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• Ruby, Python, or PHP?

  - by Gabe

  And so we return to the age old question - but with a few twists. This morning, I searched and read up on which web development language to learn first. I'm thinking Ruby, Python, or perhaps PHP. But I have a few questions before deciding. Background: I'm a year into C++ (through school), but want to get into web development. I have all summer to commit to one language, learn it, do some projects, get up some websites, and so on. Now my questions (and these are assuming that I should choose between Ruby, Python, and PHP - if I should choose a different language, let me know.): I hope to use whichever language I learn for websites/web apps. Some of the threads on stackoverflow suggested Python was the best overall language, but others were unanimous that Ruby was best specifically for web development. For a first language suited towards web development, which language do you recommend, and why? This might tie into the first question, but which language looks most promising for future work, future personal projects, and basically the future in general? I'm just a freshman in college. Ideally, the language I choose would be on the rise, community-wise and opportunity-wise. (One reason I'm leaning towards Ruby is that it seems a lot of the newer tech startups/successes are using it.)

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• fastest public web app framework for quick DB apps?

  - by Steve Eisner

  I'd like to pick up a new tech for my toolbox - something for rapid prototyping of web apps. Brief requirements: public access (not hosted on my machine) - like Google's appengine, etc no tricky configuration necessary to build a simple web app host DB access (small storage provided) including some kind of SQLish query language easy front end HTML templating ability to access as a JSON service C# or Java,PHP or Python - or a fun new language to learn is OK free! An example app, very simple: render an AJAXy editable (add/delete/edit/drag) list of rich-data list items via some template language, so I can quickly mock up a UI for a client. ie. I can do most of the work client-side, but need convenient back end to handle the permanent storage. (In fact I suppose it doesn't even need HTML templating if I can directly access a DB via AJAX calls.) I realize this is a bit vague but am wondering if anyone has recommendations. A Rails host might be best for this (but probably not free) or maybe App Engine, or some other choice I'm not aware of? I've been doing everything with heavyweight servers (ASP.NET etc) for so long that I'm just not up on the latest... Thanks - I'll follow up on comments if this isn't clear enough :)

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• Is there a way to sync (two way) tables betwen a mysql server and a local MS Access?

  - by Kailen

  Help me figure out a solution to a (not so unique) problem. My research group has gps devices attached to migratory animals. Every once in a while, a research tech will be within range of an animal and will get the chance to download all the logged points. Each individual spits out a single dbf and new locations are just appended to the end (so the file is just cumulative). These data need to be shared among a research group. Everyone else (besides me) wants to use access, so they can make small edits and prefer that interface. They do not like using MySQL. The solution I came up with is: a) The person who downloads the file goes to a web page, enters animal ID into a form, chooses .dbf file and uploads to a mysql database on the server (I still have to write php code to read the dbf and write sql insert statements from it). b) Everyone syncs from their local access database to the server. (This is natively possible from access but very clunky). Is there a tool (preferably open source), that can compare a access table to mysql table and sync the two (both ways)? Alternatively, does anyone have a more elegant solution? The ultimate goal is to allow everyone to have access to the most current data on their computers using their preferred database app.

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• Why do I get 'Connection refused - connect(2)' for some models?

  - by Will

  I have a rails application running for the past 90 days that suddenly stopped working. Debugging the problem I found that I can read from the DB but not write to it. At least for certain models. There is one model that I can save whereas all others return Connection refused - connect(2) when I attempt to save them. They all used to work fine last month. I have no idea how to determine what the problem may be. Unfortunately I do not have access to the actual server remotely right now so I am limited in my debugging ability. I was able to get some non-tech people to run simple commands though that may help identify my problem. I will also be getting access tomorrow at some point. 1 Check from the console ./script/console >> a = Post.last.clone => #<Post id: nil, title: "test"... >> a.ex_id = 7 >> a.save Connection refused - connect(2) ... ... >> b = Story.last.console => #<Story id: nil, title: "test"... >> a.ex_id = 7 >> a.save => true I am not sure why this works for story and not post. This is consistent over many tests. 2 Check from mysql ./script/dbconsole -p mysql> INSERT INTO Posts (`title`,`body`, `ex_id`) SELECT `title`, `body`, 7 FROM Posts WHERE ID = 1; Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec) Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0 And as you can see I am able to write to the table with the same credientials that Rails uses? Does anyone know why I get connection refused in the console?

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• Specific path to java class file when embedded into HTML; Help urgent

  - by Jeevanism

  This is a resonant post to one of my other query due to an error with Java applet embedded into CMS pages. well, I tell issue:- Problem:- I have a website using Concrete 5 CMS, in which I have a page that I have embedded a Java applet class. This applet should show the system information which this applet is working fine in simple single HTML pages. now whenever I access my plugin Test page which created in Concrete 5 CMS (this page I embedded this java applet), it shows a Java error. The error is says incompatible Magic Number. Observation:- After a lot of searching through various tech forums, I finally found that, the issue is happened because the browser cannot load Java class file. The class file path location is wrong. Here below I post the log of server access when I test in my local machine. 127.0.0.1 - - [20/Dec/2012:12:59:28 +0800] "GET /linuxhouse/index.php/techlab/java/testvm.class HTTP/1.1" 200 1896 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (Linux 2.6.37.6-0.9-desktop) Java/1.6.0_29" 127.0.0.1 - - [20/Dec/2012:12:59:29 +0800] "GET /linuxhouse/index.php/techlab/java/testvm.class HTTP/1.1" 200 1896 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (Linux 2.6.37.6-0.9-desktop) Java/1.6.0_29" <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Clearly, the path to Java class file is wrong. But I have no idea how to specify exact path in an embedded code. Is this a CMS specific issue. I have disabled Pretty URL feature of CMS. But still I cannot find the solution. here the referred Page that shows the java error. http://www.linux-house.net/v3/techlab/plugin pls pls give some insight..URGENT SOS

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• .NET HTML Sanitation for rich HTML Input

  - by Rick Strahl

  Recently I was working on updating a legacy application to MVC 4 that included free form text input. When I set up the new site my initial approach was to not allow any rich HTML input, only simple text formatting that would respect a few simple HTML commands for bold, lists etc. and automatically handles line break processing for new lines and paragraphs. This is typical for what I do with most multi-line text input in my apps and it works very well with very little development effort involved. Then the client sprung another note: Oh by the way we have a bunch of customers (real estate agents) who need to post complete HTML documents. Oh uh! There goes the simple theory. After some discussion and pleading on my part (<snicker>) to try and avoid this type of raw HTML input because of potential XSS issues, the client decided to go ahead and allow raw HTML input anyway. There has been lots of discussions on this subject on StackOverFlow (and here and here) but to after reading through some of the solutions I didn't really find anything that would work even closely for what I needed. Specifically we need to be able to allow just about any HTML markup, with the exception of script code. Remote CSS and Images need to be loaded, links need to work and so. While the 'legit' HTML posted by these agents is basic in nature it does span most of the full gamut of HTML (4). Most of the solutions XSS prevention/sanitizer solutions I found were way to aggressive and rendered the posted output unusable mostly because they tend to strip any externally loaded content. In short I needed a custom solution. I thought the best solution to this would be to use an HTML parser - in this case the Html Agility Pack - and then to run through all the HTML markup provided and remove any of the blacklisted tags and a number of attributes that are prone to JavaScript injection. There's much discussion on whether to use blacklists vs. whitelists in the discussions mentioned above, but I found that whitelists can make sense in simple scenarios where you might allow manual HTML input, but when you need to allow a larger array of HTML functionality a blacklist is probably easier to manage as the vast majority of elements and attributes could be allowed. Also white listing gets a bit more complex with HTML5 and the new proliferation of new HTML tags and most new tags generally don't affect XSS issues directly. Pure whitelisting based on elements and attributes also doesn't capture many edge cases (see some of the XSS cheat sheets listed below) so even with a white list, custom logic is still required to handle many of those edge cases. The Microsoft Web Protection Library (AntiXSS) My first thought was to check out the Microsoft AntiXSS library. Microsoft has an HTML Encoding and Sanitation library in the Microsoft Web Protection Library (formerly AntiXSS Library) on CodePlex, which provides stricter functions for whitelist encoding and sanitation. Initially I thought the Sanitation class and its static members would do the trick for me,but I found that this library is way too restrictive for my needs. Specifically the Sanitation class strips out images and links which rendered the full HTML from our real estate clients completely useless. I didn't spend much time with it, but apparently I'm not alone if feeling this library is not really useful without some way to configure operation. To give you an example of what didn't work for me with the library here's a small and simple HTML fragment that includes script, img and anchor tags. I would expect the script to be stripped and everything else to be left intact. Here's the original HTML:var value = "<b>Here</b> <script>alert('hello')</script> we go. Visit the " + "<a href='http://west-wind.com'>West Wind</a> site. " + "<img src='http://west-wind.com/images/new.gif' /> " ; and the code to sanitize it with the AntiXSS Sanitize class:@Html.Raw(Microsoft.Security.Application.Sanitizer.GetSafeHtmlFragment(value)) This produced a not so useful sanitized string: Here we go. Visit the <a>West Wind</a> site. While it removed the <script> tag (good) it also removed the href from the link and the image tag altogether (bad). In some situations this might be useful, but for most tasks I doubt this is the desired behavior. While links can contain javascript: references and images can 'broadcast' information to a server, without configuration to tell the library what to restrict this becomes useless to me. I couldn't find any way to customize the white list, nor is there code available in this 'open source' library on CodePlex. Using Html Agility Pack for HTML Parsing The WPL library wasn't going to cut it. After doing a bit of research I decided the best approach for a custom solution would be to use an HTML parser and inspect the HTML fragment/document I'm trying to import. I've used the HTML Agility Pack before for a number of apps where I needed an HTML parser without requiring an instance of a full browser like the Internet Explorer Application object which is inadequate in Web apps. In case you haven't checked out the Html Agility Pack before, it's a powerful HTML parser library that you can use from your .NET code. It provides a simple, parsable HTML DOM model to full HTML documents or HTML fragments that let you walk through each of the elements in your document. If you've used the HTML or XML DOM in a browser before you'll feel right at home with the Agility Pack. Blacklist based HTML Parsing to strip XSS Code For my purposes of HTML sanitation, the process involved is to walk the HTML document one element at a time and then check each element and attribute against a blacklist. There's quite a bit of argument of what's better: A whitelist of allowed items or a blacklist of denied items. While whitelists tend to be more secure, they also require a lot more configuration. In the case of HTML5 a whitelist could be very extensive. For what I need, I only want to ensure that no JavaScript is executed, so a blacklist includes the obvious <script> tag plus any tag that allows loading of external content including <iframe>, <object>, <embed> and <link> etc. <form>  is also excluded to avoid posting content to a different location. I also disallow <head> and <meta> tags in particular for my case, since I'm only allowing posting of HTML fragments. There is also some internal logic to exclude some attributes or attributes that include references to JavaScript or CSS expressions. The default tag blacklist reflects my use case, but is customizable and can be added to. Here's my HtmlSanitizer implementation:using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Xml; using HtmlAgilityPack; namespace Westwind.Web.Utilities { public class HtmlSanitizer { public HashSet<string> BlackList = new HashSet<string>() { { "script" }, { "iframe" }, { "form" }, { "object" }, { "embed" }, { "link" }, { "head" }, { "meta" } }; /// <summary> /// Cleans up an HTML string and removes HTML tags in blacklist /// </summary> /// <param name="html"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static string SanitizeHtml(string html, params string[] blackList) { var sanitizer = new HtmlSanitizer(); if (blackList != null && blackList.Length > 0) { sanitizer.BlackList.Clear(); foreach (string item in blackList) sanitizer.BlackList.Add(item); } return sanitizer.Sanitize(html); } /// <summary> /// Cleans up an HTML string by removing elements /// on the blacklist and all elements that start /// with onXXX . /// </summary> /// <param name="html"></param> /// <returns></returns> public string Sanitize(string html) { var doc = new HtmlDocument(); doc.LoadHtml(html); SanitizeHtmlNode(doc.DocumentNode); //return doc.DocumentNode.WriteTo(); string output = null; // Use an XmlTextWriter to create self-closing tags using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter()) { XmlWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(sw); doc.DocumentNode.WriteTo(writer); output = sw.ToString(); // strip off XML doc header if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(output)) { int at = output.IndexOf("?>"); output = output.Substring(at + 2); } writer.Close(); } doc = null; return output; } private void SanitizeHtmlNode(HtmlNode node) { if (node.NodeType == HtmlNodeType.Element) { // check for blacklist items and remove if (BlackList.Contains(node.Name)) { node.Remove(); return; } // remove CSS Expressions and embedded script links if (node.Name == "style") { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(node.InnerText)) { if (node.InnerHtml.Contains("expression") || node.InnerHtml.Contains("javascript:")) node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node); } } // remove script attributes if (node.HasAttributes) { for (int i = node.Attributes.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { HtmlAttribute currentAttribute = node.Attributes[i]; var attr = currentAttribute.Name.ToLower(); var val = currentAttribute.Value.ToLower(); span style="background: white; color: green">// remove event handlers if (attr.StartsWith("on")) node.Attributes.Remove(currentAttribute); // remove script links else if ( //(attr == "href" || attr== "src" || attr == "dynsrc" || attr == "lowsrc") && val != null && val.Contains("javascript:")) node.Attributes.Remove(currentAttribute); // Remove CSS Expressions else if (attr == "style" && val != null && val.Contains("expression") || val.Contains("javascript:") || val.Contains("vbscript:")) node.Attributes.Remove(currentAttribute); } } } // Look through child nodes recursively if (node.HasChildNodes) { for (int i = node.ChildNodes.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { SanitizeHtmlNode(node.ChildNodes[i]); } } } } } Please note: Use this as a starting point only for your own parsing and review the code for your specific use case! If your needs are less lenient than mine were you can you can make this much stricter by not allowing src and href attributes or CSS links if your HTML doesn't allow it. You can also check links for external URLs and disallow those - lots of options.  The code is simple enough to make it easy to extend to fit your use cases more specifically. It's also quite easy to make this code work using a WhiteList approach if you want to go that route. The code above is semi-generic for allowing full featured HTML fragments that only disallow script related content. The Sanitize method walks through each node of the document and then recursively drills into all of its children until the entire document has been traversed. Note that the code here uses an XmlTextWriter to write output - this is done to preserve XHTML style self-closing tags which are otherwise left as non-self-closing tags. The sanitizer code scans for blacklist elements and removes those elements not allowed. Note that the blacklist is configurable either in the instance class as a property or in the static method via the string parameter list. Additionally the code goes through each element's attributes and looks for a host of rules gleaned from some of the XSS cheat sheets listed at the end of the post. Clearly there are a lot more XSS vulnerabilities, but a lot of them apply to ancient browsers (IE6 and versions of Netscape) - many of these glaring holes (like CSS expressions - WTF IE?) have been removed in modern browsers. What a Pain To be honest this is NOT a piece of code that I wanted to write. I think building anything related to XSS is better left to people who have far more knowledge of the topic than I do. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a tool that worked even closely for me, or even provided a working base. For the project I was working on I had no choice and I'm sharing the code here merely as a base line to start with and potentially expand on for specific needs. It's sad that Microsoft Web Protection Library is currently such a train wreck - this is really something that should come from Microsoft as the systems vendor or possibly a third party that provides security tools. Luckily for my application we are dealing with a authenticated and validated users so the user base is fairly well known, and relatively small - this is not a wide open Internet application that's directly public facing. As I mentioned earlier in the post, if I had my way I would simply not allow this type of raw HTML input in the first place, and instead rely on a more controlled HTML input mechanism like MarkDown or even a good HTML Edit control that can provide some limits on what types of input are allowed. Alas in this case I was overridden and we had to go forward and allow *any* raw HTML posted. Sometimes I really feel sad that it's come this far - how many good applications and tools have been thwarted by fear of XSS (or worse) attacks? So many things that could be done *if* we had a more secure browser experience and didn't have to deal with every little script twerp trying to hack into Web pages and obscure browser bugs. So much time wasted building secure apps, so much time wasted by others trying to hack apps… We're a funny species - no other species manages to waste as much time, effort and resources as we humans do :-) Resources Code on GitHub Html Agility Pack XSS Cheat Sheet XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet Microsoft Web Protection Library (AntiXss) StackOverflow Links: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/341872/html-sanitizer-for-net http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/06/safe-html-and-xss/ http://code.google.com/p/subsonicforums/source/browse/trunk/SubSonic.Forums.Data/HtmlScrubber.cs?r=61© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Security  HTML  ASP.NET  JavaScript   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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• Using JSON.NET for dynamic JSON parsing

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the release of ASP.NET Web API as part of .NET 4.5 and MVC 4.0, JSON.NET has effectively pushed out the .NET native serializers to become the default serializer for Web API. JSON.NET is vastly more flexible than the built in DataContractJsonSerializer or the older JavaScript serializer. The DataContractSerializer in particular has been very problematic in the past because it can't deal with untyped objects for serialization - like values of type object, or anonymous types which are quite common these days. The JavaScript Serializer that came before it actually does support non-typed objects for serialization but it can't do anything with untyped data coming in from JavaScript and it's overall model of extensibility was pretty limited (JavaScript Serializer is what MVC uses for JSON responses). JSON.NET provides a robust JSON serializer that has both high level and low level components, supports binary JSON, JSON contracts, Xml to JSON conversion, LINQ to JSON and many, many more features than either of the built in serializers. ASP.NET Web API now uses JSON.NET as its default serializer and is now pulled in as a NuGet dependency into Web API projects, which is great. Dynamic JSON Parsing One of the features that I think is getting ever more important is the ability to serialize and deserialize arbitrary JSON content dynamically - that is without mapping the JSON captured directly into a .NET type as DataContractSerializer or the JavaScript Serializers do. Sometimes it isn't possible to map types due to the differences in languages (think collections, dictionaries etc), and other times you simply don't have the structures in place or don't want to create them to actually import the data. If this topic sounds familiar - you're right! I wrote about dynamic JSON parsing a few months back before JSON.NET was added to Web API and when Web API and the System.Net HttpClient libraries included the System.Json classes like JsonObject and JsonArray. With the inclusion of JSON.NET in Web API these classes are now obsolete and didn't ship with Web API or the client libraries. I re-linked my original post to this one. In this post I'll discus JToken, JObject and JArray which are the dynamic JSON objects that make it very easy to create and retrieve JSON content on the fly without underlying types. Why Dynamic JSON? So, why Dynamic JSON parsing rather than strongly typed parsing? Since applications are interacting more and more with third party services it becomes ever more important to have easy access to those services with easy JSON parsing. Sometimes it just makes lot of sense to pull just a small amount of data out of large JSON document received from a service, because the third party service isn't directly related to your application's logic most of the time - and it makes little sense to map the entire service structure in your application. For example, recently I worked with the Google Maps Places API to return information about businesses close to me (or rather the app's) location. The Google API returns a ton of information that my application had no interest in - all I needed was few values out of the data. Dynamic JSON parsing makes it possible to map this data, without having to map the entire API to a C# data structure. Instead I could pull out the three or four values I needed from the API and directly store it on my business entities that needed to receive the data - no need to map the entire Maps API structure. Getting JSON.NET The easiest way to use JSON.NET is to grab it via NuGet and add it as a reference to your project. You can add it to your project with: PM> Install-Package Newtonsoft.Json From the Package Manager Console or by using Manage NuGet Packages in your project References. As mentioned if you're using ASP.NET Web API or MVC 4 JSON.NET will be automatically added to your project. Alternately you can also go to the CodePlex site and download the latest version including source code: http://json.codeplex.com/ Creating JSON on the fly with JObject and JArray Let's start with creating some JSON on the fly. It's super easy to create a dynamic object structure with any of the JToken derived JSON.NET objects. The most common JToken derived classes you are likely to use are JObject and JArray. JToken implements IDynamicMetaProvider and so uses the dynamic  keyword extensively to make it intuitive to create object structures and turn them into JSON via dynamic object syntax. Here's an example of creating a music album structure with child songs using JObject for the base object and songs and JArray for the actual collection of songs:[TestMethod] public void JObjectOutputTest() { // strong typed instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here using class interface jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // or cast to dynamic to dynamically add/read properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; album.Artist = "AC/DC"; album.YearReleased = 1976; album.Songs = new JArray() as dynamic; dynamic song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; song.SongLength = "4:11"; album.Songs.Add(song); song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Love at First Feel"; song.SongLength = "3:10"; album.Songs.Add(song); Console.WriteLine(album.ToString()); } This produces a complete JSON structure: { "Entered": "2012-08-18T13:26:37.7137482-10:00", "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "Artist": "AC/DC", "YearReleased": 1976, "Songs": [ { "SongName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "SongLength": "4:11" }, { "SongName": "Love at First Feel", "SongLength": "3:10" } ] } Notice that JSON.NET does a nice job formatting the JSON, so it's easy to read and paste into blog posts :-). JSON.NET includes a bunch of configuration options that control how JSON is generated. Typically the defaults are just fine, but you can override with the JsonSettings object for most operations. The important thing about this code is that there's no explicit type used for holding the values to serialize to JSON. Rather the JSON.NET objects are the containers that receive the data as I build up my JSON structure dynamically, simply by adding properties. This means this code can be entirely driven at runtime without compile time restraints of structure for the JSON output. Here I use JObject to create a album 'object' and immediately cast it to dynamic. JObject() is kind of similar in behavior to ExpandoObject in that it allows you to add properties by simply assigning to them. Internally, JObject values are stored in pseudo collections of key value pairs that are exposed as properties through the IDynamicMetaObject interface exposed in JSON.NET's JToken base class. For objects the syntax is very clean - you add simple typed values as properties. For objects and arrays you have to explicitly create new JObject or JArray, cast them to dynamic and then add properties and items to them. Always remember though these values are dynamic - which means no Intellisense and no compiler type checking. It's up to you to ensure that the names and values you create are accessed consistently and without typos in your code. Note that you can also access the JObject instance directly (not as dynamic) and get access to the underlying JObject type. This means you can assign properties by string, which can be useful for fully data driven JSON generation from other structures. Below you can see both styles of access next to each other:// strong type instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // expando style instance you can just 'use' properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; JContainer (the base class for JObject and JArray) is a collection so you can also iterate over the properties at runtime easily:foreach (var item in jsonObject) { Console.WriteLine(item.Key + " " + item.Value.ToString()); } The functionality of the JSON objects are very similar to .NET's ExpandObject and if you used it before, you're already familiar with how the dynamic interfaces to the JSON objects works. Importing JSON with JObject.Parse() and JArray.Parse() The JValue structure supports importing JSON via the Parse() and Load() methods which can read JSON data from a string or various streams respectively. Essentially JValue includes the core JSON parsing to turn a JSON string into a collection of JsonValue objects that can be then referenced using familiar dynamic object syntax. Here's a simple example:public void JValueParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"{""Name"":""Rick"",""Company"":""West Wind"", ""Entered"":""2012-03-16T00:03:33.245-10:00""}"; dynamic json = JValue.Parse(jsonString); // values require casting string name = json.Name; string company = json.Company; DateTime entered = json.Entered; Assert.AreEqual(name, "Rick"); Assert.AreEqual(company, "West Wind"); } The JSON string represents an object with three properties which is parsed into a JObject class and cast to dynamic. Once cast to dynamic I can then go ahead and access the object using familiar object syntax. Note that the actual values - json.Name, json.Company, json.Entered - are actually of type JToken and I have to cast them to their appropriate types first before I can do type comparisons as in the Asserts at the end of the test method. This is required because of the way that dynamic types work which can't determine the type based on the method signature of the Assert.AreEqual(object,object) method. I have to either assign the dynamic value to a variable as I did above, or explicitly cast ( (string) json.Name) in the actual method call. The JSON structure can be much more complex than this simple example. Here's another example of an array of albums serialized to JSON and then parsed through with JsonValue():[TestMethod] public void JsonArrayParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"[ { ""Id"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""AlbumName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""Artist"": ""AC/DC"", ""YearReleased"": 1976, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2810521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61kTaH-uZBL._AA115_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/…ASIN=B00008BXJ4"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""SongLength"": ""4:11"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Love at First Feel"", ""SongLength"": ""3:10"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Big Balls"", ""SongLength"": ""2:38"" } ] }, { ""Id"": ""7b919432"", ""AlbumName"": ""End of the Silence"", ""Artist"": ""Henry Rollins Band"", ""YearReleased"": 1992, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2800521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FO3rb1tuL._SL160_AA160_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/End-Silence-Rollins-Band/dp/B0000040OX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1302232195&sr=8-5"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Low Self Opinion"", ""SongLength"": ""5:24"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Grip"", ""SongLength"": ""4:51"" } ] } ]"; JArray jsonVal = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; dynamic albums = jsonVal; foreach (dynamic album in albums) { Console.WriteLine(album.AlbumName + " (" + album.YearReleased.ToString() + ")"); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { Console.WriteLine("\t" + song.SongName); } } Console.WriteLine(albums[0].AlbumName); Console.WriteLine(albums[0].Songs[1].SongName); } JObject and JArray in ASP.NET Web API Of course these types also work in ASP.NET Web API controller methods. If you want you can accept parameters using these object or return them back to the server. The following contrived example receives dynamic JSON input, and then creates a new dynamic JSON object and returns it based on data from the first:[HttpPost] public JObject PostAlbumJObject(JObject jAlbum) { // dynamic input from inbound JSON dynamic album = jAlbum; // create a new JSON object to write out dynamic newAlbum = new JObject(); // Create properties on the new instance // with values from the first newAlbum.AlbumName = album.AlbumName + " New"; newAlbum.NewProperty = "something new"; newAlbum.Songs = new JArray(); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { song.SongName = song.SongName + " New"; newAlbum.Songs.Add(song); } return newAlbum; } The raw POST request to the server looks something like this: POST http://localhost/aspnetwebapi/samples/PostAlbumJObject HTTP/1.1User-Agent: FiddlerContent-type: application/jsonHost: localhostContent-Length: 88 {AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds",Songs:[ { SongName: "Problem Child"},{ SongName: "Squealer"}]} and the output that comes back looks like this: {  "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds New",  "NewProperty": "something new",  "Songs": [    {      "SongName": "Problem Child New"    },    {      "SongName": "Squealer New"    }  ]} The original values are echoed back with something extra appended to demonstrate that we're working with a new object. When you receive or return a JObject, JValue, JToken or JArray instance in a Web API method, Web API ignores normal content negotiation and assumes your content is going to be received and returned as JSON, so effectively the parameter and result type explicitly determines the input and output format which is nice. Dynamic to Strong Type Mapping You can also map JObject and JArray instances to a strongly typed object, so you can mix dynamic and static typing in the same piece of code. Using the 2 Album jsonString shown earlier, the code below takes an array of albums and picks out only a single album and casts that album to a static Album instance.[TestMethod] public void JsonParseToStrongTypeTest() { JArray albums = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; // pick out one album JObject jalbum = albums[0] as JObject; // Copy to a static Album instance Album album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); Assert.IsNotNull(album); Assert.AreEqual(album.AlbumName,jalbum.Value<string>("AlbumName")); Assert.IsTrue(album.Songs.Count > 0); } This is pretty damn useful for the scenario I mentioned earlier - you can read a large chunk of JSON and dynamically walk the property hierarchy down to the item you want to access, and then either access the specific item dynamically (as shown earlier) or map a part of the JSON to a strongly typed object. That's very powerful if you think about it - it leaves you in total control to decide what's dynamic and what's static. Strongly typed JSON Parsing With all this talk of dynamic let's not forget that JSON.NET of course also does strongly typed serialization which is drop dead easy. Here's a simple example on how to serialize and deserialize an object with JSON.NET:[TestMethod] public void StronglyTypedSerializationTest() { // Demonstrate deserialization from a raw string var album = new Album() { AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", Artist = "AC/DC", Entered = DateTime.Now, YearReleased = 1976, Songs = new List<Song>() { new Song() { SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", SongLength = "4:11" }, new Song() { SongName = "Love at First Feel", SongLength = "3:10" } } }; // serialize to string string json2 = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(album,Formatting.Indented); Console.WriteLine(json2); // make sure we can serialize back var album2 = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Album>(json2); Assert.IsNotNull(album2); Assert.IsTrue(album2.AlbumName == "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"); Assert.IsTrue(album2.Songs.Count == 2); } JsonConvert is a high level static class that wraps lower level functionality, but you can also use the JsonSerializer class, which allows you to serialize/parse to and from streams. It's a little more work, but gives you a bit more control. The functionality available is easy to discover with Intellisense, and that's good because there's not a lot in the way of documentation that's actually useful. Summary JSON.NET is a pretty complete JSON implementation with lots of different choices for JSON parsing from dynamic parsing to static serialization, to complex querying of JSON objects using LINQ. It's good to see this open source library getting integrated into .NET, and pushing out the old and tired stock .NET parsers so that we finally have a bit more flexibility - and extensibility - in our JSON parsing. Good to go! Resources Sample Test Project http://json.codeplex.com/© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET  Web Api  AJAX   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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• Differences Between NHibernate and Entity Framework

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction NHibernate and Entity Framework are two of the most popular O/RM frameworks on the .NET world. Although they share some functionality, there are some aspects on which they are quite different. This post will describe this differences and will hopefully help you get started with the one you know less. Mind you, this is a personal selection of features to compare, it is by no way an exhaustive list. History First, a bit of history. NHibernate is an open-source project that was first ported from Java’s venerable Hibernate framework, one of the first O/RM frameworks, but nowadays it is not tied to it, for example, it has .NET specific features, and has evolved in different ways from those of its Java counterpart. Current version is 3.3, with 3.4 on the horizon. It currently targets .NET 3.5, but can be used as well in .NET 4, it only makes no use of any of its specific functionality. You can find its home page at NHForge. Entity Framework 1 came out with .NET 3.5 and is now on its second major version, despite being version 4. Code First sits on top of it and but came separately and will also continue to be released out of line with major .NET distributions. It is currently on version 4.3.1 and version 5 will be released together with .NET Framework 4.5. All versions will target the current version of .NET, at the time of their release. Its home location is located at MSDN. Architecture In NHibernate, there is a separation between the Unit of Work and the configuration and model instances. You start off by creating a Configuration object, where you specify all global NHibernate settings such as the database and dialect to use, the batch sizes, the mappings, etc, then you build an ISessionFactory from it. The ISessionFactory holds model and metadata that is tied to a particular database and to the settings that came from the Configuration object, and, there will typically be only one instance of each in a process. Finally, you create instances of ISession from the ISessionFactory, which is the NHibernate representation of the Unit of Work and Identity Map. This is a lightweight object, it basically opens and closes a database connection as required and keeps track of the entities associated with it. ISession objects are cheap to create and dispose, because all of the model complexity is stored in the ISessionFactory and Configuration objects. As for Entity Framework, the ObjectContext/DbContext holds the configuration, model and acts as the Unit of Work, holding references to all of the known entity instances. This class is therefore not lightweight as its NHibernate counterpart and it is not uncommon to see examples where an instance is cached on a field. Mappings Both NHibernate and Entity Framework (Code First) support the use of POCOs to represent entities, no base classes are required (or even possible, in the case of NHibernate). As for mapping to and from the database, NHibernate supports three types of mappings: XML-based, which have the advantage of not tying the entity classes to a particular O/RM; the XML files can be deployed as files on the file system or as embedded resources in an assembly; Attribute-based, for keeping both the entities and database details on the same place at the expense of polluting the entity classes with NHibernate-specific attributes; Strongly-typed code-based, which allows dynamic creation of the model and strongly typing it, so that if, for example, a property name changes, the mapping will also be updated. Entity Framework can use: Attribute-based (although attributes cannot express all of the available possibilities – for example, cascading); Strongly-typed code mappings. Database Support With NHibernate you can use mostly any database you want, including: SQL Server; SQL Server Compact; SQL Server Azure; Oracle; DB2; PostgreSQL; MySQL; Sybase Adaptive Server/SQL Anywhere; Firebird; SQLLite; Informix; Any through OLE DB; Any through ODBC. Out of the box, Entity Framework only supports SQL Server, but a number of providers exist, both free and commercial, for some of the most used databases, such as Oracle and MySQL. See a list here. Inheritance Strategies Both NHibernate and Entity Framework support the three canonical inheritance strategies: Table Per Type Hierarchy (Single Table Inheritance), Table Per Type (Class Table Inheritance) and Table Per Concrete Type (Concrete Table Inheritance). Associations Regarding associations, both support one to one, one to many and many to many. However, NHibernate offers far more collection types: Bags of entities or values: unordered, possibly with duplicates; Lists of entities or values: ordered, indexed by a number column; Maps of entities or values: indexed by either an entity or any value; Sets of entities or values: unordered, no duplicates; Arrays of entities or values: indexed, immutable. Querying NHibernate exposes several querying APIs: LINQ is probably the most used nowadays, and really does not need to be introduced; Hibernate Query Language (HQL) is a database-agnostic, object-oriented SQL-alike language that exists since NHibernate’s creation and still offers the most advanced querying possibilities; well suited for dynamic queries, even if using string concatenation; Criteria API is an implementation of the Query Object pattern where you create a semi-abstract conceptual representation of the query you wish to execute by means of a class model; also a good choice for dynamic querying; Query Over offers a similar API to Criteria, but using strongly-typed LINQ expressions instead of strings; for this, although more refactor-friendlier that Criteria, it is also less suited for dynamic queries; SQL, including stored procedures, can also be used; Integration with Lucene.NET indexer is available. As for Entity Framework: LINQ to Entities is fully supported, and its implementation is considered very complete; it is the API of choice for most developers; Entity-SQL, HQL’s counterpart, is also an object-oriented, database-independent querying language that can be used for dynamic queries; SQL, of course, is also supported. Caching Both NHibernate and Entity Framework, of course, feature first-level cache. NHibernate also supports a second-level cache, that can be used among multiple ISessionFactorys, even in different processes/machines: Hashtable (in-memory); SysCache (uses ASP.NET as the cache provider); SysCache2 (same as above but with support for SQL Server SQL Dependencies); Prevalence; SharedCache; Memcached; Redis; NCache; Appfabric Caching. Out of the box, Entity Framework does not have any second-level cache mechanism, however, there are some public samples that show how we can add this. ID Generators NHibernate supports different ID generation strategies, coming from the database and otherwise: Identity (for SQL Server, MySQL, and databases who support identity columns); Sequence (for Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others who support sequences); Trigger-based; HiLo; Sequence HiLo (for databases that support sequences); Several GUID flavors, both in GUID as well as in string format; Increment (for single-user uses); Assigned (must know what you’re doing); Sequence-style (either uses an actual sequence or a single-column table); Table of ids; Pooled (similar to HiLo but stores high values in a table); Native (uses whatever mechanism the current database supports, identity or sequence). Entity Framework only supports: Identity generation; GUIDs; Assigned values. Properties NHibernate supports properties of entity types (one to one or many to one), collections (one to many or many to many) as well as scalars and enumerations. It offers a mechanism for having complex property types generated from the database, which even include support for querying. It also supports properties originated from SQL formulas. Entity Framework only supports scalars, entity types and collections. Enumerations support will come in the next version. Events and Interception NHibernate has a very rich event model, that exposes more than 20 events, either for synchronous pre-execution or asynchronous post-execution, including: Pre/Post-Load; Pre/Post-Delete; Pre/Post-Insert; Pre/Post-Update; Pre/Post-Flush. It also features interception of class instancing and SQL generation. As for Entity Framework, only two events exist: ObjectMaterialized (after loading an entity from the database); SavingChanges (before saving changes, which include deleting, inserting and updating). Tracking Changes For NHibernate as well as Entity Framework, all changes are tracked by their respective Unit of Work implementation. Entities can be attached and detached to it, Entity Framework does, however, also support self-tracking entities. Optimistic Concurrency Control NHibernate supports all of the imaginable scenarios: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Oracle’s ORA_ROWSCN; A column containing date and time; A column containing a version number; All/dirty columns comparison. Entity Framework is more focused on Entity Framework, so it only supports: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Comparing all/some columns. Batching NHibernate has full support for insertion batching, but only if the ID generator in use is not database-based (for example, it cannot be used with Identity), whereas Entity Framework has no batching at all. Cascading Both support cascading for collections and associations: when an entity is deleted, their conceptual children are also deleted. NHibernate also offers the possibility to set the foreign key column on children to NULL instead of removing them. Flushing Changes NHibernate’s ISession has a FlushMode property that can have the following values: Auto: changes are sent to the database when necessary, for example, if there are dirty instances of an entity type, and a query is performed against this entity type, or if the ISession is being disposed; Commit: changes are sent when committing the current transaction; Never: changes are only sent when explicitly calling Flush(). As for Entity Framework, changes have to be explicitly sent through a call to AcceptAllChanges()/SaveChanges(). Lazy Loading NHibernate supports lazy loading for Associated entities (one to one, many to one); Collections (one to many, many to many); Scalar properties (thing of BLOBs or CLOBs). Entity Framework only supports lazy loading for: Associated entities; Collections. Generating and Updating the Database Both NHibernate and Entity Framework Code First (with the Migrations API) allow creating the database model from the mapping and updating it if the mapping changes. Extensibility As you can guess, NHibernate is far more extensible than Entity Framework. Basically, everything can be extended, from ID generation, to LINQ to SQL transformation, HQL native SQL support, custom column types, custom association collections, SQL generation, supported databases, etc. With Entity Framework your options are more limited, at least, because practically no information exists as to what can be extended/changed. It features a provider model that can be extended to support any database. Integration With Other Microsoft APIs and Tools When it comes to integration with Microsoft technologies, it will come as no surprise that Entity Framework offers the best support. For example, the following technologies are fully supported: ASP.NET (through the EntityDataSource); ASP.NET Dynamic Data; WCF Data Services; WCF RIA Services; Visual Studio (through the integrated designer). Documentation This is another point where Entity Framework is superior: NHibernate lacks, for starters, an up to date API reference synchronized with its current version. It does have a community mailing list, blogs and wikis, although not much used. Entity Framework has a number of resources on MSDN and, of course, several forums and discussion groups exist. Conclusion Like I said, this is a personal list. I may come as a surprise to some that Entity Framework is so behind NHibernate in so many aspects, but it is true that NHibernate is much older and, due to its open-source nature, is not tied to product-specific timeframes and can thus evolve much more rapidly. I do like both, and I chose whichever is best for the job I have at hands. I am looking forward to the changes in EF5 which will add significant value to an already interesting product. So, what do you think? Did I forget anything important or is there anything else worth talking about? Looking forward for your comments!

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• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   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); })();

  Read the article

• error about ACPI _OSC request failed (AE_NOT_FOUND)

  - by Yavuz Maslak

  I have ubuntu server 11.10 64 bit I see an error in kernel.log. This error comes out when the server reboot. some port of grep APCI in kernel.log; Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588605] pci0000:00: Requesting ACPI _OSC control (0x1d) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588667] pci0000:00: ACPI _OSC request failed (AE_NOT_FOUND), returned control mask: 0x1d Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588746] ACPI _OSC control for PCIe not granted, disabling ASPM Which hardware may be cause this error ? root@www:# grep -r ACPI /var/log/kern.log Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bf780000 - 00000000bf798000 (ACPI data) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bf798000 - 00000000bf7dc000 (ACPI NVS) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDP 00000000000fb1a0 00014 (v00 ACPIAM) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDT 00000000bf780000 00040 (v01 022410 RSDT1405 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: FACP 00000000bf780200 00084 (v01 022410 FACP1405 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: DSDT 00000000bf7804b0 0C359 (v01 A1279 A1279001 00000001 INTL 20060113) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: FACS 00000000bf798000 00040 Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: APIC 00000000bf780390 000D8 (v01 022410 APIC1405 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: MCFG 00000000bf780470 0003C (v01 022410 OEMMCFG 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: OEMB 00000000bf798040 00072 (v01 022410 OEMB1405 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: HPET 00000000bf78f4b0 00038 (v01 022410 OEMHPET 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: OSFR 00000000bf78f4f0 000B0 (v01 022410 OEMOSFR 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: SSDT 00000000bf798fe0 00363 (v01 DpgPmm CpuPm 00000012 INTL 20060113) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee00000 Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: PM-Timer IO Port: 0x808 Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee00000 Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x02] enabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x03] lapic_id[0x04] enabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x04] lapic_id[0x06] enabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x05] lapic_id[0x84] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x06] lapic_id[0x85] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x07] lapic_id[0x86] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x08] lapic_id[0x87] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x09] lapic_id[0x88] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0a] lapic_id[0x89] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0b] lapic_id[0x8a] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0c] lapic_id[0x8b] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0d] lapic_id[0x8c] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0e] lapic_id[0x8d] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0f] lapic_id[0x8e] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x10] lapic_id[0x8f] disabled) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x01] address[0xfec00000] gsi_base[0]) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x03] address[0xfec8a000] gsi_base[24]) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 0 global_irq 2 dfl dfl) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 9 global_irq 9 high level) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ0 used by override. Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ2 used by override. Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ9 used by override. Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: HPET id: 0x8086a301 base: 0xfed00000 Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.009507] ACPI: Core revision 20110413 Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.499129] PM: Registering ACPI NVS region at bf798000 (278528 bytes) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.500749] ACPI: bus type pci registered Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.502747] ACPI: EC: Look up EC in DSDT Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.503788] ACPI: Executed 1 blocks of module-level executable AML code Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.520435] ACPI: SSDT 00000000bf7980c0 00F20 (v01 DpgPmm P001Ist 00000011 INTL 20060113) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.520863] ACPI: Dynamic OEM Table Load: Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.520990] ACPI: SSDT (null) 00F20 (v01 DpgPmm P001Ist 00000011 INTL 20060113) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.521308] ACPI: Interpreter enabled Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.521366] ACPI: (supports S0 S1 S3 S4 S5) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.521611] ACPI: Using IOAPIC for interrupt routing Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.522622] PCI: MMCONFIG at [mem 0xe0000000-0xefffffff] reserved in ACPI motherboard resources Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.554150] ACPI: No dock devices found. Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.554267] PCI: Using host bridge windows from ACPI; if necessary, use "pci=nocrs" and report a bug Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.555231] ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI0] (domain 0000 [bus 00-ff]) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588224] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0._PRT] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588398] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P1._PRT] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588451] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P4._PRT] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588473] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P6._PRT] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588492] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P7._PRT] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588512] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P8._PRT] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588540] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.NPE1._PRT] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588559] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.NPE3._PRT] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588579] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.NPE7._PRT] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588605] pci0000:00: Requesting ACPI _OSC control (0x1d) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588667] pci0000:00: ACPI _OSC request failed (AE_NOT_FOUND), returned control mask: 0x1d Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.588746] ACPI _OSC control for PCIe not granted, disabling ASPM Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.597666] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKA] (IRQs 3 4 6 7 10 11 12 14 *15) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.598142] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] (IRQs *5) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.598336] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKC] (IRQs 3 4 6 7 10 *11 12 14 15) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.598810] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKD] (IRQs 3 4 6 7 *10 11 12 14 15) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.599284] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKE] (IRQs 3 4 6 7 10 11 12 *14 15) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.599762] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKF] (IRQs *3 4 6 7 10 11 12 14 15) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.600236] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKG] (IRQs 3 4 6 *7 10 11 12 14 15) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.600709] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKH] (IRQs 3 *4 6 7 10 11 12 14 15) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.601931] PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.628146] pnp: PnP ACPI init Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.628211] ACPI: bus type pnp registered Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.628417] pnp 00:00: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0a08 PNP0a03 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.628859] system 00:01: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c01 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.628915] pnp 00:02: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0200 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.628951] pnp 00:03: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0b00 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.628975] pnp 00:04: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0800 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.629004] pnp 00:05: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c04 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.629229] system 00:06: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.629779] system 00:07: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.629849] pnp 00:08: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0103 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.629901] pnp 00:09: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs INT0800 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.630030] system 00:0a: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.630254] system 00:0b: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.630304] pnp 00:0c: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0303 PNP030b (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.630359] pnp 00:0d: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0f03 PNP0f13 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.630492] system 00:0e: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.630986] system 00:0f: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c01 (active) Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.631078] pnp: PnP ACPI: found 16 devices Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.631135] ACPI: ACPI bus type pnp unregistered Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.726291] ACPI: Power Button [PWRB] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.726452] ACPI: Power Button [PWRF] Dec 5 09:08:51 www kernel: [ 0.726527] ACPI: acpi_idle yielding to intel_idle Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bf780000 - 00000000bf798000 (ACPI data) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bf798000 - 00000000bf7dc000 (ACPI NVS) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDP 00000000000fb1a0 00014 (v00 ACPIAM) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDT 00000000bf780000 00040 (v01 022410 RSDT1405 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: FACP 00000000bf780200 00084 (v01 022410 FACP1405 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: DSDT 00000000bf7804b0 0C359 (v01 A1279 A1279001 00000001 INTL 20060113) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: FACS 00000000bf798000 00040 Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: APIC 00000000bf780390 000D8 (v01 022410 APIC1405 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: MCFG 00000000bf780470 0003C (v01 022410 OEMMCFG 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: OEMB 00000000bf798040 00072 (v01 022410 OEMB1405 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: HPET 00000000bf78f4b0 00038 (v01 022410 OEMHPET 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: OSFR 00000000bf78f4f0 000B0 (v01 022410 OEMOSFR 20100224 MSFT 00000097) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: SSDT 00000000bf798fe0 00363 (v01 DpgPmm CpuPm 00000012 INTL 20060113) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee00000 Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: PM-Timer IO Port: 0x808 Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee00000 Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x02] enabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x03] lapic_id[0x04] enabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x04] lapic_id[0x06] enabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x05] lapic_id[0x84] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x06] lapic_id[0x85] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x07] lapic_id[0x86] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x08] lapic_id[0x87] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x09] lapic_id[0x88] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0a] lapic_id[0x89] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0b] lapic_id[0x8a] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0c] lapic_id[0x8b] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0d] lapic_id[0x8c] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0e] lapic_id[0x8d] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x0f] lapic_id[0x8e] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x10] lapic_id[0x8f] disabled) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x01] address[0xfec00000] gsi_base[0]) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x03] address[0xfec8a000] gsi_base[24]) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 0 global_irq 2 dfl dfl) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 9 global_irq 9 high level) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ0 used by override. Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ2 used by override. Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ9 used by override. Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.000000] ACPI: HPET id: 0x8086a301 base: 0xfed00000 Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.009505] ACPI: Core revision 20110413 Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.499203] PM: Registering ACPI NVS region at bf798000 (278528 bytes) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.500819] ACPI: bus type pci registered Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.503121] ACPI: EC: Look up EC in DSDT Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.504162] ACPI: Executed 1 blocks of module-level executable AML code Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.520821] ACPI: SSDT 00000000bf7980c0 00F20 (v01 DpgPmm P001Ist 00000011 INTL 20060113) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.521247] ACPI: Dynamic OEM Table Load: Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.521374] ACPI: SSDT (null) 00F20 (v01 DpgPmm P001Ist 00000011 INTL 20060113) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.521691] ACPI: Interpreter enabled Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.521748] ACPI: (supports S0 S1 S3 S4 S5) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.521993] ACPI: Using IOAPIC for interrupt routing Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.523002] PCI: MMCONFIG at [mem 0xe0000000-0xefffffff] reserved in ACPI motherboard resources Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.554533] ACPI: No dock devices found. Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.554649] PCI: Using host bridge windows from ACPI; if necessary, use "pci=nocrs" and report a bug Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.555620] ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI0] (domain 0000 [bus 00-ff]) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588224] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0._PRT] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588398] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P1._PRT] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588451] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P4._PRT] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588473] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P6._PRT] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588492] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P7._PRT] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588512] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P8._PRT] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588540] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.NPE1._PRT] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588559] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.NPE3._PRT] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588579] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.NPE7._PRT] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588606] pci0000:00: Requesting ACPI _OSC control (0x1d) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588667] pci0000:00: ACPI _OSC request failed (AE_NOT_FOUND), returned control mask: 0x1d Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.588746] ACPI _OSC control for PCIe not granted, disabling ASPM Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.597661] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKA] (IRQs 3 4 6 7 10 11 12 14 *15) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.598137] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] (IRQs *5) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.598331] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKC] (IRQs 3 4 6 7 10 *11 12 14 15) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.598804] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKD] (IRQs 3 4 6 7 *10 11 12 14 15) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.599278] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKE] (IRQs 3 4 6 7 10 11 12 *14 15) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.599756] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKF] (IRQs *3 4 6 7 10 11 12 14 15) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.600230] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKG] (IRQs 3 4 6 *7 10 11 12 14 15) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.600704] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKH] (IRQs 3 *4 6 7 10 11 12 14 15) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.601926] PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.624115] pnp: PnP ACPI init Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.624179] ACPI: bus type pnp registered Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.624382] pnp 00:00: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0a08 PNP0a03 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.624821] system 00:01: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c01 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.624875] pnp 00:02: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0200 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.624911] pnp 00:03: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0b00 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.624933] pnp 00:04: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0800 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.624962] pnp 00:05: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c04 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.625186] system 00:06: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.625733] system 00:07: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.625803] pnp 00:08: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0103 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.625856] pnp 00:09: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs INT0800 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.625984] system 00:0a: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.626206] system 00:0b: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.626256] pnp 00:0c: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0303 PNP030b (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.626312] pnp 00:0d: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0f03 PNP0f13 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.626445] system 00:0e: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c02 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.626936] system 00:0f: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0c01 (active) Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.627027] pnp: PnP ACPI: found 16 devices Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.627084] ACPI: ACPI bus type pnp unregistered Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.722086] ACPI: Power Button [PWRB] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.722246] ACPI: Power Button [PWRF] Dec 7 21:45:22 www kernel: [ 0.722320] ACPI: acpi_idle yielding to intel_idle

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• Creating a dynamic proxy generator – Part 1 – Creating the Assembly builder, Module builder and cach

  - by SeanMcAlinden

  I’ve recently started a project with a few mates to learn the ins and outs of Dependency Injection, AOP and a number of other pretty crucial patterns of development as we’ve all been using these patterns for a while but have relied totally on third part solutions to do the magic. We thought it would be interesting to really get into the details by rolling our own IoC container and hopefully learn a lot on the way, and you never know, we might even create an excellent framework. The open source project is called Rapid IoC and is hosted at http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/ One of the most interesting tasks for me is creating the dynamic proxy generator for enabling Aspect Orientated Programming (AOP). In this series of articles, I’m going to track each step I take for creating the dynamic proxy generator and I’ll try my best to explain what everything means - mainly as I’ll be using Reflection.Emit to emit a fair amount of intermediate language code (IL) to create the proxy types at runtime which can be a little taxing to read. It’s worth noting that building the proxy is without a doubt going to be slightly painful so I imagine there will be plenty of areas I’ll need to change along the way. Anyway lets get started…   Part 1 - Creating the Assembly builder, Module builder and caching mechanism Part 1 is going to be a really nice simple start, I’m just going to start by creating the assembly, module and type caches. The reason we need to create caches for the assembly, module and types is simply to save the overhead of recreating proxy types that have already been generated, this will be one of the important steps to ensure that the framework is fast… kind of important as we’re calling the IoC container ‘Rapid’ – will be a little bit embarrassing if we manage to create the slowest framework. The Assembly builder The assembly builder is what is used to create an assembly at runtime, we’re going to have two overloads, one will be for the actual use of the proxy generator, the other will be mainly for testing purposes as it will also save the assembly so we can use Reflector to examine the code that has been created. Here’s the code: DynamicAssemblyBuilder using System; using System.Reflection; using System.Reflection.Emit; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Assembly {     /// <summary>     /// Class for creating an assembly builder.     /// </summary>     internal static class DynamicAssemblyBuilder     {         #region Create           /// <summary>         /// Creates an assembly builder.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="assemblyName">Name of the assembly.</param>         public static AssemblyBuilder Create(string assemblyName)         {             AssemblyName name = new AssemblyName(assemblyName);               AssemblyBuilder assembly = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DefineDynamicAssembly(                     name, AssemblyBuilderAccess.Run);               DynamicAssemblyCache.Add(assembly);               return assembly;         }           /// <summary>         /// Creates an assembly builder and saves the assembly to the passed in location.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="assemblyName">Name of the assembly.</param>         /// <param name="filePath">The file path.</param>         public static AssemblyBuilder Create(string assemblyName, string filePath)         {             AssemblyName name = new AssemblyName(assemblyName);               AssemblyBuilder assembly = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DefineDynamicAssembly(                     name, AssemblyBuilderAccess.RunAndSave, filePath);               DynamicAssemblyCache.Add(assembly);               return assembly;         }           #endregion     } }   So hopefully the above class is fairly explanatory, an AssemblyName is created using the passed in string for the actual name of the assembly. An AssemblyBuilder is then constructed with the current AppDomain and depending on the overload used, it is either just run in the current context or it is set up ready for saving. It is then added to the cache.   DynamicAssemblyCache using System.Reflection.Emit; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Exceptions; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Resources.Exceptions;   namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Assembly {     /// <summary>     /// Cache for storing the dynamic assembly builder.     /// </summary>     internal static class DynamicAssemblyCache     {         #region Declarations           private static object syncRoot = new object();         internal static AssemblyBuilder Cache = null;           #endregion           #region Adds a dynamic assembly to the cache.           /// <summary>         /// Adds a dynamic assembly builder to the cache.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="assemblyBuilder">The assembly builder.</param>         public static void Add(AssemblyBuilder assemblyBuilder)         {             lock (syncRoot)             {                 Cache = assemblyBuilder;             }         }           #endregion           #region Gets the cached assembly                  /// <summary>         /// Gets the cached assembly builder.         /// </summary>         /// <returns></returns>         public static AssemblyBuilder Get         {             get             {                 lock (syncRoot)                 {                     if (Cache != null)                     {                         return Cache;                     }                 }                   throw new RapidDynamicProxyAssertionException(AssertionResources.NoAssemblyInCache);             }         }           #endregion     } } The cache is simply a static property that will store the AssemblyBuilder (I know it’s a little weird that I’ve made it public, this is for testing purposes, I know that’s a bad excuse but hey…) There are two methods for using the cache – Add and Get, these just provide thread safe access to the cache.   The Module Builder The module builder is required as the create proxy classes will need to live inside a module within the assembly. Here’s the code: DynamicModuleBuilder using System.Reflection.Emit; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Assembly; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Module {     /// <summary>     /// Class for creating a module builder.     /// </summary>     internal static class DynamicModuleBuilder     {         /// <summary>         /// Creates a module builder using the cached assembly.         /// </summary>         public static ModuleBuilder Create()         {             string assemblyName = DynamicAssemblyCache.Get.GetName().Name;               ModuleBuilder moduleBuilder = DynamicAssemblyCache.Get.DefineDynamicModule                 (assemblyName, string.Format("{0}.dll", assemblyName));               DynamicModuleCache.Add(moduleBuilder);               return moduleBuilder;         }     } } As you can see, the module builder is created on the assembly that lives in the DynamicAssemblyCache, the module is given the assembly name and also a string representing the filename if the assembly is to be saved. It is then added to the DynamicModuleCache. DynamicModuleCache using System.Reflection.Emit; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Exceptions; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Resources.Exceptions; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Module {     /// <summary>     /// Class for storing the module builder.     /// </summary>     internal static class DynamicModuleCache     {         #region Declarations           private static object syncRoot = new object();         internal static ModuleBuilder Cache = null;           #endregion           #region Add           /// <summary>         /// Adds a dynamic module builder to the cache.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="moduleBuilder">The module builder.</param>         public static void Add(ModuleBuilder moduleBuilder)         {             lock (syncRoot)             {                 Cache = moduleBuilder;             }         }           #endregion           #region Get           /// <summary>         /// Gets the cached module builder.         /// </summary>         /// <returns></returns>         public static ModuleBuilder Get         {             get             {                 lock (syncRoot)                 {                     if (Cache != null)                     {                         return Cache;                     }                 }                   throw new RapidDynamicProxyAssertionException(AssertionResources.NoModuleInCache);             }         }           #endregion     } }   The DynamicModuleCache is very similar to the assembly cache, it is simply a statically stored module with thread safe Add and Get methods.   The DynamicTypeCache To end off this post, I’m going to create the cache for storing the generated proxy classes. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the type of collection I should use to store the types and have finally decided that for the time being I’m going to use a generic dictionary. This may change when I can actually performance test the proxy generator but the time being I think it makes good sense in theory, mainly as it pretty much maintains it’s performance with varying numbers of items – almost constant (0)1. Plus I won’t ever need to loop through the items which is not the dictionaries strong point. Here’s the code as it currently stands: DynamicTypeCache using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Security.Cryptography; using System.Text; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Types {     /// <summary>     /// Cache for storing proxy types.     /// </summary>     internal static class DynamicTypeCache     {         #region Declarations           static object syncRoot = new object();         public static Dictionary<string, Type> Cache = new Dictionary<string, Type>();           #endregion           /// <summary>         /// Adds a proxy to the type cache.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="type">The type.</param>         /// <param name="proxy">The proxy.</param>         public static void AddProxyForType(Type type, Type proxy)         {             lock (syncRoot)             {                 Cache.Add(GetHashCode(type.AssemblyQualifiedName), proxy);             }         }           /// <summary>         /// Tries the type of the get proxy for.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="type">The type.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public static Type TryGetProxyForType(Type type)         {             lock (syncRoot)             {                 Type proxyType;                 Cache.TryGetValue(GetHashCode(type.AssemblyQualifiedName), out proxyType);                 return proxyType;             }         }           #region Private Methods           private static string GetHashCode(string fullName)         {             SHA1CryptoServiceProvider provider = new SHA1CryptoServiceProvider();             Byte[] buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(fullName);             Byte[] hash = provider.ComputeHash(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);             return Convert.ToBase64String(hash);         }           #endregion     } } As you can see, there are two public methods, one for adding to the cache and one for getting from the cache. Hopefully they should be clear enough, the Get is a TryGet as I do not want the dictionary to throw an exception if a proxy doesn’t exist within the cache. Other than that I’ve decided to create a key using the SHA1CryptoServiceProvider, this may change but my initial though is the SHA1 algorithm is pretty fast to put together using the provider and it is also very unlikely to have any hashing collisions. (there are some maths behind how unlikely this is – here’s the wiki if you’re interested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA_hash_functions)   Anyway, that’s the end of part 1 – although I haven’t started any of the fun stuff (by fun I mean hairpulling, teeth grating Relfection.Emit style fun), I’ve got the basis of the DynamicProxy in place so all we have to worry about now is creating the types, interceptor classes, method invocation information classes and finally a really nice fluent interface that will abstract all of the hard-core craziness away and leave us with a lightning fast, easy to use AOP framework. Hope you find the series interesting. All of the source code can be viewed and/or downloaded at our codeplex site - http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/ Kind Regards, Sean.

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• Getting Started Building Windows 8 Store Apps with XAML/C#

  - by dwahlin

  Technology is fun isn’t it? As soon as you think you’ve figured out where things are heading a new technology comes onto the scene, changes things up, and offers new opportunities. One of the new technologies I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with lately is Windows 8 store applications. I posted my thoughts about Windows 8 during the BUILD conference in 2011 and still feel excited about the opportunity there. Time will tell how well it ends up being accepted by consumers but I’m hopeful that it’ll take off. I currently have two Windows 8 store application concepts I’m working on with one being built in XAML/C# and another in HTML/JavaScript. I really like that Microsoft supports both options since it caters to a variety of developers and makes it easy to get started regardless if you’re a desktop developer or Web developer. Here’s a quick look at how the technologies are organized in Windows 8: In this post I’ll focus on the basics of Windows 8 store XAML/C# apps by looking at features, files, and code provided by Visual Studio projects. To get started building these types of apps you’ll definitely need to have some knowledge of XAML and C#. Let’s get started by looking at the Windows 8 store project types available in Visual Studio 2012.   Windows 8 Store XAML/C# Project Types When you open Visual Studio 2012 you’ll see a new entry under C# named Windows Store. It includes 6 different project types as shown next.   The Blank App project provides initial starter code and a single page whereas the Grid App and Split App templates provide quite a bit more code as well as multiple pages for your application. The other projects available can be be used to create a class library project that runs in Windows 8 store apps, a WinRT component such as a custom control, and a unit test library project respectively. If you’re building an application that displays data in groups using the “tile” concept then the Grid App or Split App project templates are a good place to start. An example of the initial screens generated by each project is shown next: Grid App Split View App   When a user clicks a tile in a Grid App they can view details about the tile data. With a Split View app groups/categories are shown and when the user clicks on a group they can see a list of all the different items and then drill-down into them:   For the remainder of this post I’ll focus on functionality provided by the Blank App project since it provides a simple way to get started learning the fundamentals of building Windows 8 store apps.   Blank App Project Walkthrough The Blank App project is a great place to start since it’s simple and lets you focus on the basics. In this post I’ll focus on what it provides you out of the box and cover additional details in future posts. Once you have the basics down you can move to the other project types if you need the functionality they provide. The Blank App project template does exactly what it says – you get an empty project with a few starter files added to help get you going. This is a good option if you’ll be building an app that doesn’t fit into the grid layout view that you see a lot of Windows 8 store apps following (such as on the Windows 8 start screen). I ended up starting with the Blank App project template for the app I’m currently working on since I’m not displaying data/image tiles (something the Grid App project does well) or drilling down into lists of data (functionality that the Split App project provides). The Blank App project provides images for the tiles and splash screen (you’ll definitely want to change these), a StandardStyles.xaml resource dictionary that includes a lot of helpful styles such as buttons for the AppBar (a special type of menu in Windows 8 store apps), an App.xaml file, and the app’s main page which is named MainPage.xaml. It also adds a Package.appxmanifest that is used to define functionality that your app requires, app information used in the store, plus more. The App.xaml, App.xaml.cs and StandardStyles.xaml Files The App.xaml file handles loading a resource dictionary named StandardStyles.xaml which has several key styles used throughout the application: <Application x:Class="BlankApp.App" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:local="using:BlankApp"> <Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <!-- Styles that define common aspects of the platform look and feel Required by Visual Studio project and item templates --> <ResourceDictionary Source="Common/StandardStyles.xaml"/> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application>   StandardStyles.xaml has style definitions for different text styles and AppBar buttons. If you scroll down toward the middle of the file you’ll see that many AppBar button styles are included such as one for an edit icon. Button styles like this can be used to quickly and easily add icons/buttons into your application without having to be an expert in design. <Style x:Key="EditAppBarButtonStyle" TargetType="ButtonBase" BasedOn="{StaticResource AppBarButtonStyle}"> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.AutomationId" Value="EditAppBarButton"/> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.Name" Value="Edit"/> <Setter Property="Content" Value="&#xE104;"/> </Style> Switching over to App.xaml.cs, it includes some code to help get you started. An OnLaunched() method is added to handle creating a Frame that child pages such as MainPage.xaml can be loaded into. The Frame has the same overall purpose as the one found in WPF and Silverlight applications - it’s used to navigate between pages in an application. /// <summary> /// Invoked when the application is launched normally by the end user. Other entry points /// will be used when the application is launched to open a specific file, to display /// search results, and so forth. /// </summary> /// <param name="args">Details about the launch request and process.</param> protected override void OnLaunched(LaunchActivatedEventArgs args) { Frame rootFrame = Window.Current.Content as Frame; // Do not repeat app initialization when the Window already has content, // just ensure that the window is active if (rootFrame == null) { // Create a Frame to act as the navigation context and navigate to the first page rootFrame = new Frame(); if (args.PreviousExecutionState == ApplicationExecutionState.Terminated) { //TODO: Load state from previously suspended application } // Place the frame in the current Window Window.Current.Content = rootFrame; } if (rootFrame.Content == null) { // When the navigation stack isn't restored navigate to the first page, // configuring the new page by passing required information as a navigation // parameter if (!rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(MainPage), args.Arguments)) { throw new Exception("Failed to create initial page"); } } // Ensure the current window is active Window.Current.Activate(); }   Notice that in addition to creating a Frame the code also checks to see if the app was previously terminated so that you can load any state/data that the user may need when the app is launched again. If you’re new to the lifecycle of Windows 8 store apps the following image shows how an app can be running, suspended, and terminated.   If the user switches from an app they’re running the app will be suspended in memory. The app may stay suspended or may be terminated depending on how much memory the OS thinks it needs so it’s important to save state in case the application is ultimately terminated and has to be started fresh. Although I won’t cover saving application state here, additional information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh465099.aspx. Another method in App.xaml.cs named OnSuspending() is also included in App.xaml.cs that can be used to store state as the user switches to another application:   /// <summary> /// Invoked when application execution is being suspended. Application state is saved /// without knowing whether the application will be terminated or resumed with the contents /// of memory still intact. /// </summary> /// <param name="sender">The source of the suspend request.</param> /// <param name="e">Details about the suspend request.</param> private void OnSuspending(object sender, SuspendingEventArgs e) { var deferral = e.SuspendingOperation.GetDeferral(); //TODO: Save application state and stop any background activity deferral.Complete(); } The MainPage.xaml and MainPage.xaml.cs Files The Blank App project adds a file named MainPage.xaml that acts as the initial screen for the application. It doesn’t include anything aside from an empty <Grid> XAML element in it. The code-behind class named MainPage.xaml.cs includes a constructor as well as a method named OnNavigatedTo() that is called once the page is displayed in the frame.   /// <summary> /// An empty page that can be used on its own or navigated to within a Frame. /// </summary> public sealed partial class MainPage : Page { public MainPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); } /// <summary> /// Invoked when this page is about to be displayed in a Frame. /// </summary> /// <param name="e">Event data that describes how this page was reached. The Parameter /// property is typically used to configure the page.</param> protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e) { } }   If you’re experienced with XAML you can switch to Design mode and start dragging and dropping XAML controls from the ToolBox in Visual Studio. If you prefer to type XAML you can do that as well in the XAML editor or while in split mode. Many of the controls available in WPF and Silverlight are included such as Canvas, Grid, StackPanel, and Border for layout. Standard input controls are also included such as TextBox, CheckBox, PasswordBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, ListBox, and more. MediaElement is available for rendering video or playing audio files. Some of the “common” XAML controls included out of the box are shown next:   Although XAML/C# Windows 8 store apps don’t include all of the functionality available in Silverlight 5, the core functionality required to build store apps is there with additional functionality available in open source projects such as Callisto (started by Microsoft’s Tim Heuer), Q42.WinRT, and others. Standard XAML data binding can be used to bind C# objects to controls, converters can be used to manipulate data during the data binding process, and custom styles and templates can be applied to controls to modify them. Although Visual Studio 2012 doesn’t support visually creating styles or templates, Expression Blend 5 handles that very well. To get started building the initial screen of a Windows 8 app you can start adding controls as mentioned earlier. Simply place them inside of the <Grid> element that’s included. You can arrange controls in a stacked manner using the StackPanel control, add a border around controls using the Border control, arrange controls in columns and rows using the Grid control, or absolutely position controls using the Canvas control. One of the controls that may be new to you is the AppBar. It can be used to add menu/toolbar functionality into a store app and keep the app clean and focused. You can place an AppBar at the top or bottom of the screen. A user on a touch device can swipe up to display the bottom AppBar or right-click when using a mouse. An example of defining an AppBar that contains an Edit button is shown next. The EditAppBarButtonStyle is available in the StandardStyles.xaml file mentioned earlier. <Page.BottomAppBar> <AppBar x:Name="ApplicationAppBar" Padding="10,0,10,0" AutomationProperties.Name="Bottom App Bar"> <Grid> <StackPanel x:Name="RightPanel" Orientation="Horizontal" Grid.Column="1" HorizontalAlignment="Right"> <Button x:Name="Edit" Style="{StaticResource EditAppBarButtonStyle}" Tag="Edit" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> </AppBar> </Page.BottomAppBar> Like standard XAML controls, the <Button> control in the AppBar can be wired to an event handler method in the MainPage.Xaml.cs file or even bound to a ViewModel object using “commanding” if your app follows the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern (check out the MVVM Light package available through NuGet if you’re using MVVM with Windows 8 store apps). The AppBar can be used to navigate to different screens, show and hide controls, display dialogs, show settings screens, and more.   The Package.appxmanifest File The Package.appxmanifest file contains configuration details about your Windows 8 store app. By double-clicking it in Visual Studio you can define the splash screen image, small and wide logo images used for tiles on the start screen, orientation information, and more. You can also define what capabilities the app has such as if it uses the Internet, supports geolocation functionality, requires a microphone or webcam, etc. App declarations such as background processes, file picker functionality, and sharing can also be defined Finally, information about how the app is packaged for deployment to the store can also be defined. Summary If you already have some experience working with XAML technologies you’ll find that getting started building Windows 8 applications is pretty straightforward. Many of the controls available in Silverlight and WPF are available making it easy to get started without having to relearn a lot of new technologies. In the next post in this series I’ll discuss additional features that can be used in your Windows 8 store apps.

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• Mobile Friendly Websites with CSS Media Queries

  - by dwahlin

  In a previous post the concept of CSS media queries was introduced and I discussed the fundamentals of how they can be used to target different screen sizes. I showed how they could be used to convert a 3-column wide page into a more vertical view of data that displays better on devices such as an iPhone:     In this post I'll provide an additional look at how CSS media queries can be used to mobile-enable a sample site called "Widget Masters" without having to change any server-side code or HTML code. The site that will be discussed is shown next:     This site has some of the standard items shown in most websites today including a title area, menu bar, and sections where data is displayed. Without including CSS media queries the site is readable but has to be zoomed out to see everything on a mobile device, cuts-off some of the menu items, and requires horizontal scrolling to get to additional content. The following image shows what the site looks like on an iPhone. While the site works on mobile devices it's definitely not optimized for mobile.     Let's take a look at how CSS media queries can be used to override existing styles in the site based on different screen widths. Adding CSS Media Queries into a Site The Widget Masters Website relies on standard CSS combined with HTML5 elements to provide the layout shown earlier. For example, to layout the menu bar shown at the top of the page the nav element is used as shown next. A standard div element could certainly be used as well if desired.   <nav> <ul class="clearfix"> <li><a href="#home">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#products">Products</a></li> <li><a href="#aboutus">About Us</a></li> <li><a href="#contactus">Contact Us</a></li> <li><a href="#store">Store</a></li> </ul> </nav>   This HTML is combined with the CSS shown next to add a CSS3 gradient, handle the horizontal orientation, and add some general hover effects.   nav { width: 100%; } nav ul { border-radius: 6px; height: 40px; width: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0; background: rgb(125,126,125); /* Old browsers */ background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* FF3.6+ */ background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,rgba(125,126,125,1)), color-stop(100%,rgba(14,14,14,1))); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */ background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */ background: -o-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* Opera 11.10+ */ background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* IE10+ */ background: linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* W3C */ filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#7d7e7d', endColorstr='#0e0e0e',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */ } nav ul > li { list-style: none; float: left; margin: 0; padding: 0; } nav ul > li:first-child { margin-left: 8px; } nav ul > li > a { color: #ccc; text-decoration: none; line-height: 2.8em; font-size: 0.95em; font-weight: bold; padding: 8px 25px 7px 25px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } nav ul > li a:hover { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); color: #fff; }   When mobile devices hit the site the layout of the menu items needs to be adjusted so that they're all visible without having to swipe left or right to get to them. This type of modification can be accomplished using CSS media queries by targeting specific screen sizes. To start, a media query can be added into the site's CSS file as shown next: @media screen and (max-width:320px) { /* CSS style overrides for this screen width go here */ } This media query targets screens that have a maximum width of 320 pixels. Additional types of queries can also be added – refer to my previous post for more details as well as resources that can be used to test media queries in different devices. In that post I emphasize (and I'll emphasize again) that CSS media queries only modify the overall layout and look and feel of a site. They don't optimize the site as far as the size of the images or content sent to the device which is important to keep in mind. To make the navigation menu more accessible on devices such as an iPhone or Android the CSS shown next can be used. This code changes the height of the menu from 40 pixels to 100%, takes off the li element floats, changes the line-height, and changes the margins.   @media screen and (max-width:320px) { nav ul { height: 100%; } nav ul > li { float: none; } nav ul > li a { line-height: 1.5em; } nav ul > li:first-child { margin-left: 0px; } /* Additional CSS overrides go here */ }   The following image shows an example of what the menu look like when run on a device with a width of 320 pixels:   Mobile devices with a maximum width of 480 pixels need different CSS styles applied since they have 160 additional pixels of width. This can be done by adding a new CSS media query into the stylesheet as shown next. Looking through the CSS you'll see that only a minimal override is added to adjust the padding of anchor tags since the menu fits by default in this screen width.   @media screen and (max-width: 480px) { nav ul > li > a { padding: 8px 10px 7px 10px; } }   Running the site on a device with 480 pixels results in the menu shown next being rendered. Notice that the space between the menu items is much smaller compared to what was shown when the main site loads in a standard browser.     In addition to modifying the menu, the 3 horizontal content sections shown earlier can be changed from a horizontal layout to a vertical layout so that they look good on a variety of smaller mobile devices and are easier to navigate by end users. The HTML5 article and section elements are used as containers for the 3 sections in the site as shown next:   <article class="clearfix"> <section id="info"> <header>Why Choose Us?</header> <br /> <img id="mainImage" src="Images/ArticleImage.png" title="Article Image" /> <p> Post emensos insuperabilis expeditionis eventus languentibus partium animis, quas periculorum varietas fregerat et laborum, nondum tubarum cessante clangore vel milite locato per stationes hibernas. </p> </section> <section id="products"> <header>Products</header> <br /> <img id="gearsImage" src="Images/Gears.png" title="Article Image" /> <p> <ul> <li>Widget 1</li> <li>Widget 2</li> <li>Widget 3</li> <li>Widget 4</li> <li>Widget 5</li> </ul> </p> </section> <section id="FAQ"> <header>FAQ</header> <br /> <img id="faqImage" src="Images/faq.png" title="Article Image" /> <p> <ul> <li>FAQ 1</li> <li>FAQ 2</li> <li>FAQ 3</li> <li>FAQ 4</li> <li>FAQ 5</li> </ul> </p> </section> </article>   To force the sections into a vertical layout for smaller mobile devices the CSS styles shown next can be added into the media queries targeting 320 pixel and 480 pixel widths. Styles to target the display size of the images in each section are also included. It's important to note that the original image is still being downloaded from the server and isn't being optimized in any way for the mobile device. It's certainly possible for the CSS to include URL information for a mobile-optimized image if desired. @media screen and (max-width:320px) { section { float: none; width: 97%; margin: 0px; padding: 5px; } #wrapper { padding: 5px; width: 96%; } #mainImage, #gearsImage, #faqImage { width: 100%; height: 100px; } } @media screen and (max-width: 480px) { section { float: none; width: 98%; margin: 0px 0px 10px 0px; padding: 5px; } article > section:last-child { margin-right: 0px; float: none; } #bottomSection { width: 99%; } #wrapper { padding: 5px; width: 96%; } #mainImage, #gearsImage, #faqImage { width: 100%; height: 100px; } }   The following images show the site rendered on an iPhone with the CSS media queries in place. Each of the sections now displays vertically making it much easier for the user to access them. Images inside of each section also scale appropriately to fit properly.     CSS media queries provide a great way to override default styles in a website and target devices with different resolutions. In this post you've seen how CSS media queries can be used to convert a standard browser-based site into a site that is more accessible to mobile users. Although much more can be done to optimize sites for mobile, CSS media queries provide a nice starting point if you don't have the time or resources to create mobile-specific versions of sites.

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• Setting up and using Bing Translate API Service for Machine Translation

  - by Rick Strahl

  Last week I spent quite a bit of time trying to set up the Bing Translate API service. I can honestly say this was one of the most screwed up developer experiences I've had in a long while - specifically related to the byzantine sign up process that Microsoft has in place. Not only is it nearly impossible to find decent documentation on the required signup process, some of the links in the docs are just plain wrong, and some of the account pages you need to access the actual account information once signed up are not linked anywhere from the administration UI. To make things even harder is the fact that the APIs changed a while back, with a completely new authentication scheme that's described and not directly linked documentation topic also made for a very frustrating search experience. It's a bummer that this is the case too, because the actual API itself is easy to use and works very well - fast and reasonably accurate (as accurate as you can expect machine translation to be). But the sign up process is a pain in the ass doubtlessly leaving many people giving up in frustration. In this post I'll try to hit all the points needed to set up to use the Bing Translate API in one place since such a document seems to be missing from Microsoft. Hopefully the API folks at Microsoft will get their shit together and actually provide this sort of info on their site… Signing Up The first step required is to create a Windows Azure MarketPlace account. Go to: https://datamarket.azure.com/ Sign in with your Windows Live Id If you don't have an account you will be taken to a registration page which you have to fill out. Follow the links and complete the registration. Once you're signed in you can start adding services. Click on the Data Link on the main page Select Microsoft Translator from the list This adds the Microsoft Bing Translator to your services. Pricing The page shows the pricing matrix and the free service which provides 2 megabytes for translations a month for free. Prices go up steeply from there. Pricing is determined by actual bytes of the result translations used. Max translations are 1000 characters so at minimum this means you get around 2000 translations a month for free. However most translations are probable much less so you can expect larger number of translations to go through. For testing or low volume translations this should be just fine. Once signed up there are no further instructions and you're left in limbo on the MS site. Register your Application Once you've created the Data association with Translator the next step is registering your application. To do this you need to access your developer account. Go to https://datamarket.azure.com/developer/applications/register Provide a ClientId, which is effectively the unique string identifier for your application (not your customer id!) Provide your name The client secret was auto-created and this becomes your 'password' For the redirect url provide any https url: https://microsoft.com works Give this application a description of your choice so you can identify it in the list of apps Now, once you've registered your application, keep track of the ClientId and ClientSecret - those are the two keys you need to authenticate before you can call the Translate API. Oddly the applications page is hidden from the Azure Portal UI. I couldn't find a direct link from anywhere on the site back to this page where I can examine my developer application keys. To find them you can go to: https://datamarket.azure.com/developer/applications You can come back here to look at your registered applications and pick up the ClientID and ClientSecret. Fun eh? But we're now ready to actually call the API and do some translating. Using the Bing Translate API The good news is that after this signup hell, using the API is pretty straightforward. To use the translation API you'll need to actually use two services: You need to call an authentication API service first, before you can call the actual translator API. These two APIs live on different domains, and the authentication API returns JSON data while the translator service returns XML. So much for consistency. Authentication The first step is authentication. The service uses oAuth authentication with a  bearer token that has to be passed to the translator API. The authentication call retrieves the oAuth token that you can then use with the translate API call. The bearer token has a short 10 minute life time, so while you can cache it for successive calls, the token can't be cached for long periods. This means for Web backend requests you typically will have to authenticate each time unless you build a more elaborate caching scheme that takes the timeout into account (perhaps using the ASP.NET Cache object). For low volume operations you can probably get away with simply calling the auth API for every translation you do. To call the Authentication API use code like this:/// /// Retrieves an oAuth authentication token to be used on the translate /// API request. The result string needs to be passed as a bearer token /// to the translate API. /// /// You can find client ID and Secret (or register a new one) at: /// https://datamarket.azure.com/developer/applications/ /// /// The client ID of your application /// The client secret or password /// public string GetBingAuthToken(string clientId = null, string clientSecret = null) { string authBaseUrl = https://datamarket.accesscontrol.windows.net/v2/OAuth2-13; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(clientId) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(clientSecret)) { ErrorMessage = Resources.Resources.Client_Id_and_Client_Secret_must_be_provided; return null; } var postData = string.Format("grant_type=client_credentials&client_id={0}" + "&client_secret={1}" + "&scope=http://api.microsofttranslator.com", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(clientId), HttpUtility.UrlEncode(clientSecret)); // POST Auth data to the oauth API string res, token; try { var web = new WebClient(); web.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8; res = web.UploadString(authBaseUrl, postData); } catch (Exception ex) { ErrorMessage = ex.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); var auth = ser.Deserialize<BingAuth>(res); if (auth == null) return null; token = auth.access_token; return token; } private class BingAuth { public string token_type { get; set; } public string access_token { get; set; } } This code basically takes the client id and secret and posts it at the oAuth endpoint which returns a JSON string. Here I use the JavaScript serializer to deserialize the JSON into a custom object I created just for deserialization. You can also use JSON.NET and dynamic deserialization if you are already using JSON.NET in your app in which case you don't need the extra type. In my library that houses this component I don't, so I just rely on the built in serializer. The auth method returns a long base64 encoded string which can be used as a bearer token in the translate API call. Translation Once you have the authentication token you can use it to pass to the translate API. The auth token is passed as an Authorization header and the value is prefixed with a 'Bearer ' prefix for the string. Here's what the simple Translate API call looks like:/// /// Uses the Bing API service to perform translation /// Bing can translate up to 1000 characters. /// /// Requires that you provide a CLientId and ClientSecret /// or set the configuration values for these two. /// /// More info on setup: /// http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/ /// /// Text to translate /// Two letter culture name /// Two letter culture name /// Pass an access token retrieved with GetBingAuthToken. /// If not passed the default keys from .config file are used if any /// public string TranslateBing(string text, string fromCulture, string toCulture, string accessToken = null) { string serviceUrl = "http://api.microsofttranslator.com/V2/Http.svc/Translate"; if (accessToken == null) { accessToken = GetBingAuthToken(); if (accessToken == null) return null; } string res; try { var web = new WebClient(); web.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Bearer " + accessToken); string ct = "text/plain"; string postData = string.Format("?text={0}&from={1}&to={2}&contentType={3}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(text), fromCulture, toCulture, HttpUtility.UrlEncode(ct)); web.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8; res = web.DownloadString(serviceUrl + postData); } catch (Exception e) { ErrorMessage = e.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } // result is a single XML Element fragment var doc = new XmlDocument(); doc.LoadXml(res); return doc.DocumentElement.InnerText; } The first of this code deals with ensuring the auth token exists. You can either pass the token into the method manually or let the method automatically retrieve the auth code on its own. In my case I'm using this inside of a Web application and in that situation I simply need to re-authenticate every time as there's no convenient way to manage the lifetime of the auth cookie. The auth token is added as an Authorization HTTP header prefixed with 'Bearer ' and attached to the request. The text to translate, the from and to language codes and a result format are passed on the query string of this HTTP GET request against the Translate API. The translate API returns an XML string which contains a single element with the translated string. Using the Wrapper Methods It should be pretty obvious how to use these two methods but here are a couple of test methods that demonstrate the two usage scenarios:[TestMethod] public void TranslateBingWithAuthTest() { var translate = new TranslationServices(); string clientId = DbResourceConfiguration.Current.BingClientId; string clientSecret = DbResourceConfiguration.Current.BingClientSecret; string auth = translate.GetBingAuthToken(clientId, clientSecret); Assert.IsNotNull(auth); string text = translate.TranslateBing("Hello World we're back home!", "en", "de",auth); Assert.IsNotNull(text, translate.ErrorMessage); Console.WriteLine(text); } [TestMethod] public void TranslateBingIntegratedTest() { var translate = new TranslationServices(); string text = translate.TranslateBing("Hello World we're back home!","en","de"); Assert.IsNotNull(text, translate.ErrorMessage); Console.WriteLine(text); } Other API Methods The Translate API has a number of methods available and this one is the simplest one but probably also the most common one that translates a single string. You can find additional methods for this API here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff512419.aspx Soap and AJAX APIs are also available and documented on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd576287.aspx These links will be your starting points for calling other methods in this API. Dual Interface I've talked about my database driven localization provider here in the past, and it's for this tool that I added the Bing localization support. Basically I have a localization administration form that allows me to translate individual strings right out of the UI, using both Google and Bing APIs: As you can see in this example, the results from Google and Bing can vary quite a bit - in this case Google is stumped while Bing actually generated a valid translation. At other times it's the other way around - it's pretty useful to see multiple translations at the same time. Here I can choose from one of the values and driectly embed them into the translated text field. Lost in Translation There you have it. As I mentioned using the API once you have all the bureaucratic crap out of the way calling the APIs is fairly straight forward and reasonably fast, even if you have to call the Auth API for every call. Hopefully this post will help out a few of you trying to navigate the Microsoft bureaucracy, at least until next time Microsoft upends everything and introduces new ways to sign up again. Until then - happy translating… Related Posts Translation method Source on Github Translating with Google Translate without Google API Keys Creating a data-driven ASP.NET Resource Provider© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Localization  ASP.NET  .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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• Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods

  - by Rick Strahl

  ASP.NET Web API introduces a new API for creating REST APIs and making AJAX callbacks to the server. This new API provides a host of new great functionality that unifies many of the features of many of the various AJAX/REST APIs that Microsoft created before it - ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST specifically - and combines them into a whole more consistent API. Web API addresses many of the concerns that developers had with these older APIs, namely that it was very difficult to build consistent REST style resource APIs easily. While Web API provides many new features and makes many scenarios much easier, a lot of the focus has been on making it easier to build REST compliant APIs that are focused on resource based solutions and HTTP verbs. But  RPC style calls that are common with AJAX callbacks in Web applications, have gotten a lot less focus and there are a few scenarios that are not that obvious, especially if you're expecting Web API to provide functionality similar to ASP.NET AJAX style AJAX callbacks. RPC vs. 'Proper' REST RPC style HTTP calls mimic calling a method with parameters and returning a result. Rather than mapping explicit server side resources or 'nouns' RPC calls tend simply map a server side operation, passing in parameters and receiving a typed result where parameters and result values are marshaled over HTTP. Typically RPC calls - like SOAP calls - tend to always be POST operations rather than following HTTP conventions and using the GET/POST/PUT/DELETE etc. verbs to implicitly determine what operation needs to be fired. RPC might not be considered 'cool' anymore, but for typical private AJAX backend operations of a Web site I'd wager that a large percentage of use cases of Web API will fall towards RPC style calls rather than 'proper' REST style APIs. Web applications that have needs for things like live validation against data, filling data based on user inputs, handling small UI updates often don't lend themselves very well to limited HTTP verb usage. It might not be what the cool kids do, but I don't see RPC calls getting replaced by proper REST APIs any time soon.  Proper REST has its place - for 'real' API scenarios that manage and publish/share resources, but for more transactional operations RPC seems a better choice and much easier to implement than trying to shoehorn a boatload of endpoint methods into a few HTTP verbs. In any case Web API does a good job of providing both RPC abstraction as well as the HTTP Verb/REST abstraction. RPC works well out of the box, but there are some differences especially if you're coming from ASP.NET AJAX service or WCF Rest when it comes to multiple parameters. Action Routing for RPC Style Calls If you've looked at Web API demos you've probably seen a bunch of examples of how to create HTTP Verb based routing endpoints. Verb based routing essentially maps a controller and then uses HTTP verbs to map the methods that are called in response to HTTP requests. This works great for resource APIs but doesn't work so well when you have many operational methods in a single controller. HTTP Verb routing is limited to the few HTTP verbs available (plus separate method signatures) and - worse than that - you can't easily extend the controller with custom routes or action routing beyond that. Thankfully Web API also supports Action based routing which allows you create RPC style endpoints fairly easily:RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumRpcApiAction", routeTemplate: "albums/{action}/{title}", defaults: new { title = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "AlbumApi", action = "GetAblums" } ); This uses traditional MVC style {action} method routing which is different from the HTTP verb based routing you might have read a bunch about in conjunction with Web API. Action based routing like above lets you specify an end point method in a Web API controller either via the {action} parameter in the route string or via a default value for custom routes. Using routing you can pass multiple parameters either on the route itself or pass parameters on the query string, via ModelBinding or content value binding. For most common scenarios this actually works very well. As long as you are passing either a single complex type via a POST operation, or multiple simple types via query string or POST buffer, there's no issue. But if you need to pass multiple parameters as was easily done with WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX things are not so obvious. Web API has no issue allowing for single parameter like this:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album) { return String.Format("{0} {1:d}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered); } There are actually two ways to call this endpoint: albums/PostAlbum Using the Model Binder with plain POST values In this mechanism you're sending plain urlencoded POST values to the server which the ModelBinder then maps the parameter. Each property value is matched to each matching POST value. This works similar to the way that MVC's  ModelBinder works. Here's how you can POST using the ModelBinder and jQuery:$.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", data: { AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds", Entered: "5/1/2012" }, success: function (result) { alert(result); }, error: function (xhr, status, p3, p4) { var err = "Error " + " " + status + " " + p3; if (xhr.responseText && xhr.responseText[0] == "{") err = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText).message; alert(err); } }); Here's what the POST data looks like for this request: The model binder and it's straight form based POST mechanism is great for posting data directly from HTML pages to model objects. It avoids having to do manual conversions for many operations and is a great boon for AJAX callback requests. Using Web API JSON Formatter The other option is to post data using a JSON string. The process for this is similar except that you create a JavaScript object and serialize it to JSON first.album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: new Date(1977,0,1) } $.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify(album), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Here the data is sent using a JSON object rather than form data and the data is JSON encoded over the wire. The trace reveals that the data is sent using plain JSON (Source above), which is a little more efficient since there's no UrlEncoding that occurs. BTW, notice that WebAPI automatically deals with the date. I provided the date as a plain string, rather than a JavaScript date value and the Formatter and ModelBinder both automatically map the date propertly to the Entered DateTime property of the Album object. Passing multiple Parameters to a Web API Controller Single parameters work fine in either of these RPC scenarios and that's to be expected. ModelBinding always works against a single object because it maps a model. But what happens when you want to pass multiple parameters? Consider an API Controller method that has a signature like the following:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album, string userToken) Here I'm asking to pass two objects to an RPC method. Is that possible? This used to be fairly straight forward either with WCF REST and ASP.NET AJAX ASMX services, but as far as I can tell this is not directly possible using a POST operation with WebAPI. There a few workarounds that you can use to make this work: Use both POST *and* QueryString Parameters in Conjunction If you have both complex and simple parameters, you can pass simple parameters on the query string. The above would actually work with: /album/PostAlbum?userToken=sekkritt but that's not always possible. In this example it might not be a good idea to pass a user token on the query string though. It also won't work if you need to pass multiple complex objects, since query string values do not support complex type mapping. They only work with simple types. Use a single Object that wraps the two Parameters If you go by service based architecture guidelines every service method should always pass and return a single value only. The input should wrap potentially multiple input parameters and the output should convey status as well as provide the result value. You typically have a xxxRequest and a xxxResponse class that wraps the inputs and outputs. Here's what this method might look like:public PostAlbumResponse PostAlbum(PostAlbumRequest request) { var album = request.Album; var userToken = request.UserToken; return new PostAlbumResponse() { IsSuccess = true, Result = String.Format("{0} {1:d} {2}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered,userToken) }; } with these support types:public class PostAlbumRequest { public Album Album { get; set; } public User User { get; set; } public string UserToken { get; set; } } public class PostAlbumResponse { public string Result { get; set; } public bool IsSuccess { get; set; } public string ErrorMessage { get; set; } }   To call this method you now have to assemble these objects on the client and send it up as JSON:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result.Result); } }); I assemble the individual types first and then combine them in the data: property of the $.ajax() call into the actual object passed to the server, that mimics the structure of PostAlbumRequest server class that has Album, User and UserToken properties. This works well enough but it gets tedious if you have to create Request and Response types for each method signature. If you have common parameters that are always passed (like you always pass an album or usertoken) you might be able to abstract this to use a single object that gets reused for all methods, but this gets confusing too: Overload a single 'parameter' too much and it becomes a nightmare to decipher what your method actual can use. Use JObject to parse multiple Property Values out of an Object If you recall, ASP.NET AJAX and WCF REST used a 'wrapper' object to make default AJAX calls. Rather than directly calling a service you always passed an object which contained properties for each parameter: { parm1: Value, parm2: Value2 } WCF REST/ASP.NET AJAX would then parse this top level property values and map them to the parameters of the endpoint method. This automatic type wrapping functionality is no longer available directly in Web API, but since Web API now uses JSON.NET for it's JSON serializer you can actually simulate that behavior with a little extra code. You can use the JObject class to receive a dynamic JSON result and then using the dynamic cast of JObject to walk through the child objects and even parse them into strongly typed objects. Here's how to do this on the API Controller end:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(JObject jsonData) { dynamic json = jsonData; JObject jalbum = json.Album; JObject juser = json.User; string token = json.UserToken; var album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); var user = juser.ToObject<User>(); return String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", album.AlbumName, user.Name, token); } This is clearly not as nice as having the parameters passed directly, but it works to allow you to pass multiple parameters and access them using Web API. JObject is JSON.NET's generic object container which sports a nice dynamic interface that allows you to walk through the object's properties using standard 'dot' object syntax. All you have to do is cast the object to dynamic to get access to the property interface of the JSON type. Additionally JObject also allows you to parse JObject instances into strongly typed objects, which enables us here to retrieve the two objects passed as parameters from this jquery code:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Summary ASP.NET Web API brings many new features and many advantages over the older Microsoft AJAX and REST APIs, but realize that some things like passing multiple strongly typed object parameters will work a bit differently. It's not insurmountable, but just knowing what options are available to simulate this behavior is good to know. Now let me say here that it's probably not a good practice to pass a bunch of parameters to an API call. Ideally APIs should be closely factored to accept single parameters or a single content parameter at least along with some identifier parameters that can be passed on the querystring. But saying that doesn't mean that occasionally you don't run into a situation where you have the need to pass several objects to the server and all three of the options I mentioned might have merit in different situations. For now I'm sure the question of how to pass multiple parameters will come up quite a bit from people migrating WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX code to Web API. At least there are options available to make it work.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   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 Saturday, February 19, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 19, 2011Popular ReleasesAdvanced Explorer for Wp7: Advanced Explorer for Wp7 Version 1.4 Test8: Added option to run under Lockscreen. Fixed a bug when you open a pdf/mobi file without starting adobe reader/amazon kindle first boost loading time for folders added \Windows directory (all devices) you can now interact with the filesystem while it is loading!Game Files Open - Map Editor: Game Files Open - Map Editor Beta 2 v1.0.0.0: The 2° beta release of the Map Editor, we have fixed a big bug of the files regen.Document.Editor: 2011.6: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.6: New Left to Right and Left to Right support New Indent more/less support Improved Home tab Improved Tooltips/shortcut keys Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsCatel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.2: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com =========== Version 1.2 =========== Release date: ============= 2011/02/17 Added/fixed: ============ (+) DataObjectBase now supports Isolated Storage out of the box: Person.Save(myStream) stores a whole object graph in Silverlight (+) DataObjectBase can now be converted to Json via Person.ToJson(); (+)...??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-02-18: ?????All-In-One Code Framework?2011??????????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????，?????AzureBingMaps??????，??Azure，WCF, Silverlight, Window Phone????????，????????????????????????。 ???： Windows Azure SQL Azure Windows Azure AppFabric Windows Live Messenger Connect Bing Maps ?????： ??????HTML??? ??Windows PC?Mac?Silverlight??? ??Windows Phone?Silverlight??? ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011...Image.Viewer: 2011: First version of 2011Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Feb 2011: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit OverviewSilverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in the Create.msdn.com forum. Add bugs or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Help us shape the Silverlight Toolkit with your feedback! Please clearly indicate that the work items and issues are for the phone t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 29 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 29 (beta)New: Added VsTortoise Solution Explorer integration for Web Project Folder, Web Folder and Web Item. Fix: TortoiseProc was called with invalid parameters, when using TSVN 1.4.x or older #7338 (thanks psifive) Fix: Add-in does not work, when "TortoiseSVN/bin" is not added to PATH environment variable #7357 Fix: Missing error message when ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.3 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.3 Community Edition We are happy to introduce you the latest version of Sense/Net with integrated ECM Workflow capabilities! In the past weeks we have been working hard to migrate the product to .Net 4 and include a workflow framework in Sense/Net built upon Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This brand new feature enables developers to define and develop workflows, and supports users when building and setting up complicated business processes involving content creation and response...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.11): Features Added a new option that allows properties on data contract types to be marked as virtual. Bug Fixes Fixed a bug caused by certain project properties not being available on Web Service Software Factory projects. Fixed a bug that could result in the WrapperName value of the MessageContractAttribute being incorrect when the Adjust Casing option is used. The menu item code now caters for CommandBar instances that are not available. For example the Web Item CommandBar does not exist ...Terminals: Version 2 - RC1: The "Clean Install" will overwrite your log4net configuration (if you have one). If you run in a Portable Environment, you can use the "Clean Install" and target your portable folder. Tested and it works fine. Changes for this release: Re-worked on the Toolstip settings are done, just to avoid the vs.net clash with auto-generating files for .settings files. renamed it to .settings.config Packged both log4net and ToolStripSettings files into the installer Upgraded the version inform...AllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.Jint - Javascript Interpreter for .NET: Jint - 0.9.0: New CLR interoperability features Many bugfixesBuild Version Increment Add-In Visual Studio: Build Version Increment v2.4.11046.2045: v2.4.11046.2045 Fixes and/or Improvements:Major: Added complete support for VC projects including .vcxproj & .vcproj. All padding issues fixed. A project's assembly versions are only changed if the project has been modified. Minor Order of versioning style values is now according to their respective positions in the attributes i.e. Major, Minor, Build, Revision. Fixed issue with global variable storage with some projects. Fixed issue where if a project item's file does not exist, a ...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1 release. Bug fixes and minor feature requests addedTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksNuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues list A...New ProjectsComplexityEvolution: Research projectCRM 2011 Metadata Browser: The CRM 2011 Metadata Browser is a Silverlight 4 application that is packaged as a Managed CRM Solution. This tool allows you to view metadata including Entities, Attributes and Relationships. The 2011 SOAP endpoint is used to connect to CRM using the Organization.svc/web serviceEFCFvsNH3: A sample project that shows the main differences between Entity Framework Code First and Nhibernate 3: -Mapping -Configuration -DB Initialization -Query API -Session & Transaction -ValidationE-Teacher for IELTS preparation: E-teacher helps IELTS students prepare for the IELTS Academic and General Training test. Qualified English Teachers can register to the e-community and helps candidates to understand what they really need to improve for the IELTS exam and how to reach for the maximum band score.FIM CM Extensions: Extensions for Forefront Identity Manager 2010 to enable integration between the FIM Service workflow and the FIM Certificate Management workflow. Game Files Open - Map Editor: This is a map editor for the metin2 clients, it's very simple edit or create a map with this tool.Garbage Collection Sample Code: Garbage collection sample code demonstrates the differences between the large and small object heaps. This code supports the blog post at http://www.deepcode.co.ukGardenersWorld: The aim of gardenersWorld community website is to provide a platform for budding gardenening enthusiasts, hobbyists and professionals to share information. Harvester - Debug Monitor for Log4Net and NLog: Harvester enables you to monitor all Win32 debug output from all applications running on your machine. Watch real time Log4Net and NLog output across multiple applications at the same time. Trace a call from client to server and back without having to look at multiple log files.Hjelp! Jeg skal ha farmakokinetikk-eksamen!: Sliter du med å pugge formler til farmakokinetikk-eksamenen? Da er redningen din her! :DMercury Business Framework: Mercury Business Framework is a project set up to define basic objects used by the vast majority of business and non business software. The idea is to define the low level objects required by most applications on the web and desktop.MyDistrictBuilder: MyDistrictBuilder allows anybody to build legislative districts and submit to the Florida House of Rep. It is built on Bing Maps, Silverlight and AZURE. Written in C#. It is written to allow anyone to adapt for any states census geography. www.floridaredistricting.cloudapp.netMySchoolApp: MySchoolApp is a customizable application written in Visual Basic and C# for the Windows Mobile Phone 7 platform using Visual Studio Professional 2010. The application combines links to RSS and Web sites about a school, and displays a map and local weather. Osm Parser Community Edition: Osm Parser parse highways in open street maps to generate routable roads network in spatialite.PRBox Cloud Website: This is the website base for PRBox.com SEO Reporter : open source search engine optimization software: SEO Reporter is an open source search engine optimization application for detecting HTML related SEO violations, gathering data about a Web page and analyzing its keywords strategy. It's a Windows navigation application developed in F#. Setting timeout for SharePoint 2010 Silverlight web part: This web part overwrites 5sec hard-coded timeout for SharePoint 2010 Silverlight web part.SharePoint 2010 Central Administration Automatic Resources Link Generator: This feature will automatically generate the resources links list (Quick Links) in your SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site making it easier for SharePoint Admins to navigate through the common Central Administration activities without populating it themselves - VS2010/c#SharePoint Holiday Loader: SharePoint Holiday Loader allows you to quickly import public holidays into a SharePoint calendar from the standard .HOL format.Sohu?????: ?????????WPF?????????????，????????????（??、??、???），??、??、???????，????????????，??????????????。 ??V1????????，V2?????????????????。SP2010 Form Manipulator: This project will hopefully make it easier to manipulate the list form in SharePoint 2010.SPRotator: A jQuery powered web part for SharePoint that cycles through any type of list.SQL Script to Create a Website Directory: Here you can download sql script to create a website directory using SQL Server. * This is only the easy directory sql script to develop your website. Directory software may publish in future.Sri Hits Zone: This is an online repository which used to share Sri Lankan music. This is to provide Sri Lankans who living abroad to being touches with Sri Lankan artist and their music. testz: testzTime domain dissipative acoustic problem: tddapWindows Azure Hosted Services VM Manager: Windows Azure Hosted Services VM Manager is a Windows Service that can manage the number of hosted services running in Azure by either a time based schedule or by CPU load. This allows your service to scale for either dynamic load or a known schedule. Z80TR: Z80TR

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• Ops Center 12c - Provisioning Solaris Using a Card-Based NIC

  - by scottdickson

  It's been a long time since last I added something here, but having some conversations this last week, I got inspired to update things. I've been spending a lot of time with Ops Center for managing and installing systems these days.  So, I suspect a number of my upcoming posts will be in that area. Today, I want to look at how to provision Solaris using Ops Center when your network is not connected to one of the built-in NICs.  We'll talk about how this can work for both Solaris 10 and Solaris 11, since they are pretty similar.  In both cases, WANboot is a key piece of the story. Here's what I want to do:  I have a Sun Fire T2000 server with a Quad-GbE nxge card installed.  The only network is connected to port 2 on that card rather than the built-in network interfaces.  I want to install Solaris on it across the network, either Solaris 10 or Solaris 11.  I have met with a lot of customers lately who have a similar architecture.  Usually, they have T4-4 servers with the network connected via 10GbE connections. Add to this mix the fact that I use Ops Center to manage the systems in my lab, so I really would like to add this to Ops Center.  If possible, I would like this to be completely hands free.  I can't quite do that yet. Close, but not quite. WANBoot or Old-Style NetBoot? When a system is installed from the network, it needs some help getting the process rolling.  It has to figure out what its network configuration (IP address, gateway, etc.) ought to be.  It needs to figure out what server is going to help it boot and install, and it needs the instructions for the installation.  There are two different ways to bootstrap an installation of Solaris on SPARC across the network.   The old way uses a broadcast of RARP or more recently DHCP to obtain the IP configuration and the rest of the information needed.  The second is to explicitly configure this information in the OBP and use WANBoot for installation WANBoot has a number of benefits over broadcast-based installation: it is not restricted to a single subnet; it does not require special DHCP configuration or DHCP helpers; it uses standard HTTP and HTTPS protocols which traverse firewalls much more easily than NFS-based package installation.  But, WANBoot is not available on really old hardware and WANBoot requires the use o Flash Archives in Solaris 10.  Still, for many people, this is a great approach. As it turns out, WANBoot is necessary if you plan to install using a NIC on a card rather than a built-in NIC. Identifying Which Network Interface to Use One of the trickiest aspects to this process, and the one that actually requires manual intervention to set up, is identifying how the OBP and Solaris refer to the NIC that we want to use to boot.  The OBP already has device aliases configured for the built-in NICs called net, net0, net1, net2, net3.  The device alias net typically points to net0 so that when you issue the command  "boot net -v install", it uses net0 for the boot.  Our task is to figure out the network instance for the NIC we want to use.  We will need to get to the OBP console of the system we want to install in order to figure out what the network should be called.  I will presume you know how to get to the ok prompt.  Once there, we have to see what networks the OBP sees and identify which one is associated with our NIC using the OBP command show-nets. SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0 64-bit Copyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. {4} ok banner Sun Fire T200, No Keyboard Copyright (c) 1998, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.30.4.b, 32640 MB memory available, Serial #69057548. Ethernet address 0:14:4f:1d:bc:c, Host ID: 841dbc0c. {4} ok show-nets a) /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0,1 b) /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0 c) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,3 d) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 e) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,1 f) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0 g) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0,1 h) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 q) NO SELECTION Enter Selection, q to quit: d /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 has been selected. Type ^Y ( Control-Y ) to insert it in the command line. e.g. ok nvalias mydev ^Y for creating devalias mydev for /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok devalias ... net3 /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0,1 net2 /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0 net1 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0,1 net0 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 ... name aliases By looking at the devalias and the show-nets output, we can see that our Quad-GbE card must be the device nodes starting with  /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0.  The cable for our network is plugged into the 3rd slot, so the device address for our network must be /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2. With that, we can create a device alias for our network interface.  Naming the device alias may take a little bit of trial and error, especially in Solaris 11 where the device alias seems to matter more with the new virtualized network stack. So far in my testing, since this is the "next" network interface to be used, I have found success in naming it net4, even though it's a NIC in the middle of a card that might, by rights, be called net6 (assuming the 0th interface on the card is the next interface identified by Solaris and this is the 3rd interface on the card).  So, we will call it net4.  We need to assign a device alias to it: {4} ok nvalias net4 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok devalias net4 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 ... We also may need to have the MAC for this particular interface, so let's get it, too.  To do this, we go to the device and interrogate its properties. {4} ok cd /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok .properties assigned-addresses 82060210 00000000 03000000 00000000 01000000 82060218 00000000 00320000 00000000 00008000 82060220 00000000 00328000 00000000 00008000 82060230 00000000 00600000 00000000 00100000 local-mac-address 00 21 28 20 42 92 phy-type mif ... From this, we can see that the MAC for this interface is  00:21:28:20:42:92.  We will need this later. This is all we need to do at the OBP.  Now, we can configure Ops Center to use this interface. Network Boot in Solaris 10 Solaris 10 turns out to be a little simpler than Solaris 11 for this sort of a network boot.  Since WANBoot in Solaris 10 fetches a specified In order to install the system using Ops Center, it is necessary to create a OS Provisioning profile and its corresponding plan.  I am going to presume that you already know how to do this within Ops Center 12c and I will just cover the differences between a regular profile and a profile that can use an alternate interface. Create a OS Provisioning profile for Solaris 10 as usual.  However, when you specify the network resources for the primary network, click on the name of the NIC, probably GB_0, and rename it to GB_N/netN, where N is the instance number you used previously in creating the device alias.  This is where the trial and error may come into play.  You may need to try a few instance numbers before you, the OBP, and Solaris all agree on the instance number.  Mark this as the boot network. For Solaris 10, you ought to be able to then apply the OS Provisioning profile to the server and it should install using that interface.  And if you put your cards in the same slots and plug the networks into the same NICs, this profile is reusable across multiple servers. Why This Works If you watch the console as Solaris boots during the OSP process, Ops Center is going to look for the device alias netN.  Since WANBoot requires a device alias called just net, Ops Center uses the value of your netN device alias and assigns that device to the net alias.  That means that boot net will automatically use this device.  Very cool!  Here's a trace from the console as Ops Center provisions a server: Sun Sun Fire T200, No KeyboardCopyright (c) 1998, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.OpenBoot 4.30.4.b, 32640 MB memory available, Serial #69057548.Ethernet address 0:14:4f:1d:bc:c, Host ID: 841dbc0c.auto-boot? =            false{0} ok  {0} ok printenv network-boot-argumentsnetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok devalias net net                      /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0{0} ok devalias net4 net4                     /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok devalias net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok setenv network-boot-arguments host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:8004/cgi-bin/wanboot-cginetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:8004/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok boot net - installBoot device: /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2  File and args: - install/pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2: 1000 Mbps link up<time unavailable> wanboot info: WAN boot messages->console<time unavailable> wanboot info: configuring /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 See what happened?  Ops Center looked for the network device alias called net4 that we specified in the profile, took the value from it, and made it the net device alias for the boot.  Pretty cool! WANBoot and Solaris 11 Solaris 11 requires an additional step since the Automated Installer in Solaris 11 uses the MAC address of the network to figure out which manifest to use for system installation.  In order to make sure this is available, we have to take an extra step to associate the MAC of the NIC on the card with the host.  So, in addition to creating the device alias like we did above, we also have to declare to Ops Center that the host has this new MAC. Declaring the NIC Start out by discovering the hardware as usual.  Once you have discovered it, take a look under the Connectivity tab to see what networks it has discovered.  In the case of this system, it shows the 4 built-in networks, but not the networks on the additional cards.  These are not directly visible to the system controller.  In order to add the additional network interface to the hardware asset, it is necessary to Declare it.  We will declare that we have a server with this additional NIC, but we will also  specify the existing GB_0 network so that Ops Center can associate the right resources together.  The GB_0 acts as sort of a key to tie our new declaration to the old system already discovered.  Go to the Assets tab, select All Assets, and then in the Actions tab, select Add Asset.  Rather than going through a discovery this time, we will manually declare a new asset. When we declare it, we will give the hostname, IP address, system model that match those that have already been discovered.  Then, we will declare both GB_0 with its existing MAC and the new GB_4 with its MAC.  Remember that we collected the MAC for GB_4 when we created its device alias. After you declare the asset, you will see the new NIC in the connectivity tab for the asset.  You will notice that only the NICs you listed when you declared it are seen now.  If you want Ops Center to see all of the existing NICs as well as the additional one, declare them as well.  Add the other GB_1, GB_2, GB_3 links and their MACs just as you did GB_0 and GB_4.  Installing the OS  Once you have declared the asset, you can create an OS Provisioning profile for Solaris 11 in the same way that you did for Solaris 10.  The only difference from any other provisioning profile you might have created already is the network to use for installation.  Again, use GB_N/netN where N is the interface number you used for your device alias and in your declaration.  And away you go.  When the system boots from the network, the automated installer (AI) is able to see which system manifest to use, based on the new MAC that was associated, and the system gets installed. {0} ok {0} ok printenv network-boot-argumentsnetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok devalias net net                      /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0{0} ok devalias net4 net4                     /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok devalias net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok setenv network-boot-arguments host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cginetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok boot net - installBoot device: /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2  File and args: - install/pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2: 1000 Mbps link up<time unavailable> wanboot info: WAN boot messages->console<time unavailable> wanboot info: configuring /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2...SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0 64-bitCopyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.Remounting root read/writeProbing for device nodes ...Preparing network image for useDownloading solaris.zlib--2012-02-17 15:10:17--  http://10.140.204.22:5555/var/js/AI/sparc//solaris.zlibConnecting to 10.140.204.22:5555... connected.HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OKLength: 126752256 (121M) [text/plain]Saving to: `/tmp/solaris.zlib'100%[======================================>] 126,752,256 28.6M/s   in 4.4s    2012-02-17 15:10:21 (27.3 MB/s) - `/tmp/solaris.zlib' saved [126752256/126752256] Conclusion So, why go to all of this trouble?  More and more, I find that customers are wiring their data center to only use higher speed networks - 10GbE only to the hosts.  Some customers are moving aggressively toward consolidated networks combining storage and network on CNA NICs.  All of this means that network-based provisioning cannot rely exclusively on the built-in network interfaces.  So, it's important to be able to provision a system using other than the built-in networks.  Turns out, that this is pretty straight-forward for both Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 and fits into the Ops Center deployment process quite nicely. Hopefully, you will be able to use this as you build out your own private cloud solutions with Ops Center.

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• Silverlight Tree View with Multiple Levels

  - by psheriff

  There are many examples of the Silverlight Tree View that you will find on the web, however, most of them only show you how to go to two levels. What if you have more than two levels? This is where understanding exactly how the Hierarchical Data Templates works is vital. In this blog post, I am going to break down how these templates work so you can really understand what is going on underneath the hood. To start, let’s look at the typical two-level Silverlight Tree View that has been hard coded with the values shown below: <sdk:TreeView>  <sdk:TreeViewItem Header="Managers">    <TextBlock Text="Michael" />    <TextBlock Text="Paul" />  </sdk:TreeViewItem>  <sdk:TreeViewItem Header="Supervisors">    <TextBlock Text="John" />    <TextBlock Text="Tim" />    <TextBlock Text="David" />  </sdk:TreeViewItem></sdk:TreeView> Figure 1 shows you how this tree view looks when you run the Silverlight application. Figure 1: A hard-coded, two level Tree View. Next, let’s create three classes to mimic the hard-coded Tree View shown above. First, you need an Employee class and an EmployeeType class. The Employee class simply has one property called Name. The constructor is created to accept a “name” argument that you can use to set the Name property when you create an Employee object. public class Employee{  public Employee(string name)  {    Name = name;  }   public string Name { get; set; }} Finally you create an EmployeeType class. This class has one property called EmpType and contains a generic List<> collection of Employee objects. The property that holds the collection is called Employees. public class EmployeeType{  public EmployeeType(string empType)  {    EmpType = empType;    Employees = new List<Employee>();  }   public string EmpType { get; set; }  public List<Employee> Employees { get; set; }} Finally we have a collection class called EmployeeTypes created using the generic List<> class. It is in the constructor for this class where you will build the collection of EmployeeTypes and fill it with Employee objects: public class EmployeeTypes : List<EmployeeType>{  public EmployeeTypes()  {    EmployeeType type;            type = new EmployeeType("Manager");    type.Employees.Add(new Employee("Michael"));    type.Employees.Add(new Employee("Paul"));    this.Add(type);     type = new EmployeeType("Project Managers");    type.Employees.Add(new Employee("Tim"));    type.Employees.Add(new Employee("John"));    type.Employees.Add(new Employee("David"));    this.Add(type);  }} You now have a data hierarchy in memory (Figure 2) which is what the Tree View control expects to receive as its data source. Figure 2: A hierachial data structure of Employee Types containing a collection of Employee objects. To connect up this hierarchy of data to your Tree View you create an instance of the EmployeeTypes class in XAML as shown in line 13 of Figure 3. The key assigned to this object is “empTypes”. This key is used as the source of data to the entire Tree View by setting the ItemsSource property as shown in Figure 3, Callout #1. Figure 3: You need to start from the bottom up when laying out your templates for a Tree View. The ItemsSource property of the Tree View control is used as the data source in the Hierarchical Data Template with the key of employeeTypeTemplate. In this case there is only one Hierarchical Data Template, so any data you wish to display within that template comes from the collection of Employee Types. The TextBlock control in line 20 uses the EmpType property of the EmployeeType class. You specify the name of the Hierarchical Data Template to use in the ItemTemplate property of the Tree View (Callout #2). For the second (and last) level of the Tree View control you use a normal <DataTemplate> with the name of employeeTemplate (line 14). The Hierarchical Data Template in lines 17-21 sets its ItemTemplate property to the key name of employeeTemplate (Line 19 connects to Line 14). The source of the data for the <DataTemplate> needs to be a property of the EmployeeTypes collection used in the Hierarchical Data Template. In this case that is the Employees property. In the Employees property there is a “Name” property of the Employee class that is used to display the employee name in the second level of the Tree View (Line 15). What is important here is that your lowest level in your Tree View is expressed in a <DataTemplate> and should be listed first in your Resources section. The next level up in your Tree View should be a <HierarchicalDataTemplate> which has its ItemTemplate property set to the key name of the <DataTemplate> and the ItemsSource property set to the data you wish to display in the <DataTemplate>. The Tree View control should have its ItemsSource property set to the data you wish to display in the <HierarchicalDataTemplate> and its ItemTemplate property set to the key name of the <HierarchicalDataTemplate> object. It is in this way that you get the Tree View to display all levels of your hierarchical data structure. Three Levels in a Tree View Now let’s expand upon this concept and use three levels in our Tree View (Figure 4). This Tree View shows that you now have EmployeeTypes at the top of the tree, followed by a small set of employees that themselves manage employees. This means that the EmployeeType class has a collection of Employee objects. Each Employee class has a collection of Employee objects as well. Figure 4: When using 3 levels in your TreeView you will have 2 Hierarchical Data Templates and 1 Data Template. The EmployeeType class has not changed at all from our previous example. However, the Employee class now has one additional property as shown below: public class Employee{  public Employee(string name)  {    Name = name;    ManagedEmployees = new List<Employee>();  }   public string Name { get; set; }  public List<Employee> ManagedEmployees { get; set; }} The next thing that changes in our code is the EmployeeTypes class. The constructor now needs additional code to create a list of managed employees. Below is the new code. public class EmployeeTypes : List<EmployeeType>{  public EmployeeTypes()  {    EmployeeType type;    Employee emp;    Employee managed;     type = new EmployeeType("Manager");    emp = new Employee("Michael");    managed = new Employee("John");    emp.ManagedEmployees.Add(managed);    managed = new Employee("Tim");    emp.ManagedEmployees.Add(managed);    type.Employees.Add(emp);     emp = new Employee("Paul");    managed = new Employee("Michael");    emp.ManagedEmployees.Add(managed);    managed = new Employee("Sara");    emp.ManagedEmployees.Add(managed);    type.Employees.Add(emp);    this.Add(type);     type = new EmployeeType("Project Managers");    type.Employees.Add(new Employee("Tim"));    type.Employees.Add(new Employee("John"));    type.Employees.Add(new Employee("David"));    this.Add(type);  }} Now that you have all of the data built in your classes, you are now ready to hook up this three-level structure to your Tree View. Figure 5 shows the complete XAML needed to hook up your three-level Tree View. You can see in the XAML that there are now two Hierarchical Data Templates and one Data Template. Again you list the Data Template first since that is the lowest level in your Tree View. The next Hierarchical Data Template listed is the next level up from the lowest level, and finally you have a Hierarchical Data Template for the first level in your tree. You need to work your way from the bottom up when creating your Tree View hierarchy. XAML is processed from the top down, so if you attempt to reference a XAML key name that is below where you are referencing it from, you will get a runtime error. Figure 5: For three levels in a Tree View you will need two Hierarchical Data Templates and one Data Template. Each Hierarchical Data Template uses the previous template as its ItemTemplate. The ItemsSource of each Hierarchical Data Template is used to feed the data to the previous template. This is probably the most confusing part about working with the Tree View control. You are expecting the content of the current Hierarchical Data Template to use the properties set in the ItemsSource property of that template. But you need to look to the template lower down in the XAML to see the source of the data as shown in Figure 6. Figure 6: The properties you use within the Content of a template come from the ItemsSource of the next template in the resources section. Summary Understanding how to put together your hierarchy in a Tree View is simple once you understand that you need to work from the bottom up. Start with the bottom node in your Tree View and determine what that will look like and where the data will come from. You then build the next Hierarchical Data Template to feed the data to the previous template you created. You keep doing this for each level in your Tree View until you get to the last level. The data for that last Hierarchical Data Template comes from the ItemsSource in the Tree View itself. NOTE: You can download the sample code for this article by visiting my website at http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips & Tricks”, then select “Silverlight TreeView with Multiple Levels” from the drop down list.

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

  - by James Michael Hare

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

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• Designing for the future

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  User interfaces and user experience design is a fast moving field. It’s something that changes pretty quick: what feels fresh today will look outdated tomorrow. I remember the day I first got a beta version of Windows 95 and I felt swept away by the user interface of the OS. It felt so modern! If I look back now, it feels old. Well, it should: the design is 17 years old which is an eternity in our field. Of course, this is not limited to UI. Same goes for many industries. I want you to think back of the cars that amazed you when you were in your teens (if you are in your teens then this may not apply to you). Didn’t they feel like part of the future? Didn’t you think that this was the ultimate in designs? And aren’t those designs hopelessly outdated today (again, depending on your age, it may just be me)? Let’s review the Win95 design: And let’s compare that to Windows 7: There are so many differences here, I wouldn’t even know where to start explaining them. The general feeling however is one of more usability: studies have shown Windows 7 is much easier to understand for new users than the older versions of Windows did. Of course, experienced Windows users didn’t like it: people are usually afraid of changes and like to stick to what they know. But for new users this was a huge improvement. And that is what UX design is all about: make a product easier to use, with less training required and make users feel more productive. Still, there are areas where this doesn’t hold up. There are plenty examples of designs from the past that are still fresh today. But if you look closely at them, you’ll notice some subtle differences. This differences are what keep the designs fresh. A good example is the signs you’ll find on the road. They haven’t changed much over the years (otherwise people wouldn’t recognize them anymore) but they have been changing gradually to reflect changes in traffic. The same goes for computer interfaces. With each new product or version of a product, the UI and UX is changed gradually. Every now and then however, a bigger change is needed. Just think about the introduction of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007: the whole UI was redesigned. A lot of old users (not in age, but in times of using older versions) didn’t like it a bit, but new users or casual users seem to be more efficient using the product. Which, of course, is exactly the reason behind the changes. I believe that a big engine behind the changes in User Experience design has been the web. In the old days (i.e. before the explosion of the internet) user interface design in Windows applications was limited to choosing the margins between your battleship gray buttons. When the web came along, and especially the web 2.0 where the browsers started to act more and more as application platforms, designers stepped in and made a huge impact. In the browser, they could do whatever they wanted. In the beginning this was limited to the darn blink tag but gradually people really started to think about UX. Even more so: the design of the UI and the whole experience was taken away from the developers and put into the hands of people who knew what they were doing: UX designers. This caused some problems. Everyone who has done a web project in the early 2000’s must have had the same experience: the designers give you a set of Photoshop files and tell you to translate it to HTML. Which, of course, is very hard to do. However, with new tooling and new standards this became much easier. The latest version of HTML and CSS has taken the responsibility for the design away from the developers and placed them in the capable hands of the designers. And that’s where that responsibility belongs, after all, I don’t want a designer to muck around in my c# code just as much as he or she doesn’t want me to poke in the sites style definitions. This change in responsibilities resulted in good looking but more important: better thought out user interfaces in websites. And when websites became more and more interactive, people started to expect the same sort of look and feel from their desktop applications. But that didn’t really happen. Most business applications still have that battleship gray look and feel. Ok, they may use a different color but we’re not talking colors here but usability. Now, you may not be able to read the Dutch captions, but even if you did you wouldn’t understand what was going on. At least, not when you first see it. You have to scan the screen, read all the labels, see how they are related to the other elements on the screen and then figure out what they do. If you’re an experienced user of this application however, this might be a good thing: you know what to do and you get all the information you need in one single screen. But for most applications this isn’t the case. A lot of people only use their computer for a limited time a day (a weird concept for me, but it happens) and need it to get something done and then get on with their lives. For them, a user interface experience like the above isn’t working. (disclaimer: I just picked a screenshot, I am not saying this is bad software but it is an example of about 95% of the Windows applications out there). For the knowledge worker, this isn’t a problem. They use one or two systems and they know exactly what they need to do to achieve their goal. They don’t want any clutter on their screen that distracts them from their task, they just want to be as efficient as possible. When they know the systems they are very productive. The point is, how long does it take to become productive? And: could they be even more productive if the UX was better? Are there things missing that they don’t know about? Are there better ways to achieve what they want to achieve? Also: could a system be designed in such a way that it is not only much more easy to work with but also less tiring? in the example above you need to switch between the keyboard and mouse a lot, something that we now know can be very tiring. The goal of most applications (being client apps or websites on any kind of device) is to provide information. Information is data that when given to the right people, on the right time, in the right place and when it is correct adds value for that person (please, remember that definition: I still hear the statement “the information was wrong” which doesn’t make sense: data can be wrong, information cannot be). So if a system provides data, how can we make sure the chances of becoming information is as high as possible? A good example of a well thought-out system that attempts this is the Zune client. It is a very good application, and I think the UX is much better than it’s main competitor iTunes. Have a look at both: On the left you see the iTunes screenshot, on the right the Zune. As you notice, the Zune screen has more images but less chrome (chrome being visuals not part of the data you want to show, i.e. edges around buttons). The whole thing is text oriented or image oriented, where that text or image is part of the information you need. What is important is big, what’s less important is smaller. Yet, everything you need to know at that point is present and your attention is drawn immediately to what you’re trying to achieve: information about music. You can easily switch between the content on your machine and content on your Zune player but clicking on the image of the player. But if you didn’t know that, you’d find out soon enough: the whole UX is designed in such a way that it invites you to play around. So sooner or later (probably sooner) you’d click on that image and you would see what it does. In the iTunes version it’s harder to find: the discoverability is a lot lower. For inexperienced people the Zune player feels much more natural than the iTunes player, and they get up to speed a lot faster. How does this all work? Why is this UX better? The answer lies in a project from Microsoft with the codename (it seems to be becoming the official name though) “Metro”. Metro is a design language, based on certain principles. When they thought about UX they took a good long look around them and went out in search of metaphors. And they found them. The team noticed that signage in streets, airports, roads, buildings and so on are usually very clear and very precise. These signs give you the information you need and nothing more. It’s simple, clearly understood and fast to understand. A good example are airport signs. Airports can be intimidating places, especially for the non-experienced traveler. In the early 1990’s Amsterdam Airport Schiphol decided to redesign all the signage to make the traveller feel less disoriented. They developed a set of guidelines for signs and implemented those. Soon, most airports around the world adopted these ideas and you see variations of the Dutch signs everywhere on the globe. The signs are text-oriented. Yes, there are icons explaining what it all means for the people who can’t read or don’t understand the language, but the basic sign language is text. It’s clear, it’s high-contrast and it’s easy to understand. One look at the sign and you know where to go. The only thing I don’t like is the green sign pointing to the emergency exit, but since this is the default style for emergency exits I understand why they did this. If you look at the Zune UI again, you’ll notice the similarities. Text oriented, little or no icons, clear usage of fonts and all the information you need. This design language has a set of principles: Clean, light, open and fast Content, not chrome Soulful and alive These are just a couple of the principles, you can read the whole philosophy behind Metro for Windows Phone 7 here. These ideas seem to work. I love my Windows Phone 7. It’s easy to use, it’s clear, there’s no clutter that I do not need. It works for me. And I noticed it works for a lot of other people as well, especially people who aren’t as proficient with computers as I am. You see these ideas in a lot other places. Corning, a manufacturer of glass, has made a video of possible usages of their products. It’s their glimpse into the future. You’ll notice that a lot of the UI in the screens look a lot like what Microsoft is doing with Metro (not coincidentally Corning is the supplier for the Gorilla glass display surface on the new SUR40 device (or Surface v2.0 as a lot of people call it)). The idea behind this vision is that data should be available everywhere where you it. Systems should be available at all times and data is presented in a clear and light manner so that you can turn that data into information. You don’t need a lot of fancy animations that only distract from the data. You want the data and you want it fast. Have a look at this truly inspiring video that made: This is what I believe the future will look like. Of course, not everything is possible, or even desirable. But it is a nice way to think about the future . I feel very strongly about designing applications in such a way that they add value to the user. Designing applications that turn data into information. Applications that make the user feel happy to use them. So… when are you going to drop the battleship-gray designs? Tags van Technorati: surface,design,windows phone 7,wp7,metro

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• The Inkremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #4 - Make increments tangible

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/12/the-inkremental-architectacutes-napkin---4---make-increments-tangible.aspxThe driver of software development are increments, small increments, tiny increments. With an increment being a slice of the overall requirement scope thin enough to implement and get feedback from a product owner within 2 days max. Such an increment might concern Functionality or Quality.[1] To make such high frequency delivery of increments possible, the transition from talking to coding needs to be as easy as possible. A user story or some other documentation of what´s supposed to get implemented until tomorrow evening at latest is one side of the medal. The other is where to put the logic in all of the code base. To implement an increment, only logic statements are needed. Functionality like Quality are just about expressions and control flow statements. Think of Assembler code without the CALL/RET instructions. That´s all is needed. Forget about functions, forget about classes. To make a user happy none of that is really needed. It´s just about the right expressions and conditional executions paths plus some memory allocation. Automatic function inlining of compilers which makes it clear how unimportant functions are for delivering value to users at runtime. But why then are there functions? Because they were invented for optimization purposes. We need them for better Evolvability and Production Efficiency. Nothing more, nothing less. No software has become faster, more secure, more scalable, more functional because we gathered logic under the roof of a function or two or a thousand. Functions make logic easier to understand. Functions make us faster in producing logic. Functions make it easier to keep logic consistent. Functions help to conserve memory. That said, functions are important. They are even the pivotal element of software development. We can´t code without them - whether you write a function yourself or not. Because there´s always at least one function in play: the Entry Point of a program. In Ruby the simplest program looks like this:puts "Hello, world!" In C# more is necessary:class Program { public static void Main () { System.Console.Write("Hello, world!"); } } C# makes the Entry Point function explicit, not so Ruby. But still it´s there. So you can think of logic always running in some function. Which brings me back to increments: In order to make the transition from talking to code as easy as possible, it has to be crystal clear into which function you should put the logic. Product owners might be content once there is a sticky note a user story on the Scrum or Kanban board. But developers need an idea of what that sticky note means in term of functions. Because with a function in hand, with a signature to run tests against, they have something to focus on. All´s well once there is a function behind whose signature logic can be piled up. Then testing frameworks can be used to check if the logic is correct. Then practices like TDD can help to drive the implementation. That´s why most code katas define exactly how the API of a solution should look like. It´s a function, maybe two or three, not more. A requirement like “Write a function f which takes this as parameters and produces such and such output by doing x” makes a developer comfortable. Yes, there are all kinds of details to think about, like which algorithm or technology to use, or what kind of state and side effects to consider. Even a single function not only must deliver on Functionality, but also on Quality and Evolvability. Nevertheless, once it´s clear which function to put logic in, you have a tangible starting point. So, yes, what I´m suggesting is to find a single function to put all the logic in that´s necessary to deliver on a the requirements of an increment. Or to put it the other way around: Slice requirements in a way that each increment´s logic can be located under the roof of a single function. Entry points Of course, the logic of a software will always be spread across many, many functions. But there´s always an Entry Point. That´s the most important function for each increment, because that´s the root to put integration or even acceptance tests on. A batch program like the above hello-world application only has a single Entry Point. All logic is reached from there, regardless how deep it´s nested in classes. But a program with a user interface like this has at least two Entry Points: One is the main function called upon startup. The other is the button click event handler for “Show my score”. But maybe there are even more, like another Entry Point being a handler for the event fired when one of the choices gets selected; because then some logic could check if the button should be enabled because all questions got answered. Or another Entry Point for the logic to be executed when the program is close; because then the choices made should be persisted. You see, an Entry Point to me is a function which gets triggered by the user of a software. With batch programs that´s the main function. With GUI programs on the desktop that´s event handlers. With web programs that´s handlers for URL routes. And my basic suggestion to help you with slicing requirements for Spinning is: Slice them in a way so that each increment is related to only one Entry Point function.[2] Entry Points are the “outer functions” of a program. That´s where the environment triggers behavior. That´s where hardware meets software. Entry points always get called because something happened to hardware state, e.g. a key was pressed, a mouse button clicked, the system timer ticked, data arrived over a wire.[3] Viewed from the outside, software is just a collection of Entry Point functions made accessible via buttons to press, menu items to click, gestures, URLs to open, keys to enter. Collections of batch processors I´d thus say, we haven´t moved forward since the early days of software development. We´re still writing batch programs. Forget about “event-driven programming” with its fancy GUI applications. Software is just a collection of batch processors. Earlier it was just one per program, today it´s hundreds we bundle up into applications. Each batch processor is represented by an Entry Point as its root that works on a number of resources from which it reads data to process and to which it writes results. These resources can be the keyboard or main memory or a hard disk or a communication line or a display. Together many batch processors - large and small - form applications the user perceives as a single whole: Software development that way becomes quite simple: just implement one batch processor after another. Well, at least in principle ;-) Features Each batch processor entered through an Entry Point delivers value to the user. It´s an increment. Sometimes its logic is trivial, sometimes it´s very complex. Regardless, each Entry Point represents an increment. An Entry Point implemented thus is a step forward in terms of Agility. At the same time it´s a tangible unit for developers. Therefore, identifying the more or less numerous batch processors in a software system is a rewarding task for product owners and developers alike. That´s where user stories meet code. In this example the user story translates to the Entry Point triggered by clicking the login button on a dialog like this: The batch then retrieves what has been entered via keyboard, loads data from a user store, and finally outputs some kind of response on the screen, e.g. by displaying an error message or showing the next dialog. This is all very simple, but you see, there is not just one thing happening, but several. Get input (email address, password) Load user for email address If user not found report error Check password Hash password Compare hash to hash stored in user Show next dialog Viewed from 10,000 feet it´s all done by the Entry Point function. And of course that´s technically possible. It´s just a bunch of logic and calling a couple of API functions. However, I suggest to take these steps as distinct aspects of the overall requirement described by the user story. Such aspects of requirements I call Features. Features too are increments. Each provides some (small) value of its own to the user. Each can be checked individually by a product owner. Instead of implementing all the logic behind the Login() entry point at once you can move forward increment by increment, e.g. First implement the dialog, let the user enter any credentials, and log him/her in without any checks. Features 1 and 4. Then hard code a single user and check the email address. Features 2 and 2.1. Then check password without hashing it (or use a very simple hash like the length of the password). Features 3. and 3.2 Replace hard coded user with a persistent user directoy, but a very simple one, e.g. a CSV file. Refinement of feature 2. Calculate the real hash for the password. Feature 3.1. Switch to the final user directory technology. Each feature provides an opportunity to deliver results in a short amount of time and get feedback. If you´re in doubt whether you can implement the whole entry point function until tomorrow night, then just go for a couple of features or even just one. That´s also why I think, you should strive for wrapping feature logic into a function of its own. It´s a matter of Evolvability and Production Efficiency. A function per feature makes the code more readable, since the language of requirements analysis and design is carried over into implementation. It makes it easier to apply changes to features because it´s clear where their logic is located. And finally, of course, it lets you re-use features in different context (read: increments). Feature functions make it easier for you to think of features as Spinning increments, to implement them independently, to let the product owner check them for acceptance individually. Increments consist of features, entry point functions consist of feature functions. So you can view software as a hierarchy of requirements from broad to thin which map to a hierarchy of functions - with entry points at the top.   I like this image of software as a self-similar structure on many levels of abstraction where requirements and code match each other. That to me is true agile design: the core tenet of Agility to move forward in increments is carried over into implementation. Increments on paper are retained in code. This way developers can easily relate to product owners. Elusive and fuzzy requirements are not tangible. Software production is moving forward through requirements one increment at a time, and one function at a time. In closing Product owners and developers are different - but they need to work together towards a shared goal: working software. So their notions of software need to be made compatible, they need to be connected. The increments of the product owner - user stories and features - need to be mapped straightforwardly to something which is relevant to developers. To me that´s functions. Yes, functions, not classes nor components nor micro services. We´re talking about behavior, actions, activities, processes. Their natural representation is a function. Something has to be done. Logic has to be executed. That´s the purpose of functions. Later, classes and other containers are needed to stay on top of a growing amount of logic. But to connect developers and product owners functions are the appropriate glue. Functions which represent increments. Can there always be such a small increment be found to deliver until tomorrow evening? I boldly say yes. Yes, it´s always possible. But maybe you´ve to start thinking differently. Maybe the product owner needs to start thinking differently. Completion is not the goal anymore. Neither is checking the delivery of an increment through the user interface of a software. Product owners need to become comfortable using test beds for certain features. If it´s hard to slice requirements thin enough for Spinning the reason is too little knowledge of something. Maybe you don´t yet understand the problem domain well enough? Maybe you don´t yet feel comfortable with some tool or technology? Then it´s time to acknowledge this fact. Be honest about your not knowing. And instead of trying to deliver as a craftsman officially become a researcher. Research an check back with the product owner every day - until your understanding has grown to a level where you are able to define the next Spinning increment. ? Sometimes even thin requirement slices will cover several Entry Points, like “Add validation of email addresses to all relevant dialogs.” Validation then will it put into a dozen functons. Still, though, it´s important to determine which Entry Points exactly get affected. That´s much easier, if strive for keeping the number of Entry Points per increment to 1. ? If you like call Entry Point functions event handlers, because that´s what they are. They all handle events of some kind, whether that´s palpable in your code or note. A public void btnSave_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {…} might look like an event handler to you, but public static void Main() {…} is one also - for then event “program started”. ?

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• Sell good Dumps, track 1&2, CVV, Paypal, WU TRANSFER Service

  - by gOOD dUMPS cvv

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• Partitioned Repository for WebCenter Content using Oracle Database 11g

  - by Adao Junior

  One of the biggest challenges for content management solutions is related to the storage management due the high volumes of the unstoppable growing of information. Even if you have storage appliances and a lot of terabytes, thinks like backup, compression, deduplication, storage relocation, encryption, availability could be a nightmare. One standard option that you have with the Oracle WebCenter Content is to store data to the database. And the Oracle Database allows you leverage features like compression, deduplication, encryption and seamless backup. But with a huge volume, the challenge is passed to the DBA to keep the WebCenter Content Database up and running. One solution is the use of DB partitions for your content repository, but what are the implications of this? Can I fit this with my business requirements? Well, yes. It’s up to you how you will manage that, you just need a good plan. During you “storage brainstorm plan” take in your mind what you need, such as storage petabytes of documents? You need everything on-line? There’s a way to logically separate the “good content” from the “legacy content”? The first thing that comes to my mind is to use the creation date of the document, but you need to remember that this document could receive a lot of revisions and maybe you can consider the revision creation date. Your plan can have also complex rules like per Document Type or per a custom metadata like department or an hybrid per date, per DocType and an specific virtual folder. Extrapolation the use, you can have your repository distributed in different servers, different disks, different disk types (Such as ssds, sas, sata, tape,…), separated accordingly your business requirements, separating the “hot” content from the legacy and easily matching your compliance requirements. If you think to use by revision, the simple way is to consider the dId, that is the sequential unique id for every content created using the WebCenter Content or the dLastModified that is the date field of the FileStorage table that contains the date of inclusion of the content to the DB Table using SecureFiles. Using the scenario of partitioned repository using an hierarchical separation by date, we will transform the FileStorage table in an partitioned table using  “Partition by Range” of the dLastModified column (You can use the dId or a join with other tables for other metadata such as dDocType, Security, etc…). The test scenario bellow covers: Previous existent data on the JDBC Storage to be migrated to the new partitioned JDBC Storage Partition by Date Automatically generation of new partitions based on a pre-defined interval (Available only with Oracle Database 11g+) Deduplication and Compression for legacy data Oracle WebCenter Content 11g PS5 (Could present some customizations that do not affect the test scenario) For the test case you need some data stored using JDBC Storage to be the “legacy” data. If you do not have done before, just create an Storage rule pointed to the JDBC Storage: Enable the metadata StorageRule in the UI and upload some documents using this rule. For this test case you can run using the schema owner or an dba user. We will use the schema owner TESTS_OCS. I can’t forgot to tell that this is just a test and you should do a proper backup of your environment. When you use the schema owner, you need some privileges, using the dba user grant the privileges needed: REM Grant privileges required for online redefinition. GRANT EXECUTE ON DBMS_REDEFINITION TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT ALTER ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT DROP ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT LOCK ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT CREATE ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT SELECT ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; REM Privileges required to perform cloning of dependent objects. GRANT CREATE ANY TRIGGER TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT CREATE ANY INDEX TO TESTS_OCS; In our test scenario we will separate the content as Legacy, Day1, Day2, Day3 and Future. This last one will partitioned automatically using 3 tablespaces in a round robin mode. In a real scenario the partition rule could be per month, per year or any rule that you choose. Table spaces for the test scenario: CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_LEGACY DATAFILE 'tests_ocs_part_legacy.dat' SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY1 DATAFILE 'tests_ocs_part_day1.dat' SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY2 DATAFILE 'tests_ocs_part_day2.dat' SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY3 DATAFILE 'tests_ocs_part_day3.dat' SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_A 'tests_ocs_part_round_robin_a.dat' DATAFILE SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_B 'tests_ocs_part_round_robin_b.dat' DATAFILE SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_C 'tests_ocs_part_round_robin_c.dat' DATAFILE SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; Before start, gather optimizer statistics on the actual FileStorage table: EXEC DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS(USER, 'FileStorage', cascade => TRUE); Now check if is possible execute the redefinition process: EXEC DBMS_REDEFINITION.CAN_REDEF_TABLE('TESTS_OCS', 'FileStorage',DBMS_REDEFINITION.CONS_USE_PK); If no errors messages, you are good to go. Create a Partitioned Interim FileStorage table. You need to create a new table with the partition information to act as an interim table: CREATE TABLE FILESTORAGE_Part ( DID NUMBER(*,0) NOT NULL ENABLE, DRENDITIONID VARCHAR2(30 CHAR) NOT NULL ENABLE, DLASTMODIFIED TIMESTAMP (6), DFILESIZE NUMBER(*,0), DISDELETED VARCHAR2(1 CHAR), BFILEDATA BLOB ) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( ENABLE STORAGE IN ROW NOCACHE LOGGING KEEP_DUPLICATES NOCOMPRESS ) PARTITION BY RANGE (DLASTMODIFIED) INTERVAL (NUMTODSINTERVAL(1,'DAY')) STORE IN (TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_A, TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_B, TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_C) ( PARTITION FILESTORAGE_PART_LEGACY VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('05-APR-2012 12.00.00 AM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_LEGACY LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_LEGACY RETENTION NONE DEDUPLICATE COMPRESS HIGH ), PARTITION FILESTORAGE_PART_DAY1 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.25.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY1 LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY1 RETENTION AUTO KEEP_DUPLICATES COMPRESS ), PARTITION FILESTORAGE_PART_DAY2 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.55.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY2 LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY2 RETENTION AUTO KEEP_DUPLICATES NOCOMPRESS ), PARTITION FILESTORAGE_PART_DAY3 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.58.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY3 LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY3 RETENTION AUTO KEEP_DUPLICATES NOCOMPRESS ) ); After the creation you should see your partitions defined. Note that only the fixed range partitions have been created, none of the interval partition have been created. Start the redefinition process: BEGIN DBMS_REDEFINITION.START_REDEF_TABLE( uname => 'TESTS_OCS' ,orig_table => 'FileStorage' ,int_table => 'FileStorage_PART' ,col_mapping => NULL ,options_flag => DBMS_REDEFINITION.CONS_USE_PK ); END; This operation can take some time to complete, depending how many contents that you have and on the size of the table. Using the DBA user you can check the progress with this command: SELECT * FROM v$sesstat WHERE sid = 1; Copy dependent objects: DECLARE redefinition_errors PLS_INTEGER := 0; BEGIN DBMS_REDEFINITION.COPY_TABLE_DEPENDENTS( uname => 'TESTS_OCS' ,orig_table => 'FileStorage' ,int_table => 'FileStorage_PART' ,copy_indexes => DBMS_REDEFINITION.CONS_ORIG_PARAMS ,copy_triggers => TRUE ,copy_constraints => TRUE ,copy_privileges => TRUE ,ignore_errors => TRUE ,num_errors => redefinition_errors ,copy_statistics => FALSE ,copy_mvlog => FALSE ); IF (redefinition_errors > 0) THEN DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('>>> FileStorage to FileStorage_PART temp copy Errors: ' || TO_CHAR(redefinition_errors)); END IF; END; With the DBA user, verify that there's no errors: SELECT object_name, base_table_name, ddl_txt FROM DBA_REDEFINITION_ERRORS; *Note that will show 2 lines related to the constrains, this is expected. Synchronize the interim table FileStorage_PART: BEGIN DBMS_REDEFINITION.SYNC_INTERIM_TABLE( uname => 'TESTS_OCS', orig_table => 'FileStorage', int_table => 'FileStorage_PART'); END; Gather statistics on the new table: EXEC DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS(USER, 'FileStorage_PART', cascade => TRUE); Complete the redefinition: BEGIN DBMS_REDEFINITION.FINISH_REDEF_TABLE( uname => 'TESTS_OCS', orig_table => 'FileStorage', int_table => 'FileStorage_PART'); END; During the execution the FileStorage table is locked in exclusive mode until finish the operation. After the last command the FileStorage table is partitioned. If you have contents out of the range partition, you should see the new partitions created automatically, not generating an error if you “forgot” to create all the future ranges. You will see something like: You now can drop the FileStorage_PART table: border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; text-align: left; border-left-color: silver; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-bottom: 4px; line-height: 12pt; background-color: #f4f4f4; margin-top: 20px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 4px; width: 97.5%; padding-right: 4px; font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; direction: ltr; max-height: 200px; font-size: 8pt; overflow-x: auto; overflow-y: auto; border-top-color: silver; border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; cursor: text; border-right-color: silver; border-right-width: 1px; border-right-style: solid; padding-top: 4px; " id="codeSnippetWrapper"> DROP TABLE FileStorage_PART PURGE; To check the FileStorage table is valid and is partitioned, use the command: SELECT num_rows,partitioned FROM user_tables WHERE table_name = 'FILESTORAGE'; You can list the contents of the FileStorage table in a specific partition, per example: SELECT * FROM FileStorage PARTITION (FILESTORAGE_PART_LEGACY) Some useful commands that you can use to check the partitions, note that you need to run using a DBA user: SELECT * FROM DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS WHERE table_name = 'FILESTORAGE';   SELECT * FROM DBA_TABLESPACES WHERE tablespace_name like 'TESTS_OCS%'; After the redefinition process complete you have a new FileStorage table storing all content that has the Storage rule pointed to the JDBC Storage and partitioned using the rule set during the creation of the temporary interim FileStorage_PART table. At this point you can test the WebCenter Content downloading the documents (Original and Renditions). Note that the content could be already in the cache area, take a look in the weblayout directory to see if a file with the same id is there, then click on the web rendition of your test file and see if have created the file and you can open, this means that is all working. The redefinition process can be repeated many times, this allow you test what the better layout, over and over again. Now some interesting maintenance actions related to the partitions: Make an tablespace read only. No issues viewing, the WebCenter Content do not alter the revisions When try to delete an content that is part of an read only tablespace, an error will occurs and the document will not be deleted The only way to prevent errors today is creating an custom component that checks the partitions and if you have an document in an “Read Only” repository, execute the deletion process of the metadata and mark the document to be deleted on the next db maintenance, like a new redefinition. Take an tablespace off-line for archiving purposes or any other reason. When you try open an document that is included in this tablespace will receive an error that was unable to retrieve the content, but the others online tablespaces are not affected. Same behavior when deleting documents. Again, an custom component is the solution. If you have an document “out of range”, the component can show an message that the repository for that document is offline. This can be extended to a option to the user to request to put online again. Moving some legacy content to an offline repository (table) using the Exchange option to move the content from one partition to a empty nonpartitioned table like FileStorage_LEGACY. Note that this option will remove the registers from the FileStorage and will not be able to open the stored content. You always need to keep in mind the indexes and constrains. An redefinition separating the original content (vault) from the renditions and separate by date ate the same time. This could be an option for DAM environments that want to have an special place for the renditions and put the original files in a storage with less performance. The process will be the same, you just need to change the script of the interim table to use composite partitioning. Will be something like: CREATE TABLE FILESTORAGE_RenditionPart ( DID NUMBER(*,0) NOT NULL ENABLE, DRENDITIONID VARCHAR2(30 CHAR) NOT NULL ENABLE, DLASTMODIFIED TIMESTAMP (6), DFILESIZE NUMBER(*,0), DISDELETED VARCHAR2(1 CHAR), BFILEDATA BLOB ) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( ENABLE STORAGE IN ROW NOCACHE LOGGING KEEP_DUPLICATES NOCOMPRESS ) PARTITION BY LIST (DRENDITIONID) SUBPARTITION BY RANGE (DLASTMODIFIED) ( PARTITION Vault VALUES ('primaryFile') ( SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_LEGACY VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('05-APR-2012 12.00.00 AM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_DAY1 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.25.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_DAY2 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.55.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_DAY3 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.58.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_FUTURE VALUES LESS THAN (MAXVALUE) ) ,PARTITION WebLayout VALUES ('webViewableFile') ( SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_LEGACY VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('05-APR-2012 12.00.00 AM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_DAY1 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.25.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_DAY2 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.55.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_DAY3 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.58.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_FUTURE VALUES LESS THAN (MAXVALUE) ) ,PARTITION Special VALUES ('Special') ( SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_LEGACY VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('05-APR-2012 12.00.00 AM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_DAY1 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.25.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_DAY2 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.55.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_DAY3 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.58.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_FUTURE VALUES LESS THAN (MAXVALUE) ) )ENABLE ROW MOVEMENT; The next post related to partitioned repository will come with an sample component to handle the possible exceptions when you need to take off line an tablespace/partition or move to another place. Also, we can include some integration to the Retention Management and Records Management. Another subject related to partitioning is the ability to create an FileStore Provider pointed to a different database, raising the level of the distributed storage vs. performance. Let us know if this is important to you or you have an use case not listed, leave a comment. Cross-posted on the blog.ContentrA.com

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• Flow-Design Cheat Sheet &ndash; Part I, Notation

  - by Ralf Westphal

  You want to avoid the pitfalls of object oriented design? Then this is the right place to start. Use Flow-Oriented Analysis (FOA) and –Design (FOD or just FD for Flow-Design) to understand a problem domain and design a software solution. Flow-Orientation as described here is related to Flow-Based Programming, Event-Based Programming, Business Process Modelling, and even Event-Driven Architectures. But even though “thinking in flows” is not new, I found it helpful to deviate from those precursors for several reasons. Some aim at too big systems for the average programmer, some are concerned with only asynchronous processing, some are even not very much concerned with programming at all. What I was looking for was a design method to help in software projects of any size, be they large or tiny, involing synchronous or asynchronous processing, being local or distributed, running on the web or on the desktop or on a smartphone. That´s why I took ideas from all of the above sources and some additional and came up with Event-Based Components which later got repositioned and renamed to Flow-Design. In the meantime this has generated some discussion (in the German developer community) and several teams have started to work with Flow-Design. Also I´ve conducted quite some trainings using Flow-Orientation for design. The results are very promising. Developers find it much easier to design software using Flow-Orientation than OOAD-based object orientation. Since Flow-Orientation is moving fast and is not covered completely by a single source like a book, demand has increased for at least an overview of the current state of its notation. This page is trying to answer this demand by briefly introducing/describing every notational element as well as their translation into C# source code. Take this as a cheat sheet to put next to your whiteboard when designing software. However, please do not expect any explanation as to the reasons behind Flow-Design elements. Details on why Flow-Design at all and why in this specific way you´ll find in the literature covering the topic. Here´s a resource page on Flow-Design/Event-Based Components, if you´re able to read German. Notation Connected Functional Units The basic element of any FOD are functional units (FU): Think of FUs as some kind of software code block processing data. For the moment forget about classes, methods, “components”, assemblies or whatever. See a FU as an abstract piece of code. Software then consists of just collaborating FUs. I´m using circles/ellipses to draw FUs. But if you like, use rectangles. Whatever suites your whiteboard needs best.   The purpose of FUs is to process input and produce output. FUs are transformational. However, FUs are not called and do not call other FUs. There is no dependency between FUs. Data just flows into a FU (input) and out of it (output). From where and where to is of no concern to a FU.   This way FUs can be concatenated in arbitrary ways:   Each FU can accept input from many sources and produce output for many sinks:   Flows Connected FUs form a flow with a start and an end. Data is entering a flow at a source, and it´s leaving it through a sink. Think of sources and sinks as special FUs which conntect wires to the environment of a network of FUs.   Wiring Details Data is flowing into/out of FUs through wires. This is to allude to electrical engineering which since long has been working with composable parts. Wires are attached to FUs usings pins. They are the entry/exit points for the data flowing along the wires. Input-/output pins currently need not be drawn explicitly. This is to keep designing on a whiteboard simple and quick.   Data flowing is of some type, so wires have a type attached to them. And pins have names. If there is only one input pin and output pin on a FU, though, you don´t need to mention them. The default is Process for a single input pin, and Result for a single output pin. But you´re free to give even single pins different names.   There is a shortcut in use to address a certain pin on a destination FU:   The type of the wire is put in parantheses for two reasons. 1. This way a “no-type” wire can be easily denoted, 2. this is a natural way to describe tuples of data.   To describe how much data is flowing, a star can be put next to the wire type:   Nesting – Boards and Parts If more than 5 to 10 FUs need to be put in a flow a FD starts to become hard to understand. To keep diagrams clutter free they can be nested. You can turn any FU into a flow: This leads to Flow-Designs with different levels of abstraction. A in the above illustration is a high level functional unit, A.1 and A.2 are lower level functional units. One of the purposes of Flow-Design is to be able to describe systems on different levels of abstraction and thus make it easier to understand them. Humans use abstraction/decomposition to get a grip on complexity. Flow-Design strives to support this and make levels of abstraction first class citizens for programming. You can read the above illustration like this: Functional units A.1 and A.2 detail what A is supposed to do. The whole of A´s responsibility is decomposed into smaller responsibilities A.1 and A.2. FU A thus does not do anything itself anymore! All A is responsible for is actually accomplished by the collaboration between A.1 and A.2. Since A now is not doing anything anymore except containing A.1 and A.2 functional units are devided into two categories: boards and parts. Boards are just containing other functional units; their sole responsibility is to wire them up. A is a board. Boards thus depend on the functional units nested within them. This dependency is not of a functional nature, though. Boards are not dependent on services provided by nested functional units. They are just concerned with their interface to be able to plug them together. Parts are the workhorses of flows. They contain the real domain logic. They actually transform input into output. However, they do not depend on other functional units. Please note the usage of source and sink in boards. They correspond to input-pins and output-pins of the board.   Implicit Dependencies Nesting functional units leads to a dependency tree. Boards depend on nested functional units, they are the inner nodes of the tree. Parts are independent, they are the leafs: Even though dependencies are the bane of software development, Flow-Design does not usually draw these dependencies. They are implicitly created by visually nesting functional units. And they are harmless. Boards are so simple in their functionality, they are little affected by changes in functional units they are depending on. But functional units are implicitly dependent on more than nested functional units. They are also dependent on the data types of the wires attached to them: This is also natural and thus does not need to be made explicit. And it pertains mainly to parts being dependent. Since boards don´t do anything with regard to a problem domain, they don´t care much about data types. Their infrastructural purpose just needs types of input/output-pins to match.   Explicit Dependencies You could say, Flow-Orientation is about tackling complexity at its root cause: that´s dependencies. “Natural” dependencies are depicted naturally, i.e. implicitly. And whereever possible dependencies are not even created. Functional units don´t know their collaborators within a flow. This is core to Flow-Orientation. That makes for high composability of functional units. A part is as independent of other functional units as a motor is from the rest of the car. And a board is as dependend on nested functional units as a motor is on a spark plug or a crank shaft. With Flow-Design software development moves closer to how hardware is constructed. Implicit dependencies are not enough, though. Sometimes explicit dependencies make designs easier – as counterintuitive this might sound. So FD notation needs a ways to denote explicit dependencies: Data flows along wires. But data does not flow along dependency relations. Instead dependency relations represent service calls. Functional unit C is depending on/calling services on functional unit S. If you want to be more specific, name the services next to the dependency relation: Although you should try to stay clear of explicit dependencies, they are fundamentally ok. See them as a way to add another dimension to a flow. Usually the functionality of the independent FU (“Customer repository” above) is orthogonal to the domain of the flow it is referenced by. If you like emphasize this by using different shapes for dependent and independent FUs like above. Such dependencies can be used to link in resources like databases or shared in-memory state. FUs can not only produce output but also can have side effects. A common pattern for using such explizit dependencies is to hook a GUI into a flow as the source and/or the sink of data: Which can be shortened to: Treat FUs others depend on as boards (with a special non-FD API the dependent part is connected to), but do not embed them in a flow in the diagram they are depended upon.   Attributes of Functional Units Creation and usage of functional units can be modified with attributes. So far the following have shown to be helpful: Singleton: FUs are by default multitons. FUs in the same of different flows with the same name refer to the same functionality, but to different instances. Think of functional units as objects that get instanciated anew whereever they appear in a design. Sometimes though it´s helpful to reuse the same instance of a functional unit; this is always due to valuable state it holds. Signify this by annotating the FU with a “(S)”. Multiton: FUs on which others depend are singletons by default. This is, because they usually are introduced where shared state comes into play. If you want to change them to be a singletons mark them with a “(M)”. Configurable: Some parts need to be configured before the can do they work in a flow. Annotate them with a “(C)” to have them initialized before any data items to be processed by them arrive. Do not assume any order in which FUs are configured. How such configuration is happening is an implementation detail. Entry point: In each design there needs to be a single part where “it all starts”. That´s the entry point for all processing. It´s like Program.Main() in C# programs. Mark the entry point part with an “(E)”. Quite often this will be the GUI part. How the entry point is started is an implementation detail. Just consider it the first FU to start do its job.   Patterns / Standard Parts If more than a single wire is attached to an output-pin that´s called a split (or fork). The same data is flowing on all of the wires. Remember: Flow-Designs are synchronous by default. So a split does not mean data is processed in parallel afterwards. Processing still happens synchronously and thus one branch after another. Do not assume any specific order of the processing on the different branches after the split.   It is common to do a split and let only parts of the original data flow on through the branches. This effectively means a map is needed after a split. This map can be implicit or explicit.   Although FUs can have multiple input-pins it is preferrable in most cases to combine input data from different branches using an explicit join: The default output of a join is a tuple of its input values. The default behavior of a join is to output a value whenever a new input is received. However, to produce its first output a join needs an input for all its input-pins. Other join behaviors can be: reset all inputs after an output only produce output if data arrives on certain input-pins

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 21, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 21, 2012Popular ReleasesImapX 2: ImapX 2.0.0.6: An updated release of the ImapX 2 library, containing many bugfixes for both, the library and the sample application.Metodología General Ajustada - MGA: 03.05.05: Cambios John: Se modificó el Procedimiento Alamacenado PROF03ObjetivoProductoConsultarIdF03 que no incluía los campos de IdUnidadMedida y UnidadMedida, lo que generaba error en la capa de datos al leer estos campos (PasarDataSetAPROF03ObjetivoProductoInfo) y terminaba devolviendo NULL en los registros, esto no dejaba la información en la Exportación y por ende en la Importación no subían los Productos. Generación de instaladores. Soporte técnico por correo electrónico, telefónico y en sitio.WiX Toolset: WiX v3.7 RC: WiX v3.7 RC (3.7.1119.0) provides feature complete Bundle update and reference tracking plus several bug fixes. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/11/20/WiX-v3.7-Release-Candidate-availablePicturethrill: Version 2.11.20.0: Fixed up Bing image provider on Windows 8Excel AddIn to reset the last worksheet cell: XSFormatCleaner.xla: Modified the commandbar code to use CommandBar IDs instead of English names.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 11: New feature - Added ITraceWriter, MemoryTraceWriter, DiagnosticsTraceWriter New feature - Added StringEscapeHandling with options to escape HTML and non-ASCII characters New feature - Added non-generic JToken.ToObject methods New feature - Deserialize ISet<T> properties as HashSet<T> New feature - Added implicit conversions for Uri, TimeSpan, Guid New feature - Missing byte, char, Guid, TimeSpan and Uri explicit conversion operators added to JToken New feature - Special case...EntitiesToDTOs - Entity Framework DTO Generator: EntitiesToDTOs.v3.0: DTOs and Assemblers can be generated inside project folders! Choose the types you want to generate! Support for Visual Studio 2012 !!! Support for new Entity Framework EDMX (format used by VS2012) ! Support for Enum Types! Optional automatic check for updates! Added the following methods to Assemblers! IEnumerable<DTO>.ToEntities() : ICollection<Entity> IEnumerable<Entity>.ToDTOs() : ICollection<DTO> Indicate class identifier for DTOs and Assemblers! Cleaner Assemblers code....mojoPortal: 2.3.9.4: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2394-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, but we recommend you to use .NET 4, we will probably drop support for .NET 3.5 once .NET 4.5 is available The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code and are not intended for use in Visual Studio. To download the source code see getting the lates...VidCoder: 1.4.6 Beta: Brought back the x264 advanced options panel due to popular demand. Thank you for all the feedback. x264 Preset/Profile/Tune/Level has been moved back to the Video tab, along with a copy of the "extra options" string. Added Fast Decode and Zero Latency checkboxes to support multiple Tunes. Added cropping option "None". Audio bitrates that are incompatible with the encoder (such as MP3 > 320 kbps) are no longer preset on the list. Fixed crash on opening VidCoder after de-selecting "re...DotNetNuke® Store: 03.01.07: What's New in this release? IMPORTANT: this version requires DotNetNuke 04.06.02 or higher! DO NOT REPORT BUGS HERE IN THE ISSUE TRACKER, INSTEAD USE THE DotNetNuke Store Forum! Bugs corrected: - Replaced some hard coded references to the default address provider classes by the corresponding interfaces to allow the creation of another address provider with a different name. New Features: - Added the 'pickup' delivery option at checkout. - Added the 'no delivery' option in the Store Admin ...Bundle Transformer - a modular extension for ASP.NET Web Optimization Framework: Bundle Transformer 1.6.10: Version: 1.6.10 Published: 11/18/2012 Now almost all of the Bundle Transformer's assemblies is signed (except BundleTransformer.Yui.dll); In BundleTransformer.SassAndScss the SassAndCoffee.Ruby library was replaced by my own implementation of the Sass- and SCSS-compiler (based on code of the SassAndCoffee.Ruby library version 2.0.2.0); In BundleTransformer.CoffeeScript added support of CoffeeScript version 1.4.0-3; In BundleTransformer.TypeScript added support of TypeScript version 0....ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.0: +2012-11-18 v3.2.0 -?????????????????SelectedValueArray????????（◇?◆:）。 -???????????????????RecoverPropertiesFromJObject????（〓?〓、????、??、Vian_Pan）。 -????????????，?????????????，???SelectedValueArray???????（sam.chang）。 -??Alert.Show???????????（swtseaman）。 -???????????????，??Icon??IconUrl????（swtseaman）。 -?????????TimePicker（??）。 -?????????，??/res.axd?css=blue.css&v=1。 -????????，?????????????，???????。 -????MenuCheckBox（???????）。 -?RadioButton??AutoPostBack??。 -???????FCKEditor?????????...BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 1.2: Please read our release notes for BugNET 1.2: http://blog.bugnetproject.com/bugnet-1-2-has-been-released Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you will pollute the rating, and you won't get an answer.Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 2.2.0: Changes: Layer group visibility is now applied to all layers within the group. This greatly improves the visual fidelity of complex PSD files that have hidden layer groups. Layer group names are prefixed so that users can get an indication of the layer group hierarchy. (Paint.NET has a flat list of layers, so the hierarchy is flattened out on load.) The progress bar now reports status when saving PSD files, instead of showing an indeterminate rolling bar. Performance improvement of 1...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1116.7): [IMPROVED] Detailed error message descriptions for FaultException [FIX] Fixed bug in rule CrmOfflineAccessStateRule which had incorrect State attribute name [FIX] Fixed bug in rule EntityPropertyRule which was missing PropertyValue attribute [FIX] Current connection information was not displayed in status bar while refreshing list of entitiesSuper Metroid Randomizer: Super Metroid Randomizer v5: v5 -Added command line functionality for automation purposes. -Implented Krankdud's change to randomize the Etecoon's item. NOTE: this version will not accept seeds from a previous version. The seed format has changed by necessity. v4 -Started putting version numbers at the top of the form. -Added a warning when suitless Maridia is required in a parsed seed. v3 -Changed seed to only generate filename-legal characters. Using old seeds will still work exactly the same. -Files can now be saved...Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight, WP7 and WinRT/Metro made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.4: Changes This version includes many bug fixes across all platforms, improvements to nuget support and...the biggest news of all...full support for both WinRT and WP8. Download Contents Debug and Release Assemblies Samples Readme.txt License.txt Packages Available on Nuget Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly. Caliburn.Micro.Start - Includes Caliburn.Micro plus a starting bootstrapper, view model and view. Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro invers...DirectX Tool Kit: November 15, 2012: November 15, 2012 Added support for WIC2 when available on Windows 8 and Windows 7 with KB 2670838 Cleaned up warning level 4 warningsDotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.05: Major Highlights Updated the system so that it supports nested folders in the App_Code folder Updated the Global Error Handling so that when errors within the global.asax handler happen, they are caught and shown in a page displaying the original HTTP error code Fixed issue that stopped users from specifying Link URLs that open on a new window Security FixesFixed issue in the Member Directory module that could show members to non authenticated users Fixed issue in the Lists modul...fastJSON: v2.0.10: - added MonoDroid projectNew Projects1121codeplex01: Today's task is to test portal on JapaneseAgileToDo: a to do list use wpf ef sqlce!Applay: Applay is a library that allows you to wrap authorization and validation around the services of your application layer by using a dynamic proxy.ArunimaErp: Enterprise Resource Planning Software for Arunima GroupBootCMS: BootCMS makes webdevelopment easy.codeplex01: I need go out for a whileCoding4Fun's Maelstrom: Introduced at //build/ 2012, Maelstrom is Coding4Fun's latest creation. Step up to the podium and battle against your opponent in full-on stereoscopic 3D!CTCS Project 2012: 11/21/2012 @ svn repository ctodo: TODO List Management Librarydeploy-with-ease: One-click deployment tool based on DrobBox files hostingDesign Resources .NET: D-R.NET is a set of pre-built implementations of oft-recurring application designs. D-R.NET saves considerable time and money in building user-focused applications: from basic to complex. DnfWeb: dnf??Dr.Peng: dr.peng ????????。DriveKeepAlive: Managed .NET service intended to keep external hard drives "awake" for immediate access. Developed in C# with Visual Studio 2008Ecommerce Platform: Ecommerce PlatformEventManagerReset: Project created for Reset meetings.FaceComparerDistributed: project of face compare distributed versionFileSystemExplorerExample: WPF MVVM Sample applicationFinlogiK ReSharper Contrib: FinlogiK ReSharper Contrib is a plugin for ReSharper 5.1 which adds code cleanup and inspection options for static qualifiers.Gestione Lampade Votive: Gestione dei canoni annuali dei loculi cimiteriali, con stampa di comunicazioni ai contribuenti e dei bollettini di conto corrente postale (a due o tre cedole).GI_PII: HABA BABA?GIV_P2: second projectHex o'clock: Projekt kolorowego zegara.IISProcessScheduler: Schedule processes from within IIS.Image Tagger & Resizer: Resize, and text in the lower right of picture with i.e. copyright information.IT Kohvik: ITK cafe school project.jean1121codeplex01: goodKooboo3 Helper: It's a developer tutorial code for kooboo cms v3. http://kooboo.codeplex.comMAVI: mobile application for the visually impaired: bill recognition & tag and recognize objects based on a specific stickerMecanismos de Segurança Interoperáveis para Serviços Web: Esse projeto pretende desenvolver um framework que forneça requisitos de segurança de forma interoperável através de Serviços Web. Metro UI For Windows Forms: Provides a set of controls and form templates for designing user interfaces based on a similar minimalist metro style. For those who love Windows Forms.NHSmartBootstrapper: In a "fast-changing" world, your LoB application needs to be ready to change as well. The usage of NHibernate Listeners together with smart application bootstrapping, even in a complex scenario, can lead to extensible and new-feature-ready applications. Office Add-In Monitor: Office Add-in Monitor protects add-ins from being disabled.Orchard Responsive Theme Machine: A responsive version of the Orchard CMS "Theme Machine" which is commonly used as a starting point for building custom themes. Supports many resolutions.Orchard Simple Contact Form: An Orchard CMS module that provides a simple contact form that sends an email. It can be used as either a content part or widget.Peon War: Peon war is a game where peons are fighting.Project Files Linker (VS Add-In): PFL project is used to generate multiple projects with links to the same files to achieve projects for different .NET FW versions.Quibbler - Universal News Reader: Quibbler is a product designed and developed by Indigo Architects. Quibbler is a desktop application which runs on user's machine and provides a intuitive user interface for reading news in offline mode. Quibbler is developed in WPF (.Net 3.5).Samcrypt: .SenchaTest: SenchaTestShared Genomics Project - Workbench Codebase: The Shared Genomics workbench enables a diverse user group of researchers to explore the associations between genetic and other factors in their datasets. It provides a graphical user interface to the analysis functions published in a sister Codeplex project i.e. MPI Codebase.SharePoint 2013 FBA Pack: This is the home of the SharePoint 2013 FBA Pack. The FBA Pack for SharePoint 2013 is currently in development and is coming soon.SharePoint Term Store PowerShell Backup & Restore Scripts: This project is focused on development of PowerShell script tools for backup and restore of SharePoint Managed Metadata service application Term Store taxonomy.SharpPlanets: A simple game completely designed and written in C#, inspired by JPlanets.SpaceShooter: A small hobbyist game. It is similar to the 2D Arcade shooter games.Stretched Background Image jQuery plugin: jQuery plugin for adding a stretched background image for any element in a web page. Uses an absolutely positioned image at z-index -1.Stsadm Templates for Visual Studio: The Stsadm Templates for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 support you in making command extensions for SharePoint's commnand line tool stsadm.exe.SwissPost EasyTrack API: The SwissPost EasyTrack API allows you to track your parcels or letters everytime and in every application.System.Threading.Joins: The Joins project provides asynchronous concurrency semantics based on join calculus and modeled after the Microsoft Research C? (C Omega) project.T nagu Tetris: Meie versioon tuntud mängust tetris.testdd11202012tfs01: juktestddhg11202012hg01: stesttom11202012git02: fdsfdstesttom11202012hg01: gfdTetrissimus: Tetrissimus is an open source "Tetris" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses keyboard. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows and others.Thrift Client .NET for WinRT (Windows Store Apps): thrift .net client for WinRT applicationTwitter Bootstrap for SharePoint: A Masterpage for SharePoint 2010 including the twitter bootstrap front-end frameworkTX Spell .NET ActiveX Package: TX Spell .NET ActiveX Package enables you to add high-performance spell checking capabilities to your VB6 applications.USB ACCELEROMETER: This project is a test demo for usb accelerometer. Application plays music (mp3 file) while usb acc gives high values from its coordinate between interval.VfaAccoutApps: Cash Payment Application of Vf AsiaVisualPoint Use PowerPoint inside Visual Studio: VisualPoint lets you show PowerPoint presentations from inside Visual Studio. Future release will automate walkthroughs and presentations.VS2010 Rc1 Fix: Illustrates a fix for working with the ASAP.NET Wizard control with VS2010 RC1WebSite.Request: WebSite.Request launch web request (via XMLHTTP) on website. Use, for example, to make initial request to sharepoint URL and escape "slow first request" problem.WPF Checked ListBox: This is simple implementation of WPF Checked ListBoxWPortal: doing nothing. that's it. i just want to use the subversion management. XNA Capture the Flag for the Microsoft Zune: Capture the Flag is a 2d Capture the flag game made for the Zune platform using XNA 3.0 CTP. Players choose to join or start a network session in the main menu. When in game, the player uses left or right on the DPad to choose the team on which to play with. Once sides have been chosen the party leader presses the center button on the Dpad to start the game. Teams switch between offense and defense for a total of 4 rounds in each game. When the game is over the party leader simply presses th...XPS Indexer: Xps file indexing for Google Desktop

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