name: "Milk", price: 2.44, category: "Beverages" }, { name: "Oranges", price: 1.99, category: "Fruit" }, { name: "Wine", price: 8.55, category: "Beverages" }, { name: "Apples", price: 2.44, category: "Fruit" }, { name: "Steak", price: 1.99, category: "Other" }, { name: "Eggs", price: 2.44, category: "Other" }, { name: "Mushrooms", price: 1.99, category: "Other" }, { name: "Yogurt", price: 2.44, category: "Other" }, { name: "Soup", price: 1.99, category: "Other" }, { name: "Cereal", price: 2.44, category: "Other" }, { name: "Pepsi", price: 1.99, category: "Beverages" } ]); // Create grouped data source var groupedProducts = products.createGrouped( function (dataItem) { return dataItem.category; }, function (dataItem) { return { title: dataItem.category }; }, function (group1, group2) { return group1.charCodeAt(0) - group2.charCodeAt(0); } ); // Expose the grouped data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { products: groupedProducts }); })(); Notice that the createGrouped() method requires three functions as arguments: groupKey – This function associates each list item with a group. The function accepts a data item and returns a key which represents a group. In the code above, we return the value of the category property for each product. groupData – This function returns the data item displayed by the group header template. For example, in the code above, the function returns a title for the group which is displayed in the group header template. groupSorter – This function determines the order in which the groups are displayed. The code above displays the groups in alphabetical order: Beverages, Fruit, Other. Creating the Group Header Template Whenever you create a ListView control, you need to create an item template which you use to control how each list item is rendered. When grouping items in a ListView control, you also need to create a group header template. The group header template is used to render the header for each group of list items. Here’s the markup for both the item template and the group header template: <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <div id="productGroupHeaderTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="productGroupHeader"> <h1 data-win-bind="innerText: title"></h1> </div> </div> You should declare the two templates in the same file as you declare the ListView control – for example, the default.html file. Declaring the ListView Control The final step is to declare the ListView control. Here’s the required markup: <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate'), groupDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.groups.dataSource, groupHeaderTemplate:select('#productGroupHeaderTemplate'), layout: {type: WinJS.UI.GridLayout} }"> </div> In the markup above, six properties of the ListView control are set when the control is declared. First the itemDataSource and itemTemplate are specified. Nothing new here. Next, the group data source and group header template are specified. Notice that the group data source is represented by the ListViewDemos.products.groups.dataSource property of the grouped data source. Finally, notice that the layout of the ListView is changed to Grid Layout. You are required to use Grid Layout (instead of the default List Layout) when displaying grouped items in a ListView. Here’s the entire contents of the default.html page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewDemos</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- ListViewDemos references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script src="/js/products.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .product { width: 200px; height: 100px; border: white solid 1px; font-size: x-large; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <div id="productGroupHeaderTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="productGroupHeader"> <h1 data-win-bind="innerText: title"></h1> </div> </div> <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate'), groupDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.groups.dataSource, groupHeaderTemplate:select('#productGroupHeaderTemplate'), layout: {type: WinJS.UI.GridLayout} }"> </div> </body> </html> Notice that the default.html page includes a reference to the products.js file: <script src=”/js/products.js” type=”text/javascript”></script> The default.html page also contains the declarations of the item template, group header template, and ListView control. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to explain how you can group items in a ListView control. You learned how to create a grouped data source, a group header template, and declare a ListView so that it groups its list items.

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• How accurate is "Business logic should be in a service, not in a model"?

  - by Jeroen Vannevel

  Situation Earlier this evening I gave an answer to a question on StackOverflow. The question: Editing of an existing object should be done in repository layer or in service? For example if I have a User that has debt. I want to change his debt. Should I do it in UserRepository or in service for example BuyingService by getting an object, editing it and saving it ? My answer: You should leave the responsibility of mutating an object to that same object and use the repository to retrieve this object. Example situation: class User { private int debt; // debt in cents private string name; // getters public void makePayment(int cents){ debt -= cents; } } class UserRepository { public User GetUserByName(string name){ // Get appropriate user from database } } A comment I received: Business logic should really be in a service. Not in a model. What does the internet say? So, this got me searching since I've never really (consciously) used a service layer. I started reading up on the Service Layer pattern and the Unit Of Work pattern but so far I can't say I'm convinced a service layer has to be used. Take for example this article by Martin Fowler on the anti-pattern of an Anemic Domain Model: There are objects, many named after the nouns in the domain space, and these objects are connected with the rich relationships and structure that true domain models have. The catch comes when you look at the behavior, and you realize that there is hardly any behavior on these objects, making them little more than bags of getters and setters. Indeed often these models come with design rules that say that you are not to put any domain logic in the the domain objects. Instead there are a set of service objects which capture all the domain logic. These services live on top of the domain model and use the domain model for data. (...) The logic that should be in a domain object is domain logic - validations, calculations, business rules - whatever you like to call it. To me, this seemed exactly what the situation was about: I advocated the manipulation of an object's data by introducing methods inside that class that do just that. However I realize that this should be a given either way, and it probably has more to do with how these methods are invoked (using a repository). I also had the feeling that in that article (see below), a Service Layer is more considered as a façade that delegates work to the underlying model, than an actual work-intensive layer. Application Layer [his name for Service Layer]: Defines the jobs the software is supposed to do and directs the expressive domain objects to work out problems. The tasks this layer is responsible for are meaningful to the business or necessary for interaction with the application layers of other systems. This layer is kept thin. It does not contain business rules or knowledge, but only coordinates tasks and delegates work to collaborations of domain objects in the next layer down. It does not have state reflecting the business situation, but it can have state that reflects the progress of a task for the user or the program. Which is reinforced here: Service interfaces. Services expose a service interface to which all inbound messages are sent. You can think of a service interface as a façade that exposes the business logic implemented in the application (typically, logic in the business layer) to potential consumers. And here: The service layer should be devoid of any application or business logic and should focus primarily on a few concerns. It should wrap Business Layer calls, translate your Domain in a common language that your clients can understand, and handle the communication medium between server and requesting client. This is a serious contrast to other resources that talk about the Service Layer: The service layer should consist of classes with methods that are units of work with actions that belong in the same transaction. Or the second answer to a question I've already linked: At some point, your application will want some business logic. Also, you might want to validate the input to make sure that there isn't something evil or nonperforming being requested. This logic belongs in your service layer. "Solution"? Following the guidelines in this answer, I came up with the following approach that uses a Service Layer: class UserController : Controller { private UserService _userService; public UserController(UserService userService){ _userService = userService; } public ActionResult MakeHimPay(string username, int amount) { _userService.MakeHimPay(username, amount); return RedirectToAction("ShowUserOverview"); } public ActionResult ShowUserOverview() { return View(); } } class UserService { private IUserRepository _userRepository; public UserService(IUserRepository userRepository) { _userRepository = userRepository; } public void MakeHimPay(username, amount) { _userRepository.GetUserByName(username).makePayment(amount); } } class UserRepository { public User GetUserByName(string name){ // Get appropriate user from database } } class User { private int debt; // debt in cents private string name; // getters public void makePayment(int cents){ debt -= cents; } } Conclusion All together not much has changed here: code from the controller has moved to the service layer (which is a good thing, so there is an upside to this approach). However this doesn't look like it had anything to do with my original answer. I realize design patterns are guidelines, not rules set in stone to be implemented whenever possible. Yet I have not found a definitive explanation of the service layer and how it should be regarded. Is it a means to simply extract logic from the controller and put it inside a service instead? Is it supposed to form a contract between the controller and the domain? Should there be a layer between the domain and the service layer? And, last but not least: following the original comment Business logic should really be in a service. Not in a model. Is this correct? How would I introduce my business logic in a service instead of the model?

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• Merge Records in Session bean by using ADF Drag/Drop

  - by shantala.sankeshwar

  This article describes how to merge multiple selected records in Session Bean using ADF drag & drop feature. Below described is simple use case that shows how exactly this can be achieved. Here we will have table & user input field.Table shows  EMP records & user input field accepts Salary.When we drag & drop multiple records on user input field,the selected records get updated with the new Salary provided. Steps: Let us suppose that we have created Java EE Web Application with Entities from Emp table.Then create EJB Session Bean & generate Data control for the same. Write a simple code in sessionEJBBean & expose this method to local interface :  public void updateEmprecords(List empList, Object sal) {       Emp emp = null;       for (int i = 0; i < empList.size(); i++)       {        emp = em.find(Emp.class, empList.get(i));         emp.setSal((BigDecimal)sal);       }      em.merge(emp);   } Now let us create updateEmpRecords.jspx page in viewController project & Drop empFindAll object as ADF Table Define custom SelectionListener method for the table :   public void selectionListener(SelectionEvent selectionEvent)     {     // This method gets the Empno of the selected record & stores in the list object      UIXTable table = (UIXTable)selectionEvent.getComponent();      FacesCtrlHierNodeBinding fcr      =(FacesCtrlHierNodeBinding)table.getSelectedRowData();      Number empNo = (Number)fcr.getAttribute("empno") ;      this.getSelectedRowsList().add(empNo);     }Set table's selectedRowKeys to #{bindings.empFindAll.collectionModel.selectedRow}"Drop inputText on the same jspx page that accepts Salary .Now we would like to drag records from the above table & drop that on the inputtext field.This feature can be achieved by inserting dragSource operation inside the table & dropTraget operation inside the inputText:<af:dragSource discriminant="tab"/> //Insert this inside the table<af:inputText label="Enter Salary" id="it13" autoSubmit="true"       binding="# {test.deptValue}">       <af:dropTarget dropListener="#{test.handleTableDrop}">       <af:dataFlavor        flavorClass="org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.model.RowKeySet"    discriminant="tab"/>       </af:dropTarget>       <af:convertNumber/> </af:inputText> In the above code when the user drags & drops multiple records on inputText,the dropListener method gets called.Goto the respective page definition file & create updateEmprecords method action& execute action dropListener method code:        public DnDAction handleTableDrop(DropEvent dropEvent)        {          //Below code gets the updateEmprecords method,passes parameters & executes method            DataFlavor<RowKeySet> df = DataFlavor.getDataFlavor(RowKeySet.class);            RowKeySet droppedKeySet = dropEvent.getTransferable().getData(df);            if (droppedKeySet != null && droppedKeySet.size() > 0)           {                  DCBindingContainer bindings =                  (DCBindingContainer)BindingContext.getCurrent().getCurrentBindingsEntry();                  OperationBinding updateEmp;                  updateEmp= bindings.getOperationBinding("updateEmprecords");                  updateEmp.getParamsMap().put("sal",                  this.getDeptValue().getAttributes().get("value"));                            updateEmp.getParamsMap().put("empList", this.getSelectedRowsList());                  updateEmp.execute(); //Below code performs execute operation to refresh the updated records                 OperationBinding executeBinding;                 executeBinding= bindings.getOperationBinding("Execute");                 executeBinding.execute(); AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addPartialTarget(dropEvent.getDragComponent());                this.getSelectedRowsList().clear();          }                 return DnDAction.NONE;        }Run updateEmpRecords.jspx page & enter any Salary say '5000'.Select multiple records in table & drop these selected records on the inputText Salary. Note that all the selected records salary value gets updated to 5000.Technorati Tags: ADF Drag and drop,EJB Session bean,ADF table,inputText,DropEvent  

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• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario   Conventional Structures   Columnstore   Δ SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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• How-to delete a tree node using the context menu

  - by frank.nimphius

  Hierarchical trees in Oracle ADF make use of View Accessors, which means that only the top level node needs to be exposed as a View Object instance on the ADF Business Components Data Model. This also means that only the top level node has a representation in the PageDef file as a tree binding and iterator binding reference. Detail nodes are accessed through tree rule definitions that use the accessor mentioned above (or nested collections in the case of POJO or EJB business services). The tree component is configured for single node selection, which however can be declaratively changed for users to press the ctrl key and selecting multiple nodes. In the following, I explain how to create a context menu on the tree for users to delete the selected tree nodes. For this, the context menu item will access a managed bean, which then determines the selected node(s), the internal ADF node bindings and the rows they represent. As mentioned, the ADF Business Components Data Model only needs to expose the top level node data sources, which in this example is an instance of the Locations View Object. For the tree to work, you need to have associations defined between entities, which usually is done for you by Oracle JDeveloper if the database tables have foreign keys defined Note: As a general hint of best practices and to simplify your life: Make sure your database schema is well defined and designed before starting your development project. Don't treat the database as something organic that grows and changes with the requirements as you proceed in your project. Business service refactoring in response to database changes is possible, but should be treated as an exception, not the rule. Good database design is a necessity – even for application developers – and nothing evil. To create the tree component, expand the Data Controls panel and drag the View Object collection to the view. From the context menu, select the tree component entry and continue with defining the tree rules that make up the hierarchical structure. As you see, when pressing the green plus icon  in the Edit Tree Binding  dialog, the data structure, Locations -  Departments – Employees in my sample, shows without you having created a View Object instance for each of the nodes in the ADF Business Components Data Model. After you configured the tree structure in the Edit Tree Binding dialog, you press OK and the tree is created. Select the tree in the page editor and open the Structure Window (ctrl+shift+S). In the Structure window, expand the tree node to access the conextMenu facet. Use the right mouse button to insert a Popup  into the facet. Repeat the same steps to insert a Menu and a Menu Item into the Popup you created. The Menu item text should be changed to something meaningful like "Delete". Note that the custom menu item later is added to the context menu together with the default context menu options like expand and expand all. To define the action that is executed when the menu item is clicked on, you select the Action Listener property in the Property Inspector and click the arrow icon followed by the Edit menu option. Create or select a managed bean and define a method name for the action handler. Next, select the tree component and browse to its binding property in the Property Inspector. Again, use the arrow icon | Edit option to create a component binding in the same managed bean that has the action listener defined. The tree handle is used in the action listener code, which is shown below: public void onTreeNodeDelete(ActionEvent actionEvent) {   //access the tree from the JSF component reference created   //using the af:tree "binding" property. The "binding" property   //creates a pair of set/get methods to access the RichTree instance   RichTree tree = this.getTreeHandler();   //get the list of selected row keys   RowKeySet rks = tree.getSelectedRowKeys();   //access the iterator to loop over selected nodes   Iterator rksIterator = rks.iterator();          //The CollectionModel represents the tree model and is   //accessed from the tree "value" property   CollectionModel model = (CollectionModel) tree.getValue();   //The CollectionModel is a wrapper for the ADF tree binding   //class, which is JUCtrlHierBinding   JUCtrlHierBinding treeBinding =                  (JUCtrlHierBinding) model.getWrappedData();          //loop over the selected nodes and delete the rows they   //represent   while(rksIterator.hasNext()){     List nodeKey = (List) rksIterator.next();     //find the ADF node binding using the node key     JUCtrlHierNodeBinding node =                       treeBinding.findNodeByKeyPath(nodeKey);     //delete the row.     Row rw = node.getRow();       rw.remove();   }          //only refresh the tree if tree nodes have been selected   if(rks.size() > 0){     AdfFacesContext adfFacesContext =                          AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance();     adfFacesContext.addPartialTarget(tree);   } } Note: To enable multi node selection for a tree, select the tree and change the row selection setting from "single" to "multiple". Note: a fully pictured version of this post will become available at the end of the month in a PDF summary on ADF Code Corner : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/learnmore/index-101235.html 

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)

  - by mortezam

  In the previous blog post you saw that there are three different approaches to representing an inheritance hierarchy and I explained Table per Hierarchy (TPH) as the default mapping strategy in EF Code First. We argued that the disadvantages of TPH may be too serious for our design since it results in denormalized schemas that can become a major burden in the long run. In today’s blog post we are going to learn about Table per Type (TPT) as another inheritance mapping strategy and we'll see that TPT doesn’t expose us to this problem. Table per Type (TPT)Table per Type is about representing inheritance relationships as relational foreign key associations. Every class/subclass that declares persistent properties—including abstract classes—has its own table. The table for subclasses contains columns only for each noninherited property (each property declared by the subclass itself) along with a primary key that is also a foreign key of the base class table. This approach is shown in the following figure: For example, if an instance of the CreditCard subclass is made persistent, the values of properties declared by the BillingDetail base class are persisted to a new row of the BillingDetails table. Only the values of properties declared by the subclass (i.e. CreditCard) are persisted to a new row of the CreditCards table. The two rows are linked together by their shared primary key value. Later, the subclass instance may be retrieved from the database by joining the subclass table with the base class table. TPT Advantages The primary advantage of this strategy is that the SQL schema is normalized. In addition, schema evolution is straightforward (modifying the base class or adding a new subclass is just a matter of modify/add one table). Integrity constraint definition are also straightforward (note how CardType in CreditCards table is now a non-nullable column). Another much more important advantage is the ability to handle polymorphic associations (a polymorphic association is an association to a base class, hence to all classes in the hierarchy with dynamic resolution of the concrete class at runtime). A polymorphic association to a particular subclass may be represented as a foreign key referencing the table of that particular subclass. Implement TPT in EF Code First We can create a TPT mapping simply by placing Table attribute on the subclasses to specify the mapped table name (Table attribute is a new data annotation and has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5): public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } [Table("BankAccounts")] public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } } [Table("CreditCards")] public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } } public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; } } If you prefer fluent API, then you can create a TPT mapping by using ToTable() method: protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {     modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().ToTable("BankAccounts");     modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().ToTable("CreditCards"); } Generated SQL For QueriesLet’s take an example of a simple non-polymorphic query that returns a list of all the BankAccounts: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails.OfType<BankAccount>() select b; Executing this query (by invoking ToList() method) results in the following SQL statements being sent to the database (on the bottom, you can also see the result of executing the generated query in SQL Server Management Studio): Now, let’s take an example of a very simple polymorphic query that requests all the BillingDetails which includes both BankAccount and CreditCard types: projects some properties out of the base class BillingDetail, without querying for anything from any of the subclasses: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails             select new { b.BillingDetailId, b.Number, b.Owner }; -- var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; This LINQ query seems even more simple than the previous one but the resulting SQL query is not as simple as you might expect: -- As you can see, EF Code First relies on an INNER JOIN to detect the existence (or absence) of rows in the subclass tables CreditCards and BankAccounts so it can determine the concrete subclass for a particular row of the BillingDetails table. Also the SQL CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is just to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type) TPT ConsiderationsEven though this mapping strategy is deceptively simple, the experience shows that performance can be unacceptable for complex class hierarchies because queries always require a join across many tables. In addition, this mapping strategy is more difficult to implement by hand— even ad-hoc reporting is more complex. This is an important consideration if you plan to use handwritten SQL in your application (For ad hoc reporting, database views provide a way to offset the complexity of the TPT strategy. A view may be used to transform the table-per-type model into the much simpler table-per-hierarchy model.) SummaryIn this post we learned about Table per Type as the second inheritance mapping in our series. So far, the strategies we’ve discussed require extra consideration with regard to the SQL schema (e.g. in TPT, foreign keys are needed). This situation changes with the Table per Concrete Type (TPC) that we will discuss in the next post. References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: Blue; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } p.MsoNormal { margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: "Calibri" , "sans-serif"; }

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• Spacewalk 2.0 provided to manage Oracle Linux systems

  - by wcoekaer

  Oracle Linux customers have a few options to manage and provision their servers. We provide a license to use Oracle Enterprise Manager's Linux OS management, monitoring and provisioning features without additional cost for every server that has an Oracle Linux support subscription. So there is no additional pack to license and no additional per server cost, it's all included in our Basic, Premier and Systems support subscriptions. The nice thing with Oracle Enterprise Manager is that you end up with a single management product that can manage all aspects of your software stack. You have complete insight into the applications running, you have roles and responsibilities, you have third party connectors for storage or other products and it makes it very easy and convenient to correlate data and events when something happens. If you use Oracle VM as well, you end up with a complete cloud portal with selfservice, chargeback, etc... Another, much simpler option, is just using yum. It is very easy to take a server and create directories and expose these through apache as repositories. You can have a simple yum config on each server pointing to a few specific repositories. It requires some manual effort in terms of creating directories, downloading packages and creating local repo files but it's easy to do and for many people a preferred solution. There are also a good number of customers that just connect their servers directly to ULN or to our free update server public-yum. Just to re-iterate, our public-yum servers have all the errata and updates available for free. Now we added another option. Many of our customers have switched from a competing Linux vendor and they had familiarity with their management tools. Switching to Oracle for support is very easy since we don't require changes to the installed servers but we also want to make sure there is a very easy and almost transparent switch for the management tools as well. While Oracle Enterprise Manager is our preferred way of managing systems, we now are offering Spacewalk 2.0 to our customers. The community project can be found here. We have made a few changes to ensure easy and complete support for Oracle Linux, tested it with public-yum, etc.. You can find the rpms in our public-yum repos at http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/. There are repositories for spacewalk server and then for each version (OL5,OL6) and architecture (x86 and x86-64) we have the client repositories as well. Spacewalk itself is only made available for OL6 x86-64. Documentation can be found here. I set it up myself and here are some quick steps on how you can get going in just a matter of minutes: Spacewalk Server Installation : 1) Installing an Oracle Database Use an existing Oracle Database or install a new Oracle Database (Standard or Enterprise Edition) [at this time use 11g, we will add support for 12c in the near future]. This database can be installed on the spacewalk server or on a separate remote server. While Oracle XE might work to create a small sample POC, we do not support the use of Oracle XE, spacewalk repositories can become large and create a significant database workload. Customers can use their existing database licenses, they can download the database with a trial licence from http://edelivery.oracle.com or Oracle Linux subscribers (customers) will be allowed to use the Oracle Database as a spacewalk repository as part of their Oracle Linux subscription at no additional cost. |NOTE : spacewalk requires the database to be configured with the UTF8 characterset. |Installation will fail if your database does not use UTF8. |To verify if your database is configured correctly, run the following command in sqlplus: | |select value from nls_database_parameters where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET'; |This should return 'AL32UTF8' 2) Configure the database schema for spacewalk Ideally, create a tablespace in the database to hold the spacewalk schema tables/data; create tablespace spacewalk datafile '/u01/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/spacewalk.dbf' size 10G autoextend on; Create the database user spacewalk (or use some other schema name) in sqlplus. example : create user spacewalk identified by spacewalk; grant connect, resource to spacewalk; grant create table, create trigger, create synonym, create view, alter session to spacewalk; grant unlimited tablespace to spacewalk; alter user spacewalk default tablespace spacewalk; 4) Spacewalk installation and configuration Spacewalk server requires an Oracle Linux 6 x86-64 system. Clients can be Oracle Linux 5 or 6, both 32- and 64bit. The server is only supported on OL6/64bit. The easiest way to get started is to do a 'Minimal' install of Oracle Linux on a server and configure the yum repository to include the spacewalk repo from public-yum. Once you have a system with a minimal install, modify your yum repo to include the spacewalk repo. Example : edit /etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-ol.repo and add the following lines at the end of the file : [spacewalk] name=spacewalk baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/spacewalk20/server/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=1 Install the following pre-requisite packages on your spacewalk server : oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64 oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64 rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64 rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient11.2-sqlplus-11.2.0.3.0-1.x86_64 The above RPMs can be found on the Oracle Technology Network website : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxx86-64soft-092277.html As the root user, configure the library path to include the Oracle Instant Client libraries : cd /etc/ld.so.conf.d echo /usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib oracle-instantclient11.2.conf ldconfig Install spacewalk : # yum install spacewalk-oracle The above yum command should download and install all required packages to run spacewalk on your local server. | NOTE : if you did a full, desktop or workstation installation, | you have to remove the JTA package | BEFORE installing spacewalk-oracle (rpm -e --nodeps jta) Once the installation completes, simply run the spacewalk configuration tool and you are all set. (make sure to run the command with the 2 arguments) spacewalk-setup --disconnected --external-db Answer the questions during the setup, ensure you provide the current database user (example : spacewalk) and password (example : spacewalk) and database server hostname (the standard hostname of the server on which you have deployed the Oracle database) At the end of the setup script, your spacewalk server should be fully configured and you can log into the web portal. Use your favorite browser to connect to the website : http://[spacewalkserverhostname] The very first action will be to create the main admin account.

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• Not attending the LUGM mini-meetup - 05. Oct 2013

  Not attending a meeting of the LUGM can be fun, too. It's getting a bit of a habit that Ish is organising small gatherings, aka mini-meetups, of the Linux User Group Mauritius/Meta (LUGM) almost every Saturday. There they mainly discuss and talk about various elements of using Linux as ones main operating systems and the possibilities you are going to have. On top of course, some tips & tricks about mastering the command line and initial steps in scripting or even writing HTML. In general, sounds like a good portion of fun and great spirit of community. Unfortunately, I'm usually quite busy with private and family matters during the weekend and so I already signalised that I wouldn't be around. Well, at least not physically... But this Saturday a couple of things worked out faster than expected and so I was hanging out on my machine. I made virtual contact with one of Pawan's messages over on Facebook... And somehow that kicked off some kind of an online game fun on basic configuration of Apache HTTPd 2.2.x, PHP 5.x and how to improve the overall performance of a newly installed blog based on WordPress. Default configuration files Nitin's website finally came alive and despite the dark theme and the hidden Apple 'fanboy' advertisement I was more interested in the technical situation. As with any new installation there is usually quite some adjustment to be done. And Nitin's page was no exception. Unfortunately, out of the box installations of Apache httpd and PHP are too verbose and expose too much information under the hood. You might think that this isn't really a problem at all, well, think about it again after completely reading this article. First, I checked the HTTP response headers - using either Chrome Developer Tools or Firefox Web Developer extension - of Nitin's page and based on that I advised him to lower the noise levels a little bit. It's not really necessary that detailed information about web server software and scripting language has to be published in every response made. Quite a number of script kiddies and exploits actually check for version specifics prior to an attack. So, removing at least version details hardens the system a little bit. In particular, I'm talking about these response values: Server X-Powered-By How to achieve that? By tweaking the configuration files... Namely, we are going to look into the following ones: apache2.conf httpd.conf .htaccess php.ini The above list contains some additional files, I'm talking about in the next paragraphs. Anyway, those are the ones involved. Tweaking Apache Open your favourite text editor and start to modify the apache2.conf. Eventually, you might like to have a quick peak at the file to see whether it is necessary to adjust it or not. Following is a handy combination of commands to get an overview of your active directives: # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf | grep -v '^$' | less There you keep an eye on those two Apache directives: ServerSignature Off ServerTokens Prod If that's not the case, change them as highlighted above. In order to activate your modifications you have to restart Apache httpd server. On Debian and Ubuntu you might use apache2ctl for that, on other distributions you might have to use service or run the init-scripts again: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Refresh your website and check the HTTP response header. Tweaking PHP5 (a little bit) Next, check your php.ini file with the following statement: # sudo grep -v ';' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini | grep -v '^$' | less And check the value of expose_php = Off Again, if it's not as highlighted, change it... Some more Apache love Okay, back to Apache it might also be interesting to improve the situation about browser caching and removing more obsolete information. When you run your website against the usual performance checks like Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow you might see those check points with bad grades on a standard, default configuration. Well, this can be done easily. Configure entity tags (ETags) ETags are only interesting when you run your websites on a farm of multiple web servers. Removing this data for your static resources is very simple in Apache. As we are going to deal with the HTTP response header information you have to ensure that Apache is capable to manipulate them. First, check your enabled modules: # sudo ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep headers And in case that the 'headers' module is not listed, you have to enable it from the available ones: # sudo a2enmod headers Second, check your httpd.conf file (in case it exists): # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/httpd.conf | grep -v '^$' | less In newer (better said fresh) installations you might have to create a new configuration file below your conf.d folder with your favourite text editor like so: # sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf.d/headers.conf Then, in order to tweak your HTTP responses either check for those lines or add them: Header unset ETagFileETag None In case that your file doesn't exist or those lines are missing, feel free to create/add them. Afterwards, check your Apache configuration syntax and restart your running instances as already shown above: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Add Expires headers To improve the loading performance of your website, you should take some care into the proper configuration of how to leverage the browser's ability to cache certain resources and files. This is done by adding an Expires: value to the HTTP response header. Generally speaking it is advised that you specify a near-future, read: 1 week or a little bit more, for your static content like JavaScript files or Cascading Style Sheets. One solution to adjust this is to put some instructions into the .htaccess file in the root folder of your web site. Of course, this could also be placed into a more generic location of your Apache installation but honestly, I'd like to keep this at the web site level. Following some adjustments I'm currently using on this blog site: # Turn on Expires and set default to 0ExpiresActive OnExpiresDefault A0 # Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">ExpiresDefault A29030400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 1 week<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">ExpiresDefault A604800Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 31 days<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$">ExpiresDefault A2678400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> As we are editing the .htaccess files, it is not necessary to restart Apache. In case that your web site doesn't load anymore or you're experiencing an error while trying to restart your httpd, check that the 'expires' module is actually an enabled module: # ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep expires# sudo a2enmod expires Of course, the instructions above a re not feature complete but I hope that they might provide a better default configuration for your LAMP stack. Resume of the day Within a couple of hours, and while being occupied with an eLearning course on SQL Server 2012, I had some good fun in helping and assisting other LUGM members while they were some kilometers away at Bagatelle. According to other blog articles it seems that Nitin had quite some moments of desperation. Just for the records: At no time it was my intention to either kick his butt or pull a leg on him. Simply, providing some input based on the lessons I've learned over the last couple of years configuring Apache HTTPd and PHP. Check out the other blogs, too: LUGM mini-meetup... Epic! Superb Saturday Linux Meetup And last but not least, the man himself: The end of a new beginning Cheers, and happy community'ing! Updates Due to our weekly Code & Coffee sessions in the MSCC community, I had a chance to talk to Nitin directly and he showed me the problems directly on his machine. This led to update this article hence the paragraphs on enabling the modules 'headers' and 'expires'.

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• Combining Shared Secret and Username Token – Azure Service Bus

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also flow through a username token so that in your listening WCF service you will be able to identify who sent the message. This could either be in the form of an application or a user depending on how you want to use your token. Prerequisites Before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our username token like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element. Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the username token bits in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use userNameAuthentication and you can see that I have created my own custom username token validator.   This setup means that WCF will hand off to my class for validating the username token details. I have also added the serviceSecurityAudit element to give me a simple auditing of access capability. My UsernamePassword Validator The below picture shows you the details of the username password validator class I have implemented. WCF will hand off to this class when validating the token and give me a nice way to check the token credentials against an on-premise store. You have all of the validation features with a non-service bus WCF implementation available such as validating the username password against active directory or ASP.net membership features or as in my case above something much simpler.   The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a username token over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding. Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the username token with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This is the normal configuration to use a shared secret for accessing a Service Bus endpoint.   Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF service but this time we have also set the ClientCredentials to use the appropriate username and password which will be flown through the service bus and to our service which will validate them.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and username token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.UN.zip

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 3: Anonymous partial-trust consumer

  - by Elton Stoneman

  This is the third in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer As the patterns get further from the simple .NET full-trust consumer, all that changes is the communication protocol and the authentication mechanism. In Part 3 the scenario is that we still have a secure .NET environment consuming our service, so we can store shared keys securely, but the runtime environment is locked down so we can't use Microsoft.ServiceBus to get the nice WCF relay bindings. To support this we will expose a RESTful endpoint through the Azure Service Bus, and require the consumer to send a security token with each HTTP service request. Pattern applicability This is a good fit for scenarios where: the runtime environment is secure enough to keep shared secrets the consumer can execute custom code, including building HTTP requests with custom headers the consumer cannot use the Azure SDK assemblies the service may need to know who is consuming it the service does not need to know who the end-user is Note there isn't actually a .NET requirement here. By exposing the service in a REST endpoint, anything that can talk HTTP can be a consumer. We'll authenticate through ACS which also gives us REST endpoints, so the service is still accessed securely. Our real-world example would be a hosted cloud app, where we we have enough room in the app's customisation to keep the shared secret somewhere safe and to hook in some HTTP calls. We will be flowing an identity through to the on-premise service now, but it will be the service identity given to the consuming app - the end user's identity isn't flown through yet. In this post, we’ll consume the service from Part 1 in ASP.NET using the WebHttpRelayBinding. The code for Part 3 (+ Part 1) is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 3. Authenticating and authorizing with ACS We'll follow the previous examples and add a new service identity for the namespace in ACS, so we can separate permissions for different consumers (see walkthrough in Part 1). I've named the identity partialTrustConsumer. We’ll be authenticating against ACS with an explicit HTTP call, so we need a password credential rather than a symmetric key – for a nice secure option, generate a symmetric key, copy to the clipboard, then change type to password and paste in the key: We then need to do the same as in Part 2 , add a rule to map the incoming identity claim to an outgoing authorization claim that allows the identity to send messages to Service Bus: Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: partialTrustConsumer Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Send As with Part 2, this sets up a service identity which can send messages into Service Bus, but cannot register itself as a listener, or manage the namespace. RESTfully exposing the on-premise service through Azure Service Bus Relay The part 3 sample code is ready to go, just put your Azure details into Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml and “Run Custom Tool” on the .tt files.  But to do it yourself is very simple. We already have a WebGet attribute in the service for locally making REST calls, so we are just going to add a new endpoint which uses the WebHttpRelayBinding to relay that service through Azure. It's as easy as adding this endpoint to Web.config for the service:         <endpoint address="https://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/rest"                   binding="webHttpRelayBinding"                    contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService"                   behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret">         </endpoint> - and adding the webHttp attribute in your endpoint behavior:           <behavior name="SharedSecret">             <webHttp/>             <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">               <clientCredentials>                 <sharedSecret issuerName="serviceProvider"                               issuerSecret="gl0xaVmlebKKJUAnpripKhr8YnLf9Neaf6LR53N8uGs="/>               </clientCredentials>             </transportClientEndpointBehavior>           </behavior> Where's my WSDL? The metadata story for REST is a bit less automated. In our local webHttp endpoint we've enabled WCF's built-in help, so if you navigate to: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/help - you'll see the uri format for making a GET request to the service. The format is the same over Azure, so this is where you'll be connecting: https://[your-namespace].servicebus.windows.net/rest/reverse?string=abc123 Build the service with the new endpoint, open that in a browser and you'll get an XML version of an HTTP status code - a 401 with an error message stating that you haven’t provided an authorization header: <?xml version="1.0"?><Error><Code>401</Code><Detail>MissingToken: The request contains no authorization header..TrackingId:4cb53408-646b-4163-87b9-bc2b20cdfb75_5,TimeStamp:10/3/2012 8:34:07 PM</Detail></Error> By default, the setup of your Service Bus endpoint as a relying party in ACS expects a Simple Web Token to be presented with each service request, and in the browser we're not passing one, so we can't access the service. Note that this request doesn't get anywhere near your on-premise service, Service Bus only relays requests once they've got the necessary approval from ACS. Why didn't the consumer need to get ACS authorization in Part 2? It did, but it was all done behind the scenes in the NetTcpRelayBinding. By specifying our Shared Secret credentials in the consumer, the service call is preceded by a check on ACS to see that the identity provided is a) valid, and b) allowed access to our Service Bus endpoint. By making manual HTTP requests, we need to take care of that ACS check ourselves now. We do that with a simple WebClient call to the ACS endpoint of our service; passing the shared secret credentials, we will get back an SWT: var values = new System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection(); values.Add("wrap_name", "partialTrustConsumer"); //service identity name values.Add("wrap_password", "suCei7AzdXY9toVH+S47C4TVyXO/UUFzu0zZiSCp64Y="); //service identity password values.Add("wrap_scope", "http://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/"); //this is the realm of the RP in ACS var acsClient = new WebClient(); var responseBytes = acsClient.UploadValues("https://sixeyed-ipasbr-sb.accesscontrol.windows.net/WRAPv0.9/", "POST", values); rawToken = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(responseBytes); With a little manipulation, we then attach the SWT to subsequent REST calls in the authorization header; the token contains the Send claim returned from ACS, so we will be authorized to send messages into Service Bus. Running the sample Navigate to http://localhost:2028/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.WebHttpClient/Default.cshtml, enter a string and hit Go! - your string will be reversed by your on-premise service, routed through Azure: Using shared secret client credentials in this way means ACS is the identity provider for your service, and the claim which allows Send access to Service Bus is consumed by Service Bus. None of the authentication details make it through to your service, so your service is not aware who the consumer is (MSDN calls this "anonymous authentication").

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• MapRedux - PowerShell and Big Data

  - by Dittenhafer Solutions

  MapRedux – #PowerShell and #Big Data Have you been hearing about “big data”, “map reduce” and other large scale computing terms over the past couple of years and been curious to dig into more detail? Have you read some of the Apache Hadoop online documentation and unfortunately concluded that it wasn't feasible to setup a “test” hadoop environment on your machine? More recently, I have read about some of Microsoft’s work to enable Hadoop on the Azure cloud. Being a "Microsoft"-leaning technologist, I am more inclinded to be successful with experimentation when on the Windows platform. Of course, it is not that I am "religious" about one set of technologies other another, but rather more experienced. Anyway, within the past couple of weeks I have been thinking about PowerShell a bit more as the 2012 PowerShell Scripting Games approach and it occured to me that PowerShell's support for Windows Remote Management (WinRM), and some other inherent features of PowerShell might lend themselves particularly well to a simple implementation of the MapReduce framework. I fired up my PowerShell ISE and started writing just to see where it would take me. Quite simply, the ScriptBlock feature combined with the ability of Invoke-Command to create remote jobs on networked servers provides much of the plumbing of a distributed computing environment. There are some limiting factors of course. Microsoft provided some default settings which prevent PowerShell from taking over a network without administrative approval first. But even with just one adjustment, a given Windows-based machine can become a node in a MapReduce-style distributed computing environment. Ok, so enough introduction. Let's talk about the code. First, any machine that will participate as a remote "node" will need WinRM enabled for remote access, as shown below. This is not exactly practical for hundreds of intended nodes, but for one (or five) machines in a test environment it does just fine. C:> winrm quickconfig WinRM is not set up to receive requests on this machine. The following changes must be made: Set the WinRM service type to auto start. Start the WinRM service. Make these changes [y/n]? y Alternatively, you could take the approach described in the Remotely enable PSRemoting post from the TechNet forum and use PowerShell to create remote scheduled tasks that will call Enable-PSRemoting on each intended node. Invoke-MapRedux Moving on, now that you have one or more remote "nodes" enabled, you can consider the actual Map and Reduce algorithms. Consider the following snippet: $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose Invoke-MapRedux takes an instance of a MapReduceItem which references the Map and Reduce scriptblocks, an array of computer names which are the remote nodes, and the initial data set to be processed. As simple as that, you can start working with concepts of big data and the MapReduce paradigm. Now, how did we get there? I have published the initial version of my PsMapRedux PowerShell Module on GitHub. The PsMapRedux module provides the Invoke-MapRedux function described above. Feel free to browse the underlying code and even contribute to the project! In a later post, I plan to show some of the inner workings of the module, but for now let's move on to how the Map and Reduce functions are defined. Map Both the Map and Reduce functions need to follow a prescribed prototype. The prototype for a Map function in the MapRedux module is as follows. A simple scriptblock that takes one PsObject parameter and returns a hashtable. It is important to note that the PsObject $dataset parameter is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property which offers an array of data to be processed by the Map function. $aMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) # Indicate the job is running on the remote node. Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); # The hashtable to return $list = @{}; # ... Perform the mapping work and prepare the $list hashtable result with your custom PSObject... # ... The $dataset has a single 'Data' property which contains an array of data rows # which is a subset of the originally submitted data set. # Return the hashtable (Key, PSObject) Write-Output $list; } Reduce Likewise, with the Reduce function a simple prototype must be followed which takes a $key and a result $dataset from the MapRedux's partitioning function (which joins the Map results by key). Again, the $dataset is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property as described in the Map section. $aReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) # The hashtable to return $redux = @{}; # Return Write-Output $redux; } All Together Now When everything is put together in a short example script, you implement your Map and Reduce functions, query for some starting data, build the MapReduxItem via New-MapReduxItem and call Invoke-MapRedux to get the process started: # Import the MapRedux and SQL Server providers Import-Module "MapRedux" Import-Module “sqlps” -DisableNameChecking # Query the database for a dataset Set-Location SQLSERVER:\sql\dbserver1\default\databases\myDb $query = "SELECT MyKey, Date, Value1 FROM BigData ORDER BY MyKey"; Write-Host "Query: $query" $dataset = Invoke-SqlCmd -query $query # Build the Map function $MyMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); $list = @{}; foreach($row in $dataset.Data) { # Write-Host ("Key: " + $row.MyKey.ToString()); if($list.ContainsKey($row.MyKey) -eq $true) { $s = $list.Item($row.MyKey); $s.Sum += $row.Value1; $s.Count++; } else { $s = New-Object PSObject; $s | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name MyKey -Value $row.MyKey; $s | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -Name Sum -Value $row.Value1; $list.Add($row.MyKey, $s); } } Write-Output $list; } $MyReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) $redux = @{}; $count = 0; foreach($s in $dataset.Data) { $sum += $s.Sum; $count += 1; } # Reduce $redux.Add($s.MyKey, $sum / $count); # Return Write-Output $redux; } # Create the item data $Mr = New-MapReduxItem "My Test MapReduce Job" $MyMap $MyReduce # Array of processing nodes... $MyNodes = ("node1", "node2", "node3", "node4", "localhost") # Run the Map Reduce routine... $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose # Show the results Set-Location C:\ $MyMrResults | Out-GridView Conclusion I hope you have seen through this article that PowerShell has a significant infrastructure available for distributed computing. While it does take some code to expose a MapReduce-style framework, much of the work is already done and PowerShell could prove to be the the easiest platform to develop and run big data jobs in your corporate data center, potentially in the Azure cloud, or certainly as an academic excerise at home or school. Follow me on Twitter to stay up to date on the continuing progress of my Powershell MapRedux module, and thanks for reading! Daniel

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• Mscorlib mocking minus the attribute

  - by mehfuzh

  Mocking .net framework members (a.k.a. mscorlib) is always a daunting task. It’s the breed of static and final methods and full of surprises. Technically intercepting mscorlib members is completely different from other class libraries. This is the reason it is dealt differently. Generally, I prefer writing a wrapper around an mscorlib member (Ex. File.Delete(“abc.txt”)) and expose it via interface but that is not always an easy task if you already have years old codebase. While mocking mscorlib members first thing that comes to people’s mind is DateTime.Now. If you Google through, you will find tons of example dealing with just that. May be it’s the most important class that we can’t ignore and I will create an example using JustMock Q2 with the same. In Q2 2012, we just get rid of the MockClassAtrribute for mocking mscorlib members. JustMock is already attribute free for mocking class libraries. We radically think that vendor specific attributes only makes your code smelly and therefore decided the same for mscorlib. Now, I want to fake DateTime.Now for the following class: public class NestedDateTime { public DateTime GetDateTime() { return DateTime.Now; } } It is the simplest one that can be. The first thing here is that I tell JustMock “hey we have a DateTime.Now in NestedDateTime class that we want to mock”. To do so, during the test initialization I write this: .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; } Mock.Replace(() => DateTime.Now).In<NestedDateTime>(x => x.GetDateTime());.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 can also define it for all the members in the class, but that’s just a waste of extra watts. Mock.Replace(() => DateTime.Now).In<NestedDateTime>(); Now question, why should I bother doing it? The answer is that I am not using attribute and with this approach, I can mock any framework members not just File, FileInfo or DateTime. Here to note that we already mock beyond the three but when nested around a complex class, JustMock was not intercepting it correctly. Therefore, we decided to get rid of the attribute altogether fixing the issue. Finally, I write my test as usual. [TestMethod] public void ShouldAssertMockingDateTimeFromNestedClass() { var expected = new DateTime(2000, 1, 1); Mock.Arrange(() => DateTime.Now).Returns(expected); Assert.Equal(new NestedDateTime().GetDateTime(), expected); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } That’s it, we are good. Now let me do the same for a random one, let’s say I want mock a member from DriveInfo: Mock.Replace<DriveInfo[]>(() => DriveInfo.GetDrives()).In<MsCorlibFixture>(x => x.ShouldReturnExpectedDriveWhenMocked()); Moving forward, I write my test: [TestMethod] public void ShouldReturnExpectedDriveWhenMocked() { Mock.Arrange(() => DriveInfo.GetDrives()).MustBeCalled(); DriveInfo.GetDrives(); Mock.Assert(()=> DriveInfo.GetDrives()); } .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; } Here is one convention; you have to replace the mscorlib member before executing the target method that contains it. Here the call to DriveInfo is within the MsCorlibFixture therefore it should be defined during test initialization or before executing the test method. Hope this gives you the idea.

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• Combining Shared Secret and Certificates

  - by Michael Stephenson

  As discussed in the introduction article this walkthrough will explain how you can implement WCF security with the Windows Azure Service Bus to ensure that you can protect your endpoint in the cloud with a shared secret but also combine this with certificates so that you can identify the sender of the message.   Prerequisites As in the previous article before going into the walk through I want to explain a few assumptions about the scenario we are implementing but to keep the article shorter I am not going to walk through all of the steps in how to setup some of this. In the solution we have a simple console application which will represent the client application. There is also the services WCF application which contains the WCF service we will expose via the Windows Azure Service Bus. The WCF Service application in this example was hosted in IIS 7 on Windows 2008 R2 with AppFabric Server installed and configured to auto-start the WCF listening services. I am not going to go through significant detail around the IIS setup because it should not matter in relation to this article however if you want to understand more about how to configure WCF and IIS for such a scenario please refer to the following paper which goes into a lot of detail about how to configure this. The link is: http://tinyurl.com/8s5nwrz   Setting up the Certificates To keep the post and sample simple I am going to use the local computer store for all certificates but this bit is really just the same as setting up certificates for an example where you are using WCF without using Windows Azure Service Bus. In the sample I have included two batch files which you can use to create the sample certificates or remove them. Basically you will end up with: A certificate called PocServerCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the WCF Service component A certificate called PocClientCert in the personal store for the local computer which will be used by the client application A root certificate in the Root store called PocRootCA with its associated revocation list which is the root from which the client and server certificates were created   For the sample Im just using development certificates like you would normally, and you can see exactly how these are configured and placed in the stores from the batch files in the solution using makecert and certmgr.   The Service Component To begin with let's look at the service component and how it can be configured to listen to the service bus using a shared secret but to also accept a username token from the client. In the sample the service component is called Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.Services. It has a single service which is the Visual Studio template for a WCF service when you add a new WCF Service Application so we have a service called Service1 with its Echo method. Nothing special so far!.... The next step is to look at the web.config file to see how we have configured the WCF service. In the services section of the WCF configuration you can see I have created my service and I have created a local endpoint which I simply used to do a little bit of diagnostics and to check it was working, but more importantly there is the Windows Azure endpoint which is using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (note that this should also work just the same if your using netTcpRelayBinding). The key points to note on the above picture are the service behavior called MyServiceBehaviour and the service bus endpoints behavior called MyEndpointBehaviour. We will go into these in more detail later.   The Relay Binding The relay binding for the service has been configured to use the TransportWithMessageCredential security mode. This is the important bit where the transport security really relates to the interaction between the service and listening to the Azure Service Bus and the message credential is where we will use our certificate like we have specified in the message/clientCrentialType attribute. Note also that we have left the relayClientAuthenticationType set to RelayAccessToken. This means that authentication will be made against ACS for accessing the service bus and messages will not be accepted from any sender who has not been authenticated by ACS.   The Endpoint Behaviour In the below picture you can see the endpoint behavior which is configured to use the shared secret client credential for accessing the service bus and also for diagnostic purposes I have included the service registry element.     Hopefully if you are familiar with using Windows Azure Service Bus relay feature the above is very familiar to you and this is a very common setup for this section. There is nothing specific to the username token implementation here. The Service Behaviour Now we come to the bit with most of the certificate stuff in it. When you configure the service behavior I have included the serviceCredentials element and then setup to use the clientCertificate check and also specifying the serviceCertificate with information on how to find the servers certificate in the store.     I have also added a serviceAuthorization section where I will implement my own authorization component to perform additional security checks after the service has validated that the message was signed with a good certificate. I also have the same serviceSecurityAudit configuration to log access to my service. My Authorization Manager The below picture shows you implementation of my authorization manager. WCF will eventually hand off the message to my authorization component before it calls the service code. This is where I can perform some logic to check if the identity is allowed to access resources. In this case I am simple rejecting messages from anyone except the PocClientCertificate.     The Client Now let's take a look at the client side of this solution and how we can configure the client to authenticate against ACS but also send a certificate over to the service component so it can implement additional security checks on-premise. I have a console application and in the program class I want to use the proxy generated with Add Service Reference to send a message via the Azure Service Bus. You can see in my WCF client configuration below I have setup my details for the azure service bus url and am using the ws2007HttpRelayBinding.   Next is my configuration for the relay binding. You can see below I have configured security to use TransportWithMessageCredential so we will flow the token from a certificate with the message and also the RelayAccessToken relayClientAuthenticationType which means the component will validate against ACS before being allowed to access the relay endpoint to send a message.     After the binding we need to configure the endpoint behavior like in the below picture. This contains the normal transportClientEndpointBehaviour to setup the ACS shared secret configuration but we have also configured the clientCertificate to look for the PocClientCert.     Finally below we have the code of the client in the console application which will call the service bus. You can see that we have created our proxy and then made a normal call to a WCF in exactly the normal way but the configuration will jump in and ensure that a token is passed representing the client certificate.     Conclusion As you can see from the above walkthrough it is not too difficult to configure a service to use both a shared secret and certificate based token at the same time. This gives you the power and protection offered by the access control service in the cloud but also the ability to flow additional tokens to the on-premise component for additional security features to be implemented. Sample The sample used in this post is available at the following location: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/Acme.Azure.ServiceBus.Poc.Cert.zip

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• Rendering Flickr Cats Via Backbone.js

  - by Geertjan

  Create a JavaScript file and refer to it inside an HTML file. Then put this into the JavaScript file: (function($) {     var CatCollection = Backbone.Collection.extend({         url: 'http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=cat&tagmode=any&format=json&jsoncallback=?',         parse: function(response) {             return response.items;         }     });     var CatView = Backbone.View.extend({         el: $('body'),         initialize: function() {             _.bindAll(this, 'render');             carCollectionInstance.fetch({                 success: function(response, xhr) {                     catView.render();                 }             });         },         render: function() {             $(this.el).append("<ul></ul>");             for (var i = 0; i < carCollectionInstance.length; i++) {                 $('ul', this.el).append("<li>" + i + carCollectionInstance.models[i].get("description") + "</li>");             }         }     });     var carCollectionInstance = new CatCollection();     var catView = new CatView(); })(jQuery); Apologies for any errors or misused idioms. It's my second day with Backbone.js, in fact, my second day with JavaScript. I haven't seen anywhere online so far where an example such as the above is found, though plenty that do kind of or pieces of the above, or explain in text, without an actual full example. The next step, and the only reason for the above experiment, is to create some JPA entities and expose them via RESTful webservices created on EJB methods, for consumption into an HTML5 application via a Backbone.js script very similar to the above. 

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• Windows DNS Server 2008 R2 fallaciously returns SERVFAIL

  - by Easter Sunshine

  I have a Windows 2008 R2 domain controller which is also a DNS server. When resolving certain TLDs, it returns a SERVFAIL: $ dig bogus. ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1 <<>> bogus. ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 31919 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;bogus. IN A I get the same result for a real TLD like com. when querying the DC as shown above. Compare to a BIND server that is working as expected: $ dig bogus. @128.59.59.70 ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1 <<>> bogus. @128.59.59.70 ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 30141 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;bogus. IN A ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: . 10800 IN SOA a.root-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 2012012501 1800 900 604800 86400 ;; Query time: 18 msec ;; SERVER: 128.59.59.70#53(128.59.59.70) ;; WHEN: Wed Jan 25 14:09:14 2012 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 98 Similarly, when I query my Windows DNS server with dig . any, I get a SERVFAIL but the BIND servers return the root zone as expected. This sounds similar to the issue described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968372 except I am using two forwarders (128.59.59.70 from above as well as 128.59.62.10) and falling back to root hints so the preconditions to expose the issue are not the same. Nevertheless, I also applied the MaxCacheTTL registry fix as described and restarted DNS and the whole server as well but the problem persists. The problem occurs on all domain controllers in this domain and has occurred since half a year ago, even though the servers are getting automatic Windows updates. EDIT Here is a debug log. The client is 160.39.114.110, which is my workstation. 1/25/2012 2:16:01 PM 0E08 PACKET 000000001EA6BFD0 UDP Rcv 160.39.114.110 2e94 Q [0001 D NOERROR] A (5)bogus(0) UDP question info at 000000001EA6BFD0 Socket = 508 Remote addr 160.39.114.110, port 49710 Time Query=1077016, Queued=0, Expire=0 Buf length = 0x0fa0 (4000) Msg length = 0x0017 (23) Message: XID 0x2e94 Flags 0x0100 QR 0 (QUESTION) OPCODE 0 (QUERY) AA 0 TC 0 RD 1 RA 0 Z 0 CD 0 AD 0 RCODE 0 (NOERROR) QCOUNT 1 ACOUNT 0 NSCOUNT 0 ARCOUNT 0 QUESTION SECTION: Offset = 0x000c, RR count = 0 Name "(5)bogus(0)" QTYPE A (1) QCLASS 1 ANSWER SECTION: empty AUTHORITY SECTION: empty ADDITIONAL SECTION: empty 1/25/2012 2:16:01 PM 0E08 PACKET 000000001EA6BFD0 UDP Snd 160.39.114.110 2e94 R Q [8281 DR SERVFAIL] A (5)bogus(0) UDP response info at 000000001EA6BFD0 Socket = 508 Remote addr 160.39.114.110, port 49710 Time Query=1077016, Queued=0, Expire=0 Buf length = 0x0fa0 (4000) Msg length = 0x0017 (23) Message: XID 0x2e94 Flags 0x8182 QR 1 (RESPONSE) OPCODE 0 (QUERY) AA 0 TC 0 RD 1 RA 1 Z 0 CD 0 AD 0 RCODE 2 (SERVFAIL) QCOUNT 1 ACOUNT 0 NSCOUNT 0 ARCOUNT 0 QUESTION SECTION: Offset = 0x000c, RR count = 0 Name "(5)bogus(0)" QTYPE A (1) QCLASS 1 ANSWER SECTION: empty AUTHORITY SECTION: empty ADDITIONAL SECTION: empty Every option in the debug log box was checked except "filter by IP". By contrast, when I query, say, accounts.google.com, I can see the DNS server go out to its forwarder (128.59.59.70, for example). In this case, I didn't see any packets going out from my DNS server even though bogus. was not in the cache (the debug log was already running and this is the first time I queried this server for bogus. or any TLD). It just returned SERVFAIL without consulting any other DNS server, as in the Microsoft KB article linked above.

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• Spotlight Infinite Indexing issue (external data drive)

  - by Manca Weeks

  This is an external drive, formerly a boot drive which is now in use only to access music files (sibelius, audio, midi, live, logic etc.) without transferring the data into a new boot system, partly because of the issue I am about to describe, but mostly because the majority of the data is mainly there for archival purposes. The user is a composer and prominent musician and needs to be able to rehash the data at will. I have tried several things - here is a list: - make complete filesystem clone with antonio diaz's ddrescue - run Disk Warrior on copy, repair whatever errors occurred - wipe out all ACLs on entire drive - set all permissions to the same value - wide open 777 - remove any system data (applications, system files, including hidden files to the best of my knowledge) by selecting only non-system/app data and using Carbon Copy Cloner to put only the data of interest onto a newly formatted drive - transfer data to newly formatted drive folder by folder, resetting the spotlight index in between adding each to observe for issues (interesting here is that no issues occurred except for in Documents folder - when I transferred only the Documents folder to a newly formatted drive on its own - no trouble. It appears almost as thought it may not be the content but the quantity or specific combination of data that results in problems) - use DataRescue to transfer the data to yet another newly formatted drive to expose any missed hidden files Between each of the above steps I stopped Spotlight (search for anything beginning with md in Activity Monitor - All Processes and quitting it), deleted the .Spotlight-V100 directory from the affected drive. Restart Splotlight indexing by adding drive to Spotlight privacy list and removing it. In each case the same issue occurs - Spotlight begins indexing normally (or so it seems), then the index estimated time increases, usually to 4 hours remaining. This is where it gets stuck and continues to predict 4 hours remaining but never finishes. Sometimes I can't eject the drive and have to quit the md.. processes from Activity Monitor to be able to eject the drive without Force Eject. Once I disconnect the drive after the 4 hours remaining situation - if I reattach it, Spotlight forever estimates remaining time and never gets going again. So there it is. It is apparently not a filesystem issue, not a permissions issue and not tied to any particular piece of hardware or protocol (used USB and FW drives). I have tried this on several machines (3 to be precise) and in 10.5.8 and 10.6.5. Simply disabling Spotlight on this volume is not an option because the owner has no clue where things are as the data on the volume dates back to music projects and compositions from 2003 and before. He needs to be able to query for results. Anyone got any ideas? ---update 2-6-11 Since I have not received any responses except the one below which appears to misunderstand my point, I am updating this post hoping to get more responses. I have used the terminal command sudo opensnoop -p PID where PID is the mdworker process ID to try and determine what Spotlight is doing and hopefully find the files it's having trouble with. Here's what happens: After indexing for a few hours, mdworker is gone. It no longer shows up in Activity Monitor under "All Processes" and the Terminal window with the opensnoop result stops moving. I then proceeded to execute the same command on mds to see what it was doing and here's what I get, repeatedly: 501 57 mds 21 / 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/Sno Leppard 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/Tiger 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/Leppard 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/Disk Warrior 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/ONM Data These represent all the volumes currently mounted in the system. All except ONM Data, which is the one I am trying to index, are excluded from SPotlight indexing at the moment. The sequence above repeats over and over, with slight variation, sometimes skipping one of the volumes. Questions - what happened to mdworker? What is mds doing? I will let this run until tomorrow morning and throughout the day and monitor for any changes. Any input would be very much appreciated. Even if you're not sure what the ultimate answer is, please alert me to anything you think I may be missing. Hopefully at some point we will figure this out... Thanks, M __final edit__ I finally resolved the issue and here is how I did it. I used the terminal command "sudo opensnoop -p PID" where the PID is the process id of the processes I was monitoring. I was looking at all instances of mds and mdworker running in the system. After the third time through indexing the same data set (see info above), I contacted Apple and got to their highest level of support - they were flabbergasted as well. They advised me to install yet another default 10.6.6 system and try again. The same pattern repeated - mds and mdworker(s) would start indexing and eventually the spotlight icon would say 6 hours remaining and all mdworkers were gone, mds at 90% or so of CPU. But I did finally figure out that the first time mdworker stopped like that, the last file it touched was always in the same folder. I excluded that folder from spotlight search and the rest of the data set indexed within about 2 hours with no strange behavior or failures. I copied that folder to another machine and Spotlight barfed immediately. Exclude that folder and all is well again. I have no clue what is causing this behavior, still, but I did find a functional solution to the problem. Anyone with a similar problem - run opensnoop on all instances of mds and mdworker and wait patiently for wdworker to exit. Look at the last file it touched and exclude the enclosing folder from being indexed. I was able to repeat the issue and solution on 2 different installs and 2 different copies of the data set. Hope this helps. If we find an actual cause of the folder being such a problem (it is called MICHAEL BRECKER RECORD SOLOS and contains almost 1 GB of audio related files - performer, live, SD2 - things like that), I will edit again to let you all know. Thanks for ay attempts to help, M

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• Failed to Install Xdebug

  - by burnt1ce

  've registered xdebug in php.ini (as per http://xdebug.org/docs/install) but it's not showing up when i run "php -m" or when i get a test page to run "phpinfo()". I've just installed the latest version of XAMPP. I've used both "zend_extention" and "zend_extention_ts" to specify the path of the xdebug dll. I ensured that my apache server restarted and used the latest change of my php.ini by executing "httpd -k restart". Can anyone provide any suggestions in getting xdebug to show up? Here are the contents of my php.ini file. [PHP] ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; About php.ini ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; PHP's initialization file, generally called php.ini, is responsible for ; configuring many of the aspects of PHP's behavior. ; PHP attempts to find and load this configuration from a number of locations. ; The following is a summary of its search order: ; 1. SAPI module specific location. ; 2. The PHPRC environment variable. (As of PHP 5.2.0) ; 3. A number of predefined registry keys on Windows (As of PHP 5.2.0) ; 4. Current working directory (except CLI) ; 5. The web server's directory (for SAPI modules), or directory of PHP ; (otherwise in Windows) ; 6. The directory from the --with-config-file-path compile time option, or the ; Windows directory (C:\windows or C:\winnt) ; See the PHP docs for more specific information. ; http://php.net/configuration.file ; The syntax of the file is extremely simple. Whitespace and Lines ; beginning with a semicolon are silently ignored (as you probably guessed). ; Section headers (e.g. [Foo]) are also silently ignored, even though ; they might mean something in the future. ; Directives following the section heading [PATH=/www/mysite] only ; apply to PHP files in the /www/mysite directory. Directives ; following the section heading [HOST=www.example.com] only apply to ; PHP files served from www.example.com. Directives set in these ; special sections cannot be overridden by user-defined INI files or ; at runtime. Currently, [PATH=] and [HOST=] sections only work under ; CGI/FastCGI. ; http://php.net/ini.sections ; Directives are specified using the following syntax: ; directive = value ; Directive names are *case sensitive* - foo=bar is different from FOO=bar. ; Directives are variables used to configure PHP or PHP extensions. ; There is no name validation. If PHP can't find an expected ; directive because it is not set or is mistyped, a default value will be used. ; The value can be a string, a number, a PHP constant (e.g. E_ALL or M_PI), one ; of the INI constants (On, Off, True, False, Yes, No and None) or an expression ; (e.g. E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE), a quoted string ("bar"), or a reference to a ; previously set variable or directive (e.g. ${foo}) ; Expressions in the INI file are limited to bitwise operators and parentheses: ; | bitwise OR ; ^ bitwise XOR ; & bitwise AND ; ~ bitwise NOT ; ! boolean NOT ; Boolean flags can be turned on using the values 1, On, True or Yes. ; They can be turned off using the values 0, Off, False or No. ; An empty string can be denoted by simply not writing anything after the equal ; sign, or by using the None keyword: ; foo = ; sets foo to an empty string ; foo = None ; sets foo to an empty string ; foo = "None" ; sets foo to the string 'None' ; If you use constants in your value, and these constants belong to a ; dynamically loaded extension (either a PHP extension or a Zend extension), ; you may only use these constants *after* the line that loads the extension. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; About this file ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; PHP comes packaged with two INI files. One that is recommended to be used ; in production environments and one that is recommended to be used in ; development environments. ; php.ini-production contains settings which hold security, performance and ; best practices at its core. But please be aware, these settings may break ; compatibility with older or less security conscience applications. We ; recommending using the production ini in production and testing environments. ; php.ini-development is very similar to its production variant, except it's ; much more verbose when it comes to errors. We recommending using the ; development version only in development environments as errors shown to ; application users can inadvertently leak otherwise secure information. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Quick Reference ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; The following are all the settings which are different in either the production ; or development versions of the INIs with respect to PHP's default behavior. ; Please see the actual settings later in the document for more details as to why ; we recommend these changes in PHP's behavior. ; allow_call_time_pass_reference ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: Off ; Production Value: Off ; display_errors ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: Off ; display_startup_errors ; Default Value: Off ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: Off ; error_reporting ; Default Value: E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE ; Development Value: E_ALL | E_STRICT ; Production Value: E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED ; html_errors ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: On ; Production value: Off ; log_errors ; Default Value: Off ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: On ; magic_quotes_gpc ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: Off ; Production Value: Off ; max_input_time ; Default Value: -1 (Unlimited) ; Development Value: 60 (60 seconds) ; Production Value: 60 (60 seconds) ; output_buffering ; Default Value: Off ; Development Value: 4096 ; Production Value: 4096 ; register_argc_argv ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: Off ; Production Value: Off ; register_long_arrays ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: Off ; Production Value: Off ; request_order ; Default Value: None ; Development Value: "GP" ; Production Value: "GP" ; session.bug_compat_42 ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: Off ; session.bug_compat_warn ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: Off ; session.gc_divisor ; Default Value: 100 ; Development Value: 1000 ; Production Value: 1000 ; session.hash_bits_per_character ; Default Value: 4 ; Development Value: 5 ; Production Value: 5 ; short_open_tag ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: Off ; Production Value: Off ; track_errors ; Default Value: Off ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: Off ; url_rewriter.tags ; Default Value: "a=href,area=href,frame=src,form=,fieldset=" ; Development Value: "a=href,area=href,frame=src,input=src,form=fakeentry" ; Production Value: "a=href,area=href,frame=src,input=src,form=fakeentry" ; variables_order ; Default Value: "EGPCS" ; Development Value: "GPCS" ; Production Value: "GPCS" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; php.ini Options ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Name for user-defined php.ini (.htaccess) files. Default is ".user.ini" ;user_ini.filename = ".user.ini" ; To disable this feature set this option to empty value ;user_ini.filename = ; TTL for user-defined php.ini files (time-to-live) in seconds. Default is 300 seconds (5 minutes) ;user_ini.cache_ttl = 300 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Language Options ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Enable the PHP scripting language engine under Apache. ; http://php.net/engine engine = On ; This directive determines whether or not PHP will recognize code between ; <? and ?> tags as PHP source which should be processed as such. It's been ; recommended for several years that you not use the short tag "short cut" and ; instead to use the full <?php and ?> tag combination. With the wide spread use ; of XML and use of these tags by other languages, the server can become easily ; confused and end up parsing the wrong code in the wrong context. But because ; this short cut has been a feature for such a long time, it's currently still ; supported for backwards compatibility, but we recommend you don't use them. ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: Off ; Production Value: Off ; http://php.net/short-open-tag short_open_tag = Off ; Allow ASP-style <% %> tags. ; http://php.net/asp-tags asp_tags = Off ; The number of significant digits displayed in floating point numbers. ; http://php.net/precision precision = 14 ; Enforce year 2000 compliance (will cause problems with non-compliant browsers) ; http://php.net/y2k-compliance y2k_compliance = On ; Output buffering is a mechanism for controlling how much output data ; (excluding headers and cookies) PHP should keep internally before pushing that ; data to the client. If your application's output exceeds this setting, PHP ; will send that data in chunks of roughly the size you specify. ; Turning on this setting and managing its maximum buffer size can yield some ; interesting side-effects depending on your application and web server. ; You may be able to send headers and cookies after you've already sent output ; through print or echo. You also may see performance benefits if your server is ; emitting less packets due to buffered output versus PHP streaming the output ; as it gets it. On production servers, 4096 bytes is a good setting for performance ; reasons. ; Note: Output buffering can also be controlled via Output Buffering Control ; functions. ; Possible Values: ; On = Enabled and buffer is unlimited. (Use with caution) ; Off = Disabled ; Integer = Enables the buffer and sets its maximum size in bytes. ; Note: This directive is hardcoded to Off for the CLI SAPI ; Default Value: Off ; Development Value: 4096 ; Production Value: 4096 ; http://php.net/output-buffering output_buffering = Off ; You can redirect all of the output of your scripts to a function. For ; example, if you set output_handler to "mb_output_handler", character ; encoding will be transparently converted to the specified encoding. ; Setting any output handler automatically turns on output buffering. ; Note: People who wrote portable scripts should not depend on this ini ; directive. Instead, explicitly set the output handler using ob_start(). ; Using this ini directive may cause problems unless you know what script ; is doing. ; Note: You cannot use both "mb_output_handler" with "ob_iconv_handler" ; and you cannot use both "ob_gzhandler" and "zlib.output_compression". ; Note: output_handler must be empty if this is set 'On' !!!! ; Instead you must use zlib.output_handler. ; http://php.net/output-handler ;output_handler = ; Transparent output compression using the zlib library ; Valid values for this option are 'off', 'on', or a specific buffer size ; to be used for compression (default is 4KB) ; Note: Resulting chunk size may vary due to nature of compression. PHP ; outputs chunks that are few hundreds bytes each as a result of ; compression. If you prefer a larger chunk size for better ; performance, enable output_buffering in addition. ; Note: You need to use zlib.output_handler instead of the standard ; output_handler, or otherwise the output will be corrupted. ; http://php.net/zlib.output-compression zlib.output_compression = Off ; http://php.net/zlib.output-compression-level ;zlib.output_compression_level = -1 ; You cannot specify additional output handlers if zlib.output_compression ; is activated here. This setting does the same as output_handler but in ; a different order. ; http://php.net/zlib.output-handler ;zlib.output_handler = ; Implicit flush tells PHP to tell the output layer to flush itself ; automatically after every output block. This is equivalent to calling the ; PHP function flush() after each and every call to print() or echo() and each ; and every HTML block. Turning this option on has serious performance ; implications and is generally recommended for debugging purposes only. ; http://php.net/implicit-flush ; Note: This directive is hardcoded to On for the CLI SAPI implicit_flush = Off ; The unserialize callback function will be called (with the undefined class' ; name as parameter), if the unserializer finds an undefined class ; which should be instantiated. A warning appears if the specified function is ; not defined, or if the function doesn't include/implement the missing class. ; So only set this entry, if you really want to implement such a ; callback-function. unserialize_callback_func = ; When floats & doubles are serialized store serialize_precision significant ; digits after the floating point. The default value ensures that when floats ; are decoded with unserialize, the data will remain the same. serialize_precision = 100 ; This directive allows you to enable and disable warnings which PHP will issue ; if you pass a value by reference at function call time. Passing values by ; reference at function call time is a deprecated feature which will be removed ; from PHP at some point in the near future. The acceptable method for passing a ; value by reference to a function is by declaring the reference in the functions ; definition, not at call time. This directive does not disable this feature, it ; only determines whether PHP will warn you about it or not. These warnings ; should enabled in development environments only. ; Default Value: On (Suppress warnings) ; Development Value: Off (Issue warnings) ; Production Value: Off (Issue warnings) ; http://php.net/allow-call-time-pass-reference allow_call_time_pass_reference = On ; Safe Mode ; http://php.net/safe-mode safe_mode = Off ; By default, Safe Mode does a UID compare check when ; opening files. If you want to relax this to a GID compare, ; then turn on safe_mode_gid. ; http://php.net/safe-mode-gid safe_mode_gid = Off ; When safe_mode is on, UID/GID checks are bypassed when ; including files from this directory and its subdirectories. ; (directory must also be in include_path or full path must ; be used when including) ; http://php.net/safe-mode-include-dir safe_mode_include_dir = ; When safe_mode is on, only executables located in the safe_mode_exec_dir ; will be allowed to be executed via the exec family of functions. ; http://php.net/safe-mode-exec-dir safe_mode_exec_dir = ; Setting certain environment variables may be a potential security breach. ; This directive contains a comma-delimited list of prefixes. In Safe Mode, ; the user may only alter environment variables whose names begin with the ; prefixes supplied here. By default, users will only be able to set ; environment variables that begin with PHP_ (e.g. PHP_FOO=BAR). ; Note: If this directive is empty, PHP will let the user modify ANY ; environment variable! ; http://php.net/safe-mode-allowed-env-vars safe_mode_allowed_env_vars = PHP_ ; This directive contains a comma-delimited list of environment variables that ; the end user won't be able to change using putenv(). These variables will be ; protected even if safe_mode_allowed_env_vars is set to allow to change them. ; http://php.net/safe-mode-protected-env-vars safe_mode_protected_env_vars = LD_LIBRARY_PATH ; open_basedir, if set, limits all file operations to the defined directory ; and below. This directive makes most sense if used in a per-directory ; or per-virtualhost web server configuration file. This directive is ; *NOT* affected by whether Safe Mode is turned On or Off. ; http://php.net/open-basedir ;open_basedir = ; This directive allows you to disable certain functions for security reasons. ; It receives a comma-delimited list of function names. This directive is ; *NOT* affected by whether Safe Mode is turned On or Off. ; http://php.net/disable-functions disable_functions = ; This directive allows you to disable certain classes for security reasons. ; It receives a comma-delimited list of class names. This directive is ; *NOT* affected by whether Safe Mode is turned On or Off. ; http://php.net/disable-classes disable_classes = ; Colors for Syntax Highlighting mode. Anything that's acceptable in ; <span style="color: ???????"> would work. ; http://php.net/syntax-highlighting ;highlight.string = #DD0000 ;highlight.comment = #FF9900 ;highlight.keyword = #007700 ;highlight.bg = #FFFFFF ;highlight.default = #0000BB ;highlight.html = #000000 ; If enabled, the request will be allowed to complete even if the user aborts ; the request. Consider enabling it if executing long requests, which may end up ; being interrupted by the user or a browser timing out. PHP's default behavior ; is to disable this feature. ; http://php.net/ignore-user-abort ;ignore_user_abort = On ; Determines the size of the realpath cache to be used by PHP. This value should ; be increased on systems where PHP opens many files to reflect the quantity of ; the file operations performed. ; http://php.net/realpath-cache-size ;realpath_cache_size = 16k ; Duration of time, in seconds for which to cache realpath information for a given ; file or directory. For systems with rarely changing files, consider increasing this ; value. ; http://php.net/realpath-cache-ttl ;realpath_cache_ttl = 120 ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Miscellaneous ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Decides whether PHP may expose the fact that it is installed on the server ; (e.g. by adding its signature to the Web server header). It is no security ; threat in any way, but it makes it possible to determine whether you use PHP ; on your server or not. ; http://php.net/expose-php expose_php = On ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Resource Limits ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds ; http://php.net/max-execution-time ; Note: This directive is hardcoded to 0 for the CLI SAPI max_execution_time = 60 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data. It's a good ; idea to limit this time on productions servers in order to eliminate unexpectedly ; long running scripts. ; Note: This directive is hardcoded to -1 for the CLI SAPI ; Default Value: -1 (Unlimited) ; Development Value: 60 (60 seconds) ; Production Value: 60 (60 seconds) ; http://php.net/max-input-time max_input_time = 60 ; Maximum input variable nesting level ; http://php.net/max-input-nesting-level ;max_input_nesting_level = 64 ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (128MB) ; http://php.net/memory-limit memory_limit = 128M ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Error handling and logging ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; This directive informs PHP of which errors, warnings and notices you would like ; it to take action for. The recommended way of setting values for this ; directive is through the use of the error level constants and bitwise ; operators. The error level constants are below here for convenience as well as ; some common settings and their meanings. ; By default, PHP is set to take action on all errors, notices and warnings EXCEPT ; those related to E_NOTICE and E_STRICT, which together cover best practices and ; recommended coding standards in PHP. For performance reasons, this is the ; recommend error reporting setting. Your production server shouldn't be wasting ; resources complaining about best practices and coding standards. That's what ; development servers and development settings are for. ; Note: The php.ini-development file has this setting as E_ALL | E_STRICT. This ; means it pretty much reports everything which is exactly what you want during ; development and early testing. ; ; Error Level Constants: ; E_ALL - All errors and warnings (includes E_STRICT as of PHP 6.0.0) ; E_ERROR - fatal run-time errors ; E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR - almost fatal run-time errors ; E_WARNING - run-time warnings (non-fatal errors) ; E_PARSE - compile-time parse errors ; E_NOTICE - run-time notices (these are warnings which often result ; from a bug in your code, but it's possible that it was ; intentional (e.g., using an uninitialized variable and ; relying on the fact it's automatically initialized to an ; empty string) ; E_STRICT - run-time notices, enable to have PHP suggest changes ; to your code which will ensure the best interoperability ; and forward compatibility of your code ; E_CORE_ERROR - fatal errors that occur during PHP's initial startup ; E_CORE_WARNING - warnings (non-fatal errors) that occur during PHP's ; initial startup ; E_COMPILE_ERROR - fatal compile-time errors ; E_COMPILE_WARNING - compile-time warnings (non-fatal errors) ; E_USER_ERROR - user-generated error message ; E_USER_WARNING - user-generated warning message ; E_USER_NOTICE - user-generated notice message ; E_DEPRECATED - warn about code that will not work in future versions ; of PHP ; E_USER_DEPRECATED - user-generated deprecation warnings ; ; Common Values: ; E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE (Show all errors, except for notices and coding standards warnings.) ; E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE | E_STRICT (Show all errors, except for notices) ; E_COMPILE_ERROR|E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR|E_ERROR|E_CORE_ERROR (Show only errors) ; E_ALL | E_STRICT (Show all errors, warnings and notices including coding standards.) ; Default Value: E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE ; Development Value: E_ALL | E_STRICT ; Production Value: E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED ; http://php.net/error-reporting error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_DEPRECATED ; This directive controls whether or not and where PHP will output errors, ; notices and warnings too. Error output is very useful during development, but ; it could be very dangerous in production environments. Depending on the code ; which is triggering the error, sensitive information could potentially leak ; out of your application such as database usernames and passwords or worse. ; It's recommended that errors be logged on production servers rather than ; having the errors sent to STDOUT. ; Possible Values: ; Off = Do not display any errors ; stderr = Display errors to STDERR (affects only CGI/CLI binaries!) ; On or stdout = Display errors to STDOUT ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: Off ; http://php.net/display-errors display_errors = On ; The display of errors which occur during PHP's startup sequence are handled ; separately from display_errors. PHP's default behavior is to suppress those ; errors from clients. Turning the display of startup errors on can be useful in ; debugging configuration problems. But, it's strongly recommended that you ; leave this setting off on production servers. ; Default Value: Off ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: Off ; http://php.net/display-startup-errors display_startup_errors = On ; Besides displaying errors, PHP can also log errors to locations such as a ; server-specific log, STDERR, or a location specified by the error_log ; directive found below. While errors should not be displayed on productions ; servers they should still be monitored and logging is a great way to do that. ; Default Value: Off ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: On ; http://php.net/log-errors log_errors = Off ; Set maximum length of log_errors. In error_log information about the source is ; added. The default is 1024 and 0 allows to not apply any maximum length at all. ; http://php.net/log-errors-max-len log_errors_max_len = 1024 ; Do not log repeated messages. Repeated errors must occur in same file on same ; line unless ignore_repeated_source is set true. ; http://php.net/ignore-repeated-errors ignore_repeated_errors = Off ; Ignore source of message when ignoring repeated messages. When this setting ; is On you will not log errors with repeated messages from different files or ; source lines. ; http://php.net/ignore-repeated-source ignore_repeated_source = Off ; If this parameter is set to Off, then memory leaks will not be shown (on ; stdout or in the log). This has only effect in a debug compile, and if ; error reporting includes E_WARNING in the allowed list ; http://php.net/report-memleaks report_memleaks = On ; This setting is on by default. ;report_zend_debug = 0 ; Store the last error/warning message in $php_errormsg (boolean). Setting this value ; to On can assist in debugging and is appropriate for development servers. It should ; however be disabled on production servers. ; Default Value: Off ; Development Value: On ; Production Value: Off ; http://php.net/track-errors track_errors = Off ; Turn off normal error reporting and emit XML-RPC error XML ; http://php.net/xmlrpc-errors ;xmlrpc_errors = 0 ; An XML-RPC faultCode ;xmlrpc_error_number = 0 ; When PHP displays or logs an error, it has the capability of inserting html ; links to documentation related to that error. This directive controls whether ; those HTML links appear in error messages or not. For performance and security ; reasons, it's recommended you disable this on production servers. ; Note: This directive is hardcoded to Off for the CLI SAPI ; Default Value: On ; Development Value: On ; Production value: Off ; http://php.net/html-errors html_errors = On ; If html_errors is set On PHP produces clickable error messages that direct ; to a page describing the error or function causing the error in detail. ; You can download a copy of the PHP manual from http://php.net/docs ; and change docref_root to the base URL of your local copy including the ; leading '/'. You must also specify the file extension being used including ; the dot. PHP's default behavior is to leave these settings empty. ; Note: Never use this feature for production boxes. ; http://php.net/docref-root ; Examples ;docref_root = "/phpmanual/" ; http://php.net/docref-ext ;docref_ext = .html ; String to output before an error message. PHP's default behavior is to leave ; this setting blank. ; http://php.net/error-prepend-string ; Example: ;error_prepend_string = "<font color=#ff0000>" ; String to output after an error message. PHP's default behavior is to leave ; this setting blank. ; http://php.net/error-append-string ; Example: ;error_append_string = "</font>" ; Log errors to specified file. PHP's default behavior is to leave this value ; empty. ; http://php.net/error-log ; Example: ;error_log = php_errors.log ; Log errors to syslog (Event Log on NT, not valid in Windows 95). ;error_log = syslog ;error_log = "C:\xampp\apache\logs\php_error.log" ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Data Handling ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Note - track_vars is ALWAYS enabled ; The separator used in PHP generated URLs to separate arguments. ; PHP's default setting is "&". ; http://php.net/arg-separator.output ; Example: arg_separator.output = "&amp;" ; List of separator(s) used by PHP to parse input URLs into variables. ; PHP's default setting is "&

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• Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData

  - by Stephen Walther

  At the last MIX conference, Netflix announced that they are exposing their catalog of movie information using the OData protocol. This is great news! This means that you can take advantage of all of the advanced OData querying features against a live database of Netflix movies. In this blog entry, I’ll demonstrate how you can use Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData to create a simple movie lookup form. The form enables you to enter a movie title, or part of a movie title, and display a list of matching movies. For example, Figure 1 illustrates the movies displayed when you enter the value robot into the lookup form.   Using the Netflix OData Catalog API You can learn about the Netflix OData Catalog API at the following website: http://developer.netflix.com/docs/oData_Catalog The nice thing about this website is that it provides plenty of samples. It also has a good general reference for OData. For example, the website includes a list of OData filter operators and functions. The Netflix Catalog API exposes 4 top-level resources: Titles – A database of Movie information including interesting movie properties such as synopsis, BoxArt, and Cast. People – A database of people information including interesting information such as Awards, TitlesDirected, and TitlesActedIn. Languages – Enables you to get title information in different languages. Genres – Enables you to get title information for specific movie genres. OData is REST based. This means that you can perform queries by putting together the right URL. For example, if you want to get a list of the movies that were released after 2010 and that had an average rating greater than 4 then you can enter the following URL in the address bar of your browser: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=ReleaseYear gt 2010&AverageRating gt 4 Entering this URL returns the movies in Figure 2. Creating the Movie Lookup Form The complete code for the Movie Lookup form is contained in Listing 1. Listing 1 – MovieLookup.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Netflix with jQuery</title> <style type="text/css"> #movieTemplateContainer div { width:400px; padding: 10px; margin: 10px; border: black solid 1px; } </style> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <label>Search Movies:</label> <input id="movieName" size="50" /> <button id="btnLookup">Lookup</button> <div id="movieTemplateContainer"></div> <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnLookup").click(function () { // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); }); function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } </script> </body> </html> The HTML page in Listing 1 includes two JavaScript libraries: <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> The first script tag retrieves jQuery from the Microsoft Ajax CDN. You can learn more about the Microsoft Ajax CDN by visiting the following website: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/cdn.ashx The second script tag is used to reference Resig’s micro-templating library. Because I want to use a template to display each movie, I need this library: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/ When you enter a value into the Search Movies input field and click the button, the following JavaScript code is executed: // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); This code Is used to build a query that will be executed against the Netflix Catalog API. For example, if you enter the search phrase King Kong then the following URL is created: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=substringof(‘King%20Kong’,Name)&$callback=callback&$format=json This query includes the following parameters: $filter – You assign a filter expression to this parameter to filter the movie results. $callback – You assign the name of a JavaScript callback method to this parameter. OData calls this method to return the movie results. $format – you assign either the value json or xml to this parameter to specify how the format of the movie results. Notice that all of the OData parameters -- $filter, $callback, $format -- start with a dollar sign $. The Movie Lookup form uses JSONP to retrieve data across the Internet. Because WCF Data Services supports JSONP, and Netflix uses WCF Data Services to expose movies using the OData protocol, you can use JSONP when interacting with the Netflix Catalog API. To learn more about using JSONP with OData, see Pablo Castro’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/archive/2009/02/25/adding-support-for-jsonp-and-url-controlled-format-to-ado-net-data-services.aspx The actual JSONP call is performed by calling the $.ajax() method. When this call successfully completes, the JavaScript callback() method is called. The callback() method looks like this: function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } The movie results from Netflix are passed to the callback method. The callback method takes advantage of Resig’s micro-templating library to display each of the movie results. A template used to display each movie is passed to the tmpl() method. The movie template looks like this: <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script>   This template looks like a server-side ASP.NET template. However, the template is rendered in the client (browser) instead of the server. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to demonstrate how well jQuery works with OData. We managed to use a number of interesting open-source libraries and open protocols while building the Movie Lookup form including jQuery, JSONP, JSON, and OData.

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• 14+ Real Estate WordPress Themes

  - by Aditi

  If you are looking for a great WordPress real estate theme. Below is a list of some of the best wordpress real estate themes, so you can find one, which is the best suited for you and be at par with increasing industry demands in real estates business.We have covered only the best themes available. The Themes are flexible & can be used by anybody in real estate business. If you are realtor, agent, appraiser or realty these can be modified as per your use. Estate It is an immensely powerful and simple to manage business theme. It offers advanced SEO control, clean code and styling modification features. It has new “Properties” management facility when installed – proving it’s far more than just a WordPress theme. It offers flexible page templates, an advanced search facility that allows you to drill down into properties based on very specific criteria, Google Maps integration and smart property images management. It is a complete web solution. It also has IDX functionality due to dsIDXpress plugin integration, which allows multi-listing services. Price: $200 View Demo Download ElegantEstate It makes your WordPress blog into a full-feature real estate website. The theme makes browsing your listings easy, and adds special integration features for property info, photos, Google Maps and more. Help increase sales by establishing an elegant and professional online presence today. It has opera compatibility, Netscape compatibility, Safari compatibility, WordPress 3.0 compatibility. It comes with five color schemes, threaded comments, optional blog-style structure, Gravatar ready, firefox compatible, IE8 + IE7 + IE6 compatible, advertisement ready, widget ready sidebars, theme options page, custom thumbnail images, PSD files, valid XHTML + CSS, smooth table less design, ePanel theme options, page templates, complete localization and many more features. Price: $39 (Package includes more than 55 themes) View Demo Download Open House Open House is fully compatible with WordPress 3.0+ and a highly customizable Real Estate WordPress theme. It has Google Maps Integration with Street View. It has a professional look for Agents and Realtors both. It is best suited for all markets and countries with theme localization, translation and internationalization. It provides for English, Spanish and Portuguese language files in the Developer Package. It has custom scripts, which makes it easy to add/delete/modify listings. It also includes photo gallery with a lightbox effect, gorgeous photo fade animations and automatic Google Maps integration. The theme can be used as a single or multi-agent website with individual Agent-Realtor pages with listings and biography information, Agent photo uploader, financing calculator.There is Multi Category search for potential customers to locate the house they want. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Residence Real Estate It is a WordPress 3.0+ compatible stunning real estate theme. It has a dynamic real estate framework management module for easy edit-delete-add more features options, which makes this theme super easy to customize to the market needs. It allows you to add your own labels and values in your own language and switch the theme to your own language with English and Spanish files included with the ability to add your own language. It offers Multi-Category search with breadcrumb filtered results, easy photo gallery management with drag-drop sorting of images. It allows you to build your own multi-category search section menu with custom labels-choices and unlimited dropdown menus. They have been presented in a professional module with search results in breadcrumb navigation. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Smooth Smooth is a WordPress Real Estate theme. It is a complete theme, which comes with Multi Category Search, Google Maps Integration, Agent Photo and Logo uploader that offers a professional and extremely affordable solution for Realtors and Agents to showcase their properties with ease. You can add your listings with the extremely easy and flexible Dynamic Real Estate Framework, edit-add-modify-delete all features, labels and values within the WordPress administration and upload unlimited photos to your galleries with latest WordPress 3.0+ features. It is a complete solution for real estate sites. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Homeowners It is another WordPress Real Estate theme, which is a fast loading optimized theme with Google Maps Integration, fully compatible with WordPress 3.0 features and all Real Estate markets. It has a professional clean look and it is full of features extremely easy to modify. It also provides for 12 new styles provided. English, Spanish and Portuguese language files are provided in the Developer Package. Homeowners WordPress Real Estate features custom scripts that make add/delete/modify listings an easy task with an included photo gallery with a lightbox effect and automatic Google Map integration with street view (New) Agents will have access only to their own listings and add the listing management for their account making this theme an ideal affordable solution for Realtors and Real Estate agencies. The theme can be used as a single or multi-agent website with individual Agent-Realtor pages with listings and biography information, Agent photo uploader, financing calculator. Multi category search has also been provided. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Real Agent Real Estate This theme is a WordPress 3.0+ compatible clean grid based real estate theme. It has a dynamic real estate framework management module for easy edit-delete-add more features options. It is easy to customize according to market. It allows you to add your own labels and values in your own language switch the theme to your own language with English and Spanish files included with the ability to add your own language. Multi-Category search with breadcrumb filtered results, easy photo gallery management with drag-drop sorting of images. You can upload property photos in bulk with the native WordPress uploader and the new image editing and resizing options in WordPress 3.0+. The theme features 5 different color styles, blue, black, red, green and purple with professional layouts, logo and agent photo uploaders. This theme is best suited for individual or multiple agents both. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Agent Press The AgentPress theme is an ideal solution for real estate agents. It offers multiple page templates that can be used to create a complete real estate website. You can create from single property templates to a custom homepage easily with it. It is compatible to WordPress 3.0 and 3.1. It has custom background/header, property template, 6 layout options, fixed width, threaded comments and many more features. Price: $99.95 View Demo Download Real Estate It is one of the best Real Estate themes. It offers single click auto install of the site, Allow user to pay & submit properties on your site, Multi-agent site with profiles, Strategically built real estate site with professional design, User dashboard to edit/renew their submissions, Auto generated Google Maps and Image Slideshows and many more unique features. Once the users search property as per their criteria, the properties are listed with all the necessary parameters that let them select the property of their choice. Users can also add the property to favorite so they can check the property later from their member area dashboard. Admin may display different sidebar on this page and add widgets of their choice. This theme is full of custom, dynamic widgets such as top agents, finance calculator, user login; advertise blocks, testimonials and so on. There is a property details page where users can see the actual property. The agent details is displayed with the full contact details and appropriate links so the visitor can get all info about the property being sold, seller and may contact them by filling out a simple form. The email will be sent directly to the person who listed the property. Price: $89.95 Single | $159.95 Developer View Demo Download Broker Real Estate It is also a WordPress 3.0+ compatible real estate theme. It has a featured property slideshow, dynamic real estate framework management module for easy edit-delete-add more features. You can add your own labels and values in your own language. It offers multi-category search with breadcrumb-filtered results, easy photo gallery management with drag-drop sorting of images. You can also build your own multi-category search section menu with custom labels-choices and unlimited dropdown menus. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Decasa It has custom search panel that lets your user easily browse your properties by keyword search or category select drop downs. It offers the property exposé, which is a user-friendly overview over the most important details of each real estate object. You can easily add this data through a post settings meta box on the post edit screen. You can easily create a real estate image gallery. Its theme options panel makes it easy to make the basic theme settings. It supports the new WordPress post thumbnail feature. When uploading an image file the theme will automatically create all the necessary image size. You can also create your own custom menu easily and fast with drag and drop without touching any code. Price: 39 € View Demo Download RealtorPress A real estate premium WordPress theme from PremiumPress. Versatile WordPress Theme that can be used by individual agents or real estate companies. The theme allows you to easily add property listings via the custom backend admin area or import CSV spreadsheets. It features customisable search options, Google maps integration, real estate data custom field creator, image management tools and more. Price: $79 | Premium Collection: $259 (all PremiumPress themes) View Demo Download Related posts:21+ WordPress Photo Blog & Portfolio Themes 14+ WordPress Portfolio Themes Professional WordPress Business Themes

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• protobuf-net: incorrect wire-type exception deserializing Guid properties

  - by Paul Smith

  I'm having issues deserializing certain Guid properties of ORM-generated entities using protobuf-net. Here's a simplified example of the code (reproduces most elements of the scenario, but doesn't reproduce the behavior; I can't expose our internal entities, so I'm looking for clues to account for the exception). Say I have a class, Account with an AccountID read-only guid, and an AccountName read-write string. I serialize & immediately deserialize a clone. Deserializing throws an Incorrect wire-type deserializing Guid exception while deserializing. Here's example usage... Account acct = new Account() { AccountName = "Bob's Checking" }; Debug.WriteLine(acct.AccountID.ToString()); using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream()) { ProtoBuf.Serializer.Serialize<Account>(ms, acct); Debug.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ms.GetBuffer())); ms.Position = 0; Account clone = ProtoBuf.Serializer.Deserialize<Account>(ms); Debug.WriteLine(clone.AccountID.ToString()); } And here's an example ORM'd class (simplified, but demonstrates the relevant semantics I can think of). Uses a shell game to deserialize read-only properties by exposing the backing field ("can't write" essentially becomes "shouldn't write," but we can scan code for instances of assigning to these fields, so the hack works for our purposes). Again, this does not reproduce the exception behavior; I'm looking for clues as to what could: [DataContract()] [Serializable()] public partial class Account { public Account() { _accountID = Guid.NewGuid(); } [XmlAttribute("AccountID")] [DataMember(Name = "AccountID", Order = 1)] public Guid _accountID; /// <summary> /// A read-only property; XML, JSON and DataContract serializers all seem /// to correctly recognize the public backing field when deserializing: /// </summary> [IgnoreDataMember] [XmlIgnore] public Guid AccountID { get { return this._accountID; } } [IgnoreDataMember] protected string _accountName; [DataMember(Name = "AccountName", Order = 2)] [XmlAttribute] public string AccountName { get { return this._accountName; } set { this._accountName = value; } } } XML, JSON and DataContract serializers all seem to serialize / deserialize these object graphs just fine, so the attribute arrangement basically works. I've tried protobuf-net with lists vs. single instances, different prefix styles, etc., but still always get the 'incorrect wire-type ... Guid' exception when deserializing. So the specific questions is, is there any known explanation / workaround for this? I'm at a loss trying to trace what circumstances (in the real code but not the example) could be causing it. We hope not to have to create a protobuf dependency directly in the entity layer; if that's the case, we'll probably create proxy DTO entities with all public properties having protobuf attributes. (This is a subjective issue I have with all declarative serialization models; it's a ubiquitous pattern & I understand why it arose, but IMO, if we can put a man on the moon, then "normal" should be to have objects and serialization contracts decoupled. ;-) ) Thanks!

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• Build problems when adding `__str__` method to Boost Python C++ class

  - by Rickard

  I have started to play around with boost python a bit and ran into a problem. I tried to expose a C++ class to python which posed no problems. But I can't seem to manage to implement the __str__ functionality for the class without getting build errors I don't understand. I'm using boost 1_42 prebuild by boostpro. I build the library using cmake and the vs2010 compiler. I have a very simple setup. The header-file (tutorial.h) looks like the following: #include <iostream> namespace TestBoostPython{ class TestClass { private: double m_x; public: TestClass(double x); double Get_x() const; void Set_x(double x); }; std::ostream &operator<<(std::ostream &ostr, const TestClass &ts); }; and the corresponding cpp-file looks like: #include <boost/python.hpp> #include "tutorial.h" using namespace TestBoostPython; TestClass::TestClass(double x) { m_x = x; } double TestClass::Get_x() const { return m_x; } void TestClass::Set_x(double x) { m_x = x; } std::ostream &operator<<(std::ostream &ostr, TestClass &ts) { ostr << ts.Get_x() << "\n"; return ostr; } BOOST_PYTHON_MODULE(testme) { using namespace boost::python; class_<TestClass>("TestClass", init<double>()) .add_property("x", &TestClass::Get_x, &TestClass::Set_x) .def(str(self)) ; } The CMakeLists.txt looks like the following: CMAKE_MINIMUM_REQUIRED(VERSION 2.8) project (testme) FIND_PACKAGE( Boost REQUIRED ) FIND_PACKAGE( Boost COMPONENTS python REQUIRED ) FIND_PACKAGE( PythonLibs REQUIRED ) set(Boost_USE_STATIC_LIBS OFF) set(Boost_USE_MULTITHREAD ON) INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES(${Boost_INCLUDE_DIRS}) INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES ( ${PYTHON_INCLUDE_PATH} ) add_library(testme SHARED tutorial.cpp) target_link_libraries(testme ${Boost_PYTHON_LIBRARY}) target_link_libraries(testme ${PYTHON_LIBRARY} The build error I get is the following: Compiling... tutorial.cpp C:\Program Files (x86)\boost\boost_1_42\boost/python/def_visitor.hpp(31) : error C2780: 'void boost::python::api::object_operators::visit(ClassT &,const char *,const boost::python::detail::def_helper &) const' : expects 3 arguments - 1 provided with [ U=boost::python::api::object ] C:\Program Files (x86)\boost\boost_1_42\boost/python/object_core.hpp(203) : see declaration of 'boost::python::api::object_operators::visit' with [ U=boost::python::api::object ] C:\Program Files (x86)\boost\boost_1_42\boost/python/def_visitor.hpp(67) : see reference to function template instantiation 'void boost::python::def_visitor_access::visit,classT>(const V &,classT &)' being compiled with [ DerivedVisitor=boost::python::api::object, classT=boost::python::class_, V=boost::python::def_visitor ] C:\Program Files (x86)\boost\boost_1_42\boost/python/class.hpp(225) : see reference to function template instantiation 'void boost::python::def_visitor::visit>(classT &) const' being compiled with [ DerivedVisitor=boost::python::api::object, W=TestBoostPython::TestClass, classT=boost::python::class_ ] .\tutorial.cpp(29) : see reference to function template instantiation 'boost::python::class_ &boost::python::class_::def(const boost::python::def_visitor &)' being compiled with [ W=TestBoostPython::TestClass, U=boost::python::api::object, DerivedVisitor=boost::python::api::object ] Does anyone have any idea on what went wrrong? If I remove the .def(str(self)) part from the wrapper code, everything compiles fine and the class is usable from python. I'd be very greatful for assistance. Thank you, Rickard

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• Pluralsight Meet the Author Podcast on Structuring JavaScript Code

  - by dwahlin

  I had the opportunity to talk with Fritz Onion from Pluralsight about one of my recent courses titled Structuring JavaScript Code for one of their Meet the Author podcasts. We talked about why JavaScript patterns are important for building more re-useable and maintainable apps, pros and cons of different patterns, and how to go about picking a pattern as a project is started. The course provides a solid walk-through of converting what I call “Function Spaghetti Code” into more modular code that’s easier to maintain, more re-useable, and less susceptible to naming conflicts. Patterns covered in the course include the Prototype Pattern, Revealing Module Pattern, and Revealing Prototype Pattern along with several other tips and techniques that can be used. Meet the Author:  Dan Wahlin on Structuring JavaScript Code   The transcript from the podcast is shown below: [Fritz]  Hello, this is Fritz Onion with another Pluralsight author interview. Today we’re talking with Dan Wahlin about his new course, Structuring JavaScript Code. Hi, Dan, it’s good to have you with us today. [Dan]  Thanks for having me, Fritz. [Fritz]  So, Dan, your new course, which came out in December of 2011 called Structuring JavaScript Code, goes into several patterns of usage in JavaScript as well as ways of organizing your code and what struck me about it was all the different techniques you described for encapsulating your code. I was wondering if you could give us just a little insight into what your motivation was for creating this course and sort of why you decided to write it and record it. [Dan]  Sure. So, I got started with JavaScript back in the mid 90s. In fact, back in the days when browsers that most people haven’t heard of were out and we had JavaScript but it wasn’t great. I was on a project in the late 90s that was heavy, heavy JavaScript and we pretty much did what I call in the course function spaghetti code where you just have function after function, there’s no rhyme or reason to how those functions are structured, they just kind of flow and it’s a little bit hard to do maintenance on it, you really don’t get a lot of reuse as far as from an object perspective. And so coming from an object-oriented background in JAVA and C#, I wanted to put something together that highlighted kind of the new way if you will of writing JavaScript because most people start out just writing functions and there’s nothing with that, it works, but it’s definitely not a real reusable solution. So the course is really all about how to move from just kind of function after function after function to the world of more encapsulated code and more reusable and hopefully better maintenance in the process. [Fritz]  So I am sure a lot of people have had similar experiences with their JavaScript code and will be looking forward to seeing what types of patterns you’ve put forth. Now, a couple I noticed in your course one is you start off with the prototype pattern. Do you want to describe sort of what problem that solves and how you go about using it within JavaScript? [Dan]  Sure. So, the patterns that are covered such as the prototype pattern and the revealing module pattern just as two examples, you know, show these kind of three things that I harp on throughout the course of encapsulation, better maintenance, reuse, those types of things. The prototype pattern specifically though has a couple kind of pros over some of the other patterns and that is the ability to extend your code without touching source code and what I mean by that is let’s say you’re writing a library that you know either other teammates or other people just out there on the Internet in general are going to be using. With the prototype pattern, you can actually write your code in such a way that we’re leveraging the JavaScript property and by doing that now you can extend my code that I wrote without touching my source code script or you can even override my code and perform some new functionality. Again, without touching my code.  And so you get kind of the benefit of the almost like inheritance or overriding in object oriented languages with this prototype pattern and it makes it kind of attractive that way definitely from a maintenance standpoint because, you know, you don’t want to modify a script I wrote because I might roll out version 2 and now you’d have to track where you change things and it gets a little tricky. So with this you just override those pieces or extend them and get that functionality and that’s kind of some of the benefits that that pattern offers out of the box. [Fritz]  And then the revealing module pattern, how does that differ from the prototype pattern and what problem does that solve differently? [Dan]  Yeah, so the prototype pattern and there’s another one that’s kind of really closely lined with revealing module pattern called the revealing prototype pattern and it also uses the prototype key word but it’s very similar to the one you just asked about the revealing module pattern. [Fritz]  Okay. [Dan]  This is a really popular one out there. In fact, we did a project for Microsoft that was very, very heavy JavaScript. It was an HMTL5 jQuery type app and we use this pattern for most of the structure if you will for the JavaScript code and what it does in a nutshell is allows you to get that encapsulation so you have really a single function wrapper that wraps all your other child functions but it gives you the ability to do public versus private members and this is kind of a sort of debate out there on the web. Some people feel that all JavaScript code should just be directly accessible and others kind of like to be able to hide their, truly their private stuff and a lot of people do that. You just put an underscore in front of your field or your variable name or your function name and that kind of is the defacto way to say hey, this is private. With the revealing module pattern you can do the equivalent of what objective oriented languages do and actually have private members that you literally can’t get to as an external consumer of the JavaScript code and then you can expose only those members that you want to be public. Now, you don’t get the benefit though of the prototype feature, which is I can’t easily extend the revealing module pattern type code if you don’t like something I’m doing, chances are you’re probably going to have to tweak my code to fix that because we’re not leveraging prototyping but in situations where you’re writing apps that are very specific to a given target app, you know, it’s not a library, it’s not going to be used in other apps all over the place, it’s a pattern I actually like a lot, it’s very simple to get going and then if you do like that public/private feature, it’s available to you. [Fritz]  Yeah, that’s interesting. So it’s almost, you can either go private by convention just by using a standard naming convention or you can actually enforce it by using the prototype pattern. [Dan]  Yeah, that’s exactly right. [Fritz]  So one of the things that I know I run across in JavaScript and I’m curious to get your take on is we do have all these different techniques of encapsulation and each one is really quite different when you’re using closures versus simply, you know, referencing member variables and adding them to your objects that the syntax changes with each pattern and the usage changes. So what would you recommend for people starting out in a brand new JavaScript project? Should they all sort of decide beforehand on what patterns they’re going to stick to or do you change it based on what part of the library you’re working on? I know that’s one of the points of confusion in this space. [Dan]  Yeah, it’s a great question. In fact, I just had a company ask me about that. So which one do I pick and, of course, there’s not one answer fits all. [Fritz]  Right. [Dan]  So it really depends what you just said is absolutely in my opinion correct, which is I think as a, especially if you’re on a team or even if you’re just an individual a team of one, you should go through and pick out which pattern for this particular project you think is best. Now if it were me, here’s kind of the way I think of it. If I were writing a let’s say base library that several web apps are going to use or even one, but I know that there’s going to be some pieces that I’m not really sure on right now as I’m writing I and I know people might want to hook in that and have some better extension points, then I would look at either the prototype pattern or the revealing prototype. Now, really just a real quick summation between the two the revealing prototype also gives you that public/private stuff like the revealing module pattern does whereas the prototype pattern does not but both of the prototype patterns do give you the benefit of that extension or that hook capability. So, if I were writing a library that I need people to override things or I’m not even sure what I need them to override, I want them to have that option, I’d probably pick a prototype, one of the prototype patterns. If I’m writing some code that is very unique to the app and it’s kind of a one off for this app which is what I think a lot of people are kind of in that mode as writing custom apps for customers, then my personal preference is the revealing module pattern you could always go with the module pattern as well which is very close but I think the revealing module patterns a little bit cleaner and we go through that in the course and explain kind of the syntax there and the differences. [Fritz]  Great, that makes a lot of sense. [Fritz]  I appreciate you taking the time, Dan, and I hope everyone takes a chance to look at your course and sort of make these decisions for themselves in their next JavaScript project. Dan’s course is, Structuring JavaScript Code and it’s available now in the Pluralsight Library. So, thank you very much, Dan. [Dan]  Thanks for having me again.

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• Rendering a WPF Network Map/Graph layout - Manual? PathListBox? Something Else?

  - by Ben Von Handorf

  I'm writing code to present the user with a simplified network map. At any given time, the map is focused on a specific item... say a router or a server. Based on the focused item, other network entities are grouped into sets (i.e. subnets or domains) and then rendered around the focused item. Lines would represent connections and groups would be visually grouped inside a rectangle or ellipse. Panning and zooming are required features. An item can be selected to display more information in a "properties" style window. An item could also be double-clicked to re-focus the entire network map on that item. At that point, the entire map would be re-calculated. I am using MVVM without any framework, as of yet. Assume the logic for grouping items and determining what should be shown or not is all in place. I'm looking for the best way to approach the UI layout. So far, I'm aware of the following options: Use a canvas for layout (inside a ScrollViewer to handle the panning). Have my ViewModel make use of a Layout Manager type of class, which would handle assigning all the layout properties (Top, Left, etc.). Bind my set of display items to an ItemsControl and use Data Templates to handle the actual rendering. The drawbacks with this approach: Highly manual layout on my part. Lots of calculation. I have to handle item selection manually. Computation of connecting lines is manual. The Pros of this approach: I can draw additional lines between child subnets as appropriate (manually). Additional LayoutManagers could be added later to render the display differently. This could probably be wrapped up into some sort of a GraphLayout control to be re-used. Present the focused item at the center of the display and then use a PathListBox for layout of the additional items. Have my ViewModel expose a simple list of things to be drawn and bind them to the PathListBox. Override the ListBoxItem Template to also create a line geometry from the borders of the focused item (tricky) to the bound item. Use DataTemplates to handle the case where the item being bound is a subnet, in which case we would use another PathListBox in the template to display items inside the subnet. The drawbacks with this approach: Selected Item synchronization across multiple `PathListBox`es. Only one item on the whole graph can be selected at a time, but each child PathListBox maintains its own selection. Also, subnets cannot be selected, but would be selectable without additional work. Drawing the connecting lines is going to be a bit of trickery in the ListBoxItem template, since I need to know the correct side of the focused item to connect to. The pros of this approach: I get to stay out of the layout business, more. I'm looking for any advice or thoughts from others who have encountered similar issues or who have more WPF experience than I. I'm using WPF 4, so any new tricks are legal and encouraged.

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• Advantages of SQL Backup Pro

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Getting backups of your databases in place is a fundamental issue for protection of the business. Yes, I said business, not data, not databases, but business. Because of a lack of good, tested, backups, companies have gone completely out of business or suffered traumatic financial loss. That’s just a simple fact (outlined with a few examples here). So you want to get backups right. That’s a big part of why we make Red Gate SQL Backup Pro work the way it does. Yes, you could just use native backups, but you’ll be missing a few advantages that we provide over and above what you get out of the box from Microsoft. Let’s talk about them. Guidance If you’re a hard-core DBA with 20+ years of experience on every version of SQL Server and several other data platforms besides, you may already know what you need in order to get a set of tested backups in place. But, if you’re not, maybe a little help would be a good thing. To set up backups for your servers, we supply a wizard that will step you through the entire process. It will also act to guide you down good paths. For example, if your databases are in Full Recovery, you should set up transaction log backups to run on a regular basis. When you choose a transaction log backup from the Backup Type you’ll see that only those databases that are in Full Recovery will be listed: This makes it very easy to be sure you have a log backup set up for all the databases you should and none of the databases where you won’t be able to. There are other examples of guidance throughout the product. If you have the responsibility of managing backups but very little knowledge or time, we can help you out. Throughout the software you’ll notice little green question marks. You can see two in the screen above and more in each of the screens in other topics below this one. Clicking on these will open a window with additional information about the topic in question which should help to guide you through some of the tougher decisions you may have to make while setting up your backup jobs. Here’s an example: Backup Copies As a part of the wizard you can choose to make a copy of your backup on your network. This process runs as part of the Red Gate SQL Backup engine. It will copy your backup, after completing the backup so it doesn’t cause any additional blocking or resource use within the backup process, to the network location you define. Creating a copy acts as a mechanism of protection for your backups. You can then backup that copy or do other things with it, all without affecting the original backup file. This requires either an additional backup or additional scripting to get it done within the native Microsoft backup engine. Offsite Storage Red Gate offers you the ability to immediately copy your backup to the cloud as a further, off-site, protection of your backups. It’s a service we provide and expose through the Backup wizard. Your backup will complete first, just like with the network backup copy, then an asynchronous process will copy that backup to cloud storage. Again, this is built right into the wizard or even the command line calls to SQL Backup, so it’s part a single process within your system. With native backup you would need to write additional scripts, possibly outside of T-SQL, to make this happen. Before you can use this with your backups you’ll need to do a little setup, but it’s built right into the product to get this done. You’ll be directed to the web site for our hosted storage where you can set up an account. Compression If you have SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, or you’re on SQL Server 2008R2 or greater and you have a Standard or Enterprise license, then you have backup compression. It’s built right in and works well. But, if you need even more compression then you might want to consider Red Gate SQL Backup Pro. We offer four levels of compression within the product. This means you can get a little compression faster, or you can just sacrifice some CPU time and get even more compression. You decide. For just a simple example I backed up AdventureWorks2012 using both methods of compression. The resulting file from native was 53mb. Our file was 33mb. That’s a file that is smaller by 38%, not a small number when we start talking gigabytes. We even provide guidance here to help you determine which level of compression would be right for you and your system: So for this test, if you wanted maximum compression with minimum CPU use you’d probably want to go with Level 2 which gets you almost as much compression as Level 3 but will use fewer resources. And that compression is still better than the native one by 10%. Restore Testing Backups are vital. But, a backup is just a file until you restore it. How do you know that you can restore that backup? Of course, you’ll use CHECKSUM to validate that what was read from disk during the backup process is what gets written to the backup file. You’ll also use VERIFYONLY to check that the backup header and the checksums on the backup file are valid. But, this doesn’t do a complete test of the backup. The only complete test is a restore. So, what you really need is a process that tests your backups. This is something you’ll have to schedule separately from your backups, but we provide a couple of mechanisms to help you out here. First, when you create a backup schedule, all done through our wizard which gives you as much guidance as you get when running backups, you get the option of creating a reminder to create a job to test your restores. You can enable this or disable it as you choose when creating your scheduled backups. Once you’re ready to schedule test restores for your databases, we have a wizard for this as well. After you choose the databases and restores you want to test, all configurable for automation, you get to decide if you’re going to restore to a specified copy or to the original database: If you’re doing your tests on a new server (probably the best choice) you can just overwrite the original database if it’s there. If not, you may want to create a new database each time you test your restores. Another part of validating your backups is ensuring that they can pass consistency checks. So we have DBCC built right into the process. You can even decide how you want DBCC run, which error messages to include, limit or add to the checks being run. With this you could offload some DBCC checks from your production system so that you only run the physical checks on your production box, but run the full check on this backup. That makes backup testing not just a general safety process, but a performance enhancer as well: Finally, assuming the tests pass, you can delete the database, leave it in place, or delete it regardless of the tests passing. All this is automated and scheduled through the SQL Agent job on your servers. Running your databases through this process will ensure that you don’t just have backups, but that you have tested backups. Single Point of Management If you have more than one server to maintain, getting backups setup could be a tedious process. But, with Red Gate SQL Backup Pro you can connect to multiple servers and then manage all your databases and all your servers backups from a single location. You’ll be able to see what is scheduled, what has run successfully and what has failed, all from a single interface without having to connect to different servers. Log Shipping Wizard If you want to set up log shipping as part of a disaster recovery process, it can frequently be a pain to get configured correctly. We supply a wizard that will walk you through every step of the process including setting up alerts so you’ll know should your log shipping fail. Summary You want to get your backups right. As outlined above, Red Gate SQL Backup Pro will absolutely help you there. We supply a number of processes and functionalities above and beyond what you get with SQL Server native. Plus, with our guidance, hints and reminders, you will get your backups set up in a way that protects your business.

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• Building services with .Net Part 1

  - by Allan Rwakatungu

  On the 26th of May 2010 , I made a presentation to the .NET user group meeting (thanks to Malisa Ncube for organizing this event every month … ). If you missed my presentation , we talked about why we should all be building services … better still using the .NET framework. This blog post is an introduction to services , why you would want to build services and how you can build services using the .NET framework. What is a service? OASIS defines service as "a mechanism to enable access to one or more capabilities, where the access is provided using a prescribed interface and is exercised consistent with constraints and policies as specified by the service description." [1]. If the above definition sounds to academic , you can also define a service as loosely coupled units of functionality that have no calls to each other embedded in the. Instead of services embedding calls to each other in their service code they use defined protocols that describe how services pass and parse messages. This is a good way to think about services if you’re from an objected oriented background. While in object oriented programming functions make calls to each other, in service oriented programming, functions pass messages between each other. Why would you want to use services? 1. If your enterprise architecture looks like this   Services are the building blocks for SOA . With SOA you can move away from the sphaggetti infrastructure that is common in most enterprises. The complexity or lack of visibility of the integration points in your enterprises makes it difficult and costly to implement new initiatives and changes into the business - and even impossible in some cases - as it is not possible to identify the impact a change in one system might have to other systems. With services you can move to an architecture like this Your building blocks from Spaghetti infrastructure to something that is more well-defined and manageable to achieve cost efficiency and not least business agility - enabling you to react to changes in the market with speed and achieve operational efficiency and control are services. 2. If you want to become the Gates or Zuckerburger. Have you heard about Web 2.0 ? Mashups? Software as a service (SAAS) ? Cloud computing ?   They all offer you the opportunity to have scalable but low cost business models and they built using services.  Some of my favorite companies that leverage services for their business models include  https://www.salesforce.com/ (cloud CRM) http://www. twitter.com (more people use twitter clients built by 3rd parties than their official clients) http://www.kayak.com/ (compares data from other travel sites to give information to users in one location) Services with the .NET framework      If you are a .NET developer and you want to develop services, Windows Communication Framework (WCF) is the tool for you. WCF is Microsoft’s unified programming model (service model) for building service oriented applications. ( Before .NET 3.0 you had several models for programming services in .NET including .NET remoting, Web services (ASMX), COM +, Microsoft Messaging queuing (MSMQ) etc, after .NET 3.0 the programming model was unified into one i.e. WCF ). Windows Communication Framework (WCF) provides you 1. An Software Development Kit (SDK) for creating SOA applications 2. A runtime for running services on the Windows platform Why should you use Windows Communication Foundation if you’re programming services?   1. It supports interoperable and open standards e.g. WS* protocols for programming SOAP services 2. It has a unified programming model. Whether you use TCP or Http or Pipes or transmitting using Messaging Queues, programmers need to learn just one way to program. Previously you had .NET remoting, MSMQ, Web services, COM+ and they were all done differently 3. Productive programming model You don’t have to worry about all the plumbing involved to write services. You have a rich declarative programming model to add stuff like logging, transactions, and reliable messages in-built in the Windows Communication Framework. Understanding services in WCF The basic principles of WCF are as easy as ABC A – Address This is where the service is located B- Binding This describes how you communicate with the service e.g. Use TCP, HTTP or both. How to exchange security information with the service etc. C – Contract This defines what the service can do. E.g. Pay water bill, Make a phone call A - Addresses In WCF, an address is a combination of transport, server name, port and path Example addresses may include http://localhost:8001 net.tcp://localhost:8002/MyService net.pipe://localhost/MyPipe net.msmq://localhost/private/MyService net.msmq://localhost/MyService B- Binding   There are numerous ways to communicate with services , different ways that a message can be formatted/sent/secured, that allows you to tailor your service for the compatibility/performance you require for your solution. Transport You can use HTTP TCP MSMQ , Named pipes, Your own custom transport etc Message You  can send a plain text binary, Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) message Communication security No security Transport security Message security Authenticating and authorizing callers etc Behaviour You service can support Transactions Be reliable Use queues Support ajax etc C - Contract You define what your service can do using Service contracts :- Define operations that your service can do, communications and behaviours Data contracts :- Define the messages that are passed from and into your service and how they are formatted Fault contracts :- Defines errors types in your service   As an example, suppose your service service shows money. You define your service contract using a interface [ServiceContract] public interface IShowMeTheMoney {   [OperationContract]    Money Show(); } You define the data contract by annotating a class it with the Data Contract attribute and fields you want to pass in the message as Data Members. (Note:- In the latest versions of WCF you dont have to use attributes if you passing all the objects properties in the message) [DataContract] public Money {   [DataMember]   public string Currency { get; set; }   [DataMember]   public Decimal Amount { get; set; }   public string Comment { get; set; } } Features of Windows Communication Foundation Windows Communication Foundation is not only simple but feature rich , offering you several options to tweak your service to fit your business requirements. Some of the features of WCF include 1. Workflow services You can combine WCF with Windows WorkFlow Foundation (WWF) to write workflow type services 2. Control how your data (messages) are transferred and serialized e.g. you can serialize your business objects as XML or binary 3. control over session management , instance creation and concurrency management without writing code if you like 4. Queues and reliable sessions. You can store messages from the sending client and later forward them to the receiving application. You can also guarantee that messages will arrive at their destincation. 5.Transactions:  You can have different services participate in a transaction operations that can be rolled back if needed 6. Security. WCF has rich features for authorization and authentication  as well as keep audit trails 7. Web programming model. WCF allows developers to expose services as non SOAP endpoints 8. Inbuilt features that you can use to write JSON and services that support AJAX applications And lots more In my next blog I will show you how you can use WCF features to write a real world business service.               Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 ]] /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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