shallow copy - Page 451

Customize Team Build 2010 – Part 13: Get control over the Build Output

In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application In the part 8, I have explained how you can add informational messages, warnings or errors to the build output. If you want to integrate with other lines of text to the build output, you need to do more. This post will show you how you can add extra steps, additional information and hyperlinks to the build output. UPDATE 13-12-2010: Thanks to Jason Pricket, it is now also possible to not show every activity in the build log. This is really useful when you are doing for-loops in your template. To see how you can do that, check out Jason's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jpricket/archive/2010/12/09/tfs-2010-making-your-build-log-less-noisy.aspx Add an hyperlink to the end of the build output Lets start with a simple example of how you can adjust the build output. In this case we are going to add at the end of the build output an hyperlink where a user can click on to for example start the deployment to the test environment. In part 4 you can find information how you can create a custom activity To add information to the build output, you need the BuildDetail. This value is a variable in your xaml and is thus easily transferable to you custom activity. Besides the BuildDetail the user has also to specify the text and the url that has to be added to the end of the build output. The following code segment shows you how you can achieve this. [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.All)] public sealed class AddHyperlinkToBuildOutput : CodeActivity { [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<IBuildDetail> BuildDetail { get; set; } [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> DisplayText { get; set; } [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> Url { get; set; } protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) { // Obtain the runtime value of the input arguments IBuildDetail buildDetail = context.GetValue(this.BuildDetail); string displayText = context.GetValue(this.DisplayText); string url = context.GetValue(this.Url); // Add the hyperlink buildDetail.Information.AddExternalLink(displayText, new Uri(url)); buildDetail.Information.Save(); } } If you add this activity to somewhere in your build process template (within the scope Run on Agent), you will get the following build output Add an line of text to the build output The next challenge is to add this kind of output not only to the end of the build output but at the step that is currently executing. To be able to do this, you need the current node in the build output. The following code shows you how you can achieve this. First you need to get the current activity tracking, which you can get with the following line of code IActivityTracking currentTracking = context.GetExtension<IBuildLoggingExtension>().GetActivityTracking(context); Then you can create a new node and set its type to Activity Tracking Node (so copy it from the current node) and do nice things with the node. IBuildInformationNode childNode = currentTracking.Node.Children.CreateNode(); childNode.Type = currentTracking.Node.Type; childNode.Fields.Add("DisplayText", "This text is displayed."); You can also add a build step to display progress IBuildStep buildStep = childNode.Children.AddBuildStep("Custom Build Step", "This is my custom build step"); buildStep.FinishTime = DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(10); buildStep.Status = BuildStepStatus.Succeeded; Or you can add an hyperlink to the node childNode.Children.AddExternalLink("My link", new Uri(http://www.ewaldhofman.nl)); When you combine this together you get the following result in the build output You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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Silverlight Recruiting Application Part 6 - Adding an Interview Scheduling Module/View

Between the last post and this one I went ahead and carried the ideas for the Jobs module and view into the Applicants module and view- they're both doing more or less the same thing, except with different objects being at their core. Made for an easy cut-and-paste operation with a few items being switched from one to another. Now that we have the ability to add postings and applicants, wouldn't it be nice if we could schedule an interview? Of course it would! Scheduling Module I think you get the drift from previous posts that these project structures start looking somewhat similar. The interview scheduling module is no different than the rest- it gets a SchedulingModule.cs file at the root that inherits from IModule, and there is a single SchedulerView.xsml and SchedulerViewModel.cs setup for our V+VM. We have one unique concern as we enter into this- RadScheduler deals with AppointmentsSource, not ItemsSource, so there are some special considerations to take into account when planning this module. First, I need something which inherits from AppointmentBase. This is the core of the RadScheduler appointment, and if you are planning to do any form of custom appointment, you'll want it to inherit from this. Then you can add-on functionality as needed. Here is my addition to the mix, the InterviewAppointment: 01.public class InterviewAppointment : AppointmentBase 02.{ 03. private int _applicantID; 04. public int ApplicantID 05. { 06. get { return this._applicantID; } 07. set 08. { 09. if (_applicantID != value) 10. { 11. _applicantID = value; 12. OnPropertyChanged("ApplicantID"); 13. } 14. } 15. } 16. 17. private int _postingID; 18. public int PostingID 19. { 20. get { return _postingID; } 21. set 22. { 23. if (_postingID != value) 24. { 25. _postingID = value; 26. OnPropertyChanged("PostingID"); 27. } 28. } 29. } 30. 31. private string _body; 32. public string Body 33. { 34. get { return _body; } 35. set 36. { 37. if (_body != value) 38. { 39. _body = value; 40. OnPropertyChanged("Body"); 41. } 42. } 43. } 44. 45. private int _interviewID; 46. public int InterviewID 47. { 48. get { return _interviewID; } 49. set 50. { 51. if (_interviewID != value) 52. { 53. _interviewID = value; 54. OnPropertyChanged("InterviewID"); 55. } 56. } 57. } 58. 59. public override IAppointment Copy() 60. { 61. IAppointment appointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 62. appointment.CopyFrom(this); 63. return appointment; 64. } 65. 66. public override void CopyFrom(IAppointment other) 67. { 68. base.CopyFrom(other); 69. var appointment = other as InterviewAppointment; 70. if (appointment != null) 71. { 72. ApplicantID = appointment.ApplicantID; 73. PostingID = appointment.PostingID; 74. Body = appointment.Body; 75. InterviewID = appointment.InterviewID; 76. } 77. } 78.} Nothing too exciting going on here, we just make sure that our custom fields are persisted (specifically set in CopyFrom at the bottom) and notifications are fired- otherwise this ends up exactly like the standard appointment as far as interactions, etc. But if we've got custom appointment items... that also means we need to customize what our appointment dialog window will look like. Customizing the Edit Appointment Dialog This initially sounds a lot more intimidating than it really is. The first step here depends on what you're dealing with for theming, but for ease of everything I went ahead and extracted my templates in Blend for RadScheduler so I could modify it as I pleased. For the faint of heart, the RadScheduler template is a few thousand lines of goodness since there are some very complex things going on in that control. I've gone ahead and trimmed down the template parts I don't need as much as possible, so what is left is all that is relevant to the Edit Appointment Dialog. Here's the resulting Xaml, with line numbers, so I can explain further: 001.<UserControl.Resources> 002.  003. <helpers:DataContextProxy x:Key="DataContextProxy" /> 004. 005. <telerik:Windows7Theme x:Key="Theme" /> 006. <SolidColorBrush x:Key="DialogWindowBackground" 007. Color="White" /> 008. <SolidColorBrush x:Key="CategorySelectorBorderBrush" 009. Color="#FFB1B1B1" /> 010. <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="RadToolBar_InnerBackground" 011. EndPoint="0.5,1" 012. StartPoint="0.5,0"> 013. <GradientStop Color="#FFFDFEFF" 014. Offset="0" /> 015. <GradientStop Color="#FFDDE9F7" 016. Offset="1" /> 017. <GradientStop Color="#FFE6F0FA" 018. Offset="0.5" /> 019. <GradientStop Color="#FFDCE6F4" 020. Offset="0.5" /> 021. </LinearGradientBrush> 022. <Style x:Key="FormElementTextBlockStyle" 023. TargetType="TextBlock"> 024. <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" 025. Value="Right" /> 026. <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" 027. Value="Top" /> 028. <Setter Property="Margin" 029. Value="15, 15, 0, 2" /> 030. </Style> 031. <Style x:Key="FormElementStyle" 032. TargetType="FrameworkElement"> 033. <Setter Property="Margin" 034. Value="10, 10, 0, 2" /> 035. </Style> 036. <SolidColorBrush x:Key="GenericShallowBorderBrush" 037. Color="#FF979994" /> 038. <telerik:BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="BooleanToVisibilityConverter" /> 039. <telerikScheduler:ImportanceToBooleanConverter x:Key="ImportanceToBooleanConverter" /> 040. <telerikScheduler:NullToVisibilityConverter x:Key="NullToVisibilityConverter" /> 041. <telerikScheduler:InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter x:Key="InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter" /> 042. <scheduler:ResourcesSeparatorConverter x:Key="ResourcesSeparatorConverter" /> 043. <DataTemplate x:Key="IconDataEditTemplate"> 044. <Image Source="/Telerik.Windows.Controls.Scheduler;component/Themes/Office/Images/cal.png" 045. Margin="3,3,0,0" 046. Width="16" 047. Height="16" /> 048. </DataTemplate> 049. <DataTemplate x:Key="SingleSelectionTemplate"> 050. <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 051. HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"> 052. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 053. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 054. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 055. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 056. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 057. MinWidth="84" /> 058. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 059. MinWidth="200" /> 060. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 061. <TextBlock x:Name="SelectionNameLabel" 062. Margin="0,13,4,2" 063. Text="{Binding ResourceType.DisplayName}" 064. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" 065. Grid.Column="0" /> 066. <telerikInput:RadComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding ResourceItems}" 067. Width="185" 068. Margin="5,10,20,2" 069. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 070. Grid.Column="1" 071. ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 072. ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear All" 073. DisplayMemberPath="Resource.DisplayName" 074. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 075. SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedItem, Mode=TwoWay}" /> 076. </Grid> 077. </DataTemplate> 078. <DataTemplate x:Key="MultipleSelectionTemplate"> 079. <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 080. HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"> 081. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 082. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 083. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 084. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 085. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 086. MinWidth="84" /> 087. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 088. MinWidth="200" /> 089. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 090. <TextBlock x:Name="SelectionNameLabel" 091. Grid.Column="0" 092. Text="{Binding ResourceType.DisplayName}" 093. Margin="0,13,4,2" 094. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 095. <telerikInput:RadComboBox Grid.Column="1" 096. Width="185" 097. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 098. Margin="5,10,20,2" 099. ItemsSource="{Binding ResourceItems}" 100. SelectedIndex="{Binding SelectedIndex, Mode=TwoWay}" 101. ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 102. ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear All" 103. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}"> 104. <telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 105. <DataTemplate> 106. <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 107. VerticalAlignment="Stretch"> 108. <CheckBox VerticalAlignment="Center" 109. HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" 110. VerticalContentAlignment="Center" 111. IsChecked="{Binding IsChecked, Mode=TwoWay}" 112. Content="{Binding Resource.DisplayName}"> 113. <CheckBox.ContentTemplate> 114. <DataTemplate> 115. <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 116. VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 117. Text="{Binding Content, RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent}}" /> 118. </DataTemplate> 119. </CheckBox.ContentTemplate> 120. </CheckBox> 121. </Grid> 122. </DataTemplate> 123. </telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 124. </telerikInput:RadComboBox> 125. </Grid> 126. </DataTemplate> 127. <scheduler:ResourceTypeTemplateSelector x:Key="ItemTemplateSelector" 128. MultipleSelectionTemplate="{StaticResource MultipleSelectionTemplate}" 129. SingleSelectionTemplate="{StaticResource SingleSelectionTemplate}" /> 130.  131. 132. <ControlTemplate x:Key="EditAppointmentTemplate" 133. TargetType="telerikScheduler:AppointmentDialogWindow"> 134. <StackPanel Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" 135. UseLayoutRounding="True"> 136. <StackPanel Grid.Row="0" 137. Orientation="Horizontal" 138. Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 139. Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 140. Height="0"> 141.  142. <Border Margin="1,1,0,0" 143. Background="#50000000" 144. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 145. VerticalAlignment="Center" 146. Width="2" 147. Height="16"> 148. <Border Margin="0,0,1,1" 149. Background="#80FFFFFF" 150. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 151. Width="1" /> 152. </Border> 153. <Border Margin="1,1,0,0" 154. Background="#50000000" 155. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 156. VerticalAlignment="Center" 157. Width="2" 158. Height="16"> 159. <Border Margin="0,0,1,1" 160. Background="#80FFFFFF" 161. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 162. Width="1" /> 163. </Border> 164. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="ShowAs" 165. VerticalAlignment="Center" 166. Margin="5,0,0,0" /> 167. <telerikInput:RadComboBox ItemsSource="{TemplateBinding TimeMarkers}" 168. Width="100" 169. Height="20" 170. VerticalAlignment="Center" 171. Margin="5,0,0,0" 172. ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 173. ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear" 174. SelectedItem="{Binding TimeMarker,RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent},Mode=TwoWay}" 175. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}"> 176. <telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 177. <DataTemplate> 178. <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> 179. <Rectangle Fill="{Binding TimeMarkerBrush}" 180. Margin="2" 181. Width="12" 182. Height="12" /> 183. <TextBlock Text="{Binding TimeMarkerName}" 184. Margin="2" /> 185. </StackPanel> 186. </DataTemplate> 187. </telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 188. </telerikInput:RadComboBox> 189. <telerik:RadToggleButton x:Name="High" 190. BorderThickness="0" 191. Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 192. DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 193. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 194. IsChecked="{Binding Importance,Mode=TwoWay, Converter={StaticResource ImportanceToBooleanConverter},ConverterParameter=High}" 195. Margin="2,2,0,2" 196. Width="23" 197. Height="23" 198. HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" 199. ToolTipService.ToolTip="High importance" 200. CommandParameter="High" 201. Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SetAppointmentImportance"> 202. <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Center"> 203. <Path Stretch="Fill" 204. Height="10" 205. HorizontalAlignment="Center" 206. VerticalAlignment="Top" 207. Width="5.451" 208. Data="M200.39647,58.840393 C200.39337,58.336426 201.14566,57.683922 202.56244,57.684292 C204.06589,57.684685 204.73764,58.357765 204.72783,58.992363 C205.04649,61.795574 203.04713,64.181099 202.47388,66.133446 C201.93753,64.154961 199.9471,61.560352 200.39647,58.840393 z"> 209. <Path.Fill> 210. <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1.059,0.375" 211. StartPoint="-0.457,0.519"> 212. <GradientStop Color="#FFFF0606" 213. Offset="0.609" /> 214. <GradientStop Color="#FFBF0303" 215. Offset="0.927" /> 216. </LinearGradientBrush> 217. </Path.Fill> 218. </Path> 219. <Ellipse Height="3" 220. HorizontalAlignment="Center" 221. Margin="0,-1,0,0" 222. VerticalAlignment="Top" 223. Width="3"> 224. <Ellipse.Fill> 225. <RadialGradientBrush> 226. <GradientStop Color="#FFFF0606" 227. Offset="0" /> 228. <GradientStop Color="#FFBF0303" 229. Offset="1" /> 230. </RadialGradientBrush> 231. </Ellipse.Fill> 232. </Ellipse> 233. </StackPanel> 234. </telerik:RadToggleButton> 235. <telerik:RadToggleButton x:Name="Low" 236. HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" 237. BorderThickness="0" 238. Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 239. DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 240. IsChecked="{Binding Importance,Mode=TwoWay, Converter={StaticResource ImportanceToBooleanConverter},ConverterParameter=Low}" 241. Margin="0,2,0,2" 242. Width="23" 243. Height="23" 244. ToolTipService.ToolTip="Low importance" 245. CommandParameter="Low" 246. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 247. Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SetAppointmentImportance"> 248. <Path Stretch="Fill" 249. Height="12" 250. HorizontalAlignment="Center" 251. VerticalAlignment="Top" 252. Width="9" 253. Data="M222.40353,60.139881 L226.65768,60.139843 L226.63687,67.240196 L229.15347,67.240196 L224.37816,71.394943 L219.65274,67.240196 L222.37572,67.219345 z" 254. Stroke="#FF0365A7"> 255. <Path.Fill> 256. <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1.059,0.375" 257. StartPoint="-0.457,0.519"> 258. <GradientStop Color="#FFBBE4FF" /> 259. <GradientStop Color="#FF024572" 260. Offset="0.836" /> 261. <GradientStop Color="#FF43ADF4" 262. Offset="0.466" /> 263. </LinearGradientBrush> 264. </Path.Fill> 265. </Path> 266. </telerik:RadToggleButton> 267. </StackPanel > 268. <Border DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 269. Background="{Binding Category.CategoryBrush}" 270. Visibility="{Binding Category,Converter={StaticResource NullToVisibilityConverter}}" 271. CornerRadius="3" 272. Height="20" 273. Margin="5,10,5,0"> 274. <TextBlock Text="{Binding Category.DisplayName}" 275. VerticalAlignment="Center" 276. Margin="5,0,0,0" /> 277. </Border> 278. <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 279. HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 280. DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 281. Background="{TemplateBinding Background}"> 282. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 283. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 284. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 285. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 286. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 287. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 288. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 289. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 290. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 291. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 292. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 293. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 294. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 295. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 296. MinWidth="100" /> 297. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 298. MinWidth="200" /> 299. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 300.  301. <TextBlock x:Name="SubjectLabel" 302. Grid.Row="0" 303. Grid.Column="0" 304. Margin="0,15,0,2" 305. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Subject" 306. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 307. <TextBox x:Name="Subject" 308. Grid.Row="0" 309. Grid.Column="1" 310. MinHeight="22" 311. Padding="4 2" 312. Width="340" 313. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 314. Text="{Binding Subject, Mode=TwoWay}" 315. MaxLength="255" 316. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 317. Margin="10,12,20,2" /> 318.  319. <TextBlock x:Name="DescriptionLabel" 320. Grid.Row="1" 321. Grid.Column="0" 322. Margin="0,13,0,2" 323. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Body" 324. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 325. <TextBox x:Name="Body" 326. VerticalAlignment="top" 327. Grid.Row="1" 328. Grid.Column="1" 329. Height="Auto" 330. MaxHeight="82" 331. Width="340" 332. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 333. MinHeight="22" 334. Padding="4 2" 335. TextWrapping="Wrap" 336. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 337. Text="{Binding Body, Mode=TwoWay}" 338. AcceptsReturn="true" 339. Margin="10,10,20,2" 340. HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" 341. VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" /> 342.  343. <TextBlock x:Name="StartDateLabel" 344. Grid.Row="2" 345. Grid.Column="0" 346. Margin="0,13,0,2" 347. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="StartTime" 348. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 349. <telerikScheduler:DateTimePicker x:Name="StartDateTime" 350. Height="22" 351. Grid.Row="2" 352. Grid.Column="1" 353. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 354. Margin="10,10,20,2" 355. Style="{StaticResource FormElementStyle}" 356. SelectedDateTime="{Binding Start, Mode=TwoWay}" 357. telerikScheduler:StartEndDatePicker.EndPicker="{Binding ElementName=EndDateTime}" 358. IsTabStop="False" 359. IsEnabled="False" /> 360. <TextBlock x:Name="EndDateLabel" 361. Grid.Row="3" 362. Grid.Column="0" 363. Margin="0,13,0,2" 364. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="EndTime" 365. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 366. <telerikScheduler:DateTimePicker x:Name="EndDateTime" 367. Height="22" 368. Grid.Row="3" 369. Grid.Column="1" 370. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 371. Margin="10,10,20,2" 372. Style="{StaticResource FormElementStyle}" 373. IsTabStop="False" 374. IsEnabled="False" 375. SelectedDateTime="{Binding End, Mode=TwoWay}" /> 376.  377. <CheckBox x:Name="AllDayEventCheckbox" 378. IsChecked="{Binding IsAllDayEvent, Mode=TwoWay}" 379. Grid.Row="4" 380. Grid.Column="1" 381. Margin="10,10,20,2" 382. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 383. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 384. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="AllDayEvent"> 385. <telerik:CommandManager.InputBindings> 386. <telerik:InputBindingCollection> 387. <telerik:MouseBinding Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.ChangeTimePickersVisibility" 388. Gesture="LeftClick" /> 389. </telerik:InputBindingCollection> 390. </telerik:CommandManager.InputBindings> 391. </CheckBox> 392. <Grid Grid.Row="5" 393. Grid.ColumnSpan="2"> 394. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 395. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 396. MinWidth="100" /> 397. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 398. MinWidth="200" /> 399. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 400. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 401. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 402. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 403. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 404. <TextBlock Text="Applicant" 405. Margin="0,13,0,2" 406. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 407. <telerikInput:RadComboBox IsEditable="False" 408. Grid.Column="1" 409. Height="24" 410. VerticalAlignment="Center" 411. ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource DataContextProxy}, Path=DataSource.ApplicantList}" 412. SelectedValue="{Binding ApplicantID, Mode=TwoWay}" 413. SelectedValuePath="ApplicantID" 414. DisplayMemberPath="FirstName" /> 415. 416. <TextBlock Text="Job" 417. Margin="0,13,0,2" 418. Grid.Row="1" 419. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 420. <telerikInput:RadComboBox IsEditable="False" 421. Grid.Column="1" 422. Grid.Row="1" 423. Height="24" 424. VerticalAlignment="Center" 425. ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource DataContextProxy}, Path=DataSource.JobsList}" 426. SelectedValue="{Binding PostingID, Mode=TwoWay}" 427. SelectedValuePath="PostingID" 428. DisplayMemberPath="JobTitle"/> 429. </Grid> 430.  431. <Grid x:Name="ResourcesLayout" 432. Grid.Row="7" 433. Grid.Column="0" 434. Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 435. MaxHeight="130" 436. Margin="20,5,20,0"> 437. <Border Margin="0" 438. BorderThickness="1" 439. BorderBrush="{StaticResource GenericShallowBorderBrush}" 440. Visibility="{Binding ElementName=ResourcesScrollViewer, Path=ComputedVerticalScrollBarVisibility}"></Border> 441. <ScrollViewer x:Name="ResourcesScrollViewer" 442. IsTabStop="false" 443. Grid.Row="6" 444. Grid.Column="0" 445. Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 446. Margin="1" 447. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 448. VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto"> 449. <scheduler:ResourcesItemsControl x:Name="PART_Resources" 450. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 451. Padding="0,2,0,5" 452. IsTabStop="false" 453. ItemsSource="{TemplateBinding ResourceTypeModels}" 454. ItemTemplateSelector="{StaticResource ItemTemplateSelector}" /> 455. </ScrollViewer> 456. </Grid> 457. <StackPanel x:Name="FooterControls" 458. Margin="5 10 10 10" 459. Grid.Row="8" 460. Grid.Column="1" 461. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 462. Orientation="Horizontal"> 463. <telerik:RadButton x:Name="OKButton" 464. Margin="5" 465. Padding="10 0" 466. MinWidth="80" 467. Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SaveAppointment" 468. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 469. telerikNavigation:RadWindow.ResponseButton="Accept" 470. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="SaveAndCloseCommandText"> 471. </telerik:RadButton> 472. <telerik:RadButton x:Name="CancelButton" 473. Margin="5" 474. Padding="10 0" 475. MinWidth="80" 476. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Cancel" 477. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 478. telerikNavigation:RadWindow.ResponseButton="Cancel" 479. Command="telerik:WindowCommands.Close"> 480. </telerik:RadButton> 481. </StackPanel> 482. </Grid> 483. <vsm:VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> 484. <vsm:VisualStateGroup x:Name="RecurrenceRuleState"> 485. <vsm:VisualState x:Name="RecurrenceRuleIsNull"> 486. <Storyboard> 487. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="StartDateTime" 488. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 489. Duration="0"> 490. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 491. Value="True" /> 492. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 493. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="EndDateTime" 494. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 495. Duration="0"> 496. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 497. Value="True" /> 498. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 499. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="AllDayEventCheckbox" 500. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 501. Duration="0"> 502. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 503. Value="True" /> 504. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 505. </Storyboard> 506. </vsm:VisualState> 507. <vsm:VisualState x:Name="RecurrenceRuleIsNotNull"> 508. <Storyboard> 509. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="StartDateTime" 510. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 511. Duration="0"> 512. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 513. Value="False" /> 514. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 515. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="EndDateTime" 516. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 517. Duration="0"> 518. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 519. Value="False" /> 520. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 521. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="AllDayEventCheckbox" 522. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 523. Duration="0"> 524. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 525. Value="False" /> 526. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 527. </Storyboard> 528. </vsm:VisualState> 529. </vsm:VisualStateGroup> 530. </vsm:VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> 531. </StackPanel> 532. </ControlTemplate> 533. <DataTemplate x:Key="AppointmentDialogWindowHeaderDataTemplate"> 534. <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" 535. MaxWidth="400"> 536. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Event" 537. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.IsAllDayEvent, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 538. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Appointment" 539. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.IsAllDayEvent, Converter={StaticResource InvertedBooleanToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 540. <TextBlock Text=" - " /> 541. <TextBlock x:Name="SubjectTextBlock" 542. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.Subject, Converter={StaticResource NullToVisibilityConverter}}" 543. Text="{Binding Appointment.Subject}" /> 544. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Untitled" 545. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.Subject, Converter={StaticResource InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 546. </StackPanel> 547. </DataTemplate> 548. <Style x:Key="EditAppointmentStyle" 549. TargetType="telerikScheduler:AppointmentDialogWindow"> 550. <Setter Property="IconTemplate" 551. Value="{StaticResource IconDataEditTemplate}" /> 552. <Setter Property="HeaderTemplate" 553. Value="{StaticResource AppointmentDialogWindowHeaderDataTemplate}" /> 554. <Setter Property="Background" 555. Value="{StaticResource DialogWindowBackground}" /> 556. <Setter Property="Template" 557. Value="{StaticResource EditAppointmentTemplate}" /> 558. </Style> 559.</UserControl.Resources> The first line there is the DataContextProxy I mentioned previously- we use that again to work a bit of magic in this template. Where we start getting into the dialog in question is line 132, but line 407 is where things start getting interesting. The ItemsSource is pointing at a list that exists in my ViewModel (or code-behind, if it is used as a DataContext), the SelectedValue is the item I am actually binding from the applicant (note the TwoWay binding), and SelectedValuePath and DisplayMemberPath ensure the proper applicant is being displayed from the collection. You will also see similar starting on line 420 where I do the same for the Jobs we'll be displaying. Just to wrap-up the Xaml, here's the RadScheduler declaraction that ties this all together and will be the main focus of our view: 01.<telerikScheduler:RadScheduler x:Name="xJobsScheduler" 02. Grid.Row="1" 03. Grid.Column="1" 04. Width="800" 05. MinWidth="600" 06. Height="500" 07. MinHeight="300" 08. AppointmentsSource="{Binding Interviews}" 09. EditAppointmentStyle="{StaticResource EditAppointmentStyle}" 10. command:AppointmentAddedEventClass.Command="{Binding AddAppointmentCommand}" 11. command:ApptCreatedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptCreatingCommand}" 12. command:ApptEditedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptEditedCommand}" 13. command:ApptDeletedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptDeletedCommand}"> 14.</telerikScheduler:RadScheduler> Now, we get to the ViewModel and what it takes to get that rigged up. And for those of you who remember the jobs post, those command:s in the Xaml are pointing to attached behavior commands that reproduce the respective events. This becomes very handy when we're setting up the code-behind version. ;) ViewModel I've been liking this approach so far, so I'm going to put the entire ViewModel here and then go into the lines of interest. Of course, feel free to ask me questions about anything that isn't clear (by line number, ideally) so I can help out if I have missed anything important: 001.public class SchedulerViewModel : ViewModelBase 002.{ 003. private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator; 004. private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; 005. 006. public RecruitingContext context; 007. 008. private ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> _interviews = new ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment>(); 009. public ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> Interviews 010. { 011. get { return _interviews; } 012. set 013. { 014. if (_interviews != value) 015. { 016. _interviews = value; 017. NotifyChanged("Interviews"); 018. } 019. } 020. } 021. 022. private QueryableCollectionView _jobsList; 023. public QueryableCollectionView JobsList 024. { 025. get { return this._jobsList; } 026. set 027. { 028. if (this._jobsList != value) 029. { 030. this._jobsList = value; 031. this.NotifyChanged("JobsList"); 032. } 033. } 034. } 035. 036. private QueryableCollectionView _applicantList; 037. public QueryableCollectionView ApplicantList 038. { 039. get { return _applicantList; } 040. set 041. { 042. if (_applicantList != value) 043. { 044. _applicantList = value; 045. NotifyChanged("ApplicantList"); 046. } 047. } 048. } 049. 050. public DelegateCommand<object> AddAppointmentCommand { get; set; } 051. public DelegateCommand<object> ApptCreatingCommand { get; set; } 052. public DelegateCommand<object> ApptEditedCommand { get; set; } 053. public DelegateCommand<object> ApptDeletedCommand { get; set; } 054. 055. public SchedulerViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAgg, IRegionManager regionmanager) 056. { 057. // set Unity items 058. this.eventAggregator = eventAgg; 059. this.regionManager = regionmanager; 060. 061. // load our context 062. context = new RecruitingContext(); 063. LoadOperation<Interview> loadOp = context.Load(context.GetInterviewsQuery()); 064. loadOp.Completed += new EventHandler(loadOp_Completed); 065. 066. this._jobsList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.JobPostings); 067. context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 068. 069. this._applicantList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.Applicants); 070. context.Load(context.GetApplicantsQuery()); 071. 072. AddAppointmentCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.AddAppt); 073. ApptCreatingCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptCreating); 074. ApptEditedCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptEdited); 075. ApptDeletedCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptDeleted); 076. 077. } 078. 079. void loadOp_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) 080. { 081. LoadOperation loadop = sender as LoadOperation; 082. 083. foreach (var ent in loadop.Entities) 084. { 085. _interviews.Add(EntityToAppointment(ent as Interview)); 086. } 087. } 088. 089. #region Appointment Adding 090. 091. public void AddAppt(object obj) 092. { 093. // now we have a new InterviewAppointment to add to our QCV :) 094. InterviewAppointment newInterview = obj as InterviewAppointment; 095. 096. this.context.Interviews.Add(AppointmentToEntity(newInterview)); 097. this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 098. { 099. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 100. myAction.InterviewID = newInterview.InterviewID; 101. myAction.PostingID = newInterview.PostingID; 102. myAction.ApplicantID = newInterview.ApplicantID; 103. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been created by {1}", newInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 104. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 105. eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 106. } 107. , null); 108. } 109. 110. public void ApptCreating(object obj) 111. { 112. // handled in the behavior, just a placeholder to ensure it runs :) 113. } 114. 115. #endregion 116. 117. #region Appointment Editing 118. 119. public void ApptEdited(object obj) 120. { 121. Interview editedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 122. where x.InterviewID == (obj as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 123. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 124. 125. CopyAppointmentEdit(editedInterview, obj as InterviewAppointment); 126. 127. context.SubmitChanges((s) => { 128. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 129. myAction.InterviewID = editedInterview.InterviewID; 130. myAction.PostingID = editedInterview.PostingID; 131. myAction.ApplicantID = editedInterview.ApplicantID; 132. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been modified by {1}", editedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 133. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 134. eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); } 135. , null); 136. } 137. 138. #endregion 139. 140. #region Appointment Deleting 141. 142. public void ApptDeleted(object obj) 143. { 144. Interview deletedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 145. where x.InterviewID == (obj as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 146. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 147. 148. context.Interviews.Remove(deletedInterview); 149. context.SubmitChanges((s) => 150. { 151. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 152. myAction.InterviewID = deletedInterview.InterviewID; 153. myAction.PostingID = deletedInterview.PostingID; 154. myAction.ApplicantID = deletedInterview.ApplicantID; 155. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been deleted by {1}", deletedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 156. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 157. eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 158. } 159. , null); 160. } 161. 162. #endregion 163. 164. #region Appointment Helpers :) 165. 166. public Interview AppointmentToEntity(InterviewAppointment ia) 167. { 168. Interview newInterview = new Interview(); 169. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 170. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 171. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 172. newInterview.End = ia.End; 173. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 174. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 175. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 176. 177. return newInterview; 178. } 179. 180. public InterviewAppointment EntityToAppointment(Interview ia) 181. { 182. InterviewAppointment newInterview = new InterviewAppointment(); 183. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 184. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 185. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 186. newInterview.End = ia.End; 187. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 188. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 189. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 190. 191. return newInterview; 192. } 193. 194. public void CopyAppointmentEdit(Interview entityInterview, InterviewAppointment appointmentInterview) 195. { 196. entityInterview.Subject = appointmentInterview.Subject; 197. entityInterview.Body = appointmentInterview.Body; 198. entityInterview.Start = appointmentInterview.Start; 199. entityInterview.End = appointmentInterview.End; 200. entityInterview.ApplicantID = appointmentInterview.ApplicantID; 201. entityInterview.PostingID = appointmentInterview.PostingID; 202. } 203. 204. #endregion 205.} One thing we're doing here which you won't see in any of the other ViewModels is creating a duplicate collection. I know this is something which will be fixed down the line for using RadScheduler, simplifying this process, but with WCF RIA changing as it does I wanted to ensure functionality would remain consistent as I continued development on this application. So, I do a little bit of duplication, but for the greater good. This all takes place starting on line 79, so for every entity that comes back we add it to the collection that is bound to RadScheduler. Otherwise, the DelegateCommands that you see correspond directly to the events they are named after. In each case, rather than sending over the full event arguments, I just send in the appointment in question (coming through as the object obj in all cases) so I can add (line 91), edit (line 119), and delete appointments (line 142) like normal. This just ensures they get updated back to my database. Also, the one bit of code you won't see is for the Appointment Creating (line 110) event- that is because in the command I've created I simply make the replacement I need to: 1.void element_AppointmentCreating(object sender, AppointmentCreatingEventArgs e) 2.{ 3. e.NewAppointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 4. base.ExecuteCommand(); 5.} And the ViewModel is none the wiser, the appointments just work as far as it is concerned since as they are created they become InterviewAppointments. End result? I've customized my EditAppointmentDialog as follows: And adding, editing, and deleting appointments works like a charm. I can even 'edit' by moving appointments around RadScheduler, so as they are dropped into a timeslot they perform their full edit routine and things get updated. And then, the Code-Behind Version Perhaps the thing I like the most about doing one then the other is I get to steal 90% or more of the code from the MVVM version. For example, the only real changes to the Code-Behind Xaml file exist in the control declaration, in which I use events instead of attached-behavior-event-commands: 01.<telerikScheduler:RadScheduler x:Name="xJobsScheduler" 02. Grid.Row="1" 03. Grid.Column="1" 04. Width="800" 05. MinWidth="600" 06. Height="500" 07. MinHeight="300" 08. EditAppointmentStyle="{StaticResource EditAppointmentStyle}" 09. AppointmentAdded="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentAdded" 10. AppointmentCreating="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentCreating" 11. AppointmentEdited="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentEdited" 12. AppointmentDeleted="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentDeleted"> 13.</telerikScheduler:RadScheduler> Easy, right? Otherwise, all the same styling in UserControl.Resources was re-used, right down to the DataContextProxy that lets us bind to a collection from our viewmodel (in this case, our code-behind) to use within the DataTemplate. The code conversion gets even easier, as I could literally copy and paste almost everything from the ViewModel to my Code-Behind, just a matter of pasting the right section into the right event. Here's the code-behind as proof: 001.public partial class SchedulingView : UserControl, INotifyPropertyChanged 002.{ 003. public RecruitingContext context; 004. 005. private QueryableCollectionView _jobsList; 006. public QueryableCollectionView JobsList 007. { 008. get { return this._jobsList; } 009. set 010. { 011. if (this._jobsList != value) 012. { 013. this._jobsList = value; 014. this.NotifyChanged("JobsList"); 015. } 016. } 017. } 018. 019. private QueryableCollectionView _applicantList; 020. public QueryableCollectionView ApplicantList 021. { 022. get { return _applicantList; } 023. set 024. { 025. if (_applicantList != value) 026. { 027. _applicantList = value; 028. NotifyChanged("ApplicantList"); 029. } 030. } 031. } 032. 033. private ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> _interviews = new ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment>(); 034. public ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> Interviews 035. { 036. get { return _interviews; } 037. set 038. { 039. if (_interviews != value) 040. { 041. _interviews = value; 042. NotifyChanged("Interviews"); 043. } 044. } 045. } 046. 047. public SchedulingView() 048. { 049. InitializeComponent(); 050. 051. this.DataContext = this; 052. 053. this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(SchedulingView_Loaded); 054. } 055. 056. void SchedulingView_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 057. { 058. this.xJobsScheduler.AppointmentsSource = Interviews; 059. 060. context = new RecruitingContext(); 061. 062. LoadOperation loadop = context.Load(context.GetInterviewsQuery()); 063. loadop.Completed += new EventHandler(loadop_Completed); 064. 065. this._applicantList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.Applicants); 066. context.Load(context.GetApplicantsQuery()); 067. 068. this._jobsList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.JobPostings); 069. context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 070. } 071. 072. void loadop_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) 073. { 074. LoadOperation loadop = sender as LoadOperation; 075. 076. _interviews.Clear(); 077. 078. foreach (var ent in loadop.Entities) 079. { 080. _interviews.Add(EntityToAppointment(ent as Interview)); 081. } 082. } 083. 084. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentAdded(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentAddedEventArgs e) 085. { 086. // now we have a new InterviewAppointment to add to our QCV :) 087. InterviewAppointment newInterview = e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment; 088. 089. this.context.Interviews.Add(AppointmentToEntity(newInterview)); 090. this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 091. { 092. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 093. myAction.InterviewID = newInterview.InterviewID; 094. myAction.PostingID = newInterview.PostingID; 095. myAction.ApplicantID = newInterview.ApplicantID; 096. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been created by {1}", newInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 097. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 098. context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 099. context.SubmitChanges(); 100. } 101. , null); 102. } 103. 104. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentCreating(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentCreatingEventArgs e) 105. { 106. e.NewAppointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 107. } 108. 109. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentEdited(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentEditedEventArgs e) 110. { 111. Interview editedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 112. where x.InterviewID == (e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 113. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 114. 115. CopyAppointmentEdit(editedInterview, e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment); 116. 117. context.SubmitChanges((s) => 118. { 119. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 120. myAction.InterviewID = editedInterview.InterviewID; 121. myAction.PostingID = editedInterview.PostingID; 122. myAction.ApplicantID = editedInterview.ApplicantID; 123. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been modified by {1}", editedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 124. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 125. context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 126. context.SubmitChanges(); 127. } 128. , null); 129. } 130. 131. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentDeleted(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentDeletedEventArgs e) 132. { 133. Interview deletedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 134. where x.InterviewID == (e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 135. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 136. 137. context.Interviews.Remove(deletedInterview); 138. context.SubmitChanges((s) => 139. { 140. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 141. myAction.InterviewID = deletedInterview.InterviewID; 142. myAction.PostingID = deletedInterview.PostingID; 143. myAction.ApplicantID = deletedInterview.ApplicantID; 144. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been deleted by {1}", deletedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 145. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 146. context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 147. context.SubmitChanges(); 148. } 149. , null); 150. } 151. 152. #region Appointment Helpers :) 153. 154. public Interview AppointmentToEntity(InterviewAppointment ia) 155. { 156. Interview newInterview = new Interview(); 157. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 158. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 159. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 160. newInterview.End = ia.End; 161. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 162. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 163. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 164. 165. return newInterview; 166. } 167. 168. public InterviewAppointment EntityToAppointment(Interview ia) 169. { 170. InterviewAppointment newInterview = new InterviewAppointment(); 171. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 172. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 173. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 174. newInterview.End = ia.End; 175. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 176. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 177. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 178. 179. return newInterview; 180. } 181. 182. public void CopyAppointmentEdit(Interview entityInterview, InterviewAppointment appointmentInterview) 183. { 184. entityInterview.Subject = appointmentInterview.Subject; 185. entityInterview.Body = appointmentInterview.Body; 186. entityInterview.Start = appointmentInterview.Start; 187. entityInterview.End = appointmentInterview.End; 188. entityInterview.ApplicantID = appointmentInterview.ApplicantID; 189. entityInterview.PostingID = appointmentInterview.PostingID; 190. } 191. 192. #endregion 193. 194. #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members 195. 196. public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; 197. 198. public void NotifyChanged(string propertyName) 199. { 200. if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(propertyName)) 201. throw new ArgumentException("propertyName"); 202. 203. PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); 204. } 205. 206. #endregion 207.} Nice... right? :) One really important thing to note as well. See on line 51 where I set the DataContext before the Loaded event? This is super important, as if you don't have this set before the usercontrol is loaded, the DataContextProxy has no context to use and your EditAppointmentDialog Job/Applicant dropdowns will be blank and empty. Trust me on this, took a little bit of debugging to figure out that by setting the DataContext post-loaded would only lead to disaster and frustration. Otherwise, the only other real difference is that instead of sending an ActionHistory item through an event to get added to the database and saved, I do those right in the callback from submitting. The Result Again, I only have to post one picture because these bad boys used nearly identical code for both the MVVM and the code-behind views, so our end result is... So what have we learned here today? One, for the most part this MVVM thing is somewhat easy. Yeah, you sometimes have to write a bunch of extra code, but with the help of a few useful snippits you can turn the process into a pretty streamlined little workflow. Heck, this story gets even easier as you can see in this blog post by Michael Washington- specifically run a find on 'InvokeCommandAction' and you'll see the section regarding the command on TreeView in Blend 4. Brilliant! MVVM never looked so sweet! Otherwise, it is business as usual with RadScheduler for Silverlight whichever path you're choosing for your development. Between now and the next post, I'll be cleaning up styles a bit (those RadComboBoxes are a little too close to my labels!) and adding some to the RowDetailsViews for Applicants and Jobs, so you can see all the info for an appointment in the dropdown tab view. Otherwise, we're about ready to call a wrap on this oneDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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Is Berkeley DB a NoSQL solution?

- by Gregory Burd

Berkeley DB is a library. To use it to store data you must link the library into your application. You can use most programming languages to access the API, the calls across these APIs generally mimic the Berkeley DB C-API which makes perfect sense because Berkeley DB is written in C. The inspiration for Berkeley DB was the DBM library, a part of the earliest versions of UNIX written by AT&T's Ken Thompson in 1979. DBM was a simple key/value hashtable-based storage library. In the early 1990s as BSD UNIX was transitioning from version 4.3 to 4.4 and retrofitting commercial code owned by AT&T with unencumbered code, it was the future founders of Sleepycat Software who wrote libdb (aka Berkeley DB) as the replacement for DBM. The problem it addressed was fast, reliable local key/value storage. At that time databases almost always lived on a single node, even the most sophisticated databases only had simple fail-over two node solutions. If you had a lot of data to store you would choose between the few commercial RDBMS solutions or to write your own custom solution. Berkeley DB took the headache out of the custom approach. These basic market forces inspired other DBM implementations. There was the "New DBM" (ndbm) and the "GNU DBM" (GDBM) and a few others, but the theme was the same. Even today TokyoCabinet calls itself "a modern implementation of DBM" mimicking, and improving on, something first created over thirty years ago. In the mid-1990s, DBM was the name for what you needed if you were looking for fast, reliable local storage. Fast forward to today. What's changed? Systems are connected over fast, very reliable networks. Disks are cheep, fast, and capable of storing huge amounts of data. CPUs continued to follow Moore's Law, processing power that filled a room in 1990 now fits in your pocket. PCs, servers, and other computers proliferated both in business and the personal markets. In addition to the new hardware entire markets, social systems, and new modes of interpersonal communication moved onto the web and started evolving rapidly. These changes cause a massive explosion of data and a need to analyze and understand that data. Taken together this resulted in an entirely different landscape for database storage, new solutions were needed. A number of novel solutions stepped up and eventually a category called NoSQL emerged. The new market forces inspired the CAP theorem and the heated debate of BASE vs. ACID. But in essence this was simply the market looking at what to trade off to meet these new demands. These new database systems shared many qualities in common. There were designed to address massive amounts of data, millions of requests per second, and scale out across multiple systems. The first large-scale and successful solution was Dynamo, Amazon's distributed key/value database. Dynamo essentially took the next logical step and added a twist. Dynamo was to be the database of record, it would be distributed, data would be partitioned across many nodes, and it would tolerate failure by avoiding single points of failure. Amazon did this because they recognized that the majority of the dynamic content they provided to customers visiting their web store front didn't require the services of an RDBMS. The queries were simple, key/value look-ups or simple range queries with only a few queries that required more complex joins. They set about to use relational technology only in places where it was the best solution for the task, places like accounting and order fulfillment, but not in the myriad of other situations. The success of Dynamo, and it's design, inspired the next generation of Non-SQL, distributed database solutions including Cassandra, Riak and Voldemort. The problem their designers set out to solve was, "reliability at massive scale" so the first focal point was distributed database algorithms. Underneath Dynamo there is a local transactional database; either Berkeley DB, Berkeley DB Java Edition, MySQL or an in-memory key/value data structure. Dynamo was an evolution of local key/value storage onto networks. Cassandra, Riak, and Voldemort all faced similar design decisions and one, Voldemort, choose Berkeley DB Java Edition for it's node-local storage. Riak at first was entirely in-memory, but has recently added write-once, append-only log-based on-disk storage similar type of storage as Berkeley DB except that it is based on a hash table which must reside entirely in-memory rather than a btree which can live in-memory or on disk. Berkeley DB evolved too, we added high availability (HA) and a replication manager that makes it easy to setup replica groups. Berkeley DB's replication doesn't partitioned the data, every node keeps an entire copy of the database. For consistency, there is a single node where writes are committed first - a master - then those changes are delivered to the replica nodes as log records. Applications can choose to wait until all nodes are consistent, or fire and forget allowing Berkeley DB to eventually become consistent. Berkeley DB's HA scales-out quite well for read-intensive applications and also effectively eliminates the central point of failure by allowing replica nodes to be elected (using a PAXOS algorithm) to mastership if the master should fail. This implementation covers a wide variety of use cases. MemcacheDB is a server that implements the Memcache network protocol but uses Berkeley DB for storage and HA to replicate the cache state across all the nodes in the cache group. Google Accounts, the user authentication layer for all Google properties, was until recently running Berkeley DB HA. That scaled to a globally distributed system. That said, most NoSQL solutions try to partition (shard) data across nodes in the replication group and some allow writes as well as reads at any node, Berkeley DB HA does not. So, is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution? Not really, but it certainly is a component of many of the existing NoSQL solutions out there. Forgetting all the noise about how NoSQL solutions are complex distributed databases when you boil them down to a single node you still have to store the data to some form of stable local storage. DBMs solved that problem a long time ago. NoSQL has more to do with the layers on top of the DBM; the distributed, sometimes-consistent, partitioned, scale-out storage that manage key/value or document sets and generally have some form of simple HTTP/REST-style network API. Does Berkeley DB do that? Not really. Is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution today? Nope, but it's the most robust solution on which to build such a system. Re-inventing the node-local data storage isn't easy. A lot of people are starting to come to appreciate the sophisticated features found in Berkeley DB, even mimic them in some cases. Could Berkeley DB grow into a NoSQL solution? Absolutely. Our key/value API could be extended over the net using any of a number of existing network protocols such as memcache or HTTP/REST. We could adapt our node-local data partitioning out over replicated nodes. We even have a nice query language and cost-based query optimizer in our BDB XML product that we could reuse were we to build out a document-based NoSQL-style product. XML and JSON are not so different that we couldn't adapt one to work with the other interchangeably. Without too much effort we could add what's missing, we could jump into this No SQL market withing a single product development cycle. Why isn't Berkeley DB already a NoSQL solution? Why aren't we working on it? Why indeed...

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 07, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 07, 2012Popular ReleasesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.9.0: Whats newThe media section has been overhauled to support HTML5 uploads, just drag and drop files in, even multiple files are supported on any HTML5 capable browser. The folder content overview is also much improved allowing you to filter it and perform common actions on your media items. The Rich Text Editor’s “Media” button now uses an embedder based on the open oEmbed standard (if you’re upgrading, enable the media button in the Rich Text Editor datatype settings and set TidyEditorConten...menu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.1: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...iPDC - Free Phasor Data Concentrator: iPDC-v1.3.1: iPDC suite version-1.3.1, Modifications and Bug Fixed (from v 1.3.0) New User Manual for iPDC-v1.3.1 available on websites. Bug resolved : PMU Simulator TCP connection error and hang connection for client (PDC). Now PMU Simulator (server) can communicate more than one PDCs (clients) over TCP and UDP parallely. PMU Simulator is now sending the exact data frames as mentioned in data rate by user. PMU Simulator data rate has been verified by iPDC database entries and PMU Connection Tes...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks OData Feed: The AdventureWorks OData service exposes resources based on specific SQL views. The SQL views are a limited subset of the AdventureWorks database that results in several consuming scenarios: CompanySales Documents ManufacturingInstructions ProductCatalog TerritorySalesDrilldown WorkOrderRouting How to install the sample You can consume the AdventureWorks OData feed from http://services.odata.org/AdventureWorksV3/AdventureWorks.svc. You can also consume the AdventureWorks OData fe...Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.6: Sorting feeds alphabetical is now optional (see preferences window)DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.03: Major Highlights Fixed issue where mailto: links were not working when sending bulk email Fixed issue where uses did not see friendship relationships Problem is in 6.2, which does not show in the Versions Affected list above. Fixed the issue with cascade deletes in comments in CoreMessaging_Notification Fixed UI issue when using a date fields as a required profile property during user registration Fixed error when running the product in debug mode Fixed visibility issue when...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.65: Fixed null-reference error in the build task constructor.B INI Sharp Library: B INI Sharp Library v1.0.0.0 Final Realsed: The frist realsedActive Social Migrator: ActiveSocialMigrator 1.0.0 Beta: Beta release for the Active Social Migration tool.EntLib.com????????: ??????demo??-For SQL 2005-2008: EntLibShopping ???v3.0 - ??????demo??，?????SQL SERVER 2005/2008/2008 R2/2012 ??????。 ??（??）??????。 THANKS.Sistem LPK Pemkot Semarang: Panduan Penggunaan Sistem LPK: Panduan cara menggunakan Aplikasi Sistem LPK Bagian Pembangunan Kota SemarangActive Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 5.0.0 RC: RC release of Active Forums 5.0.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.7 Beta: Bug in the display icon for apk's, will fix with next release Added fallback icon if unable to get the image/icon from the Cloud Service Removed some stale plugins that were either out dated or incomplete. Added handler for *.ab files for restoring backups Added plugin to create device backups Backups stored in %USERPROFILE%\Android Backups\%DEVICE_ID%\ Added custom folder icon for the android backups directory better error handling for installing an apk bug fixes for the Runn...The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: Version 1: --Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.5: Version 8.5 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine. New features include: Built-in search engine using Lucene.NET Flood control improvements Notifications improvements: sync option and mail body View Roadmap for more details webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 961aff884a9187b6e8a86d68913cdd31f8deaf83WiX Toolset: WiX Toolset v3.6: WiX Toolset v3.6 introduces the Burn bootstrapper/chaining engine and support for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5. Other minor functionality includes: WixDependencyExtension supports dependency checking among MSI packages. WixFirewallExtension supports more features of Windows Firewall. WixTagExtension supports Software Id Tagging. WixUtilExtension now supports recursive directory deletion. Melt simplifies pure-WiX patching by extracting .msi package content and updating .w...Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.2.0）: ????ISE?0.1.0??，?????，ISE?0.2.0?????????，???????，????????20???follow?ISE，????，??ISE??????????，??????????，?????????，?????????0.2.0??????，??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”，??????，?????????，???????，???????????????????，????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????： 1. ??“????” ??。??????????，?????????，???????????????????。??：????????，????????????，??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????，???????，???????????????，?????????????，????????，?0.2.0?，???????...GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.New ProjectsAdding 2013 Jewish Holidays for Outlook2003: Instruction: Copy the outlook.hol file to your compuer where Outlook2003 is installed. Double click the file, choose "Israel" and continue. That's it Agilcont System: Sistema de contabilidad para empresas privadas de preferencia para cajas que trabajan con efectivo en soles, dolares y con el material oroARB (A Request Broker): The idea is something like a Request Broker, but with some additional functionality.BATTLE.NET - SDK: This SDK provides the ability to use the Battle.net (Blizzard) Services for all supported Games such Diablo 3, World of Warcraft. Container Terminal System: SummaryDeclarative UX Streaming Data Language for the Cloud: Bringing a better communication paradigm for media and data..Get User Profile Information from SharePoint UserProfile Service: Used SharePoint object model to get the user profile information from the User Profile Service.Guess The City & State Windows 8 Source Code: Source code for Guess The City & State in Malaysia Windows 8 AppJquery Tree: This project is to demonstrate tree basic functionality.MCEBuddy 2.x: Convert and Remove Commercials for your Windows Media CenterMvcDesign: MvcDesign engine implementation projectMy Task Manager: This is a task manager module for DotNetNuke. I am using it to get started developing modules.MyAppwithbranches: MyAppwithbranchesProjecte prova: rpyGEO: pyGEO is a python package capable of parsing microarray data files. It also has a primitive plotting function.Scarlet Road: Scarlet Road is a top-down shooter. It's you against an unending horde of monsters.simplecounter: A simple counter, cick and counter.SiteEmpires: ????????Soundcloud Loader: Simple Tool for downloading Tracks from Soundcloud.Windows Phone Samples: Windows Phone code samples.

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How to Organize a Programming Language Club

- by Ben Griswold

I previously noted that we started a language club at work. You know, I searched around but I couldn’t find a copy of the How to Organize a Programming Language Club Handbook. Maybe it’s sold out? Yes, Stack Overflow has quite a bit of information on how to learn and teach new languages and there’s also a good number of online tutorials which provide language introductions but I was interested in group learning. After two months of meetings, I present to you the Unofficial How to Organize a Programming Language Club Handbook. 1. Gauge interest. Start by surveying prospects. “Excuse me, smart-developer-whom-I-work-with-and-I-think-might-be-interested-in-learning-a-new-coding-language-with-me. Are you interested in learning a new language with me?” If you’re lucky, you work with a bunch of really smart folks who aren’t shy about teaching/learning in a group setting and you’ll have a collective interest in no time. Simply suggesting the idea is the only effort required. If you don’t work in this type of environment, maybe you should consider a new place of employment. 2. Make it official. Send out a “Welcome to the Club” email: There’s been talk of folks itching to learn new languages – Python, Scala, F# and Haskell to name a few. Rather than taking on new languages alone, let’s learn in the open. That’s right. Let’s start a languages club. We’ll have everything a real club needs – secret handshake, goofy motto and a high-and-mighty sense that we’re better than everybody else. T-shirts? Hell YES! Anyway, I’ve thrown this idea around the office and no one has laughed at me yet so please consider this your very official invitation to be in THE club. [Insert your ideas about how the club might be run, solicit feedback and suggestions, ask what other folks would like to get out the club, comment about club hazing practices and talk up the T-shirts even more. Finally, call out the languages you are interested in learning and ask the group for their list.] 3. Send out invitations to the first meeting. Don’t skimp! Hallmark greeting cards for everyone. Personalized. Hearts over the I’s and everything. Oh, and be sure to include the list of suggested languages with vote count. Here the list of languages we are interested in: Python 5 Ruby 4 Objective-C 3 F# 2 Haskell 2 Scala 2 Ada 1 Boo 1 C# 1 Clojure 1 Erlang 1 Go 1 Pi 1 Prolog 1 Qt 1 4. At the first meeting, there must be cake. Lots of cake. And you should tackle some very important questions: Which language should we start with? You can immediately go with the top vote getter or you could do as we did and designate each person to provide a high-level review of each of the proposed languages over the next two weeks. After all presentations are completed, vote on the language. Our high-level review consisted of answers to a series of questions. Decide how often and where the group will meet. We, for example, meet for a brown bag lunch every Wednesday. Decide how you’re going to learn. We determined that the best way to learn is to just dive in and write code. After choosing our first language (Python), we talked about building an application, or performing coding katas, but we ultimately choose to complete a series of Project Euler problems. We kept it simple – each member works out the same two problems each week in preparation of a code review the following Wednesday. 5. Code, Review, Learn. Prior to the weekly meeting, everyone uploads their solutions to our internal wiki. Each Project Euler problem has a dedicated page. In the meeting, we use a really fancy HD projector to show off each member’s solution. It is very important to use an HD projector. Again, don’t skimp! Each code author speaks to their solution, everyone else comments, applauds, points fingers and laughs, etc. As much as I’ve learned from solving the problems on my own, I’ve learned at least twice as much at the group code review. 6. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. We’ve hosted the language club for 7 weeks now. The first meeting just set the stage. The next two meetings provided a review of the languages followed by a first language selection. The remaining meetings focused on Python and Project Euler problems. Today we took a vote as to whether or not we’re ready to switch to another language and/or another problem set. Pretty much everyone wants to stay the course for a few more weeks at least. Until then, we’ll continue to code the next two solutions, review and learn. Again, we’ve been having a good time with the programming language club. I’m glad it got off the ground. What do you think? Would you be interested in a language club? Any suggestions on what we might do better?

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jQuery Templates - XHTML Validation

- by hajan

Many developers have already asked me about this. How to make XHTML valid the web page which uses jQuery Templates. Maybe you have already tried, and I don't know what are your results but here is my opinion regarding this. By default, Visual Studio.NET adds the xhtml1-transitional.dtd schema <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> So, if you try to validate your page which has jQuery Templates against this schema, your page won't be XHTML valid. Why? It's because when creating templates, we use HTML tags inside <script> ... </script> block. Yes, I know that the script block has type="text/html" but it's not supported in this schema, thus it's not valid. Let's try validate the following code Code <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> $(function () { var attendees = [ { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] }, { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] } ]; $("#myTemplate").tmpl(attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); </script> <script id="myTemplate" type="text/html"> <li> ${Name} ${Surname} {{if speaker}} (<font color="red">speaks</font>) {{else}} (attendee) {{/if}} </li> </script> </head> <body> <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> To validate it, go to http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input and copy paste the code rendered on client-side browser (it’s almost the same, only the template is rendered inside OL so LI tags are created for each item). Press CHECK and you will get: Result: 1 Errors, 2 warning(s) The error message says: Validation Output: 1 Error Line 21, Column 13: document type does not allow element "li" here <li> Yes, the <li> HTML element is not allowed inside the <script>, so how to make it valid? FIRST: Using <![CDATA][…]]> The first thing that came in my mind was the CDATA. So, by wrapping any HTML tag which is in script blog, inside <![CDATA[ ........ ]]> it will make our code valid. However, the problem is that the template won't render since the template tags {} cannot get evaluated if they are inside CDATA. Ok, lets try with another approach. SECOND: HTML5 validation Well, if we just remove the strikethrough part bellow of the !DOPCTYPE <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> our template is going to be checked as HTML5 and will be valid. Ok, there is another approach I've also tried: THIRD: Separate template to an external file We can separate the template to external file. I didn’t show how to do this previously, so here is the example. 1. Add HTML file with name Template.html in your ASPX website. 2. Place your defined template there without <script> tag Content inside Template.html <li> ${Name} ${Surname} {{if speaker}} (<font color="red">speaks</font>) {{else}} (attendee) {{/if}} </li> 3. Call the HTML file using $.get() jQuery ajax method and render the template with data using $.tmpl() function. $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) { $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); So the complete code is: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> $(function () { var attendees = [ { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] }, { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] } ]; $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) { $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); }); </script> </head> <body> <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> This document was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Result: Passed If you have any additional methods for XHTML validation, you can share it :). Thanks,Hajan

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Robotic Arm – Hardware

- by Szymon Kobalczyk

This is first in series of articles about project I've been building in my spare time since last Summer. Actually it all began when I was researching a topic of modeling human motion kinematics in order to create gesture recognition library for Kinect. This ties heavily into motion theory of robotic manipulators so I also glanced at some designs of robotic arms. Somehow I stumbled upon this cool looking open source robotic arm: It was featured on Thingiverse and published by user jjshortcut (Jan-Jaap). Since for some time I got hooked on toying with microcontrollers, robots and other electronics, I decided to give it a try and build it myself. In this post I will describe the hardware build of the arm and in later posts I will be writing about the software to control it. Another reason to build the arm myself was the cost factor. Even small commercial robotic arms are quite expensive – products from Lynxmotion and Dagu look great but both cost around USD $300 (actually there is one cheap arm available but it looks more like a toy to me). In comparison this design is quite cheap. It uses seven hobby grade servos and even the cheapest ones should work fine. The structure is build from a set of laser cut parts connected with few metal spacers (15mm and 47mm) and lots of M3 screws. Other than that you’d only need a microcontroller board to drive the servos. So in total it comes a lot cheaper to build it yourself than buy an of the shelf robotic arm. Oh, and if you don’t like this one there are few more robotic arm projects at Thingiverse (including one by oomlout). Laser cut parts Some time ago I’ve build another robot using laser cut parts so I knew the process already. You can grab the design files in both DXF and EPS format from Thingiverse, and there are also 3D models of each part in STL. Actually the design is split into a second project for the mini servo gripper (there is also a standard servo version available but it won’t fit this arm). I wanted to make some small adjustments, layout, and add measurements to the parts before sending it for cutting. I’ve looked at some free 2D CAD programs, and finally did all this work using QCad 3 Beta with worked great for me (I also tried LibreCAD but it didn’t work that well). All parts are cut from 4 mm thick material. Because I was worried that acrylic is too fragile and might break, I also ordered another set cut from plywood. In the end I build it from plywood because it was easier to glue (I was told acrylic requires a special glue). Btw. I found a great laser cutter service in Kraków and highly recommend it (www.ebbox.com.pl). It cost me only USD $26 for both sets ($16 acrylic + $10 plywood). Metal parts I bought all the M3 screws and nuts at local hardware store. Make sure to look for nylon lock (nyloc) nuts for the gripper because otherwise it unscrews and comes apart quickly. I couldn’t find local store with metal spacers and had to order them online (you’d need 11 x 47mm and 3 x 15mm). I think I paid less than USD $10 for all metal parts. Servos This arm uses five standards size servos to drive the arm itself, and two micro servos are used on the gripper. Author of the project used Modelcraft RS-2 Servo and Modelcraft ES-05 HT Servo. I had two Futaba S3001 servos laying around, and ordered additional TowerPro SG-5010 standard size servos and TowerPro SG90 micro servos. However it turned out that the SG90 won’t fit in the gripper so I had to replace it with a slightly smaller E-Sky EK2-0508 micro servo. Later it also turned out that Futaba servos make some strange noise while working so I swapped one with TowerPro SG-5010 which has higher torque (8kg / cm). I’ve also bought three servo extension cables. All servos cost me USD $45. Assembly The build process is not difficult but you need to think carefully about order of assembling it. You can do the base and upper arm first. Because two servos in the base are close together you need to put first with one piece of lower arm already connected before you put the second servo. Then you connect the upper arm and finally put the second piece of lower arm to hold it together. Gripper and base require some gluing so think it through too. Make sure to look closely at all the photos on Thingiverse (also other people copies) and read additional posts on jjshortcust’s blog: My mini servo grippers and completed robotic arm Multiply the robotic arm and electronics Here is also Rob’s copy cut from aluminum My assembled arm looks like this – I think it turned out really nice: Servo controller board The last piece of hardware I needed was an electronic board that would take command from PC and drive all seven servos. I could probably use Arduino for this task, and in fact there are several Arduino servo shields available (for example from Adafruit or Renbotics). However one problem is that most support only up to six servos, and second that their accuracy is limited by Arduino’s timer frequency. So instead I looked for dedicated servo controller and found a series of Maestro boards from Pololu. I picked the Pololu Mini Maestro 12-Channel USB Servo Controller. It has many nice features including native USB connection, high resolution pulses (0.25µs) with no jitter, built-in speed and acceleration control, and even scripting capability. Another cool feature is that besides servo control, each channel can be configured as either general input or output. So far I’m using seven channels so I still have five available to connect some sensors (for example distance sensor mounted on gripper might be useful). And last but important factor was that they have SDK in .NET – what more I could wish for! The board itself is very small – half of the size of Tic-Tac box. I picked one for about USD $35 in this store. Perhaps another good alternative would be the Phidgets Advanced Servo 8-Motor – but it is significantly more expensive at USD $87.30. The Maestro Controller Driver and Software package includes Maestro Control Center program with lets you immediately configure the board. For each servo I first figured out their move range and set the min/max limits. I played with setting the speed an acceleration values as well. Big issue for me was that there are two servos that control position of lower arm (shoulder joint), and both have to be moved at the same time. This is where the scripting feature of Pololu board turned out very helpful. I wrote a script that synchronizes position of second servo with first one – so now I only need to move one servo and other will follow automatically. This turned out tricky because I couldn’t find simple offset mapping of the move range for each servo – I had to divide it into several sub-ranges and map each individually. The scripting language is bit assembler-like but gets the job done. And there is even a runtime debugging and stack view available. Altogether I’m very happy with the Pololu Mini Maestro Servo Controller, and with this final piece I completed the build and was able to move my arm from the Meastro Control program. The total cost of my robotic arm was: $10 laser cut parts $10 metal parts $45 servos $35 servo controller ----------------------- $100 total So here you have all the information about the hardware. In next post I’ll start talking about the software that I wrote in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. Stay tuned!

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Blogging tips for SQL Server professionals

- by jamiet

For some time now I have been intending to put some material together relating my blogging experiences since I began blogging in 2004 and that led to me submitting a session for SQLBits recently where I intended to do just that. That didn’t get enough votes to allow me to present however so instead I resolved to write a blog post about it and Simon Sabin’s recent post Blogging – how do you do it? has prompted me to get around to completing it. So, here I present a compendium of tips that I’ve picked up from authoring a fair few blog posts over the past 6 years. Feedburner Feedburner.com is a service that can consume your blog’s default RSS feed and provide another, replacement, feed that has exactly the same content. You can then supply that replacement feed on your blog site for other people to consume in their RSS readers. Why would you want to do this? Well, two reasons actually: It makes your blog portable. If you ever want to move your blog to a different URL you don’t have to tell your subscribers to move to a different feed. The feedburner feed is a pointer to your blog content rather than being a copy of it. Feedburner will collect stats telling you how many people are subscribed to your feed, which RSS readers they use, stuff like that. Here’s a sample screenshot for http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/: It also tells you what your most viewed posts are: Web stats like these are notoriously inaccurate but then again the method of measurement here is not important, what IS important is that it gives you a trustworthy ranking of your blog posts and (in my opinion) knowing which are your most popular posts is more important than knowing exactly how many views each post has had. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Feedburner provides and I recommend every new blogger to try it! Monitor subscribers using Google Reader If for some reason Feedburner is not to your taste or (more likely) you already have an established RSS feed that you do not want to change then Google provide another way in which you can monitor your readership in the shape of their online RSS reader, Google Reader. It provides, for every RSS feed, a collection of stats including the number of Google Reader users that have subscribed to that RSS feed. This is really valuable information and in fact I have been recording this statistic for mine and a number of other blogs for a few years now and as such I can produce the following chart that indicates how readership is trending for those blogs over time: [Good news for my fellow SQLBlog bloggers.] As Stephen Few readily points out, its not the numbers that are important but the trend. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) SEO (or “How do I get my blog to show up in Google”) is a massive area of expertise which I don’t want (and am unable) to cover in much detail here but there are some simple rules of thumb that will help: Tags – If your blog engine offers the ability to add tags to your blog post, use them. Invariably those tags go into the meta section of the page HTML and search engines lap that stuff up. For example, from my recent post Microsoft publish Visual Studio 2010 Database Project Guidance: Title – Search engines take notice of web page titles as well so make them specific and descriptive (e.g. “Configuring dtsConfig connection strings”) rather than esoteric and meaningless in a vain attempt to be humorous (e.g. “Last night a DJ saved my ETL batch”)! Title(2) – Make your title even more search engine friendly by mentioning high level subject areas, not dissimilar to Twitter hashtags. For example, if you look at all of my posts related to SSIS you will notice that nearly all contain the word “SSIS” in the title even if I had to shoehorn it in there by putting it in square brackets or similar. Another tip, if you ARE putting words into your titles in this artificial manner then put them at the end so that they’re not that prominent in search engine results; they’re there for the search engines to consume, not for human beings. Images – Always add titles and alternate text (ALT attribute) to images in your blog post. If you use Windows 7 or Windows Vista then you can use Live Writer (which Simon recommended) makes this easy for you. Headings – If you want to highlight section headings use heading tags (e.g. <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc…) rather than just formatting the text appropriately – again, Live makes this easy. These tags give your blog posts structure that is understood by search engines and RSS readers alike. (I believe it makes them more amenable to CSS as well – though that’s not something I know too much about). If you check the HTML source for the blog post you’re reading right now you’ll be able to scan through and see where I have used heading tags. Microsoft provide a free tool called the SEO Toolkit that will analyse your blog site (for free) and tell you what things you should change to improve SEO. Go read more and download for free at Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Did I mention that it was free? Miscellaneous Tips If you are including code in your blog post then ensure it is formatted correctly. Use SQL Server Central’s T-SQL prettifier for formatting T-SQL code. Use images and videos. Personally speaking there’s nothing I like less when reading a blog than paragraph after paragraph of text. Images make your blog more appealing which means people are more likely to read what you have written. Be original. Don’t plagiarise other people’s content and don’t simply rewrite the contents of Books Online. Every time you publish a blog post tweet a link to it. Include hashtags in your tweet that are more likely to grab people’s attention. That’s probably enough for now - I hope this blog post proves useful to someone out there. If you would appreciate a related session at a forthcoming SQLBits conference then please let me know. This will likely be my last blog post for 2010 so I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has commented on, linked to or read any of my blog posts in that time. 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting for SQL Server observers with the impending release of SQL Server code-named Denali and I promise I’ll have lots more content on that as the year progresses. Happy New Year. @Jamiet

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What to Do When Windows Won’t Boot

- by Chris Hoffman

You turn on your computer one day and Windows refuses to boot — what do you do? “Windows won’t boot” is a common symptom with a variety of causes, so you’ll need to perform some troubleshooting. Modern versions of Windows are better at recovering from this sort of thing. Where Windows XP might have stopped in its tracks when faced with this problem, modern versions of Windows will try to automatically run Startup Repair. First Things First Be sure to think about changes you’ve made recently — did you recently install a new hardware driver, connect a new hardware component to your computer, or open your computer’s case and do something? It’s possible the hardware driver is buggy, the new hardware is incompatible, or that you accidentally unplugged something while working inside your computer. The Computer Won’t Power On At All If your computer won’t power on at all, ensure it’s plugged into a power outlet and that the power connector isn’t loose. If it’s a desktop PC, ensure the power switch on the back of its case — on the power supply — is set to the On position. If it still won’t power on at all, it’s possible you disconnected a power cable inside its case. If you haven’t been messing around inside the case, it’s possible the power supply is dead. In this case, you’ll have to get your computer’s hardware fixed or get a new computer. Be sure to check your computer monitor — if your computer seems to power on but your screen stays black, ensure your monitor is powered on and that the cable connecting it to your computer’s case is plugged in securely at both ends. The Computer Powers On And Says No Bootable Device If your computer is powering on but you get a black screen that says something like “no bootable device” or another sort of “disk error” message, your computer can’t seem to boot from the hard drive that Windows was installed on. Enter your computer’s BIOS or UEFI firmware setup screen and check its boot order setting, ensuring that it’s set to boot from its hard drive. If the hard drive doesn’t appear in the list at all, it’s possible your hard drive has failed and can no longer be booted from. In this case, you may want to insert Windows installation or recovery media and run the Startup Repair operation. This will attempt to make Windows bootable again. For example, if something overwrote your Windows drive’s boot sector, this will repair the boot sector. If the recovery environment won’t load or doesn’t see your hard drive, you likely have a hardware problem. Be sure to check your BIOS or UEFI’s boot order first if the recovery environment won’t load. You can also attempt to manually fix Windows boot loader problems using the fixmbr and fixboot commands. Modern versions of Windows should be able to fix this problem for you with the Startup Repair wizard, so you shouldn’t actually have to run these commands yourself. Windows Freezes or Crashes During Boot If Windows seems to start booting but fails partway through, you may be facing either a software or hardware problem. If it’s a software problem, you may be able to fix it by performing a Startup Repair operation. If you can’t do this from the boot menu, insert a Windows installation disc or recovery disk and use the startup repair tool from there. If this doesn’t help at all, you may want to reinstall Windows or perform a Refresh or Reset on Windows 8. If the computer encounters errors while attempting to perform startup repair or reinstall Windows, or the reinstall process works properly and you encounter the same errors afterwards, you likely have a hardware problem. Windows Starts and Blue Screens or Freezes If Windows crashes or blue-screens on you every time it boots, you may be facing a hardware or software problem. For example, malware or a buggy driver may be loading at boot and causing the crash, or your computer’s hardware may be malfunctioning. To test this, boot your Windows computer in safe mode. In safe mode, Windows won’t load typical hardware drivers or any software that starts automatically at startup. If the computer is stable in safe mode, try uninstalling any recently installed hardware drivers, performing a system restore, and scanning for malware. If you’re lucky, one of these steps may fix your software problem and allow you to boot Windows normally. If your problem isn’t fixed, try reinstalling Windows or performing a Refresh or Reset on Windows 8. This will reset your computer back to its clean, factory-default state. If you’re still experiencing crashes, your computer likely has a hardware problem. Recover Files When Windows Won’t Boot If you have important files that will be lost and want to back them up before reinstalling Windows, you can use a Windows installer disc or Linux live media to recover the files. These run entirely from a CD, DVD, or USB drive and allow you to copy your files to another external media, such as another USB stick or an external hard drive. If you’re incapable of booting a Windows installer disc or Linux live CD, you may need to go into your BIOS or UEFI and change the boot order setting. If even this doesn’t work — or if you can boot from the devices and your computer freezes or you can’t access your hard drive — you likely have a hardware problem. You can try pulling the computer’s hard drive, inserting it into another computer, and recovering your files that way. Following these steps should fix the vast majority of Windows boot issues — at least the ones that are actually fixable. The dark cloud that always hangs over such issues is the possibility that the hard drive or another component in the computer may be failing. Image Credit: Karl-Ludwig G. Poggemann on Flickr, Tzuhsun Hsu on Flickr

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Command line mode only -- successful login only brings me back to login screen

- by seth

whenever I log in the screen goes black, I see a glimpse of terminal-esque text, and then it brings me back to the log in screen (Ubuntu 12.04). I can enter and log in via the command line. The guest account works find. I think this happened because I edited some Xorg related file trying to make an external monitor work with my laptop. I copy pasted from a forum post so I dont recall the file or what i put in the file. Can't find the forum post again and my bash history wasn't recorded from that session. I tried reinstalling Xorg and ubuntu-desktop, nvidia, resetting any configs I could find... I'm really at a loss of what to do. Here's my /.xsession-errors: /usr/sbin/lightdm-session: 11: /home/seth/.profile: -s: not found Backend : gconf Integration : true Profile : unity Adding plugins Initializing core options...done Initializing composite options...done Initializing opengl options...done Initializing decor options...done Initializing vpswitch options...done Initializing snap options...done Initializing mousepoll options...done Initializing resize options...done Initializing place options...done Initializing move options...done Initializing wall options...done Initializing grid options...done I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/home/seth/.compiz/session/108fa6ea48f8a973b9133850948930576700000017740033" Initializing session options...done Initializing gnomecompat options...done ** Message: applet now removed from the notification area Initializing animation options...done Initializing fade options...done Initializing unitymtgrabhandles options...done Initializing workarounds options...done Initializing scale options...done compiz (expo) - Warn: failed to bind image to texture Initializing expo options...done Initializing ezoom options...done ** Message: using fallback from indicator to GtkStatusIcon (compiz:1846): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_client_add_dir: assertion `gconf_valid_key (dirname, NULL)' failed Initializing unityshell options...done Nautilus-Share-Message: Called "net usershare info" but it failed: 'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare: cannot open usershare directory /var/lib/samba/usershares. Error No such file or directory Please ask your system administrator to enable user sharing. Setting Update "main_menu_key" Setting Update "run_key" Setting Update "launcher_hide_mode" Setting Update "edge_responsiveness" Setting Update "launcher_capture_mouse" ** Message: moving back from GtkStatusIcon to indicator compiz (decor) - Warn: failed to bind pixmap to texture ** (zeitgeist-datahub:2128): WARNING **: zeitgeist-datahub.vala:227: Unable to get name "org.gnome.zeitgeist.datahub" on the bus! failed to create drawable compiz (core) - Warn: glXCreatePixmap failed compiz (core) - Warn: Couldn't bind background pixmap 0x1e00001 to texture compiz (decor) - Warn: failed to bind pixmap to texture ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. compiz (decor) - Warn: failed to bind pixmap to texture compiz (decor) - Warn: failed to bind pixmap to texture ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. [2348:2352:12678840568:ERROR:gpu_watchdog_thread.cc(231)] The GPU process hung. Terminating after 10000 ms. [2256:2283:14450711755:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14450726175:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14450746028:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14464521342:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14464541249:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14690775186:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14690795231:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14704543843:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14704566717:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14766138587:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14857232694:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14930901403:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14930965542:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14944566814:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14944592215:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15170929788:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15170947382:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15184585015:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15184605475:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15366189036:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15410983381:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15411569689:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15431632431:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15431674438:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15457304356:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15656020938:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15656042383:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15674651268:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15674671786:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16052544301:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16057387653:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157122849:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157123851:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157125473:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157126544:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157129682:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 If anyone can help me out, I'd be forever grateful

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LightDM will not start after stopping it

- by Sweeters

I am running Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot", and in trying to install the nvidia CUDA developer drivers I switched to a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F5) and stopped lightdm (installation required that no X server instance be running) through sudo service lightdm stop. Re-starting lightdm with sudo service lightdm start did not work: A couple of * Starting [...] lines where displayed, but the process hanged. (I do not remember at which point, but I think it was * Starting System V runlevel compatibility. I manually rebooted my laptop, and ever since booting seems to hang, usually around the * Starting anac(h)ronistic cron [OK] log line (not consistently at that point, though). From that point on, I seem to be able to interact with my system only through a tty session (Ctrl-Alt-F1). I've tried purging and reinstalling both lightdm and gdm, as well as selecting both as the default display managers (through sudo dpkg-reconfigure [lightdm / gdm] or by manually editing /etc/X11/default-display-manager) through both apt-get and aptitude (that shouldn't make a difference anyway) after updating the packages, but the problem persists. Some of the responses I'm getting are the following: After running sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm (but not ... gdm) I get the following message: dpkg-maintscript-helper:warning: environment variable DPKG_MATINSCRIPT_NAME missing dpkg-maintscript-helper:warning: environment variable DPKG_MATINSCRIPT_PACKAGE missing After trying sudo service lightdm start or sudo start lightdm I get to see the boot loading screen again but nothing changes. If I go back to the tty shell I see lightdm start/running, process <num> but ps -e | grep lightdm gives no output. After trying sudo service gdm start or sudo starg gdm I get the gdm start/running, process <num> message, and gdm-binary is supposedly an active process, but all that happens is that the screen blinks a couple of times and nothing else. Other candidate solutions that I'd found on the web included running startx but when I try that I get an error output [...] Fatal server error: no screens found [...]. Moreover, I made sure that lightdm-gtk-greeter is installed but that did not help either. Please excuse my not including complete outputs/logs; I am writing this post from another computer and it's hard to manually copy the complete logs. Also, I've seen several posts that had to do with similar problems, but either there was no fix, or the one suggested did not work for me. In closing: Please help! I very much hope to avoid re-installing Ubuntu from scratch! :) Alex @mosi I did not manage to fix the NVIDIA kernel driver as per your instructions. I should perhaps mention that I'm on a Dell XPS15 laptop with an NVIDIA Optimus graphics card, and that I have bumblebee installed (which installs nvidia drivers during its installation, I believe). Issuing the mentioned commands I get the following: ~$uname -r 3.0.0-12-generic ~$lsmod | grep -i nvidia nvidia 11713772 0 ~$dmesg | grep -i nvidia [ 8.980041] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel. [ 9.354860] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: power state changed by ACPI to D0 [ 9.354864] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: power state changed by ACPI to D0 [ 9.354868] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: enabling device (0006 -> 0007) [ 9.354873] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 9.354879] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 9.355052] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 280.13 Wed Jul 27 16:53:56 PDT 2011 Also, running aptitude search nvidia gives me the following: p nvidia-173 - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-173-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file p nvidia-173-updates - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-173-updates-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file p nvidia-96 - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-96-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file p nvidia-96-updates - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-96-updates-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file p nvidia-cg-toolkit - Cg Toolkit - GPU Shader Authoring Language p nvidia-common - Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers i nvidia-current - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-current-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file c nvidia-current-updates - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-current-updates-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file i nvidia-settings - Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics dr p nvidia-settings-updates - Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics dr v nvidia-va-driver - v nvidia-va-driver - I've tried manually installing (sudo aptitude install <package>) packages nvidia-common and nvidia-settings-updates but to no avail. For example, sudo aptitude install nvidia-settings-updates returns the following log: Reading package lists... Building dependency tree... Reading state information... Reading extended state information... Initializing package states... Writing extended state information... No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed. 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 83 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used. Writing extended state information... Reading package lists... Building dependency tree... Reading state information... Reading extended state information... Initializing package states... Writing extended state information... The same happens with the Linux headers (i.e. I cannot seem to be able to install linux-headers-3.0.0-12-generic). The output of aptitude search linux-headers is as follows: v linux-headers - v linux-headers - v linux-headers-2.6 - i linux-headers-2.6.38-11 - Header files related to Linux kernel versi i linux-headers-2.6.38-11-generic - Linux kernel headers for version 2.6.38 on i A linux-headers-2.6.38-8 - Header files related to Linux kernel versi i A linux-headers-2.6.38-8-generic - Linux kernel headers for version 2.6.38 on v linux-headers-3 - v linux-headers-3.0 - v linux-headers-3.0 - i A linux-headers-3.0.0-12 - Header files related to Linux kernel versi p linux-headers-3.0.0-12-generic - Linux kernel headers for version 3.0.0 on p linux-headers-3.0.0-12-generic- - Linux kernel headers for version 3.0.0 on p linux-headers-3.0.0-12-server - Linux kernel headers for version 3.0.0 on p linux-headers-3.0.0-12-virtual - Linux kernel headers for version 3.0.0 on p linux-headers-generic - Generic Linux kernel headers p linux-headers-generic-pae - Generic Linux kernel headers v linux-headers-lbm - v linux-headers-lbm - v linux-headers-lbm-2.6 - v linux-headers-lbm-2.6 - p linux-headers-lbm-3.0.0-12-gene - Header files related to linux-backports-mo p linux-headers-lbm-3.0.0-12-gene - Header files related to linux-backports-mo p linux-headers-lbm-3.0.0-12-serv - Header files related to linux-backports-mo p linux-headers-server - Linux kernel headers on Server Equipment. p linux-headers-virtual - Linux kernel headers for virtual machines @heartsmagic I did try purging and reinstalling any nvidia driver packages, but it did not seem to make a difference, My xorg.conf file contains the following: # nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig # nvidia-xconfig: version 280.13 ([email protected]) Wed Jul 27 17:15:58 PDT 2011 Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" EndSection Section "Files" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Keyboard0" Driver "kbd" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Unknown" HorizSync 28.0 - 33.0 VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection

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Build an Organization Chart In Visio 2010

- by Mysticgeek

With trying to manage a business these days, it’s very important to have an Organization Chart to keep everything manageable. Here we’ll show you how to build one in Visio 2010. This Guest Article was written by our friends over at Office 2010 Club. Need for Organization Charts The need of creating Organization Charts are becoming indispensable these days, as companies start focusing on extensive hiring for far reach availability, increase in productivity and targeting diverse markets. Considering this rigorous change, creating an organization chart can help stakeholders in comprehending the ever growing organization structure & hierarchy with an ease. It shows the basic structure of organization along with defining the relationships between employees working in different departments. Opportunely, Microsoft Visio 2010 offers an easy way to create Organization chart. As before now, orthodox ways of listing organization hierarchy have been used for defining the structure of departments along with communication possible including; horizontal and vertical communications. To transform these lists which defines organizational structure, into a detailed chart, Visio 2010 includes an add-in for importing Excel spreadsheet, which comes in handy for pulling out data from spreadsheet to create an organization chart. Importantly, you don’t need to indulge yourself in maze of defining organizational hierarchies and chalking-out structure, as you just need to specify the column & row headers, along with data you need to import and it will automatically create out chart defining; organizational hierarchies with specified credentials of each employee, categorized in their corresponding departments. Creating Organization Charts in Visio 2010 To start off with, we have created an Excel spreadsheet having fields, Name, Supervisor, Designation, Department and Phone. The Name field contains name of all the employees working in different departments, whereas Supervisor field contains name of supervisors or team leads. This field is vital for creating Organization Chart, as it defines the basic structure & hierarchy in chart. Now launch Visio 2010, head over to View tab, under Add-Ons menu, from Business options, click Organization Chart Wizard. This will start Organization Chart Wizard, in the first step, enable Information that’s already stored in a file or database option, and click Next. As we are importing Excel sheet, select the second option for importing Excel spreadsheet. Specify the Excel file path and click Next to continue. In this step, you need to specify the fields which actually defines the structure of an organization. In our case, these are Name & Supervisor fields. After specifying fields, click Next to Proceed further. As organization chart is primarily for showing the hierarchy of departments/employees working in organization along with how they are linked together, and who supervises whom. Considering this, in this step we will leave out Supervisor field, because it’s inclusion wouldn’t be necessary as Visio automatically chalks-out the basic structure defined in Excel sheet. Add the rest of the fields under Displayed fields category, and click Next. Now choose the fields which you want to include in Organization Chart’s shapes and click Next. This step is about breaking the chart into multiple pages, if you are dealing with 100+ employees, you may want to specify numbers of pages on which Organization Chart will be displayed. But in our case, we are dealing with much less amount of data, so we will enable I want the wizard to automatically break my organization chart across pages option. Specify the name you need to show on the top of the page. If you are having less than 20 hierarchies, enter the name of the highest ranked employee in organization and click Finish to end the wizard. It will instantly create an Organization chart out of specified Excel spreadsheet. Highest ranked employee will be shown on top of the organization chart, supervising various employees from different departments. As shown below, his immediate subordinates further manages other employees and so on. For advance customizations, head over to Org Chart tab, here you will find different groups for setting up the Org Chart’s hierarchy and manage other employees’ positions. Under Arrange group, shapes’ arrangements can be changed and it provides easy navigation through the chart. You can also change the type of the position and hide subordinates of selected employee. From Picture group, you can insert a picture of the employees, departments, etc. From synchronization group, you have the option of creating a synced copy and expanding subordinates of selected employee. Under Organization Data group, you can change whole layout of Organization chart from Display Options including; shape display, show divider, enable/disable imported fields, change block position, and fill colors, etc. If at any point of time, you need to insert new position or announce vacancy, Organization Chart stencil is always available on the left sidebar. Drag the desired Organization Chart shape into main diagram page, to maintain the structure integrity, i.e, for inserting subordinates for a specific employee, drag the position shape over the existing employee shape box. For instance, We have added a consultant in organization, who is directly under CEO, for maintaining this, we have dragged the Consultant box and just dropped it over the CEO box to make the immediate subordinate position. Adding details to new position is a cinch, just right-click new position box and click Properties. This will open up Shape Data dialog, start filling in all the relevant information and click OK. Here you can see the newly created position is easily populated with all the specified information. Now expanding an Organization Chart doesn’t require maintenance of long lists any more. Under Design tab, you can also try out different designs & layouts over organization chart to make it look more flamboyant and professional. Conclusion An Organization Chart is a great way of showing detailed organizational hierarchies; with defined credentials of employees, departments structure, new vacancies, newly hired employees, recently added departments, and importantly shows most convenient way of interaction between different departments & employees, etc. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Reviews: Using Dia as a Free Replacement for Microsoft VisioMysticgeek Blog: Create Appealing Charts In Excel 2007Create Charts in Excel 2007 the Easy Way with Chart AdvisorCreate a Hyperlink in a Word 2007 Flow Chart and Hide Annoying ScreenTipsCreate A Flow Chart In Word 2007 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 HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter Download Songs From MySpace Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 Keynote Video

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Using Find/Replace with regular expressions inside a SSIS package

- by jamiet

Another one of those might-be-useful-again-one-day-so-I’ll-share-it-in-a-blog-post blog posts I am currently working on a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2012 implementation where each package contains a parameter called ETLIfcHist_ID: During normal execution this will get altered when the package is executed from the Execute Package Task however we want to make sure that at deployment-time they all have a default value of –1. Of course, they tend to get changed during development so I wanted a way of easily changing them all back to the default value. Opening up each package in turn and editing them was an option but given that we have over 40 packages and we might want to carry out this reset fairly frequently I needed a more automated method so I turned to Visual Studio’s Find/Replace… feature Of course, we don’t know what value will be in that parameter so I can’t simply search for a particular value; hence I opted to use a regular expression to identify the value to be change. In the rest of this blog post I’ll explain how to do that. For demonstration purposes I have taken the contents of a .dtsx file and stripped out everything except the element containing the parameters (<DTS:PackageParameters>), if you want to play along at home you can copy-paste the XML document below into a new XML file and open it up in Visual Studio: <?xml version="1.0"?> <DTS:Executable xmlns:DTS="www.microsoft.com/SqlServer/Dts"> <DTS:PackageParameters> <DTS:PackageParameter DTS:CreationName="" DTS:DataType="3" DTS:Description="InterfaceHistory_ID: used for Lineage" DTS:DTSID="{635616DB-EEEE-45C8-89AA-713E25846C7E}" DTS:ObjectName="ETLIfcHist_ID"> <DTS:Property DTS:DataType="3" DTS:Name="ParameterValue">VALUE_TO_BE_CHANGED</DTS:Property> </DTS:PackageParameter> <DTS:PackageParameter DTS:CreationName="" DTS:DataType="3" DTS:Description="Some other description" DTS:DTSID="{635616DB-EEEE-45C8-89AA-713E25845C7E}" DTS:ObjectName="SomeOtherObjectName"> <DTS:Property DTS:DataType="3" DTS:Name="ParameterValue">SomeOtherValue</DTS:Property> </DTS:PackageParameter> </DTS:PackageParameters> </DTS:Executable> We are trying to identify the value of the parameter whose name is ETLIfcHist_ID – notice that in the XML document above that value is VALUE_TO_BE_CHANGED. The following regular expression will find the appropriate portion of the XML document: {\<DTS\:PackageParameter[\n ]*DTS\:CreationName="[A-Za-z0-9\:_\{\}- ]*"[\n ]*DTS\:DataType="[A-Za-z0-9\:_\{\}- ]*"[\n ]*DTS\:Description="[A-Za-z0-9\:_\{\}- ]*"[\n ]*DTS\:DTSID="[A-Za-z0-9\:_\{\}- ]*"[\n ]*DTS\:ObjectName="ETLIfcHist_ID"\>[\n ]*\<DTS\:Property[\n ]*DTS\:DataType="[A-Za-z0-9\:_\{\}- ]*"[\n ]*DTS\:Name="ParameterValue"\>}[A-Za-z0-9\:_\{\}- ]*{\<\/DTS\:Property\>} I have highlighted the name of the parameter that we’re looking for. I have also highlighted two portions identified by pairs of curly braces “{…}”; these are important because they pick out the two portions either side of the value I want to replace, in other words the portions highlighted here: <DTS:PackageParameters> <DTS:PackageParameter DTS:CreationName="" DTS:DataType="3" DTS:Description="InterfaceHistory_ID: used for Lineage" DTS:DTSID="{635616DB-EEEE-45C8-89AA-713E25846C7E}" DTS:ObjectName="ETLIfcHist_ID"> <DTS:Property DTS:DataType="3" DTS:Name="ParameterValue">VALUE_TO_BE_CHANGED</DTS:Property> </DTS:PackageParameter> Those sections in the curly braces are termed tag expressions and can be identified in the replace expression using a backslash and a number identifying which tag expression you’re referring to according to its ordinal position. Hence, our replace expression is simply: \1-1\2 We’re saying the portion of our file identified by the regular expression should be replaced by the first curly brace section, then the literal –1, then the second curly brace section. Make sense? Give it a go yourself by plugging those two expressions into Visual Studio’s Find and Replace dialog. If you set it to look in “All Open Documents” then you can open up the code-behind of all your packages and change all of them at once. The Find and Replace dialog will look like this: That’s it! I realise that not everyone will be looking to change the value of a parameter but hopefully I have shown you a technique that you can modify to work for your own scenario. Given that this blog post is, y’know, on the web I have no doubt that someone is going to find a fault with my find regex expression and if that person is you….that’s OK. Let me know about it in the comments below and perhaps we can work together to come up with something better! Note that some parameters may have a different set of properties (for example some, but not all, of my parameters have a DTS:Required attribute) so your find regular expression may have to change accordingly. When researching this I found the following article to be invaluable: Visual Studio Find/Replace Regular Expression Usage @Jamiet

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Brighton Rocks: UA Europe 2011

- by ultan o'broin

User Assistance Europe 2011 was held in Brighton, UK. Having seen Quadrophenia a dozen times, I just had to go along (OK, I wanted to talk about messages in enterprise applications). Sadly, it rained a lot, though that was still eminently more tolerable than being stuck home in Dublin during Bloomsday. So, here are my somewhat selective highlights and observations from the conference, massively skewed towards my own interests, as usual. Enjoyed Leah Guren's (Cow TC) great start ‘keynote’ on the Cultural Dimensions of Software Help Usage. Starting out by revisiting Hofstede's and Hall's work on culture (how many times I have done this for Multilingual magazine?) and then Neilsen’s findings on age as an indicator of performance, Leah showed how it is the expertise of the user that user assistance (UA) needs to be designed for (especially for high-end users), with some considerations made for age, while the gender and culture of users are not major factors. Help also needs to be contextual and concise, embedded close to the action. That users are saying things like “If I want help on Office, I go to Google ” isn't all that profound at this stage, but it is always worth reiterating how search can be optimized to return better results for users. Interestingly, regardless of user education level, the issue of information quality--hinging on the lynchpin of terminology reflecting that of the user--is critical. Major takeaway for me there. Matthew Ellison’s sessions on embedded help and demos were also impressive. Embedded help that is concise and contextual is definitely a powerful UX enabler, and I’m pleased to say that in Oracle Fusion Applications we have embraced the concept fully. Matthew also mentioned in his session about successful software demos that the principle of modality with demos is a must. Look no further than Oracle User Productivity Kit demos See It!, Try It!, Know It, and Do It! modes, for example. I also found some key takeaways in the presentation by Marie-Louise Flacke on notes and warnings. Here, legal considerations seemed to take precedence over providing any real information to users. I was delighted when Marie-Louise called out the Oracle JDeveloper documentation as an exemplar of how to use notes and instructions instead of trying to scare the bejaysus out of people and not providing them with any real information they’d find useful instead. My own session on designing messages for enterprise applications was well attended. Knowing your user profiles (remember user expertise is the king maker for UA so write for each audience involved), how users really work, the required application business and UI rules, what your application technology supports, and how messages integrate with the enterprise help desk and support policies and you will go much further than relying solely on the guideline of "writing messages in plain language". And, remember the value in warnings and confirmation messages too, and how you can use them smartly. I hope y’all got something from my presentation and from my answers to questions afterwards. Ellis Pratt stole the show with his presentation on applying game theory to software UA, using plenty of colorful, relevant examples (check out the Atlassian and DropBox approaches, for example), and striking just the right balance between theory and practice. Completely agree that the approach to take here is not to make UA itself a game, but to invoke UA as part of a bigger game dynamic (time-to-task completion, personal and communal goals, personal achievement and status, and so on). Sure there are gotchas and limitations to gamification, and we need to do more research. However, we'll hear a lot more about this subject in coming years, particularly in the enterprise space. I hope. I also heard good things about the different sessions about DITA usage (including one by Sonja Fuga that clearly opens the door for major innovation in the community content space using WordPress), the progressive disclosure of information (Cerys Willoughby), an overview of controlled language (or "information quality", as I like to position it) solutions and rationale by Dave Gash, and others. I also spent time chatting with Mike Hamilton of MadCap Software, who showed me a cool demo of their Flare product, and the Lingo translation solution. I liked the idea of their licensing model for workers-on-the-go; that’s smart UX-awareness in itself. Also chatted with Julian Murfitt of Mekon about uptake of DITA in the enterprise space. In all, it's worth attending UA Europe. I was surprised, however, not to see conference topics about mobile UA, community conversation and content, and search in its own right. These are unstoppable forces now, and the latter is pretty central to providing assistance now to all but the most irredentist of hard-copy fetishists or advanced technical or functional users working away on the back end of applications and systems. Only saw one iPad too (says the guy who carries three laptops). Tweeting during the conference was pretty much nonexistent during the event, so no community energy there. Perhaps all this can be addressed next year. I would love to see the next UA Europe event come to Dublin (despite Bloomsday, it's not a bad place place, really) now that hotels are so cheap and all. So, what is my overall impression of the state of user assistance in Europe? Clearly, there are still many people in the industry who feel there is something broken with the traditional forms of user assistance (particularly printed doc) and something needs to be done about it. I would suggest they move on and try and embrace change, instead. Many others see new possibilities, offered by UX and technology, as well as the reality of online user behavior in an increasingly connected world and that is encouraging. Such thought leaders need to be listened to. As Ellis Pratt says in his great book, Trends in Technical Communication - Rethinking Help: “To stay relevant means taking a new perspective on the role (of technical writer), and delivering “products” over and above the traditional manual and online Help file... there are a number of new trends in this field - some complementary, some conflicting. Whatever trends emerge as the norm, it’s likely the status quo will change.” It already has, IMO. I hear similar debates in the professional translation world about the onset of translation crowd sourcing (the Facebook model) and machine translation (trust me, that battle is over). Neither of these initiatives has put anyone out of a job and probably won't, though the nature of the work might change. If anything, such innovations have increased the overall need for professional translators as user expectations rise, new audiences emerge, and organizations need to collate and curate user-generated content, combining it with their own. Perhaps user assistance professionals can learn from other professions and grow accordingly.

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How-to tell the ViewCriteria a user chose in an af:query component

- by frank.nimphius

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: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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The af:query component defines a search form for application users to enter search conditions for a selected View Criteria. A View Criteria is a named where clauses that you can create declaratively on the ADF Business Component View Object. A default View Criteria that allows users to search in all attributes exists by default and exposed in the Data Controls panel. To create an ADF Faces search form, expand the View Object node that contains the View Criteria definition in the Data Controls panel. Drag the View Criteria that should be displayed as the default criteria onto the page and choose Query in the opened context menu. One of the options within the Query option is to create an ADF Query Panel with Table, which displays the result set in a table view, which can have additional column filters defined. 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: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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} To intercept the user query for modification, or just to know about the selected View Criteria, you override the QueryListener property on the af:query component of the af:table component. Overriding the QueryListener on the table makes sense if the table allows users to further filter the result set using column filters.To override the default QueryListener, copy the existing string referencing the binding layer to the clipboard and then select Edit from the field context menu (press the arrow icon to open it) to selecte or create a new managed bean and method to handle the query event. The code below is from a managed bean with custom query listener handlers defined for the af:query component and the af:table component. The default listener entry copied to the clipboard was "#{bindings.ImplicitViewCriteriaQuery.processQuery}" public void onQueryList(QueryEvent queryEvent) { // The generated QueryListener replaced by this method //#{bindings.ImplicitViewCriteriaQuery.processQuery} QueryDescriptor qdes = queryEvent.getDescriptor(); //print or log selected View Criteria System.out.println("NAME "+qdes.getName()); //call default Query Event invokeQueryEventMethodExpression(" #{bindings.ImplicitViewCriteriaQuery.processQuery}",queryEvent); } public void onQueryTable(QueryEvent queryEvent) { // The generated QueryListener replaced by this method //#{bindings.ImplicitViewCriteriaQuery.processQuery} QueryDescriptor qdes = queryEvent.getDescriptor(); //print or log selected View Criteria System.out.println("NAME "+qdes.getName()); invokeQueryEventMethodExpression( "#{bindings.ImplicitViewCriteriaQuery.processQuery}",queryEvent); } private void invokeQueryEventMethodExpression( String expression, QueryEvent queryEvent){ FacesContext fctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); ELContext elctx = fctx.getELContext(); ExpressionFactory efactory fctx.getApplication().getExpressionFactory(); MethodExpression me = efactory.createMethodExpression(elctx,expression, Object.class, new Class[]{QueryEvent.class}); me.invoke(elctx, new Object[]{queryEvent}); } Of course, this code also can be used as a starting point for other query manipulations and also works with saved custom criterias. To read more about the af:query component, see: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15523_01/apirefs.1111/e12419/tagdoc/af_query.html

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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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Windows 8.1 Will Start Encrypting Hard Drives By Default: Everything You Need to Know

- by Chris Hoffman

Windows 8.1 will automatically encrypt the storage on modern Windows PCs. This will help protect your files in case someone steals your laptop and tries to get at them, but it has important ramifications for data recovery. Previously, “BitLocker” was available on Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows, while “Device Encryption” was available on Windows RT and Windows Phone. Device encryption is included with all editions of Windows 8.1 — and it’s on by default. When Your Hard Drive Will Be Encrypted Windows 8.1 includes “Pervasive Device Encryption.” This works a bit differently from the standard BitLocker feature that has been included in Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows for the past few versions. Before Windows 8.1 automatically enables Device Encryption, the following must be true: The Windows device “must support connected standby and meet the Windows Hardware Certification Kit (HCK) requirements for TPM and SecureBoot on ConnectedStandby systems.” (Source) Older Windows PCs won’t support this feature, while new Windows 8.1 devices you pick up will have this feature enabled by default. When Windows 8.1 installs cleanly and the computer is prepared, device encryption is “initialized” on the system drive and other internal drives. Windows uses a clear key at this point, which is removed later when the recovery key is successfully backed up. The PC’s user must log in with a Microsoft account with administrator privileges or join the PC to a domain. If a Microsoft account is used, a recovery key will be backed up to Microsoft’s servers and encryption will be enabled. If a domain account is used, a recovery key will be backed up to Active Directory Domain Services and encryption will be enabled. If you have an older Windows computer that you’ve upgraded to Windows 8.1, it may not support Device Encryption. If you log in with a local user account, Device Encryption won’t be enabled. If you upgrade your Windows 8 device to Windows 8.1, you’ll need to enable device encryption, as it’s off by default when upgrading. Recovering An Encrypted Hard Drive Device encryption means that a thief can’t just pick up your laptop, insert a Linux live CD or Windows installer disc, and boot the alternate operating system to view your files without knowing your Windows password. It means that no one can just pull the hard drive from your device, connect the hard drive to another computer, and view the files. We’ve previously explained that your Windows password doesn’t actually secure your files. With Windows 8.1, average Windows users will finally be protected with encryption by default. However, there’s a problem — if you forget your password and are unable to log in, you’d also be unable to recover your files. This is likely why encryption is only enabled when a user logs in with a Microsoft account (or connects to a domain). Microsoft holds a recovery key, so you can gain access to your files by going through a recovery process. As long as you’re able to authenticate using your Microsoft account credentials — for example, by receiving an SMS message on the cell phone number connected to your Microsoft account — you’ll be able to recover your encrypted data. With Windows 8.1, it’s more important than ever to configure your Microsoft account’s security settings and recovery methods so you’ll be able to recover your files if you ever get locked out of your Microsoft account. Microsoft does hold the recovery key and would be capable of providing it to law enforcement if it was requested, which is certainly a legitimate concern in the age of PRISM. However, this encryption still provides protection from thieves picking up your hard drive and digging through your personal or business files. If you’re worried about a government or a determined thief who’s capable of gaining access to your Microsoft account, you’ll want to encrypt your hard drive with software that doesn’t upload a copy of your recovery key to the Internet, such as TrueCrypt. How to Disable Device Encryption There should be no real reason to disable device encryption. If nothing else, it’s a useful feature that will hopefully protect sensitive data in the real world where people — and even businesses — don’t enable encryption on their own. As encryption is only enabled on devices with the appropriate hardware and will be enabled by default, Microsoft has hopefully ensured that users won’t see noticeable slow-downs in performance. Encryption adds some overhead, but the overhead can hopefully be handled by dedicated hardware. If you’d like to enable a different encryption solution or just disable encryption entirely, you can control this yourself. To do so, open the PC settings app — swipe in from the right edge of the screen or press Windows Key + C, click the Settings icon, and select Change PC settings. Navigate to PC and devices -> PC info. At the bottom of the PC info pane, you’ll see a Device Encryption section. Select Turn Off if you want to disable device encryption, or select Turn On if you want to enable it — users upgrading from Windows 8 will have to enable it manually in this way. Note that Device Encryption can’t be disabled on Windows RT devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface RT and Surface 2. If you don’t see the Device Encryption section in this window, you’re likely using an older device that doesn’t meet the requirements and thus doesn’t support Device Encryption. For example, our Windows 8.1 virtual machine doesn’t offer Device Encryption configuration options. This is the new normal for Windows PCs, tablets, and devices in general. Where files on typical PCs were once ripe for easy access by thieves, Windows PCs are now encrypted by default and recovery keys are sent to Microsoft’s servers for safe keeping. This last part may be a bit creepy, but it’s easy to imagine average users forgetting their passwords — they’d be very upset if they lost all their files because they had to reset their passwords. It’s also an improvement over Windows PCs being completely unprotected by default.

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Week in Geek: IPv6 Capable Smartphones Compromise User Privacy Edition

- by Asian Angel

This week we learned how to “clone a disk, resize static windows, and create system function shortcuts”, use 45 different services, sites, and apps to help read favorite sites, add MP3 support to Audacity (for saving in MP3 format), install a Wii game loader for easy backups and fast load times, create a Blue Screen of Death in any color, and more. Photo by legofenris. Weekly News Links Photo by The H Security. IPv6: Smartphones compromise users’ privacy Since version 4 of the iOS operating system, Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPods have been capable of handling IPv6, and most Android devices have been capable since version 2.1. However, the operating systems transfer an ID that discloses information about their users. Dumb phones can be attacked too Much of the discussion of security threats to mobile phones revolves around smartphones, but researchers have found that less advanced “feature phones,” still used by the majority of people around the world, also are vulnerable to attack. SCADA exploit – the dragon awakes The recent publication of an exploit for KingView, a software package for visualising industrial process control systems, appears to be having an effect. Threatpost reports that both the Chinese vendor Wellintech and Chinese CERT (CN-CERT) have now reacted. Sophos: Spam to get more malicious Spam is becoming more malicious in nature as trickery tactics change in line with current user interests, according to a new report released Tuesday by Sophos. Global spam traffic rebounds as Rustock wakes Spam is on the rise after the Rustock botnet awoke from its Christmas slumber, according to Symantec. Cracking WPA keys in the cloud At the forthcoming Black Hat conference, blogger Thomas Roth plans to demonstrate how weak WPA PSKs can be cracked quickly and easily using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer could allow remote code execution Provides a link to more details about the vulnerability and shows a work-around/fix for the problem. Adobe plans to make it easier to delete Flash cookies in web browsers The new API, NPAPI:ClearSiteData, will allow Flash cookies – also known as Local Shared Objects (LSO) – to be deleted directly in the browser’s settings. Firefox beta getting new database standard The ninth beta version of Firefox is set to get support for a standard called IndexedDB that provides a database interface useful for offline data storage and other tasks needing information on a browser’s computer. MetroPCS accused of blocking certain Net content MetroPCS is violating the FCC’s recently approved Net neutrality rules by blocking certain Internet content, say several public interest groups. Server and Tools chief Muglia to leave Microsoft in summer 2011 Microsoft veteran and Server & Tools Business (STB) President Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft, according to an email that CEO Steve Ballmer sent to employees on January 10. Report: DOJ nearing decision on Google-ITA The U.S. Department of Justice is gearing up for a possible formal antitrust investigation into whether or not Google should be allowed to purchase travel software company ITA Software, according to a report. South Korea says Google Street View broke law Police in South Korea reportedly say Google broke the country’s law when its Street View service captured personal data from unsecure Wi-Fi networks. The backlash over Google’s HTML5 video bet Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant. Google answers critics on HTML5 Web video move Google responded to critics of its decision to drop support for a popular HTML5 video codec by declaring that a royalty-supported standard for Web video will hold the Web hostage. Random TinyHacker Links A Special GiveAway: a Great Book & Great Security Software The team from 7 Tutorials has a special giveaway running during the month of January. Signed copies of their latest book, full 1-year licenses of BitDefender Internet Security 2011 and free 3-month trials for everyone willing to participate. One Click Rooting For Android Phones Here’s a nice tool that helps you root your Android phone effortlessly. New Angry Birds Free version 1.0 Available in the App Store. Google Code University Learn programming at Google Code University. Capture and Share Your Favorite Part Of a YouTube Video SnipSnip.it lets you share only the part of the video that you like. Super User Questions More great questions and answers from this past week’s popular topics at Super User. What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? Does OS X support linux-like features? What is the easiest way to make a backup of an entire hard disk? Will shifting from Wireless to Wired network result in better performance? Is it legal to install Windows 7 Home Premium Retail inside VMware virtual machine? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Enjoy reading through our hottest articles from this past week. The 50 Best Ways to Disable Built-in Windows Features You Don’t Want The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal One Year Ago on How-To Geek More great articles from one year ago filled with helpful geeky goodness for you to enjoy. Share Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.it Start Portable Firefox in Safe Mode Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate Available, Here’s How to Fix Your Incompatible Extensions Protect Your Computer from “Little Hands” with KidSafe Lock Prying Eyes Out of Your Minimized Windows Custom Crocheted Cylon-Cthulhu Hybrid What happens when you let your Cylon Centurion figure and your crocheted Cthulhu spend too many lonely nights together? A Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid, of course! You can get your own from the Cthulhu Chick store over on Etsy. Note: This is not an ad…Ruth is a friend of ours, and this Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid makes the perfect guard for the new MVP trophy in our office. The Geek Note Whether it is a geeky indoor project or just getting outside, we hope that you and your families have a terrific fun-filled weekend! Remember to keep sending those great tips in to us at [email protected]. Photo by qwrrty. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Available for Download – Get Your Copy Now The Frustrations of a Computer Literate Watching a Newbie Use a Computer [Humorous Video] Season0nPass Jailbreaks Current Gen Apple TVs IBM’s Jeopardy Playing Computer Watson Shows The Pros How It’s Done [Video] Tranquil Juice Drop Abstract Wallpaper Pulse Is a Sleek Newsreader for iOS and Android Devices

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Using SQL Execution Plans to discover the Swedish alphabet

- by Rob Farley

SQL Server is quite remarkable in a bunch of ways. In this post, I’m using the way that the Query Optimizer handles LIKE to keep it SARGable, the Execution Plans that result, Collations, and PowerShell to come up with the Swedish alphabet. SARGability is the ability to seek for items in an index according to a particular set of criteria. If you don’t have SARGability in play, you need to scan the whole index (or table if you don’t have an index). For example, I can find myself in the phonebook easily, because it’s sorted by LastName and I can find Farley in there by moving to the Fs, and so on. I can’t find everyone in my suburb easily, because the phonebook isn’t sorted that way. I can’t even find people who have six letters in their last name, because also the book is sorted by LastName, it’s not sorted by LEN(LastName). This is all stuff I’ve looked at before, including in the talk I gave at SQLBits in October 2010. If I try to find everyone who’s names start with F, I can do that using a query a bit like: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F'; Unfortunately, the Query Optimizer doesn’t realise that all the entries that satisfy LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F' will be together, and it has to scan the whole table to find them. But if I write: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LastName LIKE 'F%'; then SQL is smart enough to understand this, and performs an Index Seek instead. To see why, I look further into the plan, in particular, the properties of the Index Seek operator. The ToolTip shows me what I’m after: You’ll see that it does a Seek to find any entries that are at least F, but not yet G. There’s an extra Predicate in there (a Residual Predicate if you like), which checks that each LastName is really LIKE F% – I suppose it doesn’t consider that the Seek Predicate is quite enough – but most of the benefit is seen by its working out the Seek Predicate, filtering to just the “at least F but not yet G” section of the data. This got me curious though, particularly about where the G comes from, and whether I could leverage it to create the Swedish alphabet. I know that in the Swedish language, there are three extra letters that appear at the end of the alphabet. One of them is ä that appears in the word Västerås. It turns out that Västerås is quite hard to find in an index when you’re looking it up in a Swedish map. I talked about this briefly in my five-minute talk on Collation from SQLPASS (the one which was slightly less than serious). So by looking at the plan, I can work out what the next letter is in the alphabet of the collation used by the column. In other words, if my alphabet were Swedish, I’d be able to tell what the next letter after F is – just in case it’s not G. It turns out it is… Yes, the Swedish letter after F is G. But I worked this out by using a copy of my PhoneBook table that used the Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI collation. I couldn’t find how the Query Optimizer calculates the G, and my friend Paul White (@SQL_Kiwi) tells me that it’s frustratingly internal to the QO. He’s particularly smart, even if he is from New Zealand. To investigate further, I decided to do some PowerShell, leveraging the Get-SqlPlan function that I blogged about recently (make sure you also have the SqlServerCmdletSnapin100 snap-in added). I started by indicating that I was going to use Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI as my collation of choice, and that I’d start whichever letter cam straight after the number 9. I figure that this is a cheat’s way of guessing the first letter of the alphabet (but it doesn’t actually work in Unicode – luckily I’m using varchar not nvarchar. Actually, there are a few aspects of this code that only work using ASCII, so apologies if you were wanting to apply it to Greek, Japanese, etc). I also initialised my $alphabet variable. $collation = 'Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI'; $firstletter = '9'; $alphabet = ''; Now I created the table for my test. A single field would do, and putting a Clustered Index on it would suffice for the Seeks. Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "create table dbo.collation_test (col varchar(10) collate $collation primary key);" Now I get into the looping. $c = $firstletter; $stillgoing = $true; while ($stillgoing) { I construct the query I want, seeking for entries which start with whatever $c has reached, and get the plan for it: $query = "select col from dbo.collation_test where col like '$($c)%';"; [xml] $pl = get-sqlplan $query "." "tempdb"; At this point, my $pl variable is a scary piece of XML, representing the execution plan. A bit of hunting through it showed me that the EndRange element contained what I was after, and that if it contained NULL, then I was done. $stillgoing = ($pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange -ne $null); Now I could grab the value out of it (which came with apostrophes that needed stripping), and append that to my $alphabet variable. if ($stillgoing) { $c=$pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange.RangeExpressions.ScalarOperator.ScalarString.Replace("'",""); $alphabet += $c; } Finally, finishing the loop, dropping the table, and showing my alphabet! } Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "drop table dbo.collation_test;"; $alphabet; When I run all this, I see that the Swedish alphabet is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZÅÄÖ, which matches what I see at Wikipedia. Interesting to see that the letters on the end are still there, even with Case Insensitivity. Turns out they’re not just “letters with accents”, they’re letters in their own right. I’m sure you gave up reading long ago, and really aren’t that fazed about the idea of doing this using PowerShell. I chose PowerShell because I’d already come up with an easy way of grabbing the estimated plan for a query, and PowerShell does allow for easy navigation of XML. I find the most interesting aspect of this as the fact that the Query Optimizer uses the next letter of the alphabet to maintain the SARGability of LIKE. I’m hoping they do something similar for a whole bunch of operations. Oh, and the fact that you know how to find stuff in the IKEA catalogue. Footnote: If you are interested in whether this works in other languages, you might want to consider the following screenshot, which shows that in principle, it should work with Japanese. It might be a bit harder to run this in PowerShell though, as I’m not sure how it translates. In Hiragana, the Japanese alphabet starts ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ...

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SQL SERVER – 3 Online SQL Courses at Pluralsight and Free Learning Resources

- by pinaldave

Usain Bolt is an inspiration for all. He broke his own record multiple times because he wanted to do better! Read more about him on wikipedia. He is great and indeed fastest man on the planet. Usain Bolt – World’s Fastest Man “Can you teach me SQL Server Performance Tuning?” This is one of the most popular questions which I receive all the time. The answer is YES. I would love to do performance tuning training for anyone, anywhere. It is my favorite thing to do, and it is my favorite thing to train others in. If possible, I would love to do training 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. To me, it doesn’t feel like a job. Of course, as much as I would love to do performance tuning 24/7/365, obviously I am just one human being and can only be in one place t one time. It is also very difficult to train more than one person at a time, and it is difficult to train two or more people at a time, especially when the two people are at different levels. I am also limited by geography. I live in India, and adjust to my own time zone. Trying to teach a live course from India to someone whose time zone is 12 or more hours off of mine is very difficult. If I am trying to teach at 2 am, I am sure I am not at my best! There was only one solution to scale – Online Trainings. I have built 3 different courses on SQL Server Performance Tuning with Pluralsight. Now I have no problem – I am 100% scalable and available 24/7 and 365. You can make me say the same things again and again till you find it right. I am in your mobile, PC as well as on XBOX. This is why I am such a big fan of online courses. I have recorded many performance tuning classes and you can easily access them online, at your own time. And don’t think that just because these aren’t live classes you won’t be able to get any feedback from me. I encourage all my viewers to go ahead and ask me questions by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever way you can get a hold of me. Here are details of three of my courses with Pluralsight. I suggest you go over the description of the course. As an author of the course, I have few FREE codes for watching the free courses. Please leave a comment with your valid email address, I will send a few of them to random winners. SQL Server Performance: Introduction to Query Tuning SQL Server performance tuning is an art to master – for developers and DBAs alike. This course takes a systematic approach to planning, analyzing, debugging and troubleshooting common query-related performance problems. This includes an introduction to understanding execution plans inside SQL Server. In this almost four hour course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 10:22 Execution Plan Basics 45:59 Essential Indexing Techniques 20:19 Query Design for Performance 50:16 Performance Tuning Tools 01:15:14 Tips and Tricks 25:53 Checklist: Performance Tuning 07:13 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics This course teaches you how to master the art of performance tuning SQL Server by better understanding indexes. In this almost two hour course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 02:03 Fundamentals of Indexing 22:21 Practical Indexing Implementation Techniques 37:25 Index Maintenance 16:33 Introduction to ColumnstoreIndex 08:06 Indexing Practical Performance Tips and Tricks 24:56 Checklist : Index and Performance 07:29 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL Server Questions and Answers This course is designed to help you better understand how to use SQL Server effectively. The course presents many of the common misconceptions about SQL Server, and then carefully debunks those misconceptions with clear explanations and short but compelling demos, showing you how SQL Server really works. In this almost 2 hours and 15 minutes course we cover following important concepts. Introduction 00:54 Retrieving IDENTITY value using @@IDENTITY 08:38 Concepts Related to Identity Values 04:15 Difference between WHERE and HAVING 05:52 Order in WHERE clause 07:29 Concepts Around Temporary Tables and Table Variables 09:03 Are stored procedures pre-compiled? 05:09 UNIQUE INDEX and NULLs problem 06:40 DELETE VS TRUNCATE 06:07 Locks and Duration of Transactions 15:11 Nested Transaction and Rollback 09:16 Understanding Date/Time Datatypes 07:40 Differences between VARCHAR and NVARCHAR datatypes 06:38 Precedence of DENY and GRANT security permissions 05:29 Identify Blocking Process 06:37 NULLS usage with Dynamic SQL 08:03 Appendix Tips and Tricks with Tools 20:44 The duration of each module is mentioned besides the name of the module. SQL in Sixty Seconds You will have to login and to get subscribed to the courses to view them. Here are my free video learning resources SQL in Sixty Seconds. These are 60 second video which I have built on various subjects related to SQL Server. Do let me know what you think about them? Here are three of my latest videos: Identify Most Resource Intensive Queries – SQL in Sixty Seconds #028 Copy Column Headers from Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #027 Effect of Collation on Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #026 You can watch and learn at your own pace. Then you can easily ask me any questions you have. E-mail is easiest, but for really tough questions I’m willing to talk on Skype, Gtalk, or even Facebook chat. Please do watch and then talk with me, I am always available on the internet! Here is the video of the world’s fastest man.Usain St. Leo Bolt inspires us that we all do better than best. We can go the next level of our own record. We all can improve if we have a will and dedication. Watch the video from 5:00 mark. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology, Video

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User Guide to Dropbox Shared Folders

- by Matthew Guay

Dropbox is an incredibly useful tool for keeping all your files synced between your computers and the cloud. Here we’re going to look at how you can keep all of your team on the same page with Dropbox shared folders. Creating a Shared Folder Setting up a shared folder in Dropbox is easy. Add the files you want to share to a folder in Dropbox on your computer, then right-click in the folder, select Dropbox, and then choose Share This Folder. Alternately, log into your Dropbox account online, click the drop-down menu beside the folder you want to share, and click Share this folder. Now, enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the folder with, and optionally enter a message explaining why you’re sharing the folder. The people you invite will receive an email inviting them to view and join the shared folder. If they haven’t signed up for Dropbox, they can directly signup; otherwise, they can simply log into their Dropbox account and start adding or editing files. Shared folders have a slightly different icon in your Dropbox. Notice the shared folder on the left has an icon with 2 people, while the folder on the right that is not shared, shows previews of its contents. See Your Shared Folder’s History Whenever your collaborators with your shared folders add or change files, you will see a tooltip notification telling you what changed. You can also view the changes online. Log into your Dropbox account in your browser and select the Events tab. This shows all changes to your Dropbox, but you can view only the changes in your shared folder by selecting its name on the left sidebar. Now you can see all recent changes to your folder, and can also see who added or removed each file. On the bottom of the page, you can even add a comment that all the collaborators will see. If someone deleted a file you still need, you can restore it by clicking its link in this online history. Or, you can view any deleted files by right-clicking in your Dropbox folder in Explorer. Select Dropbox, and then click Show Deleted Files. Get Notified When a Change is Made You’re not always in front of your computer; you’ve got a life beyond your projects, after all (at least hopefully). If you really want to stay connected to what’s happening with your project, though, you can easily do that no matter where you are. Your shared Dropbox folder’s history page offers an RSS feed of all changes to the folder. Click the Subscribe to this feed hyperlink. Now, in the popup that opens, click “Copy to clipboard” so you can use this RSS feed. You can subscribe to RSS feeds through many web browsers, email clients, dedicated feed readers, and more. In Firefox, Internet Explorer 7/8, or Opera, you can paste the feed address into your address bar and subscribe to the feed directly in your browser. However, subscribing to the feed in a desktop application won’t help you much when you’re away from your computer. One great option is to subscribe in the popular Google Reader. Then you can check your feed from any browser, on any computer or mobile device. To add your Dropbox feed to Google Reader, log into Google Reader (link below), click Add a subscription on the top left, paste your RSS feed from Dropbox, and click Add. Now you can see any changes to files or folders in Google Reader. You can even add your feed to your iGoogle homepage. Click the Add it Now button on the right in the front page of Google Reader to add your feeds to iGoogle. Now you can see updates on your files from your homepage. If you’re using a different computer, just login to your Google account to see what’s happening. You can also access your Google Reader feeds from many programs and apps for most major Smartphones including iPhone, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Receive a Tweet or Text When Changes are Made If you’re a hyper-connected individual, chances are you send and receive tweets on the go. If so, this might be the best way for you to get notified when changes are made to your Dropbox shared folder. To do this, first create a new Twitter account to publish your changes through. If you don’t want the whole world to see your updates, click Settings and set your new Twitter account to Private. Once the new account is created, follow it with your normal Twitter account so you’ll see updates. Now, let’s publish our Dropbox RSS feed to Twitter. Create an account with Twitterfeed (link below). Once your account is setup, add your feed to it. Name your feed, and enter your Feed address from Dropbox. Click Advanced Settings to make your feed work just like you want. In Advanced Settings, change the frequency to “Every 30 mins” to make sure you’re updated on changes as quick as possible. You can also change other settings if you like. Click “Continue to Step 2”, and then click Twitter under the available services to add your account. Make sure your signed into your new Twitter account, and then click Authenticate Twitter. Allow the application. Now, finally, click Create Service. Whenever a change is made, you will receive a tweet via your new Twitter account. And since you can receive tweets via text message or many mobile applications, you’ll never be very far away from your Dropbox changes! Conclusion Dropbox shared folders are a great way to keep your whole team working together on the same files in a project. And with these handy tricks, you can keep up with your shared files wherever you are! There are a lot of cool things you can do with Dropbox make sure to check out our posts on adding Dropbox to the Windows 7 Start menu, Accessing Dropbox files from Chrome, and Syncing your Pidgin Profile Across Multiple PCs. Links Signup or access your Dropbox account Google Reader Tweet your feed with Twitterfeed Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Add and Manage Shared Folders on Windows Home ServerManage User Accounts in Windows Home ServerAdd "My Dropbox" to Your Windows 7 Start MenuComplete Guide to Networking Windows 7 with XP and VistaMoving Your Personal Data Folders in Windows Vista 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 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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SQL SERVER – SSMS Automatically Generates TOP (100) PERCENT in Query Designer

- by pinaldave

Earlier this week, I was surfing various SQL forums to see what kind of help developer need in the SQL Server world. One of the question indeed caught my attention. I am here regenerating complete question as well scenario to illustrate the point in a precise manner. Additionally, I have added added second part of the question to give completeness. Question: I am trying to create a view in Query Designer (not in the New Query Window). Every time I am trying to create a view it always adds TOP (100) PERCENT automatically on the T-SQL script. No matter what I do, it always automatically adds the TOP (100) PERCENT to the script. I have attempted to copy paste from notepad, build a query and a few other things – there is no success. I am really not sure what I am doing wrong with Query Designer. Here is my query script: (I use AdventureWorks as a sample database) SELECT Person.Address.AddressID FROM Person.Address INNER JOIN Person.AddressType ON Person.Address.AddressID = Person.AddressType.AddressTypeID ORDER BY Person.Address.AddressID This script automatically replaces by following query: SELECT TOP (100) PERCENT Person.Address.AddressID FROM Person.Address INNER JOIN Person.AddressType ON Person.Address.AddressID = Person.AddressType.AddressTypeID ORDER BY Person.Address.AddressID However, when I try to do the same from New Query Window it works totally fine. However, when I attempt to create a view of the same query it gives following error. Msg 1033, Level 15, State 1, Procedure myView, Line 6 The ORDER BY clause is invalid in views, inline functions, derived tables, subqueries, and common table expressions, unless TOP, OFFSET or FOR XML is also specified. It is pretty clear to me now that the script which I have written seems to need TOP (100) PERCENT, so Query . Why do I need it? Is there any work around to this issue. I particularly find this question pretty interesting as it really touches the fundamentals of the T-SQL query writing. Please note that the query which is automatically changed is not in New Query Editor but opened from SSMS using following way. Database >> Views >> Right Click >> New View (see the image below) Answer: The answer to the above question can be very long but I will keep it simple and to the point. There are three things to discuss in above script 1) Reason for Error 2) Reason for Auto generates TOP (100) PERCENT and 3) Potential solutions to the above error. Let us quickly see them in detail. 1) Reason for Error The reason for error is already given in the error. ORDER BY is invalid in the views and a few other objects. One has to use TOP or other keywords along with it. The way semantics of the query works where optimizer only follows(honors) the ORDER BY in the same scope or the same SELECT/UPDATE/DELETE statement. There is a possibility that one can order after the scope of the view again the efforts spend to order view will be wasted. The final resultset of the query always follows the final ORDER BY or outer query’s order and due to the same reason optimizer follows the final order of the query and not of the views (as view will be used in another query for further processing e.g. in SELECT statement). Due to same reason ORDER BY is now allowed in the view. For further accuracy and clear guidance I suggest you read this blog post by Query Optimizer Team. They have explained it very clear manner the same subject. 2) Reason for Auto Generated TOP (100) PERCENT One of the most popular workaround to above error is to use TOP (100) PERCENT in the view. Now TOP (100) PERCENT allows user to use ORDER BY in the query and allows user to overcome above error which we discussed. This gives the impression to the user that they have resolved the error and successfully able to use ORDER BY in the View. Well, this is incorrect as well. The way this works is when TOP (100) PERCENT is used the result is not guaranteed as well it is ignored in our the query where the view is used. Here is the blog post on this subject: Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY. Now when you create a new view in the SSMS and build a query with ORDER BY to avoid the error automatically it adds the TOP 100 PERCENT. Here is the connect item for the same issue. I am sure there will be more connect items as well but I could not find them. 3) Potential Solutions If you are reading this post from the beginning in that case, it is clear by now that ORDER BY should not be used in the View as it does not serve any purpose unless there is a specific need of it. If you are going to use TOP 100 PERCENT with ORDER BY there is absolutely no need of using ORDER BY rather avoid using it all together. Here is another blog post of mine which describes the same subject ORDER BY Does Not Work – Limitation of the Views Part 1. It is valid to use ORDER BY in a view if there is a clear business need of using TOP with any other percentage lower than 100 (for example TOP 10 PERCENT or TOP 50 PERCENT etc). In most of the cases ORDER BY is not needed in the view and it should be used in the most outer query for present result in desired order. User can remove TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY from the view before using the view in any query or procedure. In the most outer query there should be ORDER BY as per the business need. I think this sums up the concept in a few words. This is a very long topic and not easy to illustrate in one single blog post. I welcome your comments and suggestions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL View, T SQL, Technology

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LibPCL issues on Ubuntu 13.10

- by user254885

i wanted to install the Point Cloud Library but it does not work i use an ODROID board(ARM processor) Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libpcl-all : Depends: libpcl-1.7-all but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. by compiling v1.7 , i get these errors : /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.8/../../../arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.a(ptw-fcntl.o): In function `__fcntl_nocancel': /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/fcntl.c:37: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.8/../../../arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.a(ptw-fcntl.o): In function `__libc_fcntl': /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/fcntl.c:53: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/i386/fcntl.c:57: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.8/../../../arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.a(ptw-open64.o): In function `__libc_open64': /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/open64.c:41: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/open64.c:45: undefined reference to `__libc_do_syscall' /usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.8/../../../arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.a(cancellation.o):/build/buildd/eglibc-2.17/nptl/cancellation.c:96: more undefined references to `__libc_do_syscall' follow collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [bin/pcl_convert_pcd_ascii_binary] Error 1 make[1]: *** [io/tools/CMakeFiles/pcl_convert_pcd_ascii_binary.dir/all] Error 2 make: *** [all] Error 2 i could not find anything in google to solve these errors i believe some packages were not ported for ARM processors any help would be appreciated $ dpkg --list | grep headers ii linux-headers-3.0.63-odroidx2 20130215 ii linux-headers-3.0.71-odroidx2 20130415 ii linux-headers-3.0.74-odroidx2 20130417 ii linux-headers-3.0.75-odroidx2 20130426 ii linux-headers-3.1.10-6 3.1.10-6.10 ii linux-headers-3.1.10-6-ac100 3.1.10-6.10 ii linux-headers-ac100 3.1.10.6.2 installing packages did'nt do well sudo apt-get install linux-generic [sudo] password for odroid: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: debugedit libasound2-dev libestools2.1-dev librpmbuild3 librpmsign1 thunderbird-locale-en thunderbird-locale-en-gb thunderbird-locale-en-us thunderbird-locale-ko Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: linux-headers-3.11.0-17 linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic linux-image-generic Suggested packages: fdutils linux-doc-3.11.0 linux-source-3.11.0 linux-tools The following NEW packages will be installed: linux-generic linux-headers-3.11.0-17 linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic linux-image-generic 0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 58.2 MB of archives. After this operation, 203 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y Get:1 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic armhf 3.11.0-17.31 [44.5 MB] Get:2 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-image-generic armhf 3.11.0.17.18 [2,356 B] Get:3 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-headers-3.11.0-17 all 3.11.0-17.31 [12.6 MB] Get:4 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic armhf 3.11.0-17.31 [1,128 kB] Get:5 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-headers-generic armhf 3.11.0.17.18 [2,350 B] Get:6 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ saucy-updates/main linux-generic armhf 3.11.0.17.18 [1,726 B] Fetched 58.2 MB in 13s (4,379 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic. (Reading database ... 258618 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic (from .../linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic_3.11.0-17.31_armhf.deb) ... Examining /etc/kernel/preinst.d/ Done. Selecting previously unselected package linux-image-generic. Unpacking linux-image-generic (from .../linux-image-generic_3.11.0.17.18_armhf.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-headers-3.11.0-17. Unpacking linux-headers-3.11.0-17 (from .../linux-headers-3.11.0-17_3.11.0-17.31_all.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic. Unpacking linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic (from .../linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic_3.11.0-17.31_armhf.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-headers-generic. Unpacking linux-headers-generic (from .../linux-headers-generic_3.11.0.17.18_armhf.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-generic. Unpacking linux-generic (from .../linux-generic_3.11.0.17.18_armhf.deb) ... Setting up linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic (3.11.0-17.31) ... Running depmod. update-initramfs: deferring update (hook will be called later) cp: cannot stat ‘/boot/initrd.img-3.11.0-17-generic’: No such file or directory Failed to copy /boot/initrd.img-3.11.0-17-generic to /boot/initrd.img at /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic.postinst line 730. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-generic: linux-image-generic depends on linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic; however: Package linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-image-generic (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Setting up linux-headers-3.11.0-17 (3.11.0-17.31) ... No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Setting up linux-headers-3.11.0-17-generic (3.11.0-17.31) ... Examining /etc/kernel/header_postinst.d. Setting up linux-headers-generic (3.11.0.17.18) ... dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-generic: linux-generic depends on linux-image-generic (= 3.11.0.17.18); however: Package linux-image-generic is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-generic (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Errors were encountered while processing: linux-image-3.11.0-17-generic linux-image-generic linux-generic E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) i had to uninstall these cos they were messing up other packages installation(buildessentials were already installed)

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ASP.NET MVC 2 throws exception for ‘favicon.ico’

- by nmarun

I must be on fire or something – third blog in 2 days… awesome! Before I begin, in case you’re wondering, favicon.ico is the small image that appears to the left of your web address, once the page loads. In order to learn more about MVC or any thing for that matter, it’s better to look at the source itself. Since MVC is open source (at least some part of it is), I started looking at the source code that’s available for download. While doing so, I hit Steve Sanderson’s blog site where he explains in great detail the way to debug your app using ASP.NET MVC source code. For those who are not aware, Steve Sanderson’s book - Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, is one of the best books to learn about MVC. Alrighty, I followed the article and I hit F5 to debug the default / unchanged MVC project. I put a breakpoint in the DefaultControllerFactory.cs, CreateController() method. To know a little more about this class and the method, read this. Sure enough, the control stopped at the breakpoint and I hit F5 again and the page rendered just fine. But then what’s this? The breakpoint was hit again, as if something else was being requested. I now hovered my mouse over the ‘controllerName’ parameter and it says – favicon.ico. This by itself was more than enough for me to raise my eye-brows, but what happened next just took the ground below my feet. Oh, oh, I’m sorry I’m just typing, no code, no image, so here are a couple of screen captures. The first one shows the request for the Home controller; I get ‘Home’ when I hover over the parameter: And here’s the one that shows the same for call for ‘favicon.ico’. So, I step through the code and when the control reaches line 91 – GetControllerInstance() method, I step in. This is when I had the ‘ground-losing’ experience. Wow, an exception is being thrown for this file and that too in RTM. For some reason MVC thinks, this as a controller and tries to run it through the MvcHandler and it hits this snag. So it seems like this will happen for any MVC 2 site and this did not happen for me in the previous version of MVC. Before I get to how to resolve it, here’s another way of reproducing this exception. Revert back all your changes that you did as mentioned in Steve’s blog above. Now, add a class to your MVC project and call it say, MyControllerFactory and let this inherit from DefaultControllerFactory class. (Read this for details on the DefaultControllerFactory class is and how it is used in a different context). Add an override for the CreateController() method and for the sake of this blog, just copy the same content from the DefaultControllerFactory class. The last step is to tell your MVC app to use the MyControllerFactory class instead of the default one. To do this, go to your Global.asax.cs file and add line 6 of the snippet below: 1: protected void Application_Start() 2: { 3: AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); 4: 5: RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); 6: ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new MyControllerFactory()); 7: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now, you’re ready to reproduce the issue. Just F5 the project and when you hit the overridden CreateController() method for the second time, this is what it looks like for me: And continuing further gives me the same exception. I believe this is something that MS should fix, as not having ‘favicon.ico’ file will be common for most of the applications. So I think the when you create an MVC project, line 6 should be added by default by Visual Studio itself: 1: public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication 2: { 3: public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) 4: { 5: routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); 6: routes.IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico"); 7: 8: routes.MapRoute( 9: "Default", // Route name 10: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters 11: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults 12: ); 13: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } There it is, that’s the solution to avoid the exception altogether. I tried this both IE8 and Firefox browsers and was able to successfully reproduce the error. Hope someone will look at this issue and find a fix. Just before I finish up, I found another ‘bug’, if you want to call it, with Visual Studio 2008. Remember how you could change what browser you want your application to run in by just right clicking on the .aspx file and choosing ‘Browse with…’? Seems like that’s missing when you’re working with an MVC project. In order to test the above bug in the other browser, I had to load a classic ASP.NET project, change the settings and then run my MVC project. Felt kinda ‘icky’, for lack of a better word.

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6 Ways to Free Up Hard Drive Space Used by Windows System Files

- by Chris Hoffman

We’ve previously covered the standard ways to free up space on Windows. But if you have a small solid-state drive and really want more hard space, there are geekier ways to reclaim hard drive space. Not all of these tips are recommended — in fact, if you have more than enough hard drive space, following these tips may actually be a bad idea. There’s a tradeoff to changing all of these settings. Erase Windows Update Uninstall Files Windows allows you to uninstall patches you install from Windows Update. This is helpful if an update ever causes a problem — but how often do you need to uninstall an update, anyway? And will you really ever need to uninstall updates you’ve installed several years ago? These uninstall files are probably just wasting space on your hard drive. A recent update released for Windows 7 allows you to erase Windows Update files from the Windows Disk Cleanup tool. Open Disk Cleanup, click Clean up system files, check the Windows Update Cleanup option, and click OK. If you don’t see this option, run Windows Update and install the available updates. Remove the Recovery Partition Windows computers generally come with recovery partitions that allow you to reset your computer back to its factory default state without juggling discs. The recovery partition allows you to reinstall Windows or use the Refresh and Reset your PC features. These partitions take up a lot of space as they need to contain a complete system image. On Microsoft’s Surface Pro, the recovery partition takes up about 8-10 GB. On other computers, it may be even larger as it needs to contain all the bloatware the manufacturer included. Windows 8 makes it easy to copy the recovery partition to removable media and remove it from your hard drive. If you do this, you’ll need to insert the removable media whenever you want to refresh or reset your PC. On older Windows 7 computers, you could delete the recovery partition using a partition manager — but ensure you have recovery media ready if you ever need to install Windows. If you prefer to install Windows from scratch instead of using your manufacturer’s recovery partition, you can just insert a standard Window disc if you ever want to reinstall Windows. Disable the Hibernation File Windows creates a hidden hibernation file at C:\hiberfil.sys. Whenever you hibernate the computer, Windows saves the contents of your RAM to the hibernation file and shuts down the computer. When it boots up again, it reads the contents of the file into memory and restores your computer to the state it was in. As this file needs to contain much of the contents of your RAM, it’s 75% of the size of your installed RAM. If you have 12 GB of memory, that means this file takes about 9 GB of space. On a laptop, you probably don’t want to disable hibernation. However, if you have a desktop with a small solid-state drive, you may want to disable hibernation to recover the space. When you disable hibernation, Windows will delete the hibernation file. You can’t move this file off the system drive, as it needs to be on C:\ so Windows can read it at boot. Note that this file and the paging file are marked as “protected operating system files” and aren’t visible by default. Shrink the Paging File The Windows paging file, also known as the page file, is a file Windows uses if your computer’s available RAM ever fills up. Windows will then “page out” data to disk, ensuring there’s always available memory for applications — even if there isn’t enough physical RAM. The paging file is located at C:\pagefile.sys by default. You can shrink it or disable it if you’re really crunched for space, but we don’t recommend disabling it as that can cause problems if your computer ever needs some paging space. On our computer with 12 GB of RAM, the paging file takes up 12 GB of hard drive space by default. If you have a lot of RAM, you can certainly decrease the size — we’d probably be fine with 2 GB or even less. However, this depends on the programs you use and how much memory they require. The paging file can also be moved to another drive — for example, you could move it from a small SSD to a slower, larger hard drive. It will be slower if Windows ever needs to use the paging file, but it won’t use important SSD space. Configure System Restore Windows seems to use about 10 GB of hard drive space for “System Protection” by default. This space is used for System Restore snapshots, allowing you to restore previous versions of system files if you ever run into a system problem. If you need to free up space, you could reduce the amount of space allocated to system restore or even disable it entirely. Of course, if you disable it entirely, you’ll be unable to use system restore if you ever need it. You’d have to reinstall Windows, perform a Refresh or Reset, or fix any problems manually. Tweak Your Windows Installer Disc Want to really start stripping down Windows, ripping out components that are installed by default? You can do this with a tool designed for modifying Windows installer discs, such as WinReducer for Windows 8 or RT Se7en Lite for Windows 7. These tools allow you to create a customized installation disc, slipstreaming in updates and configuring default options. You can also use them to remove components from the Windows disc, shrinking the size of the resulting Windows installation. This isn’t recommended as you could cause problems with your Windows installation by removing important features. But it’s certainly an option if you want to make Windows as tiny as possible. Most Windows users can benefit from removing Windows Update uninstallation files, so it’s good to see that Microsoft finally gave Windows 7 users the ability to quickly and easily erase these files. However, if you have more than enough hard drive space, you should probably leave well enough alone and let Windows manage the rest of these settings on its own. Image Credit: Yutaka Tsutano on Flickr

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