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• Use an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard Drive

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Deleting files or quickly formatting a drive isn’t enough for sensitive personal information. We’ll show you how to get rid of it for good using a Ubuntu Live CD. When you delete a file in Windows, Ubuntu, or any other operating system, it doesn’t actually destroy the data stored on your hard drive, it just marks that data as “deleted.” If you overwrite it later, then that data is generally unrecoverable, but if the operating system don’t happen to overwrite it, then your data is still stored on your hard drive, recoverable by anyone who has the right software. By securely delete files or entire hard drives, your data will be gone for good. Note: Modern hard drives are extremely sophisticated, as are the experts who recover data for a living. There is no guarantee that the methods covered in this article will make your data completely unrecoverable; however, they will make your data unrecoverable to the majority of recovery methods, and all methods that are readily available to the general public. Shred individual files Most of the data stored on your hard drive is harmless, and doesn’t reveal anything about you. If there are just a few files that you know you don’t want someone else to see, then the easiest way to get rid of them is a built-in Linux utility called shred. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications at the top-left of the screen, then expanding the Accessories menu and clicking on Terminal. Navigate to the file that you want to delete using cd to change directories and ls to list the files and folders in the current directory. As an example, we’ve got a file called BankInfo.txt on a Windows NTFS-formatted hard drive. We want to delete it securely, so we’ll call shred by entering the following in the terminal window: shred <file> which is, in our example: shred BankInfo.txt Notice that our BankInfo.txt file still exists, even though we’ve shredded it. A quick look at the contents of BankInfo.txt make it obvious that the file has indeed been securely overwritten. We can use some command-line arguments to make shred delete the file from the hard drive as well. We can also be extra-careful about the shredding process by upping the number of times shred overwrites the original file. To do this, in the terminal, type in: shred –remove –iterations=<num> <file> By default, shred overwrites the file 25 times. We’ll double this, giving us the following command: shred –remove –iterations=50 BankInfo.txt BankInfo.txt has now been securely wiped on the physical disk, and also no longer shows up in the directory listing. Repeat this process for any sensitive files on your hard drive! Wipe entire hard drives If you’re disposing of an old hard drive, or giving it to someone else, then you might instead want to wipe your entire hard drive. shred can be invoked on hard drives, but on modern file systems, the shred process may be reversible. We’ll use the program wipe to securely delete all of the data on a hard drive. Unlike shred, wipe is not included in Ubuntu by default, so we have to install it. Open up the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System in the top-left corner of the screen, then expanding the Administration folder and clicking on Synaptic Package Manager. wipe is part of the Universe repository, which is not enabled by default. We’ll enable it by clicking on Settings > Repositories in the Synaptic Package Manager window. Check the checkbox next to “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click Close. You’ll need to reload Synaptic’s package list. Click on the Reload button in the main Synaptic Package Manager window. Once the package list has been reloaded, the text over the search field will change to “Rebuilding search index”. Wait until it reads “Quick search,” and then type “wipe” into the search field. The wipe package should come up, along with some other packages that perform similar functions. Click on the checkbox to the left of the label “wipe” and select “Mark for Installation”. Click on the Apply button to start the installation process. Click the Apply button on the Summary window that pops up. Once the installation is done, click the Close button and close the Synaptic Package Manager window. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications in the top-left of the screen, then Accessories > Terminal. You need to figure our the correct hard drive to wipe. If you wipe the wrong hard drive, that data will not be recoverable, so exercise caution! In the terminal window, type in: sudo fdisk -l A list of your hard drives will show up. A few factors will help you identify the right hard drive. One is the file system, found in the System column of  the list – Windows hard drives are usually formatted as NTFS (which shows up as HPFS/NTFS). Another good identifier is the size of the hard drive, which appears after its identifier (highlighted in the following screenshot). In our case, the hard drive we want to wipe is only around 1 GB large, and is formatted as NTFS. We make a note of the label found under the the Device column heading. If you have multiple partitions on this hard drive, then there will be more than one device in this list. The wipe developers recommend wiping each partition separately. To start the wiping process, type the following into the terminal: sudo wipe <device label> In our case, this is: sudo wipe /dev/sda1 Again, exercise caution – this is the point of no return! Your hard drive will be completely wiped. It may take some time to complete, depending on the size of the drive you’re wiping. Conclusion If you have sensitive information on your hard drive – and chances are you probably do – then it’s a good idea to securely delete sensitive files before you give away or dispose of your hard drive. The most secure way to delete your data is with a few swings of a hammer, but shred and wipe from a Ubuntu Live CD is a good alternative! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDScan a Windows PC for Viruses from a Ubuntu Live CDRecover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CDCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi LocPDF is a Visual PDF Search Tool Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor Get Your Delicious Bookmarks In Firefox’s Awesome Bar

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• Remote Desktop to Your Azure Virtual Machine

  - by Shaun

  The Windows Azure Team had just published their new development portal this week and the SDK 1.3. Within this new release there are a lot of cool feature available. The one I’m looking forward to is Remote Desktop Access to your running Windows Azure Virtual Machine.   Configuration Remote Desktop Access It would be very simple to make the azure service enable the remote desktop access. First of all let’s create a new windows azure project from the Visual Studio. In this example I just created a normal MVC 2 web role without any modifications. Then we right-click the azure project node in the solution explorer window and select “Publish”. Then let’s select the “Deploy your Windows Azure project to Windows Azure” on the top radio button. And then select the credential, deployment service/slot, storage and label as susal. You must have the Management API Certificates uploaded to your Windows Azure account, and install the certification on you machine before in order to use this one-click deployment feature. If you are familiar with this dialog you will notice that there’s a linkage named “Configure Remote Desktop connections”. Here is where you need to make this service enable the remote desktop feature. After clicked this link we will set the configuration of the remote desktop access authorization information. There are 4 steps we need to do to configure our access. Certificates: We need either create or select a certificate file in order to encypt the access cerdenticals. In this example I will use the certificate file for my Management API. Username: The remote desktop user name to access the virtual machine. Password: The password for the access. Expiration: The access cerdentals would be expired after 1 month by default but we can amend here. After that we clicked the OK button to back to the publish dialog.   The next step is to back to the new windows azure portal and navigate to the hosted services list. I created a new hosted service and upload the certificate file onto this service. The user name and password access to the azure machine must be encrypted from the local machine, and then send to the windows azure platform, then decrypted on the azure side by the same file. This is why we need to upload the certificate file onto azure. We navigated to the “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN"” from the left panel and created a new hosted service named “SDK13” and selected the “Certificates” node. Then we clicked the “Add Certificates” button. Then we select the local certificate file and the password to install it into this azure service.   The final step would be back to our Visual Studio and in the pulish dialog just click the OK button. The Visual Studio will upload our package and the configuration into our service with the remote desktop settings.   Remote Desktop Access to Azure Virtual Machine All things had been done, let’s have a look back on the Windows Azure Development Portal. If I selected the web role that I had just published we can see on the toolbar there’s a section named “Remote Access”. In this section the Enable checkbox had been checked which means this role has the Remote Desktop Access feature enabled. If we want to modify the access cerdentals we can simply click the Configure button. Then we can update the user name, password, certificates and the expiration date.   Let’s select the instance node under the web role. In this case I just created one instance for demo. We can see that when we selected the instance node, the Connect button turned enabled. After clicked this button there will be a RDP file downloaded. This is a Remote Desctop configuration file that we can use to access to our azure virtual machine. Let’s download it to our local machine and execute. We input the user name and password we specified when we published our application to azure and then click OK. There might be some certificates warning dislog appeared. This is because the certificates we use to encryption is not signed by a trusted provider. Just select OK in these cases as we know the certificate is safty to us. Finally, the virtual machine of Windows Azure appeared.   A Quick Look into the Azure Virtual Machine Let’s just have a very quick look into our virtual machine. There are 3 disks available for us: C, D and E. Disk C: Store the local resource, diagnosis information, etc. Disk D: System disk which contains the OS, IIS, .NET Frameworks, etc. Disk E: Sotre our application code. The IIS which hosting our webiste on Azure. The IP configuration of the azure virtual machine.   Summary In this post I covered one of the new feature of the Azure SDK 1.3 – Remote Desktop Access. We can set the access per service and all of the instances of this service could be accessed through the remote desktop tool. With this feature we can deep into the virtual machines of our instances to see the inner information such as the system event, IIS log, system information, etc. But we should pay attention to modify the system settings. 2 reasons from what I know for now: 1. If we have more than one instances against our service we should ensure that all system settings we modifed are applied to all instances/virtual machines. Otherwise, as the machines are under the azure load balance proxy our application process may doesn’t work due to the defferent settings between the instances. 2. When the virtual machine encounted some problem and need to be translated to another physical machine all settings we made would be disappeared.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• LLBLGen Pro v3.1 released!

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday we released LLBLGen Pro v3.1! Version 3.1 comes with new features and enhancements, which I'll describe briefly below. v3.1 is a free upgrade for v3.x licensees. What's new / changed? Designer Extensible Import system. An extensible import system has been added to the designer to import project data from external sources. Importers are plug-ins which import project meta-data (like entity definitions, mappings and relational model data) from an external source into the loaded project. In v3.1, an importer plug-in for importing project elements from existing LLBLGen Pro v3.x project files has been included. You can use this importer to create source projects from which you import parts of models to build your actual project with. Model-only relationships. In v3.1, relationships of the type 1:1, m:1 and 1:n can be marked as model-only. A model-only relationship isn't required to have a backing foreign key constraint in the relational model data. They're ideal for projects which have to work with relational databases where changes can't always be made or some relationships can't be added to (e.g. the ones which are important for the entity model, but are not allowed to be added to the relational model for some reason). Custom field ordering. Although fields in an entity definition don't really have an ordering, it can be important for some situations to have the entity fields in a given order, e.g. when you use compound primary keys. Field ordering can be defined using a pop-up dialog which can be opened through various ways, e.g. inside the project explorer, model view and entity editor. It can also be set automatically during refreshes based on new settings. Command line relational model data refresher tool, CliRefresher.exe. The command line refresh tool shipped with v2.6 is now available for v3.1 as well Navigation enhancements in various designer elements. It's now easier to find elements like entities, typed views etc. in the project explorer from editors, to navigate to related entities in the project explorer by right clicking a relationship, navigate to the super-type in the project explorer when right-clicking an entity and navigate to the sub-type in the project explorer when right-clicking a sub-type node in the project explorer. Minor visual enhancements / tweaks LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework Entity creation is now up to 30% faster and takes 5% less memory. Creating an entity object has been optimized further by tweaks inside the framework to make instantiating an entity object up to 30% faster. It now also takes up to 5% less memory than in v3.0 Prefetch Path node merging is now up to 20-25% faster. Setting entity references required the creation of a new relationship object. As this relationship object is always used internally it could be cached (as it's used for syncing only). This increases performance by 20-25% in the merging functionality. Entity fetches are now up to 20% faster. A large number of tweaks have been applied to make entity fetches up to 20% faster than in v3.0. Full WCF RIA support. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF RIA application using the VS.NET tools for WCF RIA services. WCF RIA services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 and typically used within silverlight applications. SQL Server DQE compatibility level is now per instance. (Usable in Adapter). It's now possible to set the compatibility level of the SQL Server Dynamic Query Engine (DQE) per instance of the DQE instead of the global setting it was before. The global setting is still available and is used as the default value for the compatibility level per-instance. You can use this to switch between CE Desktop and normal SQL Server compatibility per DataAccessAdapter instance. Support for COUNT_BIG aggregate function (SQL Server specific). The aggregate function COUNT_BIG has been added to the list of available aggregate functions to be used in the framework. Minor changes / tweaks I'm especially pleased with the import system, as that makes working with entity models a lot easier. The import system lets you import from another LLBLGen Pro v3 project any entity definition, mapping and / or meta-data like table definitions. This way you can build repository projects where you store model fragments, e.g. the building blocks for a customer-order system, a user credential model etc., any model you can think of. In most projects, you'll recognize that some parts of your new model look familiar. In these cases it would have been easier if you would have been able to import these parts from projects you had pre-created. With LLBLGen Pro v3.1 you can. For example, say you have an Oracle schema called CRM which contains the bread 'n' butter customer-order-product kind of model. You create an entity model from that schema and save it in a project file. Now you start working on another project for another customer and you have to use SQL Server. You also start using model-first development, so develop the entity model from scratch as there's no existing database. As this customer also requires some CRM like entity model, you import the entities from your saved Oracle project into this new SQL Server targeting project. Because you don't work with Oracle this time, you don't import the relational meta-data, just the entities, their relationships and possibly their inheritance hierarchies, if any. As they're now entities in your project you can change them a bit to match the new customer's requirements. This can save you a lot of time, because you can re-use pre-fab model fragments for new projects. In the example above there are no tables yet (as you work model first) so using the forward mapping capabilities of LLBLGen Pro v3 creates the tables, PK constraints, Unique Constraints and FK constraints for you. This way you can build a nice repository of model fragments which you can re-use in new projects.

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• Customize the Default Screensavers in Windows 7 and Vista

  - by Matthew Guay

  Windows 7 and Vista include a nice set of backgrounds, but unfortunately most of them aren’t configurable by default.  Thanks to a free app and some registry changes, however, you can make the default screensavers uniquely yours! Customize the default screensavers If you’ve ever pressed the Customize button on most of the default screensavers in Windows 7 and Vista, you were probably greeted with this message: A little digging in the registry shows that this isn’t fully correct.  The default screensavers in Vista and 7 do have options you can set, but they’re not obvious.  With the help of an app or some registry tips, you can easily customize the screensavers to be uniquely yours.  Here’s how you can do it with an app or in the registry. Customize Windows Screensavers with System Screensavers Tweaker Download the System Screensavers Tweaker (link below), and unzip the folder.  Run nt6srccfg.exe in the folder to tweak your screensavers.  This application lets you tweak the screensavers’ registry settings graphically, and it works great in all editions of Windows Vista and 7, including x64 versions. Change any of the settings you want in the screensaver tweaker, and click Apply. To preview the changes to your screensaver, open the Screen Saver settings window as normal by right-clicking on the desktop, and selecting Personalize. Click on the Screensaver button on the bottom right. Now, select your modified screensaver, and click Preview to see your changes. You can change a wide variety of settings for the Bubbles, Ribbons, and Mystify screensavers in Windows 7 and Vista, as well as the Aurora screensaver in Windows Vista.  The tweaks to the Bubbles screensaver are especially nice.  Here’s how the Bubbles look without transparency. And, by tweaking a little more, you get a screensaver that looks more like a screen full of marbles. Ribbons and Mystify each have less settings, but still can produce some unique effects.   How’s that for a brilliant screensaver? And, if you want to return your screensavers to their default settings, simply run the System Screensavers Tweaker and select Reset to defaults on any screensaver you wish to reset. Customize Windows Screensavers in the Registry If you prefer to roll up your sleeves and tweak Windows under-the-hood, then here’s how you can customize the screensavers yourself in the Registry.  Type regedit into the search box in the Start menu, browse to the key for each screensaver, and add or modify the DWORD values listed for that screensaver using the Decimal base. Please Note: Tweaking the Registry can be difficult, so if you’re unsure, just use the tweaking application above. Also, you’ll probably want to create a System Restore Point.   Bubbles To edit the Bubbles screensaver, browse to the following in regedit: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Screensavers\Bubbles Now, add or modify the following DWORD values to tweak the screensaver: MaterialGlass – enter 0 for solid or 1 for transparent bubbles Radius – enter a number between 1090000000 and 1130000000; the larger the number, the larger the bubbles’ radius ShowBubbles – enter 0 to show a black background or 1 to show the current desktop behind the bubbles ShowShadows – enter 0 for no shadow or 1 for shadows behind the bubbles SphereDensity – enter a number from 1000000000 to 2100000000; the higher the number, the more bubbles on the screen. TurbulenceNumOctaves – enter a number from 1 to 255; the higher the number, the faster the bubble colors will change. Ribbons To edit the Ribbons screensaver, browse to the following in regedit: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Screensavers\Ribbons Now, add or modify the following DWORD values to tweak the screensaver: Blur – enter 0 to prevent ribbons from fading, or 1 to have them fade away after a few moments. Numribbons – enter a number from 1 to 100; the higher the number, the more ribbons on the screen. RibbonWidth – enter a number from 1000000000 to 1080000000; the higher the number, the thicker the ribbons. Mystify To edit the Mystify screensaver, browse to the following in regedit: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Screensavers\Mystify Now, add or modify the following DWORD values to tweak the screensaver: Blur – enter 0 to prevent lines from fading, or 1 to have them fade away after a few moments. LineWidth – enter a number from 1000000000 to 1080000000; the higher the number, the wider the lines. NumLines – enter a number from 1 to 100; the higher the value, the more lines on the screen. Aurora – Windows Vista only To edit the Aurora screensaver in Windows Vista, browse to the following in regedit: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Screensavers\Aurora Now, add or modify the following DWORD values to tweak the screensaver: Amplitude – enter a value from 500000000 to 2000000000; the higher the value, the slower the motion. Brightness – enter a value from 1000000000 to 1050000000; the higher the value, the brighter the affect. NumLayers – enter a value from 1 to 15; the higher the value, the more aurora layers displayed. Speed – enter a value from 1000000000 to 2100000000; the higher the value, the faster the cycling. Conclusion Although the default screensavers are nice, they can be boring after awhile with their default settings.  But with these tweaks, you can create a variety of vibrant screensavers that should keep your desktop fresh and interesting. Link Download the System Screensavers Tweaker Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create Icons to Start the Screensaver on Windows 7 or VistaMake Your Windows XP Logon Screen Look Like Windows VistaSpeed up Windows Vista Start Menu Search By Limiting ResultsRoundup: 16 Tweaks to Windows Vista Look & FeelSet XP as the Default OS in a Windows Vista Dual-Boot Setup TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi LocPDF is a Visual PDF Search Tool Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor

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• Trying to run my code and compiler seems to just close after it executes [migrated]

  - by Shane

  I am trying to run a program and the compiler seems to just crash right after it executes ... i have no build errors so i am wondering what the hell is going on ... I am a bit of a novice so all help would be appreciated =). I don't know if you might have time to scan through the code but this is what i have got : using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Threading.Tasks; namespace ConsoleApplication1 { public class Student { string Fname, Lname, Program ; int Sid ; // Inputting information for students public void InputStudentInfo () { Console.WriteLine ("Please enter your first name") ; Fname = Console.ReadLine() ; Console.WriteLine ("Please enter you last name") ; Lname = Console.ReadLine() ; Console.WriteLine ("Please enter you student ID#") ; Sid = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine()) ; Console.WriteLine ("Enter the Program that you are completeing") ; Program = Console.ReadLine() ; } // Printing information for students public void PrintStudentInfo () { Console.Write (" Your name is " + Fname) ; Console.Write(" " + Lname); Console.WriteLine (" Your student identification number is " + Sid) ; Console.WriteLine (" The program you are registered for is " + Program) ; } /* public void MenuInterface() { Console.WriteLine (" 1. Input Student information" ) ; Console.WriteLine (" 2. Input Course information" ) ; Console.WriteLine (" 3. Input Grade information" ) ; Console.WriteLine (" 4. Print Course information" ) ; Console.WriteLine (" 5. Print Student information" ) ; Console.WriteLine (" 6. Print Grade information" ) ; Console.WriteLine (" 7. Print Student information including Course they are registered in and the grade obtained for that course" ) ; Console.WriteLine (" 8. Print grade info of the course in which student has achieved the highest grade" ) ; Console.WriteLine (" 0. Exit") ; Console.WriteLine (" Please select a choice from 0-8") ; accode = Console.ReadLine(); } */ } public class Course { string course1, course2, course3 ; int Stuid ; // Inputting Course Information public void InputCourseInfo () { Console.WriteLine (" Please re-enter your identification number") ; Stuid = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine()) ; Console.WriteLine (" Enter the name of your first course") ; course1 = Console.ReadLine() ; Console.WriteLine (" Enter the name of your second course") ; course2 = Console.ReadLine() ; Console.WriteLine (" Enter the name of your third course") ; course3 = Console.ReadLine() ; } // Printing Course Information public void PrintCourseInfo () { Console.WriteLine (" Your ID # is " + Stuid) ; Console.Write (" The Courses you selected are " + course1) ; Console.Write("," + course2); Console.Write(" and " + course3); } } public class Grade : Course { int Studentid ; int [] hwgrade ; int [] cwgrade ; int [] midegrade ; int [] finalegrade ; int [] totalgrade ; string coursename ; public Grade ( string cname , int Studentident , int [] homework , int [] classwork , int [] midexam , int [] finalexam) { coursename = cname ; Studentid = Studentident ; hwgrade = homework ; cwgrade = classwork ; midegrade = midexam ; finalegrade = finalexam ; } public string coname { get { return coursename ; } set { coursename = value ; } } public int Studentidenty { get { return Studentid ; } set { Studentid = value ; } } public void InputGradeInfo() { Console.WriteLine (" Please enter your Student ID" ) ; grade.Studentidenty = Console.ReadLine() ; for ( int i = 0; i < 3; i++) { Console.Writeline (" Please enter the Course name" ) ; grade.coname[i] = Console.Readline() ; Console.Writeline (" Please enter your homework grade") ; grade.hwgrade[i] = int.parse(Console.Readline()) ; // ..... } } public void CalcTotalGrade() { for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) { grade.courseper[i] = (grade.hwgrade[i] + grade.cwgrade[i]) / 2; grade.finalper[i] = (grade.midexam[i] + grade.finalegrade[i]) / 2; grade.totalgrade[i] = (grade.courseper[i] + finalper[i]) / 2; } } public void PrintGradeInfo() { for ( int i = 0; i < 3; i++) { Console.Writeline (" Your homework grade is" + grade.hwgrade[i]) ; // ..... } } static void Main(string[] args) { int accode ; Student student = new Student() ; Course course = new Course() ; Grade grade = new Grade() ; do { Console.WriteLine(" 1. Input Student information"); Console.WriteLine(" 2. Input Course information"); Console.WriteLine(" 3. Input Grade information"); Console.WriteLine(" 4. Print Course information"); Console.WriteLine(" 5. Print Student information"); Console.WriteLine(" 6. Print Grade information"); Console.WriteLine(" 7. Print Student information including Course they are registered in and the grade obtained for that course"); Console.WriteLine(" 8. Print grade info of the course in which student has achieved the highest grade"); Console.WriteLine(" 0. Exit"); Console.WriteLine(" Please select a choice from 0-8"); accode = Console.ReadLine(); switch (accode) { case 1: student.InputStudentInfo(); break; case 2: course.InputCourseInfo(); break; case 3: grade.InputGradeInfo(); break; case 4: course.PrintCourseInfo(); break; case 5: student.PRintStudentInfo(); break; case 6: grade.PrintGradeInfo(); break; case 0: Console.WriteLine(" You have chosen to exit the program have a good day. =)"); break; } } while (accode != 0); Console.ReadKey(); } } }

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 27, 2010New ProjectsAlter gear SQL index Management: SQL Index management displays a list of indexes available for the chosen database and allows you to select an individual / group of indexes to be r...ASP League Ladder System: An ASP ladder / league system for online gaming league or real life leagues also.Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator is a software suite to promote computer aided strategy planning. Sports team can visualize their strategy usin...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Simple syntax hightlighting VSX add-in for Boo language in Visual Studio 2010.easySan: easySan zur einfachen Mitgliedsverwaltung im BRKFsUnit: FsUnit makes unit-testing with F# more enjoyable. It adds a special syntax to your favorite .NET testing framework.Laughing Dog XNA Framework: Laughing Dog is a simple to use, component based 2D framework for XNA game development. At present it is very early in development and as such is f...miniTodo: WPFでMVVMの練習にてきとうに作ったTODOアプリ 実用は無理です。My Common Library on .NET with CSharp: My Common Library on .NET with CSharp, it conclude database assecc, encrypt string, data caching, StringUtility, thank you for your view.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Ever thought about creating HUGE FILES for future use but felt bad for the wasted memory? Well, SPARSE FILES are the ANSWER! This FSUTIL SPARSE CO...Open SOA Platform: A centralized system for administering applications throught a SOA Enterprise Service Bus: Runtime environment (PROD, DEV, ...) , application and s...P-DBMS: Network and Database ProjectPraiseSight: PraiseSight is supposed to become a practical tool for churches to catalog an present their songs, lyrics and presentations on a beamer. The soluti...Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend is a sample frontend for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 and MDT 2010 Zero Touch. S3Appender (Appender for Log4Net that Uses Amazon S3 For Storing Log Files): The S3Appender is a log4net appender that stores log events in either a MemoryStream or FileStream and sends them to S3 based on time intervals and...sEmit: sEmit (sms emitter) is an application written in C# which was built to send text messages. The project was founded in May 2009 by cansik. It works ...Silverlight RIA Tools: A tool set that generates a full RIA Solutions in Silverlightthommo cannon: Cannon for shooting down ThommosTianjin Polytechnic University Online Judge: Online Judge System Built on Microsoft technologies. Vision & Scope: A distributed OJ Solution on Windows and Cloud. Technologies used or planed...Tinare: Tinare is an byte encryption and decryption alogrithm. The input key is a string password.TinyPlug: Small Plugin Manager, written in C# Allows a project to define supported interfaces, and at runtime add plugins which support (inherit) these in...Utility niconv helps to convert text from one encoding to another: .NET implementation of GUN iconv console converter utility. The niconv program converts text from one encoding to another encoding. In the future r...WareFeed - Software Business Analytics: WareFeed is a simple but effective Software Business Analytics tool written in PHP and compatible others languages such as .NET, Java or Python. It...Y36API1: Semestralni projekt na Y36APINew ReleasesAlter gear SQL index Management: Setup 1.0.0: setup for first alpha releaseASP League Ladder System: ASPLeagueRelease_0_4_1: Release v 0.41Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Augmented Reality Strategy Simulator: Version 1.0 InstallerAutoAudit: AutoAudit 1.10e: Version 1.10e will be the final iteration of version 1 development. Version 2 will begin adding switches and options. Pleae email your suggestio...Boo syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: Boo syntax VS 2010 - alpha: First release TODO: Multiline comments!Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET 0.6: Updated library, using Metered Components and updated Product information.Composer: V1.0.326.1000 Alpha: Initial Alpha release. Should be stable, with minor issues.CoNatural Components: CoNatural Components 1.6: Code fixes: Created helper classes to generate source code for type mapper/materializer. Fixed issue in optimized type materializer when loading ...CRM External View: 1.2: New Features in v1.2 release Password protected views. No more using Web Data Access role from v1. 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Please leave any errors in discussions or comments.Native code wrapping using c# : fsutil sparse commands: Fsutil sparse file native code - c sharp wrapper: Project Description A C# code wrapping a native code-Sparse files1 The code is about SPARSE files- the abillity to create huge files (for future us...Nice Libraries: 1.30 build 50325.01: Release 1.30 build 50325.01Pretty Good Frontend: Pretty Good Frontend binaries v1.0: This is the first public release of the Pretty Good Frontend binariesPylor: Pylor 0.1 alpha: This is the very first published version. I hope I can put a sample project soon.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.1 refresh: There was a typo or two in the sample batch file. Corrected now.Rapidshare Episode Downloader: RED v0.8.3: 0.8.1 introduced the ability to advance to the next episode. 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Fixed the bug that caused an exception to be thrown if the user...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightLINQ to TwitterTable2ClassFluent Ribbon Control SuiteNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network

  Even though IPv6 might not be that important within your local network it might be good to get yourself into shape, and be able to provide some details of your infrastructure automatically to your network clients. This is the second article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. IPv6 addresses for everyone (in your network) Okay, after setting up the configuration of your local system, it might be interesting to enable all your machines in your network to use IPv6. There are two options to solve this kind of requirement... Either you're busy like a bee and you go around to configure each and every system manually, or you're more the lazy and effective type of network administrator and you prefer to work with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Obviously, I'm of the second type. Enabling dynamic IPv6 address assignments can be done with a new or an existing instance of a DHCPd. In case of Ubuntu-based installation this might be isc-dhcp-server. The isc-dhcp-server allows address pooling for IP and IPv6 within the same package, you just have to run to independent daemons for each protocol version. First, check whether isc-dhcp-server is already installed and maybe running your machine like so: $ service isc-dhcp-server6 status In case, that the service is unknown, you have to install it like so: $ sudo apt-get install isc-dhcp-server Please bear in mind that there is no designated installation package for IPv6. Okay, next you have to create a separate configuration file for IPv6 address pooling and network parameters called /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf. This file is not automatically provided by the package, compared to IPv4. Again, use your favourite editor and put the following lines: $ sudo nano /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf authoritative;default-lease-time 14400; max-lease-time 86400;log-facility local7;subnet6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 {    option dhcp6.name-servers 2001:4860:4860::8888, 2001:4860:4860::8844;    option dhcp6.domain-search "ios.mu";    range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::100 2001:db8:bad:a55::199;    range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 temporary;} Next, save the file and start the daemon as a foreground process to see whether it is going to listen to requests or not, like so: $ sudo /usr/sbin/dhcpd -6 -d -cf /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf eth0 The parameters are explained quickly as -6 we want to run as a DHCPv6 server, -d we are sending log messages to the standard error descriptor (so you should monitor your /var/log/syslog file, too), and we explicitely want to use our newly created configuration file (-cf). You might also use the command switch -t to test the configuration file prior to running the server. In my case, I ended up with a couple of complaints by the server, especially reporting that the necessary lease file wouldn't exist. So, ensure that the lease file for your IPv6 address assignments is present: $ sudo touch /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases$ sudo chown dhcpd:dhcpd /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases Now, you should be good to go. Stop your foreground process and try to run the DHCPv6 server as a service on your system: $ sudo service isc-dhcp-server6 startisc-dhcp-server6 start/running, process 15883 Check your log file /var/log/syslog for any kind of problems. Refer to the man-pages of isc-dhcp-server and you might check out Chapter 22.6 of Peter Bieringer's IPv6 Howto. The instructions regarding DHCPv6 on the Ubuntu Wiki are not as complete as expected and it might not be as helpful as this article or Peter's HOWTO. But see for yourself. Does the client get an IPv6 address? Running a DHCPv6 server on your local network surely comes in handy but it has to work properly. The following paragraphs describe briefly how to check the IPv6 configuration of your clients, Linux - ifconfig or ip command First, you have enable IPv6 on your Linux by specifying the necessary directives in the /etc/network/interfaces file, like so: $ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces iface eth1 inet6 dhcp Note: Your network device might be eth0 - please don't just copy my configuration lines. Then, either restart your network subsystem, or enable the device manually using the dhclient command with IPv6 switch, like so: $ sudo dhclient -6 You would either use the ifconfig or (if installed) the ip command to check the configuration of your network device like so: $ sudo ifconfig eth1eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1d:09:5d:8d:98            inet addr:192.168.160.147  Bcast:192.168.160.255  Mask:255.255.255.0          inet6 addr: 2001:db8:bad:a55::193/64 Scope:Global          inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe5d:8d98/64 Scope:Link          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1 Looks good, the client has an IPv6 assignment. Now, let's see whether DNS information has been provided, too. $ less /etc/resolv.conf # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)#     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTENnameserver 2001:4860:4860::8888nameserver 2001:4860:4860::8844nameserver 192.168.1.2nameserver 127.0.1.1search ios.mu Nicely done. Windows - netsh Per description on TechNet the netsh is defined as following: "Netsh is a command-line scripting utility that allows you to, either locally or remotely, display or modify the network configuration of a computer that is currently running. Netsh also provides a scripting feature that allows you to run a group of commands in batch mode against a specified computer. Netsh can also save a configuration script in a text file for archival purposes or to help you configure other servers." And even though TechNet states that it applies to Windows Server (only), it is also available on Windows client operating systems, like Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. In order to get or even set information related to IPv6 protocol, we have to switch the netsh interface context prior to our queries. Open a command prompt in Windows and run the following statements: C:\Users\joki>netshnetsh>interface ipv6netsh interface ipv6>show interfaces Select the device index from the Idx column to get more details about the IPv6 address and DNS server information (here: I'm going to use my WiFi device with device index 11), like so: netsh interface ipv6>show address 11 Okay, address information has been provided. Now, let's check the details about DNS and resolving host names: netsh interface ipv6> show dnsservers 11 Okay, that looks good already. Our Windows client has a valid IPv6 address lease with lifetime information and details about the configured DNS servers. Talking about DNS server... Your clients should be able to connect to your network servers via IPv6 using hostnames instead of IPv6 addresses. Please read on about how to enable a local named with IPv6.

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• New Feature in ODI 11.1.1.6: ODI for Big Data

  - by Julien Testut

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} By Ananth Tirupattur Starting with Oracle Data Integrator 11.1.1.6.0, ODI is offering a solution to process Big Data. This post provides an overview of this feature. With all the buzz around Big Data and before getting into the details of ODI for Big Data, I will provide a brief introduction to Big Data and Oracle Solution for Big Data. So, what is Big Data? Big data includes: structured data (this includes data from relation data stores, xml data stores), semi-structured data (this includes data from weblogs) unstructured data (this includes data from text blob, images) Traditionally, business decisions are based on the information gathered from transactional data. For example, transactional Data from CRM applications is fed to a decision system for analysis and decision making. Products such as ODI play a key role in enabling decision systems. However, with the emergence of massive amounts of semi-structured and unstructured data it is important for decision system to include them in the analysis to achieve better decision making capability. While there is an abundance of opportunities for business for gaining competitive advantages, process of Big Data has challenges. The challenges of processing Big Data include: Volume of data Velocity of data - The high Rate at which data is generated Variety of data In order to address these challenges and convert them into opportunities, we would need an appropriate framework, platform and the right set of tools. Hadoop is an open source framework which is highly scalable, fault tolerant system, for storage and processing large amounts of data. Hadoop provides 2 key services, distributed and reliable storage called Hadoop Distributed File System or HDFS and a framework for parallel data processing called Map-Reduce. Innovations in Hadoop and its related technology continue to rapidly evolve, hence therefore, it is highly recommended to follow information on the web to keep up with latest information. Oracle's vision is to provide a comprehensive solution to address the challenges faced by Big Data. Oracle is providing the necessary Hardware, software and tools for processing Big Data Oracle solution includes: Big Data Appliance Oracle NoSQL Database Cloudera distribution for Hadoop Oracle R Enterprise- R is a statistical package which is very popular among data scientists. ODI solution for Big Data Oracle Loader for Hadoop for loading data from Hadoop to Oracle. Further details can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/big-data-appliance/overview/index.html ODI Solution for Big Data: ODI’s goal is to minimize the need to understand the complexity of Hadoop framework and simplify the adoption of processing Big Data seamlessly in an enterprise. ODI is providing the capabilities for an integrated architecture for processing Big Data. This includes capability to load data in to Hadoop, process data in Hadoop and load data from Hadoop into Oracle. ODI is expanding its support for Big Data by providing the following out of the box Knowledge Modules (KMs). IKM File to Hive (LOAD DATA).Load unstructured data from File (Local file system or HDFS ) into Hive IKM Hive Control AppendTransform and validate structured data on Hive IKM Hive TransformTransform unstructured data on Hive IKM File/Hive to Oracle (OLH)Load processed data in Hive to Oracle RKM HiveReverse engineer Hive tables to generate models Using the Loading KM you can map files (local and HDFS files) to the corresponding Hive tables. For example, you can map weblog files categorized by date into a corresponding partitioned Hive table schema. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Using the Hive control Append KM you can validate and transform data in Hive. In the below example, two source Hive tables are joined and mapped to a target Hive table. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} The Hive Transform KM facilitates processing of semi-structured data in Hive. In the below example, the data from weblog is processed using a Perl script and mapped to target Hive table. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Using the Oracle Loader for Hadoop (OLH) KM you can load data from Hive table or HDFS to a corresponding table in Oracle. OLH is available as a standalone product. ODI greatly enhances OLH capability by generating the configuration and mapping files for OLH based on the configuration provided in the interface and KM options. ODI seamlessly invokes OLH when executing the scenario. In the below example, a HDFS file is mapped to a table in Oracle. Development and Deployment:The following diagram illustrates the development and deployment of ODI solution for Big Data. Using the ODI Studio on your development machine create and develop ODI solution for processing Big Data by connecting to a MySQL DB or Oracle database on a BDA machine or Hadoop cluster. Schedule the ODI scenarios to be executed on the ODI agent deployed on the BDA machine or Hadoop cluster. ODI Solution for Big Data provides several exciting new capabilities to facilitate the adoption of Big Data in an enterprise. You can find more information about the Oracle Big Data connectors on OTN. You can find an overview of all the new features introduced in ODI 11.1.1.6 in the following document: ODI 11.1.1.6 New Features Overview

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• Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for SQL Server

  - by SQLOS Team

  Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for Windows Server Machine Running SQL Server With the release of MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta, we have added a new scenario to assess your Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness. The MAP 8.0 Beta performs a comprehensive assessment of Windows Servers running SQL Server to determine you level of readiness to migrate an on-premise physical or virtual machine to Windows Azure Virtual Machines. The MAP Toolkit then offers suggested changes to prepare the machines for migration, such as upgrading the operating system or SQL Server. MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Now, let’s walk through the MAP Toolkit task for completing the Windows Azure Virtual Machine assessment and capacity planning. The tasks include the following: Perform an inventory View the Windows Azure VM Readiness results and report Collect performance data for determine VM sizing View the Windows Azure Capacity results and report Perform an inventory: 1. To perform an inventory against a single machine or across a complete environment, choose Perform an Inventory to launch the Inventory and Assessment Wizard as shown below: 2. After the Inventory and Assessment Wizard launches, select either the Windows computers or SQL Server scenario to inventory Windows machines. HINT: If you don’t care about completely inventorying a machine, just select the SQL Server scenario. Click Next to Continue. 3. On the Discovery Methods page, select how you want to discover computers and then click Next to continue. Description of Discovery Methods: Use Active Directory Domain Services -- This method allows you to query a domain controller via the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and select computers in all or specific domains, containers, or OUs. Use this method if all computers and devices are in AD DS. Windows networking protocols --  This method uses the WIN32 LAN Manager application programming interfaces to query the Computer Browser service for computers in workgroups and Windows NT 4.0–based domains. If the computers on the network are not joined to an Active Directory domain, use only the Windows networking protocols option to find computers. System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) -- This method enables you to inventory computers managed by System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). You need to provide credentials to the System Center Configuration Manager server in order to inventory the managed computers. When you select this option, the MAP Toolkit will query SCCM for a list of computers and then MAP will connect to these computers. Scan an IP address range -- This method allows you to specify the starting address and ending address of an IP address range. The wizard will then scan all IP addresses in the range and inventory only those computers. Note: This option can perform poorly, if many IP addresses aren’t being used within the range. Manually enter computer names and credentials -- Use this method if you want to inventory a small number of specific computers. Import computer names from a files -- Using this method, you can create a text file with a list of computer names that will be inventoried. 4. On the All Computers Credentials page, enter the accounts that have administrator rights to connect to the discovered machines. This does not need to a domain account, but needs to be a local administrator. I have entered my domain account that is an administrator on my local machine. Click Next after one or more accounts have been added. NOTE: The MAP Toolkit primarily uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to collect hardware, device, and software information from the remote computers. In order for the MAP Toolkit to successfully connect and inventory computers in your environment, you have to configure your machines to inventory through WMI and also allow your firewall to enable remote access through WMI. The MAP Toolkit also requires remote registry access for certain assessments. In addition to enabling WMI, you need accounts with administrative privileges to access desktops and servers in your environment. 5. On the Credentials Order page, select the order in which want the MAP Toolkit to connect to the machine and SQL Server. Generally just accept the defaults and click Next. 6. On the Enter Computers Manually page, click Create to pull up at dialog to enter one or more computer names. 7. On the Summary page confirm your settings and then click Finish. After clicking Finish the inventory process will start, as shown below: Windows Azure Readiness results and report After the inventory progress has completed, you can review the results under the Database scenario. On the tile, you will see the number of Windows Server machine with SQL Server that were analyzed, the number of machines that are ready to move without changes and the number of machines that require further changes. If you click this Azure VM Readiness tile, you will see additional details and can generate the Windows Azure VM Readiness Report. After the report is generated, select View | Saved Reports and Proposals to view the location of the report. Open up WindowsAzureVMReadiness* report in Excel. On the Windows tab, you can see the results of the assessment. This report has a column for the Operating System and SQL Server assessment and provides a recommendation on how to resolve, if there a component is not supported. Collect Performance Data Launch the Performance Wizard to collect performance information for the Windows Server machines that you would like the MAP Toolkit to suggest a Windows Azure VM size for. Windows Azure Capacity results and report After the performance metrics are collected, the Azure VM Capacity title will display the number of Virtual Machine sizes that are suggested for the Windows Server and Linux machines that were analyzed. You can then click on the Azure VM Capacity tile to see the capacity details and generate the Windows Azure VM Capacity Report. Within this report, you can view the performance data that was collected and the Virtual Machine sizes.   MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Useful References: Windows Azure Homepage How to guides for Windows Azure Virtual Machines Provisioning a SQL Server Virtual Machine on Windows Azure Windows Azure Pricing     Peter Saddow Senior Program Manager – MAP Toolkit Team

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• Get Application Title from Windows Phone

  - by psheriff

  In a Windows Phone application that I am currently developing I needed to be able to retrieve the Application Title of the phone application. You can set the Deployment Title in the Properties of your Windows Phone Application, however getting to this value programmatically can be a little tricky. This article assumes that you have Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone tools installed along with it. The Windows Phone tools must be downloaded separately and installed with Visual Studio2010. You may also download the free Visual Studio2010 Express for Windows Phone developer environment. The WMAppManifest.xml File First off you need to understand that when you set the Deployment Title in the Properties windows of your Windows Phone application, this title actually gets stored into an XML file located under the \Properties folder of your application. This XML file is named WMAppManifest.xml. A portion of this file is shown in the following listing. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><Deployment  http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment"http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment"  AppPlatformVersion="7.0">  <App xmlns=""       ProductID="{71d20842-9acc-4f2f-b0e0-8ef79842ea53}"       Title="Mobile Time Track"       RuntimeType="Silverlight"       Version="1.0.0.0"       Genre="apps.normal"       Author="PDSA, Inc."       Description="Mobile Time Track"       Publisher="PDSA, Inc."> ... ...  </App></Deployment> Notice the “Title” attribute in the <App> element in the above XML document. This is the value that gets set when you modify the Deployment Title in your Properties Window of your Phone project. The only value you can set from the Properties Window is the Title. All of the other attributes you see here must be set by going into the XML file and modifying them directly. Note that this information duplicates some of the information that you can also set from the Assembly Information… button in the Properties Window. Why Microsoft did not just use that information, I don’t know. Reading Attributes from WMAppManifest I searched all over the namespaces and classes within the Windows Phone DLLs and could not find a way to read the attributes within the <App> element. Thus, I had to resort to good old fashioned XML processing. First off I created a WinPhoneCommon class and added two static methods as shown in the snippet below: public class WinPhoneCommon{  /// <summary>  /// Returns the Application Title   /// from the WMAppManifest.xml file  /// </summary>  /// <returns>The application title</returns>  public static string GetApplicationTitle()  {    return GetWinPhoneAttribute("Title");  }   /// <summary>  /// Returns the Application Description   /// from the WMAppManifest.xml file  /// </summary>  /// <returns>The application description</returns>  public static string GetApplicationDescription()  {    return GetWinPhoneAttribute("Description");  }   ... GetWinPhoneAttribute method here ...} In your Windows Phone application you can now simply call WinPhoneCommon.GetApplicationTitle() or WinPhone.GetApplicationDescription() to retrieve the Title or Description properties from the WMAppManifest.xml file respectively. You notice that each of these methods makes a call to the GetWinPhoneAttribute method. This method is shown in the following code snippet: /// <summary>/// Gets an attribute from the Windows Phone WMAppManifest.xml file/// To use this method, add a reference to the System.Xml.Linq DLL/// </summary>/// <param name="attributeName">The attribute to read</param>/// <returns>The Attribute's Value</returns>private static string GetWinPhoneAttribute(string attributeName){  string ret = string.Empty;   try  {    XElement xe = XElement.Load("WMAppManifest.xml");    var attr = (from manifest in xe.Descendants("App")                select manifest).SingleOrDefault();    if (attr != null)      ret = attr.Attribute(attributeName).Value;  }  catch  {    // Ignore errors in case this method is called    // from design time in VS.NET  }   return ret;} I love using the new LINQ to XML classes contained in the System.Xml.Linq.dll. When I did a Bing search the only samples I found for reading attribute information from WMAppManifest.xml used either an XmlReader or XmlReaderSettings objects. These are fine and work, but involve a little extra code. Instead of using these, I added a reference to the System.Xml.Linq.dll, then added two using statements to the top of the WinPhoneCommon class: using System.Linq;using System.Xml.Linq; Now, with just a few lines of LINQ to XML code you can read to the App element and extract the appropriate attribute that you pass into the GetWinPhoneAttribute method. Notice that I added a little bit of exception handling code in this method. I ignore the exception in case you call this method in the Loaded event of a user control. In design-time you cannot access the WMAppManifest file and thus an exception would be thrown. Summary In this article you learned how to retrieve the attributes from the WMAppManifest.xml file. I use this technique to grab information that I would otherwise have to hard-code in my application. Getting the Title or Description for your Windows Phone application is easy with just a little bit of LINQ to XML code. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "Get Application Title from Windows Phone" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free video on Silverlight entitled Silverlight XAML for the Complete Novice - Part 1.  

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• Das T5-4 TPC-H Ergebnis naeher betrachtet

  - by Stefan Hinker

  Inzwischen haben vermutlich viele das neue TPC-H Ergebnis der SPARC T5-4 gesehen, das am 7. Juni bei der TPC eingereicht wurde.  Die wesentlichen Punkte dieses Benchmarks wurden wie gewohnt bereits von unserer Benchmark-Truppe auf  "BestPerf" zusammengefasst.  Es gibt aber noch einiges mehr, das eine naehere Betrachtung lohnt. Skalierbarkeit Das TPC raet von einem Vergleich von TPC-H Ergebnissen in unterschiedlichen Groessenklassen ab.  Aber auch innerhalb der 3000GB-Klasse ist es interessant: SPARC T4-4 mit 4 CPUs (32 Cores mit 3.0 GHz) liefert 205,792 QphH. SPARC T5-4 mit 4 CPUs (64 Cores mit 3.6 GHz) liefert 409,721 QphH. Das heisst, es fehlen lediglich 1863 QphH oder 0.45% zu 100% Skalierbarkeit, wenn man davon ausgeht, dass die doppelte Anzahl Kerne das doppelte Ergebnis liefern sollte.  Etwas anspruchsvoller, koennte man natuerlich auch einen Faktor von 2.4 erwarten, wenn man die hoehere Taktrate mit beruecksichtigt.  Das wuerde die Latte auf 493901 QphH legen.  Dann waere die SPARC T5-4 bei 83%.  Damit stellt sich die Frage: Was hat hier nicht skaliert?  Vermutlich der Plattenspeicher!  Auch hier lohnt sich eine naehere Betrachtung: Plattenspeicher Im Bericht auf BestPerf und auch im Full Disclosure Report der TPC stehen einige interessante Details zum Plattenspeicher und der Konfiguration.   In der Konfiguration der SPARC T4-4 wurden 12 2540-M2 Arrays verwendet, die jeweils ca. 1.5 GB/s Durchsatz liefert, insgesamt also eta 18 GB/s.  Dabei waren die Arrays offensichtlich mit jeweils 2 Kabeln pro Array direkt an die 24 8GBit FC-Ports des Servers angeschlossen.  Mit den 2x 8GBit Ports pro Array koennte man so ein theoretisches Maximum von 2GB/s erreichen.  Tatsaechlich wurden 1.5GB/s geliefert, was so ziemlich dem realistischen Maximum entsprechen duerfte. Fuer den Lauf mit der SPARC T5-4 wurden doppelt so viele Platten verwendet.  Dafuer wurden die 2540-M2 Arrays mit je einem zusaetzlichen Plattentray erweitert.  Mit dieser Konfiguration wurde dann (laut BestPerf) ein Maximaldurchsatz von 33 GB/s erreicht - nicht ganz das doppelte des SPARC T4-4 Laufs.  Um tatsaechlich den doppelten Durchsatz (36 GB/s) zu liefern, haette jedes der 12 Arrays 3 GB/s ueber seine 4 8GBit Ports liefern muessen.  Im FDR stehen nur 12 dual-port FC HBAs, was die Verwendung der Brocade FC Switches erklaert: Es wurden alle 4 8GBit ports jedes Arrays an die Switches angeschlossen, die die Datenstroeme dann in die 24 16GBit HBA ports des Servers buendelten.  Das theoretische Maximum jedes Storage-Arrays waere nun 4 GB/s.  Wenn man jedoch den Protokoll- und "Realitaets"-Overhead mit einrechnet, sind die tatsaechlich gelieferten 2.75 GB/s gar nicht schlecht.  Mit diesen Zahlen im Hinterkopf ist die Verdopplung des SPARC T4-4 Ergebnisses eine gute Leistung - und gleichzeitig eine gute Erklaerung, warum nicht bis zum 2.4-fachen skaliert wurde. Nebenbei bemerkt: Weder die SPARC T4-4 noch die SPARC T5-4 hatten in der gemessenen Konfiguration irgendwelche Flash-Devices. Mitbewerb Seit die T4 Systeme auf dem Markt sind, bemuehen sich unsere Mitbewerber redlich darum, ueberall den Eindruck zu hinterlassen, die Leistung des SPARC CPU-Kerns waere weiterhin mangelhaft.  Auch scheinen sie ueberzeugt zu sein, dass (ueber)grosse Caches und hohe Taktraten die einzigen Schluessel zu echter Server Performance seien.  Wenn ich mir nun jedoch die oeffentlichen TPC-H Ergebnisse ansehe, sehe ich dies: TPC-H @3000GB, Non-Clustered Systems System QphH SPARC T5-4 3.6 GHz SPARC T5 4/64 – 2048 GB 409,721.8 SPARC T4-4 3.0 GHz SPARC T4 4/32 – 1024 GB 205,792.0 IBM Power 780 4.1 GHz POWER7 8/32 – 1024 GB 192,001.1 HP ProLiant DL980 G7 2.27 GHz Intel Xeon X7560 8/64 – 512 GB 162,601.7 Kurz zusammengefasst: Mit 32 Kernen (mit 3 GHz und 4MB L3 Cache), liefert die SPARC T4-4 mehr QphH@3000GB ab als IBM mit ihrer 32 Kern Power7 (bei 4.1 GHz und 32MB L3 Cache) und auch mehr als HP mit einem 64 Kern Intel Xeon System (2.27 GHz und 24MB L3 Cache).  Ich frage mich, wo genau SPARC hier mangelhaft ist? Nun koennte man natuerlich argumentieren, dass beide Ergebnisse nicht gerade neu sind.  Nun, in Ermangelung neuerer Ergebnisse kann man ja mal ein wenig spekulieren: IBMs aktueller Performance Report listet die o.g. IBM Power 780 mit einem rPerf Wert von 425.5.  Ein passendes Nachfolgesystem mit Power7+ CPUs waere die Power 780+ mit 64 Kernen, verfuegbar mit 3.72 GHz.  Sie wird mit einem rPerf Wert von  690.1 angegeben, also 1.62x mehr.  Wenn man also annimmt, dass Plattenspeicher nicht der limitierende Faktor ist (IBM hat mit 177 SSDs getestet, sie duerfen das gerne auf 400 erhoehen) und IBMs eigene Leistungsabschaetzung zugrunde legt, darf man ein theoretisches Ergebnis von 311398 QphH@3000GB erwarten.  Das waere dann allerdings immer noch weit von dem Ergebnis der SPARC T5-4 entfernt, und gerade in der von IBM so geschaetzen "per core" Metric noch weniger vorteilhaft. In der x86-Welt sieht es nicht besser aus.  Leider gibt es von Intel keine so praktischen rPerf-Tabellen.  Daher muss ich hier fuer eine Schaetzung auf SPECint_rate2006 zurueckgreifen.  (Ich bin kein grosser Fan von solchen Kreuz- und Querschaetzungen.  Insb. SPECcpu ist nicht besonders geeignet, um Datenbank-Leistung abzuschaetzen, da fast kein IO im Spiel ist.)  Das o.g. HP System wird bei SPEC mit 1580 CINT2006_rate gelistet.  Das bis einschl. 2013-06-14 beste Resultat fuer den neuen Intel Xeon E7-4870 mit 8 CPUs ist 2180 CINT2006_rate.  Das ist immerhin 1.38x besser.  (Wenn man nur die Taktrate beruecksichtigen wuerde, waere man bei 1.32x.)  Hier weiter zu rechnen, ist muessig, aber fuer die ungeduldigen Leser hier eine kleine tabellarische Zusammenfassung: TPC-H @3000GB Performance Spekulationen System QphH* Verbesserung gegenueber der frueheren Generation SPARC T4-4 32 cores SPARC T4 205,792 2x SPARC T5-464 cores SPARC T5 409,721 IBM Power 780 32 cores Power7 192,001 1.62x IBM Power 780+ 64 cores Power7+  311,398* HP ProLiant DL980 G764 cores Intel Xeon X7560 162,601 1.38x HP ProLiant DL980 G780 cores Intel Xeon E7-4870    224,348* * Keine echten Resultate  - spekulative Werte auf der Grundlage von rPerf (Power7+) oder SPECint_rate2006 (HP) Natuerlich sind IBM oder HP herzlich eingeladen, diese Werte zu widerlegen.  Aber stand heute warte ich noch auf aktuelle Benchmark Veroffentlichungen in diesem Datensegment. Was koennen wir also zusammenfassen? Es gibt einige Hinweise, dass der Plattenspeicher der begrenzende Faktor war, der die SPARC T5-4 daran hinderte, auf jenseits von 2x zu skalieren Der Mythos, dass SPARC Kerne keine Leistung bringen, ist genau das - ein Mythos.  Wie sieht es umgekehrt eigentlich mit einem TPC-H Ergebnis fuer die Power7+ aus? Cache ist nicht der magische Performance-Schalter, fuer den ihn manche Leute offenbar halten. Ein System, eine CPU-Architektur und ein Betriebsystem jenseits einer gewissen Grenze zu skalieren ist schwer.  In der x86-Welt scheint es noch ein wenig schwerer zu sein. Was fehlt?  Nun, das Thema Preis/Leistung ueberlasse ich gerne den Verkaeufern ;-) Und zu guter Letzt: Nein, ich habe mich nicht ins Marketing versetzen lassen.  Aber manchmal kann ich mich einfach nicht zurueckhalten... Disclosure Statements The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. TPC-H, QphH, $/QphH are trademarks of Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). For more information, see www.tpc.org, results as of 6/7/13. Prices are in USD. SPARC T5-4 409,721.8 QphH@3000GB, $3.94/QphH@3000GB, available 9/24/13, 4 processors, 64 cores, 512 threads; SPARC T4-4 205,792.0 QphH@3000GB, $4.10/QphH@3000GB, available 5/31/12, 4 processors, 32 cores, 256 threads; IBM Power 780 QphH@3000GB, 192,001.1 QphH@3000GB, $6.37/QphH@3000GB, available 11/30/11, 8 processors, 32 cores, 128 threads; HP ProLiant DL980 G7 162,601.7 QphH@3000GB, $2.68/QphH@3000GB available 10/13/10, 8 processors, 64 cores, 128 threads. SPEC and the benchmark names SPECfp and SPECint are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results as of June 18, 2013 from www.spec.org. HP ProLiant DL980 G7 (2.27 GHz, Intel Xeon X7560): 1580 SPECint_rate2006; HP ProLiant DL980 G7 (2.4 GHz, Intel Xeon E7-4870): 2180 SPECint_rate2006,

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• HTG Explains: Should You Build Your Own PC?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  There was a time when every geek seemed to build their own PC. While the masses bought eMachines and Compaqs, geeks built their own more powerful and reliable desktop machines for cheaper. But does this still make sense? Building your own PC still offers as much flexibility in component choice as it ever did, but prebuilt computers are available at extremely competitive prices. Building your own PC will no longer save you money in most cases. The Rise of Laptops It’s impossible to look at the decline of geeks building their own PCs without considering the rise of laptops. There was a time when everyone seemed to use desktops — laptops were more expensive and significantly slower in day-to-day tasks. With the diminishing importance of computing power — nearly every modern computer has more than enough power to surf the web and use typical programs like Microsoft Office without any trouble — and the rise of laptop availability at nearly every price point, most people are buying laptops instead of desktops. And, if you’re buying a laptop, you can’t really build your own. You can’t just buy a laptop case and start plugging components into it — even if you could, you would end up with an extremely bulky device. Ultimately, to consider building your own desktop PC, you have to actually want a desktop PC. Most people are better served by laptops. Benefits to PC Building The two main reasons to build your own PC have been component choice and saving money. Building your own PC allows you to choose all the specific components you want rather than have them chosen for you. You get to choose everything, including the PC’s case and cooling system. Want a huge case with room for a fancy water-cooling system? You probably want to build your own PC. In the past, this often allowed you to save money — you could get better deals by buying the components yourself and combining them, avoiding the PC manufacturer markup. You’d often even end up with better components — you could pick up a more powerful CPU that was easier to overclock and choose more reliable components so you wouldn’t have to put up with an unstable eMachine that crashed every day. PCs you build yourself are also likely more upgradable — a prebuilt PC may have a sealed case and be constructed in such a way to discourage you from tampering with the insides, while swapping components in and out is generally easier with a computer you’ve built on your own. If you want to upgrade your CPU or replace your graphics card, it’s a definite benefit. Downsides to Building Your Own PC It’s important to remember there are downsides to building your own PC, too. For one thing, it’s just more work — sure, if you know what you’re doing, building your own PC isn’t that hard. Even for a geek, researching the best components, price-matching, waiting for them all to arrive, and building the PC just takes longer. Warranty is a more pernicious problem. If you buy a prebuilt PC and it starts malfunctioning, you can contact the computer’s manufacturer and have them deal with it. You don’t need to worry about what’s wrong. If you build your own PC and it starts malfunctioning, you have to diagnose the problem yourself. What’s malfunctioning, the motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card, or power supply? Each component has a separate warranty through its manufacturer, so you’ll have to determine which component is malfunctioning before you can send it off for replacement. Should You Still Build Your Own PC? Let’s say you do want a desktop and are willing to consider building your own PC. First, bear in mind that PC manufacturers are buying in bulk and getting a better deal on each component. They also have to pay much less for a Windows license than the $120 or so it would cost you to to buy your own Windows license. This is all going to wipe out the cost savings you’ll see — with everything all told, you’ll probably spend more money building your own average desktop PC than you would picking one up from Amazon or the local electronics store. If you’re an average PC user that uses your desktop for the typical things, there’s no money to be saved from building your own PC. But maybe you’re looking for something higher end. Perhaps you want a high-end gaming PC with the fastest graphics card and CPU available. Perhaps you want to pick out each individual component and choose the exact components for your gaming rig. In this case, building your own PC may be a good option. As you start to look at more expensive, high-end PCs, you may start to see a price gap — but you may not. Let’s say you wanted to blow thousands of dollars on a gaming PC. If you’re looking at spending this kind of money, it would be worth comparing the cost of individual components versus a prebuilt gaming system. Still, the actual prices may surprise you. For example, if you wanted to upgrade Dell’s $2293 Alienware Aurora to include a second NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 graphics card, you’d pay an additional $600 on Alienware’s website. The same graphics card costs $650 on Amazon or Newegg, so you’d be spending more money building the system yourself. Why? Dell’s Alienware gets bulk discounts you can’t get — and this is Alienware, which was once regarded as selling ridiculously overpriced gaming PCs to people who wouldn’t build their own. Building your own PC still allows you to get the most freedom when choosing and combining components, but this is only valuable to a small niche of gamers and professional users — most people, even average gamers, would be fine going with a prebuilt system. If you’re an average person or even an average gamer, you’ll likely find that it’s cheaper to purchase a prebuilt PC rather than assemble your own. Even at the very high end, components may be more expensive separately than they are in a prebuilt PC. Enthusiasts who want to choose all the individual components for their dream gaming PC and want maximum flexibility may want to build their own PCs. Even then, building your own PC these days is more about flexibility and component choice than it is about saving money. In summary, you probably shouldn’t build your own PC. If you’re an enthusiast, you may want to — but only a small minority of people would actually benefit from building their own systems. Feel free to compare prices, but you may be surprised which is cheaper. Image Credit: Richard Jones on Flickr, elPadawan on Flickr, Richard Jones on Flickr     

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• NUMA-aware placement of communication variables

  - by Dave

  For classic NUMA-aware programming I'm typically most concerned about simple cold, capacity and compulsory misses and whether we can satisfy the miss by locally connected memory or whether we have to pull the line from its home node over the coherent interconnect -- we'd like to minimize channel contention and conserve interconnect bandwidth. That is, for this style of programming we're quite aware of where memory is homed relative to the threads that will be accessing it. Ideally, a page is collocated on the node with the thread that's expected to most frequently access the page, as simple misses on the page can be satisfied without resorting to transferring the line over the interconnect. The default "first touch" NUMA page placement policy tends to work reasonable well in this regard. When a virtual page is first accessed, the operating system will attempt to provision and map that virtual page to a physical page allocated from the node where the accessing thread is running. It's worth noting that the node-level memory interleaving granularity is usually a multiple of the page size, so we can say that a given page P resides on some node N. That is, the memory underlying a page resides on just one node. But when thinking about accesses to heavily-written communication variables we normally consider what caches the lines underlying such variables might be resident in, and in what states. We want to minimize coherence misses and cache probe activity and interconnect traffic in general. I don't usually give much thought to the location of the home NUMA node underlying such highly shared variables. On a SPARC T5440, for instance, which consists of 4 T2+ processors connected by a central coherence hub, the home node and placement of heavily accessed communication variables has very little impact on performance. The variables are frequently accessed so likely in M-state in some cache, and the location of the home node is of little consequence because a requester can use cache-to-cache transfers to get the line. Or at least that's what I thought. Recently, though, I was exploring a simple shared memory point-to-point communication model where a client writes a request into a request mailbox and then busy-waits on a response variable. It's a simple example of delegation based on message passing. The server polls the request mailbox, and having fetched a new request value, performs some operation and then writes a reply value into the response variable. As noted above, on a T5440 performance is insensitive to the placement of the communication variables -- the request and response mailbox words. But on a Sun/Oracle X4800 I noticed that was not the case and that NUMA placement of the communication variables was actually quite important. For background an X4800 system consists of 8 Intel X7560 Xeons . Each package (socket) has 8 cores with 2 contexts per core, so the system is 8x8x2. Each package is also a NUMA node and has locally attached memory. Every package has 3 point-to-point QPI links for cache coherence, and the system is configured with a twisted ladder "mobius" topology. The cache coherence fabric is glueless -- there's not central arbiter or coherence hub. The maximum distance between any two nodes is just 2 hops over the QPI links. For any given node, 3 other nodes are 1 hop distant and the remaining 4 nodes are 2 hops distant. Using a single request (client) thread and a single response (server) thread, a benchmark harness explored all permutations of NUMA placement for the two threads and the two communication variables, measuring the average round-trip-time and throughput rate between the client and server. In this benchmark the server simply acts as a simple transponder, writing the request value plus 1 back into the reply field, so there's no particular computation phase and we're only measuring communication overheads. In addition to varying the placement of communication variables over pairs of nodes, we also explored variations where both variables were placed on one page (and thus on one node) -- either on the same cache line or different cache lines -- while varying the node where the variables reside along with the placement of the threads. The key observation was that if the client and server threads were on different nodes, then the best placement of variables was to have the request variable (written by the client and read by the server) reside on the same node as the client thread, and to place the response variable (written by the server and read by the client) on the same node as the server. That is, if you have a variable that's to be written by one thread and read by another, it should be homed with the writer thread. For our simple client-server model that means using split request and response communication variables with unidirectional message flow on a given page. This can yield up to twice the throughput of less favorable placement strategies. Our X4800 uses the QPI 1.0 protocol with source-based snooping. Briefly, when node A needs to probe a cache line it fires off snoop requests to all the nodes in the system. Those recipients then forward their response not to the original requester, but to the home node H of the cache line. H waits for and collects the responses, adjudicates and resolves conflicts and ensures memory-model ordering, and then sends a definitive reply back to the original requester A. If some node B needed to transfer the line to A, it will do so by cache-to-cache transfer and let H know about the disposition of the cache line. A needs to wait for the authoritative response from H. So if a thread on node A wants to write a value to be read by a thread on node B, the latency is dependent on the distances between A, B, and H. We observe the best performance when the written-to variable is co-homed with the writer A. That is, we want H and A to be the same node, as the writer doesn't need the home to respond over the QPI link, as the writer and the home reside on the very same node. With architecturally informed placement of communication variables we eliminate at least one QPI hop from the critical path. Newer Intel processors use the QPI 1.1 coherence protocol with home-based snooping. As noted above, under source-snooping a requester broadcasts snoop requests to all nodes. Those nodes send their response to the home node of the location, which provides memory ordering, reconciles conflicts, etc., and then posts a definitive reply to the requester. In home-based snooping the snoop probe goes directly to the home node and are not broadcast. The home node can consult snoop filters -- if present -- and send out requests to retrieve the line if necessary. The 3rd party owner of the line, if any, can respond either to the home or the original requester (or even to both) according to the protocol policies. There are myriad variations that have been implemented, and unfortunately vendor terminology doesn't always agree between vendors or with the academic taxonomy papers. The key is that home-snooping enables the use of a snoop filter to reduce interconnect traffic. And while home-snooping might have a longer critical path (latency) than source-based snooping, it also may require fewer messages and less overall bandwidth. It'll be interesting to reprise these experiments on a platform with home-based snooping. While collecting data I also noticed that there are placement concerns even in the seemingly trivial case when both threads and both variables reside on a single node. Internally, the cores on each X7560 package are connected by an internal ring. (Actually there are multiple contra-rotating rings). And the last-level on-chip cache (LLC) is partitioned in banks or slices, which with each slice being associated with a core on the ring topology. A hardware hash function associates each physical address with a specific home bank. Thus we face distance and topology concerns even for intra-package communications, although the latencies are not nearly the magnitude we see inter-package. I've not seen such communication distance artifacts on the T2+, where the cache banks are connected to the cores via a high-speed crossbar instead of a ring -- communication latencies seem more regular.

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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• Master-slave vs. peer-to-peer archictecture: benefits and problems

  - by Ashok_Ora

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Almost two decades ago, I was a member of a database development team that introduced adaptive locking. Locking, the most popular concurrency control technique in database systems, is pessimistic. Locking ensures that two or more conflicting operations on the same data item don’t “trample” on each other’s toes, resulting in data corruption. In a nutshell, here’s the issue we were trying to address. In everyday life, traffic lights serve the same purpose. They ensure that traffic flows smoothly and when everyone follows the rules, there are no accidents at intersections. As I mentioned earlier, the problem with typical locking protocols is that they are pessimistic. Regardless of whether there is another conflicting operation in the system or not, you have to hold a lock! Acquiring and releasing locks can be quite expensive, depending on how many objects the transaction touches. Every transaction has to pay this penalty. To use the earlier traffic light analogy, if you have ever waited at a red light in the middle of nowhere with no one on the road, wondering why you need to wait when there’s clearly no danger of a collision, you know what I mean. The adaptive locking scheme that we invented was able to minimize the number of locks that a transaction held, by detecting whether there were one or more transactions that needed conflicting eyou could get by without holding any lock at all. In many “well-behaved” workloads, there are few conflicts, so this optimization is a huge win. If, on the other hand, there are many concurrent, conflicting requests, the algorithm gracefully degrades to the “normal” behavior with minimal cost. We were able to reduce the number of lock requests per TPC-B transaction from 178 requests down to 2! Wow! This is a dramatic improvement in concurrency as well as transaction latency. The lesson from this exercise was that if you can identify the common scenario and optimize for that case so that only the uncommon scenarios are more expensive, you can make dramatic improvements in performance without sacrificing correctness. So how does this relate to the architecture and design of some of the modern NoSQL systems? NoSQL systems can be broadly classified as master-slave sharded, or peer-to-peer sharded systems. NoSQL systems with a peer-to-peer architecture have an interesting way of handling changes. Whenever an item is changed, the client (or an intermediary) propagates the changes synchronously or asynchronously to multiple copies (for availability) of the data. Since the change can be propagated asynchronously, during some interval in time, it will be the case that some copies have received the update, and others haven’t. What happens if someone tries to read the item during this interval? The client in a peer-to-peer system will fetch the same item from multiple copies and compare them to each other. If they’re all the same, then every copy that was queried has the same (and up-to-date) value of the data item, so all’s good. If not, then the system provides a mechanism to reconcile the discrepancy and to update stale copies. So what’s the problem with this? There are two major issues: First, IT’S HORRIBLY PESSIMISTIC because, in the common case, it is unlikely that the same data item will be updated and read from different locations at around the same time! For every read operation, you have to read from multiple copies. That’s a pretty expensive, especially if the data are stored in multiple geographically separate locations and network latencies are high. Second, if the copies are not all the same, the application has to reconcile the differences and propagate the correct value to the out-dated copies. This means that the application program has to handle discrepancies in the different versions of the data item and resolve the issue (which can further add to cost and operation latency). Resolving discrepancies is only one part of the problem. What if the same data item was updated independently on two different nodes (copies)? In that case, due to the asynchronous nature of change propagation, you might land up with different versions of the data item in different copies. In this case, the application program also has to resolve conflicts and then propagate the correct value to the copies that are out-dated or have incorrect versions. This can get really complicated. My hunch is that there are many peer-to-peer-based applications that don’t handle this correctly, and worse, don’t even know it. Imagine have 100s of millions of records in your database – how can you tell whether a particular data item is incorrect or out of date? And what price are you willing to pay for ensuring that the data can be trusted? Multiple network messages per read request? Discrepancy and conflict resolution logic in the application, and potentially, additional messages? All this overhead, when all you were trying to do was to read a data item. Wouldn’t it be simpler to avoid this problem in the first place? Master-slave architectures like the Oracle NoSQL Database handles this very elegantly. A change to a data item is always sent to the master copy. Consequently, the master copy always has the most current and authoritative version of the data item. The master is also responsible for propagating the change to the other copies (for availability and read scalability). Client drivers are aware of master copies and replicas, and client drivers are also aware of the “currency” of a replica. In other words, each NoSQL Database client knows how stale a replica is. This vastly simplifies the job of the application developer. If the application needs the most current version of the data item, the client driver will automatically route the request to the master copy. If the application is willing to tolerate some staleness of data (e.g. a version that is no more than 1 second out of date), the client can easily determine which replica (or set of replicas) can satisfy the request, and route the request to the most efficient copy. This results in a dramatic simplification in application logic and also minimizes network requests (the driver will only send the request to exactl the right replica, not many). So, back to my original point. A well designed and well architected system minimizes or eliminates unnecessary overhead and avoids pessimistic algorithms wherever possible in order to deliver a highly efficient and high performance system. If you’ve every programmed an Oracle NoSQL Database application, you’ll know the difference! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for SQL Server

  - by SQLOS Team

  Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness and Capacity Assessment for Windows Server Machine Running SQL Server With the release of MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta, we have added a new scenario to assess your Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness. The MAP 8.0 Beta performs a comprehensive assessment of Windows Servers running SQL Server to determine you level of readiness to migrate an on-premise physical or virtual machine to Windows Azure Virtual Machines. The MAP Toolkit then offers suggested changes to prepare the machines for migration, such as upgrading the operating system or SQL Server. MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Now, let’s walk through the MAP Toolkit task for completing the Windows Azure Virtual Machine assessment and capacity planning. The tasks include the following: Perform an inventory View the Windows Azure VM Readiness results and report Collect performance data for determine VM sizing View the Windows Azure Capacity results and report Perform an inventory: 1. To perform an inventory against a single machine or across a complete environment, choose Perform an Inventory to launch the Inventory and Assessment Wizard as shown below: 2. After the Inventory and Assessment Wizard launches, select either the Windows computers or SQL Server scenario to inventory Windows machines. HINT: If you don’t care about completely inventorying a machine, just select the SQL Server scenario. Click Next to Continue. 3. On the Discovery Methods page, select how you want to discover computers and then click Next to continue. Description of Discovery Methods: Use Active Directory Domain Services -- This method allows you to query a domain controller via the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and select computers in all or specific domains, containers, or OUs. Use this method if all computers and devices are in AD DS. Windows networking protocols --  This method uses the WIN32 LAN Manager application programming interfaces to query the Computer Browser service for computers in workgroups and Windows NT 4.0–based domains. If the computers on the network are not joined to an Active Directory domain, use only the Windows networking protocols option to find computers. System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) -- This method enables you to inventory computers managed by System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). You need to provide credentials to the System Center Configuration Manager server in order to inventory the managed computers. When you select this option, the MAP Toolkit will query SCCM for a list of computers and then MAP will connect to these computers. Scan an IP address range -- This method allows you to specify the starting address and ending address of an IP address range. The wizard will then scan all IP addresses in the range and inventory only those computers. Note: This option can perform poorly, if many IP addresses aren’t being used within the range. Manually enter computer names and credentials -- Use this method if you want to inventory a small number of specific computers. Import computer names from a files -- Using this method, you can create a text file with a list of computer names that will be inventoried. 4. On the All Computers Credentials page, enter the accounts that have administrator rights to connect to the discovered machines. This does not need to a domain account, but needs to be a local administrator. I have entered my domain account that is an administrator on my local machine. Click Next after one or more accounts have been added. NOTE: The MAP Toolkit primarily uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to collect hardware, device, and software information from the remote computers. In order for the MAP Toolkit to successfully connect and inventory computers in your environment, you have to configure your machines to inventory through WMI and also allow your firewall to enable remote access through WMI. The MAP Toolkit also requires remote registry access for certain assessments. In addition to enabling WMI, you need accounts with administrative privileges to access desktops and servers in your environment. 5. On the Credentials Order page, select the order in which want the MAP Toolkit to connect to the machine and SQL Server. Generally just accept the defaults and click Next. 6. On the Enter Computers Manually page, click Create to pull up at dialog to enter one or more computer names. 7. On the Summary page confirm your settings and then click Finish. After clicking Finish the inventory process will start, as shown below: Windows Azure Readiness results and report After the inventory progress has completed, you can review the results under the Database scenario. On the tile, you will see the number of Windows Server machine with SQL Server that were analyzed, the number of machines that are ready to move without changes and the number of machines that require further changes. If you click this Azure VM Readiness tile, you will see additional details and can generate the Windows Azure VM Readiness Report. After the report is generated, select View | Saved Reports and Proposals to view the location of the report. Open up WindowsAzureVMReadiness* report in Excel. On the Windows tab, you can see the results of the assessment. This report has a column for the Operating System and SQL Server assessment and provides a recommendation on how to resolve, if there a component is not supported. Collect Performance Data Launch the Performance Wizard to collect performance information for the Windows Server machines that you would like the MAP Toolkit to suggest a Windows Azure VM size for. Windows Azure Capacity results and report After the performance metrics are collected, the Azure VM Capacity title will display the number of Virtual Machine sizes that are suggested for the Windows Server and Linux machines that were analyzed. You can then click on the Azure VM Capacity tile to see the capacity details and generate the Windows Azure VM Capacity Report. Within this report, you can view the performance data that was collected and the Virtual Machine sizes.   MAP Toolkit 8.0 Beta is available for download here Your participation and feedback is very important to make the MAP Toolkit work better for you. We encourage you to participate in the beta program and provide your feedback at [email protected] or through one of our surveys. Useful References: Windows Azure Homepage How to guides for Windows Azure Virtual Machines Provisioning a SQL Server Virtual Machine on Windows Azure Windows Azure Pricing     Peter Saddow Senior Program Manager – MAP Toolkit Team

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups have completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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• Refactoring an ERB Template to Haml

  - by Liam McLennan

  ERB is the default view templating system used by Ruby on Rails. Haml is an alternative templating system that uses whitespace to represent document structure. The example from the haml website shows the following equivalent markup: Haml ERB #profile .left.column #date= print_date #address= current_user.address .right.column #email= current_user.email #bio= current_user.bio <div id="profile"> <div class="left column"> <div id="date"><%= print_date %></div> <div id="address"><%= current_user.address %></div> </div> <div class="right column"> <div id="email"><%= current_user.email %></div> <div id="bio"><%= current_user.bio %></div> </div> </div> I like haml because it is concise and the significant whitespace makes it easy to see the structure at a glance. This post is about a ruby project but nhaml makes haml available for asp.net MVC also. The ERB Template Today I spent some time refactoring an ERB template to Haml. The template is called list.html.erb and its purpose is to render a list of tweets (twitter messages). <style> form { float: left; } </style> <h1>Tweets</h1> <table> <thead><tr><th></th><th>System</th><th>Human</th><th></th></tr></thead> <% @tweets.each do |tweet| %> <tr> <td><%= h(tweet['text']) %></td> <td><%= h(tweet['system_classification']) %></td> <td><%= h(tweet['human_classification']) %></td> <td><form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> </form> <form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> </form> <form action="/tweet/rate" method="post"> <%= token_tag %> <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="<%= tweet['id']%>" name="id" /> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> </form> </td> </tr> <% end %> </table> Haml Template: Take 1 My first step was to convert this page to a Haml template in place. Directly translating the ERB template to Haml resulted in: list.haml %style form {float: left;} %h1 Tweets %table %thead %tr %th %th System %th Human %th %tbody - @tweets.each do |tweet| %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} end I like this better already but I can go further. Haml Template: Take 2 The haml documentation says to avoid using iterators so I introduced a partial template (_tweet.haml) as the template to render a single tweet. _tweet.haml %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Positive"/> <input type="hidden" value="positive" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Neutral"/> <input type="hidden" value="neutral" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag <input type="submit" value="Negative"/> <input type="hidden" value="negative" name="rating" /> %input{ :type=>"hidden", :value => tweet['id']} and the list template is simplified to: list.haml %style form {float: left;} %h1 Tweets %table     %thead         %tr             %th             %th System             %th Human             %th     %tbody         = render(:partial => "tweet", :collection => @tweets) That is definitely an improvement, but then I noticed that _tweet.haml contains three form tags that are nearly identical.   Haml Template: Take 3 My first attempt, later aborted, was to use a helper to remove the duplication. A much better solution is to use another partial.  _rate_button.haml %form{ :action=>"/tweet/rate", :method=>"post"} = token_tag %input{ :type => "submit", :value => rate_button[:rating].capitalize } %input{ :type => "hidden", :value => rate_button[:rating], :name => 'rating' } %input{ :type => "hidden", :value => rate_button[:id], :name => 'id' } and the tweet template is now simpler: _tweet.haml %tr %td= tweet['text'] %td= tweet['system_classification'] %td= tweet['human_classification'] %td = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'positive', :id=> tweet['id']}) = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'neutral', :id=> tweet['id']}) = render( :partial => 'rate_button', :object => {:rating=>'negative', :id=> tweet['id']}) list.haml remains unchanged. Summary I am extremely happy with the switch. No doubt there are further improvements that I can make, but I feel like what I have now is clean and well factored.

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• MVC Razor Engine For Beginners Part 1

  - by Humprey Cogay, C|EH, E|CSA

  I. What is MVC? a. http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/older-versions/overview/asp-net-mvc-overview II. Software Requirements for this tutorial a. Visual Studio 2010/2012. You can get your free copy here Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 b. MVC Framework Option 1 - Install using a standalone installer http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30683 Option 2 - Install using Web Platform Installer http://www.microsoft.com/web/handlers/webpi.ashx?command=getinstallerredirect&appid=MVC4VS2010_Loc III. Creating your first MVC4 Application a. On the Visual Studio click file new solution link b. Click Other Project Type>Visual Studio Solutions and on the templates window select blank solution and let us name our solution MVCPrimer. c. Now Click File>New and select Project d. Select Visual C#>Web> and select ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application and Enter MyWebSite as Name e. Select Empty, Razor as view engine and uncheck Create a Unit test project f. You can now view a basic MVC 4 Application Structure on your solution explorer g. Now we will add our first controller by right clicking on the controllers folder on your solution explorer and select Add>Controller h. Change the name of the controller to HomeController and under the scaffolding options select Empty MVC Controller. i. You will now see a basic controller with an Index method that returns an ActionResult j. We will now add a new View Folder for our Home Controller. Right click on the views folder on your solution explorer and select Add> New Folder> and name this folder Home k. Add a new View by right clicking on Views>Home Folder and select Add View. l. Name the view Index, and select Razor(CSHTML) as View Engine, All checkbox should be unchecked for now and click add. m. Relationship between our HomeController and Home Views Sub Folder n. Add new HTML Contents to our newly created Index View o. Press F5 to run our MVC Application p. We will create our new model, Right click on the models folder of our solution explorer and select Add> Class. q. Let us name our class Customer r. Edit the Customer class with the following code s. Open the HomeController by double clickin HomeController of our Controllers folder and edit the HomeControllerusing System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Mvc;   namespace MyWebSite.Controllers {     public class HomeController : Controller     {         //         // GET: /Home/           public ActionResult Index()         {             return View();         }           public ActionResult ListCustomers()         {             List<Models.Customer> customers = new List<Models.Customer>();               //Add First Customer to Our Collection             customers.Add(new Models.Customer()                     {                         Id = 1,                         CompanyName = "Volvo",                         ContactNo = "123-0123-0001",                         ContactPerson = "Gustav Larson",                         Description = "Volvo Car Corporation, or Volvo Personvagnar AB, is a Scandinavian automobile manufacturer founded in 1927"                     });                 //Add Second Customer to Our Collection             customers.Add(new Models.Customer()                     {                         Id = 2,                         CompanyName = "BMW",                         ContactNo = "999-9876-9898",                         ContactPerson = "Franz Josef Popp",                         Description = "Bayerische Motoren Werke AG,  (BMW; English: Bavarian Motor Works) is a " +                                       "German automobile, motorcycle and engine manufacturing company founded in 1917. "                     });                 //Add Third Customer to Our Collection             customers.Add(new Models.Customer()             {                 Id = 3,                 CompanyName = "Audi",                 ContactNo = "983-2222-1212",                 ContactPerson = "Karl Benz",                 Description = " is a multinational division of the German manufacturer Daimler AG,"             });               return View(customers);         }     } } t. Let us now create a view for this Class, But before continuing Press Ctrl + Shift + B to rebuild the solution, this will make the previously created model on the Model class drop down of the Add View Menu. Right click on the views>Home folder and select Add>View u. Let us name our View as ListCustomers, Select Razor(CSHTML) as View Engine, Put a check mark on Create a strongly-typed view, and select Customer (MyWebSite.Models) as model class. Slect List on the Scaffold Template and Click OK. v. Run the MVC Application by pressing F5, and on the address bar insert Home/ListCustomers, We should now see a web page similar below.   x. You can edit ListCustomers.CSHTML to remove and add HTML codes @model IEnumerable<MyWebSite.Models.Customer>   @{     Layout = null; }   <!DOCTYPE html>   <html> <head>     <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />     <title>ListCustomers</title> </head> <body>     <h2>List of Customers</h2>     <table border="1">         <tr>             <th>                 @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.CompanyName)             </th>             <th>                 @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.Description)             </th>             <th>                 @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.ContactPerson)             </th>             <th>                 @Html.DisplayNameFor(model => model.ContactNo)             </th>         </tr>         @foreach (var item in Model) {         <tr>             <td>                 @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.CompanyName)             </td>             <td>                 @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.Description)             </td>             <td>                 @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.ContactPerson)             </td>             <td>                 @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.ContactNo)             </td>                   </tr>     }         </table> </body> </html> y. Press F5 to run the MVC Application   z. You will notice some @HTML.DisplayFor codes. These are called HTML Helpers you can read more about HTML Helpers on this site http://www.w3schools.com/aspnet/mvc_htmlhelpers.asp   That’s all. You now have your first MVC4 Razor Engine Web Application . . .

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• Silverlight 4 Twitter Client &ndash; Part 3

  - by Max

  Finally Silverlight 4 RC is released and also that Windows 7 Phone Series will rely heavily on Silverlight platform for apps platform. its a really good news for Silverlight developers and designers. More information on this here. You can use SL 4 RC with VS 2010. SL 4 RC does not come with VS 2010, you need to download it separately and install it. So for the next part, be ready with VS 2010 and SL4 RC, we will start using them and not With this momentum, let us go to the next part of our twitter client tutorial. This tutorial will cover setting your status in Twitter and also retrieving your 1) As everything in Silverlight is asynchronous, we need to have some visual representation showing that something is going on in the background. So what I did was to create a progress bar with indeterminate animation. The XAML is here below. <ProgressBar Maximum="100" Width="300" Height="50" Margin="20" Visibility="Collapsed" IsIndeterminate="True" Name="progressBar1" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" /> 2) I will be toggling this progress bar to show the background work. So I thought of writing this small method, which I use to toggle the visibility of this progress bar. Just pass a bool to this method and this will toggle it based on its current visibility status. public void toggleProgressBar(bool Option){ if (Option) { if (progressBar1.Visibility == System.Windows.Visibility.Collapsed) progressBar1.Visibility = System.Windows.Visibility.Visible; } else { if (progressBar1.Visibility == System.Windows.Visibility.Visible) progressBar1.Visibility = System.Windows.Visibility.Collapsed; }} 3) Now let us create a grid to hold a textbox and a update button. The XAML will look like something below <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="50"></RowDefinition> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="400"></ColumnDefinition> <ColumnDefinition Width="200"></ColumnDefinition> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBox Name="TwitterStatus" Width="380" Height="50"></TextBox> <Button Name="UpdateStatus" Content="Update" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="2" Width="200" Height="50" Click="UpdateStatus_Click"></Button></Grid> 4) The click handler for this update button will be again using the Web Client to post values. Posting values using Web Client. The code is: private void UpdateStatus_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e){ toggleProgressBar(true); string statusupdate = "status=" + TwitterStatus.Text; WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("https://", System.Net.Browser.WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);  WebClient myService = new WebClient(); myService.AllowReadStreamBuffering = true; myService.UseDefaultCredentials = false; myService.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(GlobalVariable.getUserName(), GlobalVariable.getPassword());  myService.UploadStringCompleted += new UploadStringCompletedEventHandler(myService_UploadStringCompleted); myService.UploadStringAsync(new Uri("https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"), statusupdate);  this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => ClearTextBoxValue());} 5) In the above code, we have a event handler which will be fired on this request is completed – !! Remember SL is Asynch !! So in the myService_UploadStringCompleted, we will just toggle the progress bar and change some status text to say that its done. The code for this will be StatusMessage is just another textblock conveniently positioned in the page.  void myService_UploadStringCompleted(object sender, UploadStringCompletedEventArgs e){ if (e.Error != null) { StatusMessage.Text = "Status Update Failed: " + e.Error.Message.ToString(); } else { toggleProgressBar(false); TwitterCredentialsSubmit(); }} 6) Now let us look at fetching the friends updates of the logged in user and displaying it in a datagrid. So just define a data grid and set its autogenerate columns as true. 7) Let us first create a data structure for use with fetching the friends timeline. The code is something like below: namespace MaxTwitter.Classes{ public class Status { public Status() {} public string ID { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } public string Source { get; set; } public string UserID { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } }} You can add as many fields as you want, for the list of fields, have a look at here. It will ask for your Twitter username and password, just provide them and this will display the xml file. Go through them pick and choose your desired fields and include in your Data Structure. 8) Now the web client request for this is similar to the one we saw in step 4. Just change the uri in the last but one step to https://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml Be sure to change the event handler to something else and within that we will use XLINQ to fetch the required details for us. Now let us how this event handler fetches details. public void parseXML(string text){ XDocument xdoc; if(text.Length> 0) xdoc = XDocument.Parse(text); else xdoc = XDocument.Parse(@"I USED MY OWN LOCAL COPY OF XML FILE HERE FOR OFFLINE TESTING"); statusList = new List<Status>(); statusList = (from status in xdoc.Descendants("status") select new Status { ID = status.Element("id").Value, Text = status.Element("text").Value, Source = status.Element("source").Value, UserID = status.Element("user").Element("id").Value, UserName = status.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value, }).ToList(); //MessageBox.Show(text); //this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => CallDatabindMethod(StatusCollection)); //MessageBox.Show(statusList.Count.ToString()); DataGridStatus.ItemsSource = statusList; StatusMessage.Text = "Datagrid refreshed."; toggleProgressBar(false);} in the event handler, we call this method with e.Result.ToString() Parsing XML files using LINQ is super cool, I love it.   I am stopping it here for  this post. Will post the completed files in next post, as I’ve worked on a few more features in this page and don’t want to confuse you. See you soon in my next post where will play with Twitter lists. Have a nice day! Technorati Tags: Silverlight,LINQ,XLINQ,Twitter API,Twitter,Network Credentials

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• WPF animation: binding to the "To" attribute of storyboard animation.

  - by bozalina

  Hi, I'm trying to create a button that behaves similarly to the "slide" button on the iPhone. I have an animation that adjusts the position and width of the button, but I want these values to be based on the text used in the control. Currently, they're hardcoded. Here's my working XAML, so far: <CheckBox x:Class="Smt.Controls.SlideCheckBox" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:local="clr-namespace:Smt.Controls" xmlns:System.Windows="clr-namespace:System.Windows;assembly=PresentationCore" Name="SliderCheckBox" mc:Ignorable="d"> <CheckBox.Resources> <System.Windows:Duration x:Key="AnimationTime">0:0:0.2</System.Windows:Duration> <Storyboard x:Key="OnChecking"> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Children)[0].(TranslateTransform.X)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="40" /> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Button.Width)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="41" /> </Storyboard> <Storyboard x:Key="OnUnchecking"> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Children)[0].(TranslateTransform.X)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="0" /> <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Button.Width)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="40" /> </Storyboard> <Style x:Key="SlideCheckBoxStyle" TargetType="{x:Type local:SlideCheckBox}"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type local:SlideCheckBox}"> <Canvas> <ContentPresenter SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding SnapsToDevicePixels}" Content="{TemplateBinding Content}" ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding ContentTemplate}" RecognizesAccessKey="True" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" /> <Canvas> <!--Background--> <Rectangle Width="{Binding ElementName=ButtonText, Path=ActualWidth}" Height="{Binding ElementName=ButtonText, Path=ActualHeight}" Fill="LightBlue" /> </Canvas> <Canvas> <!--Button--> <Button Width="{Binding ElementName=CheckedText, Path=ActualWidth}" Height="{Binding ElementName=ButtonText, Path=ActualHeight}" Name="CheckButton" Command="{x:Static local:SlideCheckBox.SlideCheckBoxClicked}"> <Button.RenderTransform> <TransformGroup> <TranslateTransform /> </TransformGroup> </Button.RenderTransform> </Button> </Canvas> <Canvas> <!--Text--> <StackPanel Name="ButtonText" Orientation="Horizontal" IsHitTestVisible="False"> <Grid Name="CheckedText"> <Label Margin="7 0" Content="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType={x:Type local:SlideCheckBox}}, Path=CheckedText}" /> </Grid> <Grid Name="UncheckedText" HorizontalAlignment="Right"> <Label Margin="7 0" Content="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType={x:Type local:SlideCheckBox}}, Path=UncheckedText}" /> </Grid> </StackPanel> </Canvas> </Canvas> <ControlTemplate.Triggers> <Trigger Property="IsChecked" Value="True"> <Trigger.EnterActions> <BeginStoryboard Storyboard="{StaticResource OnChecking}" /> </Trigger.EnterActions> <Trigger.ExitActions> <BeginStoryboard Storyboard="{StaticResource OnUnchecking}" /> </Trigger.ExitActions> </Trigger> </ControlTemplate.Triggers> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </CheckBox.Resources> <CheckBox.CommandBindings> <CommandBinding Command="{x:Static local:SlideCheckBox.SlideCheckBoxClicked}" Executed="OnSlideCheckBoxClicked" /> </CheckBox.CommandBindings> </CheckBox> And the code behind: using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Input; namespace Smt.Controls { public partial class SlideCheckBox : CheckBox { public SlideCheckBox() { InitializeComponent(); Loaded += OnLoaded; } public static readonly DependencyProperty CheckedTextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("CheckedText", typeof(string), typeof(SlideCheckBox), new PropertyMetadata("Checked Text")); public string CheckedText { get { return (string)GetValue(CheckedTextProperty); } set { SetValue(CheckedTextProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty UncheckedTextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("UncheckedText", typeof(string), typeof(SlideCheckBox), new PropertyMetadata("Unchecked Text")); public string UncheckedText { get { return (string)GetValue(UncheckedTextProperty); } set { SetValue(UncheckedTextProperty, value); } } public static readonly RoutedCommand SlideCheckBoxClicked = new RoutedCommand(); void OnLoaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { Style style = TryFindResource("SlideCheckBoxStyle") as Style; if (!ReferenceEquals(style, null)) { Style = style; } } void OnSlideCheckBoxClicked(object sender, ExecutedRoutedEventArgs e) { IsChecked = !IsChecked; } } } The problem comes when I try to bind the "To" attribute in the DoubleAnimations to the actual width of the text, the same as I'm doing in the ControlTemplate. If I bind the values to an ActualWidth of an element in the ControlTemplate, the control comes up as a blank checkbox (my base class). However, I'm binding to the same ActualWidths in the ControlTemplate itself without any problems. Just seems to be the CheckBox.Resources that have a problem with it. For instance, the following will break it: <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="CheckButton" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Button.Width)" Duration="{StaticResource AnimationTime}" To="{Binding ElementName=CheckedText, Path=ActualWidth}" /> I don't know whether this is because it's trying to bind to a value that doesn't exist until a render pass is done, or if it's something else. Anyone have any experience with this sort of animation binding?

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• MVVM/WPF: DataTemplate is not changed in Wizard

  - by msfanboy

  Hello, I wonder why my contentcontrol(headeredcontentcontrol) does not change the datatemplates when I press the previous/next button. While debugging everything seems ok means I jump forth and back the collection of wizardpages but always the first page is shown and its header text not the usercontrol is visible. What do I have forgotten? using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Command; using System.Collections.ObjectModel; using System.Diagnostics; using System.ComponentModel; namespace TBM.ViewModel { public class WizardMainViewModel { WizardPageViewModelBase _currentPage; ReadOnlyCollection _pages; RelayCommand _moveNextCommand; RelayCommand _movePreviousCommand; public WizardMainViewModel() { this.CurrentPage = this.Pages[0]; } public RelayCommand MoveNextCommand { get { return _moveNextCommand ?? (_moveNextCommand = new RelayCommand(() => this.MoveToNextPage(), () => this.CanMoveToNextPage)); } } public RelayCommand MovePreviousCommand { get { return _movePreviousCommand ?? (_movePreviousCommand = new RelayCommand( () => this.MoveToPreviousPage(), () => this.CanMoveToPreviousPage)); } } bool CanMoveToPreviousPage { get { return 0 < this.CurrentPageIndex; } } bool CanMoveToNextPage { get { return this.CurrentPage != null && this.CurrentPage.IsValid(); } } void MoveToPreviousPage() { this.CurrentPage = this.Pages[this.CurrentPageIndex - 1]; } void MoveToNextPage() { if (this.CurrentPageIndex < this.Pages.Count - 1) this.CurrentPage = this.Pages[this.CurrentPageIndex + 1]; } /// <summary> /// Returns the page ViewModel that the user is currently viewing. /// </summary> public WizardPageViewModelBase CurrentPage { get { return _currentPage; } private set { if (value == _currentPage) return; if (_currentPage != null) _currentPage.IsCurrentPage = false; _currentPage = value; if (_currentPage != null) _currentPage.IsCurrentPage = true; this.OnPropertyChanged("CurrentPage"); this.OnPropertyChanged("IsOnLastPage"); } } public bool IsOnLastPage { get { return this.CurrentPageIndex == this.Pages.Count - 1; } } /// <summary> /// Returns a read-only collection of all page ViewModels. /// </summary> public ReadOnlyCollection<WizardPageViewModelBase> Pages { get { return _pages ?? CreatePages(); } } ReadOnlyCollection<WizardPageViewModelBase> CreatePages() { WizardPageViewModelBase welcomePage = new WizardWelcomePageViewModel(); WizardPageViewModelBase schoolclassPage = new WizardSchoolclassSubjectPageViewModel(); WizardPageViewModelBase lessonPage = new WizardLessonTimesPageViewModel(); WizardPageViewModelBase timetablePage = new WizardTimeTablePageViewModel(); WizardPageViewModelBase finishPage = new WizardFinishPageViewModel(); var pages = new List<WizardPageViewModelBase>(); pages.Add(welcomePage); pages.Add(schoolclassPage); pages.Add(lessonPage); pages.Add(timetablePage); pages.Add(finishPage); return _pages = new ReadOnlyCollection<WizardPageViewModelBase>(pages); } int CurrentPageIndex { get { if (this.CurrentPage == null) { Debug.Fail("Why is the current page null?"); return -1; } return this.Pages.IndexOf(this.CurrentPage); } } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; void OnPropertyChanged(string propertyName) { PropertyChangedEventHandler handler = this.PropertyChanged; if (handler != null) handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } } <UserControl x:Class="TBM.View.WizardMainView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:ViewModel="clr-namespace:TBM.ViewModel" xmlns:View="clr-namespace:TBM.View" mc:Ignorable="d" > <UserControl.Resources> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardWelcomePageViewModel}"> <View:WizardWelcomePageView /> </DataTemplate> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardSchoolclassSubjectPageViewModel}"> <View:WizardSchoolclassSubjectPageView /> </DataTemplate> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardLessonTimesPageViewModel}"> <View:WizardLessonTimesPageView /> </DataTemplate> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardTimeTablePageViewModel}"> <View:WizardTimeTablePageView /> </DataTemplate> <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModel:WizardFinishPageViewModel}"> <View:WizardFinishPageView /> </DataTemplate> <!-- This Style inherits from the Button style seen above. --> <Style BasedOn="{StaticResource {x:Type Button}}" TargetType="{x:Type Button}" x:Key="moveNextButtonStyle"> <Setter Property="Content" Value="Next" /> <Style.Triggers> <DataTrigger Binding="{Binding Path=IsOnLastPage}" Value="True"> <Setter Property="Content" Value="Finish}" /> </DataTrigger> </Style.Triggers> </Style> <ViewModel:WizardMainViewModel x:Key="WizardMainViewModelID" /> </UserControl.Resources> <Grid DataContext="{Binding ., Source={StaticResource WizardMainViewModelID}}" > <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="310*" /> <RowDefinition Height="51*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <!-- CONTENT --> <Grid Grid.Row="0" Background="LightGoldenrodYellow"> <HeaderedContentControl Content="{Binding CurrentPage}" Header="{Binding Path=CurrentPage.DisplayName}" /> </Grid> <!-- NAVIGATION BUTTONS --> <Grid Grid.Row="1" Background="Aquamarine"> <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Center" Orientation="Horizontal"> <Button Command="{Binding MovePreviousCommand}" Content="Previous" /> <Button Command="{Binding MoveNextCommand}" Style="{StaticResource moveNextButtonStyle}" Content="Next" /> <Button Command="{Binding CancelCommand}" Content="Cancel" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> </Grid>

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• How do I get the PreviewDialog of Apache FOP to actually display my document?

  - by JRSofty

  Search as I may I have not found a solution to my problem here and I'm hoping the combined minds of StackOverflow will push me in the right direction. My problem is as follows, I'm developing a print and print preview portion of a messaging system's user agent. I was given specific XSLT templates that after transforming XML will produce a Formatting Objects document. With Apache FOP I've been able to render the FO document into PDF which is all fine and good, but I would also like to display it in a print preview dialog. Apache FOP contains such a class called PreviewDialog which requires in its constructor a FOUserAgent, which I can generate, and an object implementing the Renderable Interface. The Renderable Interface has one implementing class in the FOP package which is called InputHandler which takes in its constructor a standard io File object. Now here is where the trouble begins. I'm currently storing the FO document as a temp file and pass this as a File object to an InputHandler instance which is then passed to the PreviewDialog. I see the dialog appear on my screen and along the bottom in a status bar it says that it is generating the document, and that is all it does. Here is the code I'm trying to use. It isn't production code so it's not pretty: import java.io.BufferedOutputStream; import java.io.File; import java.io.FileNotFoundException; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.OutputStream; import java.util.Random; import javax.xml.transform.Result; import javax.xml.transform.Source; import javax.xml.transform.Transformer; import javax.xml.transform.TransformerConfigurationException; import javax.xml.transform.TransformerException; import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory; import javax.xml.transform.sax.SAXResult; import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult; import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource; import org.apache.fop.apps.FOPException; import org.apache.fop.apps.FOUserAgent; import org.apache.fop.apps.Fop; import org.apache.fop.apps.FopFactory; import org.apache.fop.cli.InputHandler; import org.apache.fop.render.awt.viewer.PreviewDialog; public class PrintPreview { public void showPreview(final File xslt, final File xmlSource) { boolean err = false; OutputStream out = null; Transformer transformer = null; final String tempFileName = this.getTempDir() + this.generateTempFileName(); final String tempFoFile = tempFileName + ".fo"; final String tempPdfFile = tempFileName + ".pdf"; System.out.println(tempFileName); final TransformerFactory transformFactory = TransformerFactory .newInstance(); final FopFactory fopFactory = FopFactory.newInstance(); try { transformer = transformFactory .newTransformer(new StreamSource(xslt)); final Source src = new StreamSource(xmlSource); out = new FileOutputStream(tempFoFile); final Result res = new StreamResult(out); transformer.transform(src, res); System.out.println("XSLT Transform Completed"); } catch (final TransformerConfigurationException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final FileNotFoundException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final TransformerException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (out != null) { try { out.close(); } catch (final IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } } System.out.println("Initializing Preview"); transformer = null; out = null; final File fo = new File(tempFoFile); final File pdf = new File(tempPdfFile); if (!err) { final FOUserAgent ua = fopFactory.newFOUserAgent(); try { transformer = transformFactory.newTransformer(); out = new FileOutputStream(pdf); out = new BufferedOutputStream(out); final Fop fop = fopFactory.newFop( MimeConstants.MIME_PDF, ua, out); final Source foSrc = new StreamSource(fo); final Result foRes = new SAXResult(fop.getDefaultHandler()); transformer.transform(foSrc, foRes); System.out.println("Transformation Complete"); } catch (final FOPException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final FileNotFoundException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final TransformerException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (out != null) { try { out.close(); } catch (final IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } } if (!err) { System.out.println("Attempting to Preview"); final InputHandler inputHandler = new InputHandler(fo); PreviewDialog.createPreviewDialog(ua, inputHandler, true); } } // perform the clean up // f.delete(); } private String getTempDir() { final String p = "java.io.tmpdir"; return System.getProperty(p); } private String generateTempFileName() { final String charset = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890"; final StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); Random r = new Random(); int seed = r.nextInt(); r = new Random(seed); for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) { final int n = r.nextInt(71); seed = r.nextInt(); sb.append(charset.charAt(n)); r = new Random(seed); } return sb.toString(); } } Any help on this would be appreciated.

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