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• SQL SERVER – Backing Up and Recovering the Tail End of a Transaction Log – Notes from the Field #042

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Notes from Pinal]: The biggest challenge which people face is not taking backup, but the biggest challenge is to restore a backup successfully. I have seen so many different examples where users have failed to restore their database because they made some mistake while they take backup and were not aware of the same. Tail Log backup was such an issue in earlier version of SQL Server but in the latest version of SQL Server, Microsoft team has fixed the confusion with additional information on the backup and restore screen itself. Now they have additional information, there are a few more people confused as they have no clue about this. Previously they did not find this as a issue and now they are finding tail log as a new learning. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. In this 42nd episode of the Notes from the Fields series database expert Tim Radney (partner at Linchpin People) explains in a very simple words, Backing Up and Recovering the Tail End of a Transaction Log. Many times when restoring a database over an existing database SQL Server will warn you about needing to make a tail end of the log backup. This might be your reminder that you have to choose to overwrite the database or could be your reminder that you are about to write over and lose any transactions since the last transaction log backup. You might be asking yourself “What is the tail end of the transaction log”. The tail end of the transaction log is simply any committed transactions that have occurred since the last transaction log backup. This is a very crucial part of a recovery strategy if you are lucky enough to be able to capture this part of the log. Most organizations have chosen to accept some amount of data loss. You might be shaking your head at this statement however if your organization is taking transaction logs backup every 15 minutes, then your potential risk of data loss is up to 15 minutes. Depending on the extent of the issue causing you to have to perform a restore, you may or may not have access to the transaction log (LDF) to be able to back up those vital transactions. For example, if the storage array or disk that holds your transaction log file becomes corrupt or damaged then you wouldn’t be able to recover the tail end of the log. If you do have access to the physical log file then you can still back up the tail end of the log. In 2013 I presented a session at the PASS Summit called “The Ultimate Tail Log Backup and Restore” and have been invited back this year to present it again. During this session I demonstrate how you can back up the tail end of the log even after the data file becomes corrupt. In my demonstration I set my database offline and then delete the data file (MDF). The database can’t become more corrupt than that. I attempt to bring the database back online to change the state to RECOVERY PENDING and then backup the tail end of the log. I can do this by specifying WITH NO_TRUNCATE. Using NO_TRUNCATE is equivalent to specifying both COPY_ONLY and CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR. It as its name says, does not try to truncate the log. This is a great demo however how could I achieve backing up the tail end of the log if the failure destroys my entire instance of SQL and all I had was the LDF file? During my demonstration I also demonstrate that I can attach the log file to a database on another instance and then back up the tail end of the log. If I am performing proper backups then my most recent full, differential and log files should be on a server other than the one that crashed. I am able to achieve this task by creating new database with the same name as the failed database. I then set the database offline, delete my data file and overwrite the log with my good log file. I attempt to bring the database back online and then backup the log with NO_TRUNCATE just like in the first example. I encourage each of you to view my blog post and watch the video demonstration on how to perform these tasks. I really hope that none of you ever have to perform this in production, however it is a really good idea to know how to do this just in case. It really isn’t a matter of “IF” you will have to perform a restore of a production system but more of a “WHEN”. Being able to recover the tail end of the log in these sever cases could be the difference of having to notify all your business customers of data loss or not. If you want me to take a look at your server and its settings, or if your server is facing any issue we can Fix Your SQL Server. Note: Tim has also written an excellent book on SQL Backup and Recovery, a must have for everyone. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Business Case for investing time developing Stubs and BizUnit Tests

  - by charlie.mott

  I was recently in a position where I had to justify why effort should be spent developing Stubbed Integration Tests for BizTalk solutions. These tests are usually developed using the BizUnit framework. I assumed that most seasoned BizTalk developers would consider this best practice. Even though Microsoft suggest use of BizUnit on MSDN, I've not found a single site listing the justifications for investing time writing stubs and BizUnit tests. Stubs Stubs should be developed to isolate your development team from external dependencies. This is described by Michael Stephenson here. Failing to do this can result in the following problems: In contract-first scenarios, the external system interface will have been defined.  But the interface may not have been setup or even developed yet for the BizTalk developers to work with. By the time you open the target location to see the data BizTalk has sent, it may have been swept away. If you are relying on the UI of the target system to see the data BizTalk has sent, what do you do if it fails to arrive? It may take time for the data to be processed or it may be scheduled to be processed later. Learning how to use the source\target systems and investigations into where things go wrong in these systems will slow down the BizTalk development effort. By the time the data is visible in a UI it may have undergone further transformations. In larger development teams working together, do you all use the same source and target instances. How do you know which data was created by whose tests? How do you know which event log error message are whose?  Another developer may have “cleaned up” your data. It is harder to write BizUnit tests that clean up the data\logs after each test run. What if your B2B partners' source or target system cannot support the sort of testing you want to do. They may not even have a development or test instance that you can work with. Their single test instance may be used by the SIT\UAT teams. There may be licencing costs of setting up an instances of the external system. The stubs I like to use are generic stubs that can accept\return any message type.  Usually I need to create one per protocol. They should be driven by BizUnit steps to: validates the data received; and select a response messages (or error response). Once built, they can be re-used for many integration tests and from project to project. I’m not saying that developers should never test against a real instance.  Every so often, you still need to connect to real developer or test instances of the source and target endpoints\services. The interface developers may ask you to send them some data to see if everything still works.  Or you might want some messages sent to BizTalk to get confidence that everything still works beyond BizTalk. Tests Automated “Stubbed Integration Tests” are usually built using the BizUnit framework. These facilitate testing of the entire integration process from source stub to target stub. It will ensure that all of the BizTalk components are configured together correctly to meet all the requirements. More fine grained unit testing of individual BizTalk components is still encouraged.  But BizUnit provides much the easiest way to test some components types (e.g. Orchestrations). Using BizUnit with the Behaviour Driven Development approach described by Mike Stephenson delivers the following benefits: source: http://biztalkbddsample.codeplex.com – Video 1. Requirements can be easily defined using Given/When/Then Requirements are close to the code so easier to manage as features and scenarios Requirements are defined in domain language The feature files can be used as part of the documentation The documentation is accurate to the build of code and can be published with a release The scenarios are effective to document the scenarios and are not over excessive The scenarios are maintained with the code There’s an abstraction between the intention and implementation of tests making them easier to understand The requirements drive the testing These same tests can also be used to drive load testing as described here. If you don't do this ... If you don't follow the above “Stubbed Integration Tests” approach, the developer will need to manually trigger the tests. This has the following risks: Developers are unlikely to check all the scenarios each time and all the expected conditions each time. After the developer leaves, these manual test steps may be lost. What test scenarios are there?  What test messages did they use for each scenario? There is no mechanism to prove adequate test coverage. A test team may attempt to automate integration test scenarios in a test environment through the triggering of tests from a source system UI. If this is a replacement for BizUnit tests, then this carries the following risks: It moves the tests downstream, so problems will be found later in the process. Testers may not check all the expected conditions within the BizTalk infrastructure such as: event logs, suspended messages, etc. These automated tests may also get in the way of manual tests run on these environments.

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• Speakers, Please Check Your Time

  - by AjarnMark

  Woodrow Wilson was once asked how long it would take him to prepare for a 10 minute speech. He replied "Two weeks". He was then asked how long it would take for a 1 hour speech. "One week", he replied. 2 hour speech? "I'm ready right now," he replied.  Whether that is a true story or an urban legend, I don’t really know, but either way, it is a poignant reminder for all speakers, and particularly apropos this week leading up to the PASS Community Summit. (Cross-posted to the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog #PASSProfDev.) What’s the point of that story?  Simply this…if you have plenty of time to do your presentation, you don’t need to prepare much because it is easy to throw in more and more material to stretch out to your allotted time.  But if you are on a tight time constraint, then it will take significant preparation to distill your talk down to only the essential points. I have attended seven of the last eight North American Summit events, and every one of them has been fantastic.  The speakers are great, the material is timely and relevant, and the networking opportunities are awesome.  And every year, there is one little thing that just bugs me…speakers going over their allotted time.  Why does it bother me so?  Well, if you look at a typical schedule for a Summit, you’ll see that there are six or more sessions going on at the same time, and only 15 minutes to move from one to another.  If you’re trying to maximize your training dollar by attending something during every session time slot, and you don’t want to be the last guy trying to squeeze into the middle of the row, then those 15 minutes can be critical.  All the more so if you need to stop and use the bathroom or if you have to hike to the opposite end of the convention center.  It is really a bad position to find yourself having to choose between learning the last key points of Speaker A who is going over time, and getting over to Speaker B on time so you don’t miss her key opening remarks. And frankly, I think it is just rude.  Yes, the speakers are the function, after all they are bringing the content that the rest of us are paying to learn.  But it is also an honor to be given the opportunity to speak at a conference like this, and no one speaker is so important that the conference would be a disaster without him.  Speakers know when they submit their abstract, long before the conference, how much time they will have.  It has been the same pattern at the Summit for at least the last eight years.  Program Sessions are 75 minutes long.  Some speakers who have a good track record, and meet other qualifying criteria, are extended an invitation to present a Spotlight Session which is 90 minutes (a 20% increase).  So there really is no excuse.  It’s not like you were promised a 2-hour segment and then discovered when you got here that it was only 75 minutes.  In fact, it’s not like PASS advertised 90-minute sessions for everyone and then a select few were cut back to only 75.  As a speaker, you know well before you get here which type of session you are doing and how long it is, so as a professional, you should plan accordingly. Now you might think that this only happens to rookies, but I’ll tell you that some of the worst offenders are big-name veterans who draw huge attendance numbers for their sessions.  Some attendees blow this off as, “Hey, it’s so-and-so, and I’d stay here for hours and listen to him/her talk.”  To which I would reply, “Then they should have submitted for a pre- or post-conference day-long seminar instead, but don’t try to squeeze your day-long talk into a 90-minute session.”  Now I don’t really believe that these speakers are being malicious or just selfishly trying to extend their time in the spotlight.  I think that most of them are merely being undisciplined and did not trim their presentation sufficiently, or allowed themselves to get off-track (often in a generous attempt to help someone in the audience with a question or problem that really should have been noted for further discussion after the session). So here is my recommendation…my plea, even.  TRIM THE FAT!  Now.  Before it’s too late.  Before you even get on the airplane, take a long, hard look at your presentation and eliminate some of the points that you originally thought you had to make, but in reality are not truly crucial to your main topic.  Delete a few slides.  Test your demos and have them already scripted rather than typing them during your talk.  It is better to cut out too much and end up with plenty of time at the end for Questions & Answers.  And you can always keep some notes on the stuff that you cut out so that you could fill it back in at the end as bonus material if you really do end up with a whole bunch of time on your hands.  But I don’t think you will.  And if you do, that will look even better to the audience as it will look like you’re giving them something extra that not every audience gets.  And they will thank you for that.

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• What do the participants say about the Open Day in South Africa?

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 On the 26th of September, a group of students who were specifically selected to attend an Open day at Oracle South Africa, joined us at our offices in Woodmead, Johannesburg. The Conference room was filled with inquisitive minds. What we had in store for them was a detailed presentation about Oracle which was delivered by Zuko - Cluster Leader: Tech GB South Africa. The student’s many questions were all answered especially when we started addressing the opportunities we have and detailed information on our Graduate Programme. Our employees then came to talk about their experience. This allowed all the students to have an integrated learning experience. By inviting the students to walk around our Oracle Offices allowed them to see, talk, experience a bit of the culture and ask more questions. Here is some of the feedback from the attendees: Maxwell Moloi: “The open day truly served its purpose and exceeded expectations in the sense that I got to find out more about Oracle and all the different opportunities it has to offer. The fact that Oracle supplies a full solution to a customer and not just part of it and how the company manages to setup professional development for their employees is what entices me to want to join the rapidly growing team of Oracle.” Nqobile Mabaso: “I found the open day to be quite informative and enlightening because coming from a marketing background I could apply the knowledge I got from varsity to the Company I was able to point out what they do as part of their corporate social responsibility (Oracle recently partnered with the department of education to build a school), how Oracle emphasizes on relationship building because they know they sell to people and not companies and how they offer the full stack of solutions which gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.” Nondumiso Mvelase: “The Open Day was a wonderful experience for me especially because I have never been part of an Open Day before, so it was absolutely amazing for me. It gave me a good idea of how it is to be part of Oracle. We were served with lovely breakfast and lunch which I enjoyed. I wish the Open Day went on for a whole week. Seeing and hearing from 2013 Graduates, telling us about their experience within Oracle was very inspiring to me. They were encouraging us to work hard if we ever got the opportunity they had. After hearing this from them I will definitely not take it for granted.” Itumeleng Moraka: “Before I walked into the Oracle offices all that was in my mind was databases and cloud storage. I was then surrounded by passionate, enthusiastic and welcoming employees. I came across a positive energy within the multinational company. I realized that Oracle is not a company that operates in survival mode. This may sound idealistic, but they operate in a non-traditional way investing more into innovation, they stay focused on what matters most about where technology is going and at the same time they are not losing sight of how their products make a difference in the world.” For more information on how to be part of the Oracle Graduate Programme please follow us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/CampusAtOracle /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• The Best BPM Journey: More Exciting Destinations with Process Accelerators

  - by Cesare Rotundo

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Open World (OOW) earlier this month has been a great occasion to discuss with our BPM customers. It was interesting to hear definite patterns emerging from those conversations: “BPM is a journey”, “experiences to share”, “our organization now understands what BPM is”, and my favorite (with some caveats): “BPM is like wine tasting, once you start, you want to try more”. These customers have started their journey, climbed up the learning curve, and reached a vantage point that allows them to see their next BPM destination. They see the next few processes they are going to tackle and improve with BPM. These processes/destinations target both horizontal processes where BPM replaces or coordinates manual activities, and critical industry processes that the company needs to improve to compete and deliver increasing value. Each new destination generates value, allowing the organization to reduce the cost of manual processes that were not supported by apps/custom development, and increase efficiency of end-to-end processes partially covered by apps/custom dev. The question we wanted to answer is how to help organizations experience deeper success with BPM, by increasing their awareness of the potential for reaching new targets, and equipping them with the right tools. We decided that we needed to identify destinations, and plot routes to show the fastest path to those destinations. In the end we want to enable customers to reach “Process Excellence”: continuously set new targets and consistently and efficiently reach them. The result is Oracle Process Accelerators (PA), solutions built using the rich functionality in Oracle BPM Suite. PAs offers a rapidly expanding list of exciting destinations. Our launch of the latest installment of Process Accelerators at Oracle Open World includes new Industry-focused solutions such as Public Sector Incident Reporting and Financial Services Loan Origination, and improved other horizontal PAs, including Travel Request Management, Document Routing and Approval, and Internal Service Requests. Just before OOW we had extended the Oracle deployment of Travel Request Management, riding the enthusiastic response from early adopters among travelers (employees), management and support (approvers). “Getting there first” means being among the first to extract value from the PA approach, while acquiring deeper insights into the customers’ perspective. This is especially noteworthy when it comes to PAs, a set of solutions designed to be quickly deployed and iteratively improved by customers. The OOW launch has generated immediate feedback from customers, non-customers, analysts, and partners. They all confirmed that both Business and IT at organizations benefit from PAs when it comes to exploring the potential for BPM to improve their business processes. PAs help customers visualize what can be done with BPM, and PAs are made to be extended: you can see your destination, change the path to fit your needs, and deploy. We're discovering new destinations/processes that the market wants us to support, generic enough across industries and within industries. We'll keep on building sets of requirements, deliver functional design, construct solutions using Oracle BPM, and test them not only functionally but for performance, scalability, clustering, making them robust, product-quality. Delivering BPM solutions with product-grade quality is the equivalent of following a tried-and-tested path on a map. Do you know of existing destinations in your industry? If yes, we can draw a path to innovative processes together.

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• Thinking differently about BI delivery

  - by jamiet

  My day job involves implementing Business Intelligence (BI) solutions which, as I have said before, is simply about giving people the information they need to do their jobs. I’m always interested in learning about new ways of achieving that aim and that is my motivation for writing blog entries that are not concerned with SQL or SQL Server per se. Implementing BI systems usually involves hacking together a bunch third party products with some in-house “glue” and delivering information using some shiny, expensive web-based front-end tool; the list of vendors that supply such tools is big and ever-growing. No doubt these tools have their place and of late I have started to wonder whether they can be supplemented with different ways of delivering information. The problem I have with these separate web-based tools is exactly that – they are separate web-based tools. What’s the problem with that you might ask? I’ll explain! They force the information worker to go somewhere unfamiliar in order to get the information they need to do their jobs. Would it not be better if we could deliver information into the tools that those information workers are already using and not force them to go somewhere else? I look at the rise of blogging over recent years and I realise that what made them popular is that people can subscribe to RSS feeds and have information pushed to them in their tool of choice rather than them having to go and find the information for themselves in a tool that has been foisted upon them. Would it not be a good idea to adopt the principle of subscription for the benefit of delivering BI information as well? I think it would and in the rest of this blog entry I’ll outline such a scenario where the power of subscription could be used to enhance the delivery of information to information workers. Typical questions that information workers ask might be: What are my year-on-year sales figures? What was my footfall yesterday? How many widgets have I sold so far today? Each of those questions includes a time element and that shouldn’t surprise us, any BI system that I have worked on includes the dimension of time. Now, what do people use to view and organise their time-oriented information? Its not a trick question, they use a calendar and in the enterprise space more often than not that calendar is managed using Outlook. Given then that information workers are already looking at their calendar in Outlook anyway would it not make sense then to deliver information into that same calendar? Of course it would. Calendars are a great way of visualising information such as sales figures. Observe: Just in this single screenshot I have managed to convey a multitude of information. The information worker can see, at a glance, information about hourly/daily/weekly/monthly sales and, moreover, he/she is viewing that information right inside the tool that they use every day. There is no effort on the part of him/her, the information just appears hour after hour, day after day. Taking the idea further, each one of those calendar items could be a mini-dashboard in its own right. Double-clicking on an item could show a plethora of other information about that time slot such as breaking the sales down per region or year-over-year comparisons. Perhaps the title could employ a sparkline? Loads of possibilities. The point is that calendars are a completely natural way to visualise information; we should make more use of them! The real beauty of delivering information using calendars for us BI developers is that it should be so easy. In the case of Outlook we don’t need to write complicated VBA code that can go and manipulate a person’s calendar, simply publishing data in a format that Outlook can understand is sufficient and happily such formats already exist; iCalendar is the accepted format and the even more flexible xCalendar is hopefully on its way as well.   I’d like to make one last point and this one is with my SQL Server hat on. Reporting Services 2008 R2 introduced the ability to publish data as subscribable Atom feeds so it seems logical that it could also be a vehicle for delivering calendar feeds too. If you think this would be a good idea go and vote for it at Publish data as iCalendar feeds and please please please add some comments (especially if you vote it down). Work smarter, not harder! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• From the Classroom to the Boardroom

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pens and Paper...these are the only things being a student and being a graduate / professional have in common. Walking in to the offices of Oracle South Africa as a graduate the first thing you notice is how polished and sleek all the people who work here look. 80% of the ladies wear sky-scraper heels and walk with the greatest grace. This was the first of many rude awakenings to remind me that I am no longer a student but a graduate. My first struggle was having to wake up at wee hours of the morning to prepare for work. As a student going to class was almost an optional thing, if you missed a morning class you could always attend an evening class to make up for it or simply attend with another group. But in the workplace, you HAVE to show up every single morning at the same time, with no option of coming in when it suits you and there is definitely no coming in with the evening class/shift. As a student, the earliest hour I ever woke up was 7:00am, anything earlier than that was considered inhumane torture. My reason for waking up every morning as a student was “you have a degree to go get” but as a graduate having to go to work I have to say to myself “here’s to a new day of learning and growing”. My second struggle has come in having to change my beloved wardrobe. Everyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about fashion and shopping. For me Shopping is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT, that should not be messed with. Therefore it was with great sadness that I swopped my rippled skinny jeans for pin-striped formal pants, my long chandelier earrings for simple studs, my flat shoes for heels, my sheer blouses for crisp white shirts, even my beloved wild hair had to make way for a simple ponytail. Our looks as ladies also came under great scrutiny, we had to acquaint ourselves with some serious grooming tools: the mascara, blush, lip-gloss, blush, a touch of lipstick and a manicure set. Language was a struggle of its own as well. Being a student you learn to relate to your peers in a informal way. In the workplace you have to address everyone with the same respect, including your peers. Words like “Hey buddy” had to make way for “good morning friend”. The month long winter school holiday was one of the things I looked forward to as a student. This was a time where we got to be at home and avoid the coldest month of the year, July. It was the most amazing thing ever, just sleeping and snuggling up to all sorts of warm things but sadly it is now a thing of the past. It is currently winter in South Africa and going to work has become the most unfashionable thing with all the jackets, boots, scarves and gloves. But summer is coming and I will miss those holidays too. As a student the school holidays were like a gift for us to catch a break and not think for a while which was why it was imaginable how someone would go on for the entire year without a break, with only the promise of a mere 21 days annual leave!! Right now I am sure we are all looking forward to taking that annual leave when the time is right. The worst rude awakening I must say, has to be presenting in front of clients and managers. As a student you have the same class mates for almost four years therefore presenting in front of them becomes the norm over the years and your lecturer will always go gently on you. What they don’t tell you at University is that in the real world, time is money and clients pay money to see you present therefore there is no room for error. Clients are not there to give you a score and boost your ego, they expect nothing less than 100% and they will let you know without a second thought. For a graduate this can feel like you are being fed to the sharks, you either get eaten or you swim for your life. At the end of the day, it is all an experience that is meant to groom us into better professional and make us a part of the Red Team. All the sacrifices are worth it and they lead us to being better and more polished professionals. So if you are interested in joining the ECEMEA Sales and Presales Internship Programme, please have a look at http://campus.oracle.com for more information and for our latest vacancies and internships. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• How do I dig myself out of this DEEP hole? [closed]

  - by user74847

  I may be a bit bias in the way i word this but any opinions and suggestions are welcome. I should start by saying i have a MSc in CS and a degree in new media +6 years expereince and im probably around a middleweight developer. I started a web development company with my friend from uni a year ago, there was a 4 month gap in the middle where i went miles away work on a big project. Ive since returned and picked up where we left off. A year on though i find im still staying up til 5am and getting up at 9 sometimes 2-3 days without sleep. While i was away i was working 9-5 and struggling to keep up with doing stuff for my clients 8 hours ahead, after work, so things stagnated. We currently have about 12 active projects, with one other part time developer and a full time freelancer who is dealing with one of our major projects. I am solely responsible for concurrently developing 2 big sites similar to gumtree in functionality, at the same time as about 5-6+ small WordPress based 5-10page sites. a lot of the content isnt in yet or the client is delaying so i chop and change project every other day which does my head in. Is it reasonable to expect myself to remember the intricate details of each project when i come back to it a week later? and remember the details of a task which hasnt been written down? my business partner seems to think so. or am i just forgetful? Im particularly bad at estimating timescales which doesnt help, added to that a lot of the technologies im am using are new to me (a magento site took weeks to theme rather than days and was full of bugs, even after 1000's of google searches and hours reading forums) im still trying to learn and find the best CMS for us to use and getting my head around the likes of Bootstrap and jquery, Cpanel / Linux (we just got a blank vps for me to set up with no experience) even installing an SSL certificate caused everyone's mail clients to go down which was more stress for me to sort out. I find the pressure of the workload and timescales and trying to learn this stuff so fast is beginning to turn me against my career path. The fact that i never seem to get anything done really winds up my business partner and iv come to associate him with the stress and pain of the whole situation especially when I get berated or a look that says "oh you retard" when I forget something. Even today i spent hours learning how a particular themeforest theme worked with wordpress and how i could twist it to work for our partiuclar needs, on the surface had done no work, that triggered a 30 minute tirade of anger and stress and questioning what i had done from my business partner. had i taken too long to work on that? shoudl i have done it in 2 hours instead of 6? i told him i would take 2 hours. i was wrong. I feel like im running myself into the ground. My sleeping pattern has got so bad that when im working im half asleep and making mistakes, my eyes are constantly purple underneath, i literally fall asleep at my desk, its affecting my social life too, ive not slept more than lightly for the last year and grind through impossible code puzzles in my half sleep wich keeps me awake, when im already exhausted. plus the work is rushed and buggy when it does get done so drags on into the next project. I also procrastinate quite badly, pacing the livingroom, looking out the window when Im alone for three days straight in the flat and start to get cabin fever which means i do even less work and the negative feedback loop continues. I get told im the only one with the problem when i say that i cant work from home any more, and examples of other freelancers get brought up. an office wouldnt bring any extra cash in to the company but im convinced having that moving more than 2 meters away from my bed to go to "work" would get me working, at the moment i feel guilty like i should be working 24-7. It is important that we do all this work to raise enough cash to get our business to the next level but every month still feels like a struggle to pay the rent (there is about £20K coming in by Jan) and i have to borrow money from friends often to buy food or get a taxi to a meeting, so it is vital the money keeps coming in. (im also 20 mins late for nearly all meetings but thats a different issue) have you experienced anything similar? how can i deal with the issues ive raised? is it realistic to develop 10 sites at once? how can i improve my relationship with my business partner? do you struggle to work at home? how do you deal with that? i think if i dont get my life on track by feb i will seriously consider giving it all up, but that seems like such a waste. any ideas!!? i need help! Thanks.

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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part II)

  I would now like to expand a little on what I stumbled through in part I of my Visual Studio 2010 post and touch on a few other features of VS 2010.  Specifically, I want to generate some code based off of an Entity Framework model and tie it up to an actual data source.  Im not going to take the easy way and tie to a SQL Server data source, though, I will tie it to an XML data file instead.  Why?  Well, why not?  This is purely for learning, there are probably much better ways to get strongly-typed classes around XML but it will force us to go down a path less travelled and maybe learn a few things along the way.  Once we get this XML data and the means to interact with it, I will revisit data binding to this data in a WPF form and see if I cant get reading, adding, deleting, and updating working smoothly with minimal code.  To begin, I will use what was learned in the first part of this blog topic and draw out a data model for the MFL (My Football League) - I dont want the NFL to come down and sue me for using their name in this totally football-related article.  The data model looks as follows, with Teams having Players, and Players having a position and statistics for each season they played: Note that when making the associations between these entities, I was given the option to create the foreign key but I only chose to select this option for the association between Player and Position.  The reason for this is that I am picturing the XML that will contain this data to look somewhat like this: <MFL> <Position/> <Position/> <Position/> <Team>     <Player>         <Statistic/>     </Player> </Team> </MFL> Statistic will be under its associated Player node, and Player will be under its associated Team node no need to have an Id to reference it if we know it will always fall under its parent.  Position, however, is more of a lookup value that will not have any hierarchical relationship to the player.  In fact, the Position data itself may be in a completely different xml file (something Id like to play around with), so in any case, a player will need to reference the position by its Id. So now that we have a simple data model laid out, I would like to generate two things based on it:  A class for each entity with properties corresponding to each entity property An IO class with methods to get data for each entity, either all instances, by Id or by parent. Now my experience with code generation in the past has consisted of writing up little apps that use the code dom directly to regenerate code on demand (or using tools like CodeSmith).  Surely, there has got to be a more fun way to do this given that we are using the Entity Framework which already has built-in code generation for SQL Server support.  Lets start with that built-in stuff to give us a base to work off of.  Right click anywhere in the canvas of our model and select Add Code Generation Item: So just adding that code item seemed to do quite a bit towards what I was intending: It apparently generated a class for each entity, but also a whole ton more.  I mean a TON more.  Way too much complicated code was generated now that code is likely to be a black box anyway so it shouldnt matter, but we need to understand how to make this work the way we want it to work, so lets get ready to do some stumbling through that text template (tt) file. When I open the .tt file that was generated, right off the bat I realize there is going to be trouble there is no color coding, no intellisense no nothing!  That is going to make stumbling through more like groping blindly in the dark while handcuffed and hopping on one foot, which was one of the alternate titles I was considering for this blog.  Thankfully, the community comes to my rescue and I wont have to cast my mind back to the glory days of coding in VI (look it up, kids).  Using the Extension Manager (Available under the Tools menu), I did a quick search for tt editor in the Online Gallery and quickly found the Tangible T4 Editor: Downloading and installing this was a breeze, and after doing so I got some color coding and intellisense while editing the tt files.  If you will be doing any customizing of tt files, I highly recommend installing this extension.  Next, well see if that is enough help for us to tweak that tt file to do the kind of code generation that we wantDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• What are some concise and comprehensive introductory guide to unit testing for a self-taught programmer [closed]

  - by Superbest

  I don't have much formal training in programming and I have learned most things by looking up solutions on the internet to practical problems I have. There are some areas which I think would be valuable to learn, but which ended up both being difficult to learn and easy to avoid learning for a self-taught programmer. Unit testing is one of them. Specifically, I am interested in tests in and for C#/.NET applications using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools in Visual Studio 2010 and/or 2012, but I really want a good introduction to the principles so language and IDE shouldn't matter much. At this time I'm interested in relatively trivial tests for small or medium sized programs (development time of weeks or months and mostly just myself developing). I don't necessarily intend to do test-driven development (I am aware that some say unit testing alone is supposed to be for developing features in TDD, and not an assurance that there are no bugs in the software, but unit testing is often the only kind of testing for which I have resources). I have found this tutorial which I feel gave me a decent idea of what unit tests and TDD looks like, but in trying to apply these ideas to my own projects, I often get confused by questions I can't answer and don't know how to answer, such as: What parts of my application and what sorts of things aren't necessarily worth testing? How fine grained should my tests be? Should they test every method and property separately, or work with a larger scope? What is a good naming convention for test methods? (since apparently the name of the method is the only way I will be able to tell from a glance at the test results table what works in my program and what doesn't) Is it bad to have many asserts in one test method? Since apparently VS2012 reports only that "an Assert.IsTrue failed within method MyTestMethod", and if MyTestMethod has 10 Assert.IsTrue statements, it will be irritating to figure out why a test is failing. If a lot of the functionality deals with writing and reading data to/from the disk in a not-exactly trivial fashion, how do I test that? If I provide a bunch of files as input by placing them in the program's directory, do I have to copy those files to the test project's bin/Debug folder now? If my program works with a large body of data and execution takes minutes or more, should my tests have it do the whole use all of the real data, a subset of it, or simulated data? If latter, how do I decide on the subset or how to simulate? Closely related to the previous point, if a class is such that its main operation happens in a state that is arrived to by the program after some involved operations (say, a class makes calculations on data derived from a few thousands of lines of code analyzing some raw data) how do I test just that class without inevitably ending up testing that class and all the other code that brings it to that state along with it? In general, what kind of approach should I use for test initialization? (hopefully that is the correct term, I mean preparing classes for testing by filling them in with appropriate data) How do I deal with private members? Do I just suck it up and assume that "not public = shouldn't be tested"? I have seen people suggest using private accessors and reflection, but these feel like clumsy and unsuited for regular use. Are these even good ideas? Is there anything like design patterns concerning testing specifically? I guess the main themes in what I'd like to learn more about are, (1) what are the overarching principles that should be followed (or at least considered) in every testing effort and (2) what are popular rules of thumb for writing tests. For example, at one point I recall hearing from someone that if a method is longer than 200 lines, it should be refactored - not a universally correct rule, but it has been quite helpful since I'd otherwise happily put hundreds of lines in single methods and then wonder why my code is so hard to read. Similarly I've found ReSharpers suggestions on member naming style and other things to be quite helpful in keeping my codebases sane. I see many resources both online and in print that talk about testing in the context of large applications (years of work, 10s of people or more). However, because I've never worked on such large projects, this context is very unfamiliar to me and makes the material difficult to follow and relate to my real world problems. Speaking of software development in general, advice given with the assumptions of large projects isn't always straightforward to apply to my own, smaller endeavors. Summary So my question is: What are some resources to learn about unit testing, for a hobbyist, self-taught programmer without much formal training? Ideally, I'm looking for a short and simple "bible of unit testing" which I can commit to memory, and then apply systematically by repeatedly asking myself "is this test following the bible of testing closely enough?" and then amending discrepancies if it doesn't.

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• MSBuild (.NET 4.0) access problems

  - by JMP

  I'm using Cruise Control .NET as my build server (Windows 2008 Server). Yesterday I upgraded my ASP.NET MVC project from VS 2008/.NET 3.5 to VS 2010/.NET 4.0. The only change I made to my ccnet.config's MSBuild task was the location of MSBuild.exe. Ever since I made that change, the build has been broken with the error: MSB4019 - The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk. This file does, in fact, exist in the location specified (I solved a problem similar to this when setting up the build server for VS2008/.NET 3.5 by copying the files from my dev environment to my build environment). So I RDP'ed into the build machine and opened a command prompt, used MSBUILD to attempt to build my project. MSBUILD returns the error: MSB3021 - Unable to copy file "obj\debug....dll". Access to the path 'bin....dll' is denied. Since I'm running MSBUILD from the command prompt, logged in with an account that has administrative privileges, I'm assuming that MSBUILD is running with the same privileges that I have. Next, I tried to copy the file that MSBUILD was attempting to copy. In this case, I get the UAC dialog that makes me click the [Continue] button to complete the copy. I'd like to avoid installing Visual Studio 2010 on my build machine, can anyone suggest other fixes I might try?

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• Qt vs WPF/.NET

  - by aaronc

  My company is trying to make the decision between using Qt/C++ for our GUI framework or migrating to .NET and using WPF. We have up to this point been using MFC. It seems that .NET/WPF is technically the most advanced and feature-rich platform. I do, however, have several concerns. These include: Platform support Framework longevity (i.e. future-proofing) Performance and overhead For this application we are willing to sacrifice support for Windows 2000, Macs, and Linux. But, the issue is more related to Microsoft's commitment to the framework and their extant platforms. It seems like Microsoft has a bad habit of coming up with something new, hyping it for a few years, and then relegating it to the waste-bin essentially abandoning the developers who chose it. First it was MFC and VB6, then Windows Forms, and now there's WPF. Also with .NET, versions of Windows were progressively nicked off the support list. Looks like WPF could be here to stay for a while, but since its not open source its really in Microsoft's hands. I'm also concerned about the overhead and performance of WPF since some of our applications involve processing large amounts of information and doing real-time data capture. Qt seems like a really good option, but it doesn't have all the features of WPF/.NET couldn't use languages like C#. Basically, what does the community think about Microsoft's commitment to WPF compared with previous frameworks? Are the performance considerations significant enough to avoid using it for a realtime app? And, how significant are the benefits of WPF/.NET in terms of productivity and features compared to Qt?

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• Passing a parameter using RelayCommand defined in the ViewModel (from Josh Smith example)

  - by eesh

  I would like to pass a parameter defined in the XAML (View) of my application to the ViewModel class by using the RelayCommand. I followed Josh Smith's excellent article on MVVM and have implemented the following. XAML Code <Button Command="{Binding Path=ACommandWithAParameter}" CommandParameter="Orange" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Style="{DynamicResource SimpleButton}" VerticalAlignment="Top" Content="Button"/> ViewModel Code public RelayCommand _aCommandWithAParameter; /// <summary> /// Returns a command with a parameter /// </summary> public RelayCommand ACommandWithAParameter { get { if (_aCommandWithAParameter == null) { _aCommandWithAParameter = new RelayCommand( param => this.CommandWithAParameter("Apple") ); } return _aCommandWithAParameter; } } public void CommandWithAParameter(String aParameter) { String theParameter = aParameter; } #endregion I set a breakpoint in the CommandWithAParameter method and observed that aParameter was set to "Apple", and not "Orange". This seems obvious as the method CommandWithAParameter is being called with the literal String "Apple". However, looking up the execution stack, I can see that "Orange", the CommandParameter I set in the XAML is the parameter value for RelayCommand implemenation of the ICommand Execute interface method. That is the value of parameter in the method below of the execution stack is "Orange", public void Execute(object parameter) { _execute(parameter); } What I am trying to figure out is how to create the RelayCommand ACommandWithAParameter property such that it can call the CommandWithAParameter method with the CommandParameter "Orange" defined in the XAML. Is there a way to do this? Why do I want to do this? Part of "On The Fly Localization" In my particular implementation I want to create a SetLanguage RelayCommand that can be bound to multiple buttons. I would like to pass the two character language identifier ("en", "es", "ja", etc) as the CommandParameter and have that be defined for each "set language" button defined in the XAML. I want to avoid having to create a SetLanguageToXXX command for each language supporting and hard coding the two character language identifier into each RelayCommand in the ViewModel.

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• Activation Error while testing Exception Handling Application Block

  - by CletusLoomis

  I'm getting the following error while testing my EHAB implementation: {"Activation error occured while trying to get instance of type ExceptionPolicyImpl, key "LogPolicy""} System.Exception Stack Trace: StackTrace " at Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation.ServiceLocatorImplBase.GetInstance(Type serviceType, String key) in c:\Home\Chris\Projects\CommonServiceLocator\main\Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation\ServiceLocatorImplBase.cs:line 53 at Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation.ServiceLocatorImplBase.GetInstance[TService](String key) in c:\Home\Chris\Projects\CommonServiceLocator\main\Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation\ServiceLocatorImplBase.cs:line 103 at Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicy.GetExceptionPolicy(Exception exception, String policyName) in e:\Builds\EntLib\Latest\Source\Blocks\ExceptionHandling\Src\ExceptionHandling\ExceptionPolicy.cs:line 131 at Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicy.HandleException(Exception exceptionToHandle, String policyName) in e:\Builds\EntLib\Latest\Source\Blocks\ExceptionHandling\Src\ExceptionHandling\ExceptionPolicy.cs:line 55 at Blackbox.Exception.ExceptionMain.LogException(Exception pException) in C:_Work_Black Box\Blackbox.Exception\ExceptionMain.vb:line 14 at BlackBox.Business.BusinessMain.TestExceptionHandling() in C:_Work_Black Box\BlackBox.Business\BusinessMain.vb:line 16 at Blackbox.Service.Service1.TestExceptionHandling() in C:_Work_Black Box\Blackbox.Service\Service.svc.vb:line 43" String Inner Exception: InnerException {"Resolution of the dependency failed, type = "Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicyImpl", name = "LogPolicy". Exception occurred while: Calling constructor Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.TraceListeners.FormattedEventLogTraceListener(System.String source, System.String log, System.String machineName, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Formatters.ILogFormatter formatter). Exception is: ArgumentException - Event log names must consist of printable characters and cannot contain \, *, ?, or spaces At the time of the exception, the container was: Resolving Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicyImpl,LogPolicy Resolving parameter "policyEntries" of constructor Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicyImpl(System.String policyName, System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable1[[Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicyEntry, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]] policyEntries) Resolving Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicyEntry,LogPolicy.All Exceptions Resolving parameter "handlers" of constructor Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicyEntry(System.Type exceptionType, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.PostHandlingAction postHandlingAction, System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable1[[Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.IExceptionHandler, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]] handlers, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Instrumentation.IExceptionHandlingInstrumentationProvider instrumentationProvider) Resolving Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging.LoggingExceptionHandler,LogPolicy.All Exceptions.Logging Exception Handler (mapped from Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.IExceptionHandler, LogPolicy.All Exceptions.Logging Exception Handler) Resolving parameter "writer" of constructor Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging.LoggingExceptionHandler(System.String logCategory, System.Int32 eventId, System.Diagnostics.TraceEventType severity, System.String title, System.Int32 priority, System.Type formatterType, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogWriter writer) Resolving Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogWriterImpl,LogWriter.default (mapped from Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogWriter, (none)) Resolving parameter "structureHolder" of constructor Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogWriterImpl(Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogWriterStructureHolder structureHolder, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Instrumentation.ILoggingInstrumentationProvider instrumentationProvider, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.ILoggingUpdateCoordinator updateCoordinator) Resolving Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogWriterStructureHolder,LogWriterStructureHolder.default (mapped from Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogWriterStructureHolder, (none)) Resolving parameter "traceSources" of constructor Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogWriterStructureHolder(System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable1[[Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Filters.ILogFilter, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]] filters, System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable1[[System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089]] traceSourceNames, System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable1[[Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogSource, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]] traceSources, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogSource allEventsTraceSource, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogSource notProcessedTraceSource, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogSource errorsTraceSource, System.String defaultCategory, System.Boolean tracingEnabled, System.Boolean logWarningsWhenNoCategoriesMatch, System.Boolean revertImpersonation) Resolving Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogSource,General Resolving parameter "traceListeners" of constructor Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogSource(System.String name, System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable1[[System.Diagnostics.TraceListener, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089]] traceListeners, System.Diagnostics.SourceLevels level, System.Boolean autoFlush, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Instrumentation.ILoggingInstrumentationProvider instrumentationProvider) Resolving Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.TraceListeners.ReconfigurableTraceListenerWrapper,Event Log Listener (mapped from System.Diagnostics.TraceListener, Event Log Listener) Resolving parameter "wrappedTraceListener" of constructor Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.TraceListeners.ReconfigurableTraceListenerWrapper(System.Diagnostics.TraceListener wrappedTraceListener, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.ILoggingUpdateCoordinator coordinator) Resolving Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.TraceListeners.FormattedEventLogTraceListener,Event Log Listener?implementation (mapped from System.Diagnostics.TraceListener, Event Log Listener?implementation) Calling constructor Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.TraceListeners.FormattedEventLogTraceListener(System.String source, System.String log, System.String machineName, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Formatters.ILogFormatter formatter) "} System.Exception My web.config is as follows: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <configSections> <section name="loggingConfiguration" type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Configuration.LoggingSettings, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="true" /> <section name="exceptionHandling" type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Configuration.ExceptionHandlingSettings, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="true" /> </configSections> <loggingConfiguration name="" tracingEnabled="true" defaultCategory="General"> <listeners> <add name="Event Log Listener" type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.TraceListeners.FormattedEventLogTraceListener, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" listenerDataType="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Configuration.FormattedEventLogTraceListenerData, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" source="Enterprise Library Logging" formatter="Text Formatter" log="C:\Blackbox.log" machineName="." traceOutputOptions="LogicalOperationStack, DateTime, Timestamp, Callstack" /> </listeners> <formatters> <add type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Formatters.TextFormatter, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" template="Timestamp: {timestamp}{newline}&#xA;Message: {message}{newline}&#xA;Category: {category}{newline}&#xA;Priority: {priority}{newline}&#xA;EventId: {eventid}{newline}&#xA;Severity: {severity}{newline}&#xA;Title:{title}{newline}&#xA;Machine: {localMachine}{newline}&#xA;App Domain: {localAppDomain}{newline}&#xA;ProcessId: {localProcessId}{newline}&#xA;Process Name: {localProcessName}{newline}&#xA;Thread Name: {threadName}{newline}&#xA;Win32 ThreadId:{win32ThreadId}{newline}&#xA;Extended Properties: {dictionary({key} - {value}{newline})}" name="Text Formatter" /> </formatters> <categorySources> <add switchValue="All" name="General"> <listeners> <add name="Event Log Listener" /> </listeners> </add> </categorySources> <specialSources> <allEvents switchValue="All" name="All Events" /> <notProcessed switchValue="All" name="Unprocessed Category" /> <errors switchValue="All" name="Logging Errors &amp; Warnings"> <listeners> <add name="Event Log Listener" /> </listeners> </errors> </specialSources> </loggingConfiguration> <exceptionHandling> <exceptionPolicies> <add name="LogPolicy"> <exceptionTypes> <add name="All Exceptions" type="System.Exception, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" postHandlingAction="NotifyRethrow"> <exceptionHandlers> <add name="Logging Exception Handler" type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging.LoggingExceptionHandler, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" logCategory="General" eventId="100" severity="Error" title="Enterprise Library Exception Handling" formatterType="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.TextExceptionFormatter, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling" priority="0" /> </exceptionHandlers> </add> </exceptionTypes> </add> <add name="WcfExceptionShielding"> <exceptionTypes> <add name="InvalidOperationException" type="System.InvalidOperationException, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" postHandlingAction="ThrowNewException"> <exceptionHandlers> <add type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.WCF.FaultContractExceptionHandler, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.WCF, Version=5.0.414.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" exceptionMessageResourceType="" exceptionMessageResourceName="This is the message" exceptionMessage="This is the exception" faultContractType="Blackbox.Service.WCFFault, Blackbox.Service, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null" name="Fault Contract Exception Handler"> <mappings> <add source="{Guid}" name="Id" /> <add source="{Message}" name="MessageText" /> </mappings> </add> </exceptionHandlers> </add> </exceptionTypes> </add> </exceptionPolicies> </exceptionHandling> <connectionStrings> <add name="CompassEntities" connectionString="metadata=~\bin\CompassModel.csdl|~\bin\CompassModel.ssdl|~\bin\CompassModel.msl;provider=Devart.Data.Oracle;provider connection string=&quot;User Id=foo;Password=foo;Server=foo64mo;Home=OraClient11g_home1;Persist Security Info=True&quot;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" /> <add name="BlackboxEntities" connectionString="metadata=~\bin\BlackboxModel.csdl|~\bin\BlackboxModel.ssdl|~\bin\BlackboxModel.msl;provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string=&quot;Data Source=sqldev1\cps;Initial Catalog=FundServ;Integrated Security=True;MultipleActiveResultSets=True&quot;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" /> </connectionStrings> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" strict="false" explicit="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> </system.web> <system.serviceModel> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior> <!-- To avoid disclosing metadata information, set the value below to false and remove the metadata endpoint above before deployment --> <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/> <!-- To receive exception details in faults for debugging purposes, set the value below to true. Set to false before deployment to avoid disclosing exception information --> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> <serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> </system.serviceModel> <system.webServer> <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"/> </system.webServer> </configuration> My code is as follows: Public Shared Function LogException(ByVal pException As System.Exception) As Boolean Return ExceptionPolicy.HandleException(pException, "LogPolicy") End Function Any assistance is appreciated.

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• [WPF] Custom TabItem in TabControl

  - by Simon

  I've created CustomTabItem which inherits from TabItem and i'd like to use it while binding ObservableCollection in TabControl <TabControl ItemsSource="{Binding MyObservableCollection}"/> It should like this in XAML, but i do not know how change default type of the output item created by TabControl while binding. I've tried to create converter, but it has to do something like this inside convertin method: List<CustomTabItem> resultList = new List<CustomTabItem>(); And iterate through my input ObservableCollection, create my CustomTab based on item from collection and add it to resultList... I'd like to avoid it, bacause while creating CustomTabItem i'm creating complex View and it takes a while, so i don't want to create it always when something change in binded collection. My class extends typical TabItem and i'd like to use this class in TabControl instead of TabItem. <TabControl.ItemContainerStyle> <Style TargetType="{x:Type local:CustomTabItem}"> <Setter Property="MyProperty" Value="{Binding xxx}"/> </Style> </TabControl.ItemContainerStyle> Code above generates error that Style cannot be applied to TabItem. My main purpose is to use in XAML my own CustomTabItem and bind properties... Just like above... I've also tried to use <TabControl.ItemTemplate/> <TabControl.ContentTemaplte/> But they are just styles for TabItem, so i'll still be missing my properties wchich i added in my custom class.

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• Detect blocked popup in Chrome

  - by Andrew

  I am aware of javascript techniques to detect whether a popup is blocked in other browsers (as described in the answer to this question). Here's the basic test: var newWin = window.open(url); if(!newWin || newWin.closed || typeof newWin.closed=='undefined') { //POPUP BLOCKED } But this does not work in Chrome. The "POPUP BLOCKED" section is never reached when the popup is blocked. Of course, the test is working to an extent since Chrome doesn't actually block the popup, but opens it in a tiny minimized window at the lower right corner which lists "blocked" popups. What I would like to do is be able to tell if the popup was blocked by Chrome's popup blocker. I try to avoid browser sniffing in favor of feature detection. Is there a way to do this without browser sniffing? Edit: I have now tried making use of newWin.outerHeight, newWin.left, and other similar properties to accomplish this. Google Chrome returns all position and height values as 0 when the popup is blocked. Unfortunately, it also returns the same values even if the popup is actually opened for an unknown amount of time. After some magical period (a couple of seconds in my testing), the location and size information is returned as the correct values. In other words, I'm still no closer to figuring this out. Any help would be appreciated.

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• WPF - LayoutUpdated event firing repeatedly

  - by Drew Noakes

  I've been adding a bit of animation to my WPF application. Thanks to Dan Crevier's unique solution to animating the children of a panel combined with the awesome WPF Penner animations it turned out to be fairly straightforward to make one of my controls look great and have its children move about with some nice animation. Unfortunately this all comes with a performance overhead. I'm happy to have the performance hit when items are added/removed or the control is resized, but it seems that this perf hit occurs consistently throughout the application's lifetime, even when items are completely static. The PanelLayoutAnimator class uses an attached property to hook the UIElement.LayoutUpdated.aspx) event. When this event fires, render transforms are animated to cause the children to glide to their new positions. Unfortunately it seems that the LayoutUpdated event fires every second or so, even when nothing is happening in the application (at least I don't think my code's doing anything -- the app doesn't have focus and the mouse is steady.) As the reason for the event is not immediately apparent to the event handler, all children of the control have to be reevaluated. This event is being called about once a second when idle. The frequency increases when actually using the app. So my question is, how can I improve the performance here? Any answer that assists would be appreciated, but I'm currently stuck on these sub-questions: What causes the LayoutUpdated event to fire so frequently? Is this supposed to happen, and if not, how can I find out why it's firing and curtail it? Is there a more convenient way within the handler to know whether something has happened that might have moved children? If so, I could bail out early and avoid the overhead of looping each child. For now I will work around this issue by disabling animation when there are more than N children in the panel.

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• Stateful vs. Stateless Webservices

  - by chrsk

  Imagine a more complex CRUD application which has a three-tier-architecture and communicates over webservices. The client starts a conversation to the server and doing some wizard like stuff. To process the wizard the client needs feedback given by the server. We started a discussion about stateful or stateless webservices for this approach. I made some research combined with my own experience, which points me to the question mentioned later. Stateless webservices having the following properties (in our case): + high scalability + high availability + high speed + rapid testing - bloated contract - implementing more logic on server-side But we can cross out the first two points, our application doesn't needs high scalability and availability. So we come to the stateful webservice. I've read a bunch of blogs and forum posts and the most invented point implementing a stateful webservice was: + simplifies contract (protocol) - bad testing - runs counter to the basic architecture of http But doesn't almost all web applications have these bad points? Web applications uses cookies, query strings, session ids, and all the stuff to avoid the statelessness of http. So why is it that bad for webservices?

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• How to implement Gmail OAuth API to send email (especially via SMTP)?

  - by Curtis Gibby

  I'm developing a web application that will send emails on behalf of a logged-in user. I'm trying to use the new Gmail OAuth protocol announced described here to send these emails through the user's Gmail account (preferably using SMTP rather than IMAP, but I'm easy). However, the sample PHP code gives me a couple of problems. All of the sample code is based on IMAP, not SMTP. Why "support" the SMTP protocol if you're not going to show people how to use it? The sample code gives me a fatal error from an uncaught Zend exception -- it can't find the "INBOX" folder. Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Zend_Mail_Storage_Exception' with message 'cannot change folder, maybe it does not exist' in path\to\xoauth-php-samples\Zend\Mail\Storage\Imap.php:467 Stack trace: #0 path\to\xoauth-php-samples\Zend\Mail\Storage\Imap.php(248): Zend_Mail_Storage_Imap-selectFolder('INBOX') #1 path\to\xoauth-php-samples\three-legged.php(184): Zend_Mail_Storage_Imap-__construct(Object(Zend_Mail_Protocol_Imap)) #2 {main} Next exception 'Zend_Mail_Storage_Exception' with message 'cannot select INBOX, is this a valid transport?' in path\to\xoauth-php-samples\Zend\Mail\Storage\Imap.php:254 Stack trace: #0 path\to\xoauth-php-samples\three-legged.php(184): Zend_Mail_Storage_Imap-__construct(Object(Zend_Mail_Protocol_Imap)) #1 {main} in path\to\xoauth-php-samples\Zend\Mail\Storage\Imap.php on line 254 I've verified that I'm getting good OAuth tokens back, I just don't know how to make the actual email transaction happen. This protocol is still rather new, so there's not much unofficial community documentation about it out there, and the official docs are unhelpfully dry stuff about the SMTP RFC. So if anyone can help get this going, I'd greatly appreciate it. Note: I've already been able to connect to Gmail's SMTP server via SSL and successfully send an email, provided that the user has given my application his/her Gmail username and password. I'd like to avoid this method, because it encourages phishing and security-minded users won't accept it. This question is not about that.

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• High Profile ASP.NET websites

  - by nandos

  About twice a month I get asked to justify the reason "Why are we using ASP.NET and not PHP or Java, or buzz-word-of-the-month-here, etc". 100% of the time the questions come from people that do not understand anything about technology. People that would not know the difference between FTP and HTTP. The best approach I found (so far) to justify it to people without getting into technical details is to just say "XXX website uses it". Which I get back "Oh...I did not know that, so ASP.NET must be good". I know, I know, it hurts. But it works. So, without getting into the merit of why I'm using ASP.NET (which could trigger an endless argument for other platforms), I'm trying to compile a list of high profile websites that are implemented in ASP.NET. (No, they would have no idea what StackOverflow is). Can you name a high-profile website implemented in ASP.NET? EDIT: Current list (thanks for all the responses): (trying to avoid tech sites and prioritizing retail sites) Costco - http://www.costco.com/ Crate & Barrel - http://www.crateandbarrel.com/ Home Shopping Network - http://www.hsn.com/ Buy.com - http://www.buy.com/ Dell - http://www.dell.com Nasdaq - http://www.nasdaq.com/ Virgin - http://www.virgin.com/ 7-Eleven - http://www.7-eleven.com/ Carnival Cruise Lines - http://www.carnival.com/ L'Oreal - http://www.loreal.com/ The White House - http://www.whitehouse.gov/ Remax - http://www.remax.com/ Monster Jobs - http://www.monster.com/ USA Today - http://www.usatoday.com/ ComputerJobs.com - http://computerjobs.com/ Match.com - http://www.match.com National Health Services (UK) - http://www.nhs.uk/ CarrerBuilder.com - http://www.careerbuilder.com/

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• Path Not Found error when opening VB6 project from a shared folder on Virtual PC 2007 (XP sp3)

  - by law1185

  I currently work on a small software team that primarily maintains legacy software. I am trying to set up a VirtualPC that we can use to do this maintenance. Specifically, I would like to be able to debug and run VB6 web apps from a folder on the host pc. My constraints are as follows: The VirtualPC will not be registered on the domain. The server that hosts our Subversion repository does not run the subversion service so the only way to interact with the repository is through "file:\\", which requires domain authentication. It is not possible to debug/run VB6 web apps that are located on mapped network drives, because IIS requires that the VirtualPC be on the same domain as the network drive I would like to avoid having to copy the folder from the host pc to the VirtualPC and then copying it back in order to have the latest revision from Subversion So, I am trying to use VirtualPC's shared folder feature to share the host machine's Subversion directory and open the project in VB6 on the VirtualPC. Problem is that Visual Basic throws the error: "Path not found: '\\C:\\Subversion\Path\Project.vbp'" when I try to open it. Folder C:\Subversion on the host machine is mapped to G: on the VirtualPC. If anyone can help me resolve this error or find some other way to accomplish this, I would be deeply grateful. Oh, both host and virtual OS is Windows XP sp3. Using VB 6.0, IIS v5.1. I can manipulate files in the shared directory freely from the VirtualPC ie. copy, paste, delete, etc. Edit: Link to screenshot: http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/5439/vpcscreen.png

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• Stdin to powershell script

  - by Stefan

  I have a service running that can invoke an external process to modify a text stream before it is returned to the service. The text stream is handed from the service to the external process on stdout and the modified result is read from the service on stdin. The external process (command) can in other words be used as a text "filter". I would like to use a powershell script to modify the text stream. I can successfully launch a script from the service on win 2008r2 using the command "powershell -executionpolicy bypass -noninteractive ./myscript.ps1". I can make the script return text to the service on stdout using the write-host cmdlet. My problem is that I can't find a way to read the text on stdin in the script. Read-host doesn't seem to work as it requires an interactive shell. I would like to avoid writing the stdout from the service to a tmp file and read that file in the script as the service is multithreaded (can launch more than one external command at a time) and tmp file management (locking, unique filenames etc) is not desired. Is this possible or should I use for example Perl for this? Powershell seems compelling as it is preinstalled on all my win 2008 machines.

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• WatiN SelectList Methods - Page not refreshing/actions not being fired after interacting with a sele

  - by Chad M

  Preface: If you don't care about the preface, skip down to the section marked "Question." Hi, Recently my company has upgraded to the latest version of WatiN for its test automation framework. We upgraded to avoid a problem where interacting with a select list would cause an ACCSES DENIED error. This error seems to be a product of the fact that our web application reloads the page it is on (which sits in a frame which sits in a frameset) with new fields after certain select lists options are selected. It could also be that our framework, which wraps around WatiN, often does actions on the same SelectList after the page refresh (I'm still looking into this, I'm new to the framework). The new version of WatiN does solve the ACCESS DENIED error, but also seems to stop select lists from firing the action that causes the page to reload w/ its new options. In fact, if you use WatiN to make the selection, the select list won't work correctly, even if manually interacted with, until the page has been forced to refresh. Question: When selecting an option in a SelectList using the newest WatiN code, the event that causes our web app's page to reload with new fields/values does not execute. What are some possibilities that could cause this? The term i've seen used most often to describe the refreshing that occurs when our select lists are used is "double post-back". Many thanks, Chad

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• ConcurrentDictionary and updating values

  - by rboarman

  Hello, After searching via Google and coming up empty, I decided to ask the gurus here on StackOverflow. I am trying to update entries in a ConcurrentDictionary something like this: class Class1 { public int Counter { get; set; } } class Test { private ConcurrentDictionary<int, Class1> dict = new ConcurrentDictionary<int, Class1>(); public void TestIt() { foreach (var foo in dict) { foo.Value.Counter = foo.Value.Counter + 1; // Simplified example } } } Essentially I need to iterate over the dictionary and update a field on each Value. I understand from the documentation that I need to avoid using the Value property. Instead I think I need to use TryUpdate except that I don’t want to replace my whole object. Instead, I want to update a field on the object. After reading this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pfxteam/archive/2010/01/08/9945809.aspx Perhaps I need to use AddOrUpdate and simply do nothing in the add delegate. Does anyone have any insight as to how to do this? Thank you, Rick

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• Box2d: Set active and inactive

  - by Rosarch

  I'm writing an XNA game in C# using the XNA port of Box2d - Box2dx. Entities like trees or zombies are represented as GameObjects. GameObjectManager adds and removes them from the game world: /// <summary> /// Does the work of removing the GameObject. /// </summary> /// <param name="controller">The GameObject to be removed.</param> private void removeGameObjectFromWorld(GameObjectController controller) { controllers.Remove(controller); worldState.Models.Remove(controller.Model); controller.Model.Body.SetActive(false); } public void addGameObjectToWorld(GameObjectController controller) { controllers.Add(controller); worldState.Models.Add(controller.Model); controller.Model.Body.SetActive(true); } controllers is a collection of GameObjectController instances. worldState.Models is a collection of GameObjectModel instances. When I remove GameObjects from Box2d this way, this method gets called: void IContactListener.EndContact(Contact contact) { GameObjectController collider1 = worldQueryUtils.gameObjectOfBody(contact.GetFixtureA().GetBody()); GameObjectController collider2 = worldQueryUtils.gameObjectOfBody(contact.GetFixtureB().GetBody()); collisionRecorder.removeCollision(collider1, collider2); } worldQueryUtils: // this could be cached if we know bodies never change public GameObjectController gameObjectOfBody(Body body) { return worldQueryEngine.GameObjectsForPredicate(x => x.Model.Body == body).Single(); } This method throws an error: System.InvalidOperationException was unhandled Message="Sequence contains no elements" Source="System.Core" StackTrace: at System.Linq.Enumerable.Single[TSource](IEnumerable`1 source) at etc Why is this happening? What can I do to avoid it? This method has been called many times before the body.SetActive() was called. I feel that this may be messing it up.

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