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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Server configuration

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index Welcome to the second article in this quick quide to Oracle IRM 11g. Hopefully you've just finished the first article which takes you through deploying the software onto a Linux server. This article walks you through the configuration of this new service and contains a subset of information from the official documentation and is focused on installing the server on Oracle Enterprise Linux. If you are planning to deploy on a non-Linux platform, you will need to reference the documentation for platform specific information. Contents Introduction Create IRM WebLogic Domain Starting the Admin Server and initial configuration Introduction In the previous article the database was prepared, the WebLogic Application Server installed and the files required for an IRM server installed. But we don't actually have a configured system yet. We need to now create a WebLogic Domain in which the IRM server will run, then configure some of the settings and crypography so that we can create a context and be ready to seal some content and test it all works. This article doesn't cover the configuration of SSL communication from client to server. This is quite a big topic and a separate article has been dedicated for this area. In these articles I also use the hostname, irm.company.internal to reference the IRM server and later on use the hostname irm.company.com in reference to the public facing service. Create IRM WebLogic Domain First step is creating the WebLogic domain, in a console switch to the newly created IRM installation folder as shown below and we will run the domain configuration wizard. [oracle@irm /]$ cd /oracle/middleware/Oracle_IRM/common/bin [oracle@irm bin]$ ./config.sh First thing the wizard will ask is if you wish to create a new or extend an existing domain. This guide is creating a standalone system so you should select to create a new domain. Next step is to choose what technologies from the Oracle ECM Suite you wish this domain to host. You are only interested in selecting the option "Oracle Information Rights Management". When you select this check box you will notice that it also selects "Oracle Enterprise Manager" and "Oracle JRF" as these are dependencies of the IRM server. You then need to specify where you wish to place the domain files. I usually just change the domain name from base_domain or irm_domain and leave the others with their defaults. Now the domain will have a single user initially and by default this user is called "weblogic". I usually change this account name to "sysadmin" or "administrator", but in this guide lets just accept the default. With respects to the next dialog, again for eval or dev reasons, leave the server startup mode as development. The JDK should also be automatically detected. We now need to provide details of the database. This guide is using the Oracle 11gR2 database and the settings I used can be seen in the image to the right. There is a lot of configuration that can now be done for the admin server, any managed servers and where the deployments reside. In this guide I am leaving all of these to their defaults so do not check any of the boxes. However I will on this blog be detailing later how you can go back and setup things such as automated startup of an IRM server which require changes to these default settings. But for now, lets leave it all alone and just click next. Now we are ready to install. Note that from this dialog you can scroll the left window and see there are going to be two servers created from the defaults. The AdminServer which is where you modify settings for the WebLogic Server and also hosts the Oracle Enterprise Manager for IRM which allows to monitor the IRM service performance and also make service related settings (which we shortly do below) and the IRM_server1 which hosts the actual IRM services themselves. So go right ahead and hit create, the process is pretty quick and usually under 10 minutes. When the domain creation ends, it will give you the URL to the admin server. It's worth noting this down and the URL is usually; http://irm.company.internal:7001 Starting the Admin Server and initial configuration First thing to do is to start the WebLogic Admin server and review the initial IRM server settings. In this guide we are going to run the Admin server and IRM server in console windows, in another article I will discuss running these as background services. So for now, start a console and run the Admin server by doing the following. cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/ ./startWebLogic.sh Wait for the server to start, you are looking for the following line to be reported in the console window. <BEA-00360><Server started in RUNNING mode> First step is configuring the IRM service via Enterprise Manager. Now that the Admin server is running you can point a browser at http://irm.company.internal:7001/em. Login with the username and password you supplied when you created the domain. In Enterprise Manager the IRM service administrator is able to make server wide configuration. However finding where to access the pages with these settings can be a bit of a challenge. After logging in on the left you'll see a tree containing elements of the Enterprise Manager farm Farm_irm_domain. Open up Content Management, then Information Rights Management and finally select the IRM node. On the right then select the IRM menu item, navigate to the Administration section and now we have four options, for now, we are just going to look at General Settings. The image on the right proves that a picture is worth a thousand words (or 113 in this case). The General Settings page allows you to set the cryptographic algorithms used for protecting sealed content. Unless you have a burning need to increase the key lengths or you need to comply to a regulation or government mandate, AES192 is a good start. You can change this later on without worry. The most important setting here we need to make is the Server URL. In this blog article I go over why this URL is so important, basically every single piece of content you protect with Oracle IRM is going to have this URL embedded in it, so if it's wrong or unresolvable, then nobody can open the secured documents. Note that in our environment we have yet to do any SSL configuration of the service. If you intend to build a server without SSL, then use http as the protocol instead of https. But I would recommend using SSL and setting this up is described in the next article. I would also probably up the device count from 1 to 3. This means that any user can retrieve rights to access content onto 3 computers at any one time. The default of 1 doesn't really make sense in development, evaluation nor even production environments and my experience is that 3 is a better number. Next step is to create the keystore for the IRM server. When a classification (called a context) is created, Oracle IRM generates a unique set of symmetric keys which are used to secure the content itself. These keys are then encrypted with a set of "wrapper" asymmetric cryptography keys which are stored externally to the server either in a Java Key Store or a HSM. These keys need to be generated and the following shows my commands and the resulting output. I have greyed out the responses from the commands so you can see the input a little easier. [oracle@irmsrv ~]$ cd /oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin/ [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ ./setWLSEnv.sh CLASSPATH=/oracle/middleware/patch_wls1033/profiles/default/sys_manifest_classpath/weblogic_patch.jar:/oracle/middleware/patch_ocp353/profiles/default/sys_manifest_classpath/weblogic_patch.jar:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/lib/tools.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/weblogic_sp.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/weblogic.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/features/weblogic.server.modules_10.3.3.0.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/webservices.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/lib/ant-all.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/net.sf.antcontrib_1.1.0.0_1-0b2/lib/ant-contrib.jar: PATH=/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin:/oracle/middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/bin:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/bin:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/oracle/bin Your environment has been set. [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/ [oracle@irmsrv fmwconfig]$ keytool -genkeypair -alias oracle.irm.wrap -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -keystore irm.jks Enter keystore password: Re-enter new password: What is your first and last name? [Unknown]: Simon Thorpe What is the name of your organizational unit? [Unknown]: Oracle What is the name of your organization? [Unknown]: Oracle What is the name of your City or Locality? [Unknown]: San Francisco What is the name of your State or Province? [Unknown]: CA What is the two-letter country code for this unit? [Unknown]: US Is CN=Simon Thorpe, OU=Oracle, O=Oracle, L=San Francisco, ST=CA, C=US correct? [no]: yes Enter key password for (RETURN if same as keystore password): At this point we now have an irm.jks in the directory /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig. The reason we store it here is this folder would be backed up as part of a domain backup. As with any cryptographic technology, DO NOT LOSE THESE KEYS OR THIS KEY STORE. Once you've sealed content against a context, the keys will be wrapped with these keys, lose these keys, and you can't get access to any secured content, pretty important. Now we've got the keys created, we need to go back to the IRM Enterprise Manager and set the location of the key store. Going back to the General Settings page in Enterprise Manager scroll down to Keystore Settings. Leave the type as JKS but change the location to; /oracle/Middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/irm.jks and hit Apply. The final step with regards to the key store is we need to tell the server what the password is for the Java Key Store so that it can be opened and the keys accessed. Once more fire up a console window and run these commands (again i've greyed out the clutter to see the commands easier). You will see dummy passed into the commands, this is because the command asks for a username, but in this instance we don't use one, hence the value dummy is passed and it isn't used. [oracle@irmsrv fmwconfig]$ cd /oracle/middleware/Oracle_IRM/common/bin/ [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ ./wlst.sh ... lots of settings fly by... Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell Type help() for help on available commands wls:/offline>connect('weblogic','password','t3://irmsrv.us.oracle.com:7001') Connecting to t3://irmsrv.us.oracle.com:7001 with userid weblogic ... Successfully connected to Admin Server 'AdminServer' that belongs to domain 'irm_domain'. Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port should be used instead. wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig>createCred("IRM","keystore:irm.jks","dummy","password") Location changed to domainRuntime tree. This is a read-only tree with DomainMBean as the root. For more help, use help(domainRuntime)wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig>createCred("IRM","key:irm.jks:oracle.irm.wrap","dummy","password") Already in Domain Runtime Tree wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig> At last we are now ready to fire up the IRM server itself. The domain creation created a managed server called IRM_server1 and we need to start this, use the following commands in a new console window. cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/bin/ ./startManagedWebLogic.sh IRM_server1 This will start up the server in the console, unlike the Admin server, you need to provide the username and password for the service to start. Enter in your weblogic username and password when prompted. You can change this behavior by putting the password into a boot.properties file, read more about this in the WebLogic Server documentation. Once running, wait until you see the line; <Notice><WebLogicServer><BEA-000360><Server started in RUNNING mode> At this point we can now login to the Oracle IRM Management Website at the URL. http://irm.company.internal:1600/irm_rights/ The server is just configured for HTTP at the moment, no SSL involved. Just want to ensure we can get a working system up and running. You should now see a login like the image on the right and you can now login using your weblogic username and password. The next article in this guide goes over adding SSL and now testing your server by actually adding a few users, sealing some content and opening this content as a user.

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5 Part 1: Table per Hierarchy (TPH)

  - by mortezam

  A simple strategy for mapping classes to database tables might be “one table for every entity persistent class.” This approach sounds simple enough and, indeed, works well until we encounter inheritance. Inheritance is such a visible structural mismatch between the object-oriented and relational worlds because object-oriented systems model both “is a” and “has a” relationships. SQL-based models provide only "has a" relationships between entities; SQL database management systems don’t support type inheritance—and even when it’s available, it’s usually proprietary or incomplete. There are three different approaches to representing an inheritance hierarchy: Table per Hierarchy (TPH): Enable polymorphism by denormalizing the SQL schema, and utilize a type discriminator column that holds type information. Table per Type (TPT): Represent "is a" (inheritance) relationships as "has a" (foreign key) relationships. Table per Concrete class (TPC): Discard polymorphism and inheritance relationships completely from the SQL schema.I will explain each of these strategies in a series of posts and this one is dedicated to TPH. In this series we'll deeply dig into each of these strategies and will learn about "why" to choose them as well as "how" to implement them. Hopefully it will give you a better idea about which strategy to choose in a particular scenario. Inheritance Mapping with Entity Framework Code FirstAll of the inheritance mapping strategies that we discuss in this series will be implemented by EF Code First CTP5. The CTP5 build of the new EF Code First library has been released by ADO.NET team earlier this month. EF Code-First enables a pretty powerful code-centric development workflow for working with data. I’m a big fan of the EF Code First approach, and I’m pretty excited about a lot of productivity and power that it brings. When it comes to inheritance mapping, not only Code First fully supports all the strategies but also gives you ultimate flexibility to work with domain models that involves inheritance. The fluent API for inheritance mapping in CTP5 has been improved a lot and now it's more intuitive and concise in compare to CTP4. A Note For Those Who Follow Other Entity Framework ApproachesIf you are following EF's "Database First" or "Model First" approaches, I still recommend to read this series since although the implementation is Code First specific but the explanations around each of the strategies is perfectly applied to all approaches be it Code First or others. A Note For Those Who are New to Entity Framework and Code-FirstIf you choose to learn EF you've chosen well. If you choose to learn EF with Code First you've done even better. To get started, you can find a great walkthrough by Scott Guthrie here and another one by ADO.NET team here. In this post, I assume you already setup your machine to do Code First development and also that you are familiar with Code First fundamentals and basic concepts. You might also want to check out my other posts on EF Code First like Complex Types and Shared Primary Key Associations. A Top Down Development ScenarioThese posts take a top-down approach; it assumes that you’re starting with a domain model and trying to derive a new SQL schema. Therefore, we start with an existing domain model, implement it in C# and then let Code First create the database schema for us. However, the mapping strategies described are just as relevant if you’re working bottom up, starting with existing database tables. I’ll show some tricks along the way that help you dealing with nonperfect table layouts. Let’s start with the mapping of entity inheritance. -- The Domain ModelIn our domain model, we have a BillingDetail base class which is abstract (note the italic font on the UML class diagram below). We do allow various billing types and represent them as subclasses of BillingDetail class. As for now, we support CreditCard and BankAccount: Implement the Object Model with Code First As always, we start with the POCO classes. Note that in our DbContext, I only define one DbSet for the base class which is BillingDetail. Code First will find the other classes in the hierarchy based on Reachability Convention. public abstract class BillingDetail  {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }             public string Number { get; set; } } public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } } 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; } } This object model is all that is needed to enable inheritance with Code First. If you put this in your application you would be able to immediately start working with the database and do CRUD operations. Before going into details about how EF Code First maps this object model to the database, we need to learn about one of the core concepts of inheritance mapping: polymorphic and non-polymorphic queries. Polymorphic Queries LINQ to Entities and EntitySQL, as object-oriented query languages, both support polymorphic queries—that is, queries for instances of a class and all instances of its subclasses, respectively. For example, consider the following query: IQueryable<BillingDetail> linqQuery = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; List<BillingDetail> billingDetails = linqQuery.ToList(); Or the same query in EntitySQL: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE b FROM BillingDetails AS b"; ObjectQuery<BillingDetail> objectQuery = ((IObjectContextAdapter)context).ObjectContext                                                                          .CreateQuery<BillingDetail>(eSqlQuery); List<BillingDetail> billingDetails = objectQuery.ToList(); linqQuery and eSqlQuery are both polymorphic and return a list of objects of the type BillingDetail, which is an abstract class but the actual concrete objects in the list are of the subtypes of BillingDetail: CreditCard and BankAccount. Non-polymorphic QueriesAll LINQ to Entities and EntitySQL queries are polymorphic which return not only instances of the specific entity class to which it refers, but all subclasses of that class as well. On the other hand, Non-polymorphic queries are queries whose polymorphism is restricted and only returns instances of a particular subclass. In LINQ to Entities, this can be specified by using OfType<T>() Method. For example, the following query returns only instances of BankAccount: IQueryable<BankAccount> query = from b in context.BillingDetails.OfType<BankAccount>() select b; EntitySQL has OFTYPE operator that does the same thing: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE b FROM OFTYPE(BillingDetails, Model.BankAccount) AS b"; In fact, the above query with OFTYPE operator is a short form of the following query expression that uses TREAT and IS OF operators: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE TREAT(b as Model.BankAccount)                       FROM BillingDetails AS b                       WHERE b IS OF(Model.BankAccount)"; (Note that in the above query, Model.BankAccount is the fully qualified name for BankAccount class. You need to change "Model" with your own namespace name.) Table per Class Hierarchy (TPH)An entire class hierarchy can be mapped to a single table. This table includes columns for all properties of all classes in the hierarchy. The concrete subclass represented by a particular row is identified by the value of a type discriminator column. You don’t have to do anything special in Code First to enable TPH. It's the default inheritance mapping strategy: This mapping strategy is a winner in terms of both performance and simplicity. It’s the best-performing way to represent polymorphism—both polymorphic and nonpolymorphic queries perform well—and it’s even easy to implement by hand. Ad-hoc reporting is possible without complex joins or unions. Schema evolution is straightforward. Discriminator Column As you can see in the DB schema above, Code First has to add a special column to distinguish between persistent classes: the discriminator. This isn’t a property of the persistent class in our object model; it’s used internally by EF Code First. By default, the column name is "Discriminator", and its type is string. The values defaults to the persistent class names —in this case, “BankAccount” or “CreditCard”. EF Code First automatically sets and retrieves the discriminator values. TPH Requires Properties in SubClasses to be Nullable in the Database TPH has one major problem: Columns for properties declared by subclasses will be nullable in the database. For example, Code First created an (INT, NULL) column to map CardType property in CreditCard class. However, in a typical mapping scenario, Code First always creates an (INT, NOT NULL) column in the database for an int property in persistent class. But in this case, since BankAccount instance won’t have a CardType property, the CardType field must be NULL for that row so Code First creates an (INT, NULL) instead. If your subclasses each define several non-nullable properties, the loss of NOT NULL constraints may be a serious problem from the point of view of data integrity. TPH Violates the Third Normal FormAnother important issue is normalization. We’ve created functional dependencies between nonkey columns, violating the third normal form. Basically, the value of Discriminator column determines the corresponding values of the columns that belong to the subclasses (e.g. BankName) but Discriminator is not part of the primary key for the table. As always, denormalization for performance can be misleading, because it sacrifices long-term stability, maintainability, and the integrity of data for immediate gains that may be also achieved by proper optimization of the SQL execution plans (in other words, ask your DBA). Generated SQL QueryLet's take a look at the SQL statements that EF Code First sends to the database when we write queries in LINQ to Entities or EntitySQL. For example, the polymorphic query for BillingDetails that you saw, generates the following SQL statement: SELECT  [Extent1].[Discriminator] AS [Discriminator],  [Extent1].[BillingDetailId] AS [BillingDetailId],  [Extent1].[Owner] AS [Owner],  [Extent1].[Number] AS [Number],  [Extent1].[BankName] AS [BankName],  [Extent1].[Swift] AS [Swift],  [Extent1].[CardType] AS [CardType],  [Extent1].[ExpiryMonth] AS [ExpiryMonth],  [Extent1].[ExpiryYear] AS [ExpiryYear] FROM [dbo].[BillingDetails] AS [Extent1] WHERE [Extent1].[Discriminator] IN ('BankAccount','CreditCard') Or the non-polymorphic query for the BankAccount subclass generates this SQL statement: SELECT  [Extent1].[BillingDetailId] AS [BillingDetailId],  [Extent1].[Owner] AS [Owner],  [Extent1].[Number] AS [Number],  [Extent1].[BankName] AS [BankName],  [Extent1].[Swift] AS [Swift] FROM [dbo].[BillingDetails] AS [Extent1] WHERE [Extent1].[Discriminator] = 'BankAccount' Note how Code First adds a restriction on the discriminator column and also how it only selects those columns that belong to BankAccount entity. Change Discriminator Column Data Type and Values With Fluent API Sometimes, especially in legacy schemas, you need to override the conventions for the discriminator column so that Code First can work with the schema. The following fluent API code will change the discriminator column name to "BillingDetailType" and the values to "BA" and "CC" for BankAccount and CreditCard respectively: protected override void OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {     modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()                 .Map<BankAccount>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue("BA"))                 .Map<CreditCard>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue("CC")); } Also, changing the data type of discriminator column is interesting. In the above code, we passed strings to HasValue method but this method has been defined to accepts a type of object: public void HasValue(object value); Therefore, if for example we pass a value of type int to it then Code First not only use our desired values (i.e. 1 & 2) in the discriminator column but also changes the column type to be (INT, NOT NULL): modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()             .Map<BankAccount>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue(1))             .Map<CreditCard>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue(2)); SummaryIn this post we learned about Table per Hierarchy as the default mapping strategy in Code First. The disadvantages of the TPH strategy may be too serious for your design—after all, denormalized schemas can become a major burden in the long run. Your DBA may not like it at all. In the next post, we will learn about Table per Type (TPT) strategy that doesn’t expose you to this problem. 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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• Windows Phone 7 development: reading RSS feeds

  - by DigiMortal

  One limitation on Windows Phone 7 is related to System.Net namespace classes. There is no convenient way to read data from web. There is no WebClient class. There is no GetResponse() method – we have to do it all asynchronously because compact framework has limited set of classes we can use in our applications to communicate with internet. In this posting I will show you how to read RSS-feeds on Windows Phone 7. NB! This is my draft code and it may contain some design flaws and some questionable solutions. This code is intended to use as test-drive for Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools and I don’t suppose you are going to use this code in production environment. Current state of my RSS-reader Currently my RSS-reader for Windows Phone 7 is very simple, primitive and uses almost all defaults that come out-of-box with Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools. My first goal before going on with nicer user interface design was making RSS-reading work because instead of convenient classes from .NET Framework we have to use very limited classes from .NET Framework CE. This is why I took the reading of RSS-feeds as my first task. There are currently more things to solve regarding user-interface. As I am pretty new to all this Silverlight stuff I am not very sure if I can modify default controls easily or should I write my own controls that have better look and that work faster. The image on right shows you how my RSS-reader looks like right now. Upper side of screen is filled with list that shows headlines from this blog. The bottom part of screen is used to show description of selected posting. You can click on the image to see it in original size. In my next posting I will show you some improvements of my RSS-reader user interface that make it look nicer. But currently it is nice enough to make sure that RSS-feeds are read correctly. FeedItem class As this is most straight-forward part of the following code I will show you RSS-feed items class first. I think we have to stop on it because it is simple one. public class FeedItem {     public string Title { get; set; }     public string Description { get; set; }     public DateTime PublishDate { get; set; }     public List<string> Categories { get; set; }     public string Link { get; set; }       public FeedItem()     {         Categories = new List<string>();     } } RssClient RssClient takes feed URL and when asked it loads all items from feed and gives them back to caller through ItemsReceived event. Why it works this way? Because we can make responses only using asynchronous methods. I will show you in next section how to use this class. Although the code here is not very good but it works like expected. I will refactor this code later because it needs some more efforts and investigating. But let’s hope I find excellent solution. :) public class RssClient {     private readonly string _rssUrl;       public delegate void ItemsReceivedDelegate(RssClient client, IList<FeedItem> items);     public event ItemsReceivedDelegate ItemsReceived;       public RssClient(string rssUrl)     {         _rssUrl = rssUrl;     }       public void LoadItems()     {         var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(_rssUrl);         var result = (IAsyncResult)request.BeginGetResponse(ResponseCallback, request);     }       void ResponseCallback(IAsyncResult result)     {         var request = (HttpWebRequest)result.AsyncState;         var response = request.EndGetResponse(result);           var stream = response.GetResponseStream();         var reader = XmlReader.Create(stream);         var items = new List<FeedItem>(50);           FeedItem item = null;         var pointerMoved = false;           while (!reader.EOF)         {             if (pointerMoved)             {                 pointerMoved = false;             }             else             {                 if (!reader.Read())                     break;             }               var nodeName = reader.Name;             var nodeType = reader.NodeType;               if (nodeName == "item")             {                 if (nodeType == XmlNodeType.Element)                     item = new FeedItem();                 else if (nodeType == XmlNodeType.EndElement)                     if (item != null)                     {                         items.Add(item);                         item = null;                     }                   continue;             }               if (nodeType != XmlNodeType.Element)                 continue;               if (item == null)                 continue;               reader.MoveToContent();             var nodeValue = reader.ReadElementContentAsString();             // we just moved internal pointer             pointerMoved = true;               if (nodeName == "title")                 item.Title = nodeValue;             else if (nodeName == "description")                 item.Description =  Regex.Replace(nodeValue,@"<(.|\n)*?>",string.Empty);             else if (nodeName == "feedburner:origLink")                 item.Link = nodeValue;             else if (nodeName == "pubDate")             {                 if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(nodeValue))                     item.PublishDate = DateTime.Parse(nodeValue);             }             else if (nodeName == "category")                 item.Categories.Add(nodeValue);         }           if (ItemsReceived != null)             ItemsReceived(this, items);     } } This method is pretty long but it works. Now let’s try to use it in Windows Phone 7 application. Using RssClient And this is the fragment of code behing the main page of my application start screen. You can see how RssClient is initialized and how items are bound to list that shows them. public MainPage() {     InitializeComponent();       SupportedOrientations = SupportedPageOrientation.Portrait | SupportedPageOrientation.Landscape;     listBox1.Width = Width;       var rssClient = new RssClient("http://feedproxy.google.com/gunnarpeipman");     rssClient.ItemsReceived += new RssClient.ItemsReceivedDelegate(rssClient_ItemsReceived);     rssClient.LoadItems(); }   void rssClient_ItemsReceived(RssClient client, IList<FeedItem> items) {     Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate()     {         listBox1.ItemsSource = items;     });            } Conclusion As you can see it was not very hard task to read RSS-feed and populate list with feed entries. Although we are not able to use more powerful classes that are part of full version on .NET Framework we can still live with limited set of classes that .NET Framework CE provides.

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• The Execute SQL Task

  In this article we are going to take you through the Execute SQL Task in SQL Server Integration Services for SQL Server 2005 (although it appies just as well to SQL Server 2008).  We will be covering all the essentials that you will need to know to effectively use this task and make it as flexible as possible. The things we will be looking at are as follows: A tour of the Task. The properties of the Task. After looking at these introductory topics we will then get into some examples. The examples will show different types of usage for the task: Returning a single value from a SQL query with two input parameters. Returning a rowset from a SQL query. Executing a stored procedure and retrieveing a rowset, a return value, an output parameter value and passing in an input parameter. Passing in the SQL Statement from a variable. Passing in the SQL Statement from a file. Tour Of The Task Before we can start to use the Execute SQL Task in our packages we are going to need to locate it in the toolbox. Let's do that now. Whilst in the Control Flow section of the package expand your toolbox and locate the Execute SQL Task. Below is how we found ours. Now drag the task onto the designer. As you can see from the following image we have a validation error appear telling us that no connection manager has been assigned to the task. This can be easily remedied by creating a connection manager. There are certain types of connection manager that are compatable with this task so we cannot just create any connection manager and these are detailed in a few graphics time. Double click on the task itself to take a look at the custom user interface provided to us for this task. The task will open on the general tab as shown below. Take a bit of time to have a look around here as throughout this article we will be revisting this page many times. Whilst on the general tab, drop down the combobox next to the ConnectionType property. In here you will see the types of connection manager which this task will accept. As with SQL Server 2000 DTS, SSIS allows you to output values from this task in a number of formats. Have a look at the combobox next to the Resultset property. The major difference here is the ability to output into XML. If you drop down the combobox next to the SQLSourceType property you will see the ways in which you can pass a SQL Statement into the task itself. We will have examples of each of these later on but certainly when we saw these for the first time we were very excited. Next to the SQLStatement property if you click in the empty box next to it you will see ellipses appear. Click on them and you will see the very basic query editor that becomes available to you. Alternatively after you have specified a connection manager for the task you can click on the Build Query button to bring up a completely different query editor. This is slightly inconsistent. Once you've finished looking around the general tab, move on to the next tab which is the parameter mapping tab. We shall, again, be visiting this tab throughout the article but to give you an initial heads up this is where you define the input, output and return values from your task. Note this is not where you specify the resultset. If however you now move on to the ResultSet tab this is where you define what variable will receive the output from your SQL Statement in whatever form that is. Property Expressions are one of the most amazing things to happen in SSIS and they will not be covered here as they deserve a whole article to themselves. Watch out for this as their usefulness will astound you. For a more detailed discussion of what should be the parameter markers in the SQL Statements on the General tab and how to map them to variables on the Parameter Mapping tab see Working with Parameters and Return Codes in the Execute SQL Task. Task Properties There are two places where you can specify the properties for your task. One is in the task UI itself and the other is in the property pane which will appear if you right click on your task and select Properties from the context menu. We will be doing plenty of property setting in the UI later so let's take a moment to have a look at the property pane. Below is a graphic showing our properties pane. Now we shall take you through all the properties and tell you exactly what they mean. A lot of these properties you will see across all tasks as well as the package because of everything's base structure The Container. BypassPrepare Should the statement be prepared before sending to the connection manager destination (True/False) Connection This is simply the name of the connection manager that the task will use. We can get this from the connection manager tray at the bottom of the package. DelayValidation Really interesting property and it tells the task to not validate until it actually executes. A usage for this may be that you are operating on table yet to be created but at runtime you know the table will be there. Description Very simply the description of your Task. Disable Should the task be enabled or not? You can also set this through a context menu by right clicking on the task itself. DisableEventHandlers As a result of events that happen in the task, should the event handlers for the container fire? ExecValueVariable The variable assigned here will get or set the execution value of the task. Expressions Expressions as we mentioned earlier are a really powerful tool in SSIS and this graphic below shows us a small peek of what you can do. We select a property on the left and assign an expression to the value of that property on the right causing the value to be dynamically changed at runtime. One of the most obvious uses of this is that the property value can be built dynamically from within the package allowing you a great deal of flexibility FailPackageOnFailure If this task fails does the package? FailParentOnFailure If this task fails does the parent container? A task can he hosted inside another container i.e. the For Each Loop Container and this would then be the parent. ForcedExecutionValue This property allows you to hard code an execution value for the task. ForcedExecutionValueType What is the datatype of the ForcedExecutionValue? ForceExecutionResult Force the task to return a certain execution result. This could then be used by the workflow constraints. Possible values are None, Success, Failure and Completion. ForceExecutionValue Should we force the execution result? IsolationLevel This is the transaction isolation level of the task. IsStoredProcedure Certain optimisations are made by the task if it knows that the query is a Stored Procedure invocation. The docs say this will always be false unless the connection is an ADO connection. LocaleID Gets or sets the LocaleID of the container. LoggingMode Should we log for this container and what settings should we use? The value choices are UseParentSetting, Enabled and Disabled. MaximumErrorCount How many times can the task fail before we call it a day? Name Very simply the name of the task. ResultSetType How do you want the results of your query returned? The choices are ResultSetType_None, ResultSetType_SingleRow, ResultSetType_Rowset and ResultSetType_XML. SqlStatementSource Your Query/SQL Statement. SqlStatementSourceType The method of specifying the query. Your choices here are DirectInput, FileConnection and Variables TimeOut How long should the task wait to receive results? TransactionOption How should the task handle being asked to join a transaction? Usage Examples As we move through the examples we will only cover in them what we think you must know and what we think you should see. This means that some of the more elementary steps like setting up variables will be covered in the early examples but skipped and simply referred to in later ones. All these examples used the AventureWorks database that comes with SQL Server 2005. Returning a Single Value, Passing in Two Input Parameters So the first thing we are going to do is add some variables to our package. The graphic below shows us those variables having been defined. Here the CountOfEmployees variable will be used as the output from the query and EndDate and StartDate will be used as input parameters. As you can see all these variables have been scoped to the package. Scoping allows us to have domains for variables. Each container has a scope and remember a package is a container as well. Variable values of the parent container can be seen in child containers but cannot be passed back up to the parent from a child. Our following graphic has had a number of changes made. The first of those changes is that we have created and assigned an OLEDB connection manager to this Task ExecuteSQL Task Connection. The next thing is we have made sure that the SQLSourceType property is set to Direct Input as we will be writing in our statement ourselves. We have also specified that only a single row will be returned from this query. The expressions we typed in was: SELECT COUNT(*) AS CountOfEmployees FROM HumanResources.Employee WHERE (HireDate BETWEEN ? AND ?) Moving on now to the Parameter Mapping tab this is where we are going to tell the task about our input paramaters. We Add them to the window specifying their direction and datatype. A quick word here about the structure of the variable name. As you can see SSIS has preceeded the variable with the word user. This is a default namespace for variables but you can create your own. When defining your variables if you look at the variables window title bar you will see some icons. If you hover over the last one on the right you will see it says "Choose Variable Columns". If you click the button you will see a list of checkbox options and one of them is namespace. after checking this you will see now where you can define your own namespace. The next tab, result set, is where we need to get back the value(s) returned from our statement and assign to a variable which in our case is CountOfEmployees so we can use it later perhaps. Because we are only returning a single value then if you remember from earlier we are allowed to assign a name to the resultset but it must be the name of the column (or alias) from the query. A really cool feature of Business Intelligence Studio being hosted by Visual Studio is that we get breakpoint support for free. In our package we set a Breakpoint so we can break the package and have a look in a watch window at the variable values as they appear to our task and what the variable value of our resultset is after the task has done the assignment. Here's that window now. As you can see the count of employess that matched the data range was 2. Returning a Rowset In this example we are going to return a resultset back to a variable after the task has executed not just a single row single value. There are no input parameters required so the variables window is nice and straight forward. One variable of type object. Here is the statement that will form the soure for our Resultset. select p.ProductNumber, p.name, pc.Name as ProductCategoryNameFROM Production.ProductCategory pcJOIN Production.ProductSubCategory pscON pc.ProductCategoryID = psc.ProductCategoryIDJOIN Production.Product pON psc.ProductSubCategoryID = p.ProductSubCategoryID We need to make sure that we have selected Full result set as the ResultSet as shown below on the task's General tab. Because there are no input parameters we can skip the parameter mapping tab and move straight to the Result Set tab. Here we need to Add our variable defined earlier and map it to the result name of 0 (remember we covered this earlier) Once we run the task we can again set a breakpoint and have a look at the values coming back from the task. In the following graphic you can see the result set returned to us as a COM object. We can do some pretty interesting things with this COM object and in later articles that is exactly what we shall be doing. Return Values, Input/Output Parameters and Returning a Rowset from a Stored Procedure This example is pretty much going to give us a taste of everything. We have already covered in the previous example how to specify the ResultSet to be a Full result set so we will not cover it again here. For this example we are going to need 4 variables. One for the return value, one for the input parameter, one for the output parameter and one for the result set. Here is the statement we want to execute. Note how much cleaner it is than if you wanted to do it using the current version of DTS. In the Parameter Mapping tab we are going to Add our variables and specify their direction and datatypes. In the Result Set tab we can now map our final variable to the rowset returned from the stored procedure. It really is as simple as that and we were amazed at how much easier it is than in DTS 2000. Passing in the SQL Statement from a Variable SSIS as we have mentioned is hugely more flexible than its predecessor and one of the things you will notice when moving around the tasks and the adapters is that a lot of them accept a variable as an input for something they need. The ExecuteSQL task is no different. It will allow us to pass in a string variable as the SQL Statement. This variable value could have been set earlier on from inside the package or it could have been populated from outside using a configuration. The ResultSet property is set to single row and we'll show you why in a second when we look at the variables. Note also the SQLSourceType property. Here's the General Tab again. Looking at the variable we have in this package you can see we have only two. One for the return value from the statement and one which is obviously for the statement itself. Again we need to map the Result name to our variable and this can be a named Result Name (The column name or alias returned by the query) and not 0. The expected result into our variable should be the amount of rows in the Person.Contact table and if we look in the watch window we see that it is.   Passing in the SQL Statement from a File The final example we are going to show is a really interesting one. We are going to pass in the SQL statement to the task by using a file connection manager. The file itself contains the statement to run. The first thing we are going to need to do is create our file connection mananger to point to our file. Click in the connections tray at the bottom of the designer, right click and choose "New File Connection" As you can see in the graphic below we have chosen to use an existing file and have passed in the name as well. Have a look around at the other "Usage Type" values available whilst you are here. Having set that up we can now see in the connection manager tray our file connection manager sitting alongside our OLE-DB connection we have been using for the rest of these examples. Now we can go back to the familiar General Tab to set up how the task will accept our file connection as the source. All the other properties in this task are set up exactly as we have been doing for other examples depending on the options chosen so we will not cover them again here.   We hope you will agree that the Execute SQL Task has changed considerably in this release from its DTS predecessor. It has a lot of options available but once you have configured it a few times you get to learn what needs to go where. We hope you have found this article useful.

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• jQuery Templates with ASP.NET MVC

  - by hajan

  In my three previous blogs, I’ve shown how to use Templates in your ASPX website. Introduction to jQuery TemplatesjQuery Templates - tmpl(), template() and tmplItem()jQuery Templates - {Supported Tags}Now, I will show one real-world example which you may use it in your daily work of developing applications with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. In the following example I will use Pubs database so that I will retrieve values from the authors table. To access the data, I’m using Entity Framework. Let’s pass throughout each step of the scenario: 1. Create new ASP.NET MVC Web application 2. Add new View inside Home folder but do not select a master page, and add Controller for your View 3. BODY code in the HTML <body>     <div>         <h1>Pubs Authors</h1>         <div id="authorsList"></div>     </div> </body> As you can see  in the body we have only one H1 tag and a div with id authorsList where we will append the data from database.   4. Now, I’ve created Pubs model which is connected to the Pub database and I’ve selected only the authors table in my EDMX model. You can use your own database. 5. Next, lets create one method of JsonResult type which will get the data from database and serialize it into JSON string. public JsonResult GetAuthors() {     pubsEntities pubs = new pubsEntities();     var authors = pubs.authors.ToList();     return Json(authors, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } So, I’m creating object instance of pubsEntities and get all authors in authors list. Then returning the authors list by serializing it to JSON using Json method. The JsonRequestBehaviour.AllowGet parameter is used to make the GET requests from the client become allowed. By default in ASP.NET MVC 2 the GET is not allowed because of security issue with JSON hijacking.   6. Next, lets create jQuery AJAX function which will call the GetAuthors method. We will use $.getJSON jQuery method. <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">     $(function () {         $.getJSON("GetAuthors", "", function (data) {             $("#authorsTemplate").tmpl(data).appendTo("#authorsList");         });     }); </script>   Once the web page is downloaded, the method will be called. The first parameter of $.getJSON() is url string in our case the method name. The second parameter (which in the example is empty string) is the key value pairs that will be send to the server, and the third function is the callback function or the result which is going to be returned from the server. Inside the callback function we have code that renders data with template which has id #authorsTemplate and appends it to element which has #authorsList ID.   7. The jQuery Template <script id="authorsTemplate" type="text/html">     <div id="author">         ${au_lname} ${au_fname}         <div id="address">${address}, ${city}</div>         <div id="contractType">                     {{if contract}}             <font color="green">Has contract with the publishing house</font>         {{else}}             <font color="red">Without contract</font>         {{/if}}         <br />         <em> ${printMessage(state)} </em>         <br />                     </div>     </div> </script> As you can see, I have tags containing fields (au_lname, au_fname… etc.) that corresponds to the table in the EDMX model which is the same as in the database. One more thing to note here is that I have printMessage(state) function which is called inside ${ expression/function/field } tag. The printMessage function <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">     function printMessage(s) {         if (s=="CA") return "The author is from California";         else return "The author is not from California";     } </script> So, if state is “CA” print “The author is from California” else “The author is not from California”   HERE IS THE COMPLETE ASPX CODE <!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 runat="server">     <title>Database Example :: jQuery Templates</title>     <style type="text/css">         body           {             font-family:Verdana,Arial,Courier New, Sans-Serif;             color:Black;             padding:2px, 2px, 2px, 2px;             background-color:#FF9640;         }         #author         {             display:block;             float:left;             text-decoration:none;             border:1px solid black;             background-color:White;             padding:20px 20px 20px 20px;             margin-top:2px;             margin-right:2px;             font-family:Verdana;             font-size:12px;             width:200px;             height:70px;}         #address           {             font-style:italic;             color:Blue;             font-size:12px;             font-family:Verdana;         }         .author_hover {background-color:Yellow;}     </style>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">         function printMessage(s) {             if (s=="CA") return "The author is from California";             else return "The author is not from California";         }     </script>     <script id="authorsTemplate" type="text/html">         <div id="author">             ${au_lname} ${au_fname}             <div id="address">${address}, ${city}</div>             <div id="contractType">                         {{if contract}}                 <font color="green">Has contract with the publishing house</font>             {{else}}                 <font color="red">Without contract</font>             {{/if}}             <br />             <em> ${printMessage(state)} </em>             <br />                         </div>         </div>     </script>     <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">         $(function () {             $.getJSON("GetAuthors", "", function (data) {                 $("#authorsTemplate").tmpl(data).appendTo("#authorsList");             });         });     </script> </head>     <body>     <div id="title">Pubs Authors</div>     <div id="authorsList"></div> </body> </html> So, in the complete example you also have the CSS style I’m using to stylize the output of my page. Here is print screen of the end result displayed on the web page: You can download the complete source code including examples shown in my previous blog posts about jQuery templates and PPT presentation from my last session I had in the local .NET UG meeting in the following DOWNLOAD LINK. Do let me know your feedback. Regards, Hajan

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

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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

  - by Mark Rackley

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

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• Stop Spinning Your Wheels&hellip; Sage Advice for Aspiring Developers

  - by Mark Rackley

  So… lately I’ve been tasked with helping bring some non-developers over the hump and become full-fledged, all around, SharePoint developers. Well, only time will tell if I’m successful or a complete failure. Good thing about failures though, you know what NOT to do next time! Anyway, I’ve been writing some sort of code since I was about 10 years old; so I sometimes take for granted the effort some people have to go through to learn a new technology. I guess if I had to say I was an “expert” in one thing it would be learning (and getting “stuff” done) in new technologies. Maybe that’s why I’ve embraced SharePoint and the SharePoint community. SharePoint is the first technology I haven’t been able to master or get everything done without help from other people. I KNOW I’ll never know it all and I learn something new every day.  It keeps it interesting, it keeps me motivated, and keeps me involved. So, what some people may consider a downside of SharePoint, I definitely consider a plus. Crap.. I’m rambling. Where was I? Oh yeah… me trying to be helpful. Like I said, I am able to quickly and effectively pick up new languages, technology, etc. and put it to good use. Am I just brilliant? Well, my mom thinks so.. but maybe not. Maybe I’ve just been doing it for a long time…. 25 years in some form or fashion… wow I’m old… Anyway, what I lack in depth I make up for in breadth and being the “go-to” guy wherever I work when someone needs to “get stuff done”.  Let’s see if I can take some of that experience and put it to practical use to help new people get up to speed faster, learn things more effectively, and become that go-to guy. First off…  make sure you… Know The Basics I don’t have the time to teach new developers the basics, but you gotta know them. I’ve only been “taught” two languages.. Fortran 77 and C… everything else I’ve picked up from “doing”. I HAD to know the basics though, and all new developers need to understand the very basics of development.  97.23% of all languages will have the following: Variables Functions Arrays If statements For loops / While loops If you think about it, most development is “if this, do this… or while this, do this…”.  “This” may be some unique method to your language or something you develop, but the basics are the basics. YES there are MANY other development topics you need to understand, but you shouldn’t be scratching your head trying to figure out what a ”for loop” is… (Also learn about classes and hashtables as quickly as possible). Once you have the basics down it makes it much easier to… Learn By Doing This may just apply to me and my warped brain.  I don’t learn a new technology by reading or hearing someone speak about it. I learn by doing. It does me no good to try and learn all of the intricacies of a new language or technology inside-and-out before getting my hands dirty. Just show me how to do one thing… let me get that working… then show me how to do the next thing.. let me get that working… Now, let’s see what I can figure out on my own. Okay.. now it starts to make sense. I see how the language works, I can step through the code, and before you know it.. I’m productive in a new technology. Be careful here though…. make sure you… Don’t Reinvent The Wheel People have been writing code for what… 50+ years now? So, why are you trying to tackle ANYTHING without first Googling it with Bing to see what others have done first? When I was first learning C# (I had come from a Java background) I had to call a web service.  Sure! No problem! I’d done this many times in Java. So, I proceeded to write an HTTP Handler, called the Web Service and it worked like a charm!!!  Probably about 2.3 seconds after I got it working completely someone says to me “Why didn’t you just add a Web Reference?” Really? You can do that?  oops… I just wasted a lot of time. Before undertaking the development of any sort of utility method in a new language, make sure it’s not already handled for you… Okay… you are starting to write some code and are curious about the possibilities? Well… don’t just sit there… Try It And See What Happens This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves. “So… ‘x++’ works in C#, but does it also work in JavaScript?”   Really? Did you just ask me that? In the time it spent for you to type that email, press the send button, me receive the email, get around to reading it, and replying with “yes” you could have tested it 47 times and know the answer! Just TRY it! See what happens! You aren’t doing brain surgery. You aren’t going to kill anyone, and you BETTER not be developing in production. So, you are not going to crash any production systems!! Seriously! Get off your butt and just try it yourself. The extra added benefit is that it doesn’t work, the absolute best way to learn is to… Learn From Your Failures I don’t know about you… but if I screw up and something doesn’t work, I learn A LOT more debugging my problem than if everything magically worked. It’s okay that you aren’t perfect! Not everyone can be me? In the same vein… don’t ask someone else to debug your problem until you have made a valiant attempt to do so yourself. There’s nothing quite like stepping through code line by line to see what it’s REALLY doing… and you’ll never feel more stupid sometimes than when you realize WHY it’s not working.. but you realize... you learn... and you remember. There is nothing wrong with failure as long as you learn from it. As you start writing more and more and more code make sure that you ALWAYS… Develop for Production You will soon learn that the “prototype” you wrote last week to show as a “proof of concept” is going to go directly into production no matter how much you beg and plead and try to explain it’s not ready to go into production… it’s going to go straight there.. and it’s like herpes.. it doesn’t go away and there’s no fixing it once it’s in there.  So, why not write ALL your code like it will be put in production? It MIGHT take a little longer, but in the long run it will be easier to maintain, get help on, and you won’t be embarrassed that it’s sitting on a production server for everyone to use and see. So, now that you are getting comfortable and writing code for production it is important to to remember the… KISS Principle… Learn It… Love It… Keep It Simple Stupid Seriously.. don’t try to show how smart you are by writing the most complicated code in history. Break your problem up into discrete steps and write each step. If it turns out you have some redundancy, you can always go back and tweak your code later.  How bad is it when you write code that LOOKS cocky? I’ve seen it before… some of the most abstract and complicated classes when a class wasn’t even needed! Or the most elaborate unreadable code jammed into one really long line when it could have been written in three lines, performed just as well, and been SOOO much easier to maintain. Keep it clear and simple.. baby steps people. This will help you learn the technology, debug problems, AND it will help others help you find your problems if they don’t have to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls just to figure out what you are trying to do…. Really.. don’t be that guy… try to curb your ego and… Keep an Open Mind No matter how smart you are… how fast you type… or how much you get paid, don’t let your ego get in the way. There is probably a better way to do everything you’ve ever done. Don’t become so cocky that you can’t think someone knows more than you. There’s a lot of brilliant, helpful people out there willing to show you tricks if you just give them a chance. A very super-awesome developer once told me “So what if you’ve been writing code for 10 years or more! Does your code look basically the same? Are you not growing as a developer?” Those 10 years become pretty meaningless if you just “know” that you are right and have not picked up new tips, tricks, methods, and patterns along the way. Learn from others and find out what’s new in development land (you know you don’t have to specifically use pointers anymore??). Along those same lines… If it’s not working, first assume you are doing something wrong. You have no idea how much it annoys people who are trying to help you when you first assume that the help they are trying to give you is wrong. Just MAYBE… you… the person learning is making some small mistake? Maybe you didn’t describe your problem correctly? Maybe you are using the wrong terminology? “I did exactly what you said and it didn’t work.”  Oh really? Are you SURE about that? “Your solution doesn’t work.”  Well… I’m pretty sure it works, I’ve used it 200 times… What are you doing differently? First try some humility and appreciation.. it will go much further, especially when it turns out YOU are the one that is wrong. When all else fails…. Try Professional Training Some people just don’t have the mindset to go and figure stuff out. It’s a gift and not everyone has it. If everyone could do it I wouldn’t have a job and there wouldn’t be professional training available.  So, if you’ve tried everything else and no light bulbs are coming on, contact the experts who specialize in training. Be careful though, there is bad training out there. Want to know the names of some good places? Just shoot me a message and I’ll let you know. I’m boycotting endorsing Andrew Connell anymore until I get that free course dangit!! So… that’s it.. that’s all I got right now. Maybe you thought all of this is common sense, maybe you think I’m smoking crack. If so, don’t just sit there, there’s a comments section for a reason. Finally, what about you? What tips do you have to help this aspiring to learn the dark arts??

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• URL Rewrite – Protocol (http/https) in the Action

  - by OWScott

  IIS URL Rewrite supports server variables for pretty much every part of the URL and http header. However, there is one commonly used server variable that isn’t readily available.  That’s the protocol—HTTP or HTTPS. You can easily check if a page request uses HTTP or HTTPS, but that only works in the conditions part of the rule.  There isn’t a variable available to dynamically set the protocol in the action part of the rule.  What I wish is that there would be a variable like {HTTP_PROTOCOL} which would have a value of ‘HTTP’ or ‘HTTPS’.  There is a server variable called {HTTPS}, but the values of ‘on’ and ‘off’ aren’t practical in the action.  You can also use {SERVER_PORT} or {SERVER_PORT_SECURE}, but again, they aren’t useful in the action. Let me illustrate.  The following rule will redirect traffic for http(s)://localtest.me/ to http://www.localtest.me/. <rule name="Redirect to www"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> The problem is that it forces the request to HTTP even if the original request was for HTTPS. Interestingly enough, I planned to blog about this topic this week when I noticed in my twitter feed yesterday that Jeff Graves, a former colleague of mine, just wrote an excellent blog post about this very topic.  He beat me to the punch by just a couple days.  However, I figured I would still write my blog post on this topic.  While his solution is a excellent one, I personally handle this another way most of the time.  Plus, it’s a commonly asked question that isn’t documented well enough on the web yet, so having another article on the web won’t hurt. I can think of four different ways to handle this, and depending on your situation you may lean towards any of the four.  Don’t let the choices overwhelm you though.  Let’s keep it simple, Option 1 is what I use most of the time, Option 2 is what Jeff proposed and is the safest option, and Option 3 and Option 4 need only be considered if you have a more unique situation.  All four options will work for most situations. Option 1 – CACHE_URL, single rule There is a server variable that has the protocol in it; {CACHE_URL}.  This server variable contains the entire URL string (e.g. http://www.localtest.me:80/info.aspx?id=5)  All we need to do is extract the HTTP or HTTPS and we’ll be set. This tends to be my preferred way to handle this situation. Indeed, Jeff did briefly mention this in his blog post: … you could use a condition on the CACHE_URL variable and a back reference in the rewritten URL. The problem there is that you then need to match all of the conditions which could be a problem if your rule depends on a logical “or” match for conditions. Thus the problem.  If you have multiple conditions set to “Match Any” rather than “Match All” then this option won’t work.  However, I find that 95% of all rules that I write use “Match All” and therefore, being the lazy administrator that I am I like this simple solution that only requires adding a single condition to a rule.  The caveat is that if you use “Match Any” then you must consider one of the next two options. Enough with the preamble.  Here’s how it works.  Add a condition that checks for {CACHE_URL} with a pattern of “^(.+)://” like so: How you have a back-reference to the part before the ://, which is our treasured HTTP or HTTPS.  In URL Rewrite 2.0 or greater you can check the “Track capture groups across conditions”, make that condition the first condition, and you have yourself a back-reference of {C:1}. The “Redirect to www” example with support for maintaining the protocol, will become: <rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions trackAllCaptures="true"> <add input="{CACHE_URL}" pattern="^(.+)://" /> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{C:1}://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> It’s not as easy as it would be if Microsoft gave us a built-in {HTTP_PROTOCOL} variable, but it’s pretty close. I also like this option since I often create rule examples for other people and this type of rule is portable since it’s self-contained within a single rule. Option 2 – Using a Rewrite Map For a safer rule that works for both “Match Any” and “Match All” situations, you can use the Rewrite Map solution that Jeff proposed.  It’s a perfectly good solution with the only drawback being the ever so slight extra effort to set it up since you need to create a rewrite map before you create the rule.  In other words, if you choose to use this as your sole method of handling the protocol, you’ll be safe. After you create a Rewrite Map called MapProtocol, you can use “{MapProtocol:{HTTPS}}” for the protocol within any rule action.  Following is an example using a Rewrite Map. <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{MapProtocol:{HTTPS}}://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> </rules> <rewriteMaps> <rewriteMap name="MapProtocol"> <add key="on" value="https" /> <add key="off" value="http" /> </rewriteMap> </rewriteMaps> </rewrite> Option 3 – CACHE_URL, Multi-rule If you have many rules that will use the protocol, you can create your own server variable which can be used in subsequent rules. This option is no easier to set up than Option 2 above, but you can use it if you prefer the easier to remember syntax of {HTTP_PROTOCOL} vs. {MapProtocol:{HTTPS}}. The potential issue with this rule is that if you don’t have access to the server level (e.g. in a shared environment) then you cannot set server variables without permission. First, create a rule and place it at the top of the set of rules.  You can create this at the server, site or subfolder level.  However, if you create it at the site or subfolder level then the HTTP_PROTOCOL server variable needs to be approved at the server level.  This can be achieved in IIS Manager by navigating to URL Rewrite at the server level, clicking on “View Server Variables” from the Actions pane, and added HTTP_PROTOCOL. If you create the rule at the server level then this step is not necessary.  Following is an example of the first rule to create the HTTP_PROTOCOL and then a rule that uses it.  The Create HTTP_PROTOCOL rule only needs to be created once on the server. <rule name="Create HTTP_PROTOCOL"> <match url=".*" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{CACHE_URL}" pattern="^(.+)://" /> </conditions> <serverVariables> <set name="HTTP_PROTOCOL" value="{C:1}" /> </serverVariables> <action type="None" /> </rule>   <rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{HTTP_PROTOCOL}://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> Option 4 – Multi-rule Just to be complete I’ll include an example of how to achieve the same thing with multiple rules. I don’t see any reason to use it over the previous examples, but I’ll include an example anyway.  Note that it will only work with the “Match All” setting for the conditions. <rule name="Redirect to www - http" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="off" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> <rule name="Redirect to www - https" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="on" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="https://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> Conclusion Above are four working examples of methods to call the protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) from the action of a URL Rewrite rule.  You can use whichever method you most prefer.  I’ve listed them in the order that I favor them, although I could see some people preferring Option 2 as their first choice.  In any of the cases, hopefully you can use this as a reference for when you need to use the protocol in the rule’s action when writing your URL Rewrite rules. Further information: Viewing all Server Variable for a site. URL Parts available to URL Rewrite Rules Further URL Rewrite articles

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• Metro: Understanding CSS Media Queries

  - by Stephen.Walther

  If you are building a Metro style application then your application needs to look great when used on a wide variety of devices. Your application needs to work on tiny little phones, slates, desktop monitors, and the super high resolution displays of the future. Your application also must support portable devices used with different orientations. If someone tilts their phone from portrait to landscape mode then your application must still be usable. Finally, your Metro style application must look great in different states. For example, your Metro application can be in a “snapped state” when it is shrunk so it can share screen real estate with another application. In this blog post, you learn how to use Cascading Style Sheet media queries to support different devices, different device orientations, and different application states. First, you are provided with an overview of the W3C Media Query recommendation and you learn how to detect standard media features. Next, you learn about the Microsoft extensions to media queries which are supported in Metro style applications. For example, you learn how to use the –ms-view-state feature to detect whether an application is in a “snapped state” or “fill state”. Finally, you learn how to programmatically detect the features of a device and the state of an application. You learn how to use the msMatchMedia() method to execute a media query with JavaScript. Using CSS Media Queries Media queries enable you to apply different styles depending on the features of a device. Media queries are not only supported by Metro style applications, most modern web browsers now support media queries including Google Chrome 4+, Mozilla Firefox 3.5+, Apple Safari 4+, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 9+. Loading Different Style Sheets with Media Queries Imagine, for example, that you want to display different content depending on the horizontal resolution of a device. In that case, you can load different style sheets optimized for different sized devices. Consider the following HTML page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>U.S. Robotics and Mechanical Men</title> <link href="main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <!-- Less than 1100px --> <link href="medium.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="(max-width:1100px)" /> <!-- Less than 800px --> <link href="small.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="(max-width:800px)" /> </head> <body> <div id="header"> <h1>U.S. Robotics and Mechanical Men</h1> </div> <!-- Advertisement Column --> <div id="leftColumn"> <img src="advertisement1.gif" alt="advertisement" /> <img src="advertisement2.jpg" alt="advertisement" /> </div> <!-- Product Search Form --> <div id="mainContentColumn"> <label>Search Products</label> <input id="search" /><button>Search</button> </div> <!-- Deal of the Day Column --> <div id="rightColumn"> <h1>Deal of the Day!</h1> <p> Buy two cameras and get a third camera for free! Offer is good for today only. </p> </div> </body> </html> The HTML page above contains three columns: a leftColumn, mainContentColumn, and rightColumn. When the page is displayed on a low resolution device, such as a phone, only the mainContentColumn appears: When the page is displayed in a medium resolution device, such as a slate, both the leftColumn and the mainContentColumns are displayed: Finally, when the page is displayed in a high-resolution device, such as a computer monitor, all three columns are displayed: Different content is displayed with the help of media queries. The page above contains three style sheet links. Two of the style links include a media attribute: <link href="main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <!-- Less than 1100px --> <link href="medium.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="(max-width:1100px)" /> <!-- Less than 800px --> <link href="small.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="(max-width:800px)" /> The main.css style sheet contains default styles for the elements in the page. The medium.css style sheet is applied when the page width is less than 1100px. This style sheet hides the rightColumn and changes the page background color to lime: html { background-color: lime; } #rightColumn { display:none; } Finally, the small.css style sheet is loaded when the page width is less than 800px. This style sheet hides the leftColumn and changes the page background color to red: html { background-color: red; } #leftColumn { display:none; } The different style sheets are applied as you stretch and contract your browser window. You don’t need to refresh the page after changing the size of the page for a media query to be applied: Using the @media Rule You don’t need to divide your styles into separate files to take advantage of media queries. You can group styles by using the @media rule. For example, the following HTML page contains one set of styles which are applied when a device’s orientation is portrait and another set of styles when a device’s orientation is landscape: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>Application1</title> <style type="text/css"> html { font-family:'Segoe UI Semilight'; font-size: xx-large; } @media screen and (orientation:landscape) { html { background-color: lime; } p.content { width: 50%; margin: auto; } } @media screen and (orientation:portrait) { html { background-color: red; } p.content { width: 90%; margin: auto; } } </style> </head> <body> <p class="content"> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </p> </body> </html> When a device has a landscape orientation then the background color is set to the color lime and the text only takes up 50% of the available horizontal space: When the device has a portrait orientation then the background color is red and the text takes up 90% of the available horizontal space: Using Standard CSS Media Features The official list of standard media features is contained in the W3C CSS Media Query recommendation located here: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/ Here is the official list of the 13 media features described in the standard: · width – The current width of the viewport · height – The current height of the viewport · device-width – The width of the device · device-height – The height of the device · orientation – The value portrait or landscape · aspect-ratio – The ratio of width to height · device-aspect-ratio – The ratio of device width to device height · color – The number of bits per color supported by the device · color-index – The number of colors in the color lookup table of the device · monochrome – The number of bits in the monochrome frame buffer · resolution – The density of the pixels supported by the device · scan – The values progressive or interlace (used for TVs) · grid – The values 0 or 1 which indicate whether the device supports a grid or a bitmap Many of the media features in the list above support the min- and max- prefix. For example, you can test for the min-width using a query like this: (min-width:800px) You can use the logical and operator with media queries when you need to check whether a device supports more than one feature. For example, the following query returns true only when the width of the device is between 800 and 1,200 pixels: (min-width:800px) and (max-width:1200px) Finally, you can use the different media types – all, braille, embossed, handheld, print, projection, screen, speech, tty, tv — with a media query. For example, the following media query only applies to a page when a page is being printed in color: print and (color) If you don’t specify a media type then media type all is assumed. Using Metro Style Media Features Microsoft has extended the standard list of media features which you can include in a media query with two custom media features: · -ms-high-contrast – The values any, black-white, white-black · -ms-view-state – The values full-screen, fill, snapped, device-portrait You can take advantage of the –ms-high-contrast media feature to make your web application more accessible to individuals with disabilities. In high contrast mode, you should make your application easier to use for individuals with vision disabilities. The –ms-view-state media feature enables you to detect the state of an application. For example, when an application is snapped, the application only occupies part of the available screen real estate. The snapped application appears on the left or right side of the screen and the rest of the screen real estate is dominated by the fill application (Metro style applications can only be snapped on devices with a horizontal resolution of greater than 1,366 pixels). Here is a page which contains style rules for an application in both a snap and fill application state: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>MyWinWebApp</title> <style type="text/css"> html { font-family:'Segoe UI Semilight'; font-size: xx-large; } @media screen and (-ms-view-state:snapped) { html { background-color: lime; } } @media screen and (-ms-view-state:fill) { html { background-color: red; } } </style> </head> <body> <p class="content"> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. </p> </body> </html> When the application is snapped, the application appears with a lime background color: When the application state is fill then the background color changes to red: When the application takes up the entire screen real estate – it is not in snapped or fill state – then no special style rules apply and the application appears with a white background color. Querying Media Features with JavaScript You can perform media queries using JavaScript by taking advantage of the window.msMatchMedia() method. This method returns a MSMediaQueryList which has a matches method that represents success or failure. For example, the following code checks whether the current device is in portrait mode: if (window.msMatchMedia("(orientation:portrait)").matches) { console.log("portrait"); } else { console.log("landscape"); } If the matches property returns true, then the device is in portrait mode and the message “portrait” is written to the Visual Studio JavaScript Console window. Otherwise, the message “landscape” is written to the JavaScript Console window. You can create an event listener which triggers code whenever the results of a media query changes. For example, the following code writes a message to the JavaScript Console whenever the current device is switched into or out of Portrait mode: window.msMatchMedia("(orientation:portrait)").addListener(function (mql) { if (mql.matches) { console.log("Switched to portrait"); } }); Be aware that the event listener is triggered whenever the result of the media query changes. So the event listener is triggered both when you switch from landscape to portrait and when you switch from portrait to landscape. For this reason, you need to verify that the matches property has the value true before writing the message. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to explain how CSS media queries work in the context of a Metro style application written with JavaScript. First, you were provided with an overview of the W3C CSS Media Query recommendation. You learned about the standard media features which you can query such as width and orientation. Next, we focused on the Microsoft extensions to media queries. You learned how to use –ms-view-state to detect whether a Metro style application is in “snapped” or “fill” state. You also learned how to use the msMatchMedia() method to perform a media query from JavaScript.

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• Generating EF Code First model classes from an existing database

  - by Jon Galloway

  Entity Framework Code First is a lightweight way to "turn on" data access for a simple CLR class. As the name implies, the intended use is that you're writing the code first and thinking about the database later. However, I really like the Entity Framework Code First works, and I want to use it in existing projects and projects with pre-existing databases. For example, MVC Music Store comes with a SQL Express database that's pre-loaded with a catalog of music (including genres, artists, and songs), and while it may eventually make sense to load that seed data from a different source, for the MVC 3 release we wanted to keep using the existing database. While I'm not getting the full benefit of Code First - writing code which drives the database schema - I can still benefit from the simplicity of the lightweight code approach. Scott Guthrie blogged about how to use entity framework with an existing database, looking at how you can override the Entity Framework Code First conventions so that it can work with a database which was created following other conventions. That gives you the information you need to create the model classes manually. However, it turns out that with Entity Framework 4 CTP 5, there's a way to generate the model classes from the database schema. Once the grunt work is done, of course, you can go in and modify the model classes as you'd like, but you can save the time and frustration of figuring out things like mapping SQL database types to .NET types. Note that this template requires Entity Framework 4 CTP 5 or later. You can install EF 4 CTP 5 here. Step One: Generate an EF Model from your existing database The code generation system in Entity Framework works from a model. You can add a model to your existing project and delete it when you're done, but I think it's simpler to just spin up a separate project to generate the model classes. When you're done, you can delete the project without affecting your application, or you may choose to keep it around in case you have other database schema updates which require model changes. I chose to add the Model classes to the Models folder of a new MVC 3 application. Right-click the folder and select "Add / New Item..."   Next, select ADO.NET Entity Data Model from the Data Templates list, and name it whatever you want (the name is unimportant).   Next, select "Generate from database." This is important - it's what kicks off the next few steps, which read your database's schema.   Now it's time to point the Entity Data Model Wizard at your existing database. I'll assume you know how to find your database - if not, I covered that a bit in the MVC Music Store tutorial section on Models and Data. Select your database, uncheck the "Save entity connection settings in Web.config" (since we won't be using them within the application), and click Next.   Now you can select the database objects you'd like modeled. I just selected all tables and clicked Finish.   And there's your model. If you want, you can make additional changes here before going on to generate the code.   Step Two: Add the DbContext Generator Like most code generation systems in Visual Studio lately, Entity Framework uses T4 templates which allow for some control over how the code is generated. K Scott Allen wrote a detailed article on T4 Templates and the Entity Framework on MSDN recently, if you'd like to know more. Fortunately for us, there's already a template that does just what we need without any customization. Right-click a blank space in the Entity Framework model surface and select "Add Code Generation Item..." Select the Code groupt in the Installed Templates section and pick the ADO.NET DbContext Generator. If you don't see this listed, make sure you've got EF 4 CTP 5 installed and that you're looking at the Code templates group. Note that the DbContext Generator template is similar to the EF POCO template which came out last year, but with "fix up" code (unnecessary in EF Code First) removed.   As soon as you do this, you'll two terrifying Security Warnings - unless you click the "Do not show this message again" checkbox the first time. It will also be displayed (twice) every time you rebuild the project, so I checked the box and no immediate harm befell my computer (fingers crossed!).   Here's the payoff: two templates (filenames ending with .tt) have been added to the project, and they've generated the code I needed.   The "MusicStoreEntities.Context.tt" template built a DbContext class which holds the entity collections, and the "MusicStoreEntities.tt" template build a separate class for each table I selected earlier. We'll customize them in the next step. I recommend copying all the generated .cs files into your application at this point, since accidentally rebuilding the generation project will overwrite your changes if you leave them there. Step Three: Modify and use your POCO entity classes Note: I made a bunch of tweaks to my POCO classes after they were generated. You don't have to do any of this, but I think it's important that you can - they're your classes, and EF Code First respects that. Modify them as you need for your application, or don't. The Context class derives from DbContext, which is what turns on the EF Code First features. It holds a DbSet for each entity. Think of DbSet as a simple List, but with Entity Framework features turned on.   //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // <auto-generated> // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // </auto-generated> //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ namespace EF_CodeFirst_From_Existing_Database.Models { using System; using System.Data.Entity; public partial class Entities : DbContext { public Entities() : base("name=Entities") { } public DbSet<Album> Albums { get; set; } public DbSet<Artist> Artists { get; set; } public DbSet<Cart> Carts { get; set; } public DbSet<Genre> Genres { get; set; } public DbSet<OrderDetail> OrderDetails { get; set; } public DbSet<Order> Orders { get; set; } } } It's a pretty lightweight class as generated, so I just took out the comments, set the namespace, removed the constructor, and formatted it a bit. Done. If I wanted, though, I could have added or removed DbSets, overridden conventions, etc. using System.Data.Entity; namespace MvcMusicStore.Models { public class MusicStoreEntities : DbContext { public DbSet Albums { get; set; } public DbSet Genres { get; set; } public DbSet Artists { get; set; } public DbSet Carts { get; set; } public DbSet Orders { get; set; } public DbSet OrderDetails { get; set; } } } Next, it's time to look at the individual classes. Some of mine were pretty simple - for the Cart class, I just need to remove the header and clean up the namespace. //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ namespace EF_CodeFirst_From_Existing_Database.Models { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; public partial class Cart { // Primitive properties public int RecordId { get; set; } public string CartId { get; set; } public int AlbumId { get; set; } public int Count { get; set; } public System.DateTime DateCreated { get; set; } // Navigation properties public virtual Album Album { get; set; } } } I did a bit more customization on the Album class. Here's what was generated: //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ namespace EF_CodeFirst_From_Existing_Database.Models { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; public partial class Album { public Album() { this.Carts = new HashSet(); this.OrderDetails = new HashSet(); } // Primitive properties public int AlbumId { get; set; } public int GenreId { get; set; } public int ArtistId { get; set; } public string Title { get; set; } public decimal Price { get; set; } public string AlbumArtUrl { get; set; } // Navigation properties public virtual Artist Artist { get; set; } public virtual Genre Genre { get; set; } public virtual ICollection Carts { get; set; } public virtual ICollection OrderDetails { get; set; } } } I removed the header, changed the namespace, and removed some of the navigation properties. One nice thing about EF Code First is that you don't have to have a property for each database column or foreign key. In the Music Store sample, for instance, we build the app up using code first and start with just a few columns, adding in fields and navigation properties as the application needs them. EF Code First handles the columsn we've told it about and doesn't complain about the others. Here's the basic class: using System.ComponentModel; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace MvcMusicStore.Models { public class Album { public int AlbumId { get; set; } public int GenreId { get; set; } public int ArtistId { get; set; } public string Title { get; set; } public decimal Price { get; set; } public string AlbumArtUrl { get; set; } public virtual Genre Genre { get; set; } public virtual Artist Artist { get; set; } public virtual List OrderDetails { get; set; } } } It's my class, not Entity Framework's, so I'm free to do what I want with it. I added a bunch of MVC 3 annotations for scaffolding and validation support, as shown below: using System.ComponentModel; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace MvcMusicStore.Models { [Bind(Exclude = "AlbumId")] public class Album { [ScaffoldColumn(false)] public int AlbumId { get; set; } [DisplayName("Genre")] public int GenreId { get; set; } [DisplayName("Artist")] public int ArtistId { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "An Album Title is required")] [StringLength(160)] public string Title { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Price is required")] [Range(0.01, 100.00, ErrorMessage = "Price must be between 0.01 and 100.00")] public decimal Price { get; set; } [DisplayName("Album Art URL")] [StringLength(1024)] public string AlbumArtUrl { get; set; } public virtual Genre Genre { get; set; } public virtual Artist Artist { get; set; } public virtual List<OrderDetail> OrderDetails { get; set; } } } The end result was that I had working EF Code First model code for the finished application. You can follow along through the tutorial to see how I built up to the finished model classes, starting with simple 2-3 property classes and building up to the full working schema. Thanks to Diego Vega (on the Entity Framework team) for pointing me to the DbContext template.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 28, 2011

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

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• More Animation - Self Dismissing Dialogs

  - by Duncan Mills

  In my earlier articles on animation, I discussed various slide, grow and  flip transitions for items and containers.  In this article I want to discuss a fade animation and specifically the use of fades and auto-dismissal for informational dialogs.  If you use a Mac, you may be familiar with Growl as a notification system, and the nice way that messages that are informational just fade out after a few seconds. So in this blog entry I wanted to discuss how we could make an ADF popup behave in the same way. This can be an effective way of communicating information to the user without "getting in the way" with modal alerts. This of course, has been done before, but everything I've seen previously requires something like JQuery to be in the mix when we don't really need it to be.  The solution I've put together is nice and generic and will work with either <af:panelWindow> or <af:dialog> as a the child of the popup. In terms of usage it's pretty simple to use we  just need to ensure that the popup itself has clientComponent is set to true and includes the animation JavaScript (animateFadingPopup) on a popupOpened event: <af:popup id="pop1" clientComponent="true">   <af:panelWindow title="A Fading Message...">    ...  </af:panelWindow>   <af:clientListener method="animateFadingPopup" type="popupOpened"/> </af:popup>   The popup can be invoked in the normal way using showPopupBehavior or JavaScript, no special code is required there. As a further twist you can include an additional clientAttribute called preFadeDelay to define a delay before the fade itself starts (the default is 5 seconds) . To set the delay to just 2 seconds for example: <af:popup ...>   ...   <af:clientAttribute name="preFadeDelay" value="2"/>   <af:clientListener method="animateFadingPopup" type="popupOpened"/>  </af:popup> The Animation Styles  As before, we have a couple of CSS Styles which define the animation, I've put these into the skin in my case, and, as in the other articles, I've only defined the transitions for WebKit browsers (Chrome, Safari) at the moment. In this case, the fade is timed at 5 seconds in duration. .popupFadeReset {   opacity: 1; } .popupFadeAnimate {   opacity: 0;   -webkit-transition: opacity 5s ease-in-out; } As you can see here, we are achieving the fade by simply setting the CSS opacity property. The JavaScript The final part of the puzzle is, of course, the JavaScript, there are four functions, these are generic (apart from the Style names which, if you've changed above, you'll need to reflect here): The initial function invoked from the popupOpened event,  animateFadingPopup which starts a timer and provides the initial delay before we start to fade the popup. The function that applies the fade animation to the popup - initiatePopupFade. The callback function - closeFadedPopup used to reset the style class and correctly hide the popup so that it can be invoked again and again.   A utility function - findFadeContainer, which is responsible for locating the correct child component of the popup to actually apply the style to. Function - animateFadingPopup This function, as stated is the one hooked up to the popupOpened event via a clientListener. Because of when the code is called it does not actually matter how you launch the popup, or if the popup is re-used from multiple places. All usages will get the fade behavior. /**  * Client listener which will kick off the animation to fade the dialog and register  * a callback to correctly reset the popup once the animation is complete  * @param event  */ function animateFadingPopup(event) { var fadePopup = event.getSource();   var fadeCandidate = false;   //Ensure that the popup is initially Opaque   //This handles the situation where the user has dismissed   //the popup whilst it was in the process of fading   var fadeContainer = findFadeContainer(fadePopup);   if (fadeContainer != null) {     fadeCandidate = true;     fadeContainer.setStyleClass("popupFadeReset");   }   //Only continue if we can actually fade this popup   if (fadeCandidate) {   //See if a delay has been specified     var waitTimeSeconds = event.getSource().getProperty('preFadeDelay');     //Default to 5 seconds if not supplied     if (waitTimeSeconds == undefined) {     waitTimeSeconds = 5;     }     // Now call the fade after the specified time     var fadeFunction = function () {     initiatePopupFade(fadePopup);     };     var fadeDelayTimer = setTimeout(fadeFunction, (waitTimeSeconds * 1000));   } } The things to note about this function is the initial check that we have to do to ensure that the container is currently visible and reset it's style to ensure that it is.  This is to handle the situation where the popup has begun the fade, and yet the user has still explicitly dismissed the popup before it's complete and in doing so has prevented the callback function (described later) from executing. In this particular situation the initial display of the dialog will be (apparently) missing it's normal animation but at least it becomes visible to the user (and most users will probably not notice this difference in any case). You'll notice that the style that we apply to reset the  opacity - popupFadeReset, is not applied to the popup component itself but rather the dialog or panelWindow within it. More about that in the description of the next function findFadeContainer(). Finally, assuming that we have a suitable candidate for fading, a JavaScript  timer is started using the specified preFadeDelay wait time (or 5 seconds if that was not supplied). When this timer expires then the main animation styleclass will be applied using the initiatePopupFade() function Function - findFadeContainer As a component, the <af:popup> does not support styleClass attribute, so we can't apply the animation style directly.  Instead we have to look for the container within the popup which defines the window object that can have a style attached.  This is achieved by the following code: /**  * The thing we actually fade will be the only child  * of the popup assuming that this is a dialog or window  * @param popup  * @return the component, or null if this is not valid for fading  */ function findFadeContainer(popup) { var children = popup.getDescendantComponents();   var fadeContainer = children[0];   if (fadeContainer != undefined) {   var compType = fadeContainer.getComponentType();     if (compType == "oracle.adf.RichPanelWindow" || compType == "oracle.adf.RichDialog") {     return fadeContainer;     }   }   return null; }  So what we do here is to grab the first child component of the popup and check its type. Here I decided to limit the fade behaviour to only <af:dialog> and <af:panelWindow>. This was deliberate.  If  we apply the fade to say an <af:noteWindow> you would see the text inside the balloon fade, but the balloon itself would hang around until the fade animation was over and then hide.  It would of course be possible to make the code smarter to walk up the DOM tree to find the correct <div> to apply the style to in order to hide the whole balloon, however, that means that this JavaScript would then need to have knowledge of the generated DOM structure, something which may change from release to release, and certainly something to avoid. So, all in all, I think that this is an OK restriction and frankly it's windows and dialogs that I wanted to fade anyway, not balloons and menus. You could of course extend this technique and handle the other types should you really want to. One thing to note here is the selection of the first (children[0]) child of the popup. It does not matter if there are non-visible children such as clientListener before the <af:dialog> or <af:panelWindow> within the popup, they are not included in this array, so picking the first element in this way seems to be fine, no matter what the underlying ordering is within the JSF source.  If you wanted a super-robust version of the code you might want to iterate through the children array of the popup to check for the right type, again it's up to you.  Function -  initiatePopupFade  On to the actual fading. This is actually very simple and at it's heart, just the application of the popupFadeAnimate style to the correct component and then registering a callback to execute once the fade is done. /**  * Function which will kick off the animation to fade the dialog and register  * a callback to correctly reset the popup once the animation is complete  * @param popup the popup we are animating  */ function initiatePopupFade(popup) { //Only continue if the popup has not already been dismissed    if (popup.isPopupVisible()) {   //The skin styles that define the animation      var fadeoutAnimationStyle = "popupFadeAnimate";     var fadeAnimationResetStyle = "popupFadeReset";     var fadeContainer = findFadeContainer(popup);     if (fadeContainer != null) {     var fadeContainerReal = AdfAgent.AGENT.getElementById(fadeContainer.getClientId());       //Define the callback this will correctly reset the popup once it's disappeared       var fadeCallbackFunction = function (event) {       closeFadedPopup(popup, fadeContainer, fadeAnimationResetStyle);         event.target.removeEventListener("webkitTransitionEnd", fadeCallbackFunction);       };       //Initiate the fade       fadeContainer.setStyleClass(fadeoutAnimationStyle);       //Register the callback to execute once fade is done       fadeContainerReal.addEventListener("webkitTransitionEnd", fadeCallbackFunction, false);     }   } } I've added some extra checks here though. First of all we only start the whole process if the popup is still visible. It may be that the user has closed the popup before the delay timer has finished so there is no need to start animating in that case. Again we use the findFadeContainer() function to locate the correct component to apply the style to, and additionally we grab the DOM id that represents that container.  This physical ID is required for the registration of the callback function. The closeFadedPopup() call is then registered on the callback so as to correctly close the now transparent (but still there) popup. Function -  closeFadedPopup The final function just cleans things up: /**  * Callback function to correctly cancel and reset the style in the popup  * @param popup id of the popup so we can close it properly  * @param contatiner the window / dialog within the popup to actually style  * @param resetStyle the syle that sets the opacity back to solid  */ function closeFadedPopup(popup, container, resetStyle) { container.setStyleClass(resetStyle);   popup.cancel(); }  First of all we reset the style to make the popup contents opaque again and then we cancel the popup.  This will ensure that any of your user code that is waiting for a popup cancelled event will actually get the event, additionally if you have done this as a modal window / dialog it will ensure that the glasspane is dismissed and you can interact with the UI again.  What's Next? There are several ways in which this technique could be used, I've been working on a popup here, but you could apply the same approach to in-line messages. As this code (in the popup case) is generic it will make s pretty nice declarative component and maybe, if I get time, I'll look at constructing a formal Growl component using a combination of this technique, and active data push. Also, I'm sure the above code can be improved a little too.  Specifically things like registering a popup cancelled listener to handle the style reset so that we don't loose the subtle animation that takes place when the popup is opened in that situation where the user has closed the in-fade dialog.

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

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

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

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 16, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 16, 2011Popular ReleasesuComponents: uComponents v2.1 RTM: What's new in v2.1? 5 new DataTypes JSON Datasource DropDown Multiple Textstring Similarity Text Image XPath DropDownList Please note that the release of DataType Grid has been postponed until v2.2. 3 new XSLT extensions Media Nodes Search Multi-node tree picker updates XPath start node selectors From Global or Relative start node selectors Max & Min node selection limits Bug fixes If you find a bug or have an issue, please raise a ticket here on CodePlex for us and we'l...Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.6 (BETA): This is seventh BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. New in this release: Version 5.0.6 is almost completely backward compatible with 4.2.1 and 5.0.3 (BETA) Bug fixes and helpers to simplify many common scenarios For more information about this release see the following blog posts: F...SQLCE Code Generator: Build 1.0.3: New beta of the SQLCE Code Generator. New features: - Generates an IDataRepository interface that contains the generated repository interfaces that represents each table - Visual Studio 2010 Custom Tool Support Custom Tool: The custom tool is called SQLCECodeGenerator. Write this in the Custom Tool field in the Properties Window of an SDF file included in your project, this should create a code-behind file for the generated data access codeKooboo CMS: Kooboo 3.0 RC: Bug fixes Inline editing toolbar positioning for websites with complicate CSS. Inline editing is turned on by default now for the samplesite template. MongoDB version content query for multiple filters. . Add a new 404 page to guide users to login and create first website. Naming validation for page name and datarule name. Files in this download kooboo_CMS.zip: The Kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL,SQLCE, RavenDB ...SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.2: 1. introduce sql color syntax highlighting with http://www.codeproject.com/KB/edit/FastColoredTextBox_.aspxUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.7.0: Service release fixing 50+ issues! Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to check the free foundation videos on how to get started building Umbraco sites. They're available from: Introduction for webmasters: http://umbraco.tv/help-and-support/video-tutorials/getting-started Understand the Umbraco concepts: http://umbraco.tv/help-and-support...ProDinner - ASP.NET MVC EF4 Code First DDD jQuery Sample App: first release: ProDinner is an ASP.NET MVC sample application, it uses DDD, EF4 Code First for Data Access, jQuery and MvcProjectAwesome for Web UI, it has Multi-language User Interface Features: CRUD and search operations for entities Multi-Language User Interface upload and crop Images (make thumbnail) for meals pagination using "more results" button very rich and responsive UI (using Mvc Project Awesome) Multiple UI themes (using jQuery UI themes)BEPUphysics: BEPUphysics v0.15.0: BEPUphysics v0.15.0!LiveChat Starter Kit: LCSK v1.1: This release contains couple of new features and bug fixes including: Features: Send chat transcript via email Operator can now invite visitor to chat (pro-active chat request) Bug Fixes: Operator management (Save and Delete) bug fixes Operator Console chat small fixesIronRuby: 1.1.3: IronRuby 1.1.3 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. The main purpose of this release is to sync with IronPython 2.7 release, i.e. to keep the Dynamic Language Runtime that both these languages build on top shareable. This release also fixes a few bugs: 5763 Use...SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.3.2.1 Production: Release 2.3.2.1 implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 13 modules with 163 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scripts for working with ADO.NET, SMO, Agent, RMO, SSIS, SQL script files, PBM, Performance Counters, SQLProfiler, Oracle and MySQL and using Powershell ISE as a SQL and Oracle query tool. In addition optional backend databases and SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 reports are provided with SQLServer and PBM modules. See readme file for details.IronPython: 2.7: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm very pleased to announce the release of IronPython 2.7. This release contains all of the language features of Python 2.7, as well as several previously missing modules and numerous bug fixes. IronPython 2.7 also includes built-in Visual Studio support through IronPython Tools for Visual Studio. IronPython 2.7 requires .NET 4.0 or Silverlight 4. To download IronPython 2.7, visit http://ironpython.codeplex.com/releases/view/54498. Any bugs should be report...XML Explorer: XML Explorer 4.0.2: Changes in 4.0: This release is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. Changed XSD validation to use the schema specified by the XML documents. Added a VS style Error List, double-clicking an error takes you to the offending node. XPathNavigator schema validation finally gives SourceObject (was fixed in .NET 4). Added Namespaces window and better support for XPath expressions in documents with a default namespace. Added ExpandAll and CollapseAll toolbar buttons (in a...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 1.0.0.0: Stable Release 51 Degrees.mobi Foundation has been in beta for some time now and has been used on thousands of websites worldwide. We’re now highly confident in the product and have designated this release as stable. We recommend all users update to this version. New Capabilities MappingsTo improve compatibility with other libraries some new .NET capabilities are now populated with wurfl data: “maximumRenderedPageSize” populated with “max_deck_size” “rendersBreaksAfterWmlAnchor” populated ...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.3: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager added interactive search for the lookupWPF Inspector: WPF Inspector 0.9.7: New Features in Version 0.9.7 - Support for .NET 3.5 and 4.0 - Multi-inspection of the same process - Property-Filtering for multiple keywords e.g. "Height Width" - Smart Element Selection - Select Controls by clicking CTRL, - Select Template-Parts by clicking CTRL+SHIFT - Possibility to hide the element adorner (over the context menu on the visual tree) - Many bugfixes??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-03-10: http://download.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1codechs&DownloadId=216140 ??，????。??????????All-In-One Code Framework ???，??20?Sample！！????，?????。http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ASP.NET ??： CSASPNETBingMaps VBASPNETRemoteUploadAndDownload CS/VBASPNETSerializeJsonString CSASPNETIPtoLocation CSASPNETExcelLikeGridView ....... Winform??： FTPDownload FTPUpload MultiThreadedWebDownloader...Rawr: Rawr 4.1.0: Note: This release may say 4.0.21 in the version bar. This is a typo and the version is actually 4.1.0, not to be confused with 4.0.10 which was released a while back. Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a Relea...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1.2 for IIS 7: This is a localization release of PHP Manager for IIS 7. It contains all the functionality available in 56962 plus a few bug fixes (see change list for more details). Most importantly this release is translated into five languages: German - the translation is provided by Christian Graefe Dutch - the translation is provided by Harrie Verveer Turkish - the translation is provided by Yusuf Oztürk Japanese - the translation is provided by Kenichi Wakasa Russian - the translation is provid...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Beta ChangesAdded user streams support Serialization is not attempted for Twitter 5xx errors Fixes based on feedback Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.2.0: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comNew ProjectsABSC - Automatic Battle System Configurator: ABSC - Automatic Battle System Configurator Este é um aplicativo que auxilia os usuários na configuração de diversos script's de batalha disponíveis atualmente para o Rpg Maker. O aplicativo irá gerar um script com toda a configuração especificada pelo usuário.Active Directory Monkey: Designed for IS support teams to easily reset active directoy passwords.Ag-Light: Artesis projectAnito.ORM: Anito ORMblogengine customizations: Customizations for dotnetblogengineCool Tool: Cool Tool is a Visual studio add-in for generating business entities. Generator provides functionality to be able easily and comfortable generate class elements and implement chosen interfaces. Project is developed in VS 2010 (C# 4.0). Enjoy!csmpfit - A Least Squares Optimization Library in C# (C Sharp): A C# port of the C-based mpfit Levenberg Marquardt solver at Argonne National Labs (http://cow.physics.wisc.edu/~craigm/idl/cmpfit.html), including both desktop .NET and Silverlight project libraries.DirectX 11 Framework for Experimentation: Basic Framework for DirectX 11 (without DXUT) containing basic stuffs like Text Rendering, Quad Render, Model Loading, basic Skinning animation, Shader framework (substitute for the effect API) and lots of random stuffs !!!Doanvien code project: DoanVien code projectdtweet - a dashing way of tweeting: dtweet is developed in ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM (Razor) C# JQuery 1.5.1FormMail.NET: This is a project to support emailing form data from a .NET page, and storing that form data in an XML file.LRU Cache: This project implements the LRU Cache using C#. It uses a Dictionary and a LinkedList. Dictionary ensures fast access to the data, and the linkedlist controls which objects are to be removed first.Magelia WebStore Open-source e-commerce software: Magelia WebStore is a customizable, multilingual and multi-currency open-source e-commerce software for the .net environment. WebStore was developped C# and Aspx and only requires an SQL Server Express. MDA.Net: MDA.Net is the .Net/Silverlight port of mda-vst instruments and effects. Currently it includes just the MDA piano and an overdrive with basic interfaces to build on. Just PM me if you have some time to help - we are in no rush, aim to migrate everything one-by-one. MVC NGShop: NGShop ????????????，????Asp.net MVC 2.0 + Jquery + SQL Server 2008， ???Castle Windsor IOC、entity framework，??????visual studio 2010??，??????vs2010，?????js???。Orchard - Photo Albums module: This module allows you to create photo albums with various effects: lightbox, slideshow, etc. PowerShell Workflow: PowerShell Workflow helps organizations to define their operational processes through the power of Workflow and Powershell. Project Dark: Early version of our project. Made in Torque 3dReFSharp: ReFSharp is pretty printer, analyzing tool and translator source code texts between F#, C# and Java. Current version has full functional pretty printer for F# and pre-alpha translator of C# to F#.Relate Intranet Templates: <project name> is an open source package for EPiServer Relate which creates a foundation for an intranet.Service monitor: Service monitor is a simple utility that lets you monitor and manage the states of services of multiple machines. It allows starting/stopping and restarting. It is Windows 7 UAC aware.Sharp Console: Sharp Console is a Windows Command Line (WCL)alternative written in C#. It targets those who lack access to the WCL or simply wish to use the NET framework instead. It aims to provide the same (and more!) functionality as the WCL. Contribute anything you feel will make it better!Stone2: New version of Stone, but using TFS for versioningStudent Database Management System: Student Database Management System is a sample Online Web based and also desktop application which helps school to maintain their records free online. this project is open source project and Free available for all schools to check and send their response..

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• e-interview: SunSpace to WebCenter migration

  - by me

  I had the pleasure to do an e-interview with Ana Neves around the SunSpace to WebCenter migration project.  Below is the english version of the interview.  Enjoy   Peter, you joined Oracle in 2009 through the acquisition of Sun. Becoming a part of Oracle meant many changes. The internal collaboration platform was one of them, as per a post you wrote back in 2011. Sun had SunSpace. How would you describe SunSpace? SunSpace was the internal Community and Social Collaboration platform for the Sun's Global Sales and Services Organization. SunSpace served around 600 communities with a main focus around technology, products and services. SunSpace was a big success. Within 3 months of its launch SunSpace had over 20,000 users and it won the Atlassian "Not just another wiki" Award for the best use of Confluence (https://blogs.oracle.com/peterreiser/entry/goodbye_sunspace_hello_webcenter). What made SunSpace so special? 1. People centric versus  Web centric The main concept of SunSpace put the person in the middle of everything. All relevant information, resources  etc. where dynamically pushed to a person's  myProfile ( Facebook like interface) based on the person's interest and  needs.  2. Ease to use  SunSpace was really easy to use. We spent a lot of time on social interaction design to optimize the user experience.  Also we integrated some sophisticated technology to hide complexity from the user. As example - when a user added a document to SunSpace - we analyzed the content of the document and suggested related metadata and tags to the user based on a sophisticated algorithm which was integrated with the corporate taxonomy. Based on this metadata the document was automatically shared with the relevant communities.  3. Easy to find One of the main use cases for SunSpace was that  a user could quickly find the content and information they needed for their job.  The search implementation was based on:  optimized search engine algorithm using social value based ranking enhancements community facilitated search optimization  faceted search which recommended highly relevant  content like products, communities and experts 4. Social Adoption  - How to build vibrant communities You can deploy the coolest social technology but what if the users are not using it?   To drive user adoption we implemented two  complementary models: 4.1 Community Methodology  We developed a set of best practices on how to create, run and sustain communities including: community structure and types (e.g. Community of Practice, Community of Interest etc.) & tips and tricks on how to build a "vibrant " communities, Community Health check etc.  These best practices where constantly tuned and updated by the community of community drivers. 4.2. Social Value System To drive user adoption there is ONE key  question you  have to answer for each individual user: What's In It For Me (WIIFM) We developed a Social Value System called Community Equity which measures the social value flow between People, Content and Metadata. Based on this technology we added "Gamfication" techniques (although at that time this term did not exist ) to SunSpace to honor people for the active contribution and participation.  As example: All  social credentials a user earned trough active community participation where dynamically displayed on her/his myProfile. How would you describe WebCenter? Oracle WebCenter (@oraclewebcenter) is the Oracle's  user engagement platform for social business. It helps people work together more efficiently through contextual collaboration tools that optimize connections between people, information, and applications and ensures users have access to the right information in the context of the business process in which they are engaged. Oracle WebCenter can help your organization deliver contextual and targeted Web experiences to users and enable employees to access information and applications through intuitive portals, composite applications, and mash-ups. How does it compare to SunSpace in terms of functionality? Before I answer this question, I would like to point out some limitation we started to see with the current SunSpace implementation. Due to the massive growth of the user population (>20,000 users), we experienced  performance and scalability challenges with the current technology. Also at the time - Sun Internal Communications and SunIT planned to replace the entire Sun Intranet with SunSpace. We  kicked-off a project to evaluate the enterprise level technology which eventually would replace the good old static Intranet.  And then Oracle acquired Sun. We already had defined the functional requirements for the Intranet replacement with a Social Enterprise Stack and we just needed to evaluate the functional requirements against WebCenter   Below are the summary of this evaluation  MyProfile SunSpace WebCenter How WebCenter Works Home MyProfile: to access, click on your name at the top of any WebCenter page Your name, title, and reporting line are displayed.  Sub-tabs show your activity stream (Activities); people in your network (Connections); files you have uploaded (Documents); your contact information (Organization); and any personal information you wish to share (About).   Files MyFiles Allows you to upload, download and store documents or wiki pages within folders and subfolders.  The WebDav interface allows you to download / upload files / folders with a simple drag and drop to / from your local machine.  Tagging is supported and recommended. Network HomeMyConnections Home: displays the activity stream of individuals in your network.MyConnections: shows individuals in your network.  Click on a person's name to see their contact info and link to their profile. Status Updates MyProfle > Activties Add and displays  your recent activties and status updates. Watches Preferences > Subscriptions > Current Subscriptions Receive email notifications when  pages / spaces you watch are modified. Drafts N/A WebCenter does not support Drafts Settings Preferences: to access, click on 'Preferences' at the top of any WebCenter page Set your general preferences, as well as your WebCenter messaging, search and mail settings. MyCommunities MySpaces: to access, click on 'Spaces' at the top of any WebCenter page Displays MySpaces (communities you are a member of); and Recent Spaces (communities you have recently visited). Community SunSpace Webcenter How Webcenter Works Home Home Displays a community introduction and activity stream.  Members can add messages, links or documents via the Community Message Board. No Top Contributors widget. People Members Lists members of the community. The Mail All Members feature allows moderators and participants to send a message to all members of the community. Membership Management can be found under > Manage > Members News News Members can post and access latest community news and they can subscribe to news using an RSS reader Documents Documents Allows community members to upload, download and store documents or wiki pages within folders and subfolders.  The WebDav interface allows participants to download / upload files / folders with a simple drag and drop to / from your local machine.  Tagging is supported and recommended. Wiki Wiki Allows community members to create and update web pages with a WYSIWYG editor.  Note: WebCenter does not support macros or portlet embedding. Forum Forum Post community forum topics. Contribute to community forum conversations.  N/A Calendar Update and/or view the Community Calendar. N/A Analytics Displays detailed analytics data (views,downloads, unique users etc.) for Pages, Wiki, Documents, and Forum in a given community space. What is the adoption of WebCenter at Oracle? The entire Intranet serving around 100,000 users  is running on WebCenter Content.  For professional communities we use WebCenter Portal and Spaces. Currently we have around 6,000 community spaces with  around 40,000 members.  Does Oracle have any metrics to assess usage and impact of WebCenter? Can you give us some examples? Sure -  we have a lot of metrics   For the Intranet we use traditional metrics like pageviews, monthly unique visitors and unique visits.  For Communities we use the WebCenter Portal/Spaces analytics service which gives as a wealth of data. The key metrics we track are: Space traffic (PageViews, Unique Users) Wiki,Documents (views, downloads etc.) Forum (users, views, posts etc.) Registered members over time  Depending on the community we can filter/segment the metrics by User Properties e.g. Country, Organization, Job Role etc. What are you doing to improve usage and impact? 1. We  integrating the WebCenter social services/fabric into all  main business applications. As example The Fusion CRM deployment is seamless integrated with Oracle Social Network (OSN) and all conversation around an opportunity or customer engagement is  done in OSN (see youtube video). 2. We drive Social Best Practice trough a program called "Social Networking & Business Collaboration (SNBC) program" You worked both with WebCenter and SunSpace. Knowing what you know today, if you had the chance to choose between the two, which one would you choose? Why? That's a tricky question   In the early days of  the Social Enterprise implementation (we started SunSpace in 2006), we needed an agile and easy to deploy technology to keep up with the users requirements. Sometimes we pushed two releases per day  and we were in a permanent perpetual beta mode - SunSpace was perfect for that.  After the social implementation matured over time - community generated content became business critical and we saw a change in the  requirements from agile to stability, scalability and reliability  of the infrastructure.  WebCenter is the right choice for such an enterprise-level deployment.  You are a WebCenter Evangelist at Oracle. What do you do as part of that role? Our  role is to help position Oracle as one of the key thought leaders and solutions provider for Social Business. In addition we drive social innovation trough our Oracle Appslab  team. Is that a full time role? Yes  How many other Evangelists are there in Oracle? We are currently 5 people in the WebCenter evangelist team (@webcentervoices): Christian Finn (@cfinn) leads the team - Christian came from the Microsoft Sharepoint product management team and is a recognized expert in Social Business and Enterprise Collaboration. Noël Jaffré  (@noeljaffre) is our Web Experience Management (WEM) guru and came to Oracle via FatWire acquisition (now WebCenter Sites). Jake Kuramoto (@theapplab) is part of the Oracle AppsLab innovation  team - Jake is well known as  the driving force behind  http://theappslab.com  a blog around social and innovation.  Noel Portugal (@noelportugal) is a developer in the Oracle AppsLab innovation team - he is the inventor of OraTweet - Oracle's internal tweeting platform  Peter Reiser (@peterreiser) is  a Social Business guru and the inventor of SunSpace and Community Equity.  What area of the business do you and the rest of the Evangelists sit in? What area of the organisation is responsible for WebCenter? We are part of the WebCenter product management  organization.  Is WebCenter part of the Knowledge Management strategy? Oracle WebCenter is the Oracle's user engagement platform for social business. It brings together the most complete portfolio of portal, web experience management, content, social and collaboration technologies into a single product suite and is the product foundation of the Oracle Knowledge Management strategy.  I am aware Oracle also uses Beehive internally. How would you describe Beehive? Oracle Beehive provides an integrated set of communication and collaboration services built on a single scalable, secure, enterprise-class platform Beehive is  internally used for enterprise wide mail, calendar and real collaboration (Web conferencing) services.  Are Beehive and WebCenter connected? Historically Beehive and WebCenter Portal & Content had some overlap in functionally. (Hey - if  a company has an acquisition strategy to strengthen its product offering and accelerate  innovation, it's pretty normal that functional overlap exists  :- )) A key objective of the WebCenter strategy is  to combine all social and collaboration offerings under the WebCenter product family. That means that certain Beehive components  will be integrated into the overall WebCenter product offering.  Are there any other internal collaboration tools at Oracle? Which ones There here are two other main social tools which are widely used at Oracle  Oracle Connect was the first social tool the Oracle AppsLab team created in 2007 - see (Jake's blog post for details). It is still extensively used. ... and as a former Sun guy I like this quote from the blog post:  "Traffic to Connect peaked right after the Sun merger in 2010, when it served several hundred thousand pageviews each month; since then, traffic has subsided, but still averages tens of thousands of pageviews to several thousand users each month." Oratweet - Oracle internal microblogging platform has been used since June 2008 and it is still growing.  It's entirely written in Oracle Application Express (APEX) which is a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database. Wanna try it out? Here you can download the code.  What is Oracle's strategy regarding (all these) collaboration tools? Pretty straight forward. The strategy is to seamless  integrate the WebCenter social & collaboration services into all Business Applications to help customers to socialize their enterprise. 

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• DevConnections Session Slides, Samples and Links

  - by Rick Strahl

  Finally coming up for air this week, after catching up with being on the road for the better part of three weeks. Here are my slides, samples and links for my four DevConnections Session two weeks ago in Vegas. I ended up doing one extra un-prepared for session on WebAPI and AJAX, as some of the speakers were either delayed or unable to make it at all to Vegas due to Sandy's mayhem. It was pretty hectic in the speaker room as Erik (our event coordinator extrodinaire) was scrambling to fill session slots with speakers :-). Surprisingly it didn't feel like the storm affected attendance drastically though, but I guess it's hard to tell without actual numbers. The conference was a lot of fun - it's been a while since I've been speaking at one of these larger conferences. I'd been taking a hiatus, and I forgot how much I enjoy actually giving talks. Preparing - well not  quite so much, especially since I ended up essentially preparing or completely rewriting for all three of these talks and I was stressing out a bit as I was sick the week before the conference and didn't get as much time to prepare as I wanted to. But - as always seems to be the case - it all worked out, but I guess those that attended have to be the judge of that… It was great to catch up with my speaker friends as well - man I feel out of touch. I got to spend a bunch of time with Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell, Julie Lerman and for about 10 minutes even got to catch up with the ever so busy Michele Bustamante. Lots of great technical discussions including a fun and heated REST controversy with Ward and Howard Dierking. There were also a number of great discussions with attendees, describing how they're using the technologies touched in my talks in live applications. I got some great ideas from some of these and I wish there would have been more opportunities for these kinds of discussions. One thing I miss at these Vegas events though is some sort of coherent event where attendees and speakers get to mingle. These Vegas conferences are just like "go to sessions, then go out and PARTY on the town" - it's Vegas after all! But I think that it's always nice to have at least one evening event where everybody gets to hang out together and trade stories and geek talk. Overall there didn't seem to be much opportunity for that beyond lunch or the small and short exhibit hall events which it seemed not many people actually went to. Anyways, a good time was had. I hope those of you that came to my sessions learned something useful. There were lots of great questions and discussions after the sessions - always appreciate hearing the real life scenarios that people deal with in relation to the abstracted scenarios in sessions. Here are the Session abstracts, a few comments and the links for downloading slides and  samples. It's not quite like being there, but I hope this stuff turns out to be useful to some of you. I'll be following up a couple of these sessions with white papers in the following weeks. Enjoy. ASP.NET Architecture: How ASP.NET Works at the Low Level Abstract:Interested in how ASP.NET works at a low level? ASP.NET is extremely powerful and flexible technology, but it's easy to forget about the core framework that underlies the higher level technologies like ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, WebPages, Web Services that we deal with on a day to day basis. The ASP.NET core drives all the higher level handlers and frameworks layered on top of it and with the core power comes some complexity in the form of a very rich object model that controls the flow of a request through the ASP.NET pipeline from Windows HTTP services down to the application level. To take full advantage of it, it helps to understand the underlying architecture and model. This session discusses the architecture of ASP.NET along with a number of useful tidbits that you can use for building and debugging your ASP.NET applications more efficiently. We look at overall architecture, how requests flow from the IIS (7 and later) Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime into HTTP handlers, modules and filters and finally into high-level handlers like MVC, Web Forms or Web API. Focus of this session is on the low-level aspects on the ASP.NET runtime, with examples that demonstrate the bootstrapping of ASP.NET, threading models, how Application Domains are used, startup bootstrapping, how configuration files are applied and how all of this relates to the applications you write either using low-level tools like HTTP handlers and modules or high-level pages or services sitting at the top of the ASP.NET runtime processing chain. Comments:I was surprised to see so many people show up for this session - especially since it was the last session on the last day and a short 1 hour session to boot. The room was packed and it was to see so many people interested the abstracts of architecture of ASP.NET beyond the immediate high level application needs. Lots of great questions in this talk as well - I only wish this session would have been the full hour 15 minutes as we just a little short of getting through the main material (didn't make it to Filters and Error handling). I haven't done this session in a long time and I had to pretty much re-figure all the system internals having to do with the ASP.NET bootstrapping in light for the changes that came with IIS 7 and later. The last time I did this talk was with IIS6, I guess it's been a while. I love doing this session, mainly because in my mind the core of ASP.NET overall is so cleanly designed to provide maximum flexibility without compromising performance that has clearly stood the test of time in the 10 years or so that .NET has been around. While there are a lot of moving parts, the technology is easy to manage once you understand the core components and the core model hasn't changed much even while the underlying architecture that drives has been almost completely revamped especially with the introduction of IIS 7 and later. Download Samples and Slides   Introduction to using jQuery with ASP.NET Abstract:In this session you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery in your ASP.NET applications. Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors for document element selection, manipulating these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The second half of the session then delves into jQuery's AJAX features and several different ways how you can interact with ASP.NET on the server. You'll see examples of using ASP.NET MVC for serving HTML and JSON AJAX content, as well as using the new ASP.NET Web API to serve JSON and hypermedia content. You'll also see examples of client side templating/databinding with Handlebars and Knockout. Comments:This session was in a monster of a room and to my surprise it was nearly packed, given that this was a 100 level session. I can see that it's a good idea to continue to do intro sessions to jQuery as there appeared to be quite a number of folks who had not worked much with jQuery yet and who most likely could greatly benefit from using it. Seemed seemed to me the session got more than a few people excited to going if they hadn't yet :-).  Anyway I just love doing this session because it's mostly live coding and highly interactive - not many sessions that I can build things up from scratch and iterate on in an hour. jQuery makes that easy though. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Introduction to jQuery White Paper Introduction to ASP.NET Web API   Hosting the Razor Scripting Engine in Your Own Applications Abstract:The Razor Engine used in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages is a free-standing scripting engine that can be disassociated from these Web-specific implementations and can be used in your own applications. Razor allows for a powerful mix of code and text rendering that makes it a wonderful tool for any sort of text generation, from creating HTML output in non-Web applications, to rendering mail merge-like functionality, to code generation for developer tools and even as a plug-in scripting engine. In this session, we'll look at the components that make up the Razor engine and how you can bootstrap it in your own applications to hook up templating. You'll find out how to create custom templates and manage Razor requests that can be pre-compiled, detecting page changes and act in ways similar to a full runtime. We look at ways that you can pass data into the engine and retrieve both the rendered output as well as result values in a package that makes it easy to plug Razor into your own applications. Comments:That this session was picked was a bit of a surprise to me, since it's a bit of a niche topic. Even more of a surprise was that during the session quite a few people who attended had actually used Razor externally and were there to find out more about how the process works and how to extend it. In the session I talk a bit about a custom Razor hosting implementation (Westwind.RazorHosting) and drilled into the various components required to build a custom Razor Hosting engine and a runtime around it. This sessions was a bit of a chore to prepare for as there are lots of technical implementation details that needed to be dealt with and squeezing that into an hour 15 is a bit tight (and that aren't addressed even by some of the wrapper libraries that exist). Found out though that there's quite a bit of interest in using a templating engine outside of web applications, or often side by side with the HTML output generated by frameworks like MVC or WebForms. An extra fun part of this session was that this was my first session and when I went to set up I realized I forgot my mini-DVI to VGA adapter cable to plug into the projector in my room - 6 minutes before the session was about to start. So I ended up sprinting the half a mile + back to my room - and back at a full sprint. I managed to be back only a couple of minutes late, but when I started I was out of breath for the first 10 minutes or so, while trying to talk. Musta sounded a bit funny as I was trying to not gasp too much :-) Resources: Slides and Code Samples Westwind.RazorHosting GitHub Project Original RazorHosting Blog Post   Introduction to ASP.NET Web API for AJAX Applications Abstract:WebAPI provides a new framework for creating REST based APIs, but it can also act as a backend to typical AJAX operations. This session covers the core features of Web API as it relates to typical AJAX application development. We’ll cover content-negotiation, routing and a variety of output generation options as well as managing data updates from the client in the context of a small Single Page Application style Web app. Finally we’ll look at some of the extensibility features in WebAPI to customize and extend Web API in a number and useful useful ways. Comments:This session was a fill in for session slots not filled due MIA speakers stranded by Sandy. I had samples from my previous Web API article so decided to go ahead and put together a session from it. Given that I spent only a couple of hours preparing and putting slides together I was glad it turned out as it did - kind of just ran itself by way of the examples I guess as well as nice audience interactions and questions. Lots of interest - and also some confusion about when Web API makes sense. Both this session and the jQuery session ended up getting a ton of questions about when to use Web API vs. MVC, whether it would make sense to switch to Web API for all AJAX backend work etc. In my opinion there's no need to jump to Web API for existing applications that already have a good AJAX foundation. Web API is awesome for real externally consumed APIs and clearly defined application AJAX APIs. For typical application level AJAX calls, it's still a good idea, but ASP.NET MVC can serve most if not all of that functionality just as well. There's no need to abandon MVC (or even ASP.NET AJAX or third party AJAX backends) just to move to Web API. For new projects Web API probably makes good sense for isolation of AJAX calls, but it really depends on how the application is set up. In some cases sharing business logic between the HTML and AJAX interfaces with a single MVC API can be cleaner than creating two completely separate code paths to serve essentially the same business logic. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Sample Code on GitHub Introduction to ASP.NET Web API White Paper© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Conferences  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 30, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 30, 2010Popular ReleasesVarddienis - Windows Sidebar sikriks: Varddienis 0.9.5.0: Pievienota "Svetku" funkcija; Tiek paraditi Latvijas valsts svetki, atceres un atzimejamas dienas. Pievienoti “Atrie taustini” jeb isceli (laujot atrak izmantot Varddiena iespejas); Pievienota jauna poga - "Isceli", kas lauj lietotajam apskatit Varddieni pieejamos iscelus, un to taustinus. Nelielas izmainas: Nedaudz uzlabots JavaScript kods, Izmainits lidojošo logu aizveršanas krustinš – tagad tas klust dzeltens, ja uz ta uzbrauc ar peli; Ieverojami parkartoti un samazinati sik...SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.0 alpha 8: 1. added truncate table/defrag index/check db functions 2. improved alert 3. fixed problem with alert causing config file corrupted(hopefully)People's Note: People's Note 0.20: Version 0.20 is all about polishing the UI and supporting other developers. Several screens got better handling of the "close" button and the Escape key. The ink note screen got more traditional sketching colours, instead of the primaries. It also got a greater brush size. Messages for network errors have been improved. The Evernote API library got a Win32 target. Readme.txt was updated with additional instructions. To install: copy the appropriate CAB file onto your WM device and run i...ASP.NET Comet Ajax Library (Reverse Ajax - Server Push): Object Cache Sample: Object cache sample for Windows Forms Applications. This sample project demonstrates the usage of PCache class.Analysis Services Stored Procedure Project: 1.3.5 Release: This release includes the following fixes and new functionality: Updates to GetCubeLastProcessedDate to work with perspectives Fixes to reports that call Discover functions improving drillthrough functions against perspectives improving ExecuteDrillthroughAndFixColumns logic fixing situation where MDX query calling certain ASSP sprocs which opened external connections caused deadlock to SSAS processing small fix to Partition code when DbColumnName property doesn't exist changes...DocX: DocX v1.0.0.11: Building Examples projectTo build the Examples project, download DocX.dll and add it as a reference to the project. OverviewThis version of DocX contains many bug fixes, it is a serious step towards a stable release. Added1) Unit testing project, 2) Examples project, 3) To many bug fixes to list here, see the source code change list history.Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): 71406: This is the second release supporting the full line of Visual Studio 2010 editions. Changes since release 71246 include: Debug info is now stored in a single .cpdb file (which is a Firebird database) Keyboard input works now (using Console.ReadLine) Console colors work (using Console.ForegroundColor and .BackgroundColor)AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.0: Added the all new Masteries Browser which replaces the Quick Open combobox AutoLoL will now attemt to create file associations for mastery (*.lolm) files Each Mastery Build can now contain keywords that the Masteries Browser will use for filtering Changed the way AutoLoL detects if another instance is already running Changed the format of the mastery files to allow more information stored in* Dialogs will now focus the Ok or Cancel button which allows the user to press Return to clo...Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 1.6.0: Handling of layer masks has been greatly improved. Improved reliability. Many PSD files that previously loaded in as garbage will now load in correctly. Parallelized loading. PSD files containing layer masks will load in a bit quicker thanks to the removal of the sequential bottleneck. Hidden layers are no longer made visible on save. Many thanks to the users who helped expose the layer masks problem: Rob Horowitz, M_Lyons10. Please keep sending in those bug reports and PSD repro files!Razor Templating Engine: Razor Templating Engine v1.2: Changes: ADDED: Standard namespaces imports for all templates: System, System.Collections.Generic, System.Linq (Changeset 5635) ADDED: Methods for Precompilation (Changeset 3283) CHANGED: Refactored precompilation to be exposed per-TemplateService. (Changeset 3440) CHANGED: Added more descriptive compilation exception message. (Changeset 3629) FIXED: Forced reference to Microsoft.CSharp to correct support for testing frameworks. (Changeset 3689) FIXED: Added support for nested anonymous obj...Facebook C# SDK: 4.1.1: From 4.1.1 Release: Authentication bug fix caused by facebook change (error with redirects in Safari) Authenticator fix, always returning true From 4.1.0 Release Lots of bug fixes Removed Dynamic Runtime Language dependencies from non-dynamic platforms. Samples included in release for ASP.NET, MVC, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, WinForms, and one Visual Basic Sample Changed internal serialization to use Json.net BREAKING CHANGE: Canvas Session is no longer supported. Use Signed...Catel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.0.0: And there it is, the final release of Catel, and it is no longer a beta version!EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.7 ALPHA: 2.2.7 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Mongoose has bee...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.19: Mono 2.8, Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation. Bug fixes.Euro for Windows XP: ChangeRegionalSettings 1..0: *Flickr Wallpaper Rotator (for Windows desktop): Wallpaper Flickr 1.1: Some minor bugfixes (mostly covering when network connection is flakey, so I discovered them all while at my parents' house for Christmas).NoSimplerAccounting: NoSimplerAccounting 6.0: -Fixed a bug in expense category report.NHibernate Mapping Generator: NHibernate Mapping Generator 2.0: Added support for Postgres (Thanks to Angelo)NewLife XCode: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????（????v3.5??）: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????，??： NewLife.Core ??? NewLife.Net ??? XControl ??? XTemplate ????，??C#?????? XAgent ???? NewLife.CommonEnitty ??????（???，XCode??????） XCode?? ?????????，??????????????????，?????95% XCode v3.5.2009.0714 ??，?v3.5?v6.0???????????????，?????????。v3.5???????????，??????????????。 XCoder ??XTemplate?????????，????????XCode??? XCoder_Src ???????（????XTemplate????），??????????????????Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6 Beta - codename JUNO: The Umbraco 4.6 beta (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains more than 89 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Improved installer experience Updated Starter Kits (Simple, Blog, Personal, Business) Beautiful, free, customizable skins included Skinning engine and Skin customization (see Skinning Documentation Kit) Default dashboards on install with hide option Updated Login t...New ProjectsAlquerque.net: Quer mostrar todo seu potencial? Destacar sua idéia inovadora? Desenvolva uma solução na plataforma .NET e prove que você está preparado para o mercado!Buccaneer: Buccaneer is a very extensive version of the windows explorer, which can be even furter extended with selfmade plugins. It is developed in c#.Chianti: Project Chianticomputing pi with a webcam: computing pi with a webcam and a spinning plate using buffon's methodConfree for Outlook: Confree lets you create audio conferences from Claro / Telmex directly from Outlook.Esurfing: EsurfingFoursquare Helper for WebMatrix: The Foursquare Helper for WebMatrix makes it simple to integrate Foursquare in your site. With a few lines of code you'll be able to show an "Add to My Foursquare" button or show any user's badges in your site.GetSatisfaction Helper for WebMatrix: The GetSatisfaction Helper for WebMatrix allows you to easily integrate GetSatistaction feedback functionality into your site. It provides a set of widgets for your users to share their ideas, questions, problems, and praises.GoodStore: ??????????，??B/S??，asp.net?sqlserver???，???????，?????????。。。Groupon Helper for WebMatrix: The Groupon Helper for WebMatrix allows you to easily add a Groupon badge to your WebMatrix site. When the helper is in place, it can query the Groupon API to get the deals for a given location, for you to display them in new, different ways. HarrierSight: An extensible application for analyze of spatial dataiPlay: iPlay is a WPF application built using MVVM for generating iTunes playlists randomly and displaying the status of iTunes in a user friendly way. It's secondary purpose is to explore the capabilities of WPF and MVVM in a contextual way.iSun Studio CMS: SNS Kiiro: An easy to use collaboration and project management application built for SharePoint. Kiiro lets your team collaborate on projects, documents, discussions, tasks and issues all within a simple, easy-to-use interface.Kiva7: The Kiva7 app is a Windows Phone 7 app for www.kiva.com. It shows all information on your loans and allows you to search for new loans. LeanEngine Framework: The LeanEngine framework makes it easier and faster for developers to develop .Net data centric applications. It's developed in C# language.MedSpeech: Guardado de grabaciones sobre los estudios radiologicos para luego poder realizar reportes de estos.Open Gran Turismo: Open Gran Turismo is an opensource car racing game highly customizable developed in XNA and BEPU physics. Opt.Net: Command line options and arguments parsing library for .NET 3.5 and 4.0 programs. Uses reflection to convert command line arguments and options into property values on an object that the application defines. Will support command pattern programs as well.Plancast Helper for WebMatrix: The Plancast Helper for WebMatrix provides an easy way to integrate Plancast on your WebMatrix site. With a few lines of code you'll able to show your Plancast plans or the ones from your friends. Polldaddy Helper for WebMatrix: The Polldaddy helper makes easy to add Poll widgets, ratings and surveys to your WebMatrix site in a few lines of code. It also provides access to the Polldaddy API, wrapping some of the API methods to retrieve Poll data.Scribd Helper for WebMatrix: The Scribd Helper for WebMatrix allows you to easily add Scribd documents to your site. When the helper is in place, it interacts with the Scribd API and with Scribd Reader to easily list your documents, enabling users to view them without having to leave your site. SharePoint 2010 Custom List Form Demo: This example will show you how to create a custom list form for SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010 using SharePoint Designer 2010 and VS2010... See my blog for a "Walkthrough": http://ikarstein.wordpress.comTdd unit test bar for Windows Phone development: a simple application which launches NUnit-Console on your Windows Phone unit tests every time you build, using a SilverLight version of NUnit. The output is then colored for better readability: Green bar if success, Red bar if failure.Techne: Techne is a program which will take a user input of a color or picture and then using motors to pipette paint will manually create the colors described by the user and draw a picture. The goal is to continually expand the system into performing more complicated tasks.TelerikTest1: ????Telerik??111111111TriExporterNET: TriExporter .NET Twitter Helper for WebMatrix: The Twitter Helper for WebMatrix makes it simple to integrate several Twitter social features in your site. For example, you can display Twitter widgets like "Follow Me" and "Tweet" Buttons, and access the Timeline Resources exposed by the Twitter API in a few lines of code.windows azure backup: If you need to have a backup of your files using Windows Azure, then this is the project to download. It incorporates an "admin" user and his backups. Can upload/retrieve files from local hard drive. Made with ASP.NET MVC.WP7PrintHelper: This project is aimed at the Windows Phone 7 developers that need to print from an App they are developing. The project provides a WCF service that runs on any desktop or server, and a print dialog dll that runs on the Windows 7 phone. It is developed in Framework 4.0 Client C#Wufoo Helper for WebMatrix: The Wufoo Helper for WebMatrix provides an easy way to integrate Wufoo forms and data into your WebMatrix site. It allows you to add Wufoo forms in your pages and integrate the data submitted in your forms by using Web Hooks.

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• Creating ASP.NET MVC Negotiated Content Results

  - by Rick Strahl

  In a recent ASP.NET MVC application I’m involved with, we had a late in the process request to handle Content Negotiation: Returning output based on the HTTP Accept header of the incoming HTTP request. This is standard behavior in ASP.NET Web API but ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this functionality directly out of the box. Another reason this came up in discussion is last week’s announcements of ASP.NET vNext, which seems to indicate that ASP.NET Web API is not going to be ported to the cloud version of vNext, but rather be replaced by a combined version of MVC and Web API. While it’s not clear what new API features will show up in this new framework, it’s pretty clear that the ASP.NET MVC style syntax will be the new standard for all the new combined HTTP processing framework. Why negotiated Content? Content negotiation is one of the key features of Web API even though it’s such a relatively simple thing. But it’s also something that’s missing in MVC and once you get used to automatically having your content returned based on Accept headers it’s hard to go back to manually having to create separate methods for different output types as you’ve had to with Microsoft server technologies all along (yes, yes I know other frameworks – including my own – have done this for years but for in the box features this is relatively new from Web API). As a quick review,  Accept Header content negotiation works off the request’s HTTP Accept header:POST http://localhost/mydailydosha/Editable/NegotiateContent HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: application/json Accept: application/json Host: localhost Content-Length: 76 Pragma: no-cache { ElementId: "header", PageName: "TestPage", Text: "This is a nice header" } If I make this request I would expect to get back a JSON result based on my application/json Accept header. To request XML  I‘d just change the accept header:Accept: text/xml and now I’d expect the response to come back as XML. Now this only works with media types that the server can process. In my case here I need to handle JSON, XML, HTML (using Views) and Plain Text. HTML results might need more than just a data return – you also probably need to specify a View to render the data into either by specifying the view explicitly or by using some sort of convention that can automatically locate a view to match. Today ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this sort of automatic content switching out of the box. Unfortunately, in my application scenario we have an application that started out primarily with an AJAX backend that was implemented with JSON only. So there are lots of JSON results like this:[Route("Customers")] public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return Json(repo.GetCustomers(),JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } These work fine, but they are of course JSON specific. Then a couple of weeks ago, a requirement came in that an old desktop application needs to also consume this API and it has to use XML to do it because there’s no JSON parser available for it. Ooops – stuck with JSON in this case. While it would have been easy to add XML specific methods I figured it’s easier to add basic content negotiation. And that’s what I show in this post. Missteps – IResultFilter, IActionFilter My first attempt at this was to use IResultFilter or IActionFilter which look like they would be ideal to modify result content after it’s been generated using OnResultExecuted() or OnActionExecuted(). Filters are great because they can look globally at all controller methods or individual methods that are marked up with the Filter’s attribute. But it turns out these filters don’t work for raw POCO result values from Action methods. What we wanted to do for API calls is get back to using plain .NET types as results rather than result actions. That is  you write a method that doesn’t return an ActionResult, but a standard .NET type like this:public Customer UpdateCustomer(Customer cust) { … do stuff to customer :-) return cust; } Unfortunately both OnResultExecuted and OnActionExecuted receive an MVC ContentResult instance from the POCO object. MVC basically takes any non-ActionResult return value and turns it into a ContentResult by converting the value using .ToString(). Ugh. The ContentResult itself doesn’t contain the original value, which is lost AFAIK with no way to retrieve it. So there’s no way to access the raw customer object in the example above. Bummer. Creating a NegotiatedResult This leaves mucking around with custom ActionResults. ActionResults are MVC’s standard way to return action method results – you basically specify that you would like to render your result in a specific format. Common ActionResults are ViewResults (ie. View(vn,model)), JsonResult, RedirectResult etc. They work and are fairly effective and work fairly well for testing as well as it’s the ‘standard’ interface to return results from actions. The problem with the this is mainly that you’re explicitly saying that you want a specific result output type. This works well for many things, but sometimes you do want your result to be negotiated. My first crack at this solution here is to create a simple ActionResult subclass that looks at the Accept header and based on that writes the output. I need to support JSON and XML content and HTML as well as text – so effectively 4 media types: application/json, text/xml, text/html and text/plain. Everything else is passed through as ContentResult – which effecively returns whatever .ToString() returns. Here’s what the NegotiatedResult usage looks like:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return new NegotiatedResult(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return new NegotiatedResult("Show", repo.GetCustomer(id)); } There are two overloads of this method – one that returns just the raw result value and a second version that accepts an optional view name. The second version returns the Razor view specified only if text/html is requested – otherwise the raw data is returned. This is useful in applications where you have an HTML front end that can also double as an API interface endpoint that’s using the same model data you send to the View. For the application I mentioned above this was another actual use-case we needed to address so this was a welcome side effect of creating a custom ActionResult. There’s also an extension method that directly attaches a Negotiated() method to the controller using the same syntax:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return this.Negotiated(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return this.Negotiated("Show",repo.GetCustomer(id)); } Using either of these mechanisms now allows you to return JSON, XML, HTML or plain text results depending on the Accept header sent. Send application/json you get just the Customer JSON data. Ditto for text/xml and XML data. Pass text/html for the Accept header and the "Show.cshtml" Razor view is rendered passing the result model data producing final HTML output. While this isn’t as clean as passing just POCO objects back as I had intended originally, this approach fits better with how MVC action methods are intended to be used and we get the bonus of being able to specify a View to render (optionally) for HTML. How does it work An ActionResult implementation is pretty straightforward. You inherit from ActionResult and implement the ExecuteResult method to send your output to the ASP.NET output stream. ActionFilters are an easy way to effectively do post processing on ASP.NET MVC controller actions just before the content is sent to the output stream, assuming your specific action result was used. Here’s the full code to the NegotiatedResult class (you can also check it out on GitHub):/// <summary> /// Returns a content negotiated result based on the Accept header. /// Minimal implementation that works with JSON and XML content, /// can also optionally return a view with HTML. /// </summary> /// <example> /// // model data only /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult(repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// // optional view for HTML /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public class NegotiatedResult : ActionResult { /// <summary> /// Data stored to be 'serialized'. Public /// so it's potentially accessible in filters. /// </summary> public object Data { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Optional name of the HTML view to be rendered /// for HTML responses /// </summary> public string ViewName { get; set; } public static bool FormatOutput { get; set; } static NegotiatedResult() { FormatOutput = HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data to serialize /// </summary> /// <param name="data">Data to serialize</param> public NegotiatedResult(object data) { Data = data; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data and an optional view for HTML views /// </summary> /// <param name="data"></param> /// <param name="viewName"></param> public NegotiatedResult(string viewName, object data) { Data = data; ViewName = viewName; } public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { if (context == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("context"); HttpResponseBase response = context.HttpContext.Response; HttpRequestBase request = context.HttpContext.Request; // Look for specific content types if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/html")) { response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/plain")) { response.ContentType = "text/plain"; response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("application/json")) { using (JsonTextWriter writer = new JsonTextWriter(response.Output)) { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings(); if (FormatOutput) settings.Formatting = Newtonsoft.Json.Formatting.Indented; JsonSerializer serializer = JsonSerializer.Create(settings); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/xml")) { response.ContentType = "text/xml"; if (Data != null) { using (var writer = new XmlTextWriter(response.OutputStream, new UTF8Encoding())) { if (FormatOutput) writer.Formatting = System.Xml.Formatting.Indented; XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(Data.GetType()); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } } else { // just write data as a plain string response.Write(Data); } } } /// <summary> /// Extends Controller with Negotiated() ActionResult that does /// basic content negotiation based on the Accept header. /// </summary> public static class NegotiatedResultExtensions { /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated( repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(data); } /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="viewName">Name of the View to when Accept is text/html</param> /// /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, string viewName, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(viewName, data); } } Output Generation – JSON and XML Generating output for XML and JSON is simple – you use the desired serializer and off you go. Using XmlSerializer and JSON.NET it’s just a handful of lines each to generate serialized output directly into the HTTP output stream. Please note this implementation uses JSON.NET for its JSON generation rather than the default JavaScriptSerializer that MVC uses which I feel is an additional bonus to implementing this custom action. I’d already been using a custom JsonNetResult class previously, but now this is just rolled into this custom ActionResult. Just keep in mind that JSON.NET outputs slightly different JSON for certain things like collections for example, so behavior may change. One addition to this implementation might be a flag to allow switching the JSON serializer. Html View Generation Html View generation actually turned out to be easier than anticipated. Initially I used my generic ASP.NET ViewRenderer Class that can render MVC views from any ASP.NET application. However it turns out since we are executing inside of an active MVC request there’s an easier way: We can simply create a custom ViewResult and populate its members and then execute it. The code in text/html handling code that renders the view is simply this:response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); which is a neat and easy way to render a Razor view assuming you have an active controller that’s ready for rendering. Sweet – dependency removed which makes this class self-contained without any external dependencies other than JSON.NET. Summary While this isn’t exactly a new topic, it’s the first time I’ve actually delved into this with MVC. I’ve been doing content negotiation with Web API and prior to that with my REST library. This is the first time it’s come up as an issue in MVC. But as I have worked through this I find that having a way to specify both HTML Views *and* JSON and XML results from a single controller certainly is appealing to me in many situations as we are in this particular application returning identical data models for each of these operations. Rendering content negotiated views is something that I hope ASP.NET vNext will provide natively in the combined MVC and WebAPI model, but we’ll see how this actually will be implemented. In the meantime having a custom ActionResult that provides this functionality is a workable and easily adaptable way of handling this going forward. Whatever ends up happening in ASP.NET vNext the abstraction can probably be changed to support the native features of the future. Anyway I hope some of you found this useful if not for direct integration then as insight into some of the rendering logic that MVC uses to get output into the HTTP stream… Related Resources Latest Version of NegotiatedResult.cs on GitHub Understanding Action Controllers Rendering ASP.NET Views To String© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 21, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 21, 2012Popular ReleasesWPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.8: Version: 2.5.0.8 (Milestone 8): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete WAF: Mark the class DataModel as serializable. InfoMan: Minor improvements. InfoMan: Add unit tests for all modules. Othe...LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.12.9.20: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionToolbars on text note dialog are more flexible now. You can select font face, size, color, and background of text you are typing. RAM now can be initialized to one of the following: random va...$linq - A Javascript LINQ library: Version 1.1: Version 1.1 Implemented batch, equiZip, zipLongest, prepend, pad, padWith, toJQuery, pipe, singleOrFallback, indexOf, indexOfElement, lastIndexOf, lastIndexOfElement, scan, prescan, and aggregate operators.Huo Chess: Huo Chess 0.95: The Huo Chess 0.95 version has an improved chessboard analysis function so as to be able to see which squares are the dangerous squares in the chessboard. This allows the computer to understand better when it is threatened. Two editions are included: Huo Chess 0.95 Console Application (57 KB in size) Huo Chess 0.95 Windows Application with GUI (119 KB in size) See http://harmoniaphilosophica.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/how-to-develop-a-chess-program-for-2jszrulazj6wq-23/ for the infamous How...SiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.1.2020.421): New features: Disable a specific part of SiteMap to keep the data without displaying them in the CRM application. It simply comments XML part of the sitemap (thanks to rboyers for this feature request) Right click an item and click on "Disable" to disable it Items disabled are greyed and a suffix "- disabled" is added Right click an item and click on "Enable" to enable it Refresh list of web resources in the web resources pickerAJAX Control Toolkit: September 2012 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - September 2012 Release Version 60919September 2012 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ...Lib.Web.Mvc & Yet another developer blog: Lib.Web.Mvc 6.1.0: Lib.Web.Mvc is a library which contains some helper classes for ASP.NET MVC such as strongly typed jqGrid helper, XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionResult, FileResult with range request support, custom attributes and more. Release contains: Lib.Web.Mvc.dll with xml documentation file Standalone documentation in chm file and change log Library source code Sample application for strongly typed jqGrid helper is available here. Sample application for XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionRe...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.1.2 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.1.2 Community EditionMain new featuresOur current release brings a lot of bugfixes, including the resolution of js/css editing cache issues, xlsx file handling from Office, expense claim demo workspace fixes and much more. Besides fixes 6.1.2 introduces workflow start options and other minor features like a reusable Reject client button for approval scenarios and resource editor enhancements. We have also fixed an issue with our install package to bring you a flawless installation...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.3: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 RC: PTVS 1.5RC Available! We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 RC. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, etc. support. The primary new feature for the 1.5 release is Django including Azure support! The http://www.djangoproject.com is a pop...Launchbar: Lanchbar 4.0.0: First public release.AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.4 -: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we try to package for those OSes. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) Changelog: New logo Improved airstrike! Reset nukes...Extended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.7.0: Want an easier way to install the Extended WPF Toolkit?The Extended WPF Toolkit is available on Nuget. What's new in the 1.7.0 Release?New controls Zoombox Pie New features / bug fixes PropertyGrid.ShowTitle property added to allow showing/hiding the PropertyGrid title. Modifications to the PropertyGrid.EditorDefinitions collection will now automatically be applied to the PropertyGrid. Modifications to the PropertyGrid.PropertyDefinitions collection will now be reflected automaticaly...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SqLite, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video Sencha Touch 2 example app using JayData: Netflix browser. What's new in JayData 1.2 For detailed release notes check the release notes. JayData core: all async operations now support promises JayDa...????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 4: 2012?9?17??? ?????，???????????????。 ?????Release 3??????，???????，???，??? ??????????????????SDK，????????。 ??，??????? That's all.VidCoder: 1.4.0 Beta: First Beta release! Catches up to HandBrake nightlies with SVN 4937. Added PGS (Blu-ray) subtitle support. Additional framerates available: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates available: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates available for audio. Same as Source Constant Framerate available. Added Apple TV 3 preset. Added new Bob deinterlacing option. Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will keep running and continue pro...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.02.01: Stabilization release fixed this issues: Links not worked on FF, Chrome and Safari Modified packaging with own manifest file for install and source package. Moved the user Image on the Login to the left side. Moved h2 font-size to 24px. Note : This release Comes w/o source package about we still work an a solution. Who Needs the Visual Studio source files please go to source and download it from there. Known 16 CSS issues that related to the skin.css. All others are DNN default o...Visual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.1: This fixes a bug in the 1.5 release where it would crash when no language packs were installed for VS2010.VFPX: Desktop Alerts 1.0.2: This update for the Desktop Alerts contains changes to behavior for setting custom sounds for alerts. I have removed ALERTWAV.TXT from the project, and also removed DA_DEFAULTSOUND from the VFPALERT.H file. The AlertManager class and Alert class both have a "default" cSound of ADDBS(JUSTPATH(_VFP.ServerName))+"alert.wav" --- so, as long as you distribute a sound file with the file name "alert.wav" along with the EXE, that file will be used. You can set your own sound file globally by setti...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.15: Changelog for 2.2.15 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for %originalfilepath% to get the source file full path. Used for custom commands only. 2. Added support for better parsing of Media Portal XML files to extract ShowName and Episode Name and download additional details from TVDB (like Season No, Episode No etc). 3. Added support for TVDB seriesID in metadata 4. Added support for eMail non blocking UI testNew ProjectsAppDevPoint: Cross-platform development tool for native applications without rewriting the business logic code but maintaining the speed and appearance of the OS.Author-it Plugin Hello World: A simple plug-in to help developers understand how to create a plug-in for Author-it. Build SharePoint Applications with Windows 8: Create a SharePoint Lists reader for Windows Store apps using C#/VB and XAML via WCFCatwitter - a WinRT example with Twitter and Catel: WinRT example of Catel in combination with Twitter.Community xPress MDS: Community xPress MDS is intended to serve as a reference Master Data Management implementation and learning tool for those interested in MDS & DQS.ControlDesktop: My LoveDITA to Author-it Plugin: This project is an Author-it plug-in that allows you to import several files types into Author-it, including DITA. EasyPrint: Straight forward class used to print text documents in Embarcadero's C++ Builder. Wraps the TPrinter object to allow a programmer to print pages of text.Ffmpeg converter: This is a tool that monitors folders and that converts then to the desired format. Feel free to contributeHCIProject: HCI tantárgy házi feladata, mozimusor alkalmazás.Keyboard capture of F1 and F2 (and others) in Compact Framework: How to capture F1 and F2 in Compact Framework on Windows Embedded Handheld 6.5.3MCSave: Automatically "reload" to a previous point your Minecraft game. Lose all your diamonds to that conveniently place pool of lava? Not anymore.Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Event Binder: Bind form events for CRM 2011 entities without drilling into a CRM form entity. An easier way to manage CRM jJavascript events.Mini Author-it Exporter: This is a minimal console application written in .NET/C# that exports a topic from Author-it, displays it, then closes. Mini Author-it Importer: A minimal importer for the Author-it system.MyMediaStore: Sistema para registro de mídias de acervo no computador. Versão atual: 1.0.2 - RTM. Nesta versão: Registro de vídeos. Visualização de vídeos. NAV Metro: Dynamics NAV 2013 Metro App framework.netcloud: dfdfPlanar Mechanism Kinematic Simulator (PMKS): PMKS returns quick and accurate results for the position, velocity, and acceleration of rigid bodies connected as planar mechanisms.Project Austin: Austin is a digital note-taking app for Windows 8.robintools: nothing is doingSalud Ocupacional: salud ocupacionalText-Based Calculator: Text-based calculator that accepts a string of input and performs mathematical operations on the numeric values represented by the data in the string. Tôi di h?i l?: This project only have Vietnamese version and follow function from I Paid a Bribe.comtuXXdo: This is extended from Orchard blog engine.Xiaoweiyu toolkit: toolsXiaoweiyu website: just a test

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• Spritebatch drawing sprite with jagged borders

  - by Mutoh

  Alright, I've been on the making of a sprite class and a sprite sheet manager, but have come across this problem. Pretty much, the project is acting like so; for example: Let's take this .png image, with a transparent background. Note how it has alpha-transparent pixels around it in the lineart. Now, in the latter link's image, in the left (with CornflowerBlue background) it is shown the image drawn in another project (let's call it "Project1") with a simpler sprite class - there, it works. The right (with Purple background for differentiating) shows it drawn with a different class in "Project2" - where the problem manifests itself. This is the Sprite class of Project1: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; namespace WindowsGame2 { class Sprite { Vector2 pos = new Vector2(0, 0); Texture2D image; Rectangle size; float scale = 1.0f; // --- public float X { get { return pos.X; } set { pos.X = value; } } public float Y { get { return pos.Y; } set { pos.Y = value; } } public float Width { get { return size.Width; } } public float Height { get { return size.Height; } } public float Scale { get { return scale; } set { if (value < 0) value = 0; scale = value; if (image != null) { size.Width = (int)(image.Width * scale); size.Height = (int)(image.Height * scale); } } } // --- public void Load(ContentManager Man, string filename) { image = Man.Load<Texture2D>(filename); size = new Rectangle( 0, 0, (int)(image.Width * scale), (int)(image.Height * scale) ); } public void Become(Texture2D frame) { image = frame; size = new Rectangle( 0, 0, (int)(image.Width * scale), (int)(image.Height * scale) ); } public void Draw(SpriteBatch Desenhista) { // Desenhista.Draw(image, pos, Color.White); Desenhista.Draw( image, pos, new Rectangle( 0, 0, image.Width, image.Height ), Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, scale, SpriteEffects.None, 0 ); } } } And this is the code in Project2, a rewritten, pretty much, version of the previous class. In this one I added sprite sheet managing and, in particular, removed Load and Become, to allow for static resources and only actual Sprites to be instantiated. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; namespace Mobby_s_Adventure { // Actually, I might desconsider this, and instead use static AnimationLocation[] and instanciated ID and Frame; // For determining the starting frame of an animation in a sheet and being able to iterate through // the Rectangles vector of the Sheet; class AnimationLocation { public int Location; public int FrameCount; // --- public AnimationLocation(int StartingRow, int StartingColumn, int SheetWidth, int NumberOfFrames) { Location = (StartingRow * SheetWidth) + StartingColumn; FrameCount = NumberOfFrames; } public AnimationLocation(int PositionInSheet, int NumberOfFrames) { Location = PositionInSheet; FrameCount = NumberOfFrames; } public static int CalculatePosition(int StartingRow, int StartingColumn, SheetManager Sheet) { return ((StartingRow * Sheet.Width) + StartingColumn); } } class Sprite { // The general stuff; protected SheetManager Sheet; protected Vector2 Position; public Vector2 Axis; protected Color _Tint; public float Angle; public float Scale; protected SpriteEffects _Effect; // --- // protected AnimationManager Animation; // For managing the animations; protected AnimationLocation[] Animation; public int AnimationID; protected int Frame; // --- // Properties for easy accessing of the position of the sprite; public float X { get { return Position.X; } set { Position.X = Axis.X + value; } } public float Y { get { return Position.Y; } set { Position.Y = Axis.Y + value; } } // --- // Properties for knowing the size of the sprite's frames public float Width { get { return Sheet.FrameWidth * Scale; } } public float Height { get { return Sheet.FrameHeight * Scale; } } // --- // Properties for more stuff; public Color Tint { set { _Tint = value; } } public SpriteEffects Effect { set { _Effect = value; } } public int FrameID { get { return Frame; } set { if (value >= (Animation[AnimationID].FrameCount)) value = 0; Frame = value; } } // --- // The only things that will be constantly modified will be AnimationID and FrameID, anything else only // occasionally; public Sprite(SheetManager SpriteSheet, AnimationLocation[] Animations, Vector2 Location, Nullable<Vector2> Origin = null) { // Assign the sprite's sprite sheet; // (Passed by reference! To allow STATIC sheets!) Sheet = SpriteSheet; // Define the animations that the sprite has available; // (Passed by reference! To allow STATIC animation boundaries!) Animation = Animations; // Defaulting some numerical values; Angle = 0.0f; Scale = 1.0f; _Tint = Color.White; _Effect = SpriteEffects.None; // If the user wants a default Axis, it is set in the middle of the frame; if (Origin != null) Axis = Origin.Value; else Axis = new Vector2( Sheet.FrameWidth / 2, Sheet.FrameHeight / 2 ); // Now that we have the axis, we can set the position with no worries; X = Location.X; Y = Location.Y; } // Simply put, draw the sprite with all its characteristics; public void Draw(SpriteBatch Drafter) { Drafter.Draw( Sheet.Texture, Position, Sheet.Rectangles[Animation[AnimationID].Location + FrameID], // Find the rectangle which frames the wanted image; _Tint, Angle, Axis, Scale, _Effect, 0.0f ); } } } And, in any case, this is the SheetManager class found in the previous code: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; namespace Mobby_s_Adventure { class SheetManager { protected Texture2D SpriteSheet; // For storing the sprite sheet; // Number of rows and frames in each row in the SpriteSheet; protected int NumberOfRows; protected int NumberOfColumns; // Size of a single frame; protected int _FrameWidth; protected int _FrameHeight; public Rectangle[] Rectangles; // For storing each frame; // --- public int Width { get { return NumberOfColumns; } } public int Height { get { return NumberOfRows; } } // --- public int FrameWidth { get { return _FrameWidth; } } public int FrameHeight { get { return _FrameHeight; } } // --- public Texture2D Texture { get { return SpriteSheet; } } // --- public SheetManager (Texture2D Texture, int Rows, int FramesInEachRow) { // Normal assigning SpriteSheet = Texture; NumberOfRows = Rows; NumberOfColumns = FramesInEachRow; _FrameHeight = Texture.Height / NumberOfRows; _FrameWidth = Texture.Width / NumberOfColumns; // Framing everything Rectangles = new Rectangle[NumberOfRows * NumberOfColumns]; int ID = 0; for (int i = 0; i < NumberOfRows; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < NumberOfColumns; j++) { Rectangles[ID] = new Rectangle ( _FrameWidth * j, _FrameHeight * i, _FrameWidth, _FrameHeight ); ID++; } } } public SheetManager (Texture2D Texture, int NumberOfFrames): this(Texture, 1, NumberOfFrames) { } } } For even more comprehending, if needed, here is how the main code looks like (it's just messing with the class' capacities, nothing actually; the result is a disembodied feet walking in place animation on the top-left of the screen and a static axe nearby): using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; using System.Threading; namespace Mobby_s_Adventure { /// <summary> /// This is the main type for your game /// </summary> public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; static List<Sprite> ToDraw; static Texture2D AxeSheet; static Texture2D FeetSheet; static SheetManager Axe; static Sprite Jojora; static AnimationLocation[] Hack = new AnimationLocation[1]; static SheetManager Feet; static Sprite Mutoh; static AnimationLocation[] FeetAnimations = new AnimationLocation[2]; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; this.TargetElapsedTime = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(100); this.IsFixedTimeStep = true; } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. /// This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic /// related content. Calling base.Initialize will enumerate through any components /// and initialize them as well. /// </summary> protected override void Initialize() { // TODO: Add your initialization logic here base.Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load /// all of your content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); // Loading logic ToDraw = new List<Sprite>(); AxeSheet = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Sheet"); FeetSheet = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Feet Sheet"); Axe = new SheetManager(AxeSheet, 1); Hack[0] = new AnimationLocation(0, 1); Jojora = new Sprite(Axe, Hack, new Vector2(100, 100), new Vector2(5, 55)); Jojora.AnimationID = 0; Jojora.FrameID = 0; Feet = new SheetManager(FeetSheet, 8); FeetAnimations[0] = new AnimationLocation(1, 7); FeetAnimations[1] = new AnimationLocation(0, 1); Mutoh = new Sprite(Feet, FeetAnimations, new Vector2(0, 0)); Mutoh.AnimationID = 0; Mutoh.FrameID = 0; } /// <summary> /// UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload /// all content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // TODO: Unload any non ContentManager content here } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to run logic such as updating the world, /// checking for collisions, gathering input, and playing audio. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Allows the game to exit if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) this.Exit(); // Update logic Mutoh.FrameID++; ToDraw.Add(Mutoh); ToDraw.Add(Jojora); base.Update(gameTime); } /// <summary> /// This is called when the game should draw itself. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Purple); // Drawing logic spriteBatch.Begin(); foreach (Sprite Element in ToDraw) { Element.Draw(spriteBatch); } spriteBatch.Draw(Content.Load<Texture2D>("Sheet"), new Rectangle(50, 50, 55, 60), Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } } } Please help me find out what I'm overlooking! One thing that I have noticed and could aid is that, if inserted the equivalent of this code spriteBatch.Draw( Content.Load<Texture2D>("Image Location"), new Rectangle(X, Y, images width, height), Color.White ); in Project2's Draw(GameTime) of the main loop, it works. EDIT Ok, even if the matter remains unsolved, I have made some more progress! As you see, I managed to get the two kinds of rendering in the same project (the aforementioned Project2, with the more complex Sprite class). This was achieved by adding the following code to Draw(GameTime): protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Purple); // Drawing logic spriteBatch.Begin(); foreach (Sprite Element in ToDraw) { Element.Draw(spriteBatch); } // Starting here spriteBatch.Draw( Axe.Texture, new Vector2(65, 100), new Rectangle ( 0, 0, Axe.FrameWidth, Axe.FrameHeight ), Color.White, 0.0f, new Vector2(0, 0), 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0.0f ); // Ending here spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } (Supposing that Axe is the SheetManager containing the texture, sorry if the "jargons" of my code confuse you :s) Thus, I have noticed that the problem is within the Sprite class. But I only get more clueless, because even after modifying its Draw function to this: public void Draw(SpriteBatch Drafter) { /*Drafter.Draw( Sheet.Texture, Position, Sheet.Rectangles[Animation[AnimationID].Location + FrameID], // Find the rectangle which frames the wanted image; _Tint, Angle, Axis, Scale, _Effect, 0.0f );*/ Drafter.Draw( Sheet.Texture, Position, new Rectangle( 0, 0, Sheet.FrameWidth, Sheet.FrameHeight ), Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, Scale, SpriteEffects.None, 0 ); } to make it as simple as the patch of code that works, it still draws the sprite jaggedly!

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• Connecting SceneBuilder edited FXML to Java code

  - by daniel

  Recently I had to answer several questions regarding how to connect an UI built with the JavaFX SceneBuilder 1.0 Developer Preview to Java Code. So I figured out that a short overview might be helpful. But first, let me state the obvious. What is FXML? To make it short, FXML is an XML based declaration format for JavaFX. JavaFX provides an FXML loader which will parse FXML files and from that construct a graph of Java object. It may sound complex when stated like that but it is actually quite simple. Here is an example of FXML file, which instantiate a StackPane and puts a Button inside it: -- <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?import java.lang.*?> <?import java.util.*?> <?import javafx.scene.control.*?> <?import javafx.scene.layout.*?> <?import javafx.scene.paint.*?> <StackPane prefHeight="150.0" prefWidth="200.0" xmlns:fx="http://javafx.com/fxml"> <children> <Button mnemonicParsing="false" text="Button" /> </children> </StackPane> ... and here is the code I would have had to write if I had chosen to do the same thing programatically: import javafx.scene.control.*; import javafx.scene.layout.*; ... final Button button = new Button("Button"); button.setMnemonicParsing(false); final StackPane stackPane = new StackPane(); stackPane.setPrefWidth(200.0); stackPane.setPrefHeight(150.0); stacPane.getChildren().add(button); As you can see - FXML is rather simple to understand - as it is quite close to the JavaFX API. So OK FXML is simple, but why would I use it?Well, there are several answers to that - but my own favorite is: because you can make it with SceneBuilder. What is SceneBuilder? In short SceneBuilder is a layout tool that will let you graphically build JavaFX user interfaces by dragging and dropping JavaFX components from a library, and save it as an FXML file. SceneBuilder can also be used to load and modify JavaFX scenegraphs declared in FXML. Here is how I made the small FXML file above: Start the JavaFX SceneBuilder 1.0 Developer Preview In the Library on the left hand side, click on 'StackPane' and drag it on the content view (the white rectangle) In the Library, select a Button and drag it onto the StackPane on the content view. In the Hierarchy Panel on the left hand side - select the StackPane component, then invoke 'Edit > Trim To Selected' from the menubar That's it - you can now save, and you will obtain the small FXML file shown above. Of course this is only a trivial sample, made for the sake of the example - and SceneBuilder will let you create much more complex UIs. So, I have now an FXML file. But what do I do with it? How do I include it in my program? How do I write my main class? Loading an FXML file with JavaFX Well, that's the easy part - because the piece of code you need to write never changes. You can download and look at the SceneBuilder samples if you need to get convinced, but here is the short version: Create a Java class (let's call it 'Main.java') which extends javafx.application.Application In the same directory copy/save the FXML file you just created using SceneBuilder. Let's name it "simple.fxml" Now here is the Java code for the Main class, which simply loads the FXML file and puts it as root in a stage's scene. /* * Copyright (c) 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. */ package simple; import java.util.logging.Level; import java.util.logging.Logger; import javafx.application.Application; import javafx.fxml.FXMLLoader; import javafx.scene.Scene; import javafx.scene.layout.StackPane; import javafx.stage.Stage; public class Main extends Application { /** * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String[] args) { Application.launch(Main.class, (java.lang.String[])null); } @Override public void start(Stage primaryStage) { try { StackPane page = (StackPane) FXMLLoader.load(Main.class.getResource("simple.fxml")); Scene scene = new Scene(page); primaryStage.setScene(scene); primaryStage.setTitle("FXML is Simple"); primaryStage.show(); } catch (Exception ex) { Logger.getLogger(Main.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } } } Great! Now I only have to use my favorite IDE to compile the class and run it. But... wait... what does it do? Well nothing. It just displays a button in the middle of a window. There's no logic attached to it. So how do we do that? How can I connect this button to my application logic? Here is how: Connection to code First let's define our application logic. Since this post is only intended to give a very brief overview - let's keep things simple. Let's say that the only thing I want to do is print a message on System.out when the user clicks on my button. To do that, I'll need to register an action handler with my button. And to do that, I'll need to somehow get a handle on my button. I'll need some kind of controller logic that will get my button and add my action handler to it. So how do I get a handle to my button and pass it to my controller? Once again - this is easy: I just need to write a controller class for my FXML. With each FXML file, it is possible to associate a controller class defined for that FXML. That controller class will make the link between the UI (the objects defined in the FXML) and the application logic. To each object defined in FXML we can associate an fx:id. The value of the id must be unique within the scope of the FXML, and is the name of an instance variable inside the controller class, in which the object will be injected. Since I want to have access to my button, I will need to add an fx:id to my button in FXML, and declare an @FXML variable in my controller class with the same name. In other words - I will need to add fx:id="myButton" to my button in FXML: -- <Button fx:id="myButton" mnemonicParsing="false" text="Button" /> and declare @FXML private Button myButton in my controller class @FXML private Button myButton; // value will be injected by the FXMLLoader Let's see how to do this. Add an fx:id to the Button object Load "simple.fxml" in SceneBuilder - if not already done In the hierarchy panel (bottom left), or directly on the content view, select the Button object. Open the Properties sections of the inspector (right panel) for the button object At the top of the section, you will see a text field labelled fx:id. Enter myButton in that field and validate. Associate a controller class with the FXML file Still in SceneBuilder, select the top root object (in our case, that's the StackPane), and open the Code section of the inspector (right hand side) At the top of the section you should see a text field labelled Controller Class. In the field, type simple.SimpleController. This is the name of the class we're going to create manually. If you save at this point, the FXML will look like this: -- <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?import java.lang.*?> <?import java.util.*?> <?import javafx.scene.control.*?> <?import javafx.scene.layout.*?> <?import javafx.scene.paint.*?> <StackPane prefHeight="150.0" prefWidth="200.0" xmlns:fx="http://javafx.com/fxml" fx:controller="simple.SimpleController"> <children> <Button fx:id="myButton" mnemonicParsing="false" text="Button" /> </children> </StackPane> As you can see, the name of the controller class has been added to the root object: fx:controller="simple.SimpleController" Coding the controller class In your favorite IDE, create an empty SimpleController.java class. Now what does a controller class looks like? What should we put inside? Well - SceneBuilder will help you there: it will show you an example of controller skeleton tailored for your FXML. In the menu bar, invoke View > Show Sample Controller Skeleton. A popup appears, displaying a suggestion for the controller skeleton: copy the code displayed there, and paste it into your SimpleController.java: /** * Sample Skeleton for "simple.fxml" Controller Class * Use copy/paste to copy paste this code into your favorite IDE **/ package simple; import java.net.URL; import java.util.ResourceBundle; import javafx.fxml.FXML; import javafx.fxml.Initializable; import javafx.scene.control.Button; public class SimpleController implements Initializable { @FXML // fx:id="myButton" private Button myButton; // Value injected by FXMLLoader @Override // This method is called by the FXMLLoader when initialization is complete public void initialize(URL fxmlFileLocation, ResourceBundle resources) { assert myButton != null : "fx:id=\"myButton\" was not injected: check your FXML file 'simple.fxml'."; // initialize your logic here: all @FXML variables will have been injected } } Note that the code displayed by SceneBuilder is there only for educational purpose: SceneBuilder does not create and does not modify Java files. This is simply a hint of what you can use, given the fx:id present in your FXML file. You are free to copy all or part of the displayed code and paste it into your own Java class. Now at this point, there only remains to add our logic to the controller class. Quite easy: in the initialize method, I will register an action handler with my button: () { @Override public void handle(ActionEvent event) { System.out.println("That was easy, wasn't it?"); } }); ... -- ... // initialize your logic here: all @FXML variables will have been injected myButton.setOnAction(new EventHandler<ActionEvent>() { @Override public void handle(ActionEvent event) { System.out.println("That was easy, wasn't it?"); } }); ... That's it - if you now compile everything in your IDE, and run your application, clicking on the button should print a message on the console! Summary What happens is that in Main.java, the FXMLLoader will load simple.fxml from the jar/classpath, as specified by 'FXMLLoader.load(Main.class.getResource("simple.fxml"))'. When loading simple.fxml, the loader will find the name of the controller class, as specified by 'fx:controller="simple.SimpleController"' in the FXML. Upon finding the name of the controller class, the loader will create an instance of that class, in which it will try to inject all the objects that have an fx:id in the FXML. Thus, after having created '<Button fx:id="myButton" ... />', the FXMLLoader will inject the button instance into the '@FXML private Button myButton;' instance variable found on the controller instance. This is because The instance variable has an @FXML annotation, The name of the variable exactly matches the value of the fx:id Finally, when the whole FXML has been loaded, the FXMLLoader will call the controller's initialize method, and our code that registers an action handler with the button will be executed. For a complete example, take a look at the HelloWorld SceneBuilder sample. Also make sure to follow the SceneBuilder Get Started guide, which will guide you through a much more complete example. Of course, there are more elegant ways to set up an Event Handler using FXML and SceneBuilder. There are also many different ways to work with the FXMLLoader. But since it's starting to be very late here, I think it will have to wait for another post. I hope you have enjoyed the tour! --daniel

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• From HttpRuntime.Cache to Windows Azure Caching (Preview)

  - by Jeff

  I don’t know about you, but the announcement of Windows Azure Caching (Preview) (yes, the parentheses are apparently part of the interim name) made me a lot more excited about using Azure. Why? Because one of the great performance tricks of any Web app is to cache frequently used data in memory, so it doesn’t have to hit the database, a service, or whatever. When you run your Web app on one box, HttpRuntime.Cache is a sweet and stupid-simple solution. Somewhere in the data fetching pieces of your app, you can see if an object is available in cache, and return that instead of hitting the data store. I did this quite a bit in POP Forums, and it dramatically cuts down on the database chatter. The problem is that it falls apart if you run the app on many servers, in a Web farm, where one server may initiate a change to that data, and the others will have no knowledge of the change, making it stale. Of course, if you have the infrastructure to do so, you can use something like memcached or AppFabric to do a distributed cache, and achieve the caching flavor you desire. You could do the same thing in Azure before, but it would cost more because you’d need to pay for another role or VM or something to host the cache. Now, you can use a portion of the memory from each instance of a Web role to act as that cache, with no additional cost. That’s huge. So if you’re using a percentage of memory that comes out to 100 MB, and you have three instances running, that’s 300 MB available for caching. For the uninitiated, a Web role in Azure is essentially a VM that runs a Web app (worker roles are the same idea, only without the IIS part). You can spin up many instances of the role, and traffic is load balanced to the various instances. It’s like adding or removing servers to a Web farm all willy-nilly and at your discretion, and it’s what the cloud is all about. I’d say it’s my favorite thing about Windows Azure. The slightly annoying thing about developing for a Web role in Azure is that the local emulator that’s launched by Visual Studio is a little on the slow side. If you’re used to using the built-in Web server, you’re used to building and then alt-tabbing to your browser and refreshing a page. If you’re just changing an MVC view, you’re not even doing the building part. Spinning up the simulated Azure environment is too slow for this, but ideally you want to code your app to use this fantastic distributed cache mechanism. So first off, here’s the link to the page showing how to code using the caching feature. If you’re used to using HttpRuntime.Cache, this should be pretty familiar to you. Let’s say that you want to use the Azure cache preview when you’re running in Azure, but HttpRuntime.Cache if you’re running local, or in a regular IIS server environment. Through the magic of dependency injection, we can get there pretty quickly. First, design an interface to handle the cache insertion, fetching and removal. Mine looks like this: public interface ICacheProvider {     void Add(string key, object item, int duration);     T Get<T>(string key) where T : class;     void Remove(string key); } Now we’ll create two implementations of this interface… one for Azure cache, one for HttpRuntime: public class AzureCacheProvider : ICacheProvider {     public AzureCacheProvider()     {         _cache = new DataCache("default"); // in Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching, see how-to      }         private readonly DataCache _cache;     public void Add(string key, object item, int duration)     {         _cache.Add(key, item, new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, duration));     }     public T Get<T>(string key) where T : class     {         return _cache.Get(key) as T;     }     public void Remove(string key)     {         _cache.Remove(key);     } } public class LocalCacheProvider : ICacheProvider {     public LocalCacheProvider()     {         _cache = HttpRuntime.Cache;     }     private readonly System.Web.Caching.Cache _cache;     public void Add(string key, object item, int duration)     {         _cache.Insert(key, item, null, DateTime.UtcNow.AddMilliseconds(duration), System.Web.Caching.Cache.NoSlidingExpiration);     }     public T Get<T>(string key) where T : class     {         return _cache[key] as T;     }     public void Remove(string key)     {         _cache.Remove(key);     } } Feel free to expand these to use whatever cache features you want. I’m not going to go over dependency injection here, but I assume that if you’re using ASP.NET MVC, you’re using it. Somewhere in your app, you set up the DI container that resolves interfaces to concrete implementations (Ninject call is a “kernel” instead of a container). For this example, I’ll show you how StructureMap does it. It uses a convention based scheme, where if you need to get an instance of IFoo, it looks for a class named Foo. You can also do this mapping explicitly. The initialization of the container looks something like this: ObjectFactory.Initialize(x =>             {                 x.Scan(scan =>                         {                             scan.AssembliesFromApplicationBaseDirectory();                             scan.WithDefaultConventions();                         });                 if (Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime.RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable)                     x.For<ICacheProvider>().Use<AzureCacheProvider>();                 else                     x.For<ICacheProvider>().Use<LocalCacheProvider>();             }); If you use Ninject or Windsor or something else, that’s OK. Conceptually they’re all about the same. The important part is the conditional statement that checks to see if the app is running in Azure. If it is, it maps ICacheProvider to AzureCacheProvider, otherwise it maps to LocalCacheProvider. Now when a request comes into your MVC app, and the chain of dependency resolution occurs, you can see to it that the right caching code is called. A typical design may have a call stack that goes: Controller –> BusinessLogicClass –> Repository. Let’s say your repository class looks like this: public class MyRepo : IMyRepo {     public MyRepo(ICacheProvider cacheProvider)     {         _context = new MyDataContext();         _cache = cacheProvider;     }     private readonly MyDataContext _context;     private readonly ICacheProvider _cache;     public SomeType Get(int someTypeID)     {         var key = "somename-" + someTypeID;         var cachedObject = _cache.Get<SomeType>(key);         if (cachedObject != null)         {             _context.SomeTypes.Attach(cachedObject);             return cachedObject;         }         var someType = _context.SomeTypes.SingleOrDefault(p => p.SomeTypeID == someTypeID);         _cache.Add(key, someType, 60000);         return someType;     } ... // more stuff to update, delete or whatever, being sure to remove // from cache when you do so  When the DI container gets an instance of the repo, it passes an instance of ICacheProvider to the constructor, which in this case will be whatever implementation was specified when the container was initialized. The Get method first tries to hit the cache, and of course doesn’t care what the underlying implementation is, Azure, HttpRuntime, or otherwise. If it finds the object, it returns it right then. If not, it hits the database (this example is using Entity Framework), and inserts the object into the cache before returning it. The important thing not pictured here is that other methods in the repo class will construct the key for the cached object, in this case “somename-“ plus the ID of the object, and then remove it from cache, in any method that alters or deletes the object. That way, no matter what instance of the role is processing the request, it won’t find the object if it has been made stale, that is, updated or outright deleted, forcing it to attempt to hit the database. So is this good technique? Well, sort of. It depends on how you use it, and what your testing looks like around it. Because of differences in behavior and execution of the two caching providers, for example, you could see some strange errors. For example, I immediately got an error indicating there was no parameterless constructor for an MVC controller, because the DI resolver failed to create instances for the dependencies it had. In reality, the NuGet packaged DI resolver for StructureMap was eating an exception thrown by the Azure components that said my configuration, outlined in that how-to article, was wrong. That error wouldn’t occur when using the HttpRuntime. That’s something a lot of people debate about using different components like that, and how you configure them. I kinda hate XML config files, and like the idea of the code-based approach above, but you should be darn sure that your unit and integration testing can account for the differences.

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• .NET WebAPI Serialization k_BackingField Nastiness

  - by Micah

  When i serialize the following: [Serializable] public class Error { public string Status { get; set; } public string Message { get; set; } public string ErrorReferenceCode { get; set; } public List<FriendlyError> Errors { get; set; } } I get this disgusting mess: <ErrorRootOfstring xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/Printmee.Api"> <_x003C_Errors_x003E_k__BackingField> An exception has occurred. Please contact printmee support </_x003C_Errors_x003E_k__BackingField> <_x003C_LookupCode_x003E_k__BackingField>988232ec-6bc9-48f3-8116-7ff7c71302dd</_x003C_LookupCode_x003E_k__BackingField> </ErrorRootOfstring> What gives? How can i make this pretty? JSON responses also contain the k_BackingField

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• VBA WinHTTPRequest and submitting forms

  - by Hazerider

  Hi. I spent all day yesterday trying to figure out how to submit a form using WinHTTPRequest. I can do it pretty easily with an InternetExplorer object, but the problem is that I need to save a PDF file that gets returned, and I am not sure how to do this with the IE object. Here is the relevant HTML code snippet: <div class="loginHome-left"> <fieldset> <h3>Log in Using</h3> <form> <label for="standardLogin" accesskey="s"> <input name="useLogin" id="standardLogin" value="standard" type="radio" checked="true">Standard Login</label> &nbsp; <label for="rsaSecurID" accesskey="r"> <input name="useLogin" value="rsaSecur" type="radio" id="rsaSecurID" onclick="redirectLogin('ct_logon_securid');return false;">RSA SecurID</label> &nbsp; <label for="employeeNTXP" accesskey="e"> <input name="useLogin" id="employeeNTXP" value="employee" type="radio" onclick="redirectLogin('ct_logon_external_nt');return false; "> Employee Windows Login<br></label> </form> <br> <div class="error">Error: ...</div><br> <form onSubmit="if(validate(this)) {formSubmit();} return false;" name="passwdForm" method="post" action="/UAB/ct_logon"> <input value="custom" name="pageId" type="hidden"> <input value="custom" name="auth_mode" type="hidden"> <input value="/UAB/ct_logon" name="ct_orig_uri" type="hidden"> <INPUT VALUE="" NAME="orig_url" TYPE="hidden"> <input value="" name="lpSp" type="hidden"> <label for="user"> <strong>Username</strong> </label> <input autocomplete="off" name="user" type="text" value="" class="txtFld" onkeypress="return handleEnter(this, event);"> <br> <label for="EnterPassword"> <strong>Password</strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;(<a tabindex="-1" href="/UAB/BCResetWithSecrets">Forgot Your Password?</a>) </label> <input autocomplete="off" name="password" type="password" class="txtFld" onkeypress="return handleEnter(this, event);"> <INPUT id="rememberLogin" name="lpCookie" type="checkbox"> <label for="rememberLogin">Remember My Login Information</label><br> </form> <div class="right"> <br> <input type="image" src="/BC_S/images/bclogin/btn_login.gif" name="" value="Submit" onClick="if(validate(document.forms['passwdForm'])){formSubmit();}return false;"> </div> <div class="clearfix"></div> </fieldset> </div> In order to log in through InternetExplorer, I do the following: Sub TestLogin() Dim ie As InternetExplorer, doc As HTMLDocument, form As HTMLFormElement, inp As Variant Set ie = New InternetExplorer ie.Visible = True ie.navigate "https://URL of the login page" Do Until ie.readyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE Loop Set doc = ie.document For Each form In doc.forms If InStr(form.innerText, "Password") <> 0 Then form.elements("user").Value = "my_name" form.elements("password").Value = "my_password" Exit For Else End If Next 'This is the unnamed input with an image that is used to submit the form' doc.all(78).Click ie.navigate "https://url of the PDF" Do Until ie.readyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE Loop Dim filename As String, filenum As Integer filename = "somefile.pdf" filenum = FreeFile Open filename For Binary Access Write As #filenum Write #filenum, doc.DocumentElement.innerText Close #filenum ie.Quit Debug.Print Set ie = Nothing End Sub What I really would like to do is something along the lines of the following: Sub TestLogin3() Dim whr As New WinHttpRequest, postData As String whr.Open "POST", "https://live.barcap.com/UAB/ct_logon", False whr.setRequestHeader "User-Agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)" whr.setRequestHeader "Connection", "Keep-Alive" whr.Send whr.WaitForResponse postData = "user=paschom1&password=change01" 'Or the following?' postData = "user=paschom1&password=change01&orig_url=&pageId=custom&auth_mode=custom&ct_orig_uri=/BC/dispatcher&lpSp=&lpCookie=off" whr.Send postData whr.WaitForResponse Debug.Print whr.responseText End Sub It just refuses to work though. Not sure if I need to use more setRequestHeader with Content-Form or something similar, and if I do, not sure what exactly I am supposed to pass it. If anyone has any advice regarding this, it would be hugely appreciated. I could probably use a perl module to do it, but I would rather keep it all in VBA if possible. Thanks, Marc.

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