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• Running Solaris 11 as a control domain on a T2000

  - by jsavit

  There is increased adoption of Oracle Solaris 11, and many customers are deploying it on systems that previously ran Solaris 10. That includes older T1-processor based systems like T1000 and T2000. Even though they are old (from 2005) and don't have the performance of current SPARC servers, they are still functional, stable servers that customers continue to operate. One reason to install Solaris 11 on them is that older machines are attractive for testing OS upgrades before updating current, production systems. Normally this does not present a challenge, because Solaris 11 runs on any T-series or M-series SPARC server. One scenario adds a complication: running Solaris 11 in a control domain on a T1000 or T2000 hosting logical domains. Solaris 11 pre-installed Oracle VM Server for SPARC incompatible with T1 Unlike Solaris 10, Solaris 11 comes with Oracle VM Server for SPARC preinstalled. The ldomsmanager package contains the logical domains manager for Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2, which requires a SPARC T2, T2+, T3, or T4 server. It does not work with T1-processor systems, which are only supported by LDoms Manager 1.2 and earlier. The following screenshot shows what happens (bold font) if you try to use Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.x commands in a Solaris 11 control domain. The commands were issued in a control domain on a T2000 that previously ran Solaris 10. We also display the version of the logical domains manager installed in Solaris 11: root@t2000 psrinfo -vp The physical processor has 4 virtual processors (0-3) UltraSPARC-T1 (chipid 0, clock 1200 MHz) # prtconf|grep T SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200 # ldm -V Failed to connect to logical domain manager: Connection refused # pkg info ldomsmanager Name: system/ldoms/ldomsmanager Summary: Logical Domains Manager Description: LDoms Manager - Virtualization for SPARC T-Series Category: System/Virtualization State: Installed Publisher: solaris Version: 2.2.0.0 Build Release: 5.11 Branch: 0.175.0.8.0.3.0 Packaging Date: May 25, 2012 10:20:48 PM Size: 2.86 MB FMRI: pkg://solaris/system/ldoms/[email protected],5.11-0.175.0.8.0.3.0:20120525T222048Z The 2.2 version of the logical domains manager will have to be removed, and 1.2 installed, in order to use this as a control domain. Preparing to change - create a new boot environment Before doing anything else, lets create a new boot environment: # beadm list BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created -- ------ ---------- ----- ------ ------- solaris NR / 2.14G static 2012-09-25 10:32 # beadm create solaris-1 # beadm activate solaris-1 # beadm list BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created -- ------ ---------- ----- ------ ------- solaris N / 4.82M static 2012-09-25 10:32 solaris-1 R - 2.14G static 2012-09-29 11:40 # init 0 Normally an init 6 to reboot would have been sufficient, but in the next step I reset the system anyway in order to put the system in factory default mode for a "clean" domain configuration. Preparing to change - reset to factory default There was a leftover domain configuration on the T2000, so I reset it to the factory install state. Since the ldm command is't working yet, it can't be done from the control domain, so I did it by logging onto to the service processor: $ ssh -X admin@t2000-sc Copyright (c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle Advanced Lights Out Manager CMT v1.7.9 Please login: admin Please Enter password: ******** sc> showhost Sun-Fire-T2000 System Firmware 6.7.10 2010/07/14 16:35 Host flash versions: OBP 4.30.4.b 2010/07/09 13:48 Hypervisor 1.7.3.c 2010/07/09 15:14 POST 4.30.4.b 2010/07/09 14:24 sc> bootmode config="factory-default" sc> poweroff Are you sure you want to power off the system [y/n]? y SC Alert: SC Request to Power Off Host. SC Alert: Host system has shut down. sc> poweron SC Alert: Host System has Reset At this point I rebooted into the new Solaris 11 boot environment, and Solaris commands showed it was running on the factory default configuration of a single domain owning all 32 CPUs and 32GB of RAM (that's what it looked like in 2005.) # psrinfo -vp The physical processor has 8 cores and 32 virtual processors (0-31) The core has 4 virtual processors (0-3) The core has 4 virtual processors (4-7) The core has 4 virtual processors (8-11) The core has 4 virtual processors (12-15) The core has 4 virtual processors (16-19) The core has 4 virtual processors (20-23) The core has 4 virtual processors (24-27) The core has 4 virtual processors (28-31) UltraSPARC-T1 (chipid 0, clock 1200 MHz) # prtconf|grep Mem Memory size: 32640 Megabytes Note that the older processor has 4 virtual CPUs per core, while current processors have 8 per core. Remove ldomsmanager 2.2 and install the 1.2 version The Solaris 11 pkg command is now used to remove the 2.2 version that shipped with Solaris 11: # pkg uninstall ldomsmanager Packages to remove: 1 Create boot environment: No Create backup boot environment: No Services to change: 2 PHASE ACTIONS Removal Phase 130/130 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 1/1 Package Cache Update Phase 1/1 Image State Update Phase 2/2 Finally, LDoms 1.2 installed via its install script, the same way it was done years ago: # unzip LDoms-1_2-Integration-10.zip # cd LDoms-1_2-Integration-10/Install/ # ./install-ldm Welcome to the LDoms installer. You are about to install the Logical Domains Manager package that will enable you to create, destroy and control other domains on your system. Given the capabilities of the LDoms domain manager, you can now change the security configuration of this Solaris instance using the Solaris Security Toolkit. ... ... normal install messages omitted ... The Solaris Security Toolkit applies to Solaris 10, and cannot be used in Solaris 11 (in which several things hardened by the Toolkit are already hardened by default), so answer b in the choice below: You are about to install the Logical Domains Manager package that will enable you to create, destroy and control other domains on your system. Given the capabilities of the LDoms domain manager, you can now change the security configuration of this Solaris instance using the Solaris Security Toolkit. Select a security profile from this list: a) Hardened Solaris configuration for LDoms (recommended) b) Standard Solaris configuration c) Your custom-defined Solaris security configuration profile Enter a, b, or c [a]: b ... other install messages omitted for brevity... After install I ensure that the necessary services are enabled, and verify the version of the installed LDoms Manager: # svcs ldmd STATE STIME FMRI online 22:00:36 svc:/ldoms/ldmd:default # svcs vntsd STATE STIME FMRI disabled Aug_19 svc:/ldoms/vntsd:default # ldm -V Logical Domain Manager (v 1.2-debug) Hypervisor control protocol v 1.3 Using Hypervisor MD v 1.1 System PROM: Hypervisor v. 1.7.3. @(#)Hypervisor 1.7.3.c 2010/07/09 15:14\015 OpenBoot v. 4.30.4. @(#)OBP 4.30.4.b 2010/07/09 13:48 Set up control domain and domain services At this point we have a functioning LDoms 1.2 environment that can be configured in the usual fashion. One difference is that LDoms 1.2 behavior had 'delayed configuration mode (as expected) during initial configuration before rebooting the control domain. Another minor difference with a Solaris 11 control domain is that you define virtual switches using the 'vanity name' of the network interface, rather than the hardware driver name as in Solaris 10. # ldm list ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notice: the LDom Manager is running in configuration mode. Configuration and resource information is displayed for the configuration under construction; not the current active configuration. The configuration being constructed will only take effect after it is downloaded to the system controller and the host is reset. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-c-- SP 32 32640M 3.2% 4d 2h 50m # ldm add-vdiskserver primary-vds0 primary # ldm add-vconscon port-range=5000-5100 primary-vcc0 primary # ldm add-vswitch net-dev=net0 primary-vsw0 primary # ldm set-mau 2 primary # ldm set-vcpu 8 primary # ldm set-memory 4g primary # ldm add-config initial # ldm list-spconfig factory-default initial [current] That's it, really. After reboot, we are ready to install guest domains. Summary - new wine in old bottles This example shows that (new) Solaris 11 can be installed on (old) T2000 servers and used as a control domain. The main activity is to remove the preinstalled Oracle VM Server for 2.2 and install Logical Domains 1.2 - the last version of LDoms to support T1-processor systems. I tested Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 guest domains running on this server and they worked without any surprises. This is a viable way to get further into Solaris 11 adoption, even on older T-series equipment.

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• In Case You Weren’t There: Blogwell NYC

  - by Mike Stiles

  0 0 1 1009 5755 Vitrue 47 13 6751 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA 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-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:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Your roving reporter roved out to another one of Socialmedia.org’s fantastic Blogwell events, this time in NYC. As Central Park and incredible weather beckoned, some of the biggest brand names in the world gathered to talk about how they’re incorporating social into marketing and CRM, as well as extending social across their entire organizations internally. Below we present a collection of the live tweets from many of the key sessions GE @generalelectricJon Lombardo, Leader of Social Media COE How GE builds and extends emotional connections with consumers around health and reaps the benefits of increased brand equity in the process. GE has a social platform around Healthyimagination to create better health for people. If you and a friend are trying to get healthy together, you’ll do better. Health is inherently. Get health challenges via Facebook and share with friends to achieve goals together. They’re creating an emotional connection around the health context. You don’t influence people at large. Your sphere of real influence is around 5-10 people. They find relevant conversations about health on Twitter and engage sounding like a friend, not a brand. Why would people share on behalf of a brand? Because you tapped into an activity and emotion they’re already having. To create better habits in health, GE gave away inexpensive, relevant gifts related to their goals. Create the context, give the relevant gift, get social acknowledgment for giving it. What you get when you get acknowledgment for your engagement and gift is user generated microcontent. GE got 12,000 unique users engaged and 1400 organic posts with the healthy gift campaign. The Dow Chemical Company @DowChemicalAbby Klanecky, Director of Digital & Social Media Learn how Dow Chemical is finding, training, and empowering their scientists to be their storytellers in social media. There are 1m jobs coming open in science. Only 200k are qualified for them. Dow Chemical wanted to use social to attract and talk to scientists. Dow Chemical decided to use real scientists as their storytellers. Scientists are incredibly passionate, the key ingredient of a great storyteller. Step 1 was getting scientists to focus on a few platforms, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn. Dow Chemical social flow is Core Digital Team - #CMs – ambassadors – advocates. The scientists were trained in social etiquette via practice scenarios. It’s not just about sales. It’s about growing influence and the business. Dow Chemical trained about 100 scientists, 55 are active and there’s a waiting list for the next sessions. In person social training produced faster results and better participation. Sometimes you have to tell pieces of the story instead of selling your execs on the whole vision. Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of TroubleAndy Sernovitz, CEO @SocialMediaOrg How do we get people to share our message for us? We have to have their trust. The difference between being honest and being sleazy is disclosure. Disclosure does not hurt the effectiveness of your marketing. No one will get mad if you tell them up front you’re a paid spokesperson for a company. It’s a legal requirement by the FTC, it’s the law, to disclose if you’re being paid for an endorsement. Require disclosure and truthfulness in all your social media outreach. Don’t lie to people. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements. Create social media policies and training programs. If you want to stay safe, never pay cash for social media. Money changes everything. As soon as you pay, it’s not social media, it’s advertising. Disclosure, to the feds, means clear, conspicuous, and understandable to the average reader. This phrase will keep you in the clear, “I work for ___ and this is my personal opinion.” Who are you? Were you paid? Are you giving an honest opinion based on a real experience? You as a brand are responsible for what an agency or employee or contactor does in your behalf. SocialMedia.org makes available a Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Socialmedia.org/disclosure. The point is to not ethically mess up and taint social media as happened to e-mail. Not only is the FTC cracking down, so is Google and Facebook. Visa @VisaNewsLucas Mast, Senior Business Leader, Global Corporate Social Media Visa built a mobile studio for the Olympics for execs and athletes. They wanted to do postcard style real time coverage of Visa’s Olympics sponsorships, and on a shoestring. Challenges included Olympic rules, difficulty getting interviews, time zone trouble, and resourcing. Another problem was they got bogged down with their own internal approval processes. Despite all the restrictions, they created and published a variety of and fair amount of content. They amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to the Visa Communication YouTube channel. Less corporate content yields more interest from media outlets and bloggers. They did real world video demos of how their products work in the field vs. an exec doing a demo in a studio. Don’t make exec interview videos dull and corporate. Keep answers short, shoot it in an interesting place, do takes until they’re comfortable and natural. Not everything will work. Not everything will get a retweet. But like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. Promoting content is as important as creating it. McGraw-Hill Companies @McGrawHillCosPatrick Durando, Senior Director of Global New Media McGraw-Hill has 26,000 employees. McGraw-Hill created a social intranet called Buzz. Intranets create operational efficiency, help product dev, facilitate crowdsourcing, and breaks down geo silos. Intranets help with talent development, acquisition, retention. They replaced the corporate directory with their own version of LinkedIn. The company intranet has really cut down on the use of email. Long email threats become organized, permanent social discussions. The intranet is particularly useful in HR for researching and getting answers surrounding benefits and policies. Using a profile on your company intranet can establish and promote your internal professional brand. If you’re going to make an intranet, it has to look great, work great, and employees are going have to want to go there. You can’t order them to like it. 

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 06, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 06, 2011Popular ReleasesSharepoint 2010 Diagnostic Log Compression: Sharepoint 2010 Diagnostic Log Compression v1.0: ====================== Requirements: Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 Foundation or Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 Server Release Version : 1.0PowerShell SQL Developer Tools: SQLDevTools_Module (folder) Version 0.1.0: SQLDevTools Module version 0.1.0(alpha release) Just unzip the file and move the folder "SQLDevTools" into your User "WindowsPowerShell\Modules" folder. "C:\Users\UserName...\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\SQLDevTools" Then, to load *module at either the PowerShell Console or ISE, use: Import-Module SQLDevTools To remove module use: Remove-Module SQLDevTools Again, you need have SQL Server 2008 (or above). or the standalone version of "SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 " installed ...ShowUI: Write-UI -in PowerShell: ShowUI: ShowUI is a PowerShell module to help you write rich user interfaces in script.SQL Compact Query Analyzer: Build 0.2.0.0: Beta build of SQL Compact Query Analyzer Features: - Execute SQL Queries against a SQL Server Compact Edition database - Easily edit the contents of the database - Supports SQLCE 3.5 and 4.0 Prerequisites: - .NET Framework 4.0Media Companion: MC 3.405b weekly: Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. Refer to the documentation on this site for the Installation & Setup Guide Important! If you are upgrading from a version of MC before 3.404 then..... Due to an issue where the date added & the full genre information was not being read into the Movie cache, it is highly recommended that you perform a Rebuild Movies when first running this latest version. This will read in the information from the ...Babylon Toolkit: Babylon.Toolkit v1.0.4: Note about samples: In order to run samples, you need to configure visual studio to run them as an "Out-of-browser application". in order to do that, go to the property page of a sample project, go to the Debug tab, and check the "Out-of-browser application" radio. New features : New Effects BasicEffect3Lights (3 dir lights instead of 1 position light) CartoonEffect (work in progress) SkinnedEffect (with normal and specular map support) SplattingEffect (for multi-texturing with smooth ...SizeOnDisk: 1.0.8.2: With installerTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v2.5: Added new items associated with Terraria v1.0.3 to the character editor. Fixed multiple bugs with Piggy Bank EditorySterling NoSQL OODB for .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4 and 5, and Windows Phone 7: Sterling OODB v1.5: Welcome to the Sterling 1.5 RTM. This version is backwards compatible without modification to the 1.4 beta. For the 1.0, you will need to upgrade your database. Please see this discussion for details. You must modify your 1.0 code for persistence. The 1.5 version defaults to an in-memory driver. To save to isolated storage or use one of the new mechanisms, see the available drivers and pass an instance of the appropriate one to your database (different databases may use different drivers). ...patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 10 - June 3, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To install and run the reference implementation, you must perform the fol...Claims Based Identity & Access Control Guide: Release Candidate: Highlights of this release This is the release candidate drop of the new "Claims Identity Guide" edition. In this release you will find: All code samples, including all ACS v2: ACS as a Federation Provider - Showing authentication with LiveID, Google, etc. ACS as a FP with Multiple Business Partners. ACS and REST endpoints. Using a WP7 client with REST endpoints. All ACS specific chapters. Two new chapters on SharePoint (SSO and Federation) All revised v1 chapters We are now ...Terraria Map Generator: TerrariaMapTool 1.0.0.4 Beta: 1) Fixed the generated map.html file so that the file:/// is included in the base path. 2) Added the ability to use parallelization during generation. This will cause the program to use as many threads as there are physical cores. 3) Fixed some background overdraw.Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight and WP7 made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.1 RTW: Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies Samples Changes.txt License.txt Release Highlights For WP7A new Tombstoning API based on ideas from Fluent NHibernate A new Launcher/Chooser API Strongly typed Navigation SimpleContainer included The full phone lifecycle is made easy to work with ie. we figure out whether your app is actually Resurrecting or just Continuing for you For WPFSupport for the Client Profile Better support for WinForms integration All PlatformsA power...VidCoder: 0.9.1: Added color coding to the Log window. Errors are highlighted in red, HandBrake logs are in black and VidCoder logs are in dark blue. Moved enqueue button to the right with the other control buttons. Added logic to report failures when errors are logged during the encode or when the encode finishes prematurely. Added Copy button to Log window. Adjusted audio track selection box to always show the full track name. Changed encode job progress bar to also be colored yellow when the enco...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v2.0.1: - Fixed a small bug in Auto Login - Fixed the updaterEPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the server: EPPlus 2.9.0.1: EPPlus-Create advanced Excel 2007 spreadsheets on the server This version has been updated to .Net Framework 3.5 New Features Data Validation. PivotTables (Basic functionalliy...) Support for worksheet data sources. Column, Row, Page and Data fields. Date and Numeric grouping Build in styles. ...and more And some minor new features... Ranges Text-Property|Get the formated value AutofitColumns-method to set the column width from the content of the range LoadFromCollection-metho...jQuery ASP.Net MVC Controls: Version 1.4.0.0: Version 1.4.0.0 contains the following additions: Upgraded to MVC 3.0 Upgraded to jQuery 1.6.1 (Though the project supports all jQuery version from 1.4.x onwards) Upgraded to jqGrid 3.8 Better Razor View-Engine support Better Pager support, includes support for custom pagers Added jqGrid toolbar buttons support Search module refactored, with full suport for multiple filters and ordering And Code cleanup, bug-fixes and better controller configuration support.NetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.8b: Changes: - fix critical issue 15922(AccessViolationException) once and for all ...update is strongly recommended Known Issues: - some addin ribbon examples has a COM Register function with missing codebase entry(win32 registry) ...the problem is only affected to c# examples. fixed in latest source code. NetOffice\ReleaseTags\NetOffice Release 0.8.rar Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:...................Serviio for Windows Home Server: Beta Release 0.5.2.0: Ready for widespread beta. Synchronized build number to Serviio version to avoid confusion.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta4: ??AcDown?????????????，??????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta4 2011-5-31?? ???Bilibili.us????? ???? ?? ???"????" ???Bilibili.us??? ??????? ?? ??????? ?? ???????? ?? ?? ???Bilibili.us?????(??????????????????) ??????(6.cn)?????(????) ?? ?????Acfun?????????? ?????????????? ???QQ???????? ????????????Discussion...New Projects.NET library for Audiogalaxy: AgNet is a .NET Client library for the Audiogalaxy APIAsuro scanner: A asuro programm which can recognize light values and perform predefined actions for them. This was realised for school project.AutoComplete.Net (for Asp.Net and Asp.Net MVC): AutoComplete.Net is a wrapper around the JQuery UI Autocomplete widget. It makes it easier to add autocomplete functionalities without having to bother with tons of javascript. Includes a WebControl for your Asp.Net web applications and a bunch of extension methods for your Asp.Net MVC web applications. Their purpose is to provide developers with an easy interface to the cool JQuery UI autocomplete Widget. It's developed in C#.AveSoft Advance Keylogger: Free and completely open source keystroke logging application, allows you to capture and record all keyboard input to file. Program is extremely small and lightweight, can run in a hidden mode, upload log file to specified web server. Due to open source nature, software is secure and transparent. Main Features Captures all keyboard input Caching and low level hooks uses minimal amount of CPU cycles Highly customizable Hidden mode Windows integration Log file...DDDProjector: DDDPrjector ?、DDD (Domain Driven Design: ????????) ?????????????????????????????????????、C# ???????????????????。 ???????????????????? C# ????????????????、??????????????????????????。 O/R ?????? NHibernate ??????。DogTouch: DogTouchEVMDOCS Reports: This project contain diploma of student VSTU. The project is devoted to automating the learning process at the university. Contains reports in OpenOfficeFidely - Search Query Compilation Framework: Fidely is a framework to implement a search query compiler that parses a search query string and builds up an expression tree (Expression<Func<T, bool>>) to filter a collection object. Fidely allows you to customize processes of parsing a query string and building up an expression tree, so you can create various search query compilers. The goal of this project is to make it easy to implement collection filtering features into your application.Frets: Frets is a library for creating and printing guitar chord diagrams. FuncLib: C# automatic differentiation library, transparent use with operator overloading, unlimited order of differentiation and unlimited number of variables, on-the-fly function compilation to IL code for very fast evaluation.ITAP: a management system for HCM IU's IELTS simulation examjQXB/M Expression Binder: JQ Expression Binder is a lightweigth framework (10 kbytes) for the association between javascript objects and HTML elements. Based on jQuery provides a natural and flexible way to process the data exchanged between client and server in a real WEB 2.0 paradigm. Using a few custom attributes to decorate yout HTML tags now you are enabled to take complete control over the managing of your business data directly inside yours web pages. Easy integration with ASP.NET WEBForm web applications, ...Log Processor: This software helps you to automatically analyze and process data in files (such as plain text logs, binary dumps...) based on : - plugins (for multiple input/output file types support) - plain text rules files (for a complete customization of the analysis needed) You'll then be able to easily produce stats reports from you application logs.MiniIndexer: A web application the demonstrates how to make a simple indexing search engine backed by a relational database. Monads: Monads helpers for .NET, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7.Movie Browser: Movie Browser helps collecting information from imdb and manage personal movie folders.Opc Configurable Xml Server/Service (OCXS): A Microsoft .NET 4.0 C# OPC XML Data Access 1.0 Server/ServiceSQL DAL: Data access layerTankMate: A simple Visual Basic application that lists and manages all your fish tanks. software initially designed to list fish tanks and enter their width/height/depth in inches and it display their volume in litres tank calculator was then expanded to alert if water needs changing after set interval of days number of days between changes is settable for each tank any sound file can be used for alert sounds has online update feature to keep it up to date Twoosh!: Simply, a fully-functional Twitter client for Windows... Twoosh makes it easier for Tweeple to Tweet. You'll no longer have to wait for the Twitter page to load or see the fail whale error page. It's developed in Visual Basic .NET 2008.WCF RIA Services for Azure Tables and SQL/Azure: Th project demos RIA services with POCO objects using two different back end data storage technologies, SQL/Azure and Azure Table Storage. The example shows a simple association between two tables - department and employee for read, insert and update operationsWindows Azure Storage Console Client: Windows Azure Storage Console ClientXNA 4.0 VirtualCompass: VirtualCompass is an incredibly simple and easy to use library for path finding in Microsoft's XNA 4.0 . It implements A* (A-star) path finding techniques to find the shortest path. This is an alpha status project. Limited testing and optimization thus far. Developed in C#.

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• How to free up space on /boot? [closed]

  - by Phrogz

  Possible Duplicate: Free up more space on /boot I logged onto my server today to find the message: => /boot is using 98.9% of 91MB When I look at /boot I see that it is indeed very low on space, and has old-kernel files in it: phrogz@planar:~$ df -h /boot Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 92M 54M 33M 63% /boot phrogz@planar:~$ la /boot total 81880 drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 3072 2011-12-02 06:26 ./ drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 2011-09-29 06:37 ../ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 646419 2011-03-01 19:02 abi-2.6.32-30-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 646419 2011-04-08 17:07 abi-2.6.32-31-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 646454 2011-04-20 16:53 abi-2.6.32-32-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 646454 2011-07-29 16:07 abi-2.6.32-33-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 646710 2011-09-13 18:00 abi-2.6.32-34-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 646820 2011-10-11 11:10 abi-2.6.32-35-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 110687 2011-03-01 19:02 config-2.6.32-30-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 110676 2011-04-08 17:07 config-2.6.32-31-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 110687 2011-04-20 16:53 config-2.6.32-32-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 110687 2011-07-29 16:07 config-2.6.32-33-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 110687 2011-09-13 18:00 config-2.6.32-34-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 110687 2011-10-11 11:10 config-2.6.32-35-server drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 6144 2011-12-02 06:26 grub/ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8258196 2011-05-18 11:58 initrd.img-2.6.32-30-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8259568 2011-05-23 20:24 initrd.img-2.6.32-31-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8257374 2011-05-30 07:47 initrd.img-2.6.32-32-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8287489 2011-08-10 06:37 initrd.img-2.6.32-33-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8288075 2011-09-29 06:37 initrd.img-2.6.32-34-server drwx------ 2 root root 12288 2011-05-18 11:46 lost+found/ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 160280 2010-03-23 03:40 memtest86+.bin -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2179117 2011-03-01 19:02 System.map-2.6.32-30-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2179628 2011-04-08 17:07 System.map-2.6.32-31-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2178240 2011-04-20 16:53 System.map-2.6.32-32-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2178382 2011-07-29 16:07 System.map-2.6.32-33-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2178952 2011-09-13 18:00 System.map-2.6.32-34-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2179333 2011-10-11 11:10 System.map-2.6.32-35-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1336 2011-03-01 19:08 vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-30-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1336 2011-04-08 17:13 vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-31-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1336 2011-04-20 16:54 vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-32-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1336 2011-07-29 16:08 vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-33-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1336 2011-09-13 18:03 vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-34-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1336 2011-10-11 11:11 vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-35-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4111552 2011-03-01 19:02 vmlinuz-2.6.32-30-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4113344 2011-04-08 17:07 vmlinuz-2.6.32-31-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4106528 2011-04-20 16:53 vmlinuz-2.6.32-32-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4107648 2011-07-29 16:07 vmlinuz-2.6.32-33-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4108960 2011-09-13 18:00 vmlinuz-2.6.32-34-server -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4111040 2011-10-11 11:10 vmlinuz-2.6.32-35-server I was able to find the old kernel packages like so: phrogz@planar:/boot$ dpkg -l | grep linux-image ii linux-image-2.6.32-30-server 2.6.32-30.59 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.32 on x86 ii linux-image-2.6.32-31-server 2.6.32-31.61 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.32 on x86 ii linux-image-2.6.32-32-server 2.6.32-32.62 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.32 on x86 ii linux-image-2.6.32-33-server 2.6.32-33.72 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.32 on x86 ii linux-image-2.6.32-34-server 2.6.32-34.77 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.32 on x86 iF linux-image-2.6.32-35-server 2.6.32-35.78 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.32 on x86 iU linux-image-server 2.6.32.36.42 Linux kernel image on Server Equipment. …and I can see that many of them are older than my current image: phrogz@planar:/boot$ uname -a Linux planar 2.6.32-34-server #77-Ubuntu SMP Tue Sep 13 20:54:38 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux However, I can't actually remove them due to an unmet dependency: phrogz@planar:/boot$ sudo apt-get --purge remove linux-image-2.6.32-30-server Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies: linux-image-server: Depends: linux-image-2.6.32-36-server but it is not going to be installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). But I can't fix the dependency (presumably due to low disk space): phrogz@planar:/boot$ sudo apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: liblcms1 linux-headers-2.6.32-32-server libnspr4-0d linux-headers-2.6.32-33-server linux-headers-2.6.32-32 linux-headers-2.6.32-33 linux-headers-2.6.32-34 libcups2 tzdata-java libjpeg62 linux-headers-2.6.32-34-server libavahi-client3 ca-certificates-java libnss3-1d Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: linux-image-2.6.32-36-server Suggested packages: fdutils linux-doc-2.6.32 linux-source-2.6.32 linux-tools The following NEW packages will be installed: linux-image-2.6.32-36-server 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 8 not upgraded. 3 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0B/31.8MB of archives. After this operation, 128MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? (Reading database ... 145200 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking linux-image-2.6.32-36-server (from .../linux-image-2.6.32-36-server_2.6.32-36.79_amd64.deb) ... Done. dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-image-2.6.32-36-server_2.6.32-36.79_amd64.deb (--unpack): failed in buffer_write(fd) (10, ret=-1): backend dpkg-deb during `./boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-36-server': No space left on device dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe) Running postrm hook script /usr/sbin/update-grub. Generating grub.cfg ... Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-35-server Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-34-server Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-34-server Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-33-server Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-33-server Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-32-server Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-32-server Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-31-server Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-31-server Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-30-server Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-30-server Found memtest86+ image: /memtest86+.bin done Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-image-2.6.32-36-server_2.6.32-36.79_amd64.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) How do I free up space on /boot so that I can fix my dependencies? Should I just delete the files manually? And then, should I resize my /boot to be larger, so this doesn't happen again? If so, how? If not, what maintenance should I be running regularly to prevent the accumulation of this cruft?

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• Improving Manageability of Virtual Environments

  - by Jeff Victor

  Boot Environments for Solaris 10 Branded Zones Until recently, Solaris 10 Branded Zones on Solaris 11 suffered one notable regression: Live Upgrade did not work. The individual packaging and patching tools work correctly, but the ability to upgrade Solaris while the production workload continued running did not exist. A recent Solaris 11 SRU (Solaris 11.1 SRU 6.4) restored most of that functionality, although with a slightly different concept, different commands, and without all of the feature details. This new method gives you the ability to create and manage multiple boot environments (BEs) for a Solaris 10 Branded Zone, and modify the active or any inactive BE, and to do so while the production workload continues to run. Background In case you are new to Solaris: Solaris includes a set of features that enables you to create a bootable Solaris image, called a Boot Environment (BE). This newly created image can be modified while the original BE is still running your workload(s). There are many benefits, including improved uptime and the ability to reboot into (or downgrade to) an older BE if a newer one has a problem. In Solaris 10 this set of features was named Live Upgrade. Solaris 11 applies the same basic concepts to the new packaging system (IPS) but there isn't a specific name for the feature set. The features are simply part of IPS. Solaris 11 Boot Environments are not discussed in this blog entry. Although a Solaris 10 system can have multiple BEs, until recently a Solaris 10 Branded Zone (BZ) in a Solaris 11 system did not have this ability. This limitation was addressed recently, and that enhancement is the subject of this blog entry. This new implementation uses two concepts. The first is the use of a ZFS clone for each BE. This makes it very easy to create a BE, or many BEs. This is a distinct advantage over the Live Upgrade feature set in Solaris 10, which had a practical limitation of two BEs on a system, when using UFS. The second new concept is a very simple mechanism to indicate the BE that should be booted: a ZFS property. The new ZFS property is named com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe (isn't that creative? ). It's important to note that the property is inherited from the original BE's file system to any BEs you create. In other words, all BEs in one zone have the same value for that property. When the (Solaris 11) global zone boots the Solaris 10 BZ, it boots the BE that has the name that is stored in the activebe property. Here is a quick summary of the actions you can use to manage these BEs: To create a BE: Create a ZFS clone of the zone's root dataset To activate a BE: Set the ZFS property of the root dataset to indicate the BE To add a package or patch to an inactive BE: Mount the inactive BE Add packages or patches to it Unmount the inactive BE To list the available BEs: Use the "zfs list" command. To destroy a BE: Use the "zfs destroy" command. Preparation Before you can use the new features, you will need a Solaris 10 BZ on a Solaris 11 system. You can use these three steps - on a real Solaris 11.1 server or in a VirtualBox guest running Solaris 11.1 - to create a Solaris 10 BZ. The Solaris 11.1 environment must be at SRU 6.4 or newer. Create a flash archive on the Solaris 10 system s10# flarcreate -n s10-system /net/zones/archives/s10-system.flar Configure the Solaris 10 BZ on the Solaris 11 system s11# zonecfg -z s10z Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone. zonecfg:s10z create -t SYSsolaris10 zonecfg:s10z set zonepath=/zones/s10z zonecfg:s10z exit s11# zoneadm list -cv ID NAME STATUS PATH BRAND IP 0 global running / solaris shared - s10z configured /zones/s10z solaris10 excl Install the zone from the flash archive s11# zoneadm -z s10z install -a /net/zones/archives/s10-system.flar -p You can find more information about the migration of Solaris 10 environments to Solaris 10 Branded Zones in the documentation. The rest of this blog entry demonstrates the commands you can use to accomplish the aforementioned actions related to BEs. New features in action Note that the demonstration of the commands occurs in the Solaris 10 BZ, as indicated by the shell prompt "s10z# ". Many of these commands can be performed in the global zone instead, if you prefer. If you perform them in the global zone, you must change the ZFS file system names. Create The only complicated action is the creation of a BE. In the Solaris 10 BZ, create a new "boot environment" - a ZFS clone. You can assign any name to the final portion of the clone's name, as long as it meets the requirements for a ZFS file system name. s10z# zfs snapshot rpool/ROOT/zbe-0@snap s10z# zfs clone -o mountpoint=/ -o canmount=noauto rpool/ROOT/zbe-0@snap rpool/ROOT/newBE cannot mount 'rpool/ROOT/newBE' on '/': directory is not empty filesystem successfully created, but not mounted You can safely ignore that message: we already know that / is not empty! We have merely told ZFS that the default mountpoint for the clone is the root directory. List the available BEs and active BE Because each BE is represented by a clone of the rpool/ROOT dataset, listing the BEs is as simple as listing the clones. s10z# zfs list -r rpool/ROOT NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT rpool/ROOT 3.55G 42.9G 31K legacy rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 1K 42.9G 3.55G / rpool/ROOT/newBE 3.55G 42.9G 3.55G / The output shows that two BEs exist. Their names are "zbe-0" and "newBE". You can tell Solaris that one particular BE should be used when the zone next boots by using a ZFS property. Its name is com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe. The value of that property is the name of the clone that contains the BE that should be booted. s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe zbe-0 local Change the active BE When you want to change the BE that will be booted next time, you can just change the activebe property on the rpool/ROOT dataset. s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe zbe-0 local s10z# zfs set com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe=newBE rpool/ROOT s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe newBE local s10z# shutdown -y -g0 -i6 After the zone has rebooted: s10z# zfs get com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe rpool/ROOT rpool/ROOT com.oracle.zones.solaris10:activebe newBE local s10z# zfs mount rpool/ROOT/newBE / rpool/export /export rpool/export/home /export/home rpool /rpool Mount the original BE to see that it's still there. s10z# zfs mount -o mountpoint=/mnt rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 s10z# ls /mnt Desktop export platform Documents export.backup.20130607T214951Z proc S10Flar home rpool TT_DB kernel sbin bin lib system boot lost+found tmp cdrom mnt usr dev net var etc opt Patch an inactive BE At this point, you can modify the original BE. If you would prefer to modify the new BE, you can restore the original value to the activebe property and reboot, and then mount the new BE to /mnt (or another empty directory) and modify it. Let's mount the original BE so we can modify it. (The first command is only needed if you haven't already mounted that BE.) s10z# zfs mount -o mountpoint=/mnt rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 s10z# patchadd -R /mnt -M /var/sadm/spool 104945-02 Note that the typical usage will be: Create a BE Mount the new (inactive) BE Use the package and patch tools to update the new BE Unmount the new BE Reboot Delete an inactive BE ZFS clones are children of their parent file systems. In order to destroy the parent, you must first "promote" the child. This reverses the parent-child relationship. (For more information on this, see the documentation.) The original rpool/ROOT file system is the parent of the clones that you create as BEs. In order to destroy an earlier BE that is that parent of other BEs, you must first promote one of the child BEs to be the ZFS parent. Only then can you destroy the original BE. Fortunately, this is easier to do than to explain: s10z# zfs promote rpool/ROOT/newBE s10z# zfs destroy rpool/ROOT/zbe-0 s10z# zfs list -r rpool/ROOT NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT rpool/ROOT 3.56G 269G 31K legacy rpool/ROOT/newBE 3.56G 269G 3.55G / Documentation This feature is so new, it is not yet described in the Solaris 11 documentation. However, MOS note 1558773.1 offers some details. Conclusion With this new feature, you can add and patch packages to boot environments of a Solaris 10 Branded Zone. This ability improves the manageability of these zones, and makes their use more practical. It also means that you can use the existing P2V tools with earlier Solaris 10 updates, and modify the environments after they become Solaris 10 Branded Zones.

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• NVIDIA x server - "sudo nvidia config" does not generate a working 'xorg.config'

  - by Mike

  I am over 18 hours deep on this challenge. I got to this point and am stuck. very stuck. Maybe you can figure it out? Ubuntu Version 12.04 LTS with all the updates installed. Problem: The default settings in "etc/X11/xorg.conf" that are generated by the "nvidia-xconfig" tool, do not allow the NVIDIA x server to connect to the driver in my "System Settings Additional Driver window". (that's how I understand it. Lots of information below). Symptoms of Problem "System Settings Additional Driver" window has drivers, but the nvidia x server cannot connect/utilize any of the 4 drivers. the drivers are activated, but not in use. When I go to "System Tools Administration NVIDIA x server settings" I get an error that basically tells me to create a default file to initialize the NVIDIA X server (screen shot below). This is the messages the terminal gives after running a "sudo nvidia-xconfig" command for the first time. It seems that the generated file by the tool i just ran is generating a bad/unusable file: If I run the "sudo nvidia-xconfig" command again, I wont get an error the second time. However when I reboot, the default file that is generated (etc/X11/xorg.conf) simply puts the screen resolution at 800 x 600 (or something big like that). When I try to go to NVIDIA x server settings I am greeted with the same screen as the screen shot as in symptom 2 (no option to change the resolution). If I try to go to "system settings display" there are no other resolutions to choose from. At this point I must delete the newly minted "xorg.conf" and reinstate the original in its place. Here are the contents of the "xorg.conf" that is generated first (the one missing required information): # nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig # nvidia-xconfig: version 304.88 (buildmeister@swio-display-x86-rhel47-06) Wed Mar 27 15:32:58 PDT 2013 Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 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 Hardware: I ran the "lspci|grep VGA". There results are: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [Quadro 1000M] (rev a1) More Hardware info: Ram: 16GB CPU: Intel Core i7-2720QM @2.2GHz * 8 Other: 64 bit. This is a triple boot computer and not a VM. Attempts With Not Success on My End: 1) Tried to append the "xorg.conf" with what I perceive is missing information and obviously it didn't fly. 2) All the other stuff I tried got me to this point. 3) See if this link is helpful to you (I barely get it, but i get enough knowing that a smarter person might find this useful): http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man1/nvidia-xconfig.1.html 4) I am completely new to Linux (40 hours over past week), but not to programming. However I am very serious about changing over to Linux. When you respond (I hope someone responds...) please respond in a way that a person new to Linux can understand. 5) By the way, the reason I am in this mess is because I MUST have a second monitor running from my laptop, and "System Settings Display" doesn't recognize my second display. I know it is possible to make the second display work in my system, because when I boot from the install CD, I perform work on the native laptop monitor, but the second monitor shows a purple screen with Ubuntu in the middle, so I know the VGA port is sending a signal out. If this is too much for you to tackle please suggest an alternative method to get a second display. I don't want to go to windows but I cannot have a single display. I am really fudged here. I hope some smart person can help. Thanks in advance. Mike. **********************EDIT #1********************** More Details About Graphics Card I was asked "which brand of nvidia-card do you have exactly?" Here is what I did to provide more info (maybe relevant, maybe not, but here is everything): 1) Took my Lenovo W520 right apart to see if there is an identifier on the actual card. However I realized that if I get deep enough to take a look, the laptop "won't like it". so I put it back together. Figuring out the card this way is not an option for me right now. 2) (My computer is triple boot) I logged into Win7 and ran 'dxdiag' command. here is the screen shot: 3) I tried to look on the lenovo website for more details... but no luck. I took a look at my receipts and here is info form receipt: System Unit: W520 NVIDIA Quadro 1000M 2GB 4) In win7 I went to the NVIDIA website and used the option to have my card 'scanned' by a Java applet to determine the latest update for my card. I tried the same with Ubuntu but I can't get the applet to run. Here is the recommended driver from from the NVIDIA Applet for my card for Win7 (I hope this shines some light on the specifics of the card): Quadro/NVS/Tesla/GRID Desktop Driver Release R319 Version: 320.00 WHQL Release Date: 3.5.2013 5) Also I went on the NVIDIA driver search and looked through every possible combination of product type + product series + product to find all the combinations that yield a 1000M card. My card is: Product Type: Quadro Product Series: Quadro Series (Notebooks) Product: 1000M ***********************EDIT #2******************* Additional Symptoms Another question that generated more symptoms I previously didn't mention was: "After generating xorg.conf by nvidia-xconfig, go to additional drivers, do you see nvidia-304?" 1) I took a screen shot of the "additional drivers" right after generating xorg.conf by nvidia-xconfig. Here it is: 2) Then I did a reboot. Now Ubuntu is 600 x 800 resolution. When I logged in after the computer came up I got an error (which I always get after generating xorg.conf by nvidia-xconfig and rebooting) 3) To finally answer the question - No. There is no "NVIDIA-304" driver. Screen shot of additional drivers after generating xorg.conf by nvidia-xconfig and rebooting : At this point I revert to the original xorg.conf and delete the xorg.conf generated by Nvidia.

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• Creating ASP.NET MVC Negotiated Content Results

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• Windows Azure Service Bus Scatter-Gather Implementation

  - by Alan Smith

  One of the more challenging enterprise integration patterns that developers may wish to implement is the Scatter-Gather pattern. In this article I will show the basic implementation of a scatter-gather pattern using the topic-subscription model of the windows azure service bus. I’ll be using the implementation in demos, and also as a lab in my training courses, and the pattern will also be included in the next release of my free e-book the “Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide”. The Scatter-Gather pattern answers the following scenario. How do you maintain the overall message flow when a message needs to be sent to multiple recipients, each of which may send a reply? Use a Scatter-Gather that broadcasts a message to multiple recipients and re-aggregates the responses back into a single message. The Enterprise Integration Patterns website provides a description of the Scatter-Gather pattern here.   The scatter-gather pattern uses a composite of the publish-subscribe channel pattern and the aggregator pattern. The publish-subscribe channel is used to broadcast messages to a number of receivers, and the aggregator is used to gather the response messages and aggregate them together to form a single message. Scatter-Gather Scenario The scenario for this scatter-gather implementation is an application that allows users to answer questions in a poll based voting scenario. A poll manager application will be used to broadcast questions to users, the users will use a voting application that will receive and display the questions and send the votes back to the poll manager. The poll manager application will receive the users’ votes and aggregate them together to display the results. The scenario should be able to scale to support a large number of users.   Scatter-Gather Implementation The diagram below shows the overall architecture for the scatter-gather implementation.       Messaging Entities Looking at the scatter-gather pattern diagram it can be seen that the topic-subscription architecture is well suited for broadcasting a message to a number of subscribers. The poll manager application can send the question messages to a topic, and each voting application can receive the question message on its own subscription. The static limit of 2,000 subscriptions per topic in the current release means that 2,000 voting applications can receive question messages and take part in voting. The vote messages can then be sent to the poll manager application using a queue. The voting applications will send their vote messages to the queue, and the poll manager will receive and process the vote messages. The questions topic and answer queue are created using the Windows Azure Developer Portal. Each instance of the voting application will create its own subscription in the questions topic when it starts, allowing the question messages to be broadcast to all subscribing voting applications. Data Contracts Two simple data contracts will be used to serialize the questions and votes as brokered messages. The code for these is shown below.   [DataContract] public class Question {     [DataMember]     public string QuestionText { get; set; } }     To keep the implementation of the voting functionality simple and focus on the pattern implementation, the users can only vote yes or no to the questions.   [DataContract] public class Vote {     [DataMember]     public string QuestionText { get; set; }       [DataMember]     public bool IsYes { get; set; } }     Poll Manager Application The poll manager application has been implemented as a simple WPF application; the user interface is shown below. A question can be entered in the text box, and sent to the topic by clicking the Add button. The topic and subscriptions used for broadcasting the messages are shown in a TreeView control. The questions that have been broadcast and the resulting votes are shown in a ListView control. When the application is started any existing subscriptions are cleared form the topic, clients are then created for the questions topic and votes queue, along with background workers for receiving and processing the vote messages, and updating the display of subscriptions.   public MainWindow() {     InitializeComponent();       // Create a new results list and data bind it.     Results = new ObservableCollection<Result>();     lsvResults.ItemsSource = Results;       // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Clear out any old subscriptions.     NamespaceManager = new NamespaceManager(serviceBusUri, credentials);     IEnumerable<SubscriptionDescription> subs =         NamespaceManager.GetSubscriptions(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic);     foreach (SubscriptionDescription sub in subs)     {         NamespaceManager.DeleteSubscription(sub.TopicPath, sub.Name);     }       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Create the topic and queue clients.     ScatterGatherTopicClient =         factory.CreateTopicClient(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic);     ScatterGatherQueueClient =         factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherQueue);       // Start the background worker threads.     VotesBackgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();     VotesBackgroundWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(ReceiveMessages);     VotesBackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync();       SubscriptionsBackgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();     SubscriptionsBackgroundWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(UpdateSubscriptions);     SubscriptionsBackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync(); }     When the poll manager user nters a question in the text box and clicks the Add button a question message is created and sent to the topic. This message will be broadcast to all the subscribing voting applications. An instance of the Result class is also created to keep track of the votes cast, this is then added to an observable collection named Results, which is data-bound to the ListView control.   private void btnAddQuestion_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Create a new result for recording votes.     Result result = new Result()     {         Question = txtQuestion.Text     };     Results.Add(result);       // Send the question to the topic     Question question = new Question()     {         QuestionText = result.Question     };     BrokeredMessage msg = new BrokeredMessage(question);     ScatterGatherTopicClient.Send(msg);       txtQuestion.Text = ""; }     The Results class is implemented as follows.   public class Result : INotifyPropertyChanged {     public string Question { get; set; }       private int m_YesVotes;     private int m_NoVotes;       public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;       public int YesVotes     {         get { return m_YesVotes; }         set         {             m_YesVotes = value;             NotifyPropertyChanged("YesVotes");         }     }       public int NoVotes     {         get { return m_NoVotes; }         set         {             m_NoVotes = value;             NotifyPropertyChanged("NoVotes");         }     }       private void NotifyPropertyChanged(string prop)     {         if(PropertyChanged != null)         {             PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(prop));         }     } }     The INotifyPropertyChanged interface is implemented so that changes to the number of yes and no votes will be updated in the ListView control. Receiving the vote messages from the voting applications is done asynchronously, using a background worker thread.   // This runs on a background worker. private void ReceiveMessages(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while (true)     {         // Receive a vote message from the queue         BrokeredMessage msg = ScatterGatherQueueClient.Receive();         if (msg != null)         {             // Deserialize the message.             Vote vote = msg.GetBody<Vote>();               // Update the results.             foreach (Result result in Results)             {                 if (result.Question.Equals(vote.QuestionText))                 {                     if (vote.IsYes)                     {                         result.YesVotes++;                     }                     else                     {                         result.NoVotes++;                     }                     break;                 }             }               // Mark the message as complete.             msg.Complete();         }       } }     When a vote message is received, the result that matches the vote question is updated with the vote from the user. The message is then marked as complete. A second background thread is used to update the display of subscriptions in the TreeView, with a dispatcher used to update the user interface. // This runs on a background worker. private void UpdateSubscriptions(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while (true)     {         // Get a list of subscriptions.         IEnumerable<SubscriptionDescription> subscriptions =             NamespaceManager.GetSubscriptions(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic);           // Update the user interface.         SimpleDelegate setQuestion = delegate()         {             trvSubscriptions.Items.Clear();             TreeViewItem topicItem = new TreeViewItem()             {                 Header = AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic             };               foreach (SubscriptionDescription subscription in subscriptions)             {                 TreeViewItem subscriptionItem = new TreeViewItem()                 {                     Header = subscription.Name                 };                 topicItem.Items.Add(subscriptionItem);             }             trvSubscriptions.Items.Add(topicItem);               topicItem.ExpandSubtree();         };         this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Send, setQuestion);           Thread.Sleep(3000);     } }       Voting Application The voting application is implemented as another WPF application. This one is more basic, and allows the user to vote “Yes” or “No” for the questions sent by the poll manager application. The user interface for that application is shown below. When an instance of the voting application is created it will create a subscription in the questions topic using a GUID as the subscription name. The application can then receive copies of every question message that is sent to the topic. Clients for the new subscription and the votes queue are created, along with a background worker to receive the question messages. The voting application is set to receiving mode, meaning it is ready to receive a question message from the subscription.   public MainWindow() {     InitializeComponent();       // Set the mode to receiving.     IsReceiving = true;       // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Create a subcription for this instance     NamespaceManager mgr = new NamespaceManager(serviceBusUri, credentials);     string subscriptionName = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();     mgr.CreateSubscription(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic, subscriptionName);       // Create the subscription and queue clients.     ScatterGatherSubscriptionClient = factory.CreateSubscriptionClient         (AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic, subscriptionName);     ScatterGatherQueueClient =         factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherQueue);       // Start the background worker thread.     BackgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();     BackgroundWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(ReceiveMessages);     BackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync(); }     I took the inspiration for creating the subscriptions in the voting application from the chat application that uses topics and subscriptions blogged by Ovais Akhter here. The method that receives the question messages runs on a background thread. If the application is in receive mode, a question message will be received from the subscription, the question will be displayed in the user interface, the voting buttons enabled, and IsReceiving set to false to prevent more questing from being received before the current one is answered.   // This runs on a background worker. private void ReceiveMessages(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while (true)     {         if (IsReceiving)         {             // Receive a question message from the topic.             BrokeredMessage msg = ScatterGatherSubscriptionClient.Receive();             if (msg != null)             {                 // Deserialize the message.                 Question question = msg.GetBody<Question>();                   // Update the user interface.                 SimpleDelegate setQuestion = delegate()                 {                     lblQuestion.Content = question.QuestionText;                     btnYes.IsEnabled = true;                     btnNo.IsEnabled = true;                 };                 this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Send, setQuestion);                 IsReceiving = false;                   // Mark the message as complete.                 msg.Complete();             }         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }     } }     When the user clicks on the Yes or No button, the btnVote_Click method is called. This will create a new Vote data contract with the appropriate question and answer and send the message to the poll manager application using the votes queue. The user voting buttons are then disabled, the question text cleared, and the IsReceiving flag set to true to allow a new message to be received.   private void btnVote_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Create a new vote.     Vote vote = new Vote()     {         QuestionText = (string)lblQuestion.Content,         IsYes = ((sender as Button).Content as string).Equals("Yes")     };       // Send the vote message.     BrokeredMessage msg = new BrokeredMessage(vote);     ScatterGatherQueueClient.Send(msg);       // Update the user interface.     lblQuestion.Content = "";     btnYes.IsEnabled = false;     btnNo.IsEnabled = false;     IsReceiving = true; }     Testing the Application In order to test the application, an instance of the poll manager application is started; the user interface is shown below. As no instances of the voting application have been created there are no subscriptions present in the topic. When an instance of the voting application is created the subscription will be displayed in the poll manager. Now that a voting application is subscribing, a questing can be sent from the poll manager application. When the message is sent to the topic, the voting application will receive the message and display the question. The voter can then answer the question by clicking on the appropriate button. The results of the vote are updated in the poll manager application. When two more instances of the voting application are created, the poll manager will display the new subscriptions. More questions can then be broadcast to the voting applications. As the question messages are queued up in the subscription for each voting application, the users can answer the questions in their own time. The vote messages will be received by the poll manager application and aggregated to display the results. The screenshots of the applications part way through voting are shown below. The messages for each voting application are queued up in sequence on the voting application subscriptions, allowing the questions to be answered at different speeds by the voters.

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• Unable to boot Ubuntu 13.10 (nVidia GTX 770m and Intel HD 4600)

  - by Raziel Gonzalez

  Ever since I bought this laptop I've been trying to install Ubuntu on it. It came with W8 preinstalled. Up to this point, I've been able to boot in UEFI mode with a black screen. I can tell it's trying to use the nVidia card (there's a led on the computer, depending on the color you can tell which GPU is using) and if I press crtl+alt+F1 I can go to console mode. Taking this advantage I tried to install bumblebee and after a successful install the led that indicates which GPU is being used change, indicating that it switched to the Intel HD 4600 graphics. After the installation I tried to initiate the graphic interface (startx) with no success. Xorg.0.log shows the error: [ 3706.779] X.Org X Server 1.14.3 Release Date: 2013-09-12 [ 3706.782] X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 [ 3706.783] Build Operating System: Linux 3.2.0-37-generic x86_64 Ubuntu [ 3706.783] Current Operating System: Linux ubuntu 3.11.0-12-generic #19-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 9 16:20:46 UTC 2013 x86_64 [ 3706.783] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper nomodeset -- [ 3706.785] Build Date: 15 October 2013 09:23:37AM [ 3706.786] xorg-server 2:1.14.3-3ubuntu2 (For technical support please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support) [ 3706.786] Current version of pixman: 0.30.2 [ 3706.788] Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. [ 3706.788] Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. [ 3706.791] (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Sat Nov 2 12:28:52 2013 [ 3706.792] (==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d" [ 3706.792] (==) No Layout section. Using the first Screen section. [ 3706.792] (==) No screen section available. Using defaults. [ 3706.792] (**) |-->Screen "Default Screen Section" (0) [ 3706.792] (**) | |-->Monitor "<default monitor>" [ 3706.792] (==) No monitor specified for screen "Default Screen Section". Using a default monitor configuration. [ 3706.792] (==) Automatically adding devices [ 3706.792] (==) Automatically enabling devices [ 3706.792] (==) Automatically adding GPU devices [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (==) FontPath set to: /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, built-ins [ 3706.792] (==) ModulePath set to "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/modules" [ 3706.792] (II) The server relies on udev to provide the list of input devices. If no devices become available, reconfigure udev or disable AutoAddDevices. [ 3706.792] (II) Loader magic: 0x7ff680918d20 [ 3706.792] (II) Module ABI versions: [ 3706.792] X.Org ANSI C Emulation: 0.4 [ 3706.792] X.Org Video Driver: 14.1 [ 3706.792] X.Org XInput driver : 19.1 [ 3706.792] X.Org Server Extension : 7.0 [ 3706.793] (--) PCI:*(0:0:2:0) 8086:0416:1462:10e8 rev 6, Mem @ 0xf7400000/4194304, 0xb0000000/268435456, I/O @ 0x0000f000/64 [ 3706.793] (II) Open ACPI successful (/var/run/acpid.socket) [ 3706.794] Initializing built-in extension Generic Event Extension [ 3706.795] Initializing built-in extension SHAPE [ 3706.796] Initializing built-in extension MIT-SHM [ 3706.797] Initializing built-in extension XInputExtension [ 3706.797] Initializing built-in extension XTEST [ 3706.798] Initializing built-in extension BIG-REQUESTS [ 3706.799] Initializing built-in extension SYNC [ 3706.799] Initializing built-in extension XKEYBOARD [ 3706.800] Initializing built-in extension XC-MISC [ 3706.801] Initializing built-in extension SECURITY [ 3706.802] Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA [ 3706.802] Initializing built-in extension XFIXES [ 3706.803] Initializing built-in extension RENDER [ 3706.804] Initializing built-in extension RANDR [ 3706.804] Initializing built-in extension COMPOSITE [ 3706.805] Initializing built-in extension DAMAGE [ 3706.806] Initializing built-in extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER [ 3706.806] Initializing built-in extension DOUBLE-BUFFER [ 3706.807] Initializing built-in extension RECORD [ 3706.807] Initializing built-in extension DPMS [ 3706.808] Initializing built-in extension X-Resource [ 3706.809] Initializing built-in extension XVideo [ 3706.809] Initializing built-in extension XVideo-MotionCompensation [ 3706.810] Initializing built-in extension SELinux [ 3706.811] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-VidModeExtension [ 3706.811] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-DGA [ 3706.812] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-DRI [ 3706.812] Initializing built-in extension DRI2 [ 3706.812] (II) "glx" will be loaded by default. [ 3706.812] (WW) "xmir" is not to be loaded by default. Skipping. [ 3706.812] (II) LoadModule: "dri2" [ 3706.812] (II) Module "dri2" already built-in [ 3706.812] (II) LoadModule: "glamoregl" [ 3706.813] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so [ 3706.813] (II) Module glamoregl: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.813] compiled for 1.14.2.901, module version = 0.5.1 [ 3706.813] ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4 [ 3706.813] (II) LoadModule: "glx" [ 3706.813] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so [ 3706.813] (II) Module glx: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.813] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 1.0.0 [ 3706.813] ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 7.0 [ 3706.813] (==) AIGLX enabled [ 3706.814] Loading extension GLX [ 3706.814] (==) Matched intel as autoconfigured driver 0 [ 3706.814] (==) Matched vesa as autoconfigured driver 1 [ 3706.814] (==) Matched modesetting as autoconfigured driver 2 [ 3706.814] (==) Matched fbdev as autoconfigured driver 3 [ 3706.814] (==) Assigned the driver to the xf86ConfigLayout [ 3706.814] (II) LoadModule: "intel" [ 3706.814] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so [ 3706.814] (II) Module intel: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.814] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 2.99.904 [ 3706.814] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 3706.814] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.814] (II) LoadModule: "vesa" [ 3706.814] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vesa_drv.so [ 3706.814] (II) Module vesa: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.814] compiled for 1.14.1, module version = 2.3.2 [ 3706.814] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 3706.814] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.814] (II) LoadModule: "modesetting" [ 3706.814] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/modesetting_drv.so [ 3706.814] (II) Module modesetting: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.814] compiled for 1.14.1, module version = 0.8.0 [ 3706.814] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 3706.814] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.814] (II) LoadModule: "fbdev" [ 3706.814] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/fbdev_drv.so [ 3706.815] (II) Module fbdev: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.815] compiled for 1.14.1, module version = 0.4.3 [ 3706.815] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 3706.815] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.815] (II) intel: Driver for Intel(R) Integrated Graphics Chipsets: i810, i810-dc100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 854, 852GM/855GM, 865G, 915G, E7221 (i915), 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 945GME, Pineview GM, Pineview G, 965G, G35, 965Q, 946GZ, 965GM, 965GME/GLE, G33, Q35, Q33, GM45, 4 Series, G45/G43, Q45/Q43, G41, B43, HD Graphics, HD Graphics 2000, HD Graphics 3000, HD Graphics 2500, HD Graphics 4000, HD Graphics P4000, HD Graphics 4600, HD Graphics 5000, HD Graphics P4600/P4700, Iris(TM) Graphics 5100, HD Graphics 4400, HD Graphics 4200, Iris(TM) Pro Graphics 5200 [ 3706.815] (II) VESA: driver for VESA chipsets: vesa [ 3706.815] (II) modesetting: Driver for Modesetting Kernel Drivers: kms [ 3706.815] (II) FBDEV: driver for framebuffer: fbdev [ 3706.815] (--) using VT number 7 [ 3706.819] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for modesetting [ 3706.819] (EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory [ 3706.819] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fbdev [ 3706.819] (II) Loading sub module "fbdevhw" [ 3706.819] (II) LoadModule: "fbdevhw" [ 3706.819] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libfbdevhw.so [ 3706.819] (II) Module fbdevhw: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.819] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 0.0.2 [ 3706.819] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.819] (II) Loading sub module "vbe" [ 3706.819] (II) LoadModule: "vbe" [ 3706.819] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libvbe.so [ 3706.819] (II) Module vbe: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.819] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 1.1.0 [ 3706.819] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.819] (II) Loading sub module "int10" [ 3706.819] (II) LoadModule: "int10" [ 3706.819] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libint10.so [ 3706.819] (II) Module int10: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.819] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 1.0.0 [ 3706.819] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.819] (II) VESA(0): initializing int10 [ 3706.820] (EE) VESA(0): V_BIOS address 0x0 out of range [ 3706.820] (II) UnloadModule: "vesa" [ 3706.820] (II) UnloadSubModule: "int10" [ 3706.820] (II) Unloading int10 [ 3706.820] (II) UnloadSubModule: "vbe" [ 3706.820] (II) Unloading vbe [ 3706.820] (EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration. [ 3706.820] (EE) Fatal server error: [ 3706.820] (EE) no screens found(EE) [ 3706.820] (EE) Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help. [ 3706.820] (EE) Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information. [ 3706.820] (EE) [ 3706.827] (EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file. I also saved the dsmeg output to see if it can be of any help. In order to be able to get to this stage I had to boot with nomodeset option and removed quiet and splash. Anyone got this same error? Any guidance? I've tried other linux distros and so far the only one that is able to boot is Opensuse 12.3 without any issues (but only when I switch to legacy mode instead of UEFI).

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• Adding SQL Cache Dependencies to the Loosely coupled .NET Cache Provider

  - by Rhames

  This post adds SQL Cache Dependency support to the loosely coupled .NET Cache Provider that I described in the previous post (http://geekswithblogs.net/Rhames/archive/2012/09/11/loosely-coupled-.net-cache-provider-using-dependency-injection.aspx). The sample code is available on github at https://github.com/RobinHames/CacheProvider.git. Each time we want to apply a cache dependency to a call to fetch or cache a data item we need to supply an instance of the relevant dependency implementation. This suggests an Abstract Factory will be useful to create cache dependencies as needed. We can then use Dependency Injection to inject the factory into the relevant consumer. Castle Windsor provides a typed factory facility that will be utilised to implement the cache dependency abstract factory (see http://docs.castleproject.org/Windsor.Typed-Factory-Facility-interface-based-factories.ashx). Cache Dependency Interfaces First I created a set of cache dependency interfaces in the domain layer, which can be used to pass a cache dependency into the cache provider. ICacheDependency The ICacheDependency interface is simply an empty interface that is used as a parent for the specific cache dependency interfaces. This will allow us to place a generic constraint on the Cache Dependency Factory, and will give us a type that can be passed into the relevant Cache Provider methods. namespace CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheInterfaces { public interface ICacheDependency { } }   ISqlCacheDependency.cs The ISqlCacheDependency interface provides specific SQL caching details, such as a Sql Command or a database connection and table. It is the concrete implementation of this interface that will be created by the factory in passed into the Cache Provider. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text;   namespace CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheInterfaces { public interface ISqlCacheDependency : ICacheDependency { ISqlCacheDependency Initialise(string databaseConnectionName, string tableName); ISqlCacheDependency Initialise(System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand sqlCommand); } } If we want other types of cache dependencies, such as by key or file, interfaces may be created to support these (the sample code includes an IKeyCacheDependency interface). Modifying ICacheProvider to accept Cache Dependencies Next I modified the exisitng ICacheProvider<T> interface so that cache dependencies may be passed into a Fetch method call. I did this by adding two overloads to the existing Fetch methods, which take an IEnumerable<ICacheDependency> parameter (the IEnumerable allows more than one cache dependency to be included). I also added a method to create cache dependencies. This means that the implementation of the Cache Provider will require a dependency on the Cache Dependency Factory. It is pretty much down to personal choice as to whether this approach is taken, or whether the Cache Dependency Factory is injected directly into the repository or other consumer of Cache Provider. I think, because the cache dependency cannot be used without the Cache Provider, placing the dependency on the factory into the Cache Provider implementation is cleaner. ICacheProvider.cs using System; using System.Collections.Generic;   namespace CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheInterfaces { public interface ICacheProvider<T> { T Fetch(string key, Func<T> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry); T Fetch(string key, Func<T> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry, IEnumerable<ICacheDependency> cacheDependencies);   IEnumerable<T> Fetch(string key, Func<IEnumerable<T>> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry); IEnumerable<T> Fetch(string key, Func<IEnumerable<T>> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry, IEnumerable<ICacheDependency> cacheDependencies);   U CreateCacheDependency<U>() where U : ICacheDependency; } }   Cache Dependency Factory Next I created the interface for the Cache Dependency Factory in the domain layer. ICacheDependencyFactory.cs namespace CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheInterfaces { public interface ICacheDependencyFactory { T Create<T>() where T : ICacheDependency;   void Release<T>(T cacheDependency) where T : ICacheDependency; } }   I used the ICacheDependency parent interface as a generic constraint on the create and release methods in the factory interface. Now the interfaces are in place, I moved on to the concrete implementations. ISqlCacheDependency Concrete Implementation The concrete implementation of ISqlCacheDependency will need to provide an instance of System.Web.Caching.SqlCacheDependency to the Cache Provider implementation. Unfortunately this class is sealed, so I cannot simply inherit from this. Instead, I created an interface called IAspNetCacheDependency that will provide a Create method to create an instance of the relevant System.Web.Caching Cache Dependency type. This interface is specific to the ASP.NET implementation of the Cache Provider, so it should be defined in the same layer as the concrete implementation of the Cache Provider (the MVC UI layer in the sample code). IAspNetCacheDependency.cs using System.Web.Caching;   namespace CacheDiSample.CacheProviders { public interface IAspNetCacheDependency { CacheDependency CreateAspNetCacheDependency(); } }   Next, I created the concrete implementation of the ISqlCacheDependency interface. This class also implements the IAspNetCacheDependency interface. This concrete implementation also is defined in the same layer as the Cache Provider implementation. AspNetSqlCacheDependency.cs using System.Web.Caching; using CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheInterfaces;   namespace CacheDiSample.CacheProviders { public class AspNetSqlCacheDependency : ISqlCacheDependency, IAspNetCacheDependency { private string databaseConnectionName;   private string tableName;   private System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand sqlCommand;   #region ISqlCacheDependency Members   public ISqlCacheDependency Initialise(string databaseConnectionName, string tableName) { this.databaseConnectionName = databaseConnectionName; this.tableName = tableName; return this; }   public ISqlCacheDependency Initialise(System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand sqlCommand) { this.sqlCommand = sqlCommand; return this; }   #endregion   #region IAspNetCacheDependency Members   public System.Web.Caching.CacheDependency CreateAspNetCacheDependency() { if (sqlCommand != null) return new SqlCacheDependency(sqlCommand); else return new SqlCacheDependency(databaseConnectionName, tableName); }   #endregion   } }   ICacheProvider Concrete Implementation The ICacheProvider interface is implemented by the CacheProvider class. This implementation is modified to include the changes to the ICacheProvider interface. First I needed to inject the Cache Dependency Factory into the Cache Provider: private ICacheDependencyFactory cacheDependencyFactory;   public CacheProvider(ICacheDependencyFactory cacheDependencyFactory) { if (cacheDependencyFactory == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("cacheDependencyFactory");   this.cacheDependencyFactory = cacheDependencyFactory; }   Next I implemented the CreateCacheDependency method, which simply passes on the create request to the factory: public U CreateCacheDependency<U>() where U : ICacheDependency { return this.cacheDependencyFactory.Create<U>(); }   The signature of the FetchAndCache helper method was modified to take an additional IEnumerable<ICacheDependency> parameter:   private U FetchAndCache<U>(string key, Func<U> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry, IEnumerable<ICacheDependency> cacheDependencies) and the following code added to create the relevant System.Web.Caching.CacheDependency object for any dependencies and pass them to the HttpContext Cache: CacheDependency aspNetCacheDependencies = null;   if (cacheDependencies != null) { if (cacheDependencies.Count() == 1) // We know that the implementations of ICacheDependency will also implement IAspNetCacheDependency // so we can use a cast here and call the CreateAspNetCacheDependency() method aspNetCacheDependencies = ((IAspNetCacheDependency)cacheDependencies.ElementAt(0)).CreateAspNetCacheDependency(); else if (cacheDependencies.Count() > 1) { AggregateCacheDependency aggregateCacheDependency = new AggregateCacheDependency(); foreach (ICacheDependency cacheDependency in cacheDependencies) { // We know that the implementations of ICacheDependency will also implement IAspNetCacheDependency // so we can use a cast here and call the CreateAspNetCacheDependency() method aggregateCacheDependency.Add(((IAspNetCacheDependency)cacheDependency).CreateAspNetCacheDependency()); } aspNetCacheDependencies = aggregateCacheDependency; } }   HttpContext.Current.Cache.Insert(key, value, aspNetCacheDependencies, absoluteExpiry.Value, relativeExpiry.Value);   The full code listing for the modified CacheProvider class is shown below: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Caching; using CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheInterfaces;   namespace CacheDiSample.CacheProviders { public class CacheProvider<T> : ICacheProvider<T> { private ICacheDependencyFactory cacheDependencyFactory;   public CacheProvider(ICacheDependencyFactory cacheDependencyFactory) { if (cacheDependencyFactory == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("cacheDependencyFactory");   this.cacheDependencyFactory = cacheDependencyFactory; }   public T Fetch(string key, Func<T> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry) { return FetchAndCache<T>(key, retrieveData, absoluteExpiry, relativeExpiry, null); }   public T Fetch(string key, Func<T> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry, IEnumerable<ICacheDependency> cacheDependencies) { return FetchAndCache<T>(key, retrieveData, absoluteExpiry, relativeExpiry, cacheDependencies); }   public IEnumerable<T> Fetch(string key, Func<IEnumerable<T>> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry) { return FetchAndCache<IEnumerable<T>>(key, retrieveData, absoluteExpiry, relativeExpiry, null); }   public IEnumerable<T> Fetch(string key, Func<IEnumerable<T>> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry, IEnumerable<ICacheDependency> cacheDependencies) { return FetchAndCache<IEnumerable<T>>(key, retrieveData, absoluteExpiry, relativeExpiry, cacheDependencies); }   public U CreateCacheDependency<U>() where U : ICacheDependency { return this.cacheDependencyFactory.Create<U>(); }   #region Helper Methods   private U FetchAndCache<U>(string key, Func<U> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry, IEnumerable<ICacheDependency> cacheDependencies) { U value; if (!TryGetValue<U>(key, out value)) { value = retrieveData(); if (!absoluteExpiry.HasValue) absoluteExpiry = Cache.NoAbsoluteExpiration;   if (!relativeExpiry.HasValue) relativeExpiry = Cache.NoSlidingExpiration;   CacheDependency aspNetCacheDependencies = null;   if (cacheDependencies != null) { if (cacheDependencies.Count() == 1) // We know that the implementations of ICacheDependency will also implement IAspNetCacheDependency // so we can use a cast here and call the CreateAspNetCacheDependency() method aspNetCacheDependencies = ((IAspNetCacheDependency)cacheDependencies.ElementAt(0)).CreateAspNetCacheDependency(); else if (cacheDependencies.Count() > 1) { AggregateCacheDependency aggregateCacheDependency = new AggregateCacheDependency(); foreach (ICacheDependency cacheDependency in cacheDependencies) { // We know that the implementations of ICacheDependency will also implement IAspNetCacheDependency // so we can use a cast here and call the CreateAspNetCacheDependency() method aggregateCacheDependency.Add( ((IAspNetCacheDependency)cacheDependency).CreateAspNetCacheDependency()); } aspNetCacheDependencies = aggregateCacheDependency; } }   HttpContext.Current.Cache.Insert(key, value, aspNetCacheDependencies, absoluteExpiry.Value, relativeExpiry.Value);   } return value; }   private bool TryGetValue<U>(string key, out U value) { object cachedValue = HttpContext.Current.Cache.Get(key); if (cachedValue == null) { value = default(U); return false; } else { try { value = (U)cachedValue; return true; } catch { value = default(U); return false; } } }   #endregion } }   Wiring up the DI Container Now the implementations for the Cache Dependency are in place, I wired them up in the existing Windsor CacheInstaller. First I needed to register the implementation of the ISqlCacheDependency interface: container.Register( Component.For<ISqlCacheDependency>() .ImplementedBy<AspNetSqlCacheDependency>() .LifestyleTransient());   Next I registered the Cache Dependency Factory. Notice that I have not implemented the ICacheDependencyFactory interface. Castle Windsor will do this for me by using the Type Factory Facility. I do need to bring the Castle.Facilities.TypedFacility namespace into scope: using Castle.Facilities.TypedFactory;   Then I registered the factory: container.AddFacility<TypedFactoryFacility>();   container.Register( Component.For<ICacheDependencyFactory>() .AsFactory()); The full code for the CacheInstaller class is: using Castle.MicroKernel.Registration; using Castle.MicroKernel.SubSystems.Configuration; using Castle.Windsor; using Castle.Facilities.TypedFactory;   using CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheInterfaces; using CacheDiSample.CacheProviders;   namespace CacheDiSample.WindsorInstallers { public class CacheInstaller : IWindsorInstaller { public void Install(IWindsorContainer container, IConfigurationStore store) { container.Register( Component.For(typeof(ICacheProvider<>)) .ImplementedBy(typeof(CacheProvider<>)) .LifestyleTransient());   container.Register( Component.For<ISqlCacheDependency>() .ImplementedBy<AspNetSqlCacheDependency>() .LifestyleTransient());   container.AddFacility<TypedFactoryFacility>();   container.Register( Component.For<ICacheDependencyFactory>() .AsFactory()); } } }   Configuring the ASP.NET SQL Cache Dependency There are a couple of configuration steps required to enable SQL Cache Dependency for the application and database. From the Visual Studio Command Prompt, the following commands should be used to enable the Cache Polling of the relevant database tables: aspnet_regsql -S <servername> -E -d <databasename> –ed aspnet_regsql -S <servername> -E -d CacheSample –et –t <tablename>   (The –t option should be repeated for each table that is to be made available for cache dependencies). Finally the SQL Cache Polling needs to be enabled by adding the following configuration to the <system.web> section of web.config: <caching> <sqlCacheDependency pollTime="10000" enabled="true"> <databases> <add name="BloggingContext" connectionStringName="BloggingContext"/> </databases> </sqlCacheDependency> </caching>   (obviously the name and connection string name should be altered as required). Using a SQL Cache Dependency Now all the coding is complete. To specify a SQL Cache Dependency, I can modify my BlogRepositoryWithCaching decorator class (see the earlier post) as follows: public IList<Blog> GetAll() { var sqlCacheDependency = cacheProvider.CreateCacheDependency<ISqlCacheDependency>() .Initialise("BloggingContext", "Blogs");   ICacheDependency[] cacheDependencies = new ICacheDependency[] { sqlCacheDependency };   string key = string.Format("CacheDiSample.DataAccess.GetAll");   return cacheProvider.Fetch(key, () => { return parentBlogRepository.GetAll(); }, null, null, cacheDependencies) .ToList(); }   This will add a dependency of the “Blogs” table in the database. The data will remain in the cache until the contents of this table change, then the cache item will be invalidated, and the next call to the GetAll() repository method will be routed to the parent repository to refresh the data from the database.

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• Windows Phone Developer Spotlight: Nikolai Joukov

  - by Lori Lalonde

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/lorilalonde/archive/2014/06/04/windows-phone-developer-spotlight-nikolai-joukov.aspxAs part of an ongoing series, I plan to include a spotlight post on people within the community that are stars in their field and area of expertise. For my first spotlight post, I interviewed Nikolai Joukov, who is a regular attendee at my local area .NET User Group (CTTDNUG), and has also participated in many of the Mobile and Cloud workshops we have hosted over the past few years. Nikolai stood out immediately, because of his passion for developing mobile apps, his interest in continuous learning, and his drive to publish quality apps that people will find useful and entertaining. Background: Nikolai immigrated to Canada in 1995, and has been working in IT since 1997. He moved on to become an independent contractor in 2005, and has worked at various large scale organizations over the course of his career, including BMO, Enbridge, Economical Insurance, Equitable Life, Manulife and Sun Life. Nikolai is an accomplished Windows Phone and Windows Store publisher, with 11 published Windows Phone apps, and 8 published Windows Store apps. He has almost 6000 downloads and favourable reviews. Q & A with Nikolai How many years have you been developing Windows Phone apps? 2 years When did you develop your very first Windows Phone app, and what was it about? Actually, the very first app I wrote was for the Microsoft “Smart Phone” back in 2004. This phone was given to me by Microsoft during the Developers Days Conference in Toronto. It was some kind of experimental model named Smart Phone, but you had to use VB 3 to develop the applications. Needless to say, this was not very successful at that time. My app was a Stock Trades Calculator. Very primitive, but it was working for me. The phone was heavy and the battery barely lasted 4 hours. Microsoft stopped supporting it few months later and the phone stopped working shortly after, but I still have it as a souvenir. For Windows Phone, my first app was “Trip Packing Assistant”. This is a simple trip packing check list that allows you to list items by category, set required quantity of items, and mark off the item in the list when it is packed. I designed it for me and my wife Galina, since we love to travel and this program helps manage our list for us. How did you get started in Windows Phone development? I have to say thanks to our .NET User Group for introducing me to Windows Phone development. I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. In October 2012 during a 2 day training event that ObjectSharp hosted in London, I met Bruce Johnson. On his advice, I registered for Developer Movement, and it is was a good push to actually complete the apps that I started. You have a great series of travel guide apps both for Windows Phone and Windows Store. Tell us about how you came up with the idea to develop those apps and what process you went through to put it all together. Like I said earlier, my wife and I love to travel. Before I created Trip Packing Assistant, every time we were planning to travel somewhere new, Galina would spend 3-4 weeks doing research. She would create a Word document with all of the information. We didn’t want to have to carry our laptop with us all the time, so we printed out the Word document she created, and would take it with us. After we returned from the trip, we would bring back tons of pictures and materials. Then our friends started to ask us about our materials before they planned their trips to the same places we had visited. So I decided to give it a try and started making apps for Windows Phone and for Windows 8. I hope these applications will help people who are planning to travel. So, all of the pictures used in the travel apps you created were actually taken by you during these amazing trips? Yes Do you have another Windows Store/Windows Phone project in development right now? If so, can you give us a hint at what it will be about? I want to stay with travel apps for now. But this time I will try to write an app for us (Galina and I). Usually we go on the trip, then I write the apps after we have all this beautiful pictures in our hands. We are planning a trip to Rome. This app will not have the pictures, but I want to add a map with points of interest and all information that can be useful for us. Then we will go on our trip and test it on location. As well I am planning to work on my existing apps to make them better. What learning resources would you recommend for other developers that want to get started in Window Store and Windows Phone development? I would start with dev.windowsphone.com to get all tools and samples, also links to training materials. I like MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy). Their videos are really useful and it is free. Pluralsight is good too but it is not free and I do not have a subscription anymore. Our .NET User Group meetings give good insights too. I went to all meetings and full day training events. When you start to develop your app, you need to do research for specific questions that arise during development. The Developer Portal and Nokia Developer are good resources too. Wrap Up Thanks Nikolai for participating in my first Spotlight blog post! Shown below is Nikolai’s publisher page in the Windows Phone Store and his publisher page in the Windows Store. Simply click on it to be taken to there to check out his portfolio of apps. Be sure to download his apps and try them out! They are all free! Nikolai’s Windows Phone apps   Nikolai’s Windows Store Apps

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• Tracing Silex from PHP to the OS with DTrace

  - by cj

  In this blog post I show the full stack tracing of Brendan Gregg's php_syscolors.d script in the DTrace Toolkit. The Toolkit contains a dozen very useful PHP DTrace scripts and many more scripts for other languages and the OS. For this example, I'll trace the PHP micro framework Silex, which was the topic of the second of two talks by Dustin Whittle at a recent SF PHP Meetup. His slides are at Silex: From Micro to Full Stack. Installing DTrace and PHP The php_syscolors.d script uses some static PHP probes and some kernel probes. For Oracle Linux I discussed installing DTrace and PHP in DTrace PHP Using Oracle Linux 'playground' Pre-Built Packages. On other platforms with DTrace support, follow your standard procedures to enable DTrace and load the correct providers. The sdt and systrace providers are required in addition to fasttrap. On Oracle Linux, I loaded the DTrace modules like: # modprobe fasttrap # modprobe sdt # modprobe systrace # chmod 666 /dev/dtrace/helper Installing the DTrace Toolkit I download DTraceToolkit-0.99.tar.gz and extracted it: $ tar -zxf DTraceToolkit-0.99.tar.gz The PHP scripts are in the Php directory and examples in the Examples directory. Installing Silex I downloaded the "fat" Silex .tgz file from the download page and extracted it: $ tar -zxf silex_fat.tgz I changed the demonstration silex/web/index.php so I could use the PHP development web server: <?php // web/index.php $filename = __DIR__.preg_replace('#(\?.*)$#', '', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); if (php_sapi_name() === 'cli-server' && is_file($filename)) { return false; } require_once __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php'; $app = new Silex\Application(); //$app['debug'] = true; $app->get('/hello', function() { return 'Hello!'; }); $app->run(); ?> Running DTrace The php_syscolors.d script uses the -Z option to dtrace, so it can be started before PHP, i.e. when there are zero of the requested probes available to be traced. I ran DTrace like: # cd DTraceToolkit-0.99/Php # ./php_syscolors.d Next, I started the PHP developer web server in a second terminal: $ cd silex $ php -S localhost:8080 -t web web/index.php At this point, the web server is idle, waiting for requests. DTrace is idle, waiting for the probes in php_syscolors.d to be fired, at which time the action associated with each probe will run. I then loaded the demonstration page in a browser: http://localhost:8080/hello When the request was fulfilled and the simple output of "Hello" was displayed, I ^C'd php and dtrace in their terminals to stop them. DTrace output over a thousand lines long had been generated. Here is one snippet from when run() was invoked: C PID/TID DELTA(us) FILE:LINE TYPE -- NAME ... 1 4765/4765 21 Application.php:487 func -> run 1 4765/4765 29 ClassLoader.php:182 func -> loadClass 1 4765/4765 17 ClassLoader.php:198 func -> findFile 1 4765/4765 31 ":- syscall -> access 1 4765/4765 26 ":- syscall <- access 1 4765/4765 16 ClassLoader.php:198 func <- findFile 1 4765/4765 25 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 15 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 22 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 14 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 15 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 60 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 20 ":- syscall -> open 1 4765/4765 16 ":- syscall <- open 1 4765/4765 26 ":- syscall -> newfstat 1 4765/4765 12 ":- syscall <- newfstat 1 4765/4765 17 ":- syscall -> newfstat 1 4765/4765 12 ":- syscall <- newfstat 1 4765/4765 12 ":- syscall -> newfstat 1 4765/4765 12 ":- syscall <- newfstat 1 4765/4765 20 ":- syscall -> mmap 1 4765/4765 14 ":- syscall <- mmap 1 4765/4765 3201 ":- syscall -> mmap 1 4765/4765 27 ":- syscall <- mmap 1 4765/4765 1233 ":- syscall -> munmap 1 4765/4765 53 ":- syscall <- munmap 1 4765/4765 15 ":- syscall -> close 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall <- close 1 4765/4765 34 Request.php:32 func -> main 1 4765/4765 22 Request.php:32 func <- main 1 4765/4765 31 ClassLoader.php:182 func <- loadClass 1 4765/4765 33 Request.php:249 func -> createFromGlobals 1 4765/4765 29 Request.php:198 func -> __construct 1 4765/4765 24 Request.php:218 func -> initialize 1 4765/4765 26 ClassLoader.php:182 func -> loadClass 1 4765/4765 89 ClassLoader.php:198 func -> findFile 1 4765/4765 43 ":- syscall -> access ... The output shows PHP functions being called and returning (and where they are located) and which system calls the PHP functions in turn invoked. The time each line took from the previous one is displayed in the third column. The first column is the CPU number. In this example, the process was always on CPU 1 so the output is naturally ordered without requiring post-processing, or the D script requiring to be modified to display a time stamp. On a terminal, the output of php_syscolors.d is color-coded according to whether each function is a PHP or system one, hence the file name. Summary With one tool, I was able to trace the interaction of a user application with the operating system. I was able to do this to an application running "live" in a web context. The DTrace Toolkit provides a very handy repository of DTrace information. Even though the PHP scripts were created in the time frame of the original PHP DTrace PECL extension, which only had PHP function entry and return probes, the scripts provide core examples for custom investigation and resolution scripts. You can easily adapt the ideas and and create scripts using the other PHP static probes, which are listed in the PHP Manual. Because DTrace is "always on", you can take advantage of it to resolve development questions or fix production situations.

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• Azure Diagnostics: The Bad, The Ugly, and a Better Way

  - by jasont

  If you’re a .Net web developer today, no doubt you’ve enjoyed watching Windows Azure grow up over the past couple of years. The platform has scaled, stabilized (mostly), and added on a slew of great (and sometimes overdue) features. What was once just an endpoint to host a solution, developers today have tremendous flexibility and options in the platform. Organizations are building new solutions and offerings on the platform, and others have, or are in the process of, migrating existing applications out of their own data centers into the Azure cloud. Whether new application development or migrating legacy, every development shop and IT organization needs to monitor their applications in the cloud, the same as they do on premises. Azure Diagnostics has some capabilities, but what I constantly hear from users is that it’s either (a) not enough, or (b) too cumbersome to set up. Today, Stackify is happy to announce that we fully support Azure deployments, just the same as your on-premises deployments. Let’s take a look below and compare and contrast the options. Azure Diagnostics Let’s crack open the Windows Azure documentation on Azure Diagnostics and see just how easy it is to use. The high level steps are:   Step 1: Import the Diagnostics Oh, I’ve already deployed my app without the diagnostics module. Guess I can’t do anything until I do this and re-deploy. Step 2: Configure the Diagnostics (and multiple sub-steps) Do I want it all? Or just pieces of it? Whoops, forgot to include a specific performance counter, I guess I’ll have to deploy again. Wait a minute… I have to specifically code these performance counters into my role’s OnStart() method, compile and deploy again? And query and consume it myself? Step 3: (Optional) Permanently store diagnostic data Lucky for me, Azure storage has gotten pretty cheap. But how often should I move the data into storage? I want to see real-time data, so I guess that’s out now as well. Step 4: (Optional) View stored diagnostic data Optional? Of course I want to see it. Conveniently, Microsoft recommends 3 tools to do this with. Un-conveniently, none of these are web based and they all just give you access to raw data, and very little charting or real-time intelligence. Just….. data. Nevermind that one product seems to have gotten stale since a recent acquisition, and doesn’t even have screenshots!   So, let’s summarize: lots of diagnostics data is available, but think realistically. Think Dev Ops. What happens when you are in the middle of a major production performance issue and you don’t have the diagnostics you need? You are redeploying an application (and thankfully you have a great branching strategy, so you feel perfectly safe just willy-nilly launching code into prod, don’t you?) to get data, then shipping it to storage, and then digging through that data to find a needle in a haystack. Would you like to be able to troubleshoot a performance issue in the middle of the night, or on a weekend, from your iPad or home computer’s web browser? Forget it: the best you get is this spark line in the Azure portal. If it’s real pointy, you probably have an issue; but since there is no alert based on a threshold your customers have likely already let you know. And high CPU, Memory, I/O, or Network doesn’t tell you anything about where the problem is. The Better Way – Stackify Stackify supports application and server monitoring in real time, all through a great web interface. All of the things that Azure Diagnostics provides, Stackify provides for your on-premises deployments, and you don’t need to know ahead of time that you’ll need it. It’s always there, it’s always on. Azure deployments are essentially no different than on-premises. It’s a Windows Server (or Linux) in the cloud. It’s behind a different firewall than your corporate servers. That’s it. Stackify can provide the same powerful tools to your Azure deployments in two simple steps. Step 1 Add a startup task to your web or worker role and deploy. If you can’t deploy and need it right now, no worries! Remote Desktop to the Azure instance and you can execute a Powershell script to download / install Stackify.   Step 2 Log in to your account at www.stackify.com and begin monitoring as much as you want, as often as you want and see the results instantly. WMI? It’s there Event Viewer? You’ve got it. File System Access? Yes, please! Would love to make sure my web.config is correct.   IIS / App Pool Info? Yep. You can even restart it. Running Services? All of them. Start and Stop them to your heart’s content. SQL Database access? You bet’cha. Alerts and Notification? Of course! You should know before your customers let you know. … and so much more.   Conclusion Microsoft has shown, consistently, that they love developers, developers, developers. What every developer needs to realize from this is that they’ve given you a canvas, which is exactly what Azure is. It’s great infrastructure that is readily available, easy to manage, and fairly cost effective. However, the tooling is your responsibility. What you get, at best, is bare bones. App and server diagnostics should be available when you need them. While we, as developers, try to plan for and think of everything ahead of time, there will come times where we need to get data that just isn’t available. And having to go through a lot of cumbersome steps to get that data, and then have to find a friendlier way to consume it…. well, that just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’d rather spend my time writing and developing features and completing bug fixes for my applications, than to be writing code to monitor and diagnose.

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 3 – Agile or agile?

  - by Chris George

  Another early start for my last Lean Coffee of the conference, and again it was not wasted. We had some really interesting discussions around how to determine what test automation is useful, if agile is not faster, why do it? and a rather existential discussion on whether unicorns exist! First keynote of the day was entitled “Fast Feedback Teams” by Ola Ellnestam. Again this relates nicely to the releasing faster talk on day 2, and something that we are looking at and some teams are actively trying. Introducing the notion of feedback, Ola describes a game he wrote for his eldest child. It was a simple game where every time he clicked a button, it displayed “You’ve Won!”. He then changed it to be a Win-Lose-Win-Lose pattern and watched the feedback from his son who then twigged the pattern and got his younger brother to play, alternating turns… genius! (must do that with my children). The idea behind this was that you need that feedback loop to learn and progress. If you are not getting the feedback you need to close that loop. An interesting point Ola made was to solve problems BEFORE writing software. It may be that you don’t have to write anything at all, perhaps it’s a communication/training issue? Perhaps the problem can be solved another way. Writing software, although it’s the business we are in, is expensive, and this should be taken into account. He again mentions frequent releases, and how they should be made as soon as stuff is ready to be released, don’t leave stuff on the shelf cause it’s not earning you anything, money or data. I totally agree with this and it’s something that we will be aiming for moving forwards. “Exceptions, Assumptions and Ambiguity: Finding the truth behind the story” by David Evans started off very promising by making references to ‘Grim up North’ referring to the north of England. Not sure it was appreciated by most of the audience, but it made me laugh! David explained how there are always risks associated with exceptions, giving the example of a one-way road near where he lives, with an exception sign giving rights to coaches to go the wrong way. Therefore you could merrily swing around the corner of the one way road straight into a coach! David showed the danger in making assumptions with lyrical quotes from Lola by The Kinks “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola” and with a picture of a toilet flush that needed instructions to operate the full and half flush. With this particular flush, you pulled the handle all the way down to half flush, and half way down to full flush! hmmm, a bit of a crappy user experience methinks! Then through a clever use of a passage from the Jabberwocky, David then went onto show how mis-translation/ambiguity is the can completely distort the original meaning of something, and this is a real enemy of software development. This was all helping to demonstrate that the term Story is often heavily overloaded in the Agile world, and should really be stripped back to what it is really for, stating a business problem, and offering a technical solution. Therefore a story could be worded as “In order to {make some improvement}, we will { do something}”. The first ‘in order to’ statement is stakeholder neutral, and states the problem through requesting an improvement to the software/process etc. The second part of the story is the verb, the doing bit. So to achieve the ‘improvement’ which is not currently true, we will do something to make this true in the future. My PM is very interested in this, and he’s observed some of the problems of overloading stories so I’m hoping between us we can use some of David’s suggestions to help clarify our stories better. The second keynote of the day (and our last) proved to be the most entertaining and exhausting of the conference for me. “The ongoing evolution of testing in agile development” by Scott Barber. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott before… OMG I would love to have even half of the energy he has! What struck me during this presentation was Scott’s explanation of how testing has become the role/job that it is (largely) today, and how this has led to the need for ‘methodologies’ to make dev and test work! The argument that we should be trying to converge the roles again is a very valid one, and one that a couple of the teams at work are actively doing with great results. Making developers as responsible for quality as testers is something that has been lost over the years, but something that we are now striving to achieve. The idea that we (testers) should be testing experts/specialists, not testing ‘union members’, supports this idea so the entire team works on all aspects of a feature/product, with the ‘specialists’ taking the lead and advising/coaching the others. This leads to better propagation of information around the team, a greater holistic understanding of the project and it allows the team to continue functioning if some of it’s members are off sick, for example. Feeling somewhat drained from Scott’s keynote (but at the same time excited that alot of the points he raised supported actions we are taking at work), I headed into my last presentation for Agile Testing Days 2012 before having to make my way to Tegel to catch the flight home. “Thinking and working agile in an unbending world” with Pete Walen was a talk I was not going to miss! Having spoken to Pete several times during the past few days, I was looking forward to hearing what he was going to say, and I was not disappointed. Pete started off by trying to separate the definitions of ‘Agile’ as in the methodology, and ‘agile’ as in the adjective by pronouncing them the ‘english’ and ‘american’ ways. So Agile pronounced (Ajyle) and agile pronounced (ajul). There was much confusion around what the hell he was talking about, although I thought it was quite clear. Agile – Software development methodology agile – Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character. Anyway, that aside (although it provided a few laughs during the presentation), the point was that many teams that claim to be ‘Agile’ but are not, in fact, ‘agile’ by nature. Implementing ‘Agile’ methodologies that are so prescriptive actually goes against the very nature of Agile development where a team should anticipate, adapt and explore. Pete made a valid point that very few companies intentionally put up roadblocks to impede work, so if work is being blocked/delayed, why? This is where being agile as a team pays off because the team can inspect what’s going on, explore options and adapt their processes. It is through experimentation (and that means trying and failing as well as trying and succeeding) that a team will improve and grow leading to focussing on what really needs to be done to achieve X. So, that was it, the last talk of our conference. I was gutted that we had to miss the closing keynote from Matt Heusser, as Matt was another person I had spoken too a few times during the conference, but the flight would not wait, and just as well we left when we did because the traffic was a nightmare! My Takeaway Triple from Day 3: Release often and release small – don’t leave stuff on the shelf Keep the meaning of the word ‘agile’ in mind when working in ‘Agile Look at testing as more of a skill than a role  

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• Moving from Tortoise to TFS

  - by MarkPearl

  The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed many of the worries that I had about how safe my code was on a shared folder and also gave us the opportunity to safely have several developers work on the same project at the same time. The only times when we have been unhappy has been when we have had SVN hell days – which pretty much occur when you are doing something out of the norm and suddenly SVN just won’t resolve conflicts or something along those lines. This happens once every 4 or 5 months and is not necessarily a problem caused directly by SVN – but a problem augmented by SVN. When you have SVN hell days you want to curse SVN! With that in mind I recently have been relooking at our source code control. I have explored using GIT and was very impressed by it and have also looked at TFS. From a source code control perspective I don’t want to get into a heated discussion on which one is better – but I do want to mention that I wear two hats in my organization – software developer & manager, and with the manager hat on I tend to sway the TFS route. So when I was given a coupon to test DiscountASP.Net Team Foundation Server Service for a year, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try TFS in a distributed environment and also make the first step towards having an integrated development management system. Some of the things that appeal to me about DiscountASP’s offering are the following… Basic management / planning facilities like to do lists inside Visual Studio Daily backup of data on the server – we are developers, not IT managers and so the more of this I could outsource the better Distributed solution – all of us work remotely and so this was a big one as well. Registering and Setting Up with DiscountASP.NET The whole registration process was simple and intuitive. The web interface is not the most visually impressive one, but it is functional and a few seconds after I clicked the last submit button a email was sitting in my inbox giving me my control panel username and suggesting that I read the “Getting Started” article. The getting started article was easy to read and understand so no complaints there either. Next to set my dev environment to work. With a few references to the getting started article I had completed the whole setup process in a matter of minutes. Ten minutes after initiating the whole thing I was logged into VS2010 and creating my first TFS project. With the service that I signed up for, I have access for 5 users – which is sufficient for my internal needs. So from what I can tell, to set the rest of us up on the system I just need to supply them with their user credentials and url. My Concerns Resolved 1) Security So, a few concerns I had about the service. First and foremost – is it secure? I would hate for someone to get access to our code and the whole idea of putting it up on the internet is a concern for me. Turning to the Knowledge Base on the DiscountASP website this is one of the first question I can see answered. According to them it is secure. I have extracted their comment below regarding this. Our TFS hosting service is secure. We only accept HTTPS connections ensuring that any client-server data transmission is encrypted. At the network level, all of our systems are protected by multiple Juniper firewalls, Tipping Point's Intrusion Detection System (see Tipping Point's case study of our use here), and we also employ DDoS mitigation to add extra layers of security. Additionally, physical access to the servers is tightly restricted. Please see the security section of this Knowledge Base article for further details. 2) Web Portal Access The other big concern I have is regarding web portal access. In the ideal world I would like to be able to give my end users access to a web portal for reporting bugs etc. When I initially read through the FAQ of the site it mentioned that there was web portal access – but from what I can see this is just for “users”. Since I am limited to 5 users for the account, it would not be practical to set up external users that we could get feedback from on bugs etc. I would be interested if this is possible – and if so if someone could post it in the comments it would be much appreciated. If this isn’t possible, it is a slight let down as we rely heavily on end user feedback to get feedback and it would have been ideal to have gotten this within the service. Other than those two items, I didn’t have any real concerns that were unresolved. So where do I go from here? So time passed by from the initial writing of this post and as work whirred in and out of my inbox I have still not had a proper opportunity to give the service a test run. Recently though things have began to slow down and then surprise surprise I had another SVN Hell day. With that experience I had a new found resolve to get our team on TFS and so today we are going to start to use the service as a team. I am hoping that I do not have TFS hell days – but if I do, I will be sure to write about them. In short - the verdict is still out on whether this service is going to be invaluable to my business or whether it will create more headaches than it is worth BUT I am hopping it will be an invaluable service. I will only really be able to determine that in a few months… till then!

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• Real World Nuget

  - by JoshReuben

  Why Nuget A higher level of granularity for managing references When you have solutions of many projects that depend on solutions of many projects etc à escape from Solution Hell. Links · Using A GUI (Package Explorer) to build packages - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/creating-packages/using-a-gui-to-build-packages · Creating a Nuspec File - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_aspnetmvcnuget_topic2.aspx · consuming a Nuget Package - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_aspnetmvcnuget_topic3 · Nuspec reference - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/nuspec-reference · updating packages - http://nuget.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Updating%20All%20Packages · versioning - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/versioning POC Folder Structure POC Setup Steps · Install package explorer · Source o Create a source solution – configure output directory for projects (Project > Properties > Build > Output Path) · Package o Add assemblies to package from output directory (D&D)- add net folder o File > Export – save .nuspec files and lib contents <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package > <metadata> <id>MyPackage</id> <version>1.0.0.3</version> <title /> <authors>josh-r</authors> <owners /> <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance> <description>My package description.</description> <summary /> </metadata> </package> o File > Save – saves .nupkg file · Create Target Solution o In Tools > Options: Configure package source & Add package Select projects: Output from package manager (powershell console) ------- Installing...MyPackage 1.0.0 ------- Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyA.dll' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyA.pdb' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyB.dll' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyB.pdb' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'MyPackage.1.0.0.nupkg' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0'. Successfully installed 'MyPackage 1.0.0'. Added reference 'NugetSource.AssemblyA' to project 'AssemblyX' Added reference 'NugetSource.AssemblyB' to project 'AssemblyX' Added file 'packages.config'. Added file 'packages.config' to project 'AssemblyX' Added file 'repositories.config'. Successfully added 'MyPackage 1.0.0' to AssemblyX. ============================== o Packages folder created at solution level o Packages.config file generated in each project: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <packages>   <package id="MyPackage" version="1.0.0" targetFramework="net40" /> </packages> A local Packages folder is created for package versions installed: Each folder contains the downloaded .nupkg file and its unpacked contents – eg of dlls that the project references Note: this folder is not checked in UpdatePackages o Configure Package Manager to automatically check for updates o Browse packages - It automatically picked up the updates Update Procedure · Modify source · Change source version in assembly info · Build source · Open last package in package explorer · Increment package version number and re-add assemblies · Save package with new version number and export its definition · In target solution – Tools > Manage Nuget Packages – click on All to trigger refresh , then click on recent packages to see updates · If problematic, delete packages folder Versioning uninstall-package mypackage install-package mypackage –version 1.0.0.3 uninstall-package mypackage install-package mypackage –version 1.0.0.4 Dependencies · <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2012/06/nuspec.xsd"> <metadata> <id>MyDependentPackage</id> <version>1.0.0</version> <title /> <authors>josh-r</authors> <owners /> <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance> <description>My package description.</description> <dependencies> <group targetFramework=".NETFramework4.0"> <dependency id="MyPackage" version="1.0.0.4" /> </group> </dependencies> </metadata> </package> Using NuGet without committing packages to source control http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/using-nuget-without-committing-packages Right click on the Solution node in Solution Explorer and select Enable NuGet Package Restore. — Recall that packages folder is not part of solution If you get downloading package ‘Nuget.build’ failed, config proxy to support certificate for https://nuget.org/api/v2/ & allow unrestricted access to packages.nuget.org To test connectivity: get-package –listavailable To test Nuget Package Restore – delete packages folder and open vs as admin. In nugget msbuild: <Import Project="$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\nuget.targets" /> TFSBuild Integration Modify Nuget.Targets file <RestorePackages Condition="  '$(RestorePackages)' == '' "> True </RestorePackages> … <PackageSource Include="\\IL-CV-004-W7D\Packages" /> Add System Environment variable EnableNuGetPackageRestore=true & restart the “visual studio team foundation build service host” service. Important: Ensure Network Service has access to Packages folder Nugetter TFS Build integration Add Nugetter build process templates to TFS source control For Build Controller - Specify location of custom assemblies Generate .nuspec file from Package Explorer: File > Export Edit the file elements – remove path info from src and target attributes <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2012/06/nuspec.xsd">     <metadata>         <id>Common</id>         <version>1.0.0</version>         <title />         <authors>josh-r</authors>         <owners />         <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance>         <description>My package description.</description>         <dependencies>             <group targetFramework=".NETFramework3.5" />         </dependencies>     </metadata>     <files>         <file src="CommonTypes.dll" target="CommonTypes.dll" />         <file src="CommonTypes.pdb" target="CommonTypes.pdb" /> … Add .nuspec file to solution so that it is available for build: Dev\NovaNuget\Common\NuSpec\common.1.0.0.nuspec Add a Build Process Definition based on the Nugetter build process template: Configure the build process – specify: · .sln to build · Base path (output directory) · Nuget.exe file path · .nuspec file path Copy DLLs to a binary folder 1) Set copy local for an assembly reference to false 2)  MSBuild Copy Task – modify .csproj file: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3e54c37h.aspx <ItemGroup>     <MySourceFiles Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\SourceAssemblies\**\*.*" />   </ItemGroup>     <Target Name="BeforeBuild">     <Copy SourceFiles="@(MySourceFiles)" DestinationFolder="bin\debug\SourceAssemblies" />   </Target> 3) Set Probing assembly search path from app.config - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/823z9h8w(v=vs.80).aspx -                 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration>   <runtime>     <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">       <probing privatePath="SourceAssemblies"/>     </assemblyBinding>   </runtime> </configuration> Forcing 'copy local = false' The following generic powershell script was added to the packages install.ps1: param($installPath, $toolsPath, $package, $project) if( $project.Object.Project.Name -ne "CopyPackages") { $asms = $package.AssemblyReferences | %{$_.Name} foreach ($reference in $project.Object.References) { if ($asms -contains $reference.Name + ".dll") { $reference.CopyLocal = $false; } } } An empty project named "CopyPackages" was added to the solution - it references all the packages and is the only one set to CopyLocal="true". No MSBuild knowledge required.

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• Emtel Knowledge Series - Q2/2014

  From Cyber Island to Smart Mauritius Cyber Island? Smart Mauritius? - What is Emtel talking about? "With the majority of the population living in urban environments today, the concept of "Smart Cities" has become an urgent necessity. "Smart Cities" refer to an urban transformation which, by using latest ICT technologies makes cities more efficient. Many Governments are setting out ambitious plans to build the cities of the future based on massive connectivity, high bandwidth communications, intelligent sensors and analysis of huge volumes of data. Various researches have shown four key enablers for smart city success - Government leadership, suitable technology infrastructure, solid public-private partnerships and engaged citizens. It is around these enabling factors that telecoms companies can play a vital role in assisting governments to deliver on the smart city vision." The Emtel Knowledge Series goes in compliance with Emtel's 25th anniversary celebrations throughout the year and the master of ceremony, Kim Andersen, mentioned that there will be more upcoming events on a quarterly base. As a representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) there was absolutely no hesitation to join in again. Following my visit to the first Emtel Knowledge Series workshop back in February this year, it was great to have another opportunity to meet and exchange with technology experts. But quite frankly what is it with those buzz words... As far as I remember and how it was mentioned "Cyber Island" is an old initiative from around 2005/2006 which has been refreshed in 2010. It implies the empowerment of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) as an essential factor of growth by the government here in Mauritius. Actually, the first promotional period of Cyber Island brought me here but that's another story. The venue and its own problems Like last time the event was organised and held at the Conference Hall at Cyber Tower I in Ebene. As I've been working there for some years, I know about the frustrating situation of finding a proper parking. So, does Smart Island include better solutions for the search of parking spaces? Maybe, let's see whether I will be able to answer that question at the end of the article. Anyway, after circling around the tower almost two times, I finally got a decent space to put the car, without risking to get a ticket or damage actually. International speakers and their experience Once again, Emtel did a great job to get international expertise onto the stage to share their experience and vision on this kind of embarkment. Personally, I really appreciated the fact they were speakers of global reach and could provide own-experience knowledge. Johan Gott spoke about the fundamental change that the Swedish government ignited in order to move their society and workers' environment away from heavy industry towards a knowledge-based approach. Additionally, we spoke about the effort and transformation of New York City into a greener and more efficient Smart City. Given modern technology he also advised that any kind of available Big Data should be opened to the general public - this openness would provide a playground for anyone to garner new ideas and most probably solid solutions of which no one else thought about before. Emtel Knowledge Series on moving from Cyber Island to Smart Mauritus Later during the afternoon that exact statement regarding openness to and transparency of government-owned Big Data has been emphasised again by the Danish speaker Kim Andersen and his former colleague Mika Jantunen from Finland. Mika continued to underline the important role of the government to provide a solid foundation for a knowledge-based society and mentioned that Finnish citizens have a constitutional right to broadband connectivity. Next to free higher (tertiary) education Finland already produced a good number of innovations, among them are: First country to grant voting rights to women Free higher education Constitutional right to broadband connectivity Nokia Linux Angry Birds Sauna and others...  General access to internet via broadband and/or mobile connectivity is surely a key factor towards Smart Cities, or better said Smart Mauritius given the area dimensions and size of population. CTO Paul Valette gave the audience a brief overview of the essential role that Emtel will have to move Mauritius forward towards a knowledge-based and innovation-driven environment for its citizen. What I have seen looks really promising and with recently published information that Mauritians have 127% of mobile capacity - meaning more than 1 mobile, smartphone or tablet per person - it will be crucial to have the right infrastructure for these connected devices. How would it be possible to achieve a knowledge-based society? YouTube to the rescue!Seriously, gaining more knowledge will require to have fast access to educational course material as explained by Dr Kaviraj Sukon, General Director of the Open University of Mauritius. According to him a good number of high-profile universities in the world have opened their course libraries to the general public, among them EDX, Coursera and Open University. Nowadays, you're actually able and enabled to learn for and earn a BSc or even MSc certification on your own pace - no need to attend classed on campus. It was really impressive to see the number of available hours - more than enough for a life-long learning experience! {loadposition content_adsense} Networking in the name of MSCC As briefly mentioned above I was about to combine two approaches for this workshop. Of course, getting latest information and updates on Emtel services available, especially for my business here on the west coast of the island, but also to meet and greet new people for the MSCC. And I think it was very positive on both sides. Let me quickly describe some of the key aspects that happened during the day: Met with Arnaud Meslier and Kellie, both Microsoft to swap latest information on IT events. Hereby, I got an invite to Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 Dev Camp. Got in touch with Arvin Lockee, Emtel to check our options to meet with the data team, and seizing the opportunity to have a visiting tour at the Emtel Data Centre. Had a great chat with Avinash Meetoo, Knowledge 7, Kim Andersen and Mika Jantunen about the situation of teaching and learning in general and specifically in the private sector here in Mauritius. Additionally, a number of various other interesting chats... Once again, I'm catching up on a couple of business cards in order to provide more background information about the MSCC, and to create a better awareness of MSCC within the local IT businesses. There is more to come soon!  Resume of the day The number of attendees during this event has been doubled or even tripled this time. The whole organisation has been improved massively and the combination of presentation and summarizing panel discussions was better than during the previous workshop back in February. Overall, once again a well-organised workshop and I'm already looking forward to join the next workshop in Q3. Update End of July we finally managed to visit the Emtel Data Centre in Arsenal. It was an interesting opportunity for some of our MSCC members.

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• RiverTrail - JavaScript GPPGU Data Parallelism

  - by JoshReuben

  Where is WebCL ? The Khronos WebCL working group is working on a JavaScript binding to the OpenCL standard so that HTML 5 compliant browsers can host GPGPU web apps – e.g. for image processing or physics for WebGL games - http://www.khronos.org/webcl/ . While Nokia & Samsung have some protype WebCL APIs, Intel has one-upped them with a higher level of abstraction: RiverTrail. Intro to RiverTrail Intel Labs JavaScript RiverTrail provides GPU accelerated SIMD data-parallelism in web applications via a familiar JavaScript programming paradigm. It extends JavaScript with simple deterministic data-parallel constructs that are translated at runtime into a low-level hardware abstraction layer. With its high-level JS API, programmers do not have to learn a new language or explicitly manage threads, orchestrate shared data synchronization or scheduling. It has been proposed as a draft specification to ECMA a (known as ECMA strawman). RiverTrail runs in all popular browsers (except I.E. of course). To get started, download a prebuilt version https://github.com/downloads/RiverTrail/RiverTrail/rivertrail-0.17.xpi , install Intel's OpenCL SDK http://www.intel.com/go/opencl and try out the interactive River Trail shell http://rivertrail.github.com/interactive For a video overview, see  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jueg6zB5XaM . ParallelArray the ParallelArray type is the central component of this API & is a JS object that contains ordered collections of scalars – i.e. multidimensional uniform arrays. A shape property describes the dimensionality and size– e.g. a 2D RGBA image will have shape [height, width, 4]. ParallelArrays are immutable & fluent – they are manipulated by invoking methods on them which produce new ParallelArray objects. ParallelArray supports several constructors over arrays, functions & even the canvas. // Create an empty Parallel Array var pa = new ParallelArray(); // pa0 = <>   // Create a ParallelArray out of a nested JS array. // Note that the inner arrays are also ParallelArrays var pa = new ParallelArray([ [0,1], [2,3], [4,5] ]); // pa1 = <<0,1>, <2,3>, <4.5>>   // Create a two-dimensional ParallelArray with shape [3, 2] using the comprehension constructor var pa = new ParallelArray([3, 2], function(iv){return iv[0] * iv[1];}); // pa7 = <<0,0>, <0,1>, <0,2>>   // Create a ParallelArray from canvas.  This creates a PA with shape [w, h, 4], var pa = new ParallelArray(canvas); // pa8 = CanvasPixelArray   ParallelArray exposes fluent API functions that take an elemental JS function for data manipulation: map, combine, scan, filter, and scatter that return a new ParallelArray. Other functions are scalar - reduce  returns a scalar value & get returns the value located at a given index. The onus is on the developer to ensure that the elemental function does not defeat data parallelization optimization (avoid global var manipulation, recursion). For reduce & scan, order is not guaranteed - the onus is on the dev to provide an elemental function that is commutative and associative so that scan will be deterministic – E.g. Sum is associative, but Avg is not. map Applies a provided elemental function to each element of the source array and stores the result in the corresponding position in the result array. The map method is shape preserving & index free - can not inspect neighboring values. // Adding one to each element. var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var plusOne = source.map(function inc(v) {     return v+1; }); //<2,3,4,5,6> combine Combine is similar to map, except an index is provided. This allows elemental functions to access elements from the source array relative to the one at the current index position. While the map method operates on the outermost dimension only, combine, can choose how deep to traverse - it provides a depth argument to specify the number of dimensions it iterates over. The elemental function of combine accesses the source array & the current index within it - element is computed by calling the get method of the source ParallelArray object with index i as argument. It requires more code but is more expressive. var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var plusOne = source.combine(function inc(i) { return this.get(i)+1; }); reduce reduces the elements from an array to a single scalar result – e.g. Sum. // Calculate the sum of the elements var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var sum = source.reduce(function plus(a,b) { return a+b; }); scan Like reduce, but stores the intermediate results – return a ParallelArray whose ith elements is the results of using the elemental function to reduce the elements between 0 and I in the original ParallelArray. // do a partial sum var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var psum = source.scan(function plus(a,b) { return a+b; }); //<1, 3, 6, 10, 15> scatter a reordering function - specify for a certain source index where it should be stored in the result array. An optional conflict function can prevent an exception if two source values are assigned the same position of the result: var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var reorder = source.scatter([4,0,3,1,2]); // <2, 4, 5, 3, 1> // if there is a conflict use the max. use 33 as a default value. var reorder = source.scatter([4,0,3,4,2], 33, function max(a, b) {return a>b?a:b; }); //<2, 33, 5, 3, 4> filter // filter out values that are not even var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var even = source.filter(function even(iv) { return (this.get(iv) % 2) == 0; }); // <2,4> Flatten used to collapse the outer dimensions of an array into a single dimension. pa = new ParallelArray([ [1,2], [3,4] ]); // <<1,2>,<3,4>> pa.flatten(); // <1,2,3,4> Partition used to restore the original shape of the array. var pa = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4]); // <1,2,3,4> pa.partition(2); // <<1,2>,<3,4>> Get return value found at the indices or undefined if no such value exists. var pa = new ParallelArray([0,1,2,3,4], [10,11,12,13,14], [20,21,22,23,24]) pa.get([1,1]); // 11 pa.get([1]); // <10,11,12,13,14>

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• TFS API Change WorkItem CreatedDate And ChangedDate To Historic Dates

  - by Tarun Arora

  There may be times when you need to modify the value of the fields “System.CreatedDate” and “System.ChangedDate” on a work item. Richard Hundhausen has a great blog with ample of reason why or why not you should need to set the values of these fields to historic dates. In this blog post I’ll show you, Create a PBI WorkItem linked to a Task work item by pre-setting the value of the field ‘System.ChangedDate’ to a historic date Change the value of the field ‘System.Created’ to a historic date Simulate the historic burn down of a task type work item in a sprint Explain the impact of updating values of the fields CreatedDate and ChangedDate on the Sprint burn down chart Rules of Play      1. You need to be a member of the Project Collection Service Accounts              2. You need to use ‘WorkItemStoreFlags.BypassRules’ when you instantiate the WorkItemStore service // Instanciate Work Item Store with the ByPassRules flag _wis = new WorkItemStore(_tfs, WorkItemStoreFlags.BypassRules);      3. You cannot set the ChangedDate         - Less than the changed date of previous revision         - Greater than current date Walkthrough The walkthrough contains 5 parts 00 – Required References 01 – Connect to TFS Programmatically 02 – Create a Work Item Programmatically 03 – Set the values of fields ‘System.ChangedDate’ and ‘System.CreatedDate’ to historic dates 04 – Results of our experiment Lets get started………………………………………………… 00 – Required References Microsoft.TeamFoundation.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.dll 01 – Connect to TFS Programmatically I have a in depth blog post on how to connect to TFS programmatically in case you are interested. However, the code snippet below will enable you to connect to TFS using the Team Project Picker. // Services I need access to globally private static TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs; private static ProjectInfo _selectedTeamProject; private static WorkItemStore _wis; // Connect to TFS Using Team Project Picker public static bool ConnectToTfs() { var isSelected = false; // The user is allowed to select only one project var tfsPp = new TeamProjectPicker(TeamProjectPickerMode.SingleProject, false); tfsPp.ShowDialog(); // The TFS project collection _tfs = tfsPp.SelectedTeamProjectCollection; if (tfsPp.SelectedProjects.Any()) { // The selected Team Project _selectedTeamProject = tfsPp.SelectedProjects[0]; isSelected = true; } return isSelected; } 02 – Create a Work Item Programmatically In the below code snippet I have create a Product Backlog Item and a Task type work item and then link them together as parent and child. Note – You will have to set the ChangedDate to a historic date when you created the work item. Remember, If you try and set the ChangedDate to a value earlier than last assigned you will receive the following exception… TF26212: Team Foundation Server could not save your changes. There may be problems with the work item type definition. Try again or contact your Team Foundation Server administrator. If you notice below I have added a few seconds each time I have modified the ‘ChangedDate’ just to avoid running into the exception listed above. // Create Linked Work Items and return Ids private static List<int> CreateWorkItemsProgrammatically() { // Instantiate Work Item Store with the ByPassRules flag _wis = new WorkItemStore(_tfs, WorkItemStoreFlags.BypassRules); // List of work items to return var listOfWorkItems = new List<int>(); // Create a new Product Backlog Item var p = new WorkItem(_wis.Projects[_selectedTeamProject.Name].WorkItemTypes["Product Backlog Item"]); p.Title = "This is a new PBI"; p.Description = "Description"; p.IterationPath = string.Format("{0}\\Release 1\\Sprint 1", _selectedTeamProject.Name); p.AreaPath = _selectedTeamProject.Name; p["Effort"] = 10; // Just double checking that ByPassRules is set to true if (_wis.BypassRules) { p.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value = Convert.ToDateTime("2012-01-01"); } if (p.Validate().Count == 0) { p.Save(); listOfWorkItems.Add(p.Id); } else { Console.WriteLine(">> Following exception(s) encountered during work item save: "); foreach (var e in p.Validate()) { Console.WriteLine(" - '{0}' ", e); } } var t = new WorkItem(_wis.Projects[_selectedTeamProject.Name].WorkItemTypes["Task"]); t.Title = "This is a task"; t.Description = "Task Description"; t.IterationPath = string.Format("{0}\\Release 1\\Sprint 1", _selectedTeamProject.Name); t.AreaPath = _selectedTeamProject.Name; t["Remaining Work"] = 10; if (_wis.BypassRules) { t.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value = Convert.ToDateTime("2012-01-01"); } if (t.Validate().Count == 0) { t.Save(); listOfWorkItems.Add(t.Id); } else { Console.WriteLine(">> Following exception(s) encountered during work item save: "); foreach (var e in t.Validate()) { Console.WriteLine(" - '{0}' ", e); } } var linkTypEnd = _wis.WorkItemLinkTypes.LinkTypeEnds["Child"]; p.Links.Add(new WorkItemLink(linkTypEnd, t.Id) {ChangedDate = Convert.ToDateTime("2012-01-01").AddSeconds(20)}); if (_wis.BypassRules) { p.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value = Convert.ToDateTime("2012-01-01").AddSeconds(20); } if (p.Validate().Count == 0) { p.Save(); } else { Console.WriteLine(">> Following exception(s) encountered during work item save: "); foreach (var e in p.Validate()) { Console.WriteLine(" - '{0}' ", e); } } return listOfWorkItems; } 03 – Set the value of “Created Date” and Change the value of “Changed Date” to Historic Dates The CreatedDate can only be changed after a work item has been created. If you try and set the CreatedDate to a historic date at the time of creation of a work item, it will not work. // Lets do a work item effort burn down simulation by updating the ChangedDate & CreatedDate to historic Values private static void WorkItemChangeSimulation(IEnumerable<int> listOfWorkItems) { foreach (var id in listOfWorkItems) { var wi = _wis.GetWorkItem(id); switch (wi.Type.Name) { case "ProductBacklogItem": if (wi.State.ToLower() == "new") wi.State = "Approved"; // Advance the changed date by few seconds wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value = Convert.ToDateTime(wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value).AddSeconds(10); // Set the CreatedDate to Changed Date wi.Fields["System.CreatedDate"].Value = Convert.ToDateTime(wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value).AddSeconds(10); wi.Save(); break; case "Task": // Advance the changed date by few seconds wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value = Convert.ToDateTime(wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value).AddSeconds(10); // Set the CreatedDate to Changed date wi.Fields["System.CreatedDate"].Value = Convert.ToDateTime(wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value).AddSeconds(10); wi.Save(); break; } } // A mock sprint start date var sprintStart = DateTime.Today.AddDays(-5); // A mock sprint end date var sprintEnd = DateTime.Today.AddDays(5); // What is the total Sprint duration var totalSprintDuration = (sprintEnd - sprintStart).Days; // How much of the sprint have we already covered var noOfDaysIntoSprint = (DateTime.Today - sprintStart).Days; // Get the effort assigned to our tasks var totalEffortRemaining = QueryTaskTotalEfforRemaining(listOfWorkItems); // Defining how much effort to burn every day decimal dailyBurnRate = totalEffortRemaining / totalSprintDuration < 1 ? 1 : totalEffortRemaining / totalSprintDuration; // we have just created one task var totalNoOfTasks = 1; var simulation = sprintStart; var currentDate = DateTime.Today.Date; // Carry on till effort has been burned down from sprint start to today while (simulation.Date != currentDate.Date) { var dailyBurnRate1 = dailyBurnRate; // A fixed amount needs to be burned down each day while (dailyBurnRate1 > 0) { // burn down bit by bit from all unfinished task type work items foreach (var id in listOfWorkItems) { var wi = _wis.GetWorkItem(id); var isDirty = false; // Set the status to in progress if (wi.State.ToLower() == "to do") { wi.State = "In Progress"; isDirty = true; } // Ensure that there is enough effort remaining in tasks to burn down the daily burn rate if (QueryTaskTotalEfforRemaining(listOfWorkItems) > dailyBurnRate1) { // If there is less than 1 unit of effort left in the task, burn it all if (Convert.ToDecimal(wi["Remaining Work"]) <= 1) { wi["Remaining Work"] = 0; dailyBurnRate1 = dailyBurnRate1 - Convert.ToDecimal(wi["Remaining Work"]); isDirty = true; } else { // How much to burn from each task? var toBurn = (dailyBurnRate / totalNoOfTasks) < 1 ? 1 : (dailyBurnRate / totalNoOfTasks); // Check that the task has enough effort to allow burnForTask effort if (Convert.ToDecimal(wi["Remaining Work"]) >= toBurn) { wi["Remaining Work"] = Convert.ToDecimal(wi["Remaining Work"]) - toBurn; dailyBurnRate1 = dailyBurnRate1 - toBurn; isDirty = true; } else { wi["Remaining Work"] = 0; dailyBurnRate1 = dailyBurnRate1 - Convert.ToDecimal(wi["Remaining Work"]); isDirty = true; } } } else { dailyBurnRate1 = 0; } if (isDirty) { if (Convert.ToDateTime(wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value).Date == simulation.Date) { wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value = Convert.ToDateTime(wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value).AddSeconds(20); } else { wi.Fields["System.ChangedDate"].Value = simulation.AddSeconds(20); } wi.Save(); } } } // Increase date by 1 to perform daily burn down by day simulation = Convert.ToDateTime(simulation).AddDays(1); } } // Get the Total effort remaining in the current sprint private static decimal QueryTaskTotalEfforRemaining(List<int> listOfWorkItems) { var unfinishedWorkInCurrentSprint = _wis.GetQueryDefinition( new Guid(QueryAndGuid.FirstOrDefault(c => c.Key == "Unfinished Work").Value)); var parameters = new Dictionary<string, object> { { "project", _selectedTeamProject.Name } }; var q = new Query(_wis, unfinishedWorkInCurrentSprint.QueryText, parameters); var results = q.RunLinkQuery(); var wis = new List<WorkItem>(); foreach (var result in results) { var _wi = _wis.GetWorkItem(result.TargetId); if (_wi.Type.Name == "Task" && listOfWorkItems.Contains(_wi.Id)) wis.Add(_wi); } return wis.Sum(r => Convert.ToDecimal(r["Remaining Work"])); }   04 – The Results If you are still reading, the results are beautiful! Image 1 – Create work item with Changed Date pre-set to historic date Image 2 – Set the CreatedDate to historic date (Same as the ChangedDate) Image 3 – Simulate of effort burn down on a task via the TFS API   Image 4 – The history of changes on the Task. So, essentially this task has burned 1 hour per day Sprint Burn Down Chart – What’s not possible? The Sprint burn down chart is calculated from the System.AuthorizedDate and not the System.ChangedDate/System.CreatedDate. So, though you can change the System.ChangedDate and System.CreatedDate to historic dates you will not be able to synthesize the sprint burn down chart. Image 1 – By changing the Created Date and Changed Date to ‘18/Oct/2012’ you would have expected the burn down to have been impacted, but it won’t be, because the sprint burn down chart uses the value of field ‘System.AuthorizedDate’ to calculate the unfinished work points. The AsOf queries that are used to calculate the unfinished work points use the value of the field ‘System.AuthorizedDate’. Image 2 – Using the above code I burned down 1 hour effort per day over 5 days from the task work item, I would have expected the sprint burn down to show a constant burn down, instead the burn down shows the effort exhausted on the 24th itself. Simply because the burn down is calculated using the ‘System.AuthorizedDate’. Now you would ask… “Can I change the value of the field System.AuthorizedDate to a historic date” Unfortunately that’s not possible! You will run into the exception ValidationException –  “TF26194: The value for field ‘Authorized Date’ cannot be changed.” Conclusion - You need to be a member of the Project Collection Service account group in order to set the fields ‘System.ChangedDate’ and ‘System.CreatedDate’ to historic dates - You need to instantiate the WorkItemStore using the flag ByPassValidation - The System.ChangedDate needs to be set to a historic date at the time of work item creation. You cannot reset the ChangedDate to a date earlier than the existing ChangedDate and you cannot reset the ChangedDate to a date greater than the current date time. - The System.CreatedDate can only be reset after a work item has been created. You cannot set the CreatedDate at the time of work item creation. The CreatedDate cannot be greater than the current date. You can however reset the CreatedDate to a date earlier than the existing value. - You will not be able to synthesize the Sprint burn down chart by changing the value of System.ChangedDate and System.CreatedDate to historic dates, since the burn down chart uses AsOf queries to calculate the unfinished work points which internally uses the System.AuthorizedDate and NOT the System.ChangedDate & System.CreatedDate - System.AuthorizedDate cannot be set to a historic date using the TFS API Read other posts on using the TFS API here… Enjoy!

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• 3D Graphics with XNA Game Studio 4.0 bug in light map?

  - by Eibis

  i'm following the tutorials on 3D Graphics with XNA Game Studio 4.0 and I came up with an horrible effect when I tried to implement the Light Map http://i.stack.imgur.com/BUWvU.jpg this effect shows up when I look towards the center of the house (and it moves with me). it has this shape because I'm using a sphere to represent light; using other light shapes gives different results. I'm using a class PreLightingRenderer: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Dhpoware; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; namespace XNAFirstPersonCamera { public class PrelightingRenderer { // Normal, depth, and light map render targets RenderTarget2D depthTarg; RenderTarget2D normalTarg; RenderTarget2D lightTarg; // Depth/normal effect and light mapping effect Effect depthNormalEffect; Effect lightingEffect; // Point light (sphere) mesh Model lightMesh; // List of models, lights, and the camera public List<CModel> Models { get; set; } public List<PPPointLight> Lights { get; set; } public FirstPersonCamera Camera { get; set; } GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice; int viewWidth = 0, viewHeight = 0; public PrelightingRenderer(GraphicsDevice GraphicsDevice, ContentManager Content) { viewWidth = GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width; viewHeight = GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height; // Create the three render targets depthTarg = new RenderTarget2D(GraphicsDevice, viewWidth, viewHeight, false, SurfaceFormat.Single, DepthFormat.Depth24); normalTarg = new RenderTarget2D(GraphicsDevice, viewWidth, viewHeight, false, SurfaceFormat.Color, DepthFormat.Depth24); lightTarg = new RenderTarget2D(GraphicsDevice, viewWidth, viewHeight, false, SurfaceFormat.Color, DepthFormat.Depth24); // Load effects depthNormalEffect = Content.Load<Effect>(@"Effects\PPDepthNormal"); lightingEffect = Content.Load<Effect>(@"Effects\PPLight"); // Set effect parameters to light mapping effect lightingEffect.Parameters["viewportWidth"].SetValue(viewWidth); lightingEffect.Parameters["viewportHeight"].SetValue(viewHeight); // Load point light mesh and set light mapping effect to it lightMesh = Content.Load<Model>(@"Models\PPLightMesh"); lightMesh.Meshes[0].MeshParts[0].Effect = lightingEffect; this.graphicsDevice = GraphicsDevice; } public void Draw() { drawDepthNormalMap(); drawLightMap(); prepareMainPass(); } void drawDepthNormalMap() { // Set the render targets to 'slots' 1 and 2 graphicsDevice.SetRenderTargets(normalTarg, depthTarg); // Clear the render target to 1 (infinite depth) graphicsDevice.Clear(Color.White); // Draw each model with the PPDepthNormal effect foreach (CModel model in Models) { model.CacheEffects(); model.SetModelEffect(depthNormalEffect, false); model.Draw(Camera.ViewMatrix, Camera.ProjectionMatrix, Camera.Position); model.RestoreEffects(); } // Un-set the render targets graphicsDevice.SetRenderTargets(null); } void drawLightMap() { // Set the depth and normal map info to the effect lightingEffect.Parameters["DepthTexture"].SetValue(depthTarg); lightingEffect.Parameters["NormalTexture"].SetValue(normalTarg); // Calculate the view * projection matrix Matrix viewProjection = Camera.ViewMatrix * Camera.ProjectionMatrix; // Set the inverse of the view * projection matrix to the effect Matrix invViewProjection = Matrix.Invert(viewProjection); lightingEffect.Parameters["InvViewProjection"].SetValue(invViewProjection); // Set the render target to the graphics device graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(lightTarg); // Clear the render target to black (no light) graphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black); // Set render states to additive (lights will add their influences) graphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.Additive; graphicsDevice.DepthStencilState = DepthStencilState.None; foreach (PPPointLight light in Lights) { // Set the light's parameters to the effect light.SetEffectParameters(lightingEffect); // Calculate the world * view * projection matrix and set it to // the effect Matrix wvp = (Matrix.CreateScale(light.Attenuation) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(light.Position)) * viewProjection; lightingEffect.Parameters["WorldViewProjection"].SetValue(wvp); // Determine the distance between the light and camera float dist = Vector3.Distance(Camera.Position, light.Position); // If the camera is inside the light-sphere, invert the cull mode // to draw the inside of the sphere instead of the outside if (dist < light.Attenuation) graphicsDevice.RasterizerState = RasterizerState.CullClockwise; // Draw the point-light-sphere lightMesh.Meshes[0].Draw(); // Revert the cull mode graphicsDevice.RasterizerState = RasterizerState.CullCounterClockwise; } // Revert the blending and depth render states graphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.Opaque; graphicsDevice.DepthStencilState = DepthStencilState.Default; // Un-set the render target graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); } void prepareMainPass() { foreach (CModel model in Models) foreach (ModelMesh mesh in model.Model.Meshes) foreach (ModelMeshPart part in mesh.MeshParts) { // Set the light map and viewport parameters to each model's effect if (part.Effect.Parameters["LightTexture"] != null) part.Effect.Parameters["LightTexture"].SetValue(lightTarg); if (part.Effect.Parameters["viewportWidth"] != null) part.Effect.Parameters["viewportWidth"].SetValue(viewWidth); if (part.Effect.Parameters["viewportHeight"] != null) part.Effect.Parameters["viewportHeight"].SetValue(viewHeight); } } } } that uses three effect: PPDepthNormal.fx float4x4 World; float4x4 View; float4x4 Projection; struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float3 Normal : NORMAL0; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 Depth : TEXCOORD0; float3 Normal : TEXCOORD1; }; VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input) { VertexShaderOutput output; float4x4 viewProjection = mul(View, Projection); float4x4 worldViewProjection = mul(World, viewProjection); output.Position = mul(input.Position, worldViewProjection); output.Normal = mul(input.Normal, World); // Position's z and w components correspond to the distance // from camera and distance of the far plane respectively output.Depth.xy = output.Position.zw; return output; } // We render to two targets simultaneously, so we can't // simply return a float4 from the pixel shader struct PixelShaderOutput { float4 Normal : COLOR0; float4 Depth : COLOR1; }; PixelShaderOutput PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) { PixelShaderOutput output; // Depth is stored as distance from camera / far plane distance // to get value between 0 and 1 output.Depth = input.Depth.x / input.Depth.y; // Normal map simply stores X, Y and Z components of normal // shifted from (-1 to 1) range to (0 to 1) range output.Normal.xyz = (normalize(input.Normal).xyz / 2) + .5; // Other components must be initialized to compile output.Depth.a = 1; output.Normal.a = 1; return output; } technique Technique1 { pass Pass1 { VertexShader = compile vs_1_1 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } } PPLight.fx float4x4 WorldViewProjection; float4x4 InvViewProjection; texture2D DepthTexture; texture2D NormalTexture; sampler2D depthSampler = sampler_state { texture = ; minfilter = point; magfilter = point; mipfilter = point; }; sampler2D normalSampler = sampler_state { texture = ; minfilter = point; magfilter = point; mipfilter = point; }; float3 LightColor; float3 LightPosition; float LightAttenuation; // Include shared functions #include "PPShared.vsi" struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float4 LightPosition : TEXCOORD0; }; VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input) { VertexShaderOutput output; output.Position = mul(input.Position, WorldViewProjection); output.LightPosition = output.Position; return output; } float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0 { // Find the pixel coordinates of the input position in the depth // and normal textures float2 texCoord = postProjToScreen(input.LightPosition) + halfPixel(); // Extract the depth for this pixel from the depth map float4 depth = tex2D(depthSampler, texCoord); // Recreate the position with the UV coordinates and depth value float4 position; position.x = texCoord.x * 2 - 1; position.y = (1 - texCoord.y) * 2 - 1; position.z = depth.r; position.w = 1.0f; // Transform position from screen space to world space position = mul(position, InvViewProjection); position.xyz /= position.w; // Extract the normal from the normal map and move from // 0 to 1 range to -1 to 1 range float4 normal = (tex2D(normalSampler, texCoord) - .5) * 2; // Perform the lighting calculations for a point light float3 lightDirection = normalize(LightPosition - position); float lighting = clamp(dot(normal, lightDirection), 0, 1); // Attenuate the light to simulate a point light float d = distance(LightPosition, position); float att = 1 - pow(d / LightAttenuation, 6); return float4(LightColor * lighting * att, 1); } technique Technique1 { pass Pass1 { VertexShader = compile vs_1_1 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } } PPShared.vsi has some common functions: float viewportWidth; float viewportHeight; // Calculate the 2D screen position of a 3D position float2 postProjToScreen(float4 position) { float2 screenPos = position.xy / position.w; return 0.5f * (float2(screenPos.x, -screenPos.y) + 1); } // Calculate the size of one half of a pixel, to convert // between texels and pixels float2 halfPixel() { return 0.5f / float2(viewportWidth, viewportHeight); } and finally from the Game class I set up in LoadContent with: effect = Content.Load(@"Effects\PPModel"); models[0] = new CModel(Content.Load(@"Models\teapot"), new Vector3(-50, 80, 0), new Vector3(0, 0, 0), 1f, Content.Load(@"Textures\prova_texture_autocad"), GraphicsDevice); house = new CModel(Content.Load(@"Models\house"), new Vector3(0, 0, 0), new Vector3((float)-Math.PI / 2, 0, 0), 35.0f, Content.Load(@"Textures\prova_texture_autocad"), GraphicsDevice); models[0].SetModelEffect(effect, true); house.SetModelEffect(effect, true); renderer = new PrelightingRenderer(GraphicsDevice, Content); renderer.Models = new List(); renderer.Models.Add(house); renderer.Models.Add(models[0]); renderer.Lights = new List() { new PPPointLight(new Vector3(0, 120, 0), Color.White * .85f, 2000) }; where PPModel.fx is: float4x4 World; float4x4 View; float4x4 Projection; texture2D BasicTexture; sampler2D basicTextureSampler = sampler_state { texture = ; addressU = wrap; addressV = wrap; minfilter = anisotropic; magfilter = anisotropic; mipfilter = linear; }; bool TextureEnabled = true; texture2D LightTexture; sampler2D lightSampler = sampler_state { texture = ; minfilter = point; magfilter = point; mipfilter = point; }; float3 AmbientColor = float3(0.15, 0.15, 0.15); float3 DiffuseColor; #include "PPShared.vsi" struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 UV : TEXCOORD0; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 UV : TEXCOORD0; float4 PositionCopy : TEXCOORD1; }; VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input) { VertexShaderOutput output; float4x4 worldViewProjection = mul(World, mul(View, Projection)); output.Position = mul(input.Position, worldViewProjection); output.PositionCopy = output.Position; output.UV = input.UV; return output; } float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0 { // Sample model's texture float3 basicTexture = tex2D(basicTextureSampler, input.UV); if (!TextureEnabled) basicTexture = float4(1, 1, 1, 1); // Extract lighting value from light map float2 texCoord = postProjToScreen(input.PositionCopy) + halfPixel(); float3 light = tex2D(lightSampler, texCoord); light += AmbientColor; return float4(basicTexture * DiffuseColor * light, 1); } technique Technique1 { pass Pass1 { VertexShader = compile vs_1_1 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } } I don't have any idea on what's wrong... googling the web I found that this tutorial may have some bug but I don't know if it's the LightModel fault (the sphere) or in a shader or in the class PrelightingRenderer. Any help is very appreciated, thank you for reading!

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• Advice for a distracted, unhappy, recently graduated programmer? [closed]

  - by Re-Invent

  I graduated 4 months ago. I had offers from a few good places to work at. At the same time I wanted to stick to building a small software business of my own, still have some ideas with good potential, some half done projects frozen in my github. But due to social pressures, I chose a job, the pay is great, but I am half-passionate about it. A small team of smart folks building useful product, working out contracts across the world. I've started finding it extremely boring. Boring to the extent that I skip 2-3 days a week together not doing work. Neither do I spend that time progressing any of my own projects. Yes, I feel stupid at the way I'm wasting time, but I don't understand exactly why is it happening. It's as if all the excitement has been drained. What can I do about it? Long version: School - I was in third standard. Only students, 6th grade had access to computer labs. I once peeked into the lab from the little door opening. No hard-disks, MS DOS on 5 1/2 inch floppies. I asked a senior student to play some sound in BASIC. He used PLAY to compose a tune. Boy! I was so excited, I was jumping from within. Back home, asked my brother to teach me some programming. We bought a book "MODERN All About GW-BASIC for Schools & Colleges". The book had everything, right from printing, to taking input, file i/o, game programming, machine level support, etc. I was in 6th standard, wrote my first game - a wheel of fortune, rotated the wheel by manipulating 16 color palette's definition. Got internet soon, got hooked to QuickBasic programming community. Made some more games "007 in Danger", "Car Crush 2" for submission to allbasiccode archives. I was extremely excited about all this. My interests now swayed into "hacking" (computer security). Taught myself some perl, found it annoying, learnt PHP and a bit of SQL. Also taught myself Visual Basic one of the winters and wrote a pacman clone with Direct X. By the time I was in 10th standard, I created some evil tools using visual basic, php and mysql and eventually landed myself into an unpaid side-job at a government facility, building evil tools for them. It was a dream come true for crackers of that time. And so was I, still very excited. Things changed soon, last two years of school were not so great as I was balancing preps for college, work at govt. and studies for school at same time. College - College was opposite of all I had wished it to be. I imagined it to be a place where I'd spend my 4 years building something awesome. It was rather an epitome of rote learning, attendance, rules, busy schedules, ban on personal laptops, hardly any hackers surrounding you and shit like that. We had to take permissions to even introduce some cultural/creative activities in our annual schedule. The labs won't be open on weekends because the lab employees had to have their leaves. Yes, a horrible place for someone like me. I still managed to pull out a project with a friend over 2 months. Showed it to people high in the academia hierarchy. They were immensely impressed, we proposed to allow personal computers for students. They made up half-assed reasons and didn't agree. We felt frustrated. And so on, I still managed to teach myself new languages, do new projects of my own, do an intern at the same govt. facility, start a small business for sometime, give a talk at a conference I'm passionate about, win game-dev and hacking contest at most respected colleges, solve good deal of programming contest problems, etc. At the same time I was not content with all these restrictions, great emphasis on rote learning, and sheer wastage of time due to college. I never felt I was overdoing, but now I feel I burnt myself out. During my last days at college, I did an intern at a bigco. While I spent my time building prototypes for certain LBS, the other interns around me, even a good friend, was just skipping time. I thought maybe, in a few weeks he would put in some serious efforts at work assigned to him, but all he did was to find creative ways to skip work, hide his face from manager, engage people in talks if they try to question his progress, etc. I tried a few time to get him on track, but it seems all he wanted was to "not to work hard at all and still reap the fruits". I don't know how others take such people, but I find their vicinity very very poisonous to one's own motivation and productivity. Over that, the place where I come from, HRs don't give much value to what have you done past 4 years. So towards the end of out intern, we all were offered work at the bigco, but the slacker, even after not writing more than 200 lines of code was made a much better offer. I felt enraged instantly - "Is this how the corp world treats someone who does fruitful, if not extra-ordinary work form them for past 6 months?". Yes, I did try to negotiate and debate. The bigcos seem blind due to departmentalization of responsibilities and many layers of management. I decided not to be in touch with any characters of that depressing play. Probably the busy time I had at college, ignoring friends, ignoring fun and squeezing every bit of free time for myself is also responsible. Probably this is what has drained all my willingness to work for anyone. I find my day job boring, at the same time I with to maintain it for financial reasons. I feel a bit burnt out, unsatisfied and at the same time an urge to quit working for someone else and start finishing my frozen side-projects (which may be profitable). Though I haven't got much to support myself with food, office, internet bills, etc in savings. I still have my day job, but I don't find it very interesting, even though the pay is higher than the slacker, I don't find money to be a great motivator here. I keep comparing myself to my past version. I wonder how to get rid of this and reboot myself back to the way I was in school days - excited about it, tinkering, building, learning new things daily, and NOT BORED?

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• “It’s only test code…”

  - by Chris George

  “Let me hack this in, it’s only test code”, “Don’t worry about getting it reviewed, it’s only test code”, “It doesn’t have to be elegant or efficient, it’s only test code”… do these phrases sound familiar? Chances are if you’ve working with test automation, at one point or other you will have heard these phrases, you have probably even used them yourself! What is certain is that code written under this “it’s only test code” mantra will come back and bite you in the arse! I’ve recently encountered a case where a test was giving a false positive, therefore hiding a real product bug because that test code was very badly written. Firstly it was very difficult to understand what the test was actually trying to achieve let alone how it was doing it, and this complexity masked a simple logic error. These issues are real and they do happen. Let’s take a step back from this and look at what we are trying to do. We are writing test code that tests product code, and we do this to create a suite of tests that will help protect our software against regressions. This test code is making sure that the product behaves as it should by employing some sort of expected result verification. The simple cases of these are generally not a problem. However, automation allows us to explore more complex scenarios in many more permutations. As this complexity increases then so does the complexity of the test code. It is at this point that code which has not been architected properly will cause problems.   Keep your friends close… So, how do we make sure we are doing it right? The development teams I have worked on have always had Test Engineers working very closely with their Software Engineers. This is something that I have always tried to take full advantage of. They are coding experts! So run your ideas past them, ask for advice on how to structure your code, help you design your data structures. This may require a shift in your teams viewpoint, as contrary to this section title and folklore, Software Engineers are not actually the mortal enemy of Test Engineers. As time progresses, and test automation becomes more and more ingrained in what we do, the two roles are converging more than ever. Over the 16 years I have spent as a Test Engineer, I have seen the grey area between the two roles grow significantly larger. This serves to strengthen the relationship and common bond between the two roles which helps to make test code activities so much easier!   Pair for the win Possibly the best thing you could do to write good test code is to pair program on the task. This will serve a few purposes. you will get the benefit of the Software Engineers knowledge and experience the Software Engineer will gain knowledge on the testing process. Sharing the love is a wonderful thing! two pairs of eyes are always better than one… And so are two brains. Between the two of you, I will guarantee you will derive more useful test cases than if it was just one of you.   Code reviews Another policy which certainly pays dividends is the practice of code reviews. By having one of your peers review your code before you commit it serves two purposes. Firstly, it forces you to explain your code. Just the act of doing this will often pick up errors in your code. Secondly, it gets yet another pair of eyes on your code! I cannot stress enough how important code reviews are. The benefits they offer apply as much to product code as test code. In short, Software and Test Engineers should all be doing them! It can be extended even further by getting test code reviewed by a Software Engineer and a Test Engineer, and likewise product code. This serves to keep both functions in the loop with changes going on within your code base.   Learn from your devs I briefly touched on this earlier but I’d like to go into more detail here. Pairing with your Software Engineers when writing your test code is such an amazing opportunity to improve your coding skills. As I sit here writing this article waiting to be called into court for jury service, it reminds me that it takes a lot of patience to be a Test Engineer, almost as much as it takes to be a juror! However tempting it is to go rushing in and start writing your automated tests, resist that urge. Discuss what you want to achieve then talk through the approach you’re going to take. Then code it up together. I find it really enlightening to ask questions like ‘is there a better way to do this?’ Or ‘is this how you would code it?’ The latter question, especially, is where I learn the most. I’ve found that most Software Engineers will be reluctant to show you the ‘right way’ to code something when writing tests because they perceive the ‘right way’ to be too complicated for the Test Engineer (e.g. not mentioning LINQ and instead doing something verbose). So by asking how THEY would code it, it unleashes their true dev-ness and advanced code usually ensues! I would like to point out, however, that you don’t have to accept their method as the final answer. On numerous occasions I have opted for the more simple/verbose solution because I found the code written by the Software Engineer too advanced and therefore I would find it unreadable when I return to the code in a months’ time! Always keep the target audience in mind when writing clever code, and in my case that is mostly Test Engineers.  

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• Loosely coupled .NET Cache Provider using Dependency Injection

  - by Rhames

  I have recently been reading the excellent book “Dependency Injection in .NET”, written by Mark Seemann. I do not generally buy software development related books, as I never seem to have the time to read them, but I have found the time to read Mark’s book, and it was time well spent I think. Reading the ideas around Dependency Injection made me realise that the Cache Provider code I wrote about earlier (see http://geekswithblogs.net/Rhames/archive/2011/01/10/using-the-asp.net-cache-to-cache-data-in-a-model.aspx) could be refactored to use Dependency Injection, which should produce cleaner code. The goals are to: Separate the cache provider implementation (using the ASP.NET data cache) from the consumers (loose coupling). This will also mean that the dependency on System.Web for the cache provider does not ripple down into the layers where it is being consumed (such as the domain layer). Provide a decorator pattern to allow a consumer of the cache provider to be implemented separately from the base consumer (i.e. if we have a base repository, we can decorate this with a caching version). Although I used the term repository, in reality the cache consumer could be just about anything. Use constructor injection to provide the Dependency Injection, with a suitable DI container (I use Castle Windsor). The sample code for this post is available on github, https://github.com/RobinHames/CacheProvider.git ICacheProvider In the sample code, the key interface is ICacheProvider, which is in the domain layer. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3:   4: namespace CacheDiSample.Domain 5: { 6: public interface ICacheProvider<T> 7: { 8: T Fetch(string key, Func<T> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry); 9: IEnumerable<T> Fetch(string key, Func<IEnumerable<T>> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry); 10: } 11: }   This interface contains two methods to retrieve data from the cache, either as a single instance or as an IEnumerable. the second paramerter is of type Func<T>. This is the method used to retrieve data if nothing is found in the cache. The ASP.NET implementation of the ICacheProvider interface needs to live in a project that has a reference to system.web, typically this will be the root UI project, or it could be a separate project. The key thing is that the domain or data access layers do not need system.web references adding to them. In my sample MVC application, the CacheProvider is implemented in the UI project, in a folder called “CacheProviders”: 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Caching; 6: using CacheDiSample.Domain; 7:   8: namespace CacheDiSample.CacheProvider 9: { 10: public class CacheProvider<T> : ICacheProvider<T> 11: { 12: public T Fetch(string key, Func<T> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry) 13: { 14: return FetchAndCache<T>(key, retrieveData, absoluteExpiry, relativeExpiry); 15: } 16:   17: public IEnumerable<T> Fetch(string key, Func<IEnumerable<T>> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry) 18: { 19: return FetchAndCache<IEnumerable<T>>(key, retrieveData, absoluteExpiry, relativeExpiry); 20: } 21:   22: #region Helper Methods 23:   24: private U FetchAndCache<U>(string key, Func<U> retrieveData, DateTime? absoluteExpiry, TimeSpan? relativeExpiry) 25: { 26: U value; 27: if (!TryGetValue<U>(key, out value)) 28: { 29: value = retrieveData(); 30: if (!absoluteExpiry.HasValue) 31: absoluteExpiry = Cache.NoAbsoluteExpiration; 32:   33: if (!relativeExpiry.HasValue) 34: relativeExpiry = Cache.NoSlidingExpiration; 35:   36: HttpContext.Current.Cache.Insert(key, value, null, absoluteExpiry.Value, relativeExpiry.Value); 37: } 38: return value; 39: } 40:   41: private bool TryGetValue<U>(string key, out U value) 42: { 43: object cachedValue = HttpContext.Current.Cache.Get(key); 44: if (cachedValue == null) 45: { 46: value = default(U); 47: return false; 48: } 49: else 50: { 51: try 52: { 53: value = (U)cachedValue; 54: return true; 55: } 56: catch 57: { 58: value = default(U); 59: return false; 60: } 61: } 62: } 63:   64: #endregion 65:   66: } 67: }   The FetchAndCache helper method checks if the specified cache key exists, if it does not, the Func<U> retrieveData method is called, and the results are added to the cache. Using Castle Windsor to register the cache provider In the MVC UI project (my application root), Castle Windsor is used to register the CacheProvider implementation, using a Windsor Installer: 1: using Castle.MicroKernel.Registration; 2: using Castle.MicroKernel.SubSystems.Configuration; 3: using Castle.Windsor; 4:   5: using CacheDiSample.Domain; 6: using CacheDiSample.CacheProvider; 7:   8: namespace CacheDiSample.WindsorInstallers 9: { 10: public class CacheInstaller : IWindsorInstaller 11: { 12: public void Install(IWindsorContainer container, IConfigurationStore store) 13: { 14: container.Register( 15: Component.For(typeof(ICacheProvider<>)) 16: .ImplementedBy(typeof(CacheProvider<>)) 17: .LifestyleTransient()); 18: } 19: } 20: }   Note that the cache provider is registered as a open generic type. Consuming a Repository I have an existing couple of repository interfaces defined in my domain layer: IRepository.cs 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3:   4: using CacheDiSample.Domain.Model; 5:   6: namespace CacheDiSample.Domain.Repositories 7: { 8: public interface IRepository<T> 9: where T : EntityBase 10: { 11: T GetById(int id); 12: IList<T> GetAll(); 13: } 14: }   IBlogRepository.cs 1: using System; 2: using CacheDiSample.Domain.Model; 3:   4: namespace CacheDiSample.Domain.Repositories 5: { 6: public interface IBlogRepository : IRepository<Blog> 7: { 8: Blog GetByName(string name); 9: } 10: }   These two repositories are implemented in the DataAccess layer, using Entity Framework to retrieve data (this is not important though). One important point is that in the BaseRepository implementation of IRepository, the methods are virtual. This will allow the decorator to override them. The BlogRepository is registered in a RepositoriesInstaller, again in the MVC UI project. 1: using Castle.MicroKernel.Registration; 2: using Castle.MicroKernel.SubSystems.Configuration; 3: using Castle.Windsor; 4:   5: using CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheDecorators; 6: using CacheDiSample.Domain.Repositories; 7: using CacheDiSample.DataAccess; 8:   9: namespace CacheDiSample.WindsorInstallers 10: { 11: public class RepositoriesInstaller : IWindsorInstaller 12: { 13: public void Install(IWindsorContainer container, IConfigurationStore store) 14: { 15: container.Register(Component.For<IBlogRepository>() 16: .ImplementedBy<BlogRepository>() 17: .LifestyleTransient() 18: .DependsOn(new 19: { 20: nameOrConnectionString = "BloggingContext" 21: })); 22: } 23: } 24: }   Now I can inject a dependency on the IBlogRepository into a consumer, such as a controller in my sample code: 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6:   7: using CacheDiSample.Domain.Repositories; 8: using CacheDiSample.Domain.Model; 9:   10: namespace CacheDiSample.Controllers 11: { 12: public class HomeController : Controller 13: { 14: private readonly IBlogRepository blogRepository; 15:   16: public HomeController(IBlogRepository blogRepository) 17: { 18: if (blogRepository == null) 19: throw new ArgumentNullException("blogRepository"); 20:   21: this.blogRepository = blogRepository; 22: } 23:   24: public ActionResult Index() 25: { 26: ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!"; 27:   28: var blogs = blogRepository.GetAll(); 29:   30: return View(new Models.HomeModel { Blogs = blogs }); 31: } 32:   33: public ActionResult About() 34: { 35: return View(); 36: } 37: } 38: }   Consuming the Cache Provider via a Decorator I used a Decorator pattern to consume the cache provider, this means my repositories follow the open/closed principle, as they do not require any modifications to implement the caching. It also means that my controllers do not have any knowledge of the caching taking place, as the DI container will simply inject the decorator instead of the root implementation of the repository. The first step is to implement a BlogRepository decorator, with the caching logic in it. Note that this can reside in the domain layer, as it does not require any knowledge of the data access methods. BlogRepositoryWithCaching.cs 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5:   6: using CacheDiSample.Domain.Model; 7: using CacheDiSample.Domain; 8: using CacheDiSample.Domain.Repositories; 9:   10: namespace CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheDecorators 11: { 12: public class BlogRepositoryWithCaching : IBlogRepository 13: { 14: // The generic cache provider, injected by DI 15: private ICacheProvider<Blog> cacheProvider; 16: // The decorated blog repository, injected by DI 17: private IBlogRepository parentBlogRepository; 18:   19: public BlogRepositoryWithCaching(IBlogRepository parentBlogRepository, ICacheProvider<Blog> cacheProvider) 20: { 21: if (parentBlogRepository == null) 22: throw new ArgumentNullException("parentBlogRepository"); 23:   24: this.parentBlogRepository = parentBlogRepository; 25:   26: if (cacheProvider == null) 27: throw new ArgumentNullException("cacheProvider"); 28:   29: this.cacheProvider = cacheProvider; 30: } 31:   32: public Blog GetByName(string name) 33: { 34: string key = string.Format("CacheDiSample.DataAccess.GetByName.{0}", name); 35: // hard code 5 minute expiry! 36: TimeSpan relativeCacheExpiry = new TimeSpan(0, 5, 0); 37: return cacheProvider.Fetch(key, () => 38: { 39: return parentBlogRepository.GetByName(name); 40: }, 41: null, relativeCacheExpiry); 42: } 43:   44: public Blog GetById(int id) 45: { 46: string key = string.Format("CacheDiSample.DataAccess.GetById.{0}", id); 47:   48: // hard code 5 minute expiry! 49: TimeSpan relativeCacheExpiry = new TimeSpan(0, 5, 0); 50: return cacheProvider.Fetch(key, () => 51: { 52: return parentBlogRepository.GetById(id); 53: }, 54: null, relativeCacheExpiry); 55: } 56:   57: public IList<Blog> GetAll() 58: { 59: string key = string.Format("CacheDiSample.DataAccess.GetAll"); 60:   61: // hard code 5 minute expiry! 62: TimeSpan relativeCacheExpiry = new TimeSpan(0, 5, 0); 63: return cacheProvider.Fetch(key, () => 64: { 65: return parentBlogRepository.GetAll(); 66: }, 67: null, relativeCacheExpiry) 68: .ToList(); 69: } 70: } 71: }   The key things in this caching repository are: I inject into the repository the ICacheProvider<Blog> implementation, via the constructor. This will make the cache provider functionality available to the repository. I inject the parent IBlogRepository implementation (which has the actual data access code), via the constructor. This will allow the methods implemented in the parent to be called if nothing is found in the cache. I override each of the methods implemented in the repository, including those implemented in the generic BaseRepository. Each override of these methods follows the same pattern. It makes a call to the CacheProvider.Fetch method, and passes in the parentBlogRepository implementation of the method as the retrieval method, to be used if nothing is present in the cache. Configuring the Caching Repository in the DI Container The final piece of the jigsaw is to tell Castle Windsor to use the BlogRepositoryWithCaching implementation of IBlogRepository, but to inject the actual Data Access implementation into this decorator. This is easily achieved by modifying the RepositoriesInstaller to use Windsor’s implicit decorator wiring: 1: using Castle.MicroKernel.Registration; 2: using Castle.MicroKernel.SubSystems.Configuration; 3: using Castle.Windsor; 4:   5: using CacheDiSample.Domain.CacheDecorators; 6: using CacheDiSample.Domain.Repositories; 7: using CacheDiSample.DataAccess; 8:   9: namespace CacheDiSample.WindsorInstallers 10: { 11: public class RepositoriesInstaller : IWindsorInstaller 12: { 13: public void Install(IWindsorContainer container, IConfigurationStore store) 14: { 15:   16: // Use Castle Windsor implicit wiring for the block repository decorator 17: // Register the outermost decorator first 18: container.Register(Component.For<IBlogRepository>() 19: .ImplementedBy<BlogRepositoryWithCaching>() 20: .LifestyleTransient()); 21: // Next register the IBlogRepository inmplementation to inject into the outer decorator 22: container.Register(Component.For<IBlogRepository>() 23: .ImplementedBy<BlogRepository>() 24: .LifestyleTransient() 25: .DependsOn(new 26: { 27: nameOrConnectionString = "BloggingContext" 28: })); 29: } 30: } 31: }   This is all that is needed. Now if the consumer of the repository makes a call to the repositories method, it will be routed via the caching mechanism. You can test this by stepping through the code, and seeing that the DataAccess.BlogRepository code is only called if there is no data in the cache, or this has expired. The next step is to add the SQL Cache Dependency support into this pattern, this will be a future post.

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• Maintenance plans love story

  - by Maria Zakourdaev

  There are about 200 QA and DEV SQL Servers out there.  There is a maintenance plan on many of them that performs a backup of all databases and removes the backup history files. First of all, I must admit that I’m no big fan of maintenance plans in particular or the SSIS packages in general.  In this specific case, if I ever need to change anything in the way backup is performed, such as the compression feature or perform some other change, I have to open each plan one by one. This is quite a pain. Therefore, I have decided to replace the maintenance plans with a stored procedure that will perform exactly the same thing.  Having such a procedure will allow me to open multiple server connections and just execute an ALTER PROCEDURE whenever I need to change anything in it. There is nothing like good ole T-SQL. The first challenge was to remove the unneeded maintenance plans. Of course, I didn’t want to do it server by server.  I found the procedure msdb.dbo.sp_maintplan_delete_plan, but it only has a parameter for the maintenance plan id and it has no other parameters, like plan name, which would have been much more useful. Now I needed to find the table that holds all maintenance plans on the server. You would think that it would be msdb.dbo.sysdbmaintplans but, unfortunately, regardless of the number of maintenance plans on the instance, it contains just one row.    After a while I found another table: msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_subplans. It contains the plan id that I was looking for, in the plan_id column and well as the agent’s job id which is executing the plan’s package: That was all I needed and the rest turned out to be quite easy.  Here is a script that can be executed against hundreds of servers from a multi-server query window to drop the specific maintenance plans. DECLARE @PlanID uniqueidentifier   SELECT @PlanID = plan_id FROM msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_subplans Where name like ‘BackupPlan%’   EXECUTE msdb.dbo.sp_maintplan_delete_plan @plan_id=@PlanID   The second step was to create a procedure that will perform  all of the old maintenance plan tasks: create a folder for each database, backup all databases on the server and clean up the old files. The script is below. Enjoy.   ALTER PROCEDURE BackupAllDatabases                                   @PrintMode BIT = 1 AS BEGIN          DECLARE @BackupLocation VARCHAR(500)        DECLARE @PurgeAferDays INT        DECLARE @PurgingDate VARCHAR(30)        DECLARE @SQLCmd  VARCHAR(MAX)        DECLARE @FileName  VARCHAR(100)               SET @PurgeAferDays = -14        SET @BackupLocation = '\\central_storage_servername\BACKUPS\'+@@servername               SET @PurgingDate = CONVERT(VARCHAR(19), DATEADD (dd,@PurgeAferDays,GETDATE()),126)               SET @FileName = '?_full_'+                      + REPLACE(CONVERT(VARCHAR(19), GETDATE(),126),':','-')                      +'.bak';          SET @SQLCmd = '               IF ''?'' <> ''tempdb'' BEGIN                      EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_create_subdir N'''+@BackupLocation+'\?\'' ;                        BACKUP DATABASE ? TO  DISK = N'''+@BackupLocation+'\?\'+@FileName+'''                      WITH NOFORMAT, NOINIT,  SKIP, REWIND, NOUNLOAD, COMPRESSION,  STATS = 10 ;                        EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_delete_file 0,N'''+@BackupLocation+'\?\'',N''bak'',N'''+@PurgingDate+''',1;               END'          IF @PrintMode = 1 BEGIN               PRINT @SQLCmd        END               EXEC sp_MSforeachdb @SQLCmd        END

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• jqgrid with asp.net webmethod and json working with sorting, paging, searching and LINQ

  - by aimlessWonderer

  THIS WORKS! Most topics covering jqgrid and asp.net seem to relate to just receiving JSON, or working in the MVC framework, or utilizing other handlers or web services... but not many dealt with actually passing parameters back to an actual webmethod in the codebehind. Furthermore, scarce are the examples that contain successful implementation the AJAX paging, sorting, or searching along with LINQ to SQL for asp.net jqGrid. Below is a working example that may help others who need help to pass parameters to jqGrid in order to have correct paging, sorting, filtering.. it uses pieces from here and there... ================================================== First, THE JAVASCRIPT <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { var grid = $("#list"); $("#list").jqGrid({ // setup custom parameter names to pass to server prmNames: { search: "isSearch", nd: null, rows: "numRows", page: "page", sort: "sortField", order: "sortOrder" }, // add by default to avoid webmethod parameter conflicts postData: { searchString: '', searchField: '', searchOper: '' }, // setup ajax call to webmethod datatype: function(postdata) { mtype: "GET", $.ajax({ url: 'PageName.aspx/getGridData', type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", data: JSON.stringify(postdata), dataType: "json", success: function(data, st) { if (st == "success") { var grid = jQuery("#list")[0]; grid.addJSONData(JSON.parse(data.d)); } }, error: function() { alert("Error with AJAX callback"); } }); }, // this is what jqGrid is looking for in json callback jsonReader: { root: "rows", page: "page", total: "totalpages", records: "totalrecords", cell: "cell", id: "id", //index of the column with the PK in it userdata: "userdata", repeatitems: true }, colNames: ['Id', 'First Name', 'Last Name'], colModel: [ { name: 'id', index: 'id', width: 55, search: false }, { name: 'fname', index: 'fname', width: 200, searchoptions: { sopt: ['eq', 'ne', 'cn']} }, { name: 'lname', index: 'lname', width: 200, searchoptions: { sopt: ['eq', 'ne', 'cn']} } ], rowNum: 10, rowList: [10, 20, 30], pager: jQuery("#pager"), sortname: "fname", sortorder: "asc", viewrecords: true, caption: "Grid Title Here" }).jqGrid('navGrid', '#pager', { edit: false, add: false, del: false }, {}, // default settings for edit {}, // add {}, // delete { closeOnEscape: true, closeAfterSearch: true}, //search {} ) }); </script> ================================================== Second, THE C# WEBMETHOD [WebMethod] public static string getGridData(int? numRows, int? page, string sortField, string sortOrder, bool isSearch, string searchField, string searchString, string searchOper) { string result = null; MyDataContext db = null; try { //--- retrieve the data db = new MyDataContext("my connection string path"); var query = from u in db.TBL_USERs select u; //--- determine if this is a search filter if (isSearch) { searchOper = getOperator(searchOper); // need to associate correct operator to value sent from jqGrid string whereClause = String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", searchField, searchOper, "@" + searchField); //--- associate value to field parameter Dictionary<string, object> param = new Dictionary<string, object>(); param.Add("@" + searchField, searchString); query = query.Where(whereClause, new object[1] { param }); } //--- setup calculations int pageIndex = page ?? 1; //--- current page int pageSize = numRows ?? 10; //--- number of rows to show per page int totalRecords = query.Count(); //--- number of total items from query int totalPages = (int)Math.Ceiling((decimal)totalRecords / (decimal)pageSize); //--- number of pages //--- filter dataset for paging and sorting IQueryable<TBL_USER> orderedRecords = query.OrderBy(sortfield); IEnumerable<TBL_USER> sortedRecords = orderedRecords.ToList(); if (sortorder == "desc") sortedRecords= sortedRecords.Reverse(); sortedRecords= sortedRecords .Skip((pageIndex - 1) * pageSize) //--- page the data .Take(pageSize); //--- format json var jsonData = new { totalpages = totalPages, //--- number of pages page = pageIndex, //--- current page totalrecords = totalRecords, //--- total items rows = ( from row in sortedRecords select new { i = row.USER_ID, cell = new string[] { row.USER_ID.ToString(), row.FNAME.ToString(), row.LNAME } } ).ToArray() }; result = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(jsonData); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine(ex); } finally { if (db != null) db.Dispose(); } return result; } ================================================== Third, NECESSITIES In order to have dynamic OrderBy clauses in the LINQ, I had to pull in a class to my AppCode folder called 'Dynamic.cs'. You can retrieve the file from downloading here. You will find the file in the "DynamicQuery" folder. That file will give you the ability to utilized dynamic ORDERBY clause since we don't know what column we're filtering by except on the initial load. To serialize the JSON back from the C-sharp to the JS, I incorporated the James Newton-King JSON.net DLL found here : http://json.codeplex.com/releases/view/37810. After downloading, there is a "Newtonsoft.Json.Compact.dll" which you can add in your Bin folder as a reference Here's my USING's block using System; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Web.Services; using System.Linq.Dynamic; For the Javascript references, I'm using the following scripts in respective order in case that helps some folks: 1) jquery-1.3.2.min.js ... 2) jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.min.js ... 3) json.min.js ... 4) i18n/grid.locale-en.js ... 5) jquery.jqGrid.min.js For the CSS, I'm using jqGrid's necessities as well as the jQuery UI Theme: 1) jquery_theme/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.css ... 2) ui.jqgrid.css The key to getting the parameters from the JS to the WebMethod without having to parse an unserialized string on the backend or having to setup some JS logic to switch methods for different numbers of parameters was this block postData: { searchString: '', searchField: '', searchOper: '' }, Those parameters will still be set correctly when you actually do a search and then reset to empty when you "reset" or want the grid to not do any filtering Hope this helps some others!!!! Please reply if you find major issues or ways of refactoring or doing better that I haven't considered.

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