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• MSCC: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp

  Mauritius participated and contributed to the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 (GWAB). Again! And this time stronger than ever, and together with 137 other locations in 56 countries world-wide. We had 62 named registrations, 7 guest additions and approximately 10 offline participants prior to the event day. Most interestingly the organisation of the GWAB through the MSCC helped to increased the number of craftsmen. The Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community has currently 138 registered members - in less than one year! Only with those numbers we can proudly say that all the preparations and hard work towards this event already paid off. Personally, I'm really grateful that we had this kind of response and the feedback from some attendees confirmed that the MSCC is on the right track here on Cyber Island Mauritius. Inspired and motivated by the success of this event, rest assured that there will be more public events like the GWAB. This time it took some time to reflect on our meetup, following my first impression right on spot: "Wow, what an experience to organise and participate in this global event. Overall, I've been very pleased with the preparations and the event itself. Surely, there have been some nicks that we have to address and to improve for future activities like this. Quite frankly, we are not professional event organisers (not yet) but we learned a lot over the past couple of days. A big Thank You to our event sponsors, namely Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands & French Pacific, Ceridian Mauritius and Emtel. Without them this event wouldn't have happened - Thank You! And to the cool team members of Microsoft Student Partners (MSPs). You geeks did a great job! Thanks!" So, how many attendees did we actually have? 61! - Awesome - 61 cloud computing instances to help on the research of diabetes. During Saturday afternoon there was even an online publication on L'Express: Les développeurs mauriciens se joignent au combat contre le diabète Reactions of other attendees Don't take my word for granted... Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Awesome event, really appreciated the presentations :-)" -- Kevin on event comments "very interesting and enriching." -- Diana on event comments "#gwab #gwabmru 2014 great success. Looking forward for gwab 2015" -- Wasiim on Twitter "Was there till the end. Awesome Event. I'll surely join upcoming meetup sessions :)" -- Luchmun on event comments "#gwabmru was not that cool. left early" -- Mohammad on Twitter The overall feedback is positive but we are absolutely aware that there quite a number of problems we had to face. We are already looking into that and ideas / action plans on how we will be able to improve it for future events. The sessions We started the day with welcoming speeches by Thierry Coret, Sr. Marketing Manager of Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands & French Pacific and Vidia Mooneegan, Managing Director and Sr. Vice President of Ceridian Mauritius. The clear emphasis was on the endless possibilities of cloud computing and how it can enable any kind of sectors here in the country. Then it was about time to set up the cloud computing services in order to contribute each attendees cloud computing resources to the global research of diabetes, a step by step guide presented by Arnaud Meslier, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. Given a rendering package and a configuration file it was very interesting to follow the single steps in Windows Azure. Also, during the day we were not sure whether the set up had been correctly, as Mauritius didn't show up on the results board - which should have been the case after approximately 20 to 30 minutes. Anyways, let the minions work... Next, Arnaud gave a brief overview of the variety of services Windows Azure has to offer. Whether you need a development environment for your websites or mobiles app, running a virtual machine with your existing applications or simply putting a SQL database online. No worries, Windows Azure has the right packages available and the online management portal is really easy t handle. After this, we got a little bit more business oriented while Wasiim Hosenbocus, employee at Ceridian, took the attendees through the inerts of a real-life application, and demoed a couple of the existing features. He did a great job by showing how the different services of Windows Azure can be created and pulled together. After the lunch break it is always tough to keep the audience awake... And it was my turn. I gave a brief overview on operating and managing a SQL database on Windows Azure. Well, there are actually two options available and depending on your individual requirements you should be aware of both. The simpler version is called SQL Database and while provisioning only takes a couple of seconds, you should take into consideration that SQL Database has a number of constraints, like limitations on the actual database size - up to 5 GB as web edition and up to 150 GB maximum as business edition -, among others. Next, it was Chervine Bhiwoo's session on Windows Azure Mobile Services. It was absolutely amazing to see that the mobiles services directly offers you various project templates, like Windows 8 Store App, Android app, iOS app, and even Xamarin cross-platform app development. So, within a couple of minutes you can have your first mobile app active and running on Windows Azure. Furthermore, Chervine showed the attendees that adding another user interface, like Web Sites running on ASP.NET MVC 4 only takes a couple of minutes, too. And last but not least, we rounded up the day with Windows Azure Websites and hosting of Virtual Machines presented by some members of the local Microsoft Students Partners programme. Surely, one of the big advantages using Windows Azure is the availability of pre-defined installation packages of known web applications, like WordPress, Joomla!, or Ghost. Compared to running your own web site with a traditional web hoster it is surely en par, and depending on your personal level of expertise, Windows Azure provides you more liberty in terms of configuration than maybe a shared hosting environment. Running a pre-defined web application is one thing but in case that you would like to have more control over your hosting environment it is highly advised to opt for a virtual machine. Provisioning of an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system was very simple to do but it takes some more minutes than you might expect. So, please be patient and take your time while Windows Azure gets everything in place for you. Afterwards, you can use a SecureShell (ssh) client like Putty in case of a Linux-based machine, or Remote Desktop Services when operating a Windows Server system to log in into your virtual machine. At the end of the day we had a great Q&A session and we finalised the event with our raffle of goodies. Participation in the raffle was bound to submission of the session survey and most gratefully we had a give-away for everyone. What a nice coincidence to finish of the day. Note: All session slides (and demo codes) will be made available on the MSCC event page. Please, check the Files section over there. (Some) Visual impressions from the event Just to give you an idea about what has happened during the GWAB 2014 at Ebene... Speakers and Microsoft Student Partners are getting ready for the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 GWAB 2014 attendees are fully integrated into the hands-on-labs and setting up their individuals cloud computing services 60 attendees at the GWAB 2014. Despite some technical difficulties we had a great time running the event GWAB 2014: Using the lunch break for networking and exchange of ideas - Great conversations and topics amongst attendees There are more pictures on the original event page: Questions & Answers Following are a couple of questions which have been asked and didn't get an answer during the event: Q: Is it possible to upload static pages via FTP? A: Yes, you can. Have a look at the right side column on the dashboard of your website. There you'll find information about the FTP and SFTP host names. You can use any FTP client, like ie. FileZilla to log in. FTP also gives you access to your log files. Q: What are the size limitations on SQL Database? A: 5 GB on the Web Edition, and 150 GB on the business edition. A maximum 150 databases (inclusing 'master') per SQL Database server. More details here: General Guidelines and Limitations (Azure SQL Database) Q: What's the maximum size of a SQL Server running in a Virtual Machine? A: The maximum Windows Azure VM has currently 8 CPU cores, 14 or 56 GB of RAM and 16x 1 TB hard drives. More details here: Virtual Machine and Cloud Service Sizes for Azure Q: How can we register for Windows Azure? A: Mauritius is currently not listed for phone verification. Please get in touch with Arnaud Meslier at Microsoft IOI & FP Q: Can I use my own domain name for Windows Azure websites? A: Yes, you can. But this might require to upscale your account to Standard. In case that I missed a question and answer, please use the comment section at the end of the article. Thanks! Final results Every participant was instructed during the hands-on-lab session on how to set up a cloud computing service in their account. Of course, I won't keep the results from you... Global Azure Lab GWAB 2014: Our cloud computing contribution to the research of diabetes And I would say Mauritius did a good job! Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Launch of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 (15.4.2014) Corsair Hackers Reboot (19.4.2014) WebCup (TBA ~ June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! Networking and job/project opportunities Despite having technical presentations on Windows Azure an event like this always offers a great bunch of possibilities and opportunities to get in touch with new people in IT, have an exchange of experience with other like-minded people. As I already wrote about Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion - I had a great conversation with representatives of the University des Mascareignes which are currently embracing cloud infrastructure and cloud computing for their various campuses in the Indian Ocean. As for the MSCC it would be a great experience to stay in touch with them, and to work on upcoming, common activities. Furthermore, I had a very good conversation with Thierry and Ludovic of Microsoft IOI & FP on the necessity of user groups and IT communities here on the island. It's great to see that the MSCC is currently on a run and that local companies are sharing our thoughts on promoting IT careers and exchange of IT knowledge in such an open way. I'm also looking forward to be able to participate and to contribute on more events in the near future. My resume of the day We learned a lot today and there is always room for improvement! It was an awesome event and quite frankly it was a pleasure to spend the day with so many enthuastic IT people in the same room. It was a great experience to organise such event locally and participate on a global scale to support the GlyQ-IQ Technology in their research on diabetes. I was so pleased to see the involvement of new MSCC members in taking the opportunity to share and learn about the power of cloud computing. The Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is on the right way and this year's bootcamp on Windows Azure only marked the beginning of our journey. Thank you to our sponsors and my kudos to the MSPs! Update: Media coverage The event has been reported in local media, too. Following are some resources: Orange - Local - Business: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète Maurice Info.mu: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète Le Quotidien Pg 2: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 - Le cloud pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète The Observer Pg 12: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète

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• Down Tools Week Cometh: Kissing Goodbye to CVs/Resumes and Cover Letters

  - by Bart Read

  I haven't blogged about what I'm doing in my (not so new) temporary role as Red Gate's technical recruiter, mostly because it's been routine, business as usual stuff, and because I've been trying to understand the role by doing it. I think now though the time has come to get a little more radical, so I'm going to tell you why I want to largely eliminate CVs/resumes and cover letters from the application process for some of our technical roles, and why I think that might be a good thing for candidates (and for us). I have a terrible confession to make, or at least it's a terrible confession for a recruiter: I don't really like CV sifting, or reading cover letters, and, unless I've misread the mood around here, neither does anybody else. It's dull, it's time-consuming, and it's somewhat soul destroying because, when all is said and done, you're being paid to be incredibly judgemental about people based on relatively little information. I feel like I've dirtied myself by saying that - I mean, after all, it's a core part of my job - but it sucks, it really does. (And, of course, the truth is I'm still a software engineer at heart, and I'm always looking for ways to do things better.) On the flip side, I've never met anyone who likes writing their CV. It takes hours and hours of faffing around and massaging it into shape, and the whole process is beset by a gnawing anxiety, frustration, and insecurity. All you really want is a chance to demonstrate your skills - not just talk about them - and how do you do that in a CV or cover letter? Often the best candidates will include samples of their work (a portfolio, screenshots, links to websites, product downloads, etc.), but sometimes this isn't possible, or may not be appropriate, or you just don't think you're allowed because of what your school/university careers service has told you (more commonly an issue with grads, obviously). And what are we actually trying to find out about people with all of this? I think the common criteria are actually pretty basic: Smart Gets things done (thanks for these two Joel) Not an a55hole* (sorry, have to get around Simple Talk's swear filter - and thanks to Professor Robert I. Sutton for this one) *Of course, everyone has off days, and I don't honestly think we're too worried about somebody being a bit grumpy every now and again. We can do a bit better than this in the context of the roles I'm talking about: we can be more specific about what "gets things done" means, at least in part. For software engineers and interns, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Excellent coder For test engineers, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Good at finding problems in software Competent coder Team player, etc., to me, are covered by "not an a55hole". I don't expect people to be the life and soul of the party, or a wild extrovert - that's not what team player means, and it's not what "not an a55hole" means. Some of our best technical staff are quiet, introverted types, but they're still pleasant to work with. My problem is that I don't think the initial sift really helps us find out whether people are smart and get things done with any great efficacy. It's better than nothing, for sure, but it's not as good as it could be. It's also contentious, and potentially unfair/inequitable - if you want to get an idea of what I mean by this, check out the background information section at the bottom. Before I go any further, let's look at the Red Gate recruitment process for technical staff* as it stands now: (LOTS of) People apply for jobs. All these applications go through a brutal process of manual sifting, which eliminates between 75 and 90% of them, depending upon the role, and the time of year**. Depending upon the role, those who pass the sift will be sent an assessment or telescreened. For the purposes of this blog post I'm only interested in those that are sent some sort of programming assessment, or bug hunt. This means software engineers, test engineers, and software interns, which are the roles for which I receive the most applications. The telescreen tends to be reserved for project or product managers. Those that pass the assessment are invited in for first interview. This interview is mostly about assessing their technical skills***, although we're obviously on the look out for cultural fit red flags as well. If the first interview goes well we'll invite candidates back for a second interview. This is where team/cultural fit is really scoped out. We also use this interview to dive more deeply into certain areas of their skillset, and explore any concerns that may have come out of the first interview (these obviously won't have been serious or obvious enough to cause a rejection at that point, but are things we do need to look into before we'd consider making an offer). We might subsequently invite them in for lunch before we make them an offer. This tends to happen when we're recruiting somebody for a specific team and we'd like them to meet all the people they'll be working with directly. It's not an interview per se, but can prove pivotal if they don't gel with the team. Anyone who's made it this far will receive an offer from us. *We have a slightly quirky definition of "technical staff" as it relates to the technical recruiter role here. It includes software engineers, test engineers, software interns, user experience specialists, technical authors, project managers, product managers, and development managers, but does not include product support or information systems roles. **For example, the quality of graduate applicants overall noticeably drops as the academic year wears on, which is not to say that by now there aren't still stars in there, just that they're fewer and further between. ***Some organisations prefer to assess for team fit first, but I think assessing technical skills is a more effective initial filter - if they're the nicest person in the world, but can't cut a line of code they're not going to work out. Now, as I suggested in the title, Red Gate's Down Tools Week is upon us once again - next week in fact - and I had proposed as a project that we refactor and automate the first stage of marking our programming assessments. Marking assessments, and in fact organising the marking of them, is a somewhat time-consuming process, and we receive many assessment solutions that just don't make the cut, for whatever reason. Whilst I don't think it's possible to fully automate marking, I do think it ought to be possible to run a suite of automated tests over each candidate's solution to see whether or not it behaves correctly and, if it does, move on to a manual stage where we examine the code for structure, decomposition, style, readability, maintainability, etc. Obviously it's possible to use tools to generate potentially helpful metrics for some of these indices as well. This would obviously reduce the marking workload, and would provide candidates with quicker feedback about whether they've been successful - though I do wonder if waiting a tactful interval before sending a (nicely written) rejection might be wise. I duly scrawled out a picture of my ideal process, which looked like this: The problem is, as soon as I'd roughed it out, I realised that fundamentally it wasn't an ideal process at all, which explained the gnawing feeling of cognitive dissonance I'd been wrestling with all week, whilst I'd been trying to find time to do this. Here's what I mean. Automated assessment marking, and the associated infrastructure around that, makes it much easier for us to deal with large numbers of assessments. This means we can be much more permissive about who we send assessments out to or, in other words, we can give more candidates the opportunity to really demonstrate their skills to us. And this leads to a question: why not give everyone the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, to show that they're smart and can get things done? (Two or three of us even discussed this in the down tools week hustings earlier this week.) And isn't this a lot simpler than the alternative we'd been considering? (FYI, this was automated CV/cover letter sifting by some form of textual analysis to ideally eliminate the worst 50% or so of applications based on an analysis of the 20,000 or so historical applications we've received since 2007 - definitely not the basic keyword analysis beloved of recruitment agencies, since this would eliminate hardly anyone who was awful, but definitely would eliminate stellar Oxbridge candidates - #fail - or some nightmarishly complex Google-like system where we profile all our currently employees, only to realise that we're never going to get representative results because we don't have a statistically significant sample size in any given role - also #fail.) No, I think the new way is better. We let people self-select. We make them the masters (or mistresses) of their own destiny. We give applicants the power - we put their fate in their hands - by giving them the chance to demonstrate their skills, which is what they really want anyway, instead of requiring that they spend hours and hours creating a CV and cover letter that I'm going to evaluate for suitability, and make a value judgement about, in approximately 1 minute (give or take). It doesn't matter what university you attended, it doesn't matter if you had a bad year when you took your A-levels - here's your chance to shine, so take it and run with it. (As a side benefit, we cut the number of applications we have to sift by something like two thirds.) WIN! OK, yeah, sounds good, but will it actually work? That's an excellent question. My gut feeling is yes, and I'll justify why below (and hopefully have gone some way towards doing that above as well), but what I'm proposing here is really that we run an experiment for a period of time - probably a couple of months or so - and measure the outcomes we see: How many people apply? (Wouldn't be surprised or alarmed to see this cut by a factor of ten.) How many of them submit a good assessment? (More/less than at present?) How much overhead is there for us in dealing with these assessments compared to now? What are the success and failure rates at each interview stage compared to now? How many people are we hiring at the end of it compared to now? I think it'll work because I hypothesize that, amongst other things: It self-selects for people who really want to work at Red Gate which, at the moment, is something I have to try and assess based on their CV and cover letter - but if you're not that bothered about working here, why would you complete the assessment? Candidates who would submit a shoddy application probably won't feel motivated to do the assessment. Candidates who would demonstrate good attention to detail in their CV/cover letter will demonstrate good attention to detail in the assessment. In general, only the better candidates will complete and submit the assessment. Marking assessments is much less work so we'll be able to deal with any increase that we see (hopefully we will see). There are obviously other questions as well: Is plagiarism going to be a problem? Is there any way we can detect/discourage potential plagiarism? How do we assess candidates' education and experience? What about their ability to communicate in writing? Do we still want them to submit a CV afterwards if they pass assessment? Do we want to offer them the opportunity to tell us a bit about why they'd like the job when they submit their assessment? How does this affect our relationship with recruitment agencies we might use to hire for these roles? So, what's the objective for next week's Down Tools Week? Pretty simple really - we want to implement this process for the Graduate Software Engineer and Software Engineer positions that you can find on our website. I will be joined by a crack team of our best developers (Kevin Boyle, and new Red-Gater, Sam Blackburn), and recruiting hostess with the mostest Laura McQuillen, and hopefully a couple of others as well - if I can successfully twist more arms before Monday.* Hopefully by next Friday our experiment will be up and running, and we may have changed the way Red Gate recruits software engineers for good! Stay tuned and we'll let you know how it goes! *I'm going to play dirty by offering them beer and chocolate during meetings. Some background information: how agonising over the initial CV/cover letter sift helped lead us to bin it off entirely The other day I was agonising about the new university/good degree grade versus poor A-level results issue, and decided to canvas for other opinions to see if there was something I could do that was fairer than my current approach, which is almost always to reject. This generated quite an involved discussion on our Yammer site: I'm sure you can glean a pretty good impression of my own educational prejudices from that discussion as well, although I'm very open to changing my opinion - hopefully you've already figured that out from reading the rest of this post. Hopefully you can also trace a logical path from agonising about sifting to, "Uh, hang on, why on earth are we doing this anyway?!?" Technorati Tags: recruitment,hr,developers,testers,red gate,cv,resume,cover letter,assessment,sea change

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• Fast multi-window rendering with C#

  - by seb

  I've been searching and testing different kind of rendering libraries for C# days for many weeks now. So far I haven't found a single library that works well on multi-windowed rendering setups. The requirement is to be able to run the program on 12+ monitor setups (financial charting) without latencies on a fast computer. Each window needs to update multiple times every second. While doing this CPU needs to do lots of intensive and time critical tasks so some of the burden has to be shifted to GPUs. That's where hardware rendering steps in, in another words DirectX or OpenGL. I have tried GDI+ with windows forms and figured it's way too slow for my needs. I have tried OpenGL via OpenTK (on windows forms control) which seemed decently quick (I still have some tests to run on it) but painfully difficult to get working properly (hard to find/program good text rendering libraries). Recently I tried DirectX9, DirectX10 and Direct2D with Windows forms via SharpDX. I tried a separate device for each window and a single device/multiple swap chains approaches. All of these resulted in very poor performance on multiple windows. For example if I set target FPS to 20 and open 4 full screen windows on different monitors the whole operating system starts lagging very badly. Rendering is simply clearing the screen to black, no primitives rendered. CPU usage on this test was about 0% and GPU usage about 10%, I don't understand what is the bottleneck here? My development computer is very fast, i7 2700k, AMD HD7900, 16GB ram so the tests should definitely run on this one. In comparison I did some DirectX9 tests on C++/Win32 API one device/multiple swap chains and I could open 100 windows spread all over the 4-monitor workspace (with 3d teapot rotating on them) and still had perfectly responsible operating system (fps was dropping of course on the rendering windows quite badly to around 5 which is what I would expect running 100 simultaneous renderings). Does anyone know any good ways to do multi-windowed rendering on C# or am I forced to re-write my program in C++ to get that performance (major pain)? I guess I'm giving OpenGL another shot before I go the C++ route... I'll report any findings here. Test methods for reference: For C# DirectX one-device multiple swapchain test I used the method from this excellent answer: Display Different images per monitor directX 10 Direct3D10 version: I created the d3d10device and DXGIFactory like this: D3DDev = new SharpDX.Direct3D10.Device(SharpDX.Direct3D10.DriverType.Hardware, SharpDX.Direct3D10.DeviceCreationFlags.None); DXGIFac = new SharpDX.DXGI.Factory(); Then initialized the rendering windows like this: var scd = new SwapChainDescription(); scd.BufferCount = 1; scd.ModeDescription = new ModeDescription(control.Width, control.Height, new Rational(60, 1), Format.R8G8B8A8_UNorm); scd.IsWindowed = true; scd.OutputHandle = control.Handle; scd.SampleDescription = new SampleDescription(1, 0); scd.SwapEffect = SwapEffect.Discard; scd.Usage = Usage.RenderTargetOutput; SC = new SwapChain(Parent.DXGIFac, Parent.D3DDev, scd); var backBuffer = Texture2D.FromSwapChain<Texture2D>(SC, 0); _rt = new RenderTargetView(Parent.D3DDev, backBuffer); Drawing command executed on each rendering iteration is simply: Parent.D3DDev.ClearRenderTargetView(_rt, new Color4(0, 0, 0, 0)); SC.Present(0, SharpDX.DXGI.PresentFlags.None); DirectX9 version is very similar: Device initialization: PresentParameters par = new PresentParameters(); par.PresentationInterval = PresentInterval.Immediate; par.Windowed = true; par.SwapEffect = SharpDX.Direct3D9.SwapEffect.Discard; par.PresentationInterval = PresentInterval.Immediate; par.AutoDepthStencilFormat = SharpDX.Direct3D9.Format.D16; par.EnableAutoDepthStencil = true; par.BackBufferFormat = SharpDX.Direct3D9.Format.X8R8G8B8; // firsthandle is the handle of first rendering window D3DDev = new SharpDX.Direct3D9.Device(new Direct3D(), 0, DeviceType.Hardware, firsthandle, CreateFlags.SoftwareVertexProcessing, par); Rendering window initialization: if (parent.D3DDev.SwapChainCount == 0) { SC = parent.D3DDev.GetSwapChain(0); } else { PresentParameters pp = new PresentParameters(); pp.Windowed = true; pp.SwapEffect = SharpDX.Direct3D9.SwapEffect.Discard; pp.BackBufferFormat = SharpDX.Direct3D9.Format.X8R8G8B8; pp.EnableAutoDepthStencil = true; pp.AutoDepthStencilFormat = SharpDX.Direct3D9.Format.D16; pp.PresentationInterval = PresentInterval.Immediate; SC = new SharpDX.Direct3D9.SwapChain(parent.D3DDev, pp); } Code for drawing loop: SharpDX.Direct3D9.Surface bb = SC.GetBackBuffer(0); Parent.D3DDev.SetRenderTarget(0, bb); Parent.D3DDev.Clear(ClearFlags.Target, Color.Black, 1f, 0); SC.Present(Present.None, new SharpDX.Rectangle(), new SharpDX.Rectangle(), HWND); bb.Dispose(); C++ DirectX9/Win32 API test with multiple swapchains and one device code is here: http://pastebin.com/tjnRvATJ It's a modified version from Kevin Harris's nice example code.

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• Can't create admin user on Heroku

  - by Nick5a1

  I am new to rails and I have gone through Kevin Skoglund's Ruby on Rails 3 Essential Training course on Lynda.com. Through the course you set up a simple cms, which I did. It doesn't cover Git or deployment but I've pushed my simple cms to github (https://github.com/nick5a1/Simple_CMS) and deployed to Heroku (http://nkarrasch.herokuapp.com/). In order to deploy to Heroku I followed the Heroku setup guide (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails3) and switched my database from MySQL to PostgreSQL. As instructed I changed gen'mysql2' to gen 'sqlite3' in my Gemfile and ran bundle install before pushing. I then ran heroku run rake db:migrate. I'm running into 2 problems. When I try to log in (http://nkarrasch.herokuapp.com/access) I get an error "We're sorry, but something went wrong". I should instead be getting a flash message with invalid username/password combination. This is what I'm getting on my test environment on my local machine. Secondly, when I log into the Heroku console to create and create an admin user, when I try to save that user I get the following error: irb(main):004:0> user.save (1.2ms) BEGIN AdminUser Exists (1.9ms) SELECT 1 AS one FROM "admin_users" WHERE "admin_users"."username" = 'Nick5a1' LIMIT 1 (1.7ms) ROLLBACK => false Any advice on how to troubleshoot would be greatly appreciated :). Thanks very much, Nick EDIT: Here are my Heroku logs: 2012-06-27T20:36:44+00:00 heroku[slugc]: Slug compilation started 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Add shared-database:5mb add-on by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Release v2 created by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Add RAILS_ENV, LANG, PATH, RACK_ENV, GEM_PATH config by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Release v3 created by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Release v4 created by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Deploy 1d82839 by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:35+00:00 heroku[slugc]: Slug compilation finished 2012-06-27T20:37:36+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec rails server -p 45450` 2012-06-27T20:37:40+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:5) 2012-06-27T20:37:40+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:5) 2012-06-27T20:37:40+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:5) 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: => Rails 3.2.6 application starting in production on http://0.0.0.0:45450 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: => Call with -d to detach 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: => Booting WEBrick 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: Connecting to database specified by DATABASE_URL 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: => Ctrl-C to shutdown server 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-06-27 20:37:44] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-06-27 20:37:44] INFO ruby 1.9.2 (2011-07-09) [x86_64-linux] 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-06-27 20:37:44] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=2 port=45450 2012-06-27T20:37:45+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-06-27T20:39:44+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Awaiting client 2012-06-27T20:39:44+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec rake db:migrate` 2012-06-27T20:39:44+00:00 heroku[run.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-06-27T20:39:51+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Process exited with status 0 2012-06-27T20:39:51+00:00 heroku[run.1]: State changed from up to complete 2012-06-27T20:41:05+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Awaiting client 2012-06-27T20:41:05+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec rails console` 2012-06-27T20:41:05+00:00 heroku[run.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-06-27T20:46:09+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Process exited with status 0 2012-06-27T20:46:09+00:00 heroku[run.1]: State changed from up to complete

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• Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

  - by Rick Strahl

  originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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• Array help Index out of range exeption was unhandled

  - by Michael Quiles

  I am trying to populate combo boxes from a text file using comma as a delimiter everything was working fine, but now when I debug I get the "Index out of range exeption was unhandled" warning. I guess I need a fresh pair of eyes to see where I went wrong, I commented on the line that gets the error //Fname = fields[1]; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Printing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.IO; namespace Sullivan_Payroll { public partial class xEmpForm : Form { bool complete = false; public xEmpForm() { InitializeComponent(); } private void xEmpForm_Resize(object sender, EventArgs e) { this.xCenterPanel.Left = Convert.ToInt16((this.Width - this.xCenterPanel.Width) / 2); this.xCenterPanel.Top = Convert.ToInt16((this.Height - this.xCenterPanel.Height) / 2); Refresh(); } private void exitToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { //Exits the application this.Close(); } private void xEmpForm_FormClosing(object sender, FormClosingEventArgs e) //use this on xtrip calculator { DialogResult Response; if (complete == true) { Application.Exit(); } else { Response = MessageBox.Show("Are you sure you want to Exit?", "Exit", MessageBoxButtons.YesNo, MessageBoxIcon.Question, MessageBoxDefaultButton.Button2); if (Response == DialogResult.No) { complete = false; e.Cancel = true; } else { complete = true; Application.Exit(); } } } private void xEmpForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { //file sources string fileDept = "source\\Department.txt"; string fileSex = "source\\Sex.txt"; string fileStatus = "source\\Status.txt"; if (File.Exists(fileDept)) { using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = System.IO.File.OpenText(fileDept)) { string dept = ""; while ((dept = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { this.xDeptComboBox.Items.Add(dept); } } } else { MessageBox.Show("The Department file can not be found.", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } if (File.Exists(fileSex)) { using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = System.IO.File.OpenText(fileSex)) { string sex = ""; while ((sex = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { this.xSexComboBox.Items.Add(sex); } } } else { MessageBox.Show("The Sex file can not be found.", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } if (File.Exists(fileStatus)) { using (System.IO.StreamReader sr = System.IO.File.OpenText(fileStatus)) { string status = ""; while ((status = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { this.xStatusComboBox.Items.Add(status); } } } else { MessageBox.Show("The Status file can not be found.", "Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error); } } private void xFileSaveMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { { const string fileNew = "source\\New Staff.txt"; string recordIn; FileStream outFile = new FileStream(fileNew, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write); StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(outFile); for (int count = 0; count <= this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Count - 1; count++) { this.xEmployeeListBox.SelectedIndex = count; recordIn = this.xEmployeeListBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); writer.WriteLine(recordIn); } writer.Close(); outFile.Close(); this.xDeptComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xStatusComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xSexComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; MessageBox.Show("your file is saved"); } } private void xViewFacultyMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { const string fileStaff = "source\\Staff.txt"; const char DELIM = ','; string Lname, Fname, Depart, Stat, Sex, Salary, cDept, cStat, cSex; double Gtotal; string recordIn; string[] fields; cDept = this.xDeptComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); cStat = this.xStatusComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); cSex = this.xSexComboBox.SelectedItem.ToString(); FileStream inFile = new FileStream(fileStaff, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(inFile); recordIn = reader.ReadLine(); while (recordIn != null) { fields = recordIn.Split(DELIM); Lname = fields[0]; Fname = fields[1]; // this is where the error appears Depart = fields[2]; Stat = fields[3]; Sex = fields[4]; Salary = fields[5]; Fname = fields[1].TrimStart(null); Depart = fields[2].TrimStart(null); Stat = fields[3].TrimStart(null); Sex = fields[4].TrimStart(null); Salary = fields[5].TrimStart(null); Gtotal = double.Parse(Salary); if (Depart == cDept && cStat == Stat && cSex == Sex) { this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Add(recordIn); } recordIn = reader.ReadLine(); } reader.Close(); inFile.Close(); if (this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Count >= 1) { this.xFileSaveMenuItem.Enabled = true; this.xFilePrintMenuItem.Enabled = true; this.xEditClearMenuItem.Enabled = true; } else { this.xFileSaveMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xFilePrintMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xEditClearMenuItem.Enabled = false; MessageBox.Show("Records not found"); } } private void xEditClearMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { this.xEmployeeListBox.Items.Clear(); this.xDeptComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xStatusComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xSexComboBox.SelectedIndex = -1; this.xFileSaveMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xFilePrintMenuItem.Enabled = false; this.xEditClearMenuItem.Enabled = false; } } } Source file -- Anderson, Kristen, Accounting, Assistant, Female, 43155 Ball, Robin, Accounting, Instructor, Female, 42723 Chin, Roger, Accounting, Full, Male,59281 Coats, William, Accounting, Assistant, Male, 45371 Doepke, Cheryl, Accounting, Full, Female, 52105 Downs, Clifton, Accounting, Associate, Male, 46887 Garafano, Karen, Finance, Associate, Female, 49000 Hill, Trevor, Management, Instructor, Male, 38590 Jackson, Carole, Accounting, Instructor, Female, 38781 Jacobson, Andrew, Management, Full, Male, 56281 Lewis, Karl, Management, Associate, Male, 48387 Mack, Kevin, Management, Assistant, Male, 45000 McKaye, Susan, Management, Instructor, Female, 43979 Nelsen, Beth, Finance, Full, Female, 52339 Nelson, Dale, Accounting, Full, Male, 54578 Palermo, Sheryl, Accounting, Associate, Female, 45617 Rais, Mary, Finance, Instructor, Female, 27000 Scheib, Earl, Management, Instructor, Male, 37389 Smith, Tom, Finance, Full, Male, 57167 Smythe, Janice, Management, Associate, Female, 46887 True, David, Accounting, Full, Male, 53181 Young, Jeff, Management, Assistant, Male, 43513

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• Can't connect to SSL web service with WS-Security using PHP SOAP extension - certificate, complex WSDL

  - by BillF

  Using the PHP5 SOAP extension I have been unable to connect to a web service having an https endpoint, with client certificate and using WS-Security, although I can connect using soapUI with the exact same wsdl and client certificate, and obtain the normal response to the request. There is no HTTP authentication and no proxy is involved. The message I get is 'Could not connect to host'. Have been able to verify that I am NOT hitting the host server. (Earlier I wrongly said that I was hitting the server.) The self-signed client SSL certificate is a .pem file converted by openssl from a .p12 keystore which in turn was converted by keytool from a .jks keystore having a single entry consisting of private key and client certificate. In soapUI I did not need to supply a server private certificate, the only two files I gave it were the wdsl and pem. I did have to supply the pem and its passphrase to be able to connect. I am speculating that despite the error message my problem might actually be in the formation of the XML request rather than the SSL connection itself. The wsdl I have been given has nested complex types. The php server is on my Windows XP laptop with IIS. The code, data values and WSDL extracts are shown below. (The WSSoapClient class simply extends SoapClient, adding a WS-Security Username Token header with mustUnderstand = true and including a nonce, both of which the soapUI call had required.) Would so much appreciate any help. I'm a newbie thrown in at the deep end, and how! Have done vast amounts of Googling on this over many days, following many suggestions and have read Pro PHP by Kevin McArthur. An attempt to use classmaps in place of nested arrays also fell flat. The Code class STEeService { public function invokeWebService(array $connection, $operation, array $request) { try { $localCertificateFilespec = $connection['localCertificateFilespec']; $localCertificatePassphrase = $connection['localCertificatePassphrase']; $sslOptions = array( 'ssl' => array( 'local_cert' => $localCertificateFilespec, 'passphrase' => $localCertificatePassphrase, 'allow_self-signed' => true, 'verify_peer' => false ) ); $sslContext = stream_context_create($sslOptions); $clientArguments = array( 'stream_context' => $sslContext, 'local_cert' => $localCertificateFilespec, 'passphrase' => $localCertificatePassphrase, 'trace' => true, 'exceptions' => true, 'encoding' => 'UTF-8', 'soap_version' => SOAP_1_1 ); $oClient = new WSSoapClient($connection['wsdlFilespec'], $clientArguments); $oClient->__setUsernameToken($connection['username'], $connection['password']); return $oClient->__soapCall($operation, $request); } catch (exception $e) { throw new Exception("Exception in eServices " . $operation . " ," . $e->getMessage(), "\n"); } } } $connection is as follows: array(5) { ["username"]=> string(8) "DFU00050" ["password"]=> string(10) "Fabricate1" ["wsdlFilespec"]=> string (63) "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/DMZExternalService_Concrete_WSDL_Staging.xml" ["localCertificateFilespec"]=> string(37) "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/ClientKeystore.pem" ["localCertificatePassphrase"]=> string(14) "password123456" } $clientArguments is as follows: array(7) { ["stream_context"]=> resource(8) of type (stream-context) ["local_cert"]=> string(37) "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/ClientKeystore.pem" ["passphrase"]=> string(14) "password123456" ["trace"]=> bool(true) ["exceptions"]=> bool(true) ["encoding"]=> string(5) "UTF-8" ["soap_version"]=> int(1) } $operation is as follows: 'getConsignmentDetails' $request is as follows: array(1) { [0]=> array(2) { ["header"]=> array(2) { ["source"]=> string(9) "customerA" ["accountNo"]=> string(8) "10072906" } ["consignmentId"]=> string(11) "GKQ00000085" } } Note how there is an extra level of nesting, an array wrapping the request which is itself an array. This was suggested in a post although I don't see the reason, but it seems to help avoid other exceptions. The exception thrown by ___soapCall is as follows: object(SoapFault)#6 (9) { ["message":protected]=> string(25) "Could not connect to host" ["string":"Exception":private]=> string(0) "" ["code":protected]=> int(0) ["file":protected]=> string(43) "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\eServices\WSSecurity.php" ["line":protected]=> int(85) ["trace":"Exception":private]=> array(5) { [0]=> array(6) { ["file"]=> string(43) "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\eServices\WSSecurity.php" ["line"]=> int(85) ["function"]=> string(11) "__doRequest" ["class"]=> string(10) "SoapClient" ["type"]=> string(2) "->" ["args"]=> array(4) { [0]=> string(1240) " DFU00050 Fabricate1 E0ByMUA= 2010-10-28T13:13:52Z customerA10072906GKQ00000085 " [1]=> string(127) "https://services.startrackexpress.com.au:7560/DMZExternalService/InterfaceServices/ExternalOps.serviceagent/OperationsEndpoint1" [2]=> string(104) "/DMZExternalService/InterfaceServices/ExternalOps.serviceagent/OperationsEndpoint1/getConsignmentDetails" [3]=> int(1) } } [1]=> array(4) { ["function"]=> string(11) "__doRequest" ["class"]=> string(39) "startrackexpress\eservices\WSSoapClient" ["type"]=> string(2) "->" ["args"]=> array(5) { [0]=> string(1240) " DFU00050 Fabricate1 E0ByMUA= 2010-10-28T13:13:52Z customerA10072906GKQ00000085 " [1]=> string(127) "https://services.startrackexpress.com.au:7560/DMZExternalService/InterfaceServices/ExternalOps.serviceagent/OperationsEndpoint1" [2]=> string(104) "/DMZExternalService/InterfaceServices/ExternalOps.serviceagent/OperationsEndpoint1/getConsignmentDetails" [3]=> int(1) [4]=> int(0) } } [2]=> array(6) { ["file"]=> string(43) "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\eServices\WSSecurity.php" ["line"]=> int(70) ["function"]=> string(10) "__soapCall" ["class"]=> string(10) "SoapClient" ["type"]=> string(2) "->" ["args"]=> array(4) { [0]=> string(21) "getConsignmentDetails" [1]=> array(1) { [0]=> array(2) { ["header"]=> array(2) { ["source"]=> string(9) "customerA" ["accountNo"]=> string(8) "10072906" } ["consignmentId"]=> string(11) "GKQ00000085" } } [2]=> NULL [3]=> object(SoapHeader)#5 (4) { ["namespace"]=> string(81) "http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd" ["name"]=> string(8) "Security" ["data"]=> object(SoapVar)#4 (2) { ["enc_type"]=> int(147) ["enc_value"]=> string(594) " DFU00050 Fabricate1 E0ByMUA= 2010-10-28T13:13:52Z " } ["mustUnderstand"]=> bool(true) } } } [3]=> array(6) { ["file"]=> string(42) "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\eServices\eServices.php" ["line"]=> int(87) ["function"]=> string(10) "__soapCall" ["class"]=> string(39) "startrackexpress\eservices\WSSoapClient" ["type"]=> string(2) "->" ["args"]=> array(2) { [0]=> string(21) "getConsignmentDetails" [1]=> array(1) { [0]=> array(2) { ["header"]=> array(2) { ["source"]=> string(9) "customerA" ["accountNo"]=> string(8) "10072906" } ["consignmentId"]=> string(11) "GKQ00000085" } } } } [4]=> array(6) { ["file"]=> string(58) "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\eServices\EnquireConsignmentDetails.php" ["line"]=> int(44) ["function"]=> string(16) "invokeWebService" ["class"]=> string(38) "startrackexpress\eservices\STEeService" ["type"]=> string(2) "->" ["args"]=> array(3) { [0]=> array(5) { ["username"]=> string(10) "DFU00050 " ["password"]=> string(12) "Fabricate1 " ["wsdlFilespec"]=> string(63) "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/DMZExternalService_Concrete_WSDL_Staging.xml" ["localCertificateFilespec"]=> string(37) "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/ClientKeystore.pem" ["localCertificatePassphrase"]=> string(14) "password123456" } [1]=> string(21) "getConsignmentDetails" [2]=> array(1) { [0]=> array(2) { ["header"]=> array(2) { ["source"]=> string(9) "customerA" ["accountNo"]=> string(8) "10072906" } ["consignmentId"]=> string(11) "GKQ00000085" } } } } } ["previous":"Exception":private]=> NULL ["faultstring"]=> string(25) "Could not connect to host" ["faultcode"]=> string(4) "HTTP" } Here are some WSDL extracts (TIBCO BusinessWorks): <xsd:complexType name="TransactionHeaderType"> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="source" type="xsd:string"/> <xsd:element name="accountNo" type="xsd:integer"/> <xsd:element name="userId" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0"/> <xsd:element name="transactionId" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0"/> <xsd:element name="transactionDatetime" type="xsd:dateTime" minOccurs="0"/> </xsd:sequence> </xsd:complexType> <xsd:element name="getConsignmentDetailRequest"> <xsd:complexType> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="header" type="prim:TransactionHeaderType"/> <xsd:element name="consignmentId" type="prim:ID" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> </xsd:sequence> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> <xsd:element name="getConsignmentDetailResponse"> <xsd:complexType> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="consignment" type="freight:consignmentType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> </xsd:sequence> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> <xsd:element name="getConsignmentDetailRequest"> <xsd:complexType> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="header" type="prim:TransactionHeaderType"/> <xsd:element name="consignmentId" type="prim:ID" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> </xsd:sequence> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> <xsd:element name="getConsignmentDetailResponse"> <xsd:complexType> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="consignment" type="freight:consignmentType" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/> </xsd:sequence> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> <wsdl:operation name="getConsignmentDetails"> <wsdl:input message="tns:getConsignmentDetailsRequest"/> <wsdl:output message="tns:getConsignmentDetailsResponse"/> <wsdl:fault name="fault1" message="tns:fault"/> </wsdl:operation> <wsdl:service name="ExternalOps"> <wsdl:port name="OperationsEndpoint1" binding="tns:OperationsEndpoint1Binding"> <soap:address location="https://services.startrackexpress.com.au:7560/DMZExternalService/InterfaceServices/ExternalOps.serviceagent/OperationsEndpoint1"/> </wsdl:port> </wsdl:service> And here in case it's relevant is the WSSoapClient class: <?PHP namespace startrackexpress\eservices; use SoapClient, SoapVar, SoapHeader; class WSSoapClient extends SoapClient { private $username; private $password; /*Generates a WS-Security header*/ private function wssecurity_header() { $timestamp = gmdate('Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z'); $nonce = mt_rand(); $passdigest = base64_encode(pack('H*', sha1(pack('H*', $nonce).pack('a*', $timestamp).pack('a*', $this->password)))); $auth = ' <wsse:Security SOAP-ENV:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:UsernameToken> <wsse:Username>' . $this->username . '</wsse:Username> <wsse:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText">' . $this->password . '</wsse:Password> <wsse:Nonce>' . base64_encode(pack('H*', $nonce)).'</wsse:Nonce> <wsu:Created xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">' . $timestamp . '</wsu:Created> </wsse:UsernameToken> </wsse:Security> '; $authvalues = new SoapVar($auth, XSD_ANYXML); $header = new SoapHeader("http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd", "Security",$authvalues, true); return $header; } // Sets a username and passphrase public function __setUsernameToken($username,$password) { $this->username=$username; $this->password=$password; } // Overwrites the original method, adding the security header public function __soapCall($function_name, $arguments, $options=null, $input_headers=null, $output_headers=null) { try { $result = parent::__soapCall($function_name, $arguments, $options, $this->wssecurity_header()); return $result; } catch (exception $e) { throw new Exception("Exception in __soapCall, " . $e->getMessage(), "\n"); } } } ?> Update: The request XML would have been as follows: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:ns1="http://startrackexpress/Common/Primitives/v1" xmlns:ns2="http://startrackexpress/Common/actions/externals/Consignment/v1" xmlns:ns3="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <SOAP-ENV:Header> <wsse:Security SOAP-ENV:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:UsernameToken> <wsse:Username>DFU00050</wsse:Username> <wsse:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText">Fabricate1</wsse:Password> <wsse:Nonce>M4FIeGA=</wsse:Nonce> <wsu:Created xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2010-10-29T14:05:27Z</wsu:Created> </wsse:UsernameToken> </wsse:Security> </SOAP-ENV:Header> <SOAP-ENV:Body><ns2:getConsignmentDetailRequest> <ns2:header><ns1:source>customerA</ns1:source><ns1:accountNo>10072906</ns1:accountNo></ns2:header> <ns2:consignmentId>GKQ00000085</ns2:consignmentId> </ns2:getConsignmentDetailRequest></SOAP-ENV:Body> </SOAP-ENV:Envelope> This was obtained with the following code in WSSoapClient: public function __doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version) { echo "<p> " . htmlspecialchars($request) . " </p>" ; return parent::__doRequest($request, $location, $action, $version); }

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