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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, January 11, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, January 11, 2011Popular ReleasesArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap 1.1 beta2: This is the beta2 release for the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap version 1.1. Changes from version 1.0: Multi-part geometries are now supported. Homogeneous relations (consisting of only lines or only polygons) are converted into the appropriate multi-part geometry. Mixed relations and super relations are maintained and tracked in a stand-alone relation table. The underlying editing logic has changed. As opposed to tracking the editing changes upon "Save edit" or "Stop edit" the changes a...VSSpeedster - Parallel Builds for VS: VSSpeedster 1.2 (beta): - Improved Parallel Builds - Cancel running Parallel Build using Ctrl+BreakASP.NET Comet Ajax Library (Reverse Ajax - Server Push): Multiple server ASP.NET Reverse Ajax: This sample project demonstrates how is easy to scale your web applications via PokeInHawkeye - The .Net Runtime Object Editor: Hawkeye 1.2.5: In the case you are running an x86 Windows and you installed Release 1.2.4, you should consider upgrading to this release (1.2.5) as it appears Hawkeye is broken on x86 OS. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it appears Hawkeye 1.2.4 (and probably previous versions) doesn't run on x86 Windows (See issue http://hawkeye.codeplex.com/workitem/7791). This maintenance release fixes this broken behavior. This release comes in two flavors: Hawkeye.125.N2 is the standard .NET 2 build, was compile...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (January 2011): Another release build for daily use; it contains many new features, enhanced compatibility with latest PHP opensource applications and several issue fixes. To improve the performance of your application using MySQL, please use Managed MySQL Extension for Phalanger. Changes made within this release include following: New features available only in Phalanger. Full support of Multi-Script-Assemblies was implemented; you can build your application into several DLLs now. Deploy them separately t...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.0: 2.3.0This release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Changed how flame shoc...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.3: A message will be displayed when there's an update available Shows a list of recent mastery files in the Editor Tab (requested by quite a few people) Updater: Update information is now scrollable Added a buton to launch AutoLoL after updating is finished Updated the UI to match that of AutoLoL Fix: Detects and resolves 'Read Only' state on Version.xmlExtended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.3.0: What's in the 1.3.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner ChildWindow ColorPicker - Updated (Breaking Changes) DateTimeUpDown - New Control Magnifier - New Control MaskedTextBox - New Control MessageBox NumericUpDown RichTextBox RichTextBoxFormatBar - Updated .NET 3.5 binaries and SourcePlease note: The Extended WPF Toolkit 3.5 is dependent on .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit. You must install .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit in order to use any features in the To...sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9d: added elementclient coordinate catcher to catch coordinates select a target (ingame) i.e. your char, npc or monster than click the button and coordinates+direction will be transfered to the selected row in the table corrected labels from Rot to Direction (because it is a vector)Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.7 beta Released: Hi, Today Visifire is released along with one new feature * Inlines property has been implemented in Title. Now onwards you can customize the text content in Title. Please check out the Visifire documentation for more information. This release contains fix for the following bugs: * Styles for chart elements were not working as expected. * Bar chart was not drawn properly if AxisMinimum property was set to a value above zero base line. * In DateTime axis, AxisLables were no...Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter: 2.1 latest stable: V2.1 is stable, and is in maintenance mode. This is v2.1.1.25. It is a bug-fix release. There are no new features. 28629 29172 28722 27626 28074 29164 27659 27900 many documentation updates and fixes proper x64 build environment. This release includes x64 binaries in zip form, but no x64 MSI file. You'll have to manually install x64 servers, following the instructions in the documentation.StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14980.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the correct path ...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.1: New release with bug fixes and updates for performance.UltimateJB: Ultimate JB 2.03 PL3 KAKAROTO + HERMES + Spoof 3.5: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 2.43 !!! Conclusion : - UltimateJB203PSXXXDEFAULTKAKAROTO=> Pas de spoof mais disponible pour les PS3 suivantes : 3.41_kiosk 3.41 3.40 3.30 3.21 3.15 3.10 3.01 2.76 2.70 2.60 2.53 2.43 - UltimateJB203PS341_HERMES => Pas de spoof mais version hermes 4b - UltimateJB203PS341HERMESSPOOF35X => hermes 4b + spoof des firmwares 3.50 et 3.55 au li....NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.03: Added lot's of new extensions and new projects for MVC and Entity Framework. object.FindTypeByRecursion Int32.InRange String.RemoveAllSpecialCharacters String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IsNotEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IfEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.ToUpperFirstLetter String.GetBytes String.ToTitleCase String.ToPlural DateTime.GetDaysInYear DateTime.GetPeriodOfDay IEnumberable.RemoveAll IEnumberable.Distinct ICollection.RemoveAll IList.Join IList.Match IList.Cast Array.IsNullOrEmpty Array.W...EFMVC - ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First: EFMVC 0.5- ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First: Demo web app ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code FirstVidCoder: 0.8.0: Added x64 version. Made the audio output preview more detailed and accurate. If the chosen encoder or mixdown is incompatible with the source, the fallback that will be used is displayed. Added "Auto" to the audio mixdown choices. Reworked non-anamorphic size calculation to work better with non-standard pixel aspect ratios and cropping. Reworked Custom anamorphic to be more intuitive and allow display width to be set automatically (Thanks, Statick). Allowing higher bitrates for 6-ch....NET Voice Recorder: Auto-Tune Release: This is the source code and binaries to accompany the article on the Coding 4 Fun website. It is the Auto Tuner release of the .NET Voice Recorder application.BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.2.0: - Simulation Log is now automatically disabled and hidden when running 10 or more iterations - Hit and Expertise are now entered by Rating, and include option for a Racial Expertise bonus - Added option for boss to use a periodic magic ability (Dragon Breath) - Added option for boss to periodically Enrage, gaining a Damage/Attack Speed buffASP.NET MVC CMS ( Using CommonLibrary.NET ): CommonLibrary.NET CMS 0.9.5 Alpha: CommonLibrary CMSA simple yet powerful CMS system in ASP.NET MVC 2 using C# 4.0. ActiveRecord based components for Blogs, Widgets, Pages, Parts, Events, Feedback, BlogRolls, Links Includes several widgets ( tag cloud, archives, recent, user cloud, links twitter, blog roll and more ) Built using the http://commonlibrarynet.codeplex.com framework. ( Uses TDD, DDD, Models/Entities, Code Generation ) Can run w/ In-Memory Repositories or Sql Server Database See Documentation tab for Ins...New Projects.NET Event Spy: Full information available here: http://martincarolan.blogspot.com/2011/01/secret-project.html Simple development/debugging tool that hooks into and monitors events raised on any .NET object3DTweet: 3Dtweet is an effort to make tweets appear in a aesthetic manner to the users of windows phone.Its developed using VS2010 expresss.Agile .NET with SCRUM and XP: Source code for the book Apress Professional Agile .NET Development with SCRUM and XPBeskid Niski Agroturystyka: Travel Poland, turystyka w beskidzie niskim. Agroturystyka w miejscowosci Losie nad zalewem KlimkowkaCoding better: A better coding labs for .net new feature.FBApp: A simple facebook app I was busy with over the holidays as an experiment to try out the facebook api. Is currently not complete but I wanted to get some criticism on it for my 1st web app. It is developed using WPF and C#. Freemium Helper for WebMatrix: The Freemium Helper for WebMatrix provides an easy way to apply the Freemium model into your WebMatrix site. Using different user groups (or roles), it allows you to easily enable or disable features on your pages depending on the stock-keeping unit the user has paid for.Haversine Distance Calculation: A very small project that implements the Haversine formula, which calculates the great circle distance between two points on the earth's surface. The points are latitude / longitude coordinates in DD. The formula is implemented client side with javascript and server side with C#.Hexa.Core: Hexa.Core is our implementation of the Domain Driven Design Architecture. Also providing a set of helper classes for ASP.Net and WCF development.Minecraft NBT reader: A simple Minecraft NBT reader.MobSoft: MobSoft is silverlight based news related application designed to test the new functionalitities in Silverlight 4netduino Helpers: The 'netduino Helpers' is a C# driver set for common hardware components and features convenient wrappers around complex .Net Micro Framework features such as: Analog joysticks, Real-time clock, 8*8 LED matrix, Shift register, runtime assembly & resource loader, bitmaps, etc.NewsGator Social Connectors for Sharepoint 2010: This project contains social connectors for the NewsGator SharePoint platform and supports sending messages to Twitter and LinkedIn just by putting tags in the text #li for sending to linkedin #tw for sending to twitterNon Profit Contact Relationship Management: A non profit contact relationship management software intended to help those in the non profit arena manage donors, sponsors, and prospects.OpenAGE: OpenAGE, short for Open Advance Game Engine, is aimed at developing a new Advanced Game engine strictly for the PC and Xbox360 gaming System using XNA 4.0, and Visual Studio 2010OpenAutoPoster: OpenAutoPoster automates some of the boring everyday tasks of aggregating, linking and posting that haunts content creators.Phefer WoodTurning Sketcher: Draw out your own turnings before you hit the wood. Import images and trace around them, print them out with the length and width measuresments.Simple Script Interpreter- A simple GPLEX/GPPG (Lex/Yacc) Primer: Simple Script is a simple implementation of an interpreter language built with GPlex and Gppg (Lex/Yacc). It's developed in C#.SP2010Tutorials: Code for learning SharePoint 2010The Social Developer: This is a social developer tool for programmers to create and share projects using the .Net framework and other technologies and integrate it into a socialistic approach of sharing the work load and the resources needed to develop high level applications. Traffic-sign Classification: Traffic sign shape classification and localization.unnamedyet: Experimental! para Investigadores de Sistemas. Objetivo! desarrollar una praxis tal que con un conjunto finito y discreto de términos para describir sea posible auto-demostrar y ejecutar cualquier proposición dada.VSSpeedster - Parallel Builds for VS: Improve the performance of your Visual Studio: - Parallel Builds integrated in visual studioWebservice Xslt Transformer WebPart for SharePoint 2010: The Dynamic Webservice Xslt Transformer WebPart makes it much easier for SharePoint Developers and Administrators to call the webservice and transform the results directly to HTML by providing their own custom xslt. The properties can be set on the webpart by using the UI.WilWaNet.HASH: An ASP.NET MVC web site designed for tracking nutrition for the purposes of losing weight. Tracks calories, fat calories, fat grams and saturated fat along with daily weight and exercise. Includes daily Basic Metabolic Rate calculation and graphing functions.WP7 Try it 01: The first try in wp7WPF TryIt 01: Quan ly Nhan khau WPF ApplicationWX Alerter CAP/XML: NWS Alerter using CAP 1.1 alerting protocol. The goal of this project is to consume weather alerts from the NWS site. The user will select the city or SAME code/zone to watch. As alerts trigger notices will display and info will fill the Alert Tab.

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• How to add event receiver to SharePoint2010 content type programmatically

  - by ybbest

  Today , I’d like to show how to add event receiver to How to add event receiver to SharePoint2010 content type programmatically. 1. Create empty SharePoint Project and add a class called ItemContentTypeEventReceiver and make it inherit from SPItemEventReceiver and implement your logic as below public class ItemContentTypeEventReceiver : SPItemEventReceiver { private bool eventFiringEnabledStatus; public override void ItemAdded(SPItemEventProperties properties) { base.ItemAdded(properties); UpdateTitle(properties); } private void UpdateTitle(SPItemEventProperties properties) { SPListItem addedItem = properties.ListItem; string enteredTitle = addedItem["Title"] as string; addedItem["Title"] = enteredTitle + " Updated"; DisableItemEventsScope(); addedItem.Update(); EnableItemEventsScope(); } public override void ItemUpdated(SPItemEventProperties properties) { base.ItemUpdated(properties); UpdateTitle(properties); } private void DisableItemEventsScope() { eventFiringEnabledStatus = EventFiringEnabled; EventFiringEnabled = false; } private void EnableItemEventsScope() { eventFiringEnabledStatus = EventFiringEnabled; EventFiringEnabled = true; } } 2.Create a Site or Web(depending or your requirements) scoped feature and implement your feature event handler as below: public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { SPWeb web = GetFeatureWeb(properties); //http://karinebosch.wordpress.com/walkthroughs/event-receivers-theory/ string assemblyName =  System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName; const string className = "YBBEST.AddEventReceiverToContentType.ItemContentTypeEventReceiver"; SPContentType contentType= web.ContentTypes["Item"]; AddEventReceiverToContentType(className, contentType, assemblyName, SPEventReceiverType.ItemAdded, SPEventReceiverSynchronization.Asynchronous); AddEventReceiverToContentType(className, contentType, assemblyName, SPEventReceiverType.ItemUpdated, SPEventReceiverSynchronization.Asynchronous); contentType.Update(); } protected static void AddEventReceiverToContentType(string className, SPContentType contentType, string assemblyName, SPEventReceiverType eventReceiverType, SPEventReceiverSynchronization eventReceiverSynchronization) { if (className == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("className"); if (contentType == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("contentType"); if (assemblyName == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("assemblyName"); SPEventReceiverDefinition eventReceiver = contentType.EventReceivers.Add(); eventReceiver.Synchronization = eventReceiverSynchronization; eventReceiver.Type = eventReceiverType; eventReceiver.Assembly = assemblyName; eventReceiver.Class = className; eventReceiver.Update(); } 3.Deploy your solution and now you have a event receiver that attached to the Item contentType. You can download the complete source code here.You can also check how to add event receiver to a list using SharePoint event receiver item in Visual Studio2010 in my previous blog.

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• Reverse-engineer SharePoint fields, content types and list instance—Part3

  - by ybbest

  Reverse-engineer SharePoint fields, content types and list instance—Part1 Reverse-engineer SharePoint fields, content types and list instance—Part2 Reverse-engineer SharePoint fields, content types and list instance—Part3 In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I demonstrate how to reverse engineer SharePoint fields, content types. In this post I will cover how to include lookup fields in the content type and create list instance using these content types. Firstly, I will cover how to create list instance and bind the custom content type to the custom list. 1. Create a custom list using list Instance item in visual studio and select custom list. 2. In the feature receiver add the Department content type to Department list and remove the item content type. C# AddContentTypeToList(web, “Department”, ” Department”); private void AddContentTypeToList(SPWeb web,string listName, string contentTypeName) { SPList list = web.Lists.TryGetList(listName); list.OnQuickLaunch = true; list.ContentTypesEnabled = true; list.Update(); SPContentType employeeContentType = web.ContentTypes[contentTypeName]; list.ContentTypes.Add(employeeContentType); list.ContentTypes["Item"].Delete(); list.Update(); } Next, I will cover how to create the lookup fields. The difference between creating a normal field and lookup fields is that you need to create the lookup fields after the lists are created. This is because the lookup fields references fields from the foreign list. 1. In your solution, you need to create a feature that deploys the list before deploying the lookup fields. 2. You need to write the following code in the feature receiver to add the lookup columns in the ContentType. C# //add the lookup fields SPFieldLookup departmentField = EnsureLookupField(currentWeb, “YBBESTDepartment”, currentWeb.Lists["DepartmentList"].ID, “Title”); //add to the content types SPContentType employeeContentType = currentWeb.ContentTypes["Employee"]; //Add the lookup fields as SPFieldLink employeeContentType.FieldLinks.Add(new SPFieldLink(departmentField)); employeeContentType.Update(true); private static SPFieldLookup EnsureLookupField(SPWeb currentWeb, String sFieldName, Guid LookupListID, String sLookupField) { //add the lookup fields SPFieldLookup lookupField = null; try { lookupField = currentWeb.Fields[sFieldName] as SPFieldLookup; } catch (Exception e) { } if (lookupField == null) { currentWeb.Fields.AddLookup(sFieldName, LookupListID, true); currentWeb.Update(); lookupField = currentWeb.Fields[sFieldName] as SPFieldLookup; lookupField.LookupField = sLookupField; lookupField.Group = “YBBEST”; lookupField.Required = true; lookupField.Update(); } return lookupField; }

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• using Generics in C# [closed]

  - by Uphaar Goyal

  I have started looking into using generics in C#. As an example what i have done is that I have an abstract class which implements generic methods. these generic methods take a sql query, a connection string and the Type T as parameters and then construct the data set, populate the object and return it back. This way each business object does not need to have a method to populate it with data or construct its data set. All we need to do is pass the type, the sql query and the connection string and these methods do the rest.I am providing the code sample here. I am just looking to discuss with people who might have a better solution to what i have done. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; using MWTWorkUnitMgmtLib.Business; using System.Collections.ObjectModel; using System.Reflection; namespace MWTWorkUnitMgmtLib.TableGateway { public abstract class TableGateway { public TableGateway() { } protected abstract string GetConnection(); protected abstract string GetTableName(); public DataSet GetDataSetFromSql(string connectionString, string sql) { DataSet ds = null; using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString)) using (SqlCommand command = connection.CreateCommand()) { command.CommandText = sql; connection.Open(); using (ds = new DataSet()) using (SqlDataAdapter adapter = new SqlDataAdapter(command)) { adapter.Fill(ds); } } return ds; } public static bool ContainsColumnName(DataRow dr, string columnName) { return dr.Table.Columns.Contains(columnName); } public DataTable GetDataTable(string connString, string sql) { DataSet ds = GetDataSetFromSql(connString, sql); DataTable dt = null; if (ds != null) { if (ds.Tables.Count 0) { dt = ds.Tables[0]; } } return dt; } public T Construct(DataRow dr, T t) where T : class, new() { Type t1 = t.GetType(); PropertyInfo[] properties = t1.GetProperties(); foreach (PropertyInfo property in properties) { if (ContainsColumnName(dr, property.Name) && (dr[property.Name] != null)) property.SetValue(t, dr[property.Name], null); } return t; } public T GetByID(string connString, string sql, T t) where T : class, new() { DataTable dt = GetDataTable(connString, sql); DataRow dr = dt.Rows[0]; return Construct(dr, t); } public List GetAll(string connString, string sql, T t) where T : class, new() { List collection = new List(); DataTable dt = GetDataTable(connString, sql); foreach (DataRow dr in dt.Rows) collection.Add(Construct(dr, t)); return collection; } } }

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• Packing a DBF

  - by Tom Hines

  I thought my days of dealing with DBFs as a "production data" source were over, but HA (no such luck). I recently had to retrieve, modify and replace some data that needed to be delivered in a DBF file. Everything was fine until I realized / remembered the DBF driver does not ACTUALLY delete records from the data source -- it only marks them for deletion.  You are responsible for handling the "chaff" either by using a utility to remove deleted records or by simply ignoring them.  If imported into Excel, the marked-deleted records are ignored, but the file size will reflect the extra content. So, I went hunting for a method to "Pack" the records (removing deleted ones and resizing the DBF file) and eventually ran across the FOXPRO driver at ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx ).  Once installed, I changed the DSN in the code to the new one I created in the ODBC Administrator and ran some tests.  Using MSQuery, I simply tested the raw SQL command Pack {tablename} and it WORKED! One really neat thing is the PACK command is used like regular SQL instructions; "Pack {tablename}" is all that is needed. It is necessary, however, to close all connections to the database before issuing the PACK command.    Here is some C# code for a Pack method.         /// <summary>       /// Pack the DBF removing all deleted records       /// </summary>       /// <param name="strTableName">The table to pack</param>       /// <param name="strError">output of any errors</param>       /// <returns>bool (true if no errors)</returns>       public static bool Pack(string strTableName, ref string strError)       {          bool blnRetVal = true;          try          {             OdbcConnectionStringBuilder csbOdbc = new OdbcConnectionStringBuilder()             {                Dsn = "PSAP_FOX_DBF"             };             string strSQL = "pack " + strTableName;             using (OdbcConnection connOdbc = new OdbcConnection(csbOdbc.ToString()))             {                connOdbc.Open();                OdbcCommand cmdOdbc = new OdbcCommand(strSQL, connOdbc);                cmdOdbc.ExecuteNonQuery();                connOdbc.Close();             }          }          catch (Exception exc)          {             blnRetVal = false;             strError = exc.Message;          }          return blnRetVal;       }

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• Packing a DBF

  - by Tom Hines

  I thought my days of dealing with DBFs as a "production data" source were over, but HA (no such luck). I recently had to retrieve, modify and replace some data that needed to be delivered in a DBF file. Everything was fine until I realized / remembered the DBF driver does not ACTUALLY delete records from the data source -- it only marks them for deletion.  You are responsible for handling the "chaff" either by using a utility to remove deleted records or by simply ignoring them.  If imported into Excel, the marked-deleted records are ignored, but the file size will reflect the extra content.  After several rounds of testing CRUD, the output DBF was huge. So, I went hunting for a method to "Pack" the records (removing deleted ones and resizing the DBF file) and eventually ran across the FOXPRO driver at ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/bb190233.aspx ).  Once installed, I changed the DSN in the code to the new one I created in the ODBC Administrator and ran some tests.  Using MSQuery, I simply tested the raw SQL command Pack {tablename} and it WORKED! One really neat thing is the PACK command is used like regular SQL instructions; "Pack {tablename}" is all that is needed. It is necessary, however, to close all connections to the database (and re-open) before issuing the PACK command or you will get the "File is in use" error.    Here is some C# code for a Pack method.         /// <summary>       /// Pack the DBF removing all deleted records       /// </summary>       /// <param name="strTableName">The table to pack</param>       /// <param name="strError">output of any errors</param>       /// <returns>bool (true if no errors)</returns>       public static bool Pack(string strTableName, ref string strError)       {          bool blnRetVal = true;          try          {             OdbcConnectionStringBuilder csbOdbc = new OdbcConnectionStringBuilder()             {                Dsn = "PSAP_FOX_DBF"             };             string strSQL = "pack " + strTableName;             using (OdbcConnection connOdbc = new OdbcConnection(csbOdbc.ToString()))             {                connOdbc.Open();                OdbcCommand cmdOdbc = new OdbcCommand(strSQL, connOdbc);                cmdOdbc.ExecuteNonQuery();                connOdbc.Close();             }          }          catch (Exception exc)          {             blnRetVal = false;             strError = exc.Message;          }          return blnRetVal;       }

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• What is Inversion of control and why we need it?

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  Most of programmer need inversion of control pattern in today’s complex real time application world. So I have decided to write a blog post about it. This blog post will explain what is Inversion of control and why we need it. We are going to take a real world example so it would be better to understand. The problem- Why we need inversion of control? Before giving definition of Inversion of control let’s take a simple real word example to see why we need inversion of control. Please have look on the following code. public class class1 { private class2 _class2; public class1() { _class2=new class2(); } } public class class2 { //Some implementation of class2 } I have two classes “Class1” and “Class2”.  If you see the code in that I have created a instance of class2 class in the class1 class constructor. So the “class1” class is dependent on “class2”. I think that is the biggest issue in real world scenario as if we change the “class2” class then we might need to change the “class1” class also. Here there is one type of dependency between this two classes that is called Tight Coupling. Tight coupling will have lots of problem in real world applications as things are tends to be change in future so we have to change all the tight couple classes that are dependent of each other. To avoid this kind of issue we need Inversion of control. What is Inversion of Control? According to the wikipedia following is a definition of Inversion of control. “In software engineering, Inversion of Control (IoC) is an object-oriented programming practice where the object coupling is bound at run time by an assembler object and is typically not known at compile time using static analysis.” So if you read the it carefully it says that we should have object coupling at run time not compile time where it know what object it will create, what method it will call or what feature it will going to use for that. We need to use same classes in such way so that it will not tight couple with each other. There are multiple way to implement Inversion of control. You can refer wikipedia link for knowing multiple ways of implementing Inversion of control. In future posts we are going to see all the different way of implementing Inversion of control.

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• HTTP Headers: Max-Age vs Expires – Which One To Choose?

  - by Gopinath

  Caching of static content like images, scripts, styles on the client browser reduces load on the webservers and also improves end users browsing experience by loading web pages quickly. We can use HTTP headers Expires or Cache-Control:max-age to cache content on client browser and set expiry time for them. Expire header is HTTP/1.0 standard and Cache-Control:max-age is introduced in HTTP/1.1 specification to solve the issues and limitation with Expire  header. Consider the following headers.   Cache-Control: max-age=24560 Expires: Tue, 15 May 2012 06:17:00 GMT The first header instructs web browsers to cache the content for 24560 seconds relative to the time the content is downloaded and expire it after the time period elapses. The second header instructs web browser to expiry the content after 15th May 2011 06:17. Out of these two options which one to use – max-age or expires? I prefer max-age header for the following reasons As max-age  is a relative value and in most of the cases it makes sense to set relative expiry date rather than an absolute expiry date. Expire  header values are complex to set – time format should be proper, time zones should be appropriate. Even a small mistake in settings these values results in unexpected behaviour. As Expire header values are absolute, we need to  keep changing them at regular intervals. Lets say if we set 2011 June 1 as expiry date to all the image files of this blog, on 2011 June 2 we should modify the expiry date to something like 2012 Jan 1. This add burden of managing the Expire headers. Related: Amazon S3 Tips: Quickly Add/Modify HTTP Headers To All Files Recursively cc image flickr:rogue3w This article titled,HTTP Headers: Max-Age vs Expires – Which One To Choose?, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Extending NerdDinner: Adding Geolocated Flair

  - by Jon Galloway

  NerdDinner is a website with the audacious goal of “Organizing the world’s nerds and helping them eat in packs.” Because nerds aren’t likely to socialize with others unless a website tells them to do it. Scott Hanselman showed off a lot of the cool features we’ve added to NerdDinner lately during his popular talk at MIX10, Beyond File | New Company: From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform. Did you miss it? Go ahead and watch it, I’ll wait. One of the features we wanted to add was flair. You know about flair, right? It’s a way to let folks who like your site show it off in their own site. For example, here’s my StackOverflow flair: Great! So how could we add some of this flair stuff to NerdDinner? What do we want to show? If we’re going to encourage our users to give up a bit of their beautiful website to show off a bit of ours, we need to think about what they’ll want to show. For instance, my StackOverflow flair is all about me, not StackOverflow. So how will this apply to NerdDinner? Since NerdDinner is all about organizing local dinners, in order for the flair to be useful it needs to make sense for the person viewing the web page. If someone visits from Egypt visits my blog, they should see information about NerdDinners in Egypt. That’s geolocation – localizing site content based on where the browser’s sitting, and it makes sense for flair as well as entire websites. So we’ll set up a simple little callout that prompts them to host a dinner in their area: Hopefully our flair works and there is a dinner near your viewers, so they’ll see another view which lists upcoming dinners near them: The Geolocation Part Generally website geolocation is done by mapping the requestor’s IP address to a geographic area. It’s not an exact science, but I’ve always found it to be pretty accurate. There are (at least) three ways to handle it: You pay somebody like MaxMind for a database (with regular updates) that sits on your server, and you use their API to do lookups. I used this on a pretty big project a few years ago and it worked well. You use HTML 5 Geolocation API or Google Gears or some other browser based solution. I think those are cool (I use Google Gears a lot), but they’re both in flux right now and I don’t think either has a wide enough of an install base yet to rely on them. You might want to, but I’ve heard you do all kinds of crazy stuff, and sometimes it gets you in trouble. I don’t mean talk out of line, but we all laugh behind your back a bit. But, hey, it’s up to you. It’s your flair or whatever. There are some free webservices out there that will take an IP address and give you location information. Easy, and works for everyone. That’s what we’re doing. I looked at a few different services and settled on IPInfoDB. It’s free, has a great API, and even returns JSON, which is handy for Javascript use. The IP query is pretty simple. We hit a URL like this: http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=74.125.45.100&timezone=false … and we get an XML response back like this… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Response> <Ip>74.125.45.100</Ip> <Status>OK</Status> <CountryCode>US</CountryCode> <CountryName>United States</CountryName> <RegionCode>06</RegionCode> <RegionName>California</RegionName> <City>Mountain View</City> <ZipPostalCode>94043</ZipPostalCode> <Latitude>37.4192</Latitude> <Longitude>-122.057</Longitude> </Response> So we’ll build some data transfer classes to hold the location information, like this: public class LocationInfo { public string Country { get; set; } public string RegionName { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string ZipPostalCode { get; set; } public LatLong Position { get; set; } } public class LatLong { public float Lat { get; set; } public float Long { get; set; } } And now hitting the service is pretty simple: public static LocationInfo HostIpToPlaceName(string ip) { string url = "http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip={0}&timezone=false"; url = String.Format(url, ip); var result = XDocument.Load(url); var location = (from x in result.Descendants("Response") select new LocationInfo { City = (string)x.Element("City"), RegionName = (string)x.Element("RegionName"), Country = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), ZipPostalCode = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), Position = new LatLong { Lat = (float)x.Element("Latitude"), Long = (float)x.Element("Longitude") } }).First(); return location; } Getting The User’s IP Okay, but first we need the end user’s IP, and you’d think it would be as simple as reading the value from HttpContext: HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress But you’d be wrong. Sorry. UserHostAddress just wraps HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"], but that doesn’t get you the IP for users behind a proxy. That’s in another header, “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR". So you can either hit a wrapper and then check a header, or just check two headers. I went for uniformity: string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; We’re almost set to wrap this up, but first let’s talk about our views. Yes, views, because we’ll have two. Selecting the View We wanted to make it easy for people to include the flair in their sites, so we looked around at how other people were doing this. The StackOverflow folks have a pretty good flair system, which allows you to include the flair in your site as either an IFRAME reference or a Javascript include. We’ll do both. We have a ServicesController to handle use of the site information outside of NerdDinner.com, so this fits in pretty well there. We’ll be displaying the same information for both HTML and Javascript flair, so we can use one Flair controller action which will return a different view depending on the requested format. Here’s our general flow for our controller action: Get the user’s IP Translate it to a location Grab the top three upcoming dinners that are near that location Select the view based on the format (defaulted to “html”) Return a FlairViewModel which contains the list of dinners and the location information public ActionResult Flair(string format = "html") { string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty( Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; var location = GeolocationService.HostIpToPlaceName(SourceIP); var dinners = dinnerRepository. FindByLocation(location.Position.Lat, location.Position.Long). OrderByDescending(p => p.EventDate).Take(3); // Select the view we'll return. // Using a switch because we'll add in JSON and other formats later. string view; switch (format.ToLower()) { case "javascript": view = "JavascriptFlair"; break; default: view = "Flair"; break; } return View( view, new FlairViewModel { Dinners = dinners.ToList(), LocationName = string.IsNullOrEmpty(location.City) ? "you" : String.Format("{0}, {1}", location.City, location.RegionName) } ); } Note: I’m not in love with the logic here, but it seems like overkill to extract the switch statement away when we’ll probably just have two or three views. What do you think? The HTML View The HTML version of the view is pretty simple – the only thing of any real interest here is the use of an extension method to truncate strings that are would cause the titles to wrap. public static string Truncate(this string s, int maxLength) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(s) || maxLength <= 0) return string.Empty; else if (s.Length > maxLength) return s.Substring(0, maxLength) + "..."; else return s; }   So here’s how the HTML view ends up looking: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<FlairViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Nerd Dinner</title> <link href="/Content/Flair.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="nd-wrapper"> <h2 id="nd-header">NerdDinner.com</h2> <div id="nd-outer"> <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> <div id="nd-bummer"> Looks like there's no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create">host one</a>?</div> <% } else { %> <h3> Dinners Near You</h3> <ul> <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> <li> <%: Html.ActionLink(String.Format("{0} with {1} on {2}", item.Title.Truncate(20), item.HostedBy, item.EventDate.ToShortDateString()), "Details", "Dinners", new { id = item.DinnerID }, new { target = "_blank" })%></li> <% } %> </ul> <% } %> <div id="nd-footer"> More dinners and fun at <a target="_blank" href="http://nrddnr.com">http://nrddnr.com</a></div> </div> </div> </body> </html> You’d include this in a page using an IFRAME, like this: <IFRAME height=230 marginHeight=0 src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair" frameBorder=0 width=160 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME> The Javascript view The Javascript flair is written so you can include it in a webpage with a simple script include, like this: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair?format=javascript"></script> The goal of this view is very similar to the HTML embed view, with a few exceptions: We’re creating a script element and adding it to the head of the document, which will then document.write out the content. Note that you have to consider if your users will actually have a <head> element in their documents, but for website flair use cases I think that’s a safe bet. Since the content is being added to the existing page rather than shown in an IFRAME, all links need to be absolute. That means we can’t use Html.ActionLink, since it generates relative routes. We need to escape everything since it’s being written out as strings. We need to set the content type to application/x-javascript. The easiest way to do that is to use the <%@ Page ContentType%> directive. <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<NerdDinner.Models.FlairViewModel>" ContentType="application/x-javascript" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> document.write('<script>var link = document.createElement(\"link\");link.href = \"http://nerddinner.com/content/Flair.css\";link.rel = \"stylesheet\";link.type = \"text/css\";var head = document.getElementsByTagName(\"head\")[0];head.appendChild(link);</script>'); document.write('<div id=\"nd-wrapper\"><h2 id=\"nd-header\">NerdDinner.com</h2><div id=\"nd-outer\">'); <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-bummer\">Looks like there\'s no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create\">host one</a>?</div>'); <% } else { %> document.write('<h3> Dinners Near You</h3><ul>'); <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> document.write('<li><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com/<%: item.DinnerID %>\"><%: item.Title.Truncate(20) %> with <%: item.HostedBy %> on <%: item.EventDate.ToShortDateString() %></a></li>'); <% } %> document.write('</ul>'); <% } %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-footer\"> More dinners and fun at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com\">http://nrddnr.com</a></div></div></div>'); Getting IP’s for Testing There are a variety of online services that will translate a location to an IP, which were handy for testing these out. I found http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html to be most useful, but I’m open to suggestions if you know of something better. Next steps I think the next step here is to minimize load – you know, in case people start actually using this flair. There are two places to think about – the NerdDinner.com servers, and the services we’re using for Geolocation. I usually think about caching as a first attack on server load, but that’s less helpful here since every user will have a different IP. Instead, I’d look at taking advantage of Asynchronous Controller Actions, a cool new feature in ASP.NET MVC 2. Async Actions let you call a potentially long-running webservice without tying up a thread on the server while waiting for the response. There’s some good info on that in the MSDN documentation, and Dino Esposito wrote a great article on Asynchronous ASP.NET Pages in the April 2010 issue of MSDN Magazine. But let’s think of the children, shall we? What about ipinfodb.com? Well, they don’t have specific daily limits, but they do throttle you if you put a lot of traffic on them. From their FAQ: We do not have a specific daily limit but queries that are at a rate faster than 2 per second will be put in "queue". If you stay below 2 queries/second everything will be normal. If you go over the limit, you will still get an answer for all queries but they will be slowed down to about 1 per second. This should not affect most users but for high volume websites, you can either use our IP database on your server or we can whitelist your IP for 5$/month (simply use the donate form and leave a comment with your server IP). Good programming practices such as not querying our API for all page views (you can store the data in a cookie or a database) will also help not reaching the limit. So the first step there is to save the geolocalization information in a time-limited cookie, which will allow us to look up the local dinners immediately without having to hit the geolocation service.

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• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  "Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack. Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while. Self-Service BI Self-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI. This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me: PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.) Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.) One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.) Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.) Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.) This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users. It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations. Collaborative BI I have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time. Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people." The Microsoft BI Stack in General A question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years. Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?" Expo Hall I had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here. Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions. Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind! Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• AxCMS.net 10 with Microsoft Silverlight 4 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

  - by Axinom

  Axinom, European WCM vendor, today announced the next version of its WCM solution AxCMS.net 10, which streamlines the processes involved in creating, managing and distributing corporate content on the internet. The new solution helps reducing ongoing costs for managing and distributing to large audiences, while at the same time drastically reducing time-to-market and one-time setup costs. http://www.AxCMS.net Axinom’s WCM portfolio, based on the Microsoft .NET Framework 4, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Silverlight 4, allows enterprises to increase process efficiency, reduce operating costs and more effectively manage delivery of rich media assets on the Web and mobile devices. Axinom solutions are widely used by major European online brands in IT, telco, retail, media and entertainment industries such as Siemens, American Express, Microsoft Corp., ZDF, Pro7Sat1 Media, and Deutsche Post. Brand New User Interface built with Silverlight 4By using Silverlight 4, Axinom’s team created a new user interface for AxCMS.net 10 that is optimized for improved usability and speed. WYSIWYG mode, integrated image editor, extended list views, and detail views of objects allow a substantial acceleration of typical editor tasks. Axinom’s team worked with Silverlight Rough Cut Editor for video management and Silverlight Analytics Framework for extended reporting to complete the wide range of capabilities included in the new release. “Axinom’s release of AxCMS.net 10 enables developers to take advantage of the latest features in Silverlight 4,” said Brian Goldfarb, director of the developer platform group at Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft is excited about the opportunity this creates for Web developers to streamline the creating, managing and distributing of online corporate content using AxCMS.net 10 and Silverlight.” Rapid Web Development with Visual Studio 2010AxCMS.net 10 is extended by additional products that enable developers to get productive quickly and help solve typical customer scenarios. AxCMS.net template projects come with documented source code that help kick-start projects and learn best practices in all aspects of Web application development. AxCMS.net overcomes many hard-to-solve technical obstacles in an out-of-the-box manner by providing a set of ready-to-use vertical solutions such as corporate Web site, Web shop, Web campaign management, email marketing, multi-channel distribution, management of rich Internet applications, and Web business intelligence. Extended Multi-Site ManagementAxCMS.net has been supporting the management of an unlimited number of Web sites for a long time. The new version 10 of AxCMS.net will further improve multi-site management and provide features to editors and developers that will simplify and accelerate multi-site and multi-language management. Extended publication workflow will take into account additional dependencies of dynamic objects, pages, and documents. “The customer requests evolved from static html pages to dynamic Web applications content with the emergence of rich media assets seamlessly combined across many channels including Web, mobile and IPTV. With the.NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4, we’re on the fast track to making the three screen strategy a reality for our customers,” said Damir Tomicic, CEO of Axinom Group. “Our customers enjoy substantial competitive advantages of using latest Microsoft technologies. We have a long-standing, relationship with Microsoft and are committed to continued development using Microsoft tools and technologies to deliver innovative Web solutions in the future.”  

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• Is Social Media The Vital Skill You Aren’t Tracking?

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Mark Bennett - Originally featured in Talent Management Excellence The ever-increasing presence of the workforce on social media presents opportunities as well as risks for organizations. While on the one hand, we read about social media embarrassments happening to organizations, on the other we see that social media activities by workers and candidates can enhance a company’s brand and provide insight into what individuals are, or can become, influencers in the social media sphere. HR can play a key role in helping organizations make the most value out of the activities and presence of workers and candidates, while at the same time also helping to manage the risks that come with the permanence and viral nature of social media. What is Missing from Understanding Our Workforce? “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three-times more productive.”  Lew Platt, Former Chairman, President, CEO, Hewlett-Packard  What Lew Platt recognized was that organizations only have a partial understanding of what their workforce is capable of. This lack of understanding impacts the company in several negative ways: 1. A particular skill that the company needs to access in one part of the organization might exist somewhere else, but there is no record that the skill exists, so the need is unfulfilled. 2. As market conditions change rapidly, the company needs to know strategic options, but some options are missed entirely because the company doesn’t know that sufficient capability already exists to enable those options. 3. Employees may miss out on opportunities to demonstrate how their hidden skills could create new value to the company. Why don’t companies have that more complete picture of their workforce capabilities – that is, not know what they know? One very good explanation is that companies put most of their efforts into rating their workforce according to the jobs and roles they are filling today. This is the essence of two important talent management processes: recruiting and performance appraisals.  In recruiting, a set of requirements is put together for a job, either explicitly or indirectly through a job description. During the recruiting process, much of the attention is paid towards whether the candidate has the qualifications, the skills, the experience and the cultural fit to be successful in the role. This makes a lot of sense.  In the performance appraisal process, an employee is measured on how well they performed the functions of their role and in an effort to help the employee do even better next time, they are also measured on proficiency in the competencies that are deemed to be key in doing that job. Again, the logic is impeccable.  But in both these cases, two adages come to mind: 1. What gets measured is what gets managed. 2. You only see what you are looking for. In other words, the fact that the current roles the workforce are performing are the basis for measuring which capabilities the workforce has, makes them the only capabilities to be measured. What was initially meant to be a positive, i.e. identify what is needed to perform well and measure it, in order that it can be managed, comes with the unintended negative consequence of overshadowing the other capabilities the workforce has. This also comes with an employee engagement price, for the measurements and management of workforce capabilities is to typically focus on where the workforce comes up short. Again, it makes sense to do this, since improving a capability that appears to result in improved performance benefits, both the individual through improved performance ratings and the company through improved productivity. But this is based on the assumption that the capabilities identified and their required proficiencies are the only attributes of the individual that matter. Anything else the individual brings that results in high performance, while resulting in a desired performance outcome, often goes unrecognized or underappreciated at best. As social media begins to occupy a more important part in current and future roles in organizations, businesses must incorporate social media savvy and innovation into job descriptions and expectations. These new measures could provide insight into how well someone can use social media tools to influence communities and decision makers; keep abreast of trends in fast-moving industries; present a positive brand image for the organization around thought leadership, customer focus, social responsibility; and coordinate and collaborate with partners. These measures should demonstrate the “social capital” the individual has invested in and developed over time. Without this dimension, “short cut” methods may generate a narrow set of positive metrics that do not have real, long-lasting benefits to the organization. How Workforce Reputation Management Helps HR Harness Social Media With hundreds of petabytes of social media data flowing across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, businesses are tapping technology solutions to effectively leverage social for HR. Workforce reputation management technology helps organizations discover, mobilize and retain talent by providing insight into the social reputation and influence of the workforce while also helping organizations monitor employee social media policy compliance and mitigate social media risk.  There are three major ways that workforce reputation management technology can play a strategic role to support HR: 1. Improve Awareness and Decisions on Talent Many organizations measure the skills and competencies that they know they need today, but are unaware of what other skills and competencies their workforce has that could be essential tomorrow. How about whether your workforce has the reputation and influence to make their skills and competencies more effective? Many organizations don’t have insight into the social media “reach” their workforce has, which is becoming more critical to business performance. These features help organizations, managers, and employees improve many talent processes and decision making, including the following: Hiring and Assignments. People and teams with higher reputations are considered more valuable and effective workers. Someone with high reputation who refers a candidate also can have high credibility as a source for hires.   Training and Development. Reputation trend analysis can impact program decisions regarding training offerings by showing how reputation and influence across the workforce changes in concert with training. Worker reputation impacts development plans and goal choices by helping the individual see which development efforts result in improved reputation and influence.   Finding Hidden Talent. Managers can discover hidden talent and skills amongst employees based on a combination of social profile information and social media reputation. Employees can improve their personal brand and accelerate their career development.  2. Talent Search and Discovery The right technology helps organizations find information on people that might otherwise be hidden. By leveraging access to candidate and worker social profiles as well as their social relationships, workforce reputation management provides companies with a more complete picture of what their knowledge, skills, and attributes are and what they can in turn access. This more complete information helps to find the right talent both outside the organization as well as the right, perhaps previously hidden talent, within the organization to fill roles and staff projects, particularly those roles and projects that are required in reaction to fast-changing opportunities and circumstances. 3. Reputation Brings Credibility Workforce reputation management technology provides a clearer picture of how candidates and workers are viewed by their peers and communities across a wide range of social reputation and influence metrics. This information is less subject to individual bias and can impact critical decision-making. Knowing the individual’s reputation and influence enables the organization to predict how well their capabilities and behaviors will have a positive effect on desired business outcomes. Many roles that have the highest impact on overall business performance are dependent on the individual’s influence and reputation. In addition, reputation and influence measures offer a very tangible source of feedback for workers, providing them with insight that helps them develop themselves and their careers and see the effectiveness of those efforts by tracking changes over time in their reputation and influence. The following are some examples of the different reputation and influence measures of the workforce that Workforce Reputation Management could gather and analyze: Generosity – How often the user reposts other’s posts. Influence – How often the user’s material is reposted by others.  Engagement – The ratio of recent posts with references (e.g. links to other posts) to the total number of posts.  Activity – How frequently the user posts. (e.g. number per day)  Impact – The size of the users’ social networks, which indicates their ability to reach unique followers, friends, or users.   Clout – The number of references and citations of the user’s material in others’ posts.  The Vital Ingredient of Workforce Reputation Management: Employee Participation “Nothing about me, without me.” Valerie Billingham, “Through the Patient’s Eyes”, Salzburg Seminar Session 356, 1998 Since data resides primarily in social media, a question arises: what manner is used to collect that data? While much of social media activity is publicly accessible (as many who wished otherwise have learned to their chagrin), the social norms of social media have developed to put some restrictions on what is acceptable behavior and by whom. Disregarding these norms risks a repercussion firestorm. One of the more recognized norms is that while individuals can follow and engage with other individual’s public social activity (e.g. Twitter updates) fairly freely, the more an organization does this unprompted and without getting permission from the individual beforehand, the more likely the organization risks a totally opposite outcome from the one desired. Instead, the organization must look for permission from the individual, which can be met with resistance. That resistance comes from not knowing how the information will be used, how it will be shared with others, and not receiving enough benefit in return for granting permission. As the quote above about patient concerns and rights succinctly states, no one likes not feeling in control of the information about themselves, or the uncertainty about where it will be used. This is well understood in consumer social media (i.e. permission-based marketing) and is applicable to workforce reputation management. However, asking permission leaves open the very real possibility that no one, or so few, will grant permission, resulting in a small set of data with little usefulness for the company. Connecting Individual Motivation to Organization Needs So what is it that makes an individual decide to grant an organization access to the data it wants? It is when the individual’s own motivations are in alignment with the organization’s objectives. In the case of workforce reputation management, when the individual is motivated by a desire for increased visibility and career growth opportunities to advertise their skills and level of influence and reputation, they are aligned with the organizations’ objectives; to fill resource needs or strategically build better awareness of what skills are present in the workforce, as well as levels of influence and reputation. Individuals can see the benefit of granting access permission to the company through multiple means. One is through simple social awareness; they begin to discover that peers who are getting more career opportunities are those who are signed up for workforce reputation management. Another is where companies take the message directly to the individual; we think you would benefit from signing up with our workforce reputation management solution. Another, more strategic approach is to make reputation management part of a larger Career Development effort by the company; providing a wide set of tools to help the workforce find ways to plan and take action to achieve their career aspirations in the organization. An effective mechanism, that facilitates connecting the visibility and career growth motivations of the workforce with the larger context of the organization’s business objectives, is to use game mechanics to help individuals transform their career goals into concrete, actionable steps, such as signing up for reputation management. This works in favor of companies looking to use workforce reputation because the workforce is more apt to see how it fits into achieving their overall career goals, as well as seeing how other participation brings additional benefits.  Once an individual has signed up with reputation management, not only have they made themselves more visible within the organization and increased their career growth opportunities, they have also enabled a tool that they can use to better understand how their actions and behaviors impact their influence and reputation. Since they will be able to see their reputation and influence measurements change over time, they will gain better insight into how reputation and influence impacts their effectiveness in a role, as well as how their behaviors and skill levels in turn affect their influence and reputation. This insight can trigger much more directed, and effective, efforts by the individual to improve their ability to perform at a higher level and become more productive. The increased sense of autonomy the individual experiences, in linking the insight they gain to the actions and behavior changes they make, greatly enhances their engagement with their role as well as their career prospects within the company. Workforce reputation management takes the wide range of disparate data about the workforce being produced across various social media platforms and transforms it into accessible, relevant, and actionable information that helps the organization achieve its desired business objectives. Social media holds untapped insights about your talent, brand and business, and workforce reputation management can help unlock them. Imagine - if you could find the hidden secrets of your businesses, how much more productive and efficient would your organization be? Mark Bennett is a Director of Product Strategy at Oracle. Mark focuses on setting the strategic vision and direction for tools that help organizations understand, shape, and leverage the capabilities of their workforce to achieve business objectives, as well as help individuals work effectively to achieve their goals and navigate their own growth. His combination of a deep technical background in software design and development, coupled with a broad knowledge of business challenges and thinking in today’s globalized, rapidly changing, technology accelerated economy, has enabled him to identify and incorporate key innovations that are central to Oracle Fusion’s unique value proposition. Mark has over the course of his career been in charge of the design, development, and strategy of Talent Management products and the design and development of cutting edge software that is better equipped to handle the increasingly complex demands of users while also remaining easy to use. Follow him @mpbennett

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• ASP.NET Frameworks and Raw Throughput Performance

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few days ago I had a curious thought: With all these different technologies that the ASP.NET stack has to offer, what's the most efficient technology overall to return data for a server request? When I started this it was mere curiosity rather than a real practical need or result. Different tools are used for different problems and so performance differences are to be expected. But still I was curious to see how the various technologies performed relative to each just for raw throughput of the request getting to the endpoint and back out to the client with as little processing in the actual endpoint logic as possible (aka Hello World!). I want to clarify that this is merely an informal test for my own curiosity and I'm sharing the results and process here because I thought it was interesting. It's been a long while since I've done any sort of perf testing on ASP.NET, mainly because I've not had extremely heavy load requirements and because overall ASP.NET performs very well even for fairly high loads so that often it's not that critical to test load performance. This post is not meant to make a point  or even come to a conclusion which tech is better, but just to act as a reference to help understand some of the differences in perf and give a starting point to play around with this yourself. I've included the code for this simple project, so you can play with it and maybe add a few additional tests for different things if you like. Source Code on GitHub I looked at this data for these technologies: ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET MVC WebForms ASP.NET WebPages ASMX AJAX Services  (couldn't get AJAX/JSON to run on IIS8 ) WCF Rest Raw ASP.NET HttpHandlers It's quite a mixed bag, of course and the technologies target different types of development. What started out as mere curiosity turned into a bit of a head scratcher as the results were sometimes surprising. What I describe here is more to satisfy my curiosity more than anything and I thought it interesting enough to discuss on the blog :-) First test: Raw Throughput The first thing I did is test raw throughput for the various technologies. This is the least practical test of course since you're unlikely to ever create the equivalent of a 'Hello World' request in a real life application. The idea here is to measure how much time a 'NOP' request takes to return data to the client. So for this request I create the simplest Hello World request that I could come up for each tech. Http Handler The first is the lowest level approach which is an HTTP handler. public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } WebForms Next I added a couple of ASPX pages - one using CodeBehind and one using only a markup page. The CodeBehind page simple does this in CodeBehind without any markup in the ASPX page: public partial class HelloWorld_CodeBehind : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() ); Response.End(); } } while the Markup page only contains some static output via an expression:<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="HelloWorld_Markup.aspx.cs" Inherits="AspNetFrameworksPerformance.HelloWorld_Markup" %> Hello World. Time is <%= DateTime.Now %> ASP.NET WebPages WebPages is the freestanding Razor implementation of ASP.NET. Here's the simple HelloWorld.cshtml page:Hello World @DateTime.Now WCF REST WCF REST was the token REST implementation for ASP.NET before WebAPI and the inbetween step from ASP.NET AJAX. I'd like to forget that this technology was ever considered for production use, but I'll include it here. Here's an OperationContract class: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } } WCF REST can return arbitrary results by returning a Stream object and a content type. The code above turns the string result into a stream and returns that back to the client. ASP.NET AJAX (ASMX Services) I also wanted to test ASP.NET AJAX services because prior to WebAPI this is probably still the most widely used AJAX technology for the ASP.NET stack today. Unfortunately I was completely unable to get this running on my Windows 8 machine. Visual Studio 2012  removed adding of ASP.NET AJAX services, and when I tried to manually add the service and configure the script handler references it simply did not work - I always got a SOAP response for GET and POST operations. No matter what I tried I always ended up getting XML results even when explicitly adding the ScriptHandler. So, I didn't test this (but the code is there - you might be able to test this on a Windows 7 box). ASP.NET MVC Next up is probably the most popular ASP.NET technology at the moment: MVC. Here's the small controller: public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } } ASP.NET WebAPI Next up is WebAPI which looks kind of similar to MVC. Except here I have to use a StringContent result to return the response: public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } } Testing Take a minute to think about each of the technologies… and take a guess which you think is most efficient in raw throughput. The fastest should be pretty obvious, but the others - maybe not so much. The testing I did is pretty informal since it was mainly to satisfy my curiosity - here's how I did this: I used Apache Bench (ab.exe) from a full Apache HTTP installation to run and log the test results of hitting the server. ab.exe is a small executable that lets you hit a URL repeatedly and provides counter information about the number of requests, requests per second etc. ab.exe and the batch file are located in the \LoadTests folder of the project. An ab.exe command line  looks like this: ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld which hits the specified URL 100,000 times with a load factor of 20 concurrent requests. This results in output like this:   It's a great way to get a quick and dirty performance summary. Run it a few times to make sure there's not a large amount of varience. You might also want to do an IISRESET to clear the Web Server. Just make sure you do a short test run to warm up the server first - otherwise your first run is likely to be skewed downwards. ab.exe also allows you to specify headers and provide POST data and many other things if you want to get a little more fancy. Here all tests are GET requests to keep it simple. I ran each test: 100,000 iterations Load factor of 20 concurrent connections IISReset before starting A short warm up run for API and MVC to make sure startup cost is mitigated Here is the batch file I used for the test: IISRESET REM make sure you add REM C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin REM to your path so ab.exe can be found REM Warm up ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJsonab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/handler.ashx > handler.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_CodeBehind.aspx > AspxCodeBehind.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_Markup.aspx > AspxMarkup.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld > Wcf.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldCode > Mvc.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld > WebApi.txt I ran each of these tests 3 times and took the average score for Requests/second, with the machine otherwise idle. I did see a bit of variance when running many tests but the values used here are the medians. Part of this has to do with the fact I ran the tests on my local machine - result would probably more consistent running the load test on a separate machine hitting across the network. I ran these tests locally on my laptop which is a Dell XPS with quad core Sandibridge I7-2720QM @ 2.20ghz and a fast SSD drive on Windows 8. CPU load during tests ran to about 70% max across all 4 cores (IOW, it wasn't overloading the machine). Ideally you can try running these tests on a separate machine hitting the local machine. If I remember correctly IIS 7 and 8 on client OSs don't throttle so the performance here should be Results Ok, let's cut straight to the chase. Below are the results from the tests… It's not surprising that the handler was fastest. But it was a bit surprising to me that the next fastest was WebForms and especially Web Forms with markup over a CodeBehind page. WebPages also fared fairly well. MVC and WebAPI are a little slower and the slowest by far is WCF REST (which again I find surprising). As mentioned at the start the raw throughput tests are not overly practical as they don't test scripting performance for the HTML generation engines or serialization performances of the data engines. All it really does is give you an idea of the raw throughput for the technology from time of request to reaching the endpoint and returning minimal text data back to the client which indicates full round trip performance. But it's still interesting to see that Web Forms performs better in throughput than either MVC, WebAPI or WebPages. It'd be interesting to try this with a few pages that actually have some parsing logic on it, but that's beyond the scope of this throughput test. But what's also amazing about this test is the sheer amount of traffic that a laptop computer is handling. Even the slowest tech managed 5700 requests a second, which is one hell of a lot of requests if you extrapolate that out over a 24 hour period. Remember these are not static pages, but dynamic requests that are being served. Another test - JSON Data Service Results The second test I used a JSON result from several of the technologies. I didn't bother running WebForms and WebPages through this test since that doesn't make a ton of sense to return data from the them (OTOH, returning text from the APIs didn't make a ton of sense either :-) In these tests I have a small Person class that gets serialized and then returned to the client. The Person class looks like this: public class Person { public Person() { Id = 10; Name = "Rick"; Entered = DateTime.Now; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public DateTime Entered { get; set; } } Here are the updated handler classes that use Person: Handler public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { var action = context.Request.QueryString["action"]; if (action == "json") JsonRequest(context); else TextRequest(context); } public void TextRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public void JsonRequest(HttpContext context) { var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new Person(), Formatting.None); context.Response.ContentType = "application/json"; context.Response.Write(json); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } This code adds a little logic to check for a action query string and route the request to an optional JSON result method. To generate JSON, I'm using the same JSON.NET serializer (JsonConvert.SerializeObject) used in Web API to create the JSON response. WCF REST   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } [OperationContract] [WebGet(ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json,BodyStyle=WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest)] public Person HelloWorldJson() { // Add your operation implementation here return new Person(); } } For WCF REST all I have to do is add a method with the Person result type.   ASP.NET MVC public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { // // GET: /MvcPerformance/ public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } public JsonResult HelloWorldJson() { return Json(new Person(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } } For MVC all I have to do for a JSON response is return a JSON result. ASP.NET internally uses JavaScriptSerializer. ASP.NET WebAPI public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } [HttpGet] public Person HelloWorldJson() { return new Person(); } [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldJson2() { var response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); response.Content = new ObjectContent<Person>(new Person(), GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter); return response; } } Testing and Results To run these data requests I used the following ab.exe commands:REM JSON RESPONSES ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/Handler.ashx?action=json > HandlerJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJson > MvcJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson > WebApiJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorldJson > WcfJson.txt The results from this test run are a bit interesting in that the WebAPI test improved performance significantly over returning plain string content. Here are the results:   The performance for each technology drops a little bit except for WebAPI which is up quite a bit! From this test it appears that WebAPI is actually significantly better performing returning a JSON response, rather than a plain string response. Snag with Apache Benchmark and 'Length Failures' I ran into a little snag with Apache Benchmark, which was reporting failures for my Web API requests when serializing. As the graph shows performance improved significantly from with JSON results from 5580 to 6530 or so which is a 15% improvement (while all others slowed down by 3-8%). However, I was skeptical at first because the WebAPI test reports showed a bunch of errors on about 10% of the requests. Check out this report: Notice the Failed Request count. What the hey? Is WebAPI failing on roughly 10% of requests when sending JSON? Turns out: No it's not! But it took some sleuthing to figure out why it reports these failures. At first I thought that Web API was failing, and so to make sure I re-ran the test with Fiddler attached and runiisning the ab.exe test by using the -X switch: ab.exe -n100 -c10 -X localhost:8888 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson which showed that indeed all requests where returning proper HTTP 200 results with full content. However ab.exe was reporting the errors. After some closer inspection it turned out that the dates varying in size altered the response length in dynamic output. For example: these two results: {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.841926-10:00"} {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.8519262-10:00"} are different in length for the number which results in 68 and 69 bytes respectively. The same URL produces different result lengths which is what ab.exe reports. I didn't notice at first bit the same is happening when running the ASHX handler with JSON.NET result since it uses the same serializer that varies the milliseconds. Moral: You can typically ignore Length failures in Apache Benchmark and when in doubt check the actual output with Fiddler. Note that the other failure values are accurate though. Another interesting Side Note: Perf drops over Time As I was running these tests repeatedly I was finding that performance steadily dropped from a startup peak to a 10-15% lower stable level. IOW, with Web API I'd start out with around 6500 req/sec and in subsequent runs it keeps dropping until it would stabalize somewhere around 5900 req/sec occasionally jumping lower. For these tests this is why I did the IIS RESET and warm up for individual tests. This is a little puzzling. Looking at Process Monitor while the test are running memory very quickly levels out as do handles and threads, on the first test run. Subsequent runs everything stays stable, but the performance starts going downwards. This applies to all the technologies - Handlers, Web Forms, MVC, Web API - curious to see if others test this and see similar results. Doing an IISRESET then resets everything and performance starts off at peak again… Summary As I stated at the outset, these were informal to satiate my curiosity not to prove that any technology is better or even faster than another. While there clearly are differences in performance the differences (other than WCF REST which was by far the slowest and the raw handler which was by far the highest) are relatively minor, so there is no need to feel that any one technology is a runaway standout in raw performance. Choosing a technology is about more than pure performance but also about the adequateness for the job and the easy of implementation. The strengths of each technology will make for any minor performance difference we see in these tests. However, to me it's important to get an occasional reality check and compare where new technologies are heading. Often times old stuff that's been optimized and designed for a time of less horse power can utterly blow the doors off newer tech and simple checks like this let you compare. Luckily we're seeing that much of the new stuff performs well even in V1.0 which is great. To me it was very interesting to see Web API perform relatively badly with plain string content, which originally led me to think that Web API might not be properly optimized just yet. For those that caught my Tweets late last week regarding WebAPI's slow responses was with String content which is in fact considerably slower. Luckily where it counts with serialized JSON and XML WebAPI actually performs better. But I do wonder what would make generic string content slower than serialized code? This stresses another point: Don't take a single test as the final gospel and don't extrapolate out from a single set of tests. Certainly Twitter can make you feel like a fool when you post something immediate that hasn't been fleshed out a little more <blush>. Egg on my face. As a result I ended up screwing around with this for a few hours today to compare different scenarios. Well worth the time… I hope you found this useful, if not for the results, maybe for the process of quickly testing a few requests for performance and charting out a comparison. Now onwards with more serious stuff… Resources Source Code on GitHub Apache HTTP Server Project (ab.exe is part of the binary distribution)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• ASP.NET MVC localization DisplayNameAttribute alternatives: a better way

  - by Brian Schroer

  In my last post, I talked bout creating a custom class inheriting from System.ComponentModel.DisplayNameAttribute to retrieve display names from resource files: [LocalizedDisplayName("RememberMe")] public bool RememberMe { get; set; } That’s a lot of work to put an attribute on all of my model properties though. It would be nice if I could intercept the ASP.NET MVC code that analyzes the model metadata to retrieve display names to make it automatically get localized text from my resource files. That way, I could just set up resource file entries where the keys are the property names, and not have to put attributes on all of my properties. That’s done by creating a custom class inheriting from System.Web.Mvc.DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider: 1: public class LocalizedDataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider : 2: DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider 3: { 4: protected override ModelMetadata CreateMetadata( 5: IEnumerable<Attribute> attributes, 6: Type containerType, 7: Func<object> modelAccessor, 8: Type modelType, 9: string propertyName) 10: { 11: var meta = base.CreateMetadata 12: (attributes, containerType, modelAccessor, modelType, propertyName); 13:   14: if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(propertyName)) 15: return meta; 16:   17: if (meta.DisplayName == null) 18: GetLocalizedDisplayName(meta, propertyName); 19:   20: if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(meta.DisplayName)) 21: meta.DisplayName = string.Format("[[{0}]]", propertyName); 22:   23: return meta; 24: } 25:   26: private static void GetLocalizedDisplayName(ModelMetadata meta, string propertyName) 27: { 28: ResourceManager resourceManager = MyResource.ResourceManager; 29: CultureInfo culture = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture; 30:   31: meta.DisplayName = resourceManager.GetString(propertyName, culture); 32: } 33: } Line 11 calls the base CreateMetadata method. Line 17 checks whether the metadata DisplayName property has already been populated by a DisplayNameAttribute (or my LocalizedDisplayNameAttribute). If so, it respects that and doesn’t use my custom localized text lookup. The GetLocalizedDisplayName method checks for the property name as a resource file key. If found, it uses the localized text from the resource files. If the key is not found in the resource file, as with my LocalizedDisplayNameAttribute, I return a formatted string containing the property name (e.g. “[[RememberMe]]”) so I can tell by looking at my web pages which resource keys I haven’t defined yet. It’s hooked up with this code in the Application_Start method of Global.asax: ModelMetadataProviders.Current = new LocalizedDataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider();

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• Syncing Data with a Server using Silverlight and HTTP Polling Duplex

  - by dwahlin

  Many applications have the need to stay in-sync with data provided by a service. Although web applications typically rely on standard polling techniques to check if data has changed, Silverlight provides several interesting options for keeping an application in-sync that rely on server “push” technologies. A few years back I wrote several blog posts covering different “push” technologies available in Silverlight that rely on sockets or HTTP Polling Duplex. We recently had a project that looked like it could benefit from pushing data from a server to one or more clients so I thought I’d revisit the subject and provide some updates to the original code posted. If you’ve worked with AJAX before in Web applications then you know that until browsers fully support web sockets or other duplex (bi-directional communication) technologies that it’s difficult to keep applications in-sync with a server without relying on polling. The problem with polling is that you have to check for changes on the server on a timed-basis which can often be wasteful and take up unnecessary resources. With server “push” technologies, data can be pushed from the server to the client as it changes. Once the data is received, the client can update the user interface as appropriate. Using “push” technologies allows the client to listen for changes from the data but stay 100% focused on client activities as opposed to worrying about polling and asking the server if anything has changed. Silverlight provides several options for pushing data from a server to a client including sockets, TCP bindings and HTTP Polling Duplex.  Each has its own strengths and weaknesses as far as performance and setup work with HTTP Polling Duplex arguably being the easiest to setup and get going.  In this article I’ll demonstrate how HTTP Polling Duplex can be used in Silverlight 4 applications to push data and show how you can create a WCF server that provides an HTTP Polling Duplex binding that a Silverlight client can consume.   What is HTTP Polling Duplex? Technologies that allow data to be pushed from a server to a client rely on duplex functionality. Duplex (or bi-directional) communication allows data to be passed in both directions.  A client can call a service and the server can call the client. HTTP Polling Duplex (as its name implies) allows a server to communicate with a client without forcing the client to constantly poll the server. It has the benefit of being able to run on port 80 making setup a breeze compared to the other options which require specific ports to be used and cross-domain policy files to be exposed on port 943 (as with sockets and TCP bindings). Having said that, if you’re looking for the best speed possible then sockets and TCP bindings are the way to go. But, they’re not the only game in town when it comes to duplex communication. The first time I heard about HTTP Polling Duplex (initially available in Silverlight 2) I wasn’t exactly sure how it was any better than standard polling used in AJAX applications. I read the Silverlight SDK, looked at various resources and generally found the following definition unhelpful as far as understanding the actual benefits that HTTP Polling Duplex provided: "The Silverlight client periodically polls the service on the network layer, and checks for any new messages that the service wants to send on the callback channel. The service queues all messages sent on the client callback channel and delivers them to the client when the client polls the service." Although the previous definition explained the overall process, it sounded as if standard polling was used. Fortunately, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie provided me with a more clear definition several years back that explains the benefits provided by HTTP Polling Duplex quite well (used with his permission): "The [HTTP Polling Duplex] duplex support does use polling in the background to implement notifications – although the way it does it is different than manual polling. It initiates a network request, and then the request is effectively “put to sleep” waiting for the server to respond (it doesn’t come back immediately). The server then keeps the connection open but not active until it has something to send back (or the connection times out after 90 seconds – at which point the duplex client will connect again and wait). This way you are avoiding hitting the server repeatedly – but still get an immediate response when there is data to send." After hearing Scott’s definition the light bulb went on and it all made sense. A client makes a request to a server to check for changes, but instead of the request returning immediately, it parks itself on the server and waits for data. It’s kind of like waiting to pick up a pizza at the store. Instead of calling the store over and over to check the status, you sit in the store and wait until the pizza (the request data) is ready. Once it’s ready you take it back home (to the client). This technique provides a lot of efficiency gains over standard polling techniques even though it does use some polling of its own as a request is initially made from a client to a server. So how do you implement HTTP Polling Duplex in your Silverlight applications? Let’s take a look at the process by starting with the server. Creating an HTTP Polling Duplex WCF Service Creating a WCF service that exposes an HTTP Polling Duplex binding is straightforward as far as coding goes. Add some one way operations into an interface, create a client callback interface and you’re ready to go. The most challenging part comes into play when configuring the service to properly support the necessary binding and that’s more of a cut and paste operation once you know the configuration code to use. To create an HTTP Polling Duplex service you’ll need to expose server-side and client-side interfaces and reference the System.ServiceModel.PollingDuplex assembly (located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Libraries\Server on my machine) in the server project. For the demo application I upgraded a basketball simulation service to support the latest polling duplex assemblies. The service simulates a simple basketball game using a Game class and pushes information about the game such as score, fouls, shots and more to the client as the game changes over time. Before jumping too far into the game push service, it’s important to discuss two interfaces used by the service to communicate in a bi-directional manner. The first is called IGameStreamService and defines the methods/operations that the client can call on the server (see Listing 1). The second is IGameStreamClient which defines the callback methods that a server can use to communicate with a client (see Listing 2).   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "Silverlight", CallbackContract = typeof(IGameStreamClient))] public interface IGameStreamService { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void GetTeamData(); } Listing 1. The IGameStreamService interface defines server operations that can be called on the server.   [ServiceContract] public interface IGameStreamClient { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void ReceiveTeamData(List<Team> teamData); [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, AsyncPattern=true)] IAsyncResult BeginReceiveGameData(GameData gameData, AsyncCallback callback, object state); void EndReceiveGameData(IAsyncResult result); } Listing 2. The IGameStreamClient interfaces defines client operations that a server can call.   The IGameStreamService interface is decorated with the standard ServiceContract attribute but also contains a value for the CallbackContract property.  This property is used to define the interface that the client will expose (IGameStreamClient in this example) and use to receive data pushed from the service. Notice that each OperationContract attribute in both interfaces sets the IsOneWay property to true. This means that the operation can be called and passed data as appropriate, however, no data will be passed back. Instead, data will be pushed back to the client as it’s available.  Looking through the IGameStreamService interface you can see that the client can request team data whereas the IGameStreamClient interface allows team and game data to be received by the client. One interesting point about the IGameStreamClient interface is the inclusion of the AsyncPattern property on the BeginReceiveGameData operation. I initially created this operation as a standard one way operation and it worked most of the time. However, as I disconnected clients and reconnected new ones game data wasn’t being passed properly. After researching the problem more I realized that because the service could take up to 7 seconds to return game data, things were getting hung up. By setting the AsyncPattern property to true on the BeginReceivedGameData operation and providing a corresponding EndReceiveGameData operation I was able to get around this problem and get everything running properly. I’ll provide more details on the implementation of these two methods later in this post. Once the interfaces were created I moved on to the game service class. The first order of business was to create a class that implemented the IGameStreamService interface. Since the service can be used by multiple clients wanting game data I added the ServiceBehavior attribute to the class definition so that I could set its InstanceContextMode to InstanceContextMode.Single (in effect creating a Singleton service object). Listing 3 shows the game service class as well as its fields and constructor.   [ServiceBehavior(ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple, InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)] public class GameStreamService : IGameStreamService { object _Key = new object(); Game _Game = null; Timer _Timer = null; Random _Random = null; Dictionary<string, IGameStreamClient> _ClientCallbacks = new Dictionary<string, IGameStreamClient>(); static AsyncCallback _ReceiveGameDataCompleted = new AsyncCallback(ReceiveGameDataCompleted); public GameStreamService() { _Game = new Game(); _Timer = new Timer { Enabled = false, Interval = 2000, AutoReset = true }; _Timer.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(_Timer_Elapsed); _Timer.Start(); _Random = new Random(); }} Listing 3. The GameStreamService implements the IGameStreamService interface which defines a callback contract that allows the service class to push data back to the client. By implementing the IGameStreamService interface, GameStreamService must supply a GetTeamData() method which is responsible for supplying information about the teams that are playing as well as individual players.  GetTeamData() also acts as a client subscription method that tracks clients wanting to receive game data.  Listing 4 shows the GetTeamData() method. public void GetTeamData() { //Get client callback channel var context = OperationContext.Current; var sessionID = context.SessionId; var currClient = context.GetCallbackChannel<IGameStreamClient>(); context.Channel.Faulted += Disconnect; context.Channel.Closed += Disconnect; IGameStreamClient client; if (!_ClientCallbacks.TryGetValue(sessionID, out client)) { lock (_Key) { _ClientCallbacks[sessionID] = currClient; } } currClient.ReceiveTeamData(_Game.GetTeamData()); //Start timer which when fired sends updated score information to client if (!_Timer.Enabled) { _Timer.Enabled = true; } } Listing 4. The GetTeamData() method subscribes a given client to the game service and returns. The key the line of code in the GetTeamData() method is the call to GetCallbackChannel<IGameStreamClient>().  This method is responsible for accessing the calling client’s callback channel. The callback channel is defined by the IGameStreamClient interface shown earlier in Listing 2 and used by the server to communicate with the client. Before passing team data back to the client, GetTeamData() grabs the client’s session ID and checks if it already exists in the _ClientCallbacks dictionary object used to track clients wanting callbacks from the server. If the client doesn’t exist it adds it into the collection. It then pushes team data from the Game class back to the client by calling ReceiveTeamData().  Since the service simulates a basketball game, a timer is then started if it’s not already enabled which is then used to randomly send data to the client. When the timer fires, game data is pushed down to the client. Listing 5 shows the _Timer_Elapsed() method that is called when the timer fires as well as the SendGameData() method used to send data to the client. void _Timer_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e) { int interval = _Random.Next(3000, 7000); lock (_Key) { _Timer.Interval = interval; _Timer.Enabled = false; } SendGameData(_Game.GetGameData()); } private void SendGameData(GameData gameData) { var cbs = _ClientCallbacks.Where(cb => ((IContextChannel)cb.Value).State == CommunicationState.Opened); for (int i = 0; i < cbs.Count(); i++) { var cb = cbs.ElementAt(i).Value; try { cb.BeginReceiveGameData(gameData, _ReceiveGameDataCompleted, cb); } catch (TimeoutException texp) { //Log timeout error } catch (CommunicationException cexp) { //Log communication error } } lock (_Key) _Timer.Enabled = true; } private static void ReceiveGameDataCompleted(IAsyncResult result) { try { ((IGameStreamClient)(result.AsyncState)).EndReceiveGameData(result); } catch (CommunicationException) { // empty } catch (TimeoutException) { // empty } } LIsting 5. _Timer_Elapsed is used to simulate time in a basketball game. When _Timer_Elapsed() fires the SendGameData() method is called which iterates through the clients wanting to be notified of changes. As each client is identified, their respective BeginReceiveGameData() method is called which ultimately pushes game data down to the client. Recall that this method was defined in the client callback interface named IGameStreamClient shown earlier in Listing 2. Notice that BeginReceiveGameData() accepts _ReceiveGameDataCompleted as its second parameter (an AsyncCallback delegate defined in the service class) and passes the client callback as the third parameter. The initial version of the sample application had a standard ReceiveGameData() method in the client callback interface. However, sometimes the client callbacks would work properly and sometimes they wouldn’t which was a little baffling at first glance. After some investigation I realized that I needed to implement an asynchronous pattern for client callbacks to work properly since 3 – 7 second delays are occurring as a result of the timer. Once I added the BeginReceiveGameData() and ReceiveGameDataCompleted() methods everything worked properly since each call was handled in an asynchronous manner. The final task that had to be completed to get the server working properly with HTTP Polling Duplex was adding configuration code into web.config. In the interest of brevity I won’t post all of the code here since the sample application includes everything you need. However, Listing 6 shows the key configuration code to handle creating a custom binding named pollingDuplexBinding and associate it with the service’s endpoint.   <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="pollingDuplexBinding"> <binaryMessageEncoding /> <pollingDuplex maxPendingSessions="2147483647" maxPendingMessagesPerSession="2147483647" inactivityTimeout="02:00:00" serverPollTimeout="00:05:00"/> <httpTransport /> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <services> <service name="GameService.GameStreamService" behaviorConfiguration="GameStreamServiceBehavior"> <endpoint address="" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="pollingDuplexBinding" contract="GameService.IGameStreamService"/> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> </service> </services>   Listing 6. Configuring an HTTP Polling Duplex binding in web.config and associating an endpoint with it. Calling the Service and Receiving “Pushed” Data Calling the service and handling data that is pushed from the server is a simple and straightforward process in Silverlight. Since the service is configured with a MEX endpoint and exposes a WSDL file, you can right-click on the Silverlight project and select the standard Add Service Reference item. After the web service proxy is created you may notice that the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file only contains an empty configuration element instead of the normal configuration elements created when creating a standard WCF proxy. You can certainly update the file if you want to read from it at runtime but for the sample application I fed the service URI directly to the service proxy as shown next: var address = new EndpointAddress("http://localhost.:5661/GameStreamService.svc"); var binding = new PollingDuplexHttpBinding(); _Proxy = new GameStreamServiceClient(binding, address); _Proxy.ReceiveTeamDataReceived += _Proxy_ReceiveTeamDataReceived; _Proxy.ReceiveGameDataReceived += _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived; _Proxy.GetTeamDataAsync(); This code creates the proxy and passes the endpoint address and binding to use to its constructor. It then wires the different receive events to callback methods and calls GetTeamDataAsync().  Calling GetTeamDataAsync() causes the server to store the client in the server-side dictionary collection mentioned earlier so that it can receive data that is pushed.  As the server-side timer fires and game data is pushed to the client, the user interface is updated as shown in Listing 7. Listing 8 shows the _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived() method responsible for handling the data and calling UpdateGameData() to process it.   Listing 7. The Silverlight interface. Game data is pushed from the server to the client using HTTP Polling Duplex. void _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived(object sender, ReceiveGameDataReceivedEventArgs e) { UpdateGameData(e.gameData); } private void UpdateGameData(GameData gameData) { //Update Score this.tbTeam1Score.Text = gameData.Team1Score.ToString(); this.tbTeam2Score.Text = gameData.Team2Score.ToString(); //Update ball visibility if (gameData.Action != ActionsEnum.Foul) { if (tbTeam1.Text == gameData.TeamOnOffense) { AnimateBall(this.BB1, this.BB2); } else //Team 2 { AnimateBall(this.BB2, this.BB1); } } if (this.lbActions.Items.Count > 9) this.lbActions.Items.Clear(); this.lbActions.Items.Add(gameData.LastAction); if (this.lbActions.Visibility == Visibility.Collapsed) this.lbActions.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; } private void AnimateBall(Image onBall, Image offBall) { this.FadeIn.Stop(); Storyboard.SetTarget(this.FadeInAnimation, onBall); Storyboard.SetTarget(this.FadeOutAnimation, offBall); this.FadeIn.Begin(); } Listing 8. As the server pushes game data, the client’s _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived() method is called to process the data. In a real-life application I’d go with a ViewModel class to handle retrieving team data, setup data bindings and handle data that is pushed from the server. However, for the sample application I wanted to focus on HTTP Polling Duplex and keep things as simple as possible.   Summary Silverlight supports three options when duplex communication is required in an application including TCP bindins, sockets and HTTP Polling Duplex. In this post you’ve seen how HTTP Polling Duplex interfaces can be created and implemented on the server as well as how they can be consumed by a Silverlight client. HTTP Polling Duplex provides a nice way to “push” data from a server while still allowing the data to flow over port 80 or another port of your choice.   Sample Application Download

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• Guidance and Pricing for MSDN 2010

  - by John Alexander

  Sorry for the rather lengthy post here. I get asked this all the time so I decided to post it…Visual Studio 2010 editions will be available on April 12, 2010. Product Features Professional with MSDN Essentials Professional with MSDN Premium with MSDN Ultimate with MSDN Test Professional with MSDN Debugging and Diagnostics IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger)         Static Code Analysis       Code Metrics       Profiling       Debugger   Testing Tools Unit Testing   Code Coverage       Test Impact Analysis       Coded UI Test       Web Performance Testing         Load Testing1         Microsoft Test Manager 2010       Test Case Management2       Manual Test Execution       Fast-Forward for Manual Testing       Lab Management Configuration3       Integrated Development Environment Multiple Monitor Support   Multi-Targeting   One Click Web Deployment   JavaScript and jQuery Support   Extensible WPF-Based Environment Database Development Database Deployment       Database Change Management2       Database Unit Testing       Database Test Data Generation       Data Access   Development Platform Support Windows Development   Web Development   Office and SharePoint Development   Cloud Development   Customizable Development Experience   Architecture and Modeling Architecture Explorer         UML® 2.0 Compliant Diagrams (Activity, Use Case, Sequence, Class, Component)         Layer Diagram and Dependency Validation         Read-only diagrams (UML, Layer, DGML Graphs)         Lab Management Virtual environment setup & tear down3       Provision environment from template3       Checkpoint environment3       Team Foundation Server Version Control2   Work Item Tracking2   Build Automation2   Team Portal2   Reporting & Business Intelligence2   Agile Planning Workbook2   Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010   Test Case Management2       MSDN Subscription – Software and Services for Production Use Windows Azure Platform 20 hrs/mo † 50 hrs/mo † 100 hrs/mo † 250 hrs/mo † n/a Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010   Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 CAL   1 1 1 1 Microsoft Expression Studio 3       Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Project Professional 2010, Visio Premium 2010 (following Office 2010 launch)       MSDN Subscription – Software for Development and Testing 4 Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 Toolkits, Software Development Kits, Driver Development Kits Previous versions of Windows (client and server operation systems)   Previous versions of Microsoft SQL Server   Microsoft Office       Microsoft Dynamics       All other Servers       Windows Embedded operating systems       Teamprise         MSDN Subscription – Other Benefits Technical support incidents 0 2 4 4 2 Priority support in MSDN Forums Microsoft e-learning collections (typically 10 courses or 20 hours) 0 1 2 2 1 MSDN Flash newsletter MSDN Online Concierge MSDN Magazine   System Requirements View View View View View Buy from (MSRP) $799 $1,199 $5,469 $11,899 $2,169 Renew from (MSRP) $549 (upgrade) $799 $2,299 $3,799 $899 † Availability varies by country and subscription level.  Details available on the MSDN site 1. May require one or more Microsoft Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 2. Requires Team Foundation Server and a Team Foundation Server CAL 3. Requires Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 4. Per-user license allows unlimited installations and use for designing, developing, testing, and demonstrating applications. UML is a registered trademark of Object Management Group, Inc. Windows is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

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• Multi-Threaded Application vs. Single Threaded Application

  Why would we use a multi threaded application vs. a single threaded application? First we must define multithreading. Multithreading is a feature of an operating system that allows programs to run subcomponents or threads in parallel. Typically most applications only need to use one thread because they do not perform time consuming tasks. The use of multiple threads allows an application to distribute long running tasks so that they can be executed in parallel. This gives the user the perceived appearance that the application is working faster due to the fact that while one thread is waiting on an IO process the remaining tasks can make use of the available CPU. The allows working threads to execute in tandem so that they can be competed sooner. Multithreading Benefits Improved responsiveness — Users usually report improved responsiveness compared to single thread applications. Faster applications — Multiple threads can lead to improved application performance. Prioritization — Threads can be assigned a priority which would allow higher priority tasks to take precedence over lower priority tasks. Single Threading Benefits Programming and debugging —These activities are easier compared to multithreaded applications due to the reduced complexity Less Overhead — Threads add overhead to an application When developing multi-threaded applications, the following must be considered. Deadlocks occur when two threads hold a monitor that the other one requires. In essence each task is blocking the other and both tasks are waiting for the other monitor to be released. This forces an application to hang or deadlock. Resource allocation is used to prevent deadlocks because the system determines if approving the resource request will render the system in an unsafe state. An unsafe state could result in a deadlock. The system only approves requests that will lead to safe states. Thread Synchronization is used when multiple threads use the same instance of an object. The threads accessing the object can then be locked and then synchronized so that each task can interact with the static object on at a time.

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• How to add items to the Document Types context menu.

  - by Vizioz Limited

  I am currently working on an extension to Umbraco that needed an extra menu item on the Document Types menu in the Settings section, my first thought was to use the BeforeNodeRender event to add the menu item, but this event only fires on the Content and Media menu trees.See: Codeplex Issue 21623The "temporary" solution has been to extend the "loadNodeTypes" class, I say temporary because I assume that the core team may well extend the event functionality to the entire menu tree in the future which would be much better and would prevent you from having to complete override the menu items.This was suggested by Slace on my "is it possible to add an item to the context menu in tree's other than media content" post on the our.umbraco.org site.There are three things you need to do:1) Override the loadNodeTypesusing System.Collections.Generic;using umbraco.interfaces;using umbraco.BusinessLogic.Actions;namespace Vizioz.xMind2Umbraco{ // Note: Remember these menu's might change in future versions of Umbraco public class loadNodeTypesMenu : umbraco.loadNodeTypes { public loadNodeTypesMenu(string application) : base(application) { } protected override void CreateRootNodeActions(ref List<IAction> actions) { actions.Clear(); actions.Add(ActionNew.Instance); actions.Add(xMindImportAction.Instance); actions.Add(ContextMenuSeperator.Instance); actions.Add(ActionImport.Instance); actions.Add(ContextMenuSeperator.Instance); actions.Add(ActionRefresh.Instance); } protected override void CreateAllowedActions(ref List<IAction> actions) { actions.Clear(); actions.Add(ActionCopy.Instance); actions.Add(xMindImportAction.Instance); actions.Add(ContextMenuSeperator.Instance); actions.Add(ActionExport.Instance); actions.Add(ContextMenuSeperator.Instance); actions.Add(ActionDelete.Instance); } }}2) Create a new Action to be used on the menuusing umbraco.interfaces;namespace Vizioz.xMind2Umbraco{ public class xMindImportAction : IAction { #region Implementation of IAction public static xMindImportAction Instance { get { return umbraco.Singleton<xMindImportAction>.Instance; } } public char Letter { get { return 'p'; } } public bool ShowInNotifier { get { return true; } } public bool CanBePermissionAssigned { get { return true; } } public string Icon { get { return "editor/OPEN.gif"; } } public string Alias { get { return "Import from xMind"; } } public string JsFunctionName { get { return "openModal('dialogs/xMindImport.aspx?id=' + nodeID, 'Publish Management', 550, 480);"; } } public string JsSource { get { return string.Empty; } } #endregion }}3) Update the UmbracoAppTree table, my case I changed the following:TreeHandlerTypeFrom: loadNodeTypesTo: loadNodeTypesMenuTreeHandlerAssemblyFrom: umbracoTo: Vizioz.xMind2UmbracoAnd the result is:

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• Sending Parameters with the BizTalk HTTP Adapter

  - by Christopher House

  I've never had occaison to use the BizTalk HTTP adapter since I've always needed SOAP rather than just POX (plain old XML).  Yesterday we decided that we're going to expose some data via a Java servlet that will accept an HTTP post and respond with POX.  I knew BizTalk had an HTTP adapter but I had no idea what it's capabilities were. After a quick read through the BizTalk docs, it was apparent that the HTTP send adapter does in fact do posts.  The concern I had though was how we were going to supply parameters to the servlet.  The examples I had seen using the HTTP adapter all involved posting an XML message to some HTTP location.  Our Java guy, however didn't want to take that approach.  He wanted us to provide a query string via post, much like you'd expect to see on an HTTP get.  I decided to put together a little test scenario and see what I could come up with.  We didn't have a test servlet I could go against and my Java experience is virtually nill, so I decided to put together an ASP.Net project to act as the servlet.  It didn't need to be fancy, just one HttpHandler that accepts a post, reads a parameter and returns XML.  With the HttpHandler done, I put together a simple orchestration to send a message to the handler.  I started by having the orch send a message of type System.String to see what it would look like when the handler received it. I set a breakpoint in my handler and kicked off the orchestration.  Below is what I saw: As I suspected, because of BizTalk's XML serialization, System.String was not going to work.  I thought back to my BizTalk 2004 days and I project I worked on that required sending HTML formatted emails via the SMTP adapter.  To acomplish that, I had used a .Net class with a custom serialization formatter that I got from a Microsoft sample.  The code for the class, RawString can be found here. I created a new class library with the RawString class as well as a static factory class, referenced that in my orchestration project and changed my message type from System.String to RawString.  Below is what the code in my message construction looks like: After deploying the updated orchestration, I fired it off again and checked the breakpoint in my HttpHandler.  This is what I saw: And there you have it.  The RawString message type allowed me to pass a query string in the HTTP post without wrapping it in XML.

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• Silverlight Cream for April 20, 2010 -- #842

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Zoltan Arvai, Svetla Stoycheva, Alexey Zakharov, Chris Rouw, David Anson(-2-), Bill Reiss, John Papa and Adam Kinney, Chris Klug, CorrinaB, and Mike Snow. Shoutouts: Pete Brown interviewed David Kelley at MIX10: Pete at MIX10: David Kelley on the Prototype WPF and Silverlight Retail Experience Pete Brown also interviewed Emil Stoychev at MIX10: Pete at MIX10: Emil Stoychev on the CompletIT Silverlight Site SilverlightShow has a MIX10 Review by SilverlightShow Live Reporter Cigdem Patlak SilverlightShow also has an Interview with SilverlightShow Article Author Andrej Tozon From SilverlightCream.com: Implementing Push Notifications in Windows Phone 7 Zoltan Arvai has a post up on SilverlightShow discussing Push Notification on WP7 ... what it is, and how to use it. Completit.com - the challenges behind building a corporate website in Silverlight Svetla Stoycheva shows off the new CompleteIT corporate website which is pretty darn cool... and disucusses some of the challenges and solutions Introducing to Halcyone - Silverlight Application Framework: Silverlight Rest Extensions Alexey Zakharov has a tutorial up on a Silverlight application framework he's working on called Halcyone which is available on CodePlex Using the Tag Property during Silverlight Binding Chris Rouw details his SL3 to SL4 conversion and some issues he had, and how he was able to resolve a binding problem using the tag property. Using ContextMenu to implement SplitButton and MenuButton for Silverlight (or WPF) David Anson has a cool discussion up of using the ContextMenu code he put up previously to build a Split button, and includes all the code as usual. Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization Development Release 4 and Windows Phone 7 Charting sample! David Anson updated his Data Visualization because of the new releases, and this time he's including WP7... charting in WP7... ! Space Rocks game step 10: More fun with rocks In episode 10, Bill Reiss shows how to deal with multiple asteroids and all the interaction. Silverlight Training Course (Silverlight 4) Get your serious Silverlight 4 Mojo on with a new SL4 Training kit on Channel 9 ... buncha folks, spearheaded (it looks like) by John Papa and Adam Kinney... Plug-ins and composite applications in Silverlight – pt 3 Chris Klug is back with part 3 of his series on extensions and plug-in loading. So far he's covered a roll-your-own concept and MEF, now he digs into Prism. Transitions, Animations, and Effects with Blend - Part One How cool to have CorrinaB speak at your User Group meeting! ... She did just that in Portland, and instead of simply dropping a deck and some code in her blog, she's giving the run-down on her presentation... always good stuff, Corrina! Tip of the Day #110 – Using Static Resources in Class Libraries Mike Snow's latest tip is about how to create and use a Resource Dictionary. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• How to Run Apache Commands From Oracle HTTP Server 11g Home

  - by Daniel Mortimer

  Every now and then you come across a problem when there is nothing in the "troubleshooting manual" which can help you. Instead you need to think outside the box. This happened to me two or three years back. Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) 11g did not start. The error reported back by OPMN was generic and gave no clue, and worse the HTTP Server error log was empty, and remained so even after I had increased the OPMN and HTTP Server log levels. After checking configuration files, operating system resources, etc I was still no nearer the solution. And then the light bulb moment! OHS is based on Apache - what happens if I attempt to start HTTP Server using the native apache command. Trouble was the OHS 11g solution has its binaries and configuration files in separate "home" directories ORACLE_HOME contains the binaries ORACLE_INSTANCE contains the configuration files How to set the environment so that native apache commands run without error? Eventually, with help from a colleague, the knowledge articleHow to Start Oracle HTTP Server 11g Without Using opmnctl [ID 946532.1]was born! To be honest, I cannot remember the exact cause and solution to that OHS problem two or three years ago. But, I do remember that an attempt to start HTTP Server using the native apache command threw back an error to the console which led me to discover the culprit was some unusual filesystem fault.The other day, I was asked to review and publish a new knowledge article which described how to use the apache command to dump a list of static and shared loaded modules. This got me thinking that it was time [ID 946532.1] was given an update. The resultHow To Run Native Apache Commands in an Oracle HTTP Server 11g Environment [ID 946532.1] Highlights: Title change Improved environment setting scripts Interactive, should be no need to manually edit the scripts (although readers are welcome to do so) Automatically dump out some diagnostic information Inclusion of some links to other troubleshooting collateral To view the knowledge article you need a My Oracle Support login. For convenience, you can obtain the scripts via the links below.MS Windows:Wrapper cmd script - calls main cmd script [After download, remove the ".txt" file extension]Main cmd script - sets OHS 11g environment to run Apache commands [After download, remove the ".txt" file extension]Unix:Shell script - sets OHS 11g environment to run Apache commands on Unix Please note: I cannot guarantee that the scripts held in the blog repository will be maintained. Any enhancements or faults will applied to the scripts attached to the knowledge article. Lastly, to find out more about native apache commands, refer to the Apache Documentation apachectl - Apache HTTP Server Control Interface[http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/apachectl.html]httpd - Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol Server[http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/httpd.html]

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• Working with Visual Studio Web Development Server and IE6 in XP Mode on Windows 7

  - by Igor Milovanovic

  (Brian Reiter from  thoughtful computing has described this setup in this StackOverflow thread. The credit for the idea is entirely his, I have just extended it with some step by step descriptions and added some links and screenhots.)   If you are forced  to still support Internet Explorer 6, you can setup following combination on your machine to make the development for it less painful. A common problem if you are developing on Windows 7 is that you can’t install IE6 on your machine. (Not that you want that anyway). So you will probably end up working locally with IE8 and FF, and test your IE6 compatibility on a separate machine. This can get quite annoying, because you will have to maintain two different development environments, not have all the tools available, etc.   You can help yourself by installing IE6 in a Windows 7 XP Mode, which is basically just an Windows XP running in a virtual machine.   [1] Windows XP Mode installation   After you have installed and configured your XP mode (remember the security settings like Windows Update and antivirus software), you can add the shortcut to the IE6 in the virtual machine to the “all users” start menu. This shortcut will be replicated to your windows 7 XP mode start menu, and you will be able to seamlessly start your IE 6 as a normal window on your Windows 7 desktop.   [2] Configure IE6 for the Windows 7 installation   If you configure your XP – Mode to use (Shared Networking)  NAT, you can now use IE6 to browse the sites in the internet. (add proxy settings to IE6 if necessary)                       The problem now is that you can’t connect to the webdev server which is running on your local machine. This is because web development server is crippled to allow only local connections for security reasons.   In order to trick webdev in believing that the requests are coming from local machine itself you can use a light weight proxy like privoxy on your host (windows 7) machine and configure the IE6 running in the virtual host.   The first step is to make the host machine (running windows 7) reachable from the virtual machine (running XP). In order to do that, you can install the loopback adapter, and configure it to use an IP which is routable from the virtual machine. In example screenshot (192.168.1.66).   [3] How to install loopback adapter in Windows 7   After installation you can assign a static IP which is routable from the virtual machine (in example 192.168.1.66)                     The next step is to configure privoxy to listen on that IP address (using some not used port, in example, the default port 8118)   Change following line in config.txt:   # #      Suppose you are running Privoxy on an IPv6-capable machine and #      you want it to listen on the IPv6 address of the loopback device: # #        listen-address [::1]:8118 # # listen-address  192.168.1.66:8118   The last step is to configure the IE6 to use Privoxy which is running on your Windows 7 host machine as proxy for all addresses (including localhost)                             And now you can use your Windows7 XP Mode IE6 to connect to your Visual Studio’s webdev web server.                         [4] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/683151/connect-remotely-to-webdev-webserver-exe

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• Share Your Top 30 Visited Domains with Visitation Cloud for Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  Curious about the domains that you visit most or perhaps you want a way to share that information on a social website? Now you can see and share the 30 most visited domains in your browser’s history with the Visitation Cloud extension. Accessing Visitation Cloud As soon as you install the extension you can get started using it. Depending on how your browser’s UI is set up there are three methods for accessing Visitation Cloud: a “Visitation Cloud Button” inserted at the end of your “Bookmarks Toolbar”, a menu listing in the “Tools Menu”, and a “Toolbar Button” (not shown here). Visitation Cloud in Action As soon as you activate Visitation Cloud a new window will appear with your top domains displayed in a cloud format. Keep in mind that this is more than just a static image…each listing is actually a clickable link. Clicking on any of the listings will open that domain in a new tab or window depending on your particular browser settings. If you feel that you have a great set of links and want to share it with your friends then that is easy to do. Right click anywhere within the Visitation Cloud Window and select “Save as…”. The “cloud image” can be saved in “.png, .jpg, or Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)” format. For our example we chose the “.svg format”. Perhaps you love the set of links but not the layout…right click and select “Randomize” to change how the cloud looks. Here is our cloud after being “Randomized”. Things definitely got moved around… Accessing the Visitation Cloud Image in other Browsers Once you have your “cloud image” saved you can share it with friends or save it for your own future use in other browsers. Here is our “cloud image” open in Opera Browser with link opening in progress. The same “cloud image” open in Google Chrome. Very nice… Conclusion While this may not be something that everyone will use Visitation Cloud does make for a rather unique, interesting, & fun way to access and share your most visited domains. Links Download the Visitation Cloud extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fix "Security Error: Domain Name Mismatch" Warning in FirefoxAdd Variety to Your Searches with Search CloudletRestore Your Missing/Deleted Smart Bookmarks Folder in Firefox 3Blocking Spam from International Senders in Windows Vista MailSee Where a Package is Installed on Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Share High Res Photos using Divvyshot Draw Online using Harmony How to Browse Privately in Firefox Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar

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• Func Delegate in C#

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  We already know about delegates in C# and I have previously posted about basics of delegates in C#. Following are posts about basic of delegates I have written. Delegates in C# Multicast Delegates in C# In this post we are going to learn about Func Delegates in C#. As per MSDN following is a definition. “Encapsulates a method that has one parameter and returns a value of the type specified by the TResult parameter.” Func can handle multiple arguments. The Func delegates is parameterized type. It takes any valid C# type as parameter and you have can multiple parameters and also you have specify the return type as last parameters. Followings are some examples of parameters. Func<int T,out TResult> Func<int T,int T, out Tresult> Now let’s take a string concatenation example for that. I am going to create two func delegate which will going to concate two strings and three string. Following is a code for that. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace FuncExample { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Func<string, string, string> concatTwo = (x, y) => string.Format("{0} {1}",x,y); Func<string, string, string, string> concatThree = (x, y, z) => string.Format("{0} {1} {2}", x, y,z); Console.WriteLine(concatTwo("Hello", "Jalpesh")); Console.WriteLine(concatThree("Hello","Jalpesh","Vadgama")); Console.ReadLine(); } } } As you can see in above example, I have create two delegates ‘concatTwo’ and ‘concatThree. The first concat two strings and another concat three strings. If you see the func statements the last parameter is for the out as here its output string so I have written string as last parameter in both statements. Now it’s time to run the example and as expected following is output. That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more updates.

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• NoSQL is not about object databases

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  NoSQL as a movement is an interesting beast. I kinda like that it’s negatively defined (I happen to belong myself to at least one other such a-community). It’s not in its roots about proposing one specific new silver bullet to kill an old problem. it’s about challenging the consensus. Actually, blindly and systematically replacing relational databases with object databases would just replace one set of issues with another. No, the point is to recognize that relational databases are not a universal answer -although they have been used as one for so long- and recognize instead that there’s a whole spectrum of data storage solutions out there. Why is it so hard to recognize, by the way? You are already using some of those other data storage solutions every day. Let me cite a few: The file system Active Directory XML / JSON documents The Web e-mail Logs Excel files EXIF blobs in your photos Relational databases And yes, object databases It’s just a fact of modern life. Notice by the way that most of the data that you use every day is unstructured and thus mostly unsuitable for relational storage. It really is more a matter of recognizing it: you are already doing NoSQL. So what happens when for any reason you need to simultaneously query two or more of these heterogeneous data stores? Well, you build an index of sorts combining them, and that’s what you query instead. Of course, there’s not much distance to travel from that to realizing that querying is better done when completely separated from storage. So why am I writing about this today? Well, that’s something I’ve been giving lots of thought, on and off, over the last ten years. When I built my first CMS all that time ago, one of the main problems my customers were facing was to manage and make sense of the mountain of unstructured data that was constituting most of their business. The central entity of that system was the file system because we were dealing with lots of Word documents, PDFs, OCR’d articles, photos and static web pages. We could have stored all that in SQL Server. It would have worked. Ew. I’m so glad we didn’t. Today, I’m working on Orchard (another CMS ;). It’s a pretty young project but already one of the questions we get the most is how to integrate existing data. One of the ideas I’ll be trying hard to sell to the rest of the team in the next few months is to completely split the querying from the storage. Not only does this provide great opportunities for performance optimizations, it gives you homogeneous access to heterogeneous and existing data sources. For free.

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