django context - Page 459

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 13, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 13, 2010New Projects[Experiment] vczh DBUI: EXPERIMENT. Auto UI adaptor for a specified data base[SAMPLE PROJECT] Branch and Patch with GIT: I'll paste more here later...BlogPress: This web application provides a content management system. Coot: Facebook Photos Screensaver.DotNetNuke® JDMenu: dnnJDMenu makes it easy to use the open source JDMenu component in your DotNetNuke skin.DotNetNuke® RadRotator: dnnRadRotator makes it easy to add telerik RadRotator functionality to your site or custom module. Licensing permits anyone to use the components ...DotNetNuke® RadTabStrip: DNNRadTabStrip makes it easy to add telerik RadTabStrip functionality to your module or skin. Licensing permits anyone to use the components (incl...DotNetNuke® RadTreeView: DNNRadTreeView makes it easy to add telerik RadTreeView functionality to your module or skin. Licensing permits anyone to use the components (incl...DotNetNuke® Skin Garden: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by Mark Allan of DnnGarden. Concise and semantic HTML 5 stru...ElmasFC: Elmas Facebook CheckerFront Callback Protocol: Front Callback Protocol make it easier for developers to create a network application in the .Net Language. It provide the flexibility of using TCP...Glass UI: A Windows Forms Control Library built specifically for Aero Glass. This will consist of existing controls, modified to render on glass, as well as ...Guitarist Tools: Some tools for guitarists.HomeUX: HomeUX is home control software featuring a Silverlight-based touch screen user interface.Homework Helper: Homework Helper help students to train simpler homework like "What's the name of the capital of France?" - Question - Answear based. It's made i...IGNOU Mini Project Allocation: A mini project allocation system.Images Compiler: Images Compiler is pretty small wpf application for users who want to resize, rename, disable colors... for too much images in very short time. It...InstitutionManagementSystem: Institution Management System prototypeManagedCv: ManagedCv is the library for C#/VB/ to use the OpenCV librarymanagement joint ownership: Application pour la gestion des actions réalisées au sein d’une copropriété. Application for management actions within a joint ownershipMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 is an open source geographic information system (GIS) and library of geospatial software development tools for .NET, written in C#. T...Morris Auto: Morris Auto is a social application build templateMouse control with finger detection: The aim of this project is to design an application for recognition of the movement of a finger through a webcam and then control the mouse. The pr...ORAYLIS BI.Quality: ORAYLIS BI.Quality makes it easier to develop BI Solutions in an agile environment. It adapts Unit Tests to BI Development. Propositional Framework: Different sales propositions are presented to the user using data collected from marketing intelligence, browser history or user behaviour as they ...ServStop: ServStop is a .NET application that makes it easy to stop several system services at once. Now you don't have to change startup types or stop them ...shatkotha web portal: source code of web portal shatkothaSurvey and Registration tools: Two Silverlight tools for add Survey and Registration in your websiteTable Storage Backup & Restore for Windows Azure: Allows various backup & restore options for Windows Azure Table Storage accounts: - Backup from one storage account to another - Backup a storag...Topsy Lib: This project provides wrapper methods to call Topsy's web services from C#.twNowplaying: twNowplaying is a small and handy utility that allows you to tweet your currently playing track from Spotify to Twitter. Followed by the #twNowplay...XOM: XOM: Xml Object Mapper Automatically populate your objects with data from XML via an XML map. Never do this again: if(e.GetElementsByTagName("us...YS Utils: The library contains set of useful classes which may solve common tasks for different applications.ZabViewer: CS ProjectNew ReleasesAppFabric Caching Admin Tool: AppFabric Caching Admin Tool (0.8): System Requirements:.NET 4.0 RC AppFabric Caching Beta2 Test On:Win 7 (64x)ASP.Net Routing Configuration: mal.Web.Routing v0.9.2.0: mal.Web.Routing v0.9.2.0DotNetNuke IM Module of Facebook Like Messenger: DNN IM Module of Facebook Like Messenger: Empower DNN Website with a 1-to-1 Chat Solution named Free Facebook Messenger Style Web Chat Bar of 123 Web Messenger. 1. If you need to use the c...DotNetNuke® Form and List (formerly User Defined Table): 05.01.02: Form and List 05.01.02 (Release Candidate 2)5.1.2 will be the next stabilzation release. Major Highlights fixed Cancel action in a form, it don't ...DotNetNuke® JDMenu: DNN jdMenu 1.0.0: dnnJDMenu makes it easy to use the open source JDMenu component in your DotNetNuke skin. Many thanks to Jonathan Sharp of Outwest Media for creati...DotNetNuke® RadTabStrip: DNNRadTabstrip 1.0.0: DNNRadTabStrip makes it easy to add telerik RadTabStrip functionality to your module or skin. Licensing permits anyone to use the components (inclu...DotNetNuke® RadTreeView: DNNRadTreeView 1.0.0: DNNRadTreeView makes it easy to create skins which use the Telerik RadTreeview functionality. Licensing permits anyone (including designers) to use...DotNetNuke® Skin Garden: Garden Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by Mark Allan of DnnGarden. Concise and semantic HTML 5 struc...ElmasFC: Elmas FC: This porgram is checking your facebook account automaticly.Free DotNetNuke IM of 123 Web Messenger -- Web-based Friend List: Free Download DNN IM Module and Source Code: 123 Web Messenger offers free DotNetNuke Instant Messaging to help you embed a IM Software into DNN Website by integrating 123 Web Messenger with D...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.4 Released: Hi, Today we have released the final version of Visifire v3.0.4 which contains the following major features: * Zooming * Step Line chart ...Home Access Plus+: v3.1.0.0: Version 3.1.0.0 Release Problem with this release, get Version 3.1.1.1 Change Log: Fixed ampersand issue Added Unzip Features Added Help Desk ...Home Access Plus+: v3.1.1.1: Version 3.1.1.1 Release Change Log: Fixed the Help Desk File Changes: ~/App_Data/Tickets.xml ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdbHomework Helper: Homework Helper 1.0: The first release of Homework Helper. It got basic functionality. Check the Documentation or press F1 while using the program.Homework Helper: Homework Helper v1.0: This is the latest version of Homework Helper. Just a few updates since the latest one (a couple of minutes ago). Now it saves your settings! Instr...IBCSharp: IBCSharp 1.02: What IBCSharp 1.02.zip unzips to: http://i39.tinypic.com/28hz8m1.png Note: The above solution has MSTest, Typemock Isolator, and Microsoft CHESS c...InfoService: InfoService v1.5 RC 1: InfoService Release Canidate Please note this is a RC. It should be stable, but i can't guarantee that! So use it on your own risk. Please read Pl...IntX: IntX 0.9.3.3: Fixed issue #7100IronRuby: 1.0 RC3: The IronRuby team is pleased to announce version 1.0 RC3! As IronRuby approaches the final 1.0, these RCs will contain crucial bug fixes and enhanc...MAISGestão: LayerDiagram (pdf): This is the final version of the layer diagramMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi (March 12): After some significant trouble with svn, this site represents a test of using Mercurial for our version control. Hopefully the choice of this new ...MSBuild Mercurial Tasks: 0.2.0 Beta: This release realises the Scenario 2 and provides two MSBuild tasks: HgCommit and HgPush. This task allows to create a new changeset in the current...NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: NLog 2.0 preview 1: This is very experimental first build of NLog from 2.0 branch is available for download. It’s not alpha, beta or even gamma, just a preview of upco...Open NFe: Fonte DANFE v1.9.5: Código-fonte para a versão 1.9.5 do DANFEOpiConsole (XNA): OpiConsole 0.3: OpiConsole 0.3 OpiConsole includes: * PC & Xbox support. * Default commands (cvar, quit etc.) * Ability to add custom commands. *...ORAYLIS BI.Quality: Release 1.0.0: Release 1.0.0Pcap.Net: Pcap.Net 0.5.0 (38141): Pcap.Net - March 2010 Release Pcap.Net is a .NET wrapper for WinPcap written in C++/CLI and C#. It Features almost all WinPcap features and include...PhysX.Net: PhysX.Net 0.12.0.0 Beta 1: This is beta release of 0.12.0.0 for people to test and provide feedback on. It targets 2.8.3.21 of PhysXPólya: Pólya 2010 03 13 alpha: Pólya is a collection of generic data structures; as generic as C#/.Net allows them to be. In this first release the focus has been on some fundam...Prolog.NET: Prolog.NET 1.0 Beta 1.3: Installer includes: primary Prolog.NET assembly Prolog.NET Workbench Prolog.NET Scheduler sample application PrologTest console applicatio...Propositional Framework: USP: The initial code drop was based on the Autocomplete demo and the neural network approach used by Jeff Heaton (@ http://www.heatonresearch.com/) - e...Protocol Transition with BizTalk: Source: Stable buildRoTwee: RoTwee (7.1.0.0): Now picture of your friend is shown in RoTwee. Place mouse cursor to the tweet !ServStop: 0.5.0.0: Initial Release Contents of ServStop0500.zip ServStop.exe 0.5.0.0 Initial Release. 32,768 bytes. Other files None. Source code available on "...SkeinLibManaged: Release 1.0.0.0 (Beta): This is the compiled DLL with XML documentation, so there should be plenty of context sensitive help and Intellisense. This is the Release version...sPWadmin: pwAdmin v0.9a: Added: LiveChat Plugin Shows the latest 150 chat messages from "/Your PW Server/logservice/logs/world2.chat" Refresh chat every 5 seconds Allow...sPWadmin: pwAdmin v0.9b: Some minor fixes to style, layout & different browser support Merged the forms in server configuration tab to a single form that can now save mul...Topsy Lib: Initial release: Initial Debug and Release versions.twNowplaying: twNowplaying: Press the Twitter icon to get started, don't forget to submit bugs to the issue tracker. What's new This release has some minor UI fixes.twNowplaying: twNowplaying Alpha 1.0: Press the Twitter icon to get started, don't forget to submit bugs to the issue tracker. Thank you , and enjoy! =)VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30312.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWPF Dialogs: Version 0.1.3: The FolderBrowseDialog / FolderBrowseDialog - Deutsch was improved and extended.XOM: XOM 0.1A: Just a release of the code I have so far. In order to get your objects to work, you need to create an XML file to define your objects. Here is a ...Xpress - ASP.NET MVC 个人博客程序: xpress2.1.1.0312.beta: 最新beta版，注意：此版本和2.1.0不兼容更改内容：将主题文件发放在 Views 文件夹下主题文件支持强类型Model 主题资源文件放在Resouces目录下YS Utils: V 1.0.0.0: This is first release. The YSUtils library contains first set of classes. ZIP files contains documentation.Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NET Ajax LibraryASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrN2 CMSBlogEngine.NETFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryFarseer Physics EngineSharePoint Team-MailerCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightCalcium: A modular application toolset leveraging PrismjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services

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Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release

- by Jon Galloway

ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesSummary for lazy readers: Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download on the Visual Studio site and on MSDN subscriber downloads) Visual Studio 2013 installs side by side with Visual Studio 2012 and supports round-tripping between Visual Studio versions, so you can try it out without committing to a switch Visual Studio 2013 ships with the new version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0 The new releases ASP.NET focuses on One ASP.NET, so core features and web tools work the same across the platform (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application) New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system, and a new identity system Visual Studio 2013 is an incredible editor for web files, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, LESS, Coffeescript, Handlebars, Angular, Ember, Knockdown, etc. Top links: Visual Studio 2013 content on the ASP.NET site are in the standard new releases area: http://www.asp.net/vnext ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release Notes Short intro videos on the new Visual Studio web editor features from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 post on the official .NET Web Development and Tools Blog Scott Guthrie's post: Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework Okay, for those of you who are still with me, let's dig in a bit. Quick web dev notes on downloading and installing Visual Studio 2013 I found Visual Studio 2013 to be a pretty fast install. According to Brian Harry's release post, installing over pre-release versions of Visual Studio is supported. I've installed the release version over pre-release versions, and it worked fine. If you're only going to be doing web development, you can speed up the install if you just select Web Developer tools. Of course, as a good Microsoft employee, I'll mention that you might also want to install some of those other features, like the Store apps for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but they do download and install a lot of other stuff (e.g. the Windows Phone SDK sets up Hyper-V and downloads several GB's of VM's). So if you're planning just to do web development for now, you can pick just the Web Developer Tools and install the other stuff later. If you've got a fast internet connection, I recommend using the web installer instead of downloading the ISO. The ISO includes all the features, whereas the web installer just downloads what you're installing. Visual Studio 2013 development settings and color theme When you start up Visual Studio, it'll prompt you to pick some defaults. These are totally up to you -whatever suits your development style - and you can change them later. As I said, these are completely up to you. I recommend either the Web Development or Web Development (Code Only) settings. The only real difference is that Code Only hides the toolbars, and you can switch between them using Tools / Import and Export Settings / Reset. Web Development settings Web Development (code only) settings Usually I've just gone with Web Development (code only) in the past because I just want to focus on the code, although the Standard toolbar does make it easier to switch default web browsers. More on that later. Color theme Sigh. Okay, everyone's got their favorite colors. I alternate between Light and Dark depending on my mood, and I personally like how the low contrast on the window chrome in those themes puts the emphasis on my code rather than the tabs and toolbars. I know some people got pretty worked up over that, though, and wanted the blue theme back. I personally don't like it - it reminds me of ancient versions of Visual Studio that I don't want to think about anymore. So here's the thing: if you install Visual Studio Ultimate, it defaults to Blue. The other versions default to Light. If you use Blue, I won't criticize you - out loud, that is. You can change themes really easily - either Tools / Options / Environment / General, or the smart way: ctrl+q for quick launch, then type Theme and hit enter. Signing in During the first run, you'll be prompted to sign in. You don't have to - you can click the "Not now, maybe later" link at the bottom of that dialog. I recommend signing in, though. It's not hooked in with licensing or tracking the kind of code you write to sell you components. It is doing good things, like syncing your Visual Studio settings between computers. More about that here. So, you don't have to, but I sure do. Overview of shiny new things in ASP.NET land There are a lot of good new things in ASP.NET. I'll list some of my favorite here, but you can read more on the ASP.NET site. One ASP.NET You've heard us talk about this for a while. The idea is that options are good, but choice can be a burden. When you start a new ASP.NET project, why should you have to make a tough decision - with long-term consequences - about how your application will work? If you want to use ASP.NET Web Forms, but have the option of adding in ASP.NET MVC later, why should that be hard? It's all ASP.NET, right? Ideally, you'd just decide that you want to use ASP.NET to build sites and services, and you could use the appropriate tools (the green blocks below) as you needed them. So, here it is. When you create a new ASP.NET application, you just create an ASP.NET application. Next, you can pick from some templates to get you started... but these are different. They're not "painful decision" templates, they're just some starting pieces. And, most importantly, you can mix and match. I can pick a "mostly" Web Forms template, but include MVC and Web API folders and core references. If you've tried to mix and match in the past, you're probably aware that it was possible, but not pleasant. ASP.NET MVC project files contained special project type GUIDs, so you'd only get controller scaffolding support in a Web Forms project if you manually edited the csproj file. Features in one stack didn't work in others. Project templates were painful choices. That's no longer the case. Hooray! I just did a demo in a presentation last week where I created a new Web Forms + MVC + Web API site, built a model, scaffolded MVC and Web API controllers with EF Code First, add data in the MVC view, viewed it in Web API, then added a GridView to the Web Forms Default.aspx page and bound it to the Model. In about 5 minutes. Sure, it's a simple example, but it's great to be able to share code and features across the whole ASP.NET family. Authentication In the past, authentication was built into the templates. So, for instance, there was an ASP.NET MVC 4 Intranet Project template which created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application that was preconfigured for Windows Authentication. All of that authentication stuff was built into each template, so they varied between the stacks, and you couldn't reuse them. You didn't see a lot of changes to the authentication options, since they required big changes to a bunch of project templates. Now, the new project dialog includes a common authentication experience. When you hit the Change Authentication button, you get some common options that work the same way regardless of the template or reference settings you've made. These options work on all ASP.NET frameworks, and all hosting environments (IIS, IIS Express, or OWIN for self-host) The default is Individual User Accounts: This is the standard "create a local account, using username / password or OAuth" thing; however, it's all built on the new Identity system. More on that in a second. The one setting that has some configuration to it is Organizational Accounts, which lets you configure authentication using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, or Office 365. Identity There's a new identity system. We've taken the best parts of the previous ASP.NET Membership and Simple Identity systems, rolled in a lot of feedback and made big enhancements to support important developer concerns like unit testing and extensiblity. I've written long posts about ASP.NET identity, and I'll do it again. Soon. This is not that post. The short version is that I think we've finally got just the right Identity system. Some of my favorite features: There are simple, sensible defaults that work well - you can File / New / Run / Register / Login, and everything works. It supports standard username / password as well as external authentication (OAuth, etc.). It's easy to customize without having to re-implement an entire provider. It's built using pluggable pieces, rather than one large monolithic system. It's built using interfaces like IUser and IRole that allow for unit testing, dependency injection, etc. You can easily add user profile data (e.g. URL, twitter handle, birthday). You just add properties to your ApplicationUser model and they'll automatically be persisted. Complete control over how the identity data is persisted. By default, everything works with Entity Framework Code First, but it's built to support changes from small (modify the schema) to big (use another ORM, store your data in a document database or in the cloud or in XML or in the EXIF data of your desktop background or whatever). It's configured via OWIN. More on OWIN and Katana later, but the fact that it's built using OWIN means it's portable. You can find out more in the Authentication and Identity section of the ASP.NET site (and lots more content will be going up there soon). New Bootstrap based project templates The new project templates are built using Bootstrap 3. Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a front-end framework that brings a lot of nice benefits: It's responsive, so your projects will automatically scale to device width using CSS media queries. For example, menus are full size on a desktop browser, but on narrower screens you automatically get a mobile-friendly menu. The built-in Bootstrap styles make your standard page elements (headers, footers, buttons, form inputs, tables etc.) look nice and modern. Bootstrap is themeable, so you can reskin your whole site by dropping in a new Bootstrap theme. Since Bootstrap is pretty popular across the web development community, this gives you a large and rapidly growing variety of templates (free and paid) to choose from. Bootstrap also includes a lot of very useful things: components (like progress bars and badges), useful glyphicons, and some jQuery plugins for tooltips, dropdowns, carousels, etc.). Here's a look at how the responsive part works. When the page is full screen, the menu and header are optimized for a wide screen display: When I shrink the page down (this is all based on page width, not useragent sniffing) the menu turns into a nice mobile-friendly dropdown: For a quick example, I grabbed a new free theme off bootswatch.com. For simple themes, you just need to download the boostrap.css file and replace the /content/bootstrap.css file in your project. Now when I refresh the page, I've got a new theme: Scaffolding The big change in scaffolding is that it's one system that works across ASP.NET. You can create a new Empty Web project or Web Forms project and you'll get the Scaffold context menus. For release, we've got MVC 5 and Web API 2 controllers. We had a preview of Web Forms scaffolding in the preview releases, but they weren't fully baked for RTM. Look for them in a future update, expected pretty soon. This scaffolding system wasn't just changed to work across the ASP.NET frameworks, it's also built to enable future extensibility. That's not in this release, but should also hopefully be out soon. Project Readme page This is a small thing, but I really like it. When you create a new project, you get a Project_Readme.html page that's added to the root of your project and opens in the Visual Studio built-in browser. I love it. A long time ago, when you created a new project we just dumped it on you and left you scratching your head about what to do next. Not ideal. Then we started adding a bunch of Getting Started information to the new project templates. That told you what to do next, but you had to delete all of that stuff out of your website. It doesn't belong there. Not ideal. This is a simple HTML file that's not integrated into your project code at all. You can delete it if you want. But, it shows a lot of helpful links that are current for the project you just created. In the future, if we add new wacky project types, they can create readme docs with specific information on how to do appropriately wacky things. Side note: I really like that they used the internal browser in Visual Studio to show this content rather than popping open an HTML page in the default browser. I hate that. It's annoying. If you're doing that, I hope you'll stop. What if some unnamed person has 40 or 90 tabs saved in their browser session? When you pop open your "Thanks for installing my Visual Studio extension!" page, all eleventy billion tabs start up and I wish I'd never installed your thing. Be like these guys and pop stuff Visual Studio specific HTML docs in the Visual Studio browser. ASP.NET MVC 5 The biggest change with ASP.NET MVC 5 is that it's no longer a separate project type. It integrates well with the rest of ASP.NET. In addition to that and the other common features we've already looked at (Bootstrap templates, Identity, authentication), here's what's new for ASP.NET MVC. Attribute routing ASP.NET MVC now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers. This supports some pretty complex, customized routing scenarios, and it allows you to keep your route information right with your controller actions if you'd like. Here's a controller that includes an action whose method name is Hiding, but I've used AttributeRouting to configure it to /spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo public class SampleController : Controller { [Route("spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo")] public string Hiding() { return "You found me!"; } } I enable that in my RouteConfig.cs, and I can use that in conjunction with my other MVC routes like this: public class RouteConfig { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes(); routes.MapRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); } } You can read more about Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 here. Filter enhancements There are two new additions to filters: Authentication Filters and Filter Overrides. Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorized requests. Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features. Attribute Routing ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article. OAuth 2.0 ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN (discussed below). This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson. Lots more There's a huge list of other features, including CORS (cross-origin request sharing), IHttpActionResult, IHttpRequestContext, and more. I think the best overview is in the release notes. OWIN and Katana I've written about OWIN and Katana recently. I'm a big fan. OWIN is the Open Web Interfaces for .NET. It's a spec, like HTML or HTTP, so you can't install OWIN. The benefit of OWIN is that it's a community specification, so anyone who implements it can plug into the ASP.NET stack, either as middleware or as a host. Katana is the Microsoft implementation of OWIN. It leverages OWIN to wire up things like authentication, handlers, modules, IIS hosting, etc., so ASP.NET can host OWIN components and Katana components can run in someone else's OWIN implementation. Howard Dierking just wrote a cool article in MSDN magazine describing Katana in depth: Getting Started with the Katana Project. He had an interesting example showing an OWIN based pipeline which leveraged SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and NancyFx components in the same stack. If this kind of thing makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, don't worry, but keep an eye on it. You're going to see some cool things happen as a result of ASP.NET becoming more and more pluggable. Visual Studio Web Tools Okay, this stuff's just crazy. Visual Studio has been adding some nice web dev features over the past few years, but they've really cranked it up for this release. Visual Studio is by far my favorite code editor for all web files: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and lots of popular libraries. Stop thinking of Visual Studio as a big editor that you only use to write back-end code. Stop editing HTML and CSS in Notepad (or Sublime, Notepad++, etc.). Visual Studio starts up in under 2 seconds on a modern computer with an SSD. Misspelling HTML attributes or your CSS classes or jQuery or Angular syntax is stupid. It doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a silly person who wastes time. Browser Link Browser Link is a real-time, two-way connection between Visual Studio and all connected browsers. It's only attached when you're running locally, in debug, but it applies to any and all connected browser, including emulators. You may have seen demos that showed the browsers refreshing based on changes in the editor, and I'll agree that's pretty cool. But it's really just the start. It's a two-way connection, and it's built for extensiblity. That means you can write extensions that push information from your running application (in IE, Chrome, a mobile emulator, etc.) back to Visual Studio. Mads and team have showed off some demonstrations where they enabled edit mode in the browser which updated the source HTML back on the browser. It's also possible to look at how the rendered HTML performs, check for compatibility issues, watch for unused CSS classes, the sky's the limit. New HTML editor The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Here's a 3 minute tour from Mads Kristensen. The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Lots more Visual Studio web dev features That's just a sampling - there's a ton of great features for JavaScript editing, CSS editing, publishing, and Page Inspector (which shows real-time rendering of your page inside Visual Studio). Here are some more short videos showing those features. Lots, lots more Okay, that's just a summary, and it's still quite a bit. Head on over to http://asp.net/vnext for more information, and download Visual Studio 2013 now to get started!

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Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework

- by ScottGu

Today we released VS 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. These releases include a ton of great improvements, and include some fantastic enhancements to ASP.NET and the Entity Framework. You can download and start using them now. Below are details on a few of the great ASP.NET, Web Development, and Entity Framework improvements you can take advantage of with this release. Please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext for additional release notes, documentation, and tutorials. One ASP.NET With the release of Visual Studio 2013, we have taken a step towards unifying the experience of using the different ASP.NET sub-frameworks (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR, etc), and you can now easily mix and match the different ASP.NET technologies you want to use within a single application. When you do a File-New Project with VS 2013 you’ll now see a single ASP.NET Project option: Selecting this project will bring up an additional dialog that allows you to start with a base project template, and then optionally add/remove the technologies you want to use in it. For example, you could start with a Web Forms template and add Web API or Web Forms support for it, or create a MVC project and also enable Web Forms pages within it: This makes it easy for you to use any ASP.NET technology you want within your apps, and take advantage of any feature across the entire ASP.NET technology span. Richer Authentication Support The new “One ASP.NET” project dialog also includes a new Change Authentication button that, when pushed, enables you to easily change the authentication approach used by your applications – and makes it much easier to build secure applications that enable SSO from a variety of identity providers. For example, when you start with the ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC templates you can easily add any of the following authentication options to the application: No Authentication Individual User Accounts (Single Sign-On support with FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft ID – or Forms Auth with ASP.NET Membership) Organizational Accounts (Single Sign-On support with Windows Azure Active Directory ) Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application) The Windows Azure Active Directory support is particularly cool. Last month we updated Windows Azure Active Directory so that developers can now easily create any number of Directories using it (for free and deployed within seconds). It now takes only a few moments to enable single-sign-on support within your ASP.NET applications against these Windows Azure Active Directories. Simply choose the “Organizational Accounts” radio button within the Change Authentication dialog and enter the name of your Windows Azure Active Directory to do this: This will automatically configure your ASP.NET application to use Windows Azure Active Directory and register the application with it. Now when you run the app your users can easily and securely sign-in using their Active Directory credentials within it – regardless of where the application is hosted on the Internet. For more information about the new process for creating web projects, see Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013. Responsive Project Templates with Bootstrap The new default project templates for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SPA are built using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework that helps you build responsive websites which look great on different form factors such as mobile phones, tables and desktops. For example in a browser window the home page created by the MVC template looks like the following: When you resize the browser to a narrow window to see how it would like on a phone, you can notice how the contents gracefully wrap around and the horizontal top menu turns into an icon: When you click the menu-icon above it expands into a vertical menu – which enables a good navigation experience for small screen real-estate devices: We think Bootstrap will enable developers to build web applications that work even better on phones, tablets and other mobile devices – and enable you to easily build applications that can leverage the rich ecosystem of Bootstrap CSS templates already out there. You can learn more about Bootstrap here. Visual Studio Web Tooling Improvements Visual Studio 2013 includes a new, much richer, HTML editor for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The new HTML editor provides a single unified schema based on HTML5. It has automatic brace completion, jQuery UI and AngularJS attribute IntelliSense, attribute IntelliSense Grouping, and other great improvements. For example, typing “ng-“ on an HTML element will show the intellisense for AngularJS: This support for AngularJS, Knockout.js, Handlebars and other SPA technologies in this release of ASP.NET and VS 2013 makes it even easier to build rich client web applications: The screen shot below demonstrates how the HTML editor can also now inspect your page at design-time to determine all of the CSS classes that are available. In this case, the auto-completion list contains classes from Bootstrap’s CSS file. No more guessing at which Bootstrap element names you need to use: Visual Studio 2013 also comes with built-in support for both CoffeeScript and LESS editing support. The LESS editor comes with all the cool features from the CSS editor and has specific Intellisense for variables and mixins across all the LESS documents in the @import chain. Browser Link – SignalR channel between browser and Visual Studio The new Browser Link feature in VS 2013 lets you run your app within multiple browsers on your dev machine, connect them to Visual Studio, and simultaneously refresh all of them just by clicking a button in the toolbar. You can connect multiple browsers (including IE, FireFox, Chrome) to your development site, including mobile emulators, and click refresh to refresh all the browsers all at the same time. This makes it much easier to easily develop/test against multiple browsers in parallel. Browser Link also exposes an API to enable developers to write Browser Link extensions. By enabling developers to take advantage of the Browser Link API, it becomes possible to create very advanced scenarios that crosses boundaries between Visual Studio and any browser that’s connected to it. Web Essentials takes advantage of the API to create an integrated experience between Visual Studio and the browser’s developer tools, remote controlling mobile emulators and a lot more. You will see us take advantage of this support even more to enable really cool scenarios going forward. ASP.NET Scaffolding ASP.NET Scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.NET Web applications. It makes it easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. When using scaffolding, we ensure that all required dependencies are automatically installed for you in the project. For example, if you start with an ASP.NET Web Forms project and then use scaffolding to add a Web API Controller, the required NuGet packages and references to enable Web API are added to your project automatically. To do this, just choose the Add->New Scaffold Item context menu: Support for scaffolding async controllers uses the new async features from Entity Framework 6. ASP.NET Identity ASP.NET Identity is a new membership system for ASP.NET applications that we are introducing with this release. ASP.NET Identity makes it easy to integrate user-specific profile data with application data. ASP.NET Identity also allows you to choose the persistence model for user profiles in your application. You can store the data in a SQL Server database or another data store, including NoSQL data stores such as Windows Azure Storage Tables. ASP.NET Identity also supports Claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. Users can login by creating an account on the website using username and password, or they can login using social identity providers (such as Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or using organizational accounts through Windows Azure Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). To learn more about how to use ASP.NET Identity visit http://www.asp.net/identity. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 has a bunch of great improvements including: Attribute routing ASP.NET Web API now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your Web API routes by annotating your actions and controllers like this: OAuth 2.0 support The Web API and Single Page Application project templates now support authorization using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a framework for authorizing client access to protected resources. It works for a variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API also now provides support for OData endpoints and enables support for both ATOM and JSON-light formats. With OData you get support for rich query semantics, paging, $metadata, CRUD operations, and custom actions over any data source. Below are some of the specific enhancements in ASP.NET Web API 2 OData. Support for $select, $expand, $batch, and $value Improved extensibility Type-less support Reuse an existing model OWIN Integration ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API. More Web API Improvements In addition to the features above there have been a host of other features in ASP.NET Web API, including CORS support Authentication Filters Filter Overrides Improved Unit Testability Portable ASP.NET Web API Client To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/web-api/ ASP.NET SignalR 2 ASP.NET SignalR is library for ASP.NET developers that dramatically simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to your applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server-side code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR 2.0 introduces a ton of great improvements. We’ve added support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to SignalR 2.0. iOS and Android support for SignalR have also been added using the MonoTouch and MonoDroid components from the Xamarin library (for more information on how to use these additions, see the article Using Xamarin Components from the SignalR wiki). We’ve also added support for the Portable .NET Client in SignalR 2.0 and created a new self-hosting package. This change makes the setup process for SignalR much more consistent between web-hosted and self-hosted SignalR applications. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/signalr. ASP.NET MVC 5 The ASP.NET MVC project templates integrate seamlessly with the new One ASP.NET experience and enable you to integrate all of the above ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Identity improvements. You can also customize your MVC project and configure authentication using the One ASP.NET project creation wizard. The MVC templates have also been updated to use ASP.NET Identity and Bootstrap as well. An introductory tutorial to ASP.NET MVC 5 can be found at Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 5. This release of ASP.NET MVC also supports several nice new MVC-specific features including: Authentication filters: These filters allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller or globally for all controllers. Attribute Routing: Attribute Routing allows you to define your routes on actions or controllers. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/mvc Entity Framework 6 Improvements Visual Studio 2013 ships with Entity Framework 6, which bring a lot of great new features to the data access space: Async and Task<T> Support EF6’s new Async Query and Save support enables you to perform asynchronous data access and take advantage of the Task<T> support introduced in .NET 4.5 within data access scenarios. This allows you to free up threads that might otherwise by blocked on data access requests, and enable them to be used to process other requests whilst you wait for the database engine to process operations. When the database server responds the thread will be re-queued within your ASP.NET application and execution will continue. This enables you to easily write significantly more scalable server code. Here is an example ASP.NET WebAPI action that makes use of the new EF6 async query methods: Interception and Logging Interception and SQL logging allows you to view – or even change – every command that is sent to the database by Entity Framework. This includes a simple, human readable log – which is great for debugging – as well as some lower level building blocks that give you access to the command and results. Here is an example of wiring up the simple log to Debug in the constructor of an MVC controller: Custom Code-First Conventions The new Custom Code-First Conventions enable bulk configuration of a Code First model – reducing the amount of code you need to write and maintain. Conventions are great when your domain classes don’t match the Code First conventions. For example, the following convention configures all properties that are called ‘Key’ to be the primary key of the entity they belong to. This is different than the default Code First convention that expects Id or <type name>Id. Connection Resiliency The new Connection Resiliency feature in EF6 enables you to register an execution strategy to handle – and potentially retry – failed database operations. This is especially useful when deploying to cloud environments where dropped connections become more common as you traverse load balancers and distributed networks. EF6 includes a built-in execution strategy for SQL Azure that knows about retryable exception types and has some sensible – but overridable – defaults for the number of retries and time between retries when errors occur. Registering it is simple using the new Code-Based Configuration support: These are just some of the new features in EF6. You can visit the release notes section of the Entity Framework site for a complete list of new features. Microsoft OWIN Components Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) defines an open abstraction between .NET web servers and web applications, and the ASP.NET “Katana” project brings this abstraction to ASP.NET. OWIN decouples the web application from the server, making web applications host-agnostic. For example, you can host an OWIN-based web application in IIS or self-host it in a custom process. For more information about OWIN and Katana, see What's new in OWIN and Katana. Summary Today’s Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET and Entity Framework release delivers some fantastic new features that streamline your web development lifecycle. These feature span from server framework to data access to tooling to client-side HTML development. They also integrate some great open-source technology and contributions from our developer community. Download and start using them today! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Creating Custom Ajax Control Toolkit Controls

- by Stephen Walther

The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can extend the Ajax Control Toolkit with custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. I describe how you can create the two halves of an Ajax Control Toolkit control: the server-side control extender and the client-side control behavior. Finally, I explain how you can use the new Ajax Control Toolkit control in a Web Forms page. At the end of this blog entry, there is a link to download a Visual Studio 2010 solution which contains the code for two Ajax Control Toolkit controls: SampleExtender and PopupHelpExtender. The SampleExtender contains the minimum skeleton for creating a new Ajax Control Toolkit control. You can use the SampleExtender as a starting point for your custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. The PopupHelpExtender control is a super simple custom Ajax Control Toolkit control. This control extender displays a help message when you start typing into a TextBox control. The animated GIF below demonstrates what happens when you click into a TextBox which has been extended with the PopupHelp extender. Here’s a sample of a Web Forms page which uses the control: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="ShowPopupHelp.aspx.cs" Inherits="MyACTControls.Web.Default" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html > <head runat="server"> <title>Show Popup Help</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> <%-- Social Security Number --%> <asp:Label ID="lblSSN" Text="SSN:" AssociatedControlID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph1" TargetControlID="txtSSN" HelpText="Please enter your social security number." runat="server" /> <%-- Social Security Number --%> <asp:Label ID="lblPhone" Text="Phone Number:" AssociatedControlID="txtPhone" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtPhone" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph2" TargetControlID="txtPhone" HelpText="Please enter your phone number." runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> In the page above, the PopupHelp extender is used to extend the functionality of the two TextBox controls. When focus is given to a TextBox control, the popup help message is displayed. An Ajax Control Toolkit control extender consists of two parts: a server-side control extender and a client-side behavior. For example, the PopupHelp extender consists of a server-side PopupHelpExtender control (PopupHelpExtender.cs) and a client-side PopupHelp behavior JavaScript script (PopupHelpBehavior.js). Over the course of this blog entry, I describe how you can create both the server-side extender and the client-side behavior. Writing the Server-Side Code Creating a Control Extender You create a control extender by creating a class that inherits from the abstract ExtenderControlBase class. For example, the PopupHelpExtender control is declared like this: public class PopupHelpExtender: ExtenderControlBase { } The ExtenderControlBase class is part of the Ajax Control Toolkit. This base class contains all of the common server properties and methods of every Ajax Control Toolkit extender control. The ExtenderControlBase class inherits from the ExtenderControl class. The ExtenderControl class is a standard class in the ASP.NET framework located in the System.Web.UI namespace. This class is responsible for generating a client-side behavior. The class generates a call to the Microsoft Ajax Library $create() method which looks like this: <script type="text/javascript"> $create(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, {"HelpText":"Please enter your social security number.","id":"ph1"}, null, null, $get("txtSSN")); }); </script> The JavaScript $create() method is part of the Microsoft Ajax Library. The reference for this method can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397487.aspx This method accepts the following parameters: type – The type of client behavior to create. The $create() method above creates a client PopupHelpBehavior. Properties – Enables you to pass initial values for the properties of the client behavior. For example, the initial value of the HelpText property. This is how server property values are passed to the client. Events – Enables you to pass client-side event handlers to the client behavior. References – Enables you to pass references to other client components. Element – The DOM element associated with the client behavior. This will be the DOM element associated with the control being extended such as the txtSSN TextBox. The $create() method is generated for you automatically. You just need to focus on writing the server-side control extender class. Specifying the Target Control All Ajax Control Toolkit extenders inherit a TargetControlID property from the ExtenderControlBase class. This property, the TargetControlID property, points at the control that the extender control extends. For example, the Ajax Control Toolkit TextBoxWatermark control extends a TextBox, the ConfirmButton control extends a Button, and the Calendar control extends a TextBox. You must indicate the type of control which your extender is extending. You indicate the type of control by adding a [TargetControlType] attribute to your control. For example, the PopupHelp extender is declared like this: [TargetControlType(typeof(TextBox))] public class PopupHelpExtender: ExtenderControlBase { } The PopupHelp extender can be used to extend a TextBox control. If you try to use the PopupHelp extender with another type of control then an exception is thrown. If you want to create an extender control which can be used with any type of ASP.NET control (Button, DataView, TextBox or whatever) then use the following attribute: [TargetControlType(typeof(Control))] Decorating Properties with Attributes If you decorate a server-side property with the [ExtenderControlProperty] attribute then the value of the property gets passed to the control’s client-side behavior. The value of the property gets passed to the client through the $create() method discussed above. The PopupHelp control contains the following HelpText property: [ExtenderControlProperty] [RequiredProperty] public string HelpText { get { return GetPropertyValue("HelpText", "Help Text"); } set { SetPropertyValue("HelpText", value); } } The HelpText property determines the help text which pops up when you start typing into a TextBox control. Because the HelpText property is decorated with the [ExtenderControlProperty] attribute, any value assigned to this property on the server is passed to the client automatically. For example, if you declare the PopupHelp extender in a Web Form page like this: <asp:TextBox ID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph1" TargetControlID="txtSSN" HelpText="Please enter your social security number." runat="server" /> Then the PopupHelpExtender renders the call to the the following Microsoft Ajax Library $create() method: $create(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, {"HelpText":"Please enter your social security number.","id":"ph1"}, null, null, $get("txtSSN")); You can see this call to the JavaScript $create() method by selecting View Source in your browser. This call to the $create() method calls a method named set_HelpText() automatically and passes the value “Please enter your social security number”. There are several attributes which you can use to decorate server-side properties including: ExtenderControlProperty – When a property is marked with this attribute, the value of the property is passed to the client automatically. ExtenderControlEvent – When a property is marked with this attribute, the property represents a client event handler. Required – When a value is not assigned to this property on the server, an error is displayed. DefaultValue – The default value of the property passed to the client. ClientPropertyName – The name of the corresponding property in the JavaScript behavior. For example, the server-side property is named ID (uppercase) and the client-side property is named id (lower-case). IDReferenceProperty – Applied to properties which refer to the IDs of other controls. URLProperty – Calls ResolveClientURL() to convert from a server-side URL to a URL which can be used on the client. ElementReference – Returns a reference to a DOM element by performing a client $get(). The WebResource, ClientResource, and the RequiredScript Attributes The PopupHelp extender uses three embedded resources named PopupHelpBehavior.js, PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js, and PopupHelpBehavior.css. The first two files are JavaScript files and the final file is a Cascading Style sheet file. These files are compiled as embedded resources. You don’t need to mark them as embedded resources in your Visual Studio solution because they get added to the assembly when the assembly is compiled by a build task. You can see that these files get embedded into the MyACTControls assembly by using Red Gate’s .NET Reflector tool: In order to use these files with the PopupHelp extender, you need to work with both the WebResource and the ClientScriptResource attributes. The PopupHelp extender includes the following three WebResource attributes. [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.css", "text/css", PerformSubstitution = true)] These WebResource attributes expose the embedded resource from the assembly so that they can be accessed by using the ScriptResource.axd or WebResource.axd handlers. The first parameter passed to the WebResource attribute is the name of the embedded resource and the second parameter is the content type of the embedded resource. The PopupHelp extender also includes the following ClientScriptResource and ClientCssResource attributes: [ClientScriptResource("MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior", "PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.js")] [ClientCssResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.css")] Including these attributes causes the PopupHelp extender to request these resources when you add the PopupHelp extender to a page. If you open View Source in a browser which uses the PopupHelp extender then you will see the following link for the Cascading Style Sheet file: <link href="/WebResource.axd?d=0uONMsWXUuEDG-pbJHAC1kuKiIMteQFkYLmZdkgv7X54TObqYoqVzU4mxvaa4zpn5H9ch0RDwRYKwtO8zM5mKgO6C4WbrbkWWidKR07LD1d4n4i_uNB1mHEvXdZu2Ae5mDdVNDV53znnBojzCzwvSw2&t=634417392021676003" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /> You also will see the following script include for the JavaScript file: <script src="/ScriptResource.axd?d=pIS7xcGaqvNLFBvExMBQSp_0xR3mpDfS0QVmmyu1aqDUjF06TrW1jVDyXNDMtBHxpRggLYDvgFTWOsrszflZEDqAcQCg-hDXjun7ON0Ol7EXPQIdOe1GLMceIDv3OeX658-tTq2LGdwXhC1-dE7_6g2&t=ffffffff88a33b59" type="text/javascript"></script> The JavaScrpt file returned by this request to ScriptResource.axd contains the combined scripts for any and all Ajax Control Toolkit controls in a page. By default, the Ajax Control Toolkit combines all of the JavaScript files required by a page into a single JavaScript file. Combining files in this way really speeds up how quickly all of the JavaScript files get delivered from the web server to the browser. So, by default, there will be only one ScriptResource.axd include for all of the JavaScript files required by a page. If you want to disable Script Combining, and create separate links, then disable Script Combining like this: <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" CombineScripts="false" /> There is one more important attribute used by Ajax Control Toolkit extenders. The PopupHelp behavior uses the following two RequirdScript attributes to load the JavaScript files which are required by the PopupHelp behavior: [RequiredScript(typeof(CommonToolkitScripts), 0)] [RequiredScript(typeof(PopupExtender), 1)] The first parameter of the RequiredScript attribute represents either the string name of a JavaScript file or the type of an Ajax Control Toolkit control. The second parameter represents the order in which the JavaScript files are loaded (This second parameter is needed because .NET attributes are intrinsically unordered). In this case, the RequiredScript attribute will load the JavaScript files associated with the CommonToolkitScripts type and the JavaScript files associated with the PopupExtender in that order. The PopupHelp behavior depends on these JavaScript files. Writing the Client-Side Code The PopupHelp extender uses a client-side behavior written with the Microsoft Ajax Library. Here is the complete code for the client-side behavior: (function () { // The unique name of the script registered with the // client script loader var scriptName = "PopupHelpBehavior"; function execute() { Type.registerNamespace('MyACTControls'); MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { /// <summary> /// A behavior which displays popup help for a textbox /// </summmary> /// <param name="element" type="Sys.UI.DomElement">The element to attach to</param> MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.initializeBase(this, [element]); this._textbox = Sys.Extended.UI.TextBoxWrapper.get_Wrapper(element); this._cssClass = "ajax__popupHelp"; this._popupBehavior = null; this._popupPosition = Sys.Extended.UI.PositioningMode.BottomLeft; this._popupDiv = null; this._helpText = "Help Text"; this._element$delegates = { focus: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onfocus), blur: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onblur) }; } MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { initialize: function () { MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.callBaseMethod(this, 'initialize'); // Add event handlers for focus and blur var element = this.get_element(); $addHandlers(element, this._element$delegates); }, _ensurePopup: function () { if (!this._popupDiv) { var element = this.get_element(); var id = this.get_id(); this._popupDiv = $common.createElementFromTemplate({ nodeName: "div", properties: { id: id + "_popupDiv" }, cssClasses: ["ajax__popupHelp"] }, element.parentNode); this._popupBehavior = new $create(Sys.Extended.UI.PopupBehavior, { parentElement: element }, {}, {}, this._popupDiv); this._popupBehavior.set_positioningMode(this._popupPosition); } }, get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, _element_onfocus: function (e) { this.show(); }, _element_onblur: function (e) { this.hide(); }, show: function () { this._popupBehavior.show(); }, hide: function () { if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.hide(); } }, dispose: function() { var element = this.get_element(); $clearHandlers(element); if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.dispose(); this._popupBehavior = null; } } }; MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.registerClass('MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior', Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase); Sys.registerComponent(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, { name: "popupHelp" }); } // execute if (window.Sys && Sys.loader) { Sys.loader.registerScript(scriptName, ["ExtendedBase", "ExtendedCommon"], execute); } else { execute(); } })(); In the following sections, we’ll discuss how this client-side behavior works. Wrapping the Behavior for the Script Loader The behavior is wrapped with the following script: (function () { // The unique name of the script registered with the // client script loader var scriptName = "PopupHelpBehavior"; function execute() { // Behavior Content } // execute if (window.Sys && Sys.loader) { Sys.loader.registerScript(scriptName, ["ExtendedBase", "ExtendedCommon"], execute); } else { execute(); } })(); This code is required by the Microsoft Ajax Library Script Loader. You need this code if you plan to use a behavior directly from client-side code and you want to use the Script Loader. If you plan to only use your code in the context of the Ajax Control Toolkit then you can leave out this code. Registering a JavaScript Namespace The PopupHelp behavior is declared within a namespace named MyACTControls. In the code above, this namespace is created with the following registerNamespace() method: Type.registerNamespace('MyACTControls'); JavaScript does not have any built-in way of creating namespaces to prevent naming conflicts. The Microsoft Ajax Library extends JavaScript with support for namespaces. You can learn more about the registerNamespace() method here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397723.aspx Creating the Behavior The actual Popup behavior is created with the following code. MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { /// <summary> /// A behavior which displays popup help for a textbox /// </summmary> /// <param name="element" type="Sys.UI.DomElement">The element to attach to</param> MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.initializeBase(this, [element]); this._textbox = Sys.Extended.UI.TextBoxWrapper.get_Wrapper(element); this._cssClass = "ajax__popupHelp"; this._popupBehavior = null; this._popupPosition = Sys.Extended.UI.PositioningMode.BottomLeft; this._popupDiv = null; this._helpText = "Help Text"; this._element$delegates = { focus: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onfocus), blur: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onblur) }; } MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { initialize: function () { MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.callBaseMethod(this, 'initialize'); // Add event handlers for focus and blur var element = this.get_element(); $addHandlers(element, this._element$delegates); }, _ensurePopup: function () { if (!this._popupDiv) { var element = this.get_element(); var id = this.get_id(); this._popupDiv = $common.createElementFromTemplate({ nodeName: "div", properties: { id: id + "_popupDiv" }, cssClasses: ["ajax__popupHelp"] }, element.parentNode); this._popupBehavior = new $create(Sys.Extended.UI.PopupBehavior, { parentElement: element }, {}, {}, this._popupDiv); this._popupBehavior.set_positioningMode(this._popupPosition); } }, get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, _element_onfocus: function (e) { this.show(); }, _element_onblur: function (e) { this.hide(); }, show: function () { this._popupBehavior.show(); }, hide: function () { if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.hide(); } }, dispose: function() { var element = this.get_element(); $clearHandlers(element); if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.dispose(); this._popupBehavior = null; } } }; The code above has two parts. The first part of the code is used to define the constructor function for the PopupHelp behavior. This is a factory method which returns an instance of a PopupHelp behavior: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { } The second part of the code modified the prototype for the PopupHelp behavior: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { } Any code which is particular to a single instance of the PopupHelp behavior should be placed in the constructor function. For example, the default value of the _helpText field is assigned in the constructor function: this._helpText = "Help Text"; Any code which is shared among all instances of the PopupHelp behavior should be added to the PopupHelp behavior’s prototype. For example, the public HelpText property is added to the prototype: get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, Registering a JavaScript Class After you create the PopupHelp behavior, you must register the behavior as a class by using the Microsoft Ajax registerClass() method like this: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.registerClass('MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior', Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase); This call to registerClass() registers PopupHelp behavior as a class which derives from the base Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase class. Like the ExtenderControlBase class on the server side, the BehaviorBase class on the client side contains method used by every behavior. The documentation for the BehaviorBase class can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb311020.aspx The most important methods and properties of the BehaviorBase class are the following: dispose() – Use this method to clean up all resources used by your behavior. In the case of the PopupHelp behavior, the dispose() method is used to remote the event handlers created by the behavior and disposed the Popup behavior. get_element() -- Use this property to get the DOM element associated with the behavior. In other words, the DOM element which the behavior extends. get_id() – Use this property to the ID of the current behavior. initialize() – Use this method to initialize the behavior. This method is called after all of the properties are set by the $create() method. Creating Debug and Release Scripts You might have noticed that the PopupHelp behavior uses two scripts named PopupHelpBehavior.js and PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js. However, you never create these two scripts. Instead, you only create a single script named PopupHelpBehavior.pre.js. The pre in PopupHelpBehavior.pre.js stands for preprocessor. When you build the Ajax Control Toolkit (or the sample Visual Studio Solution at the end of this blog entry), a build task named JSBuild generates the PopupHelpBehavior.js release script and PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js debug script automatically. The JSBuild preprocessor supports the following directives: #IF #ELSE #ENDIF #INCLUDE #LOCALIZE #DEFINE #UNDEFINE The preprocessor directives are used to mark code which should only appear in the debug version of the script. The directives are used extensively in the Microsoft Ajax Library. For example, the Microsoft Ajax Library Array.contains() method is created like this: $type.contains = function Array$contains(array, item) { //#if DEBUG var e = Function._validateParams(arguments, [ {name: "array", type: Array, elementMayBeNull: true}, {name: "item", mayBeNull: true} ]); if (e) throw e; //#endif return (indexOf(array, item) >= 0); } Notice that you add each of the preprocessor directives inside a JavaScript comment. The comment prevents Visual Studio from getting confused with its Intellisense. The release version, but not the debug version, of the PopupHelpBehavior script is also minified automatically by the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. The minifier is invoked by a build step in the project file. Conclusion The goal of this blog entry was to explain how you can create custom AJAX Control Toolkit controls. In the first part of this blog entry, you learned how to create the server-side portion of an Ajax Control Toolkit control. You learned how to derive a new control from the ExtenderControlBase class and decorate its properties with the necessary attributes. Next, in the second part of this blog entry, you learned how to create the client-side portion of an Ajax Control Toolkit control by creating a client-side behavior with JavaScript. You learned how to use the methods of the Microsoft Ajax Library to extend your client behavior from the BehaviorBase class. Download the Custom ACT Starter Solution

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Creating a dynamic proxy generator – Part 1 – Creating the Assembly builder, Module builder and cach

- by SeanMcAlinden

I’ve recently started a project with a few mates to learn the ins and outs of Dependency Injection, AOP and a number of other pretty crucial patterns of development as we’ve all been using these patterns for a while but have relied totally on third part solutions to do the magic. We thought it would be interesting to really get into the details by rolling our own IoC container and hopefully learn a lot on the way, and you never know, we might even create an excellent framework. The open source project is called Rapid IoC and is hosted at http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/ One of the most interesting tasks for me is creating the dynamic proxy generator for enabling Aspect Orientated Programming (AOP). In this series of articles, I’m going to track each step I take for creating the dynamic proxy generator and I’ll try my best to explain what everything means - mainly as I’ll be using Reflection.Emit to emit a fair amount of intermediate language code (IL) to create the proxy types at runtime which can be a little taxing to read. It’s worth noting that building the proxy is without a doubt going to be slightly painful so I imagine there will be plenty of areas I’ll need to change along the way. Anyway lets get started… Part 1 - Creating the Assembly builder, Module builder and caching mechanism Part 1 is going to be a really nice simple start, I’m just going to start by creating the assembly, module and type caches. The reason we need to create caches for the assembly, module and types is simply to save the overhead of recreating proxy types that have already been generated, this will be one of the important steps to ensure that the framework is fast… kind of important as we’re calling the IoC container ‘Rapid’ – will be a little bit embarrassing if we manage to create the slowest framework. The Assembly builder The assembly builder is what is used to create an assembly at runtime, we’re going to have two overloads, one will be for the actual use of the proxy generator, the other will be mainly for testing purposes as it will also save the assembly so we can use Reflector to examine the code that has been created. Here’s the code: DynamicAssemblyBuilder using System; using System.Reflection; using System.Reflection.Emit; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Assembly { /// <summary> /// Class for creating an assembly builder. /// </summary> internal static class DynamicAssemblyBuilder { #region Create /// <summary> /// Creates an assembly builder. /// </summary> /// <param name="assemblyName">Name of the assembly.</param> public static AssemblyBuilder Create(string assemblyName) { AssemblyName name = new AssemblyName(assemblyName); AssemblyBuilder assembly = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DefineDynamicAssembly( name, AssemblyBuilderAccess.Run); DynamicAssemblyCache.Add(assembly); return assembly; } /// <summary> /// Creates an assembly builder and saves the assembly to the passed in location. /// </summary> /// <param name="assemblyName">Name of the assembly.</param> /// <param name="filePath">The file path.</param> public static AssemblyBuilder Create(string assemblyName, string filePath) { AssemblyName name = new AssemblyName(assemblyName); AssemblyBuilder assembly = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DefineDynamicAssembly( name, AssemblyBuilderAccess.RunAndSave, filePath); DynamicAssemblyCache.Add(assembly); return assembly; } #endregion } } So hopefully the above class is fairly explanatory, an AssemblyName is created using the passed in string for the actual name of the assembly. An AssemblyBuilder is then constructed with the current AppDomain and depending on the overload used, it is either just run in the current context or it is set up ready for saving. It is then added to the cache. DynamicAssemblyCache using System.Reflection.Emit; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Exceptions; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Resources.Exceptions; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Assembly { /// <summary> /// Cache for storing the dynamic assembly builder. /// </summary> internal static class DynamicAssemblyCache { #region Declarations private static object syncRoot = new object(); internal static AssemblyBuilder Cache = null; #endregion #region Adds a dynamic assembly to the cache. /// <summary> /// Adds a dynamic assembly builder to the cache. /// </summary> /// <param name="assemblyBuilder">The assembly builder.</param> public static void Add(AssemblyBuilder assemblyBuilder) { lock (syncRoot) { Cache = assemblyBuilder; } } #endregion #region Gets the cached assembly /// <summary> /// Gets the cached assembly builder. /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static AssemblyBuilder Get { get { lock (syncRoot) { if (Cache != null) { return Cache; } } throw new RapidDynamicProxyAssertionException(AssertionResources.NoAssemblyInCache); } } #endregion } } The cache is simply a static property that will store the AssemblyBuilder (I know it’s a little weird that I’ve made it public, this is for testing purposes, I know that’s a bad excuse but hey…) There are two methods for using the cache – Add and Get, these just provide thread safe access to the cache. The Module Builder The module builder is required as the create proxy classes will need to live inside a module within the assembly. Here’s the code: DynamicModuleBuilder using System.Reflection.Emit; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Assembly; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Module { /// <summary> /// Class for creating a module builder. /// </summary> internal static class DynamicModuleBuilder { /// <summary> /// Creates a module builder using the cached assembly. /// </summary> public static ModuleBuilder Create() { string assemblyName = DynamicAssemblyCache.Get.GetName().Name; ModuleBuilder moduleBuilder = DynamicAssemblyCache.Get.DefineDynamicModule (assemblyName, string.Format("{0}.dll", assemblyName)); DynamicModuleCache.Add(moduleBuilder); return moduleBuilder; } } } As you can see, the module builder is created on the assembly that lives in the DynamicAssemblyCache, the module is given the assembly name and also a string representing the filename if the assembly is to be saved. It is then added to the DynamicModuleCache. DynamicModuleCache using System.Reflection.Emit; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Exceptions; using Rapid.DynamicProxy.Resources.Exceptions; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Module { /// <summary> /// Class for storing the module builder. /// </summary> internal static class DynamicModuleCache { #region Declarations private static object syncRoot = new object(); internal static ModuleBuilder Cache = null; #endregion #region Add /// <summary> /// Adds a dynamic module builder to the cache. /// </summary> /// <param name="moduleBuilder">The module builder.</param> public static void Add(ModuleBuilder moduleBuilder) { lock (syncRoot) { Cache = moduleBuilder; } } #endregion #region Get /// <summary> /// Gets the cached module builder. /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static ModuleBuilder Get { get { lock (syncRoot) { if (Cache != null) { return Cache; } } throw new RapidDynamicProxyAssertionException(AssertionResources.NoModuleInCache); } } #endregion } } The DynamicModuleCache is very similar to the assembly cache, it is simply a statically stored module with thread safe Add and Get methods. The DynamicTypeCache To end off this post, I’m going to create the cache for storing the generated proxy classes. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the type of collection I should use to store the types and have finally decided that for the time being I’m going to use a generic dictionary. This may change when I can actually performance test the proxy generator but the time being I think it makes good sense in theory, mainly as it pretty much maintains it’s performance with varying numbers of items – almost constant (0)1. Plus I won’t ever need to loop through the items which is not the dictionaries strong point. Here’s the code as it currently stands: DynamicTypeCache using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Security.Cryptography; using System.Text; namespace Rapid.DynamicProxy.Types { /// <summary> /// Cache for storing proxy types. /// </summary> internal static class DynamicTypeCache { #region Declarations static object syncRoot = new object(); public static Dictionary<string, Type> Cache = new Dictionary<string, Type>(); #endregion /// <summary> /// Adds a proxy to the type cache. /// </summary> /// <param name="type">The type.</param> /// <param name="proxy">The proxy.</param> public static void AddProxyForType(Type type, Type proxy) { lock (syncRoot) { Cache.Add(GetHashCode(type.AssemblyQualifiedName), proxy); } } /// <summary> /// Tries the type of the get proxy for. /// </summary> /// <param name="type">The type.</param> /// <returns></returns> public static Type TryGetProxyForType(Type type) { lock (syncRoot) { Type proxyType; Cache.TryGetValue(GetHashCode(type.AssemblyQualifiedName), out proxyType); return proxyType; } } #region Private Methods private static string GetHashCode(string fullName) { SHA1CryptoServiceProvider provider = new SHA1CryptoServiceProvider(); Byte[] buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(fullName); Byte[] hash = provider.ComputeHash(buffer, 0, buffer.Length); return Convert.ToBase64String(hash); } #endregion } } As you can see, there are two public methods, one for adding to the cache and one for getting from the cache. Hopefully they should be clear enough, the Get is a TryGet as I do not want the dictionary to throw an exception if a proxy doesn’t exist within the cache. Other than that I’ve decided to create a key using the SHA1CryptoServiceProvider, this may change but my initial though is the SHA1 algorithm is pretty fast to put together using the provider and it is also very unlikely to have any hashing collisions. (there are some maths behind how unlikely this is – here’s the wiki if you’re interested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA_hash_functions) Anyway, that’s the end of part 1 – although I haven’t started any of the fun stuff (by fun I mean hairpulling, teeth grating Relfection.Emit style fun), I’ve got the basis of the DynamicProxy in place so all we have to worry about now is creating the types, interceptor classes, method invocation information classes and finally a really nice fluent interface that will abstract all of the hard-core craziness away and leave us with a lightning fast, easy to use AOP framework. Hope you find the series interesting. All of the source code can be viewed and/or downloaded at our codeplex site - http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/ Kind Regards, Sean.

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IIS SSL Certificate Renewal Pain

- by Rick Strahl

I’m in the middle of my annual certificate renewal for the West Wind site and I can honestly say that I hate IIS’s certificate system. When it works it’s fine, but when it doesn’t man can it be a pain. Because I deal with public certificates on my site merely once a year, and you have to perform the certificate dance just the right way, I seem to run into some sort of trouble every year, thinking that Microsoft surely must have addressed the issues I ran into previously – HA! Not so. Don’t ever use the Renew Certificate Feature in IIS! The first rule that I should have never forgotten is that certificate renewals in IIS (7 is what I’m using but I think it’s no different in 7.5 and 8), simply don’t work if you’re submitting to get a public certificate from a certificate authority. I use DNSimple for my DNS domain management and SSL certificates because they provide ridiculously easy domain management and good prices for SSL certs – especially wildcard certificates, which is what I use on west-wind.com. Certificates in IIS can be found pegged to the machine root. If you go into the IIS Manager, go to the machine root the tree and then click on certificates and you then get various certificate options: Both of these options create a new Certificate request (CSR), which is just a text file. But if you’re silly enough like me to click on the Renew button on your old certificate, you’ll find that you end up generating a very long Certificate Request that looks nothing like the original certificate request and the format that’s used for this is not accepted by most certificate authorities. While I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, it simply looks like IIS is respecting none of your original certificate bit size choices and is generating a huge certificate request that is 3 times the size of a ‘normal’ certificate request. The end result is (and I’ve done this at least twice now) is that the certificate processor is likely to fail processing those renewals. Always create a new Certificate While it’s a little more work and you have to remember how to fill out the certificate request properly, this is the safe way to make sure your certificate generates properly. First comes the Distinguished Name Properties dialog: Ah yes you have to love the nomenclature of this stuff. Distinguished name, Common name – WTF is a common name? It doesn’t look common to me! Make sure this form gets filled out correctly. Common NameThis is the domain name of the Web site. In my case I’m creating a wildcard certificate so I’m using the * prefix. If you’re purchasing a certificate for a specific domain use www.west-wind.com or store.west-wind.com for example. Make sure this matches the EXACT domain you’re trying to use secure access on because that’s all the certificate is going to work on unless you get a wildcard certificate. Organization Is the name of your company or organization. Depending on the kind of certificate you purchase this name will show up on your certificate. Most low end SSL certificates (ie. those that cost under $100 for single domains) don’t list the organization, the higher signature certificates that also require extensive validation by the cert authority do. Regardless you should make sure this matches the right company/organization. Organizational Unit This can be anything. Not really sure what this is for, but traditionally I’ve always set this to Web because – well this is a Web thing after all right? I’ve never seen this used anywhere that I can tell other than to internally reference the cert. State and CountryPretty obvious. Should reflect the location of the business/organization/person or site. Next you have to configure the bit size used for the certificate: The default on this dialog is 1024, but I’ve found that most providers these days request a minimum bit length of 2048, as did my DNSimple provider. Again check with the provider when you submit to make sure. Bit length mismatches can cause problems if you use a size that isn’t supported by the provider. I had that happen last year when I submitted my CSR and it got rejected quite a bit later, when the certs usually are issued within an hour or less. When you’re done here, the certificate is saved to disk as a .txt file and it should look something like this (this is a 2048 bit length CSR):-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- MIIEVGCCAz0CAQAwdjELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxDzANBgNVBAgMBkhhd2FpaTENMAsG A1UEBwwEUGFpYTEfMB0GA1UECgwWV2VzdCBXaW5kIFRlY2hub2xvZ2llczEMMAoG B1UECwwDV2ViMRgwFgYDVQQDDA8qLndlc3Qtd2luZC5jb20wggEiMA0GCSqGSIb3 DQEBAQUAA4IBDwAwggEKAoIBAQDIPWOFMkMVRp2Ftj9w/cCVV4OYYhoZYtl+8lTk oqDwKca0xWHLgioX/9v0rZLS6a82MHqKEBxVXu+cuCmSE4AQtB/1YH9lS4tpc/be OZDvnTotP6l4MCEzzAfROcw4CiIg6X0RMSnl8IATAvv2V5LQM9TDdt9oDdMpX2IY +vVC9RZ7PMHBmR9kwI2i/lrKitzhQKaHgpmKcRlM6iqpALUiX28w5HJaDKK1MDHN 607tyFJLHijuJKx7PdTqZYf50KkC3NupfZ2avVycf18Q13jHWj59tvwEOczoVzRL l4LQivAqbhyiqMpWnrZunIOUZta5aGm+jo7O1knGWJjxuraTAgMBAAGgggGYMBoG CisGAQQBgjcNAgMxDBYKNi4yLjkyMDAuMjA0BgkrBgEEAYI3FRQxJzAlAgEFDAZS QVNYUFMMC1JBU1hQU1xSaWNrDAtJbmV0TWdyLmV4ZTByBgorBgEEAYI3DQICMWQw YgIBAR5aAE0AaQBjAHIAbwBzAG8AZgB0ACAAUgBTAEEAIABTAEMAaABhAG4AbgBl AGwAIABDAHIAeQBwAHQAbwBnAHIAYQBwAGgAaQBjACAAUAByAG8AdgBpAGQAZQBy AwEAMIHPBgkqhkiG9w0BCQ4xgcEwgb4wDgYDVR0PAQH/BAQDAgTwMBMGA1UdJQQM MAoGCCsGAQUFBwMBMHgGCSqGSIb3DQEJDwRrMGkwDgYIKoZIhvcNAwICAgCAMA4G CCqGSIb3DQMEAgIAgDALBglghkgBZQMEASowCwYJYIZIAWUDBAEtMAsGCWCGSAFl AwQBAjALBglghkgBZQMEAQUwBwYFKw4DAgcwCgYIKoZIhvcNAwcwHQYDVR0OBBYE FD/yOsTbXE+GVFCFMmldzQvyloz9MA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAA4IBAQCK6LlsCuIM 1AU0niB6QZ9v0FTsGFxP1dYvVUnJyY6VEKNiGFiQjZac7UCs0p58yScdXWEFOE8V OsjAYD3xYNc05+ckyD67UHRGEUAVB9RBvbKW23KeR/8kBmEzc8PemD52YOgExxAJ 57xWmAwEHAvbgYzQvhO8AOzH3TGvvHbg5UKM1pYgNmuwZq5DkL/IDoeIJwfk/wrI wghNTuxxIFgbH4YrgLgv4PRvrS/LaTCRBdboaCgzATMczaOb1nd/DVNR+3fCtMhM W0psTAjzRbmXF3nJyAQa7jF/52gkY0RfFX2lG5tJnG+XDsVNvKNvh9Qa5Tlmkm06 ILKCm9ciWCKk -----END NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- You can take that certificate request and submit that to your certificate provider. Since this is base64 encoded you can typically just paste it into a text box on the submission page, or some providers will ask you to upload the CSR as a file. What does a Renewal look like? Note the length of the CSR will vary somewhat with key strength, but compare this to a renewal request that IIS generated from my existing site:-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- MIIPpwYFKoZIhvcNAQcCoIIPmDCCD5QCAQExCzAJBgUrDgMCGgUAMIIIqAYJKoZI hvcNAQcBoIIImQSCCJUwggiRMIIH+gIBADBdMSEwHwYDVQQLDBhEb21haW4gQ29u dHJvbCBWYWxpFGF0ZWQxHjAcBgNVBAsMFUVzc2VudGlhbFNTTCBXaWxkY2FyZDEY MBYGA1UEAwwPKi53ZXN0LXdpbmQuY29tMIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCB iQKBgQCK4OuIOR18Wb8tNMGRZiD1c9X57b332Lj7DhbckFqLs0ys8kVDHrTXSj+T Ye9nmAvfPpZmBtE5p9qRNN79rUYugAdl+qEtE4IJe1bRfxXzcKa1SXa8+TEs3zQa zYSmcR2dDuC8om1eAdeCtt0NnkvANgm1VLwGOor/UHMASaEhCQIDAQABoIIG8jAa BgorBgEEAYI3DQIDMQwWCjYuMi45MjAwLjIwNAYJKwYBBAGCNxUUMScwJQIBBQwG UkFTWFBTDAtSQVNYUFNcUmljawwLSW5ldE1nci5leGUwZgYKKwYBBAGCNw0CAjFY MFYCAQIeTgBNAGkAYwByAG8AcwBvAGYAdAAgAFMAdAByAG8AbgBnACAAQwByAHkA cAB0AG8AZwByAGEAcABoAGkAYwAgAFAAcgBvAHYAaQBkAGUAcgMBADCCAQAGCSqG SIb3DQEJDjGB8jCB7zAOBgNVHQ8BAf8EBAMCBaAwDAYDVR0TAQH/BAIwADA0BgNV 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And it didn’t work. IIS creates a custom CSR that is encoded in a format that no certificate authority I’ve ever used uses. If you want the gory details of what’s in there look at this ServerFault question (thanks to Mika in the comments). In the end it doesn’t matter though – no certificate authority knows what to do with this CSR. So create a new CSR and skip the renewal. Always! Use the same Server Keep in mind that on IIS at least you should always create your certificate on a single server and then when you receive the final certificate from your provider import it on that server. IIS tracks the CSR it created and requires it in order to import the final certificate properly. So if for some reason you try to install the certificate on another server, it won’t work. I’ve also run into trouble trying to install the same certificate twice – this time around I didn’t give my certificate the proper friendly name and IIS failed to allow me to assign the certificate to any of my Web sites. So I removed the certificate and tried to import again, only to find it failed the second time around. There are other ways to fix this, but in my case I had to have the certificate re-issued to work – not what you want to do. Regardless of what you do though, when you import make sure you do it right the first time by crossing all your t’s and dotting your i's– it’ll save you a lot of grief! You don’t actually have to use the server that the certificate gets installed on to generate the CSR and first install it, but it is generally a good idea to do so just so you can get the certificate installed into the right place right away. If you have access to the server where you need to install the certificate you might as well use it. But you can use another machine to generated the and install the certificate, then export the certificate and move it to another machine as needed. So you can use your Dev machine to create a certificate then export it and install it on a live server. More on installation and back up/export later. Installing the Certificate Once you’ve submitted a CSR request your provider will process the request and eventually issue you a new final certificate that contains another text file with the final key to import into your certificate store. IIS does this by combining the content in your certificate request with the original CSR. If all goes well your new certificate shows up in the certificate list and you’re ready to assign the certificate to your sites. Make sure you use a friendly name that matches domain name of your site. So use *.mysite.com or www.mysite.com or store.mysite.com to ensure IIS recognizes the certificate. I made the mistake of not naming my friendly name this way and found that IIS was unable to link my sites to my wildcard certificate. It needed to have the *. as part of the certificate otherwise the Hostname input field was blanked out. Changing the Friendly Name If you by accidentally used an invalid friendly name you can change it later in the Windows certificate store. Bring up a Run Box Type MMC File | Add/Remove Snap In Add Certificates | Computer Account | Local Computer Drill into Certificates | Personal | Certificates Find your Certificate | Right Click | Properties Edit the Friendly Name | Click OK Backing up your Certificate The first thing you should do once your certificate is successfully installed is to back it up! In case your server crashes or you otherwise lose your configuration this will ensure you have an easy way to recover and reinstall your certificate either on the same server or a different one. If you’re running a server farm or using a wildcard certificate you also need to get the certificate onto other machines and a PFX file import is the easiest way to do this. To back up your certificate select your certificate and choose Export from the context or sidebar menu: The Export Certificate option allows you to export a password protected binary file that you can import in a single step. You can copy the resulting binary PFX file to back up or copy to other machines to install on. Importing the certificate on another machine is as easy as pointing at the PFX file and specifying the password. IIS handles the rest. Assigning a new certificate to your Site Once you have the new certificate installed, all that’s left to do is assign it to your site. In IIS select your Web site and bring up the Site Bindings from the right sidebar. Add a new binding for https, bind it to port 443, specify your hostname and pick the certificate from the pick list. If you’re using a root site make sure to set up your certificate for www.yoursite.com and also for yoursite.com so that both work properly with SSL. Note that you need to explicitly configure each hostname for a certificate if you plan to use SSL. Luckily if you update your SSL certificate in the following year, IIS prompts you and asks whether you like to update all other sites that are using the existing cert to the newer cert. And you’re done. So what’s the Pain? So, all of this is old hat and it doesn’t look all that bad right? So what’s the pain here? Well if you follow the instructions and do everything right, then the process is about as straight forward as you would expect it to be. You create a cert request, you import it and assign it to your sites. That’s the basic steps and to be perfectly fair it works well – if nothing goes wrong. However, renewing tends to be the problem. The first unintuitive issue is that you simply shouldn’t renew but create a new CSR and generate your new certificate from that. Over the years I’ve fallen prey to the belief that Microsoft eventually will fix this so that the renewal creates the same type of CSR as the old cert, but apparently that will just never happen. Booo! The other problem I ran into is that I accidentally misnamed my imported certificate which in turn set off a chain of events that caused my originally issued certificate to become uninstallable. When I received my completed certificate I installed it and it installed just fine, but the friendly name was wrong. As a result IIS refused to assign the certificate to any of my host headered sites. That’s strike number one. Why the heck should the friendly name have any effect on the ability to attach the certificate??? Next I uninstalled the certificate because I figured that would be the easiest way to make sure I get it right. But I found that I could not reinstall my certificate. I kept getting these stop errors: "ASN1 bad tag value met" that would prevent the installation from completion. After searching around for this error and reading countless long messages on forums, I found that this error supposedly does not actually mean the install failed, but the list wouldn’t refresh. Commodo has this to say: Note: There is a known issue in IIS 7 giving the following error: "Cannot find the certificate request associated with this certificate file. A certificate request must be completed on the computer where it was created." You may also receive a message stating "ASN1 bad tag value met". If this is the same server that you generated the CSR on then, in most cases, the certificate is actually installed. Simply cancel the dialog and press "F5" to refresh the list of server certificates. If the new certificate is now in the list, you can continue with the next step. If it is not in the list, you will need to reissue your certificate using a new CSR (see our CSR creation instructions for IIS 7). After creating a new CSR, login to your Comodo account and click the 'replace' button for your certificate. Not sure if this issue is fixed in IIS 8 but that’s an insane bug to have crop up. As it turns out, in my case the refresh didn’t work and the certificate didn’t show up in the IIS list after the reinstall. In fact when looking at the certificate store I could see my certificate was installed in the right place, but the private key is missing which is most likely why IIS is not picking it up. It looks like IIS could not match the final cert to the original CSR generated. But again some sort of message to that affect might be helpful instead of ASN1 bad tag value met. Recovering the Private Key So it turns out my original problem was that I received the published key, but when I imported the private key was missing. There’s a relatively easy way to recover from this. If your certificate doesn’t show up in IIS check in the certificate store for the local machine (see steps above on how to bring this up). If you look at the certificate in Certificates/Personal/Certificates make sure you see the key as shown in the image below: if the key is missing it means that the certificate is missing the private key most likely. To fix a certificate you can do the following: Double click the certificate Go to the Details Tab Copy down the Serial number You can copy the serial number from the area blurred out above. The serial number will be in a format like ?00 a7 9b a1 a4 9d 91 63 57 d6 9f 26 b8 ee 79 b5 cb and you’ll need to strip out the spaces in order to use it in the next step. Next open up an Administrative command prompt and issue the following command: certutil -repairstore my 00a79ba1a49d916357d69f26b8ee79b5cb You should get a confirmation message that the repair worked. If you now go back to the certificate store you should now see the key icon show up on the certificate. Your certificate is fixed. Now go back into IIS Manager and refresh the list of certificates and if all goes well you should see all the certificates that showed in the cert store now: Remember – back up the key first then map to your site… Summary I deal with a lot of customers who run their own IIS servers, and I can’t tell you how often I hear about botched SSL installations. When I posted some of my issues on Twitter yesterday I got a hell storm of “me too” responses. I’m clearly not the only one, who’s run into this especially with renewals. I feel pretty comfortable with IIS configuration and I do a lot of it for support purposes, but the SSL configuration is one that never seems to go seamlessly. This blog post is meant as reminder to myself to read next time I do a renewal. So I can dot my i's and dash my t’s before I get caught in the mess I’m dealing with today. Hopefully some of you find this useful as well.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in IIS7 Security 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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Getting Started Building Windows 8 Store Apps with XAML/C#

- by dwahlin

Technology is fun isn’t it? As soon as you think you’ve figured out where things are heading a new technology comes onto the scene, changes things up, and offers new opportunities. One of the new technologies I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with lately is Windows 8 store applications. I posted my thoughts about Windows 8 during the BUILD conference in 2011 and still feel excited about the opportunity there. Time will tell how well it ends up being accepted by consumers but I’m hopeful that it’ll take off. I currently have two Windows 8 store application concepts I’m working on with one being built in XAML/C# and another in HTML/JavaScript. I really like that Microsoft supports both options since it caters to a variety of developers and makes it easy to get started regardless if you’re a desktop developer or Web developer. Here’s a quick look at how the technologies are organized in Windows 8: In this post I’ll focus on the basics of Windows 8 store XAML/C# apps by looking at features, files, and code provided by Visual Studio projects. To get started building these types of apps you’ll definitely need to have some knowledge of XAML and C#. Let’s get started by looking at the Windows 8 store project types available in Visual Studio 2012. Windows 8 Store XAML/C# Project Types When you open Visual Studio 2012 you’ll see a new entry under C# named Windows Store. It includes 6 different project types as shown next. The Blank App project provides initial starter code and a single page whereas the Grid App and Split App templates provide quite a bit more code as well as multiple pages for your application. The other projects available can be be used to create a class library project that runs in Windows 8 store apps, a WinRT component such as a custom control, and a unit test library project respectively. If you’re building an application that displays data in groups using the “tile” concept then the Grid App or Split App project templates are a good place to start. An example of the initial screens generated by each project is shown next: Grid App Split View App When a user clicks a tile in a Grid App they can view details about the tile data. With a Split View app groups/categories are shown and when the user clicks on a group they can see a list of all the different items and then drill-down into them: For the remainder of this post I’ll focus on functionality provided by the Blank App project since it provides a simple way to get started learning the fundamentals of building Windows 8 store apps. Blank App Project Walkthrough The Blank App project is a great place to start since it’s simple and lets you focus on the basics. In this post I’ll focus on what it provides you out of the box and cover additional details in future posts. Once you have the basics down you can move to the other project types if you need the functionality they provide. The Blank App project template does exactly what it says – you get an empty project with a few starter files added to help get you going. This is a good option if you’ll be building an app that doesn’t fit into the grid layout view that you see a lot of Windows 8 store apps following (such as on the Windows 8 start screen). I ended up starting with the Blank App project template for the app I’m currently working on since I’m not displaying data/image tiles (something the Grid App project does well) or drilling down into lists of data (functionality that the Split App project provides). The Blank App project provides images for the tiles and splash screen (you’ll definitely want to change these), a StandardStyles.xaml resource dictionary that includes a lot of helpful styles such as buttons for the AppBar (a special type of menu in Windows 8 store apps), an App.xaml file, and the app’s main page which is named MainPage.xaml. It also adds a Package.appxmanifest that is used to define functionality that your app requires, app information used in the store, plus more. The App.xaml, App.xaml.cs and StandardStyles.xaml Files The App.xaml file handles loading a resource dictionary named StandardStyles.xaml which has several key styles used throughout the application: <Application x:Class="BlankApp.App" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:local="using:BlankApp"> <Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>  <ResourceDictionary Source="Common/StandardStyles.xaml"/> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application> StandardStyles.xaml has style definitions for different text styles and AppBar buttons. If you scroll down toward the middle of the file you’ll see that many AppBar button styles are included such as one for an edit icon. Button styles like this can be used to quickly and easily add icons/buttons into your application without having to be an expert in design. <Style x:Key="EditAppBarButtonStyle" TargetType="ButtonBase" BasedOn="{StaticResource AppBarButtonStyle}"> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.AutomationId" Value="EditAppBarButton"/> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.Name" Value="Edit"/> <Setter Property="Content" Value=""/> </Style> Switching over to App.xaml.cs, it includes some code to help get you started. An OnLaunched() method is added to handle creating a Frame that child pages such as MainPage.xaml can be loaded into. The Frame has the same overall purpose as the one found in WPF and Silverlight applications - it’s used to navigate between pages in an application. /// <summary> /// Invoked when the application is launched normally by the end user. Other entry points /// will be used when the application is launched to open a specific file, to display /// search results, and so forth. /// </summary> /// <param name="args">Details about the launch request and process.</param> protected override void OnLaunched(LaunchActivatedEventArgs args) { Frame rootFrame = Window.Current.Content as Frame; // Do not repeat app initialization when the Window already has content, // just ensure that the window is active if (rootFrame == null) { // Create a Frame to act as the navigation context and navigate to the first page rootFrame = new Frame(); if (args.PreviousExecutionState == ApplicationExecutionState.Terminated) { //TODO: Load state from previously suspended application } // Place the frame in the current Window Window.Current.Content = rootFrame; } if (rootFrame.Content == null) { // When the navigation stack isn't restored navigate to the first page, // configuring the new page by passing required information as a navigation // parameter if (!rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(MainPage), args.Arguments)) { throw new Exception("Failed to create initial page"); } } // Ensure the current window is active Window.Current.Activate(); } Notice that in addition to creating a Frame the code also checks to see if the app was previously terminated so that you can load any state/data that the user may need when the app is launched again. If you’re new to the lifecycle of Windows 8 store apps the following image shows how an app can be running, suspended, and terminated. If the user switches from an app they’re running the app will be suspended in memory. The app may stay suspended or may be terminated depending on how much memory the OS thinks it needs so it’s important to save state in case the application is ultimately terminated and has to be started fresh. Although I won’t cover saving application state here, additional information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh465099.aspx. Another method in App.xaml.cs named OnSuspending() is also included in App.xaml.cs that can be used to store state as the user switches to another application: /// <summary> /// Invoked when application execution is being suspended. Application state is saved /// without knowing whether the application will be terminated or resumed with the contents /// of memory still intact. /// </summary> /// <param name="sender">The source of the suspend request.</param> /// <param name="e">Details about the suspend request.</param> private void OnSuspending(object sender, SuspendingEventArgs e) { var deferral = e.SuspendingOperation.GetDeferral(); //TODO: Save application state and stop any background activity deferral.Complete(); } The MainPage.xaml and MainPage.xaml.cs Files The Blank App project adds a file named MainPage.xaml that acts as the initial screen for the application. It doesn’t include anything aside from an empty <Grid> XAML element in it. The code-behind class named MainPage.xaml.cs includes a constructor as well as a method named OnNavigatedTo() that is called once the page is displayed in the frame. /// <summary> /// An empty page that can be used on its own or navigated to within a Frame. /// </summary> public sealed partial class MainPage : Page { public MainPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); } /// <summary> /// Invoked when this page is about to be displayed in a Frame. /// </summary> /// <param name="e">Event data that describes how this page was reached. The Parameter /// property is typically used to configure the page.</param> protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e) { } } If you’re experienced with XAML you can switch to Design mode and start dragging and dropping XAML controls from the ToolBox in Visual Studio. If you prefer to type XAML you can do that as well in the XAML editor or while in split mode. Many of the controls available in WPF and Silverlight are included such as Canvas, Grid, StackPanel, and Border for layout. Standard input controls are also included such as TextBox, CheckBox, PasswordBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, ListBox, and more. MediaElement is available for rendering video or playing audio files. Some of the “common” XAML controls included out of the box are shown next: Although XAML/C# Windows 8 store apps don’t include all of the functionality available in Silverlight 5, the core functionality required to build store apps is there with additional functionality available in open source projects such as Callisto (started by Microsoft’s Tim Heuer), Q42.WinRT, and others. Standard XAML data binding can be used to bind C# objects to controls, converters can be used to manipulate data during the data binding process, and custom styles and templates can be applied to controls to modify them. Although Visual Studio 2012 doesn’t support visually creating styles or templates, Expression Blend 5 handles that very well. To get started building the initial screen of a Windows 8 app you can start adding controls as mentioned earlier. Simply place them inside of the <Grid> element that’s included. You can arrange controls in a stacked manner using the StackPanel control, add a border around controls using the Border control, arrange controls in columns and rows using the Grid control, or absolutely position controls using the Canvas control. One of the controls that may be new to you is the AppBar. It can be used to add menu/toolbar functionality into a store app and keep the app clean and focused. You can place an AppBar at the top or bottom of the screen. A user on a touch device can swipe up to display the bottom AppBar or right-click when using a mouse. An example of defining an AppBar that contains an Edit button is shown next. The EditAppBarButtonStyle is available in the StandardStyles.xaml file mentioned earlier. <Page.BottomAppBar> <AppBar x:Name="ApplicationAppBar" Padding="10,0,10,0" AutomationProperties.Name="Bottom App Bar"> <Grid> <StackPanel x:Name="RightPanel" Orientation="Horizontal" Grid.Column="1" HorizontalAlignment="Right"> <Button x:Name="Edit" Style="{StaticResource EditAppBarButtonStyle}" Tag="Edit" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> </AppBar> </Page.BottomAppBar> Like standard XAML controls, the <Button> control in the AppBar can be wired to an event handler method in the MainPage.Xaml.cs file or even bound to a ViewModel object using “commanding” if your app follows the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern (check out the MVVM Light package available through NuGet if you’re using MVVM with Windows 8 store apps). The AppBar can be used to navigate to different screens, show and hide controls, display dialogs, show settings screens, and more. The Package.appxmanifest File The Package.appxmanifest file contains configuration details about your Windows 8 store app. By double-clicking it in Visual Studio you can define the splash screen image, small and wide logo images used for tiles on the start screen, orientation information, and more. You can also define what capabilities the app has such as if it uses the Internet, supports geolocation functionality, requires a microphone or webcam, etc. App declarations such as background processes, file picker functionality, and sharing can also be defined Finally, information about how the app is packaged for deployment to the store can also be defined. Summary If you already have some experience working with XAML technologies you’ll find that getting started building Windows 8 applications is pretty straightforward. Many of the controls available in Silverlight and WPF are available making it easy to get started without having to relearn a lot of new technologies. In the next post in this series I’ll discuss additional features that can be used in your Windows 8 store apps.

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jQuery Time Entry with Time Navigation Keys

- by Rick Strahl

So, how do you display time values in your Web applications? Displaying date AND time values in applications is lot less standardized than date display only. While date input has become fairly universal with various date picker controls available, time entry continues to be a bit of a non-standardized. In my own applications I tend to use the jQuery UI DatePicker control for date entries and it works well for that. Here's an example: The date entry portion is well defined and it makes perfect sense to have a calendar pop up so you can pick a date from a rich UI when necessary. However, time values are much less obvious when it comes to displaying a UI or even just making time entries more useful. There are a slew of time picker controls available but other than adding some visual glitz, they are not really making time entry any easier. Part of the reason for this is that time entry is usually pretty simple. Clicking on a dropdown of any sort and selecting a value from a long scrolling list tends to take more user interaction than just typing 5 characters (7 if am/pm is used). Keystrokes can make Time Entry easier Time entry maybe pretty simple, but I find that adding a few hotkeys to handle date navigation can make it much easier. Specifically it'd be nice to have keys to: Jump to the current time (Now) Increase/decrease minutes Increase/decrease hours The timeKeys jQuery PlugIn Some time ago I created a small plugin to handle this scenario. It's non-visual other than tooltip that pops up when you press ? to display the hotkeys that are available: Try it Online The keys loosely follow the ancient Quicken convention of using the first and last letters of what you're increasing decreasing (ie. H to decrease, R to increase hours and + and - for the base unit or minutes here). All navigation happens via the keystrokes shown above, so it's all non-visual, which I think is the most efficient way to deal with dates. To hook up the plug-in, start with the textbox:<input type="text" id="txtTime" name="txtTime" value="12:05 pm" title="press ? for time options" /> Note the title which might be useful to alert people using the field that additional functionality is available. To hook up the plugin code is as simple as:$("#txtTime").timeKeys(); You essentially tie the plugin to any text box control. OptionsThe syntax for timeKeys allows for an options map parameter:$(selector).timeKeys(options); Options are passed as a parameter map object which can have the following properties: timeFormatYou can pass in a format string that allows you to format the date. The default is "hh:mm t" which is US time format that shows a 12 hour clock with am/pm. Alternately you can pass in "HH:mm" which uses 24 hour time. HH, hh, mm and t are translated in the format string - you can arrange the format as you see fit. callbackYou can also specify a callback function that is called when the date value has been set. This allows you to either re-format the date or perform post processing (such as displaying highlight if it's after a certain hour for example). Here's another example that uses both options:$("#txtTime").timeKeys({ timeFormat: "HH:mm", callback: function (time) { showStatus("new time is: " + time.toString() + " " + $(this).val() ); } }); The plugin code itself is fairly simple. It hooks the keydown event and checks for the various keys that affect time navigation which is straight forward. The bulk of the code however deals with parsing the time value and formatting the output using a Time class that implements parsing, formatting and time navigation methods. Here's the code for the timeKeys jQuery plug-in:/// <reference path="jquery.js" /> /// <reference path="ww.jquery.js" /> (function ($) { $.fn.timeKeys = function (options) { /// <summary> /// Attaches a set of hotkeys to time fields /// + Add minute - subtract minute /// H Subtract Hour R Add houR /// ? Show keys /// </summary> /// <param name="options" type="object"> /// Options: /// timeFormat: "hh:mm t" by default HH:mm alternate /// callback: callback handler after time assignment /// </param> /// <example> /// var proxy = new ServiceProxy("JsonStockService.svc/"); /// proxy.invoke("GetStockQuote",{symbol:"msft"},function(quote) { alert(result.LastPrice); },onPageError); ///</example> if (this.length < 1) return this; var opt = { timeFormat: "hh:mm t", callback: null } $.extend(opt, options); return this.keydown(function (e) { var $el = $(this); var time = new Time($el.val()); //alert($(this).val() + " " + time.toString() + " " + time.date.toString()); switch (e.keyCode) { case 78: // [N]ow time = new Time(new Date()); break; case 109: case 189: // - time.addMinutes(-1); break; case 107: case 187: // + time.addMinutes(1); break; case 72: //H time.addHours(-1); break; case 82: //R time.addHours(1); break; case 191: // ? if (e.shiftKey) $(this).tooltip("<b>N</b> Now<br/><b>+</b> add minute<br /><b>-</b> subtract minute<br /><b>H</b> Subtract Hour<br /><b>R</b> add hour", 4000, { isHtml: true }); return false; default: return true; } $el.val(time.toString(opt.timeFormat)); if (opt.callback) { // call async and set context in this element setTimeout(function () { opt.callback.call($el.get(0), time) }, 1); } return false; }); } Time = function (time, format) { /// <summary> /// Time object that can parse and format /// a time values. /// </summary> /// <param name="time" type="object"> /// A time value as a string (12:15pm or 23:01), a Date object /// or time value. /// /// </param> /// <param name="format" type="string"> /// Time format string: /// HH:mm (23:01) /// hh:mm t (11:01 pm) /// </param> /// <example> /// var time = new Time( new Date()); /// time.addHours(5); /// time.addMinutes(10); /// var s = time.toString(); /// /// var time2 = new Time(s); // parse with constructor /// var t = time2.parse("10:15 pm"); // parse with .parse() method /// alert( t.hours + " " + t.mins + " " + t.ampm + " " + t.hours25) ///</example> var _I = this; this.date = new Date(); this.timeFormat = "hh:mm t"; if (format) this.timeFormat = format; this.parse = function (time) { /// <summary> /// Parses time value from a Date object, or string in format of: /// 12:12pm or 23:01 /// </summary> /// <param name="time" type="any"> /// A time value as a string (12:15pm or 23:01), a Date object /// or time value. /// /// </param> if (!time) return null; // Date if (time.getDate) { var t = {}; var d = time; t.hours24 = d.getHours(); t.mins = d.getMinutes(); t.ampm = "am"; if (t.hours24 > 11) { t.ampm = "pm"; if (t.hours24 > 12) t.hours = t.hours24 - 12; } time = t; } if (typeof (time) == "string") { var parts = time.split(":"); if (parts < 2) return null; var time = {}; time.hours = parts[0] * 1; time.hours24 = time.hours; time.mins = parts[1].toLowerCase(); if (time.mins.indexOf("am") > -1) { time.ampm = "am"; time.mins = time.mins.replace("am", ""); if (time.hours == 12) time.hours24 = 0; } else if (time.mins.indexOf("pm") > -1) { time.ampm = "pm"; time.mins = time.mins.replace("pm", ""); if (time.hours < 12) time.hours24 = time.hours + 12; } time.mins = time.mins * 1; } _I.date.setMinutes(time.mins); _I.date.setHours(time.hours24); return time; }; this.addMinutes = function (mins) { /// <summary> /// adds minutes to the internally stored time value. /// </summary> /// <param name="mins" type="number"> /// number of minutes to add to the date /// </param> _I.date.setMinutes(_I.date.getMinutes() + mins); } this.addHours = function (hours) { /// <summary> /// adds hours the internally stored time value. /// </summary> /// <param name="hours" type="number"> /// number of hours to add to the date /// </param> _I.date.setHours(_I.date.getHours() + hours); } this.getTime = function () { /// <summary> /// returns a time structure from the currently /// stored time value. /// Properties: hours, hours24, mins, ampm /// </summary> return new Time(new Date()); h } this.toString = function (format) { /// <summary> /// returns a short time string for the internal date /// formats: 12:12 pm or 23:12 /// </summary> /// <param name="format" type="string"> /// optional format string for date /// HH:mm, hh:mm t /// </param> if (!format) format = _I.timeFormat; var hours = _I.date.getHours(); if (format.indexOf("t") > -1) { if (hours > 11) format = format.replace("t", "pm") else format = format.replace("t", "am") } if (format.indexOf("HH") > -1) format = format.replace("HH", hours.toString().padL(2, "0")); if (format.indexOf("hh") > -1) { if (hours > 12) hours -= 12; if (hours == 0) hours = 12; format = format.replace("hh", hours.toString().padL(2, "0")); } if (format.indexOf("mm") > -1) format = format.replace("mm", _I.date.getMinutes().toString().padL(2, "0")); return format; } // construction if (time) this.time = this.parse(time); } String.prototype.padL = function (width, pad) { if (!width || width < 1) return this; if (!pad) pad = " "; var length = width - this.length if (length < 1) return this.substr(0, width); return (String.repeat(pad, length) + this).substr(0, width); } String.repeat = function (chr, count) { var str = ""; for (var x = 0; x < count; x++) { str += chr }; return str; } })(jQuery); The plugin consists of the actual plugin and the Time class which handles parsing and formatting of the time value via the .parse() and .toString() methods. Code like this always ends up taking up more effort than the actual logic unfortunately. There are libraries out there that can handle this like datejs or even ww.jquery.js (which is what I use) but to keep the code self contained for this post the plugin doesn't rely on external code. There's one optional exception: The code as is has one dependency on ww.jquery.js for the tooltip plugin that provides the small popup for all the hotkeys available. You can replace that code with some other mechanism to display hotkeys or simply remove it since that behavior is optional. While we're at it: A jQuery dateKeys plugIn Although date entry tends to be much better served with drop down calendars to pick dates from, often it's also easier to pick dates using a few simple hotkeys. Navigation that uses + - for days and M and H for MontH navigation, Y and R for YeaR navigation are a quick way to enter dates without having to resort to using a mouse and clicking around to what you want to find. Note that this plugin does have a dependency on ww.jquery.js for the date formatting functionality.$.fn.dateKeys = function (options) { /// <summary> /// Attaches a set of hotkeys to date 'fields' /// + Add day - subtract day /// M Subtract Month H Add montH /// Y Subtract Year R Add yeaR /// ? Show keys /// </summary> /// <param name="options" type="object"> /// Options: /// dateFormat: "MM/dd/yyyy" by default "MMM dd, yyyy /// callback: callback handler after date assignment /// </param> /// <example> /// var proxy = new ServiceProxy("JsonStockService.svc/"); /// proxy.invoke("GetStockQuote",{symbol:"msft"},function(quote) { alert(result.LastPrice); },onPageError); ///</example> if (this.length < 1) return this; var opt = { dateFormat: "MM/dd/yyyy", callback: null }; $.extend(opt, options); return this.keydown(function (e) { var $el = $(this); var d = new Date($el.val()); if (!d) d = new Date(1900, 0, 1, 1, 1); var month = d.getMonth(); var year = d.getFullYear(); var day = d.getDate(); switch (e.keyCode) { case 84: // [T]oday d = new Date(); break; case 109: case 189: d = new Date(year, month, day - 1); break; case 107: case 187: d = new Date(year, month, day + 1); break; case 77: //M d = new Date(year, month - 1, day); break; case 72: //H d = new Date(year, month + 1, day); break; case 191: // ? if (e.shiftKey) $el.tooltip("<b>T</b> Today<br/><b>+</b> add day<br /><b>-</b> subtract day<br /><b>M</b> subtract Month<br /><b>H</b> add montH<br/><b>Y</b> subtract Year<br/><b>R</b> add yeaR", 5000, { isHtml: true }); return false; default: return true; } $el.val(d.formatDate(opt.dateFormat)); if (opt.callback) // call async setTimeout(function () { opt.callback.call($el.get(0),d); }, 10); return false; }); } The logic for this plugin is similar to the timeKeys plugin, but it's a little simpler as it tries to directly parse the date value from a string via new Date(inputString). As mentioned it also uses a helper function from ww.jquery.js to format dates which removes the logic to perform date formatting manually which again reduces the size of the code. And the Key is… I've been using both of these plugins in combination with the jQuery UI datepicker for datetime values and I've found that I rarely actually pop up the date picker any more. It's just so much more efficient to use the hotkeys to navigate dates. It's still nice to have the picker around though - it provides the expected behavior for date entry. For time values however I can't justify the UI overhead of a picker that doesn't make it any easier to pick a time. Most people know how to type in a time value and if they want shortcuts keystrokes easily beat out any pop up UI. Hopefully you'll find this as useful as I have found it for my code. Resources Online Sample Download Sample Project © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery HTML Tweet (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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Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales. Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released. Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys. As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch. Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation. Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code. Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client? Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from. Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years. Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software. Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client? Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow. Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching? Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs. Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established. Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding. Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible. Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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Why does my laptop resume immediately after suspend?

- by Igor Zinov'yev

I seem to be having some problem with suspend mode. Every time I try to suspend my laptop, it just locks the screen. Or maybe it successfully suspends just to resume only an instant after. What could cause such a behaviour? I'm running 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 with the 3.2.0-25 kernel on a HP dv5-1178er Pavilion laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo). Here are the relevant log sections: kern.log: Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.131171] PM: Syncing filesystems ... done. Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.141222] PM: Preparing system for mem sleep Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.141239] Freezing user space processes ... (elapsed 0.01 seconds) done. Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.156171] Freezing remaining freezable tasks ... (elapsed 0.01 seconds) done. Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.172139] PM: Entering mem sleep Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.172169] Suspending console(s) (use no_console_suspend to debug) Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.172895] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Synchronizing SCSI cache Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.181767] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Stopping disk Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.251089] ene_ir 00:0a: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.251115] i8042 aux 00:09: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.251133] i8042 kbd 00:08: wake-up capability enabled by ACPI Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.251286] jmb38x_ms 0000:06:00.3: PCI INT A disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.252491] sdhci-pci 0000:06:00.1: PCI INT A disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.264130] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: PCI INT D disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.264142] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: PCI INT B disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.264325] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: PCI INT B disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.288059] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: PCI INT A disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.288097] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.3: PCI INT C disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.288135] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: PCI INT A disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.316051] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: PCI INT A disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.316068] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: PCI INT D disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.522872] PM: suspend of drv:sd dev:0:0:0:0 complete after 349.979 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.522901] PM: suspend of drv:scsi dev:target0:0:0 complete after 349.955 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.522927] PM: suspend of drv:scsi dev:host0 complete after 272.260 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.522969] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: BIOS update required for suspend/resume Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.522976] pci_legacy_suspend(): ahci_pci_device_suspend+0x0/0x80 returns -5 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.522981] pm_op(): pci_pm_suspend+0x0/0x110 returns -5 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.522984] PM: suspend of drv:ahci dev:0000:00:1f.2 complete after 258.932 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.522987] PM: Device 0000:00:1f.2 failed to suspend async: error -5 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.576228] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: PCI INT A disabled Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.576270] ACPI handle has no context! Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592136] PM: suspend of drv:snd_hda_intel dev:0000:00:1b.0 complete after 327.889 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592206] PM: Some devices failed to suspend Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592291] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592298] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592325] usb usb3: root hub lost power or was reset Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592339] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592345] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.1: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592371] usb usb4: root hub lost power or was reset Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592387] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: PCI INT D -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592395] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1a.7: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592843] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 20 (level, low) -> IRQ 20 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592851] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.0: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592854] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: PCI INT B -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592863] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.1: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592878] usb usb5: root hub lost power or was reset Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592892] usb usb6: root hub lost power or was reset Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592895] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: PCI INT D -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592903] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.2: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592906] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.3: PCI INT C -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592915] uhci_hcd 0000:00:1d.3: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592930] usb usb7: root hub lost power or was reset Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592946] usb usb8: root hub lost power or was reset Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592949] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: PCI INT A -> GSI 20 (level, low) -> IRQ 20 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592957] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.592963] pci 0000:00:1e.0: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.597106] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Starting disk Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.608138] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: BAR 0: set to [mem 0xdf300000-0xdf303fff 64bit] (PCI address [0xdf300000-0xdf303fff]) Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.608180] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: restoring config space at offset 0xf (was 0x100, writing 0x10b) Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.608233] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: restoring config space at offset 0x3 (was 0x0, writing 0x10) Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.608248] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: restoring config space at offset 0x1 (was 0x100000, writing 0x100002) Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.608299] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 22 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.608313] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.608420] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: irq 50 for MSI/MSI-X Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.612095] firewire_ohci 0000:06:00.0: restoring config space at offset 0x1 (was 0x100000, writing 0x100006) Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.612181] sdhci-pci 0000:06:00.1: restoring config space at offset 0x1 (was 0x100003, writing 0x100007) Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.612211] sdhci-pci 0000:06:00.1: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.612225] sdhci-pci 0000:06:00.1: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.612296] jmb38x_ms 0000:06:00.3: restoring config space at offset 0x1 (was 0x100003, writing 0x100007) Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.612326] jmb38x_ms 0000:06:00.3: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.612332] jmb38x_ms 0000:06:00.3: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.699170] PM: resume of drv:uvcvideo dev:2-4:1.0 complete after 101.965 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.699179] PM: resume of drv:uvcvideo dev:2-4:1.1 complete after 101.932 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.699186] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 101.917 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.699197] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_83 complete after 101.972 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.716148] PM: resume of drv:hub dev:3-0:1.0 complete after 119.543 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.716155] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 119.544 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.716161] PM: resume of drv:hub dev:5-0:1.0 complete after 119.420 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.716168] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 119.381 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.716174] PM: resume of drv:hub dev:8-0:1.0 complete after 119.141 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.716181] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 119.104 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.716186] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_81 complete after 119.579 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.716191] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_81 complete after 119.427 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.716197] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_81 complete after 119.143 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.747148] firewire_core: skipped bus generations, destroying all nodes Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.776093] PM: resume of drv:hp_accel dev:HPQ0004:00 complete after 167.225 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.777243] i8042 kbd 00:08: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.777278] ene_ir 00:0a: wake-up capability disabled by ACPI Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.820100] PM: resume of drv:hub dev:4-0:1.0 complete after 223.436 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.820115] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 223.444 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.820123] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_81 complete after 223.456 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.820206] PM: resume of drv:hub dev:7-0:1.0 complete after 223.266 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.820221] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_81 complete after 223.260 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.820238] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 223.255 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.820295] PM: resume of drv:hub dev:6-0:1.0 complete after 223.453 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.820302] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 223.415 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.820321] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_81 complete after 223.457 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2225.932108] usb 4-2: reset full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.086714] PM: resume of drv:usbhid dev:4-2:1.0 complete after 489.393 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.086728] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_81 complete after 489.384 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.086745] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 489.329 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.086753] PM: resume of drv:usbhid dev:4-2:1.1 complete after 489.384 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.086764] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_82 complete after 489.373 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.180555] usb 7-2: reset full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.244858] firewire_core: rediscovered device fw0 Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.335066] btusb 7-2:1.0: no reset_resume for driver btusb? Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.335068] btusb 7-2:1.1: no reset_resume for driver btusb? Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.432082] usb 6-1: reset full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.578280] PM: resume of drv:nvidia dev:0000:01:00.0 complete after 985.301 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584296] PM: resume of drv:usb dev:7-2:1.0 complete after 986.693 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584308] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 986.452 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584311] PM: resume of drv:usb dev:7-2:1.1 complete after 986.616 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584315] PM: resume of drv:usb dev:7-2:1.3 complete after 986.483 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584320] PM: resume of drv:usb dev:7-2:1.2 complete after 986.556 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584328] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_03 complete after 986.588 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584331] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_81 complete after 986.704 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584334] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_83 complete after 986.617 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584337] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_82 complete after 986.688 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584340] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_02 complete after 986.667 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584344] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_84 complete after 986.558 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.584352] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_04 complete after 986.542 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.590883] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_00 complete after 993.327 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.590887] PM: resume of drv:usb dev:6-1:1.0 complete after 993.424 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.590927] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_82 complete after 993.395 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.590934] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_81 complete after 993.426 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.590940] PM: resume of drv: dev:ep_01 complete after 993.456 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.592450] PM: resume of drv:sd dev:0:0:0:0 complete after 995.343 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.592461] PM: resume of drv:scsi_disk dev:0:0:0:0 complete after 802.688 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.592472] PM: resume of drv:scsi_device dev:0:0:0:0 complete after 995.324 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.600339] PM: resume of devices complete after 1008.129 msecs Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.601293] PM: resume devices took 1.008 seconds Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.601330] PM: Finishing wakeup. Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.601332] Restarting tasks ... done. Jun 1 10:42:21 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2226.625660] video LNXVIDEO:01: Restoring backlight state Jun 1 10:42:22 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2227.478921] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S Jun 1 10:42:22 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2227.481981] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: Radio type=0x1-0x2-0x0 Jun 1 10:42:22 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2227.527727] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready Jun 1 10:42:22 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2227.532468] r8169 0000:03:00.0: eth0: link down Jun 1 10:42:22 igor-laptop kernel: [ 2227.533967] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready pm_suspend.log: Fri Jun 1 10:42:14 MSK 2012: Running hooks for suspend. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/000kernel-change suspend suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/000kernel-change suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00logging suspend suspend: Linux igor-laptop 3.2.0-25-generic #40-Ubuntu SMP Wed May 23 20:33:05 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux Module Size Used by pci_stub 12550 1 vboxpci 22882 0 vboxnetadp 13328 0 vboxnetflt 27211 0 vboxdrv 252189 3 vboxpci,vboxnetadp,vboxnetflt dm_crypt 22528 0 snd_hda_codec_hdmi 31775 1 snd_hda_codec_idt 60251 1 arc4 12473 2 hp_wmi 13652 0 sparse_keymap 13658 1 hp_wmi rfcomm 38139 12 snd_hda_intel 32765 5 snd_hda_codec 109562 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_hda_intel snd_hwdep 13276 1 snd_hda_codec bnep 17830 2 btusb 17912 2 bluetooth 158438 23 rfcomm,bnep,btusb joydev 17393 0 parport_pc 32114 0 snd_pcm 80845 4 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec ppdev 12849 0 uvcvideo 67203 0 binfmt_misc 17292 1 videodev 86588 1 uvcvideo snd_seq_midi 13132 0 snd_rawmidi 25424 1 snd_seq_midi nvidia 10958194 43 snd_seq_midi_event 14475 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 51567 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event ir_lirc_codec 12739 0 lirc_dev 18700 1 ir_lirc_codec snd_timer 28931 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14172 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq ir_mce_kbd_decoder 12681 0 ir_sony_decoder 12462 0 ir_jvc_decoder 12459 0 ir_rc6_decoder 12459 0 psmouse 87213 0 ir_rc5_decoder 12459 0 serio_raw 13027 0 iwlwifi 287934 0 rc_rc6_mce 12454 0 ir_nec_decoder 12459 0 ene_ir 18019 0 rc_core 21263 10 ir_lirc_codec,ir_mce_kbd_decoder,ir_sony_decoder,ir_jvc_decoder,ir_rc6_decoder,ir_rc5_decoder,rc_rc6_mce,ir_nec_decoder,ene_ir mac80211 436455 1 iwlwifi snd 62064 19 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device cfg80211 178679 2 iwlwifi,mac80211 hp_accel 25728 0 lis3lv02d 19268 1 hp_accel input_polldev 13648 1 lis3lv02d mac_hid 13077 0 wmi 18744 1 hp_wmi jmb38x_ms 17406 0 soundcore 14635 1 snd snd_page_alloc 14115 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm memstick 15857 1 jmb38x_ms firewire_sbp2 18346 0 lp 17455 0 parport 40930 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp vesafb 13516 1 usbhid 41906 0 hid 77367 1 usbhid firewire_ohci 40180 0 firewire_core 56906 2 firewire_sbp2,firewire_ohci crc_itu_t 12627 1 firewire_core sdhci_pci 18324 0 sdhci 28241 1 sdhci_pci r8169 56321 0 video 19068 0 total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3095544 2364260 731284 0 159020 1280240 -/+ buffers/cache: 925000 2170544 Swap: 1718916 0 1718916 /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00logging suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00powersave suspend suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00powersave suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/01PulseAudio suspend suspend: Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information. >>> >>> Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information. >>> >>> Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information. >>> >>> /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/01PulseAudio suspend suspend: success. Running hook /etc/pm/sleep.d/10_grub-common suspend suspend: /etc/pm/sleep.d/10_grub-common suspend suspend: success. Running hook /etc/pm/sleep.d/10_unattended-upgrades-hibernate suspend suspend: /etc/pm/sleep.d/10_unattended-upgrades-hibernate suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/55NetworkManager suspend suspend: Having NetworkManager put all interaces to sleep...Failed. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/55NetworkManager suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/60_wpa_supplicant suspend suspend: Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/60_wpa_supplicant suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/75modules suspend suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/75modules suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/90clock suspend suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/90clock suspend suspend: not applicable. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/94cpufreq suspend suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/94cpufreq suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95anacron suspend suspend: stop: Unknown instance: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95anacron suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95hdparm-apm suspend suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95hdparm-apm suspend suspend: not applicable. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95led suspend suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95led suspend suspend: not applicable. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/98video-quirk-db-handler suspend suspend: nVidia binary video drive detected, not using quirks. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/98video-quirk-db-handler suspend suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video suspend suspend: kernel.acpi_video_flags = 0 /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video suspend suspend: success. Running hook /etc/pm/sleep.d/novatel_3g_suspend suspend suspend: /etc/pm/sleep.d/novatel_3g_suspend suspend suspend: success. Fri Jun 1 10:42:19 MSK 2012: performing suspend Fri Jun 1 10:42:21 MSK 2012: Awake. Fri Jun 1 10:42:21 MSK 2012: Running hooks for resume Running hook /etc/pm/sleep.d/novatel_3g_suspend resume suspend: /etc/pm/sleep.d/novatel_3g_suspend resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video resume suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/98video-quirk-db-handler resume suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/98video-quirk-db-handler resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95led resume suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95led resume suspend: not applicable. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95hdparm-apm resume suspend: /dev/sda: setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xfe (254) APM_level = 254 /dev/sda: setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xfe (254) APM_level = 254 /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95hdparm-apm resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95anacron resume suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/95anacron resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/94cpufreq resume suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/94cpufreq resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/90clock resume suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/90clock resume suspend: not applicable. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/75modules resume suspend: Reloaded unloaded modules. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/75modules resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/60_wpa_supplicant resume suspend: Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/60_wpa_supplicant resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/55NetworkManager resume suspend: Having NetworkManager wake interfaces back up...Failed. /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/55NetworkManager resume suspend: success. Running hook /etc/pm/sleep.d/10_unattended-upgrades-hibernate resume suspend: /etc/pm/sleep.d/10_unattended-upgrades-hibernate resume suspend: success. Running hook /etc/pm/sleep.d/10_grub-common resume suspend: /etc/pm/sleep.d/10_grub-common resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/01PulseAudio resume suspend: Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information. >>> >>> Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information. >>> >>> Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information. >>> >>> /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/01PulseAudio resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00powersave resume suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00powersave resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00logging resume suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00logging resume suspend: success. Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/000kernel-change resume suspend: /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/000kernel-change resume suspend: success. Fri Jun 1 10:42:22 MSK 2012: Finished.

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SCCM 2012 unable to update boot images with pxe enabled

- by Adam

we are fighting an error in sccm 2012. When we attempt to distribute boot images (after selecting the pxe option) we receive an error that the pxe image cannot be expanded (distmgr log). Can you give us any direction on what to try or attempt in this scenario? We only have one dp in our environment at the moment, however we have found that by creating another dp on a different server we don’t have this problem. However we really need the primary site to be a dp. We have tried: Removing and reinstalling the dp Removing and reinstalling the WDS Reinstalled the OS ... ouch Reinstalled SQL We even attempted to manually mount these wims in the remote install folder, no luck... And we have been working on this for days... Any and all help is appreciated! Our log is below Thank you very much, Small Town IT guy Attempting to add or update a package on a distribution point. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) The distribution point is on the siteserver and the package is a content type package. There is nothing to be copied over. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) STATMSG: ID=2342 SEV=I LEV=M SOURCE="SMS Server" COMP="SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER" SYS=OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us SITE=IVC PID=3600 TID=6924 GMTDATE=Fri Jun 22 19:49:41.559 2012 ISTR0="Boot image (x86)" ISTR1="["Display=\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=IVC"]\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\" ISTR2="" ISTR3="" ISTR4="" ISTR5="" ISTR6="" ISTR7="" ISTR8="" ISTR9="" NUMATTRS=2 AID0=400 AVAL0="IVC00001" AID1=404 AVAL1="["Display=\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=IVC"]\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\" SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) The current user context will be used for connecting to ["Display=\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=IVC"]\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) No network connection is needed to ["Display=\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=IVC"]\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\ as this is the local machine. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Signature share exists on distribution point path \OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\SMSSIG$ SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Ignoring drive C:. File C:\NO_SMS_ON_DRIVE.SMS exists. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) user(NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) runing application(SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER) from machine (OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us) is submitting SDK changes from site(IVC) SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Share SMSPKGD$ exists on distribution point \OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\SMSPKGD$ SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Creating, reading and or updating Operations Management server role registry keys for a Distribution Point ... SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) user(NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) runing application(SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER) from machine (OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us) is submitting SDK changes from site(IVC) SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Creating, reading or updating IIS registry key for a distribution point. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) IISPortsList in the SCF is "80". SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) IISSSLPortsList in the SCF is "443". SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) IISWebSiteName in the SCF is "". SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) IISSSLState in the SCF is 224. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:41 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Virtual Directory SMS_DP_SMSPKG$ for the physical path F:\SCCMContentLib already exists. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) STATMSG: ID=2375 SEV=I LEV=M SOURCE="SMS Server" COMP="SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER" SYS=OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us SITE=IVC PID=3600 TID=6924 GMTDATE=Fri Jun 22 19:49:42.058 2012 ISTR0="["Display=\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=IVC"]\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\" ISTR1="" ISTR2="" ISTR3="" ISTR4="" ISTR5="" ISTR6="" ISTR7="" ISTR8="" ISTR9="" NUMATTRS=1 AID0=404 AVAL0="["Display=\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=IVC"]\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\" SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Creating, reading or updating IIS registry key for a distribution point. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) IISPortsList in the SCF is "80". SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) IISSSLPortsList in the SCF is "443". SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) IISWebSiteName in the SCF is "". SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) IISSSLState in the SCF is 224. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Virtual Directory SMS_DP_SMSSIG$ for the physical path D:\SMSSIG$ already exists. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) STATMSG: ID=2375 SEV=I LEV=M SOURCE="SMS Server" COMP="SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER" SYS=OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us SITE=IVC PID=3600 TID=6924 GMTDATE=Fri Jun 22 19:49:42.105 2012 ISTR0="["Display=\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=IVC"]\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\" ISTR1="" ISTR2="" ISTR3="" ISTR4="" ISTR5="" ISTR6="" ISTR7="" ISTR8="" ISTR9="" NUMATTRS=1 AID0=404 AVAL0="["Display=\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=IVC"]\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\" SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) user(NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) runing application(SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER) from machine (OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us) is submitting SDK changes from site(IVC) SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) RDC:Successfully created package signature file from \?\F:\SMSPKGSIG\IVC00001.3 to \OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\SMSSIG$\IVC00001.3.tar SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Setting permissions on file MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=IVC"]\OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us\SMSSIG$\IVC00001.3.tar. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) ExpandPXEImage: IVC00001, 1024 SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) CContentDefinition::GetFileProperties failed; 0x80070003 SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) CContentDefinition::TotalFileSizes failed; 0x80070003 SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) ExpandPXEImage failed; 0x80070003 SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) Error occurred. Performing error cleanup prior to returning. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 6924 (0x1B0C) DP thread with array index 0 ended. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C) DP thread with thread handle 00000000000013A4 and thread ID 6924 ended. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C) Updating package info for package IVC00001 SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C) Package IVC00001 does not have a preferred sender. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C) The package and/or program properties for package IVC00001 have not changed, need to determine which site(s) need updated package info. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C) StoredPkgVersion (3) of package IVC00001. StoredPkgVersion in database is 3. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C) SourceVersion (3) of package IVC00001. SourceVersion in database is 3. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C) STATMSG: ID=2302 SEV=E LEV=M SOURCE="SMS Server" COMP="SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER" SYS=OURSERVER.ourdomain.cc.ia.us SITE=IVC PID=3600 TID=4492 GMTDATE=Fri Jun 22 19:49:42.292 2012 ISTR0="Boot image (x86)" ISTR1="IVC00001" ISTR2="" ISTR3="" ISTR4="" ISTR5="" ISTR6="" ISTR7="" ISTR8="" ISTR9="" NUMATTRS=1 AID0=400 AVAL0="IVC00001" SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C) Failed to process package IVC00001 after 0 retries, will retry 100 more times SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C) Exiting package processing thread. SMS_DISTRIBUTION_MANAGER 6/22/2012 2:49:42 PM 4492 (0x118C)

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JMS Step 7 - How to Write to an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) Queue from a BPEL Process

- by John-Brown.Evans

JMS Step 7 - How to Write to an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) Queue from a BPEL Process ol{margin:0;padding:0} .jblist{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0;padding-left:0pt;margin-left:36pt} .c4_7{vertical-align:top;width:468pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c3_7{vertical-align:top;width:234pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:0pt 5pt 0pt 5pt} .c6_7{vertical-align:top;width:156pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c16_7{background-color:#ffffff;padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt} .c0_7{height:11pt;direction:ltr} .c9_7{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c17_7{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c5_7{direction:ltr} .c18_7{background-color:#ffff00} .c2_7{background-color:#f3f3f3} .c14_7{height:0pt} .c8_7{text-indent:36pt} .c11_7{text-align:center} .c7_7{font-style:italic} .c1_7{font-family:"Courier New"} .c13_7{line-height:1.0} .c15_7{border-collapse:collapse} .c12_7{font-weight:bold} .c10_7{font-size:8pt} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt} .subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} This post continues the series of JMS articles which demonstrate how to use JMS queues in a SOA context. The previous posts were: JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue JMS Step 3 - Using the QueueReceive.java Sample Program to Read a Message from a JMS Queue JMS Step 4 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Writes a Message Based on an XML Schema to a JMS Queue JMS Step 5 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Reads a Message Based on an XML Schema from a JMS Queue JMS Step 6 - How to Set Up an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) for SOA Purposes This example demonstrates how to write a simple message to an Oracle AQ via the the WebLogic AQ JMS functionality from a BPEL process and a JMS adapter. If you have not yet reviewed the previous posts, please do so first, especially the JMS Step 6 post, as this one references objects created there. 1. Recap and Prerequisites In the previous example, we created an Oracle Advanced Queue (AQ) and some related JMS objects in WebLogic Server to be able to access it via JMS. Here are the objects which were created and their names and JNDI names: Database Objects Name Type AQJMSUSER Database User MyQueueTable Advanced Queue (AQ) Table UserQueue Advanced Queue WebLogic Server Objects Object Name Type JNDI Name aqjmsuserDataSource Data Source jdbc/aqjmsuserDataSource AqJmsModule JMS System Module AqJmsForeignServer JMS Foreign Server AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory JMS Foreign Server Connection Factory AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory AqJmsForeignDestination AQ JMS Foreign Destination queue/USERQUEUE eis/aqjms/UserQueue Connection Pool eis/aqjms/UserQueue 2 . Create a BPEL Composite with a JMS Adapter Partner Link This step requires that you have a valid Application Server Connection defined in JDeveloper, pointing to the application server on which you created the JMS Queue and Connection Factory. You can create this connection in JDeveloper under the Application Server Navigator. Give it any name and be sure to test the connection before completing it. This sample will write a simple XML message to the AQ JMS queue via the JMS adapter, based on the following XSD file, which consists of a single string element: stringPayload.xsd <?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252" ?> <xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://www.example.org" targetNamespace="http://www.example.org" elementFormDefault="qualified"> <xsd:element name="exampleElement" type="xsd:string"> </xsd:element> </xsd:schema> The following steps are all executed in JDeveloper. The SOA project will be created inside a JDeveloper Application. If you do not already have an application to contain the project, you can create a new one via File > New > General > Generic Application. Give the application any name, for example JMSTests and, when prompted for a project name and type, call the project JmsAdapterWriteAqJms and select SOA as the project technology type. If you already have an application, continue below. Create a SOA Project Create a new project and select SOA Tier > SOA Project as its type. Name it JmsAdapterWriteAqJms . When prompted for the composite type, choose Composite With BPEL Process. When prompted for the BPEL Process, name it JmsAdapterWriteAqJms too and choose Synchronous BPEL Process as the template. This will create a composite with a BPEL process and an exposed SOAP service. Double-click the BPEL process to open and begin editing it. You should see a simple BPEL process with a Receive and Reply activity. As we created a default process without an XML schema, the input and output variables are simple strings. Create an XSD File An XSD file is required later to define the message format to be passed to the JMS adapter. In this step, we create a simple XSD file, containing a string variable and add it to the project. First select the xsd item in the left-hand navigation tree to ensure that the XSD file is created under that item. Select File > New > General > XML and choose XML Schema. Call it stringPayload.xsd and when the editor opens, select the Source view. then replace the contents with the contents of the stringPayload.xsd example above and save the file. You should see it under the XSD item in the navigation tree. Create a JMS Adapter Partner Link We will create the JMS adapter as a service at the composite level. If it is not already open, double-click the composite.xml file in the navigator to open it. From the Component Palette, drag a JMS adapter over onto the right-hand swim lane, under External References. This will start the JMS Adapter Configuration Wizard. Use the following entries: Service Name: JmsAdapterWrite Oracle Enterprise Messaging Service (OEMS): Oracle Advanced Queueing AppServer Connection: Use an existing application server connection pointing to the WebLogic server on which the connection factory created earlier is located. You can use the “+” button to create a connection directly from the wizard, if you do not already have one. Adapter Interface > Interface: Define from operation and schema (specified later) Operation Type: Produce Message Operation Name: Produce_message Produce Operation Parameters Destination Name: Wait for the list to populate. (Only foreign servers are listed here, because Oracle Advanced Queuing was selected earlier, in step 3) . Select the foreign server destination created earlier, AqJmsForeignDestination (queue) . This will automatically populate the Destination Name field with the name of the foreign destination, queue/USERQUEUE . JNDI Name: The JNDI name to use for the JMS connection. This is the JNDI name of the connection pool created in the WebLogic Server.JDeveloper does not verify the value entered here. If you enter a wrong value, the JMS adapter won’t find the queue and you will get an error message at runtime. In our example, this is the value eis/aqjms/UserQueue Messages URL: We will use the XSD file we created earlier, stringPayload.xsd to define the message format for the JMS adapter. Press the magnifying glass icon to search for schema files. Expand Project Schema Files > stringPayload.xsd and select exampleElement : string . Press Next and Finish, which will complete the JMS Adapter configuration. Wire the BPEL Component to the JMS Adapter In this step, we link the BPEL process/component to the JMS adapter. From the composite.xml editor, drag the right-arrow icon from the BPEL process to the JMS adapter’s in-arrow. This completes the steps at the composite level. 3. Complete the BPEL Process Design Invoke the JMS Adapter Open the BPEL component by double-clicking it in the design view of the composite.xml. This will display the BPEL process in the design view. You should see the JmsAdapterWrite partner link under one of the two swim lanes. We want it in the right-hand swim lane. If JDeveloper displays it in the left-hand lane, right-click it and choose Display > Move To Opposite Swim Lane. An Invoke activity is required in order to invoke the JMS adapter. Drag an Invoke activity between the Receive and Reply activities. Drag the right-hand arrow from the Invoke activity to the JMS adapter partner link. This will open the Invoke editor. The correct default values are entered automatically and are fine for our purposes. We only need to define the input variable to use for the JMS adapter. By pressing the green “+” symbol, a variable of the correct type can be auto-generated, for example with the name Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable. Press OK after creating the variable. Assign Variables Drag an Assign activity between the Receive and Invoke activities. We will simply copy the input variable to the JMS adapter and, for completion, so the process has an output to print, again to the process’s output variable. Double-click the Assign activity and create two Copy rules: for the first, drag Variables > inputVariable > payload > client:process > client:input_string to Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable > body > ns2:exampleElement for the second, drag the same input variable to outputVariable > payload > client:processResponse > client:result This will create two copy rules, similar to the following: Press OK. This completes the BPEL and Composite design. 4. Compile and Deploy the Composite Compile the process by pressing the Make or Rebuild icons or by right-clicking the project name in the navigator and selecting Make... or Rebuild... If the compilation is successful, deploy it to the SOA server connection defined earlier. (Right-click the project name in the navigator, select Deploy to Application Server, choose the application server connection, choose the partition on the server (usually default) and press Finish. You should see the message ---- Deployment finished. ---- in the Deployment frame, if the deployment was successful. 5. Test the Composite Execute a Test Instance In a browser, log in to the Enterprise Manager 11g Fusion Middleware Control (EM) for your SOA installation. Navigate to SOA > soa-infra (soa_server1) > default (or wherever you deployed your composite) and click on JmsAdapterWriteAqJms [1.0] , then press the Test button. Enter any string into the text input field, for example “Test message from JmsAdapterWriteAqJms” then press Test Web Service. If the instance is successful, you should see the same text you entered in the Response payload frame. Monitor the Advanced Queue The test message will be written to the advanced queue created at the top of this sample. To confirm it, log in to the database as AQJMSUSER and query the MYQUEUETABLE database table. For example, from a shell window with SQL*Plus sqlplus aqjmsuser/aqjmsuser SQL> SELECT user_data FROM myqueuetable; which will display the message contents, for example Similarly, you can use the JDeveloper Database Navigator to view the contents. Use a database connection to the AQJMSUSER and in the navigator, expand Queues Tables and select MYQUEUETABLE. Select the Data tab and scroll to the USER_DATA column to view its contents. This concludes this example. The following post will be the last one in this series. In it, we will learn how to read the message we just wrote using a BPEL process and AQ JMS. Best regards John-Brown Evans Oracle Technology Proactive Support Delivery

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JMS Step 4 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Writes a Message Based on an XML Schema to a JMS Queue

- by John-Brown.Evans

JMS Step 4 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Writes a Message Based on an XML Schema to a JMS Queue ol{margin:0;padding:0} .c11_4{vertical-align:top;width:129.8pt;border-style:solid;background-color:#f3f3f3;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c9_4{vertical-align:top;width:207pt;border-style:solid;background-color:#f3f3f3;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt}.c14{vertical-align:top;width:207pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c17_4{vertical-align:top;width:129.8pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c7_4{vertical-align:top;width:130pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:0pt 5pt 0pt 5pt} .c19_4{vertical-align:top;width:468pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c22_4{background-color:#ffffff} .c20_4{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0} .c6_4{font-size:8pt;font-family:"Courier New"} .c24_4{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c23_4{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c0_4{height:11pt;direction:ltr} .c10_4{font-size:10pt;font-family:"Courier New"} .c3_4{padding-left:0pt;margin-left:36pt} .c18_4{font-size:8pt} .c8_4{text-align:center} .c12_4{background-color:#ffff00} .c2_4{font-weight:bold} .c21_4{background-color:#00ff00} .c4_4{line-height:1.0} .c1_4{direction:ltr} .c15_4{background-color:#f3f3f3} .c13_4{font-family:"Courier New"} .c5_4{font-style:italic} .c16_4{border-collapse:collapse} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt} .subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:0pt} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-style:italic;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";padding-bottom:0pt} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-style:italic;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";padding-bottom:0pt} This post continues the series of JMS articles which demonstrate how to use JMS queues in a SOA context. The previous posts were: JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue JMS Step 3 - Using the QueueReceive.java Sample Program to Read a Message from a JMS Queue In this example we will create a BPEL process which will write (enqueue) a message to a JMS queue using a JMS adapter. The JMS adapter will enqueue the full XML payload to the queue. This sample will use the following WebLogic Server objects. The first two, the Connection Factory and JMS Queue, were created as part of the first blog post in this series, JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g. If you haven't created those objects yet, please see that post for details on how to do so. The Connection Pool will be created as part of this example. Object Name Type JNDI Name TestConnectionFactory Connection Factory jms/TestConnectionFactory TestJMSQueue JMS Queue jms/TestJMSQueue eis/wls/TestQueue Connection Pool eis/wls/TestQueue 1. Verify Connection Factory and JMS Queue As mentioned above, this example uses a WLS Connection Factory called TestConnectionFactory and a JMS queue TestJMSQueue. As these are prerequisites for this example, let us verify they exist. Log in to the WebLogic Server Administration Console. Select Services > JMS Modules > TestJMSModule You should see the following objects: If not, or if the TestJMSModule is missing, please see the abovementioned article and create these objects before continuing. 2. Create a JMS Adapter Connection Pool in WebLogic Server The BPEL process we are about to create uses a JMS adapter to write to the JMS queue. The JMS adapter is deployed to the WebLogic server and needs to be configured to include a connection pool which references the connection factory associated with the JMS queue. In the WebLogic Server Console Go to Deployments > Next and select (click on) the JmsAdapter Select Configuration > Outbound Connection Pools and expand oracle.tip.adapter.jms.IJmsConnectionFactory. This will display the list of connections configured for this adapter. For example, eis/aqjms/Queue, eis/aqjms/Topic etc. These JNDI names are actually quite confusing. We are expecting to configure a connection pool here, but the names refer to queues and topics. One would expect these to be called *ConnectionPool or *_CF or similar, but to conform to this nomenclature, we will call our entry eis/wls/TestQueue . This JNDI name is also the name we will use later, when creating a BPEL process to access this JMS queue! Select New, check the oracle.tip.adapter.jms.IJmsConnectionFactory check box and Next. Enter JNDI Name: eis/wls/TestQueue for the connection instance, then press Finish. Expand oracle.tip.adapter.jms.IJmsConnectionFactory again and select (click on) eis/wls/TestQueue The ConnectionFactoryLocation must point to the JNDI name of the connection factory associated with the JMS queue you will be writing to. In our example, this is the connection factory called TestConnectionFactory, with the JNDI name jms/TestConnectionFactory.( As a reminder, this connection factory is contained in the JMS Module called TestJMSModule, under Services > Messaging > JMS Modules > TestJMSModule which we verified at the beginning of this document. )Enter jms/TestConnectionFactory into the Property Value field for Connection Factory Location. After entering it, you must press Return/Enter then Save for the value to be accepted. If your WebLogic server is running in Development mode, you should see the message that the changes have been activated and the deployment plan successfully updated. If not, then you will manually need to activate the changes in the WebLogic server console. Although the changes have been activated, the JmsAdapter needs to be redeployed in order for the changes to become effective. This should be confirmed by the message Remember to update your deployment to reflect the new plan when you are finished with your changes as can be seen in the following screen shot: The next step is to redeploy the JmsAdapter.Navigate back to the Deployments screen, either by selecting it in the left-hand navigation tree or by selecting the “Summary of Deployments” link in the breadcrumbs list at the top of the screen. Then select the checkbox next to JmsAdapter and press the Update button On the Update Application Assistant page, select “Redeploy this application using the following deployment files” and press Finish. After a few seconds you should get the message that the selected deployments were updated. The JMS adapter configuration is complete and it can now be used to access the JMS queue. To summarize: we have created a JMS adapter connection pool connector with the JNDI name jms/TestConnectionFactory. This is the JNDI name to be accessed by a process such as a BPEL process, when using the JMS adapter to access the previously created JMS queue with the JNDI name jms/TestJMSQueue. In the following step, we will set up a BPEL process to use this JMS adapter to write to the JMS queue. 3. Create a BPEL Composite with a JMS Adapter Partner Link This step requires that you have a valid Application Server Connection defined in JDeveloper, pointing to the application server on which you created the JMS Queue and Connection Factory. You can create this connection in JDeveloper under the Application Server Navigator. Give it any name and be sure to test the connection before completing it. This sample will use the connection name jbevans-lx-PS5, as that is the name of the connection pointing to my SOA PS5 installation. When using a JMS adapter from within a BPEL process, there are various configuration options, such as the operation type (consume message, produce message etc.), delivery mode and message type. One of these options is the choice of the format of the JMS message payload. This can be structured around an existing XSD, in which case the full XML element and tags are passed, or it can be opaque, meaning that the payload is sent as-is to the JMS adapter. In the case of an XSD-based message, the payload can simply be copied to the input variable of the JMS adapter. In the case of an opaque message, the JMS adapter’s input variable is of type base64binary. So the payload needs to be converted to base64 binary first. I will go into this in more detail in a later blog entry. This sample will pass a simple message to the adapter, based on the following simple XSD file, which consists of a single string element: stringPayload.xsd <?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252" ?> <xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://www.example.org" targetNamespace="http://www.example.org" elementFormDefault="qualified" <xsd:element name="exampleElement" type="xsd:string"> </xsd:element> </xsd:schema> The following steps are all executed in JDeveloper. The SOA project will be created inside a JDeveloper Application. If you do not already have an application to contain the project, you can create a new one via File > New > General > Generic Application. Give the application any name, for example JMSTests and, when prompted for a project name and type, call the project JmsAdapterWriteWithXsd and select SOA as the project technology type. If you already have an application, continue below. Create a SOA Project Create a new project and choose SOA Tier > SOA Project as its type. Name it JmsAdapterWriteSchema. When prompted for the composite type, choose Composite With BPEL Process. When prompted for the BPEL Process, name it JmsAdapterWriteSchema too and choose Synchronous BPEL Process as the template. This will create a composite with a BPEL process and an exposed SOAP service. Double-click the BPEL process to open and begin editing it. You should see a simple BPEL process with a Receive and Reply activity. As we created a default process without an XML schema, the input and output variables are simple strings. Create an XSD File An XSD file is required later to define the message format to be passed to the JMS adapter. In this step, we create a simple XSD file, containing a string variable and add it to the project. First select the xsd item in the left-hand navigation tree to ensure that the XSD file is created under that item. Select File > New > General > XML and choose XML Schema. Call it stringPayload.xsd and when the editor opens, select the Source view. then replace the contents with the contents of the stringPayload.xsd example above and save the file. You should see it under the xsd item in the navigation tree. Create a JMS Adapter Partner Link We will create the JMS adapter as a service at the composite level. If it is not already open, double-click the composite.xml file in the navigator to open it. From the Component Palette, drag a JMS adapter over onto the right-hand swim lane, under External References. This will start the JMS Adapter Configuration Wizard. Use the following entries: Service Name: JmsAdapterWrite Oracle Enterprise Messaging Service (OEMS): Oracle Weblogic JMS AppServer Connection: Use an existing application server connection pointing to the WebLogic server on which the above JMS queue and connection factory were created. You can use the “+” button to create a connection directly from the wizard, if you do not already have one. This example uses a connection called jbevans-lx-PS5. Adapter Interface > Interface: Define from operation and schema (specified later) Operation Type: Produce Message Operation Name: Produce_message Destination Name: Press the Browse button, select Destination Type: Queues, then press Search. Wait for the list to populate, then select the entry for TestJMSQueue , which is the queue created earlier. JNDI Name: The JNDI name to use for the JMS connection. This is probably the most important step in this exercise and the most common source of error. This is the JNDI name of the JMS adapter’s connection pool created in the WebLogic Server and which points to the connection factory. JDeveloper does not verify the value entered here. If you enter a wrong value, the JMS adapter won’t find the queue and you will get an error message at runtime, which is very difficult to trace. In our example, this is the value eis/wls/TestQueue . (See the earlier step on how to create a JMS Adapter Connection Pool in WebLogic Server for details.) MessagesURL: We will use the XSD file we created earlier, stringPayload.xsd to define the message format for the JMS adapter. Press the magnifying glass icon to search for schema files. Expand Project Schema Files > stringPayload.xsd and select exampleElement: string. Press Next and Finish, which will complete the JMS Adapter configuration. Wire the BPEL Component to the JMS Adapter In this step, we link the BPEL process/component to the JMS adapter. From the composite.xml editor, drag the right-arrow icon from the BPEL process to the JMS adapter’s in-arrow. This completes the steps at the composite level. 4. Complete the BPEL Process Design Invoke the JMS Adapter Open the BPEL component by double-clicking it in the design view of the composite.xml, or open it from the project navigator by selecting the JmsAdapterWriteSchema.bpel file. This will display the BPEL process in the design view. You should see the JmsAdapterWrite partner link under one of the two swim lanes. We want it in the right-hand swim lane. If JDeveloper displays it in the left-hand lane, right-click it and choose Display > Move To Opposite Swim Lane. An Invoke activity is required in order to invoke the JMS adapter. Drag an Invoke activity between the Receive and Reply activities. Drag the right-hand arrow from the Invoke activity to the JMS adapter partner link. This will open the Invoke editor. The correct default values are entered automatically and are fine for our purposes. We only need to define the input variable to use for the JMS adapter. By pressing the green “+” symbol, a variable of the correct type can be auto-generated, for example with the name Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable. Press OK after creating the variable. ( For some reason, while I was testing this, the JMS Adapter moved back to the left-hand swim lane again after this step. There is no harm in leaving it there, but I find it easier to follow if it is in the right-hand lane, because I kind-of think of the message coming in on the left and being routed through the right. But you can follow your personal preference here.) Assign Variables Drag an Assign activity between the Receive and Invoke activities. We will simply copy the input variable to the JMS adapter and, for completion, so the process has an output to print, again to the process’s output variable. Double-click the Assign activity and create two Copy rules: for the first, drag Variables > inputVariable > payload > client:process > client:input_string to Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable > body > ns2:exampleElement for the second, drag the same input variable to outputVariable > payload > client:processResponse > client:result This will create two copy rules, similar to the following: Press OK. This completes the BPEL and Composite design. 5. Compile and Deploy the Composite We won’t go into too much detail on how to compile and deploy. In JDeveloper, compile the process by pressing the Make or Rebuild icons or by right-clicking the project name in the navigator and selecting Make... or Rebuild... If the compilation is successful, deploy it to the SOA server connection defined earlier. (Right-click the project name in the navigator, select Deploy to Application Server, choose the application server connection, choose the partition on the server (usually default) and press Finish. You should see the message ---- Deployment finished. ---- in the Deployment frame, if the deployment was successful. 6. Test the Composite This is the exciting part. Open two tabs in your browser and log in to the WebLogic Administration Console in one tab and the Enterprise Manager 11g Fusion Middleware Control (EM) for your SOA installation in the other. We will use the Console to monitor the messages being written to the queue and the EM to execute the composite. In the Console, go to Services > Messaging > JMS Modules > TestJMSModule > TestJMSQueue > Monitoring. Note the number of messages under Messages Current. In the EM, go to SOA > soa-infra (soa_server1) > default (or wherever you deployed your composite to) and click on JmsAdapterWriteSchema [1.0], then press the Test button. Under Input Arguments, enter any string into the text input field for the payload, for example Test Message then press Test Web Service. If the instance is successful you should see the same text in the Response message, “Test Message”. In the Console, refresh the Monitoring screen to confirm a new message has been written to the queue. Check the checkbox and press Show Messages. Click on the newest message and view its contents. They should include the full XML of the entered payload. 7. Troubleshooting If you get an exception similar to the following at runtime ... BINDING.JCA-12510 JCA Resource Adapter location error. Unable to locate the JCA Resource Adapter via .jca binding file element The JCA Binding Component is unable to startup the Resource Adapter specified in the element: location='eis/wls/QueueTest'. The reason for this is most likely that either 1) the Resource Adapters RAR file has not been deployed successfully to the WebLogic Application server or 2) the '' element in weblogic-ra.xml has not been set to eis/wls/QueueTest. In the last case you will have to add a new WebLogic JCA connection factory (deploy a RAR). Please correct this and then restart the Application Server at oracle.integration.platform.blocks.adapter.fw.AdapterBindingException. createJndiLookupException(AdapterBindingException.java:130) at oracle.integration.platform.blocks.adapter.fw.jca.cci. JCAConnectionManager$JCAConnectionPool.createJCAConnectionFactory (JCAConnectionManager.java:1387) at oracle.integration.platform.blocks.adapter.fw.jca.cci. JCAConnectionManager$JCAConnectionPool.newPoolObject (JCAConnectionManager.java:1285) ... then this is very likely due to an incorrect JNDI name entered for the JMS Connection in the JMS Adapter Wizard. Recheck those steps. The error message prints the name of the JNDI name used. In this example, it was incorrectly entered as eis/wls/QueueTest instead of eis/wls/TestQueue. This concludes this example. Best regards John-Brown Evans Oracle Technology Proactive Support Delivery

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Windows Azure: Backup Services Release, Hyper-V Recovery Manager, VM Enhancements, Enhanced Enterprise Management Support

- by ScottGu

This morning we released a huge set of updates to Windows Azure. These new capabilities include: Backup Services: General Availability of Windows Azure Backup Services Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Public preview of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Configuration Active Directory: Securely manage hundreds of SaaS applications Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure SDK 2.2: A massive update of our SDK + Visual Studio tooling support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately. Below are more details about them. Backup Service: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Backup Today we are releasing Windows Azure Backup Service as a general availability service. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. Windows Azure Backup is a cloud based backup solution for Windows Server which allows files and folders to be backed up and recovered from the cloud, and provides off-site protection against data loss. The service provides IT administrators and developers with the option to back up and protect critical data in an easily recoverable way from any location with no upfront hardware cost. Windows Azure Backup is built on the Windows Azure platform and uses Windows Azure blob storage for storing customer data. Windows Server uses the downloadable Windows Azure Backup Agent to transfer file and folder data securely and efficiently to the Windows Azure Backup Service. Along with providing cloud backup for Windows Server, Windows Azure Backup Service also provides capability to backup data from System Center Data Protection Manager and Windows Server Essentials, to the cloud. All data is encrypted onsite before it is sent to the cloud, and customers retain and manage the encryption key (meaning the data is stored entirely secured and can’t be decrypted by anyone but yourself). Getting Started To get started with the Windows Azure Backup Service, create a new Backup Vault within the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Backup Vault to do this: Once the backup vault is created you’ll be presented with a simple tutorial that will help guide you on how to register your Windows Servers with it: Once the servers you want to backup are registered, you can use the appropriate local management interface (such as the Microsoft Management Console snap-in, System Center Data Protection Manager Console, or Windows Server Essentials Dashboard) to configure the scheduled backups and to optionally initiate recoveries. You can follow these tutorials to learn more about how to do this: Tutorial: Schedule Backups Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with setting up a backup schedule for your registered Windows Servers. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to set up a custom backup schedule. Tutorial: Recover Files and Folders Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with recovering data from a backup. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to do the same tasks. Below are some of the key benefits the Windows Azure Backup Service provides: Simple configuration and management. Windows Azure Backup Service integrates with the familiar Windows Server Backup utility in Windows Server, the Data Protection Manager component in System Center and Windows Server Essentials, in order to provide a seamless backup and recovery experience to a local disk, or to the cloud. Block level incremental backups. The Windows Azure Backup Agent performs incremental backups by tracking file and block level changes and only transferring the changed blocks, hence reducing the storage and bandwidth utilization. Different point-in-time versions of the backups use storage efficiently by only storing the changes blocks between these versions. Data compression, encryption and throttling. The Windows Azure Backup Agent ensures that data is compressed and encrypted on the server before being sent to the Windows Azure Backup Service over the network. As a result, the Windows Azure Backup Service only stores encrypted data in the cloud storage. The encryption key is not available to the Windows Azure Backup Service, and as a result the data is never decrypted in the service. Also, users can setup throttling and configure how the Windows Azure Backup service utilizes the network bandwidth when backing up or restoring information. Data integrity is verified in the cloud. In addition to the secure backups, the backed up data is also automatically checked for integrity once the backup is done. As a result, any corruptions which may arise due to data transfer can be easily identified and are fixed automatically. Configurable retention policies for storing data in the cloud. The Windows Azure Backup Service accepts and implements retention policies to recycle backups that exceed the desired retention range, thereby meeting business policies and managing backup costs. Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Now Available in Public Preview I’m excited to also announce the public preview of a new Windows Azure Service – the Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM). Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager helps protect your business critical services by coordinating the replication and recovery of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 private clouds at a secondary location. With automated protection, asynchronous ongoing replication, and orderly recovery, the Hyper-V Recovery Manager service can help you implement Disaster Recovery and restore important services accurately, consistently, and with minimal downtime. Application data in an Hyper-V Recovery Manager scenarios always travels on your on-premise replication channel. Only metadata (such as names of logical clouds, virtual machines, networks etc.) that is needed for orchestration is sent to Azure. All traffic sent to/from Azure is encrypted. You can begin using Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery today by clicking New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Hyper-V Recovery Manager within the Windows Azure Management Portal. You can read more about Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager in Brad Anderson’s 9-part series, Transform the datacenter. To learn more about setting up Hyper-V Recovery Manager follow our detailed step-by-step guide. Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Today’s Windows Azure release includes a number of nice updates to Windows Azure Virtual Machines. These improvements include: Ability to Delete both VM Instances + Attached Disks in One Operation Prior to today’s release, when you deleted VMs within Windows Azure we would delete the VM instance – but not delete the drives attached to the VM. You had to manually delete these yourself from the storage account. With today’s update we’ve added a convenience option that now allows you to either retain or delete the attached disks when you delete the VM: We’ve also added the ability to delete a cloud service, its deployments, and its role instances with a single action. This can either be a cloud service that has production and staging deployments with web and worker roles, or a cloud service that contains virtual machines. To do this, simply select the Cloud Service within the Windows Azure Management Portal and click the “Delete” button: Warnings on Availability Sets with Only One Virtual Machine In Them One of the nice features that Windows Azure Virtual Machines supports is the concept of “Availability Sets”. An “availability set” allows you to define a tier/role (e.g. webfrontends, databaseservers, etc) that you can map Virtual Machines into – and when you do this Windows Azure separates them across fault domains and ensures that at least one of them is always available during servicing operations. This enables you to deploy applications in a high availability way. One issue we’ve seen some customers run into is where they define an availability set, but then forget to map more than one VM into it (which defeats the purpose of having an availability set). With today’s release we now display a warning in the Windows Azure Management Portal if you have only one virtual machine deployed in an availability set to help highlight this: You can learn more about configuring the availability of your virtual machines here. Configuring SQL Server Always On SQL Server Always On is a great feature that you can use with Windows Azure to enable high availability and DR scenarios with SQL Server. Today’s Windows Azure release makes it even easier to configure SQL Server Always On by enabling “Direct Server Return” endpoints to be configured and managed within the Windows Azure Management Portal. Previously, setting this up required using PowerShell to complete the endpoint configuration. Starting today you can enable this simply by checking the “Direct Server Return” checkbox: You can learn more about how to use direct server return for SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups here. Active Directory: Application Access Enhancements This summer we released our initial preview of our Application Access Enhancements for Windows Azure Active Directory. This service enables you to securely implement single-sign-on (SSO) support against SaaS applications (including Office 365, SalesForce, Workday, Box, Google Apps, GitHub, etc) as well as LOB based applications (including ones built with the new Windows Azure AD support we shipped last week with ASP.NET and VS 2013). Since the initial preview we’ve enhanced our SAML federation capabilities, integrated our new password vaulting system, and shipped multi-factor authentication support. We've also turned on our outbound identity provisioning system and have it working with hundreds of additional SaaS Applications: Earlier this month we published an update on dates and pricing for when the service will be released in general availability form. In this blog post we announced our intention to release the service in general availability form by the end of the year. We also announced that the below features would be available in a free tier with it: SSO to every SaaS app we integrate with – Users can Single Sign On to any app we are integrated with at no charge. This includes all the top SAAS Apps and every app in our application gallery whether they use federation or password vaulting. Application access assignment and removal – IT Admins can assign access privileges to web applications to the users in their active directory assuring that every employee has access to the SAAS Apps they need. And when a user leaves the company or changes jobs, the admin can just as easily remove their access privileges assuring data security and minimizing IP loss User provisioning (and de-provisioning) – IT admins will be able to automatically provision users in 3rd party SaaS applications like Box, Salesforce.com, GoToMeeting, DropBox and others. We are working with key partners in the ecosystem to establish these connections, meaning you no longer have to continually update user records in multiple systems. Security and auditing reports – Security is a key priority for us. With the free version of these enhancements you'll get access to our standard set of access reports giving you visibility into which users are using which applications, when they were using them and where they are using them from. In addition, we'll alert you to un-usual usage patterns for instance when a user logs in from multiple locations at the same time. Our Application Access Panel – Users are logging in from every type of devices including Windows, iOS, & Android. Not all of these devices handle authentication in the same manner but the user doesn't care. They need to access their apps from the devices they love. Our Application Access Panel will support the ability for users to access access and launch their apps from any device and anywhere. You can learn more about our plans for application management with Windows Azure Active Directory here. Try out the preview and start using it today. Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure Active Directory provides the ability to manage your organization in a directory which is hosted entirely in the cloud, or alternatively kept in sync with an on-premises Windows Server Active Directory solution (allowing you to seamlessly integrate with the directory you already have). With today’s Windows Azure release we are integrating Windows Azure Active Directory even more within the core Windows Azure management experience, and enabling an even richer enterprise security offering. Specifically: 1) All Windows Azure accounts now have a default Windows Azure Active Directory created for them. You can create and map any users you want into this directory, and grant administrative rights to manage resources in Windows Azure to these users. 2) You can keep this directory entirely hosted in the cloud – or optionally sync it with your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory. Both options are free. The later approach is ideal for companies that wish to use their corporate user identities to sign-in and manage Windows Azure resources. It also ensures that if an employee leaves an organization, his or her access control rights to the company’s Windows Azure resources are immediately revoked. 3) The Windows Azure Service Management APIs have been updated to support using Windows Azure Active Directory credentials to sign-in and perform management operations. Prior to today’s release customers had to download and use management certificates (which were not scoped to individual users) to perform management operations. We still support this management certificate approach (don’t worry – nothing will stop working). But we think the new Windows Azure Active Directory authentication support enables an even easier and more secure way for customers to manage resources going forward. 4) The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release (which is also shipping today) includes built-in support for the new Service Management APIs that authenticate with Windows Azure Active Directory, and now allow you to create and manage Windows Azure applications and resources directly within Visual Studio using your Active Directory credentials. This, combined with updated PowerShell scripts that also support Active Directory, enables an end-to-end enterprise authentication story with Windows Azure. Below are some details on how all of this works: Subscriptions within a Directory As part of today’s update, we have associated all existing Window Azure accounts with a Windows Azure Active Directory (and created one for you if you don’t already have one). When you login to the Windows Azure Management Portal you’ll now see the directory name in the URI of the browser. For example, in the screen-shot below you can see that I have a “scottgu” directory that my subscriptions are hosted within: Note that you can continue to use Microsoft Accounts (formerly known as Microsoft Live IDs) to sign-into Windows Azure. These map just fine to a Windows Azure Active Directory – so there is no need to create new usernames that are specific to a directory if you don’t want to. In the scenario above I’m actually logged in using my @hotmail.com based Microsoft ID which is now mapped to a “scottgu” active directory that was created for me. By default everything will continue to work just like you used to before. Manage your Directory You can manage an Active Directory (including the one we now create for you by default) by clicking the “Active Directory” tab in the left-hand side of the portal. This will list all of the directories in your account. Clicking one the first time will display a getting started page that provides documentation and links to perform common tasks with it: You can use the built-in directory management support within the Windows Azure Management Portal to add/remove/manage users within the directory, enable multi-factor authentication, associate a custom domain (e.g. mycompanyname.com) with the directory, and/or rename the directory to whatever friendly name you want (just click the configure tab to do this). You can also setup the directory to automatically sync with an on-premises Active Directory using the “Directory Integration” tab. Note that users within a directory by default do not have admin rights to login or manage Windows Azure based resources. You still need to explicitly grant them co-admin permissions on a subscription for them to login or manage resources in Windows Azure. You can do this by clicking the Settings tab on the left-hand side of the portal and then by clicking the administrators tab within it. Sign-In Integration within Visual Studio If you install the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release, you can now connect to Windows Azure from directly inside Visual Studio without having to download any management certificates. You can now just right-click on the “Windows Azure” icon within the Server Explorer and choose the “Connect to Windows Azure” context menu option to do so: Doing this will prompt you to enter the email address of the username you wish to sign-in with (make sure this account is a user in your directory with co-admin rights on a subscription): You can use either a Microsoft Account (e.g. Windows Live ID) or an Active Directory based Organizational account as the email. The dialog will update with an appropriate login prompt depending on which type of email address you enter: Once you sign-in you’ll see the Windows Azure resources that you have permissions to manage show up automatically within the Visual Studio server explorer and be available to start using: No downloading of management certificates required. All of the authentication was handled using your Windows Azure Active Directory! Manage Subscriptions across Multiple Directories If you have already have multiple directories and multiple subscriptions within your Windows Azure account, we have done our best to create a good default mapping of your subscriptions->directories as part of today’s update. If you don’t like the default subscription-to-directory mapping we have done you can click the Settings tab in the left-hand navigation of the Windows Azure Management Portal and browse to the Subscriptions tab within it: If you want to map a subscription under a different directory in your account, simply select the subscription from the list, and then click the “Edit Directory” button to choose which directory to map it to. Mapping a subscription to a different directory takes only seconds and will not cause any of the resources within the subscription to recycle or stop working. We’ve made the directory->subscription mapping process self-service so that you always have complete control and can map things however you want. Filtering By Directory and Subscription Within the Windows Azure Management Portal you can filter resources in the portal by subscription (allowing you to show/hide different subscriptions). If you have subscriptions mapped to multiple directory tenants, we also now have a filter drop-down that allows you to filter the subscription list by directory tenant. This filter is only available if you have multiple subscriptions mapped to multiple directories within your Windows Azure Account: Windows Azure SDK 2.2 Today we are also releasing a major update of our Windows Azure SDK. The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release adds some great new features including: Visual Studio 2013 Support Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter I’ll post a follow-up blog shortly with more details about all of the above. Additional Updates In addition to the above enhancements, today’s release also includes a number of additional improvements: AutoScale: Richer time and date based scheduling support (set different rules on different dates) AutoScale: Ability to Scale to Zero Virtual Machines (very useful for Dev/Test scenarios) AutoScale: Support for time-based scheduling of Mobile Service AutoScale rules Operation Logs: Auditing support for Service Bus management operations Today we also shipped a major update to the Windows Azure SDK – Windows Azure SDK 2.2. It has so much goodness in it that I have a whole second blog post coming shortly on it! :-) Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a bunch of great new scenarios, and enables a much richer enterprise authentication offering. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Using BPEL Performance Statistics to Diagnose Performance Bottlenecks

- by fip

Tuning performance of Oracle SOA 11G applications could be challenging. Because SOA is a platform for you to build composite applications that connect many applications and "services", when the overall performance is slow, the bottlenecks could be anywhere in the system: the applications/services that SOA connects to, the infrastructure database, or the SOA server itself.How to quickly identify the bottleneck becomes crucial in tuning the overall performance. Fortunately, the BPEL engine in Oracle SOA 11G (and 10G, for that matter) collects BPEL Engine Performance Statistics, which show the latencies of low level BPEL engine activities. The BPEL engine performance statistics can make it a bit easier for you to identify the performance bottleneck. Although the BPEL engine performance statistics are always available, the access to and interpretation of them are somewhat obscure in the early and current (PS5) 11G versions. This blog attempts to offer instructions that help you to enable, retrieve and interpret the performance statistics, before the future versions provides a more pleasant user experience. Overview of BPEL Engine Performance Statistics SOA BPEL has a feature of collecting some performance statistics and store them in memory. One MBean attribute, StatLastN, configures the size of the memory buffer to store the statistics. This memory buffer is a "moving window", in a way that old statistics will be flushed out by the new if the amount of data exceeds the buffer size. Since the buffer size is limited by StatLastN, impacts of statistics collection on performance is minimal. By default StatLastN=-1, which means no collection of performance data. Once the statistics are collected in the memory buffer, they can be retrieved via another MBean oracle.as.soainfra.bpel:Location=[Server Name],name=BPELEngine,type=BPELEngine.> My friend in Oracle SOA development wrote this simple 'bpelstat' web app that looks up and retrieves the performance data from the MBean and displays it in a human readable form. It does not have beautiful UI but it is fairly useful. Although in Oracle SOA 11.1.1.5 onwards the same statistics can be viewed via a more elegant UI under "request break down" at EM -> SOA Infrastructure -> Service Engines -> BPEL -> Statistics, some unsophisticated minds like mine may still prefer the simplicity of the 'bpelstat' JSP. One thing that simple JSP does do well is that you can save the page and send it to someone to further analyze Follows are the instructions of how to install and invoke the BPEL statistic JSP. My friend in SOA Development will soon blog about interpreting the statistics. Stay tuned. Step1: Enable BPEL Engine Statistics for Each SOA Servers via Enterprise Manager First st you need to set the StatLastN to some number as a way to enable the collection of BPEL Engine Performance Statistics EM Console -> soa-infra(Server Name) -> SOA Infrastructure -> SOA Administration -> BPEL Properties Click on "More BPEL Configuration Properties" Click on attribute "StatLastN", set its value to some integer number. Typically you want to set it 1000 or more. Step 2: Download and Deploy bpelstat.war File to Admin Server, Note: the WAR file contains a JSP that does NOT have any security restriction. You do NOT want to keep in your production server for a long time as it is a security hazard. Deactivate the war once you are done. Download the bpelstat.war to your local PC At WebLogic Console, Go to Deployments -> Install Click on the "upload your file(s)" Click the "Browse" button to upload the deployment to Admin Server Accept the uploaded file as the path, click next Check the default option "Install this deployment as an application" Check "AdminServer" as the target server Finish the rest of the deployment with default settings Console -> Deployments Check the box next to "bpelstat" application Click on the "Start" button. It will change the state of the app from "prepared" to "active" Step 3: Invoke the BPEL Statistic Tool The BPELStat tool merely call the MBean of BPEL server and collects and display the in-memory performance statics. You usually want to do that after some peak loads. Go to http://<admin-server-host>:<admin-server-port>/bpelstat Enter the correct admin hostname, port, username and password Enter the SOA Server Name from which you want to collect the performance statistics. For example, SOA_MS1, etc. Click Submit Keep doing the same for all SOA servers. Step 3: Interpret the BPEL Engine Statistics You will see a few categories of BPEL Statistics from the JSP Page. First it starts with the overall latency of BPEL processes, grouped by synchronous and asynchronous processes. Then it provides the further break down of the measurements through the life time of a BPEL request, which is called the "request break down". 1. Overall latency of BPEL processes The top of the page shows that the elapse time of executing the synchronous process TestSyncBPELProcess from the composite TestComposite averages at about 1543.21ms, while the elapse time of executing the asynchronous process TestAsyncBPELProcess from the composite TestComposite2 averages at about 1765.43ms. The maximum and minimum latency were also shown. Synchronous process statistics <statistics> <stats key="default/TestComposite!2.0.2-ScopedJMSOSB*soa_bfba2527-a9ba-41a7-95c5-87e49c32f4ff/TestSyncBPELProcess" min="1234" max="4567" average="1543.21" count="1000"> </stats> </statistics> Asynchronous process statistics <statistics> <stats key="default/TestComposite2!2.0.2-ScopedJMSOSB*soa_bfba2527-a9ba-41a7-95c5-87e49c32f4ff/TestAsyncBPELProcess" min="2234" max="3234" average="1765.43" count="1000"> </stats> </statistics> 2. Request break down Under the overall latency categorized by synchronous and asynchronous processes is the "Request breakdown". Organized by statistic keys, the Request breakdown gives finer grain performance statistics through the life time of the BPEL requests.It uses indention to show the hierarchy of the statistics. Request breakdown <statistics> <stats key="eng-composite-request" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="0"> <stats key="eng-single-request" min="22" max="606" average="258.43" count="277"> <stats key="populate-context" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="248"> Please note that in SOA 11.1.1.6, the statistics under Request breakdown is aggregated together cross all the BPEL processes based on statistic keys. It does not differentiate between BPEL processes. If two BPEL processes happen to have the statistic that share same statistic key, the statistics from two BPEL processes will be aggregated together. Keep this in mind when we go through more details below. 2.1 BPEL process activity latencies A very useful measurement in the Request Breakdown is the performance statistics of the BPEL activities you put in your BPEL processes: Assign, Invoke, Receive, etc. The names of the measurement in the JSP page directly come from the names to assign to each BPEL activity. These measurements are under the statistic key "actual-perform" Example 1: Follows is the measurement for BPEL activity "AssignInvokeCreditProvider_Input", which looks like the Assign activity in a BPEL process that assign an input variable before passing it to the invocation: <stats key="AssignInvokeCreditProvider_Input" min="1" max="8" average="1.9" count="153"> <stats key="sensor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="1" average="0.0" count="306"> </stats> <stats key="sensor-send-variable-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153"> </stats> <stats key="monitor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="306"> </stats> </stats> Note: because as previously mentioned that the statistics cross all BPEL processes are aggregated together based on statistic keys, if two BPEL processes happen to name their Invoke activity the same name, they will show up at one measurement (i.e. statistic key). Example 2: Follows is the measurement of BPEL activity called "InvokeCreditProvider". You can not only see that by average it takes 3.31ms to finish this call (pretty fast) but also you can see from the further break down that most of this 3.31 ms was spent on the "invoke-service". <stats key="InvokeCreditProvider" min="1" max="13" average="3.31" count="153"> <stats key="initiate-correlation-set-again" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153"> </stats> <stats key="invoke-service" min="1" max="13" average="3.08" count="153"> <stats key="prep-call" min="0" max="1" average="0.04" count="153"> </stats> </stats> <stats key="initiate-correlation-set" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153"> </stats> <stats key="sensor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="306"> </stats> <stats key="sensor-send-variable-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153"> </stats> <stats key="monitor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="306"> </stats> <stats key="update-audit-trail" min="0" max="2" average="0.03" count="153"> </stats> </stats> 2.2 BPEL engine activity latency Another type of measurements under Request breakdown are the latencies of underlying system level engine activities. These activities are not directly tied to a particular BPEL process or process activity, but they are critical factors in the overall engine performance. These activities include the latency of saving asynchronous requests to database, and latency of process dehydration. My friend Malkit Bhasin is working on providing more information on interpreting the statistics on engine activities on his blog (https://blogs.oracle.com/malkit/). I will update this blog once the information becomes available. Update on 2012-10-02: My friend Malkit Bhasin has published the detail interpretation of the BPEL service engine statistics at his blog http://malkit.blogspot.com/2012/09/oracle-bpel-engine-soa-suite.html.

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Simple MSBuild Configuration: Updating Assemblies With A Version Number

- by srkirkland

When distributing a library you often run up against versioning problems, once facet of which is simply determining which version of that library your client is running. Of course, each project in your solution has an AssemblyInfo.cs file which provides, among other things, the ability to set the Assembly name and version number. Unfortunately, setting the assembly version here would require not only changing the version manually for each build (depending on your schedule), but keeping it in sync across all projects. There are many ways to solve this versioning problem, and in this blog post I’m going to try to explain what I think is the easiest and most flexible solution. I will walk you through using MSBuild to create a simple build script, and I’ll even show how to (optionally) integrate with a Team City build server. All of the code from this post can be found at https://github.com/srkirkland/BuildVersion. Create CommonAssemblyInfo.cs The first step is to create a common location for the repeated assembly info that is spread across all of your projects. Create a new solution-level file (I usually create a Build/ folder in the solution root, but anywhere reachable by all your projects will do) called CommonAssemblyInfo.cs. In here you can put any information common to all your assemblies, including the version number. An example CommonAssemblyInfo.cs is as follows: using System.Reflection; using System.Resources; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; [assembly: AssemblyCompany("University of California, Davis")] [assembly: AssemblyProduct("BuildVersionTest")] [assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Scott Kirkland & UC Regents")] [assembly: AssemblyConfiguration("")] [assembly: AssemblyTrademark("")] [assembly: ComVisible(false)] [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.2.3.4")] //Will be replaced [assembly: NeutralResourcesLanguage("en-US")] .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Cleanup AssemblyInfo.cs & Link CommonAssemblyInfo.cs For each of your projects, you’ll want to clean up your assembly info to contain only information that is unique to that assembly – everything else will go in the CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file. For most of my projects, that just means setting the AssemblyTitle, though you may feel AssemblyDescription is warranted. An example AssemblyInfo.cs file is as follows: using System.Reflection; [assembly: AssemblyTitle("BuildVersionTest")] .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Next, you need to “link” the CommonAssemblyinfo.cs file into your projects right beside your newly lean AssemblyInfo.cs file. To do this, right click on your project and choose Add | Existing Item from the context menu. Navigate to your CommonAssemblyinfo.cs file but instead of clicking Add, click the little down-arrow next to add and choose “Add as Link.” You should see a little link graphic similar to this: We’ve actually reduced complexity a lot already, because if you build all of your assemblies will have the same common info, including the product name and our static (fake) assembly version. Let’s take this one step further and introduce a build script. Create an MSBuild file What we want from the build script (for now) is basically just to have the common assembly version number changed via a parameter (eventually to be passed in by the build server) and then for the project to build. Also we’d like to have a flexibility to define what build configuration to use (debug, release, etc). In order to find/replace the version number, we are going to use a Regular Expression to find and replace the text within your CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file. There are many other ways to do this using community build task add-ins, but since we want to keep it simple let’s just define the Regular Expression task manually in a new file, Build.tasks (this example taken from the NuGet build.tasks file). <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Go" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <UsingTask TaskName="RegexTransform" TaskFactory="CodeTaskFactory" AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.Build.Tasks.v4.0.dll"> <ParameterGroup> <Items ParameterType="Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITaskItem[]" /> </ParameterGroup> <Task> <Using Namespace="System.IO" /> <Using Namespace="System.Text.RegularExpressions" /> <Using Namespace="Microsoft.Build.Framework" /> <Code Type="Fragment" Language="cs"> <![CDATA[ foreach(ITaskItem item in Items) { string fileName = item.GetMetadata("FullPath"); string find = item.GetMetadata("Find"); string replaceWith = item.GetMetadata("ReplaceWith"); if(!File.Exists(fileName)) { Log.LogError(null, null, null, null, 0, 0, 0, 0, String.Format("Could not find version file: {0}", fileName), new object[0]); } string content = File.ReadAllText(fileName); File.WriteAllText( fileName, Regex.Replace( content, find, replaceWith ) ); } ]]> </Code> </Task> </UsingTask> </Project> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If you glance at the code, you’ll see it’s really just going a Regex.Replace() on a given file, which is exactly what we need. Now we are ready to write our build file, called (by convention) Build.proj. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Go" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <Import Project="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\Build.tasks" /> <PropertyGroup> <Configuration Condition="'$(Configuration)' == ''">Debug</Configuration> <SolutionRoot>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)</SolutionRoot> </PropertyGroup> <ItemGroup> <RegexTransform Include="$(SolutionRoot)\CommonAssemblyInfo.cs"> <Find>(?<major>\d+)\.(?<minor>\d+)\.\d+\.(?<revision>\d+)</Find> <ReplaceWith>$(BUILD_NUMBER)</ReplaceWith> </RegexTransform> </ItemGroup> <Target Name="Go" DependsOnTargets="UpdateAssemblyVersion; Build"> </Target> <Target Name="UpdateAssemblyVersion" Condition="'$(BUILD_NUMBER)' != ''"> <RegexTransform Items="@(RegexTransform)" /> </Target> <Target Name="Build"> <MSBuild Projects="$(SolutionRoot)\BuildVersionTest.sln" Targets="Build" /> </Target> </Project> Reviewing this MSBuild file, we see that by default the “Go” target will be called, which in turn depends on “UpdateAssemblyVersion” and then “Build.” We go ahead and import the Bulid.tasks file and then setup some handy properties for setting the build configuration and solution root (in this case, my build files are in the solution root, but we might want to create a Build/ directory later). The rest of the file flows logically, we setup the RegexTransform to match version numbers such as <major>.<minor>.1.<revision> (1.2.3.4 in our example) and replace it with a $(BUILD_NUMBER) parameter which will be supplied externally. The first target, “UpdateAssemblyVersion” just runs the RegexTransform, and the second target, “Build” just runs the default MSBuild on our solution. Testing the MSBuild file locally Now we have a build file which can replace assembly version numbers and build, so let’s setup a quick batch file to be able to build locally. To do this you simply create a file called Build.cmd and have it call MSBuild on your Build.proj file. I’ve added a bit more flexibility so you can specify build configuration and version number, which makes your Build.cmd look as follows: set config=%1 if "%config%" == "" ( set config=debug ) set version=%2 if "%version%" == "" ( set version=2.3.4.5 ) %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild Build.proj /p:Configuration="%config%" /p:build_number="%version%" .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now if you click on the Build.cmd file, you will get a default debug build using the version 2.3.4.5. Let’s run it in a command window with the parameters set for a release build version 2.0.1.453. Excellent! We can now run one simple command and govern the build configuration and version number of our entire solution. Each DLL produced will have the same version number, making determining which version of a library you are running very simple and accurate. Configure the build server (TeamCity) Of course you are not really going to want to run a build command manually every time, and typing in incrementing version numbers will also not be ideal. A good solution is to have a computer (or set of computers) act as a build server and build your code for you, providing you a consistent environment, excellent reporting, and much more. One of the most popular Build Servers is JetBrains’ TeamCity, and this last section will show you the few configuration parameters to use when setting up a build using your MSBuild file created earlier. If you are using a different build server, the same principals should apply. First, when setting up the project you want to specify the “Build Number Format,” often given in the form <major>.<minor>.<revision>.<build>. In this case you will set major/minor manually, and optionally revision (or you can use your VCS revision number with %build.vcs.number%), and then build using the {0} wildcard. Thus your build number format might look like this: 2.0.1.{0}. During each build, this value will be created and passed into the $BUILD_NUMBER variable of our Build.proj file, which then uses it to decorate your assemblies with the proper version. After setting up the build number, you must choose MSBuild as the Build Runner, then provide a path to your build file (Build.proj). After specifying your MSBuild Version (equivalent to your .NET Framework Version), you have the option to specify targets (the default being “Go”) and additional MSBuild parameters. The one parameter that is often useful is manually setting the configuration property (/p:Configuration="Release") if you want something other than the default (which is Debug in our example). Your resulting configuration will look something like this: [Under General Settings] [Build Runner Settings] Now every time your build is run, a newly incremented build version number will be generated and passed to MSBuild, which will then version your assemblies and build your solution. A Quick Review Our goal was to version our output assemblies in an automated way, and we accomplished it by performing a few quick steps: Move the common assembly information, including version, into a linked CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file Create a simple MSBuild script to replace the common assembly version number and build your solution Direct your build server to use the created MSBuild script That’s really all there is to it. You can find all of the code from this post at https://github.com/srkirkland/BuildVersion. Enjoy!

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Setup Custom Portal & Content Enabled Domain

- by Stefan Krantz

When overlooking the past year we have seen a large increase in deployments where only some parts of the WebCenter Suite infrastructure has been used. The most common from my personal perspective is a domain topology that includes: WebCenter Custom Portal, WebCenter Content and Oracle HTTP ServicesToday its very common to see installation where the whole suite is installed when the use case only requires the custom portal and some sub component like WebCenter Content. This post will go into detail on how to minimize the deployment time and effort by only laying down the necessary managed servers needed, by following this proposed method you will minimize the configuration steps and only install the required components and schema's, configure only the necessary components and minimize the impact of architectural changes through reduced dependencies. Assumptions: Oracle 11g Database installed SYS or equivalent access to Database to setup schema's via RCU Running Operating System supporting JDK 7 Update 2 (Check support matrix here) Good understanding of WebLogic Architecture Binaries: Oracle JDK 7 Update 2 (1.7.0_02) (Download) Oracle WebLogic 10.3.6 (Download) Oracle WebCenter Binaries (11.1.1.6) (Download) Oracle WebCenter Content Binaries (11.1.1.6) (Download 1) (Download 2) Oracle HTTP Services (11.1.1.6) (Download) Oracle Repository Creation Utility (11.1.1.6) (Download Linux or Windows) Schema's: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} MDS - Meta Data Services (WebCenter and OWSM) WebCenter (WebCenter Schema) OCS (Oracle WebCenter Content) Activities (WebCenter Activities) OPSS (Policy Store for WebCenter) Installation Structure: - [Installation Home]/Middleware - Oracle_WC1 (WebCenter Installation) - Oracle_WT1 (Oracle WebTier) - Oracle_ECM (WebCenter Content) - wlserver_10.3 (Weblogic installation)- [Installation Home]/domains - webcenter (WebCenter Domain) - instances (OHS/OPMN instance)- [Installation Home]/applications- [Installation Home]/JDK1.7.0_02 Installation and Configuration Steps: Install Java and configure Java Home Extract the Java Installable (jdk-7u2-linux-x64) to [Installation Home]/JDK1.7.0_02 Add JAVA_HOME to Environment Settings (JAVA_HOME=[Installation Home]/JDK1.7.0_02) Update PATH in Environment Settings (PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH) Install WebLogic Server (Middleware Home) Run the installer / execute jar file (java - jar wls1036_generic.jar) Create the Middleware Home under [Installation Home]/Middleware Install WebCenter Portal (Extend Middleware Home) Extract the compressed file (ofm_wc_generic_11.1.1.6.0_disk1_1of1.zip) to a temp folder Execute runInstaller under folder (DISK1/) with following command (runInstaller -jreLoc $JAVA_HOME) Make sure to install in following structure ([Installation Home]/Middleware/Oracle_WC1) Install WebCenter Content (Extend Middleware Home) Extract the compressed files (ofm_wcc_generic_11.1.1.6.0_disk1_1of2.zip & ofm_wcc_generic_11.1.1.6.0_disk1_2of2.zip) to the same temp folder Execute runInstaller under folder (DISK1/) with following command (runInstaller -jreLoc $JAVA_HOME) Make sure to install in following structure ([Installation Home]/Middleware/Oracle_ECM) Configure Initial Domain (Domain name webcenter) Execute configuration tool - [Installation Home]/Middleware/wlserver_10.3/common/bin/config Select "Create a New Weblogic Domain" Select following template (Basic Weblogic Server Domain, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle WSM Policy Manager, Oracle JRF) Create new domain with name webcenter under following location ([Installation Home]/domains) for applications ([Installation Home]/applications) Select Production Mode Finish Configuration wizard Setup username for startup scripts - Add a new file called boot.properties to ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/servers/AdminServer/security)Add following lines to boot.propertiesusername=weblogicpassword=[password clear text, it will be encrypted during first start] Start AdminServer in the background ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/startWeblogic) Install and Configure Oracle WebTier (OHS Server) Extract compressed file (ofm_webtier_linux_11.1.1.6.0_64_disk1_1of1.zip) to a temp folder Execute runInstaller under folder (DISK1/) with following command (runInstaller) Select Install & Configure option Deselect Oracle WebCache Auto Configure Ports Configure Schema's with RCU (Repository Creation Utility) Extract compressed file (ofm_rcu_linux_11.1.1.6.0_disk1_1of1.zip) to a temp folder Execute rcu with following command ([temp]/rcuHome/rcu) Make sure database meets RCU requirements, particular (PROCESSES is 200 or more) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Using SQLPLUS and sys user tou can update this configuration in the database with following procedure:ALTER SYSTEM SET PROCESSES=200 SCOPE=SPFILE shutdown immediate startup Create and Configure following schemas:MDS - Meta Data Services (WebCenter and OWSM)WebCenter (WebCenter Schema)OCS (Oracle WebCenter Content)Activities (WebCenter Activities)OPSS (Policy Store for WebCenter) Remember selected schema prefix and password (will be used later) Configure WebCenter Portal instance (WC_CustomPortal) Execute following command to start configuration wizard ([Installation Home]/Middleware/Oracle_WC1/common/bin/config) Select Extend an Existing WebLogic domain Select the existing webcenter domain ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter) Select Extend my domain using existing extension templateBrowse to ([Installation Home]/Middleware/Oracle_WC1/common/templates/applications)Select oracle.wc_custom_portal_template_11.1.1.jar Select to configure (Managed Servers/Clusters/Machines) On the Managed Server Screen you can now configure 1 or more WC_CustomPortal managed servers (name them WC_CustomPortal[n] (skip numbering if not clustered)) In case of two WC_CustomPortal Servers then create a Cluster (any name) and make sure the managed servers join the new cluster Create a new machine with same name as the current machine Make sure the AdminServer and WC_CustomPortal[n] managed servers joins the machine Finish the configuration wizard Stop AdminServer ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/stopWeblogic) Start AdminServer in the background ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/startWeblogic) Start WC_CustomPortal in the foreground (([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/startManagedServer WC_CustomPortal))- repeat for each WC_CustomPortal instance on the host Give credentials for weblogic user on start up Copy folder security including file boot.properties - from ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/servers/AdminServer/) to ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/servers/WC_CustomPortal/) Result should be ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/servers/WC_CustomPortal/security/boot.properties) Configure WebCenter Content instance (UCM_server1) Execute following command to start configuration wizard ([Installation Home]/Middleware/Oracle_ECM/common/bin/config) Select Extend an Existing WebLogic domain Select Oracle Universal Content Management - Content Server Select to configure (Managed Servers/Clusters/Machines) On Managed Server Screen create only one managed server instance (UCM_server1 on port 16200 (you can select any other available port)) Make sure the UCM_server1 managed server joins the machine Finish the configuration wizard Stop AdminServer ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/stopWeblogic) Start AdminServer in the background ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/startWeblogic) Start UCM_server1 in the foreground ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/startManagedServer UCM_server1)Give credentials for weblogic user on start up Copy folder security including file boot.properties - from ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/servers/AdminServer/) to ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/servers/UCM_server1/ Result should be ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/servers/UCM_server1/security/boot.properties) Post Configure WebCenter Content instance for WebCenter Portal Open a browser where you have support for Java applets - navigate to http://host:port/cs WARNING: The page that you are presented with after authentication will only appear once for each instance WARNING: Make sure you set correct storage options - also remember to consider file sharing options if you like to cluster your Content Server instance over multiple hosts Set an appropriate Auto number prefix Update the Server Socket Port: Commonly set to (4444) used for RIDC communication (a requirement for WebCenter Portal) Update the IP Address Filter to include the IP that is planned to access the server over RIDC - at the minimum add the ip address of the current host (this option can be updated later via EM) Stop UCM_server1 ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/stopManagedServer UCM_server1) Start UCM_server1 in the background([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/startManagedServer UCM_server1) Open a browser where you have support for Java applets - navigate to http://host:port/cs Navigate to Administration/Admin Server Go to General ConfigurationCheck Enable AccountsIn Additional Configuration Variables (Add on two lines) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} AllowUpdateForGenwww=1CollectionUseCache=1 Save the changes and go to Component Manager Click on the link advanced component manager Enable following components Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Folders_g, WebCenterConfigure, SiteStudio, SiteStudioExternalApplications, DBSearchContainsOpSupport WARNING: Make sure that following component is disabled: FrameworkFolders Stop UCM_server1 ([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/stopManagedServer UCM_server1) Start UCM_server1 in the background([Installation Home]/domains/webcenter/bin/startManagedServer UCM_server1) Open a browser where you have support for Java applets - navigate to http://host:port/cs Navigate to Administration/Site Studio Administration and update - Do not forget to save and submit each page Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Set Default ProjectSet Default WebAssets Post Configure Oracle WebTier (OHS) to include Content Server and WebCenter Portal application context Update following file - [Installation Home]/domains/instances/instance1/config/OHS/ohs1/mod_wl_ohs.conf For single add lines from following example: Link For clustered environment add lines from following template (note the clustering in example on applies to WC_CustomPortal): Link For more information on this: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/core.1111/e12037/contentsvr.htm#WCEDG318 Optional - Configure JOC Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Follow instructions: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/core.1111/e12037/extend_wc.htm#WCEDG264 Optional (Recommended) - Configure Node Manager Follow instructions: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/core.1111/e12037/node_manager.htm#WCEDG277 Optional (Mandatory for clustered environments) - Re-Associate Policy Store to Database or OID Follow instructions: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/webcenter.1111/e12405/wcadm_security_credstore.htm#CFHDEDJH Optional - Configure Coherence for Content Presenter Follow instructions in Blog Post (This post is for PS4): https://blogs.oracle.com/ATEAM_WEBCENTER/entry/enabling_coherence_for_content_presenter Other Recommended Post Cloning WebCenter Custom Portal - https://blogs.oracle.com/ATEAM_WEBCENTER/entry/cloning_a_webcenter_portal_managedImproving WebCenter Performance through caching - https://blogs.oracle.com/ATEAM_WEBCENTER/entry/improving_webcenter_performance

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Announcing Entity Framework Code-First (CTP5 release)

- by ScottGu

This week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library. EF Code-First enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data. It enables you to: Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping I’m a big fan of the EF Code-First approach, and wrote several blog posts about it this summer: Code-First Development with Entity Framework 4 (July 16th) EF Code-First: Custom Database Schema Mapping (July 23rd) Using EF Code-First with an Existing Database (August 3rd) Today’s new CTP5 release delivers several nice improvements over the CTP4 build, and will be the last preview build of Code First before the final release of it. We will ship the final EF Code First release in the first quarter of next year (Q1 of 2011). It works with all .NET application types (including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects). Installing EF Code First You can install and use EF Code First CTP5 using one of two ways: Approach 1) By downloading and running a setup program. Once installed you can reference the EntityFramework.dll assembly it provides within your projects. or: Approach 2) By using the NuGet Package Manager within Visual Studio to download and install EF Code First within a project. To do this, simply bring up the NuGet Package Manager Console within Visual Studio (View->Other Windows->Package Manager Console) and type “Install-Package EFCodeFirst”: Typing “Install-Package EFCodeFirst” within the Package Manager Console will cause NuGet to download the EF Code First package, and add it to your current project: Doing this will automatically add a reference to the EntityFramework.dll assembly to your project: NuGet enables you to have EF Code First setup and ready to use within seconds. When the final release of EF Code First ships you’ll also be able to just type “Update-Package EFCodeFirst” to update your existing projects to use the final release. EF Code First Assembly and Namespace The CTP5 release of EF Code First has an updated assembly name, and new .NET namespace: Assembly Name: EntityFramework.dll Namespace: System.Data.Entity These names match what we plan to use for the final release of the library. Nice New CTP5 Improvements The new CTP5 release of EF Code First contains a bunch of nice improvements and refinements. Some of the highlights include: Better support for Existing Databases Built-in Model-Level Validation and DataAnnotation Support Fluent API Improvements Pluggable Conventions Support New Change Tracking API Improved Concurrency Conflict Resolution Raw SQL Query/Command Support The rest of this blog post contains some more details about a few of the above changes. Better Support for Existing Databases EF Code First makes it really easy to create model layers that work against existing databases. CTP5 includes some refinements that further streamline the developer workflow for this scenario. Below are the steps to use EF Code First to create a model layer for the Northwind sample database: Step 1: Create Model Classes and a DbContext class Below is all of the code necessary to implement a simple model layer using EF Code First that goes against the Northwind database: EF Code First enables you to use “POCO” – Plain Old CLR Objects – to represent entities within a database. This means that you do not need to derive model classes from a base class, nor implement any interfaces or data persistence attributes on them. This enables the model classes to be kept clean, easily testable, and “persistence ignorant”. The Product and Category classes above are examples of POCO model classes. EF Code First enables you to easily connect your POCO model classes to a database by creating a “DbContext” class that exposes public properties that map to the tables within a database. The Northwind class above illustrates how this can be done. It is mapping our Product and Category classes to the “Products” and “Categories” tables within the database. The properties within the Product and Category classes in turn map to the columns within the Products and Categories tables – and each instance of a Product/Category object maps to a row within the tables. The above code is all of the code required to create our model and data access layer! Previous CTPs of EF Code First required an additional step to work against existing databases (a call to Database.Initializer<Northwind>(null) to tell EF Code First to not create the database) – this step is no longer required with the CTP5 release. Step 2: Configure the Database Connection String We’ve written all of the code we need to write to define our model layer. Our last step before we use it will be to setup a connection-string that connects it with our database. To do this we’ll add a “Northwind” connection-string to our web.config file (or App.Config for client apps) like so: <connectionStrings> <add name="Northwind" connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|\northwind.mdf;User Instance=true" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings> EF “code first” uses a convention where DbContext classes by default look for a connection-string that has the same name as the context class. Because our DbContext class is called “Northwind” it by default looks for a “Northwind” connection-string to use. Above our Northwind connection-string is configured to use a local SQL Express database (stored within the \App_Data directory of our project). You can alternatively point it at a remote SQL Server. Step 3: Using our Northwind Model Layer We can now easily query and update our database using the strongly-typed model layer we just built with EF Code First. The code example below demonstrates how to use LINQ to query for products within a specific product category. This query returns back a sequence of strongly-typed Product objects that match the search criteria: The code example below demonstrates how we can retrieve a specific Product object, update two of its properties, and then save the changes back to the database: EF Code First handles all of the change-tracking and data persistence work for us, and allows us to focus on our application and business logic as opposed to having to worry about data access plumbing. Built-in Model Validation EF Code First allows you to use any validation approach you want when implementing business rules with your model layer. This enables a great deal of flexibility and power. Starting with this week’s CTP5 release, EF Code First also now includes built-in support for both the DataAnnotation and IValidatorObject validation support built-into .NET 4. This enables you to easily implement validation rules on your models, and have these rules automatically be enforced by EF Code First whenever you save your model layer. It provides a very convenient “out of the box” way to enable validation within your applications. Applying DataAnnotations to our Northwind Model The code example below demonstrates how we could add some declarative validation rules to two of the properties of our “Product” model: We are using the [Required] and [Range] attributes above. These validation attributes live within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace that is built-into .NET 4, and can be used independently of EF. The error messages specified on them can either be explicitly defined (like above) – or retrieved from resource files (which makes localizing applications easy). Validation Enforcement on SaveChanges() EF Code-First (starting with CTP5) now automatically applies and enforces DataAnnotation rules when a model object is updated or saved. You do not need to write any code to enforce this – this support is now enabled by default. This new support means that the below code – which violates our above rules – will automatically throw an exception when we call the “SaveChanges()” method on our Northwind DbContext: The DbEntityValidationException that is raised when the SaveChanges() method is invoked contains a “EntityValidationErrors” property that you can use to retrieve the list of all validation errors that occurred when the model was trying to save. This enables you to easily guide the user on how to fix them. Note that EF Code-First will abort the entire transaction of changes if a validation rule is violated – ensuring that our database is always kept in a valid, consistent state. EF Code First’s validation enforcement works both for the built-in .NET DataAnnotation attributes (like Required, Range, RegularExpression, StringLength, etc), as well as for any custom validation rule you create by sub-classing the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.ValidationAttribute base class. UI Validation Support A lot of our UI frameworks in .NET also provide support for DataAnnotation-based validation rules. For example, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and Silverlight (via WCF RIA Services) all provide support for displaying client-side validation UI that honor the DataAnnotation rules applied to model objects. The screen-shot below demonstrates how using the default “Add-View” scaffold template within an ASP.NET MVC 3 application will cause appropriate validation error messages to be displayed if appropriate values are not provided: ASP.NET MVC 3 supports both client-side and server-side enforcement of these validation rules. The error messages displayed are automatically picked up from the declarative validation attributes – eliminating the need for you to write any custom code to display them. Keeping things DRY The “DRY Principle” stands for “Do Not Repeat Yourself”, and is a best practice that recommends that you avoid duplicating logic/configuration/code in multiple places across your application, and instead specify it only once and have it apply everywhere. EF Code First CTP5 now enables you to apply declarative DataAnnotation validations on your model classes (and specify them only once) and then have the validation logic be enforced (and corresponding error messages displayed) across all applications scenarios – including within controllers, views, client-side scripts, and for any custom code that updates and manipulates model classes. This makes it much easier to build good applications with clean code, and to build applications that can rapidly iterate and evolve. Other EF Code First Improvements New to CTP5 EF Code First CTP5 includes a bunch of other improvements as well. Below are a few short descriptions of some of them: Fluent API Improvements EF Code First allows you to override an “OnModelCreating()” method on the DbContext class to further refine/override the schema mapping rules used to map model classes to underlying database schema. CTP5 includes some refinements to the ModelBuilder class that is passed to this method which can make defining mapping rules cleaner and more concise. The ADO.NET Team blogged some samples of how to do this here. Pluggable Conventions Support EF Code First CTP5 provides new support that allows you to override the “default conventions” that EF Code First honors, and optionally replace them with your own set of conventions. New Change Tracking API EF Code First CTP5 exposes a new set of change tracking information that enables you to access Original, Current & Stored values, and State (e.g. Added, Unchanged, Modified, Deleted). This support is useful in a variety of scenarios. Improved Concurrency Conflict Resolution EF Code First CTP5 provides better exception messages that allow access to the affected object instance and the ability to resolve conflicts using current, original and database values. Raw SQL Query/Command Support EF Code First CTP5 now allows raw SQL queries and commands (including SPROCs) to be executed via the SqlQuery and SqlCommand methods exposed off of the DbContext.Database property. The results of these method calls can be materialized into object instances that can be optionally change-tracked by the DbContext. This is useful for a variety of advanced scenarios. Full Data Annotations Support EF Code First CTP5 now supports all standard DataAnnotations within .NET, and can use them both to perform validation as well as to automatically create the appropriate database schema when EF Code First is used in a database creation scenario. Summary EF Code First provides an elegant and powerful way to work with data. I really like it because it is extremely clean and supports best practices, while also enabling solutions to be implemented very, very rapidly. The code-only approach of the library means that model layers end up being flexible and easy to customize. This week’s CTP5 release further refines EF Code First and helps ensure that it will be really sweet when it ships early next year. I recommend using NuGet to install and give it a try today. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how awesome it is. Hope this helps, Scott

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Openvpn plugin openvpn-auth-ldap does not bind to Active Directory

- by Selivanov Pavel

I'm trying to configure OpenVPN with openvpn-auth-ldap plugin to authorize users via Active Directory LDAP. When I use the same server config without plugin option, and add client config with generated client key and cert, connection is successful, so problem is in the plugin. server.conf: plugin /usr/lib/openvpn/openvpn-auth-ldap.so "/etc/openvpn-test/openvpn-auth-ldap.conf" port 1194 proto tcp dev tun keepalive 10 60 topology subnet server 10.0.2.0 255.255.255.0 tls-server ca ca.crt dh dh1024.pem cert server.crt key server.key #crl-verify crl.pem persist-key persist-tun user nobody group nogroup verb 3 mute 20 openvpn-auth-ldap.conf: <LDAP> URL ldap://dc1.domain:389 TLSEnable no BindDN cn=bot_auth,cn=Users,dc=domain Password bot_auth Timeout 15 FollowReferrals yes </LDAP> <Authorization> BaseDN "cn=Users,dc=domain" SearchFilter "(sAMAccountName=%u)" RequireGroup false # <Group> # BaseDN "ou=groups,dc=mycompany,dc=local" # SearchFilter "(|(cn=developers)(cn=artists))" # MemberAttribute uniqueMember # </Group> </Authorization> Top-level domain in AD is used by historical reasons. Analogue configuration is working for Apache 2.2 in mod-authzn-ldap. User and password are correct. client.conf: remote server_name port 1194 proto tcp client pull remote-cert-tls server dev tun resolv-retry infinite nobind ca ca.crt ; with keys - works fine #cert test.crt #key test.key ; without keys - by password auth-user-pass persist-tun verb 3 mute 20 In server log there is string PLUGIN_INIT: POST /usr/lib/openvpn/openvpn-auth-ldap.so '[/usr/lib/openvpn/openvpn-auth-ldap.so] [/etc/openvpn-test/openvpn-auth-ldap.conf]' which indicates, that plugin failed. I can telnet to dc1.domain:389, so this is not network/firewall problem. Later server says TLS Error: TLS object -> incoming plaintext read error TLS handshake failed - without plugin it tryes to do usal key authentification. server log: Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 OpenVPN 2.1.3 i486-pc-linux-gnu [SSL] [LZO2] [EPOLL] [PKCS11] [MH] [PF_INET6] [eurephia] built on Oct 21 2010 Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 NOTE: OpenVPN 2.1 requires '--script-security 2' or higher to call user-defined scripts or executables Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 PLUGIN_INIT: POST /usr/lib/openvpn/openvpn-auth-ldap.so '[/usr/lib/openvpn/openvpn-auth-ldap.so] [/etc/openvpn-test/openvpn-auth-ldap.conf]' intercepted=PLUGIN_AUTH_USER_PASS_VERIFY|PLUGIN_CLIENT_CONNECT|PLUGIN_CLIENT_DISCONNECT Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 Diffie-Hellman initialized with 1024 bit key Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 /usr/bin/openssl-vulnkey -q -b 1024 -m <modulus omitted> Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 Control Channel Authentication: using 'ta.key' as a OpenVPN static key file Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 Outgoing Control Channel Authentication: Using 160 bit message hash 'SHA1' for HMAC authentication Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 Incoming Control Channel Authentication: Using 160 bit message hash 'SHA1' for HMAC authentication Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 TLS-Auth MTU parms [ L:1543 D:168 EF:68 EB:0 ET:0 EL:0 ] Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 Socket Buffers: R=[87380->131072] S=[16384->131072] Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 TUN/TAP device tun1 opened Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 TUN/TAP TX queue length set to 100 Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 /sbin/ifconfig tun1 10.0.2.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 mtu 1500 broadcast 10.0.2.255 Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 Data Channel MTU parms [ L:1543 D:1450 EF:43 EB:4 ET:0 EL:0 ] Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 GID set to nogroup Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 UID set to nobody Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 Listening for incoming TCP connection on [undef] Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 TCPv4_SERVER link local (bound): [undef] Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 TCPv4_SERVER link remote: [undef] Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 MULTI: multi_init called, r=256 v=256 Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 IFCONFIG POOL: base=10.0.2.2 size=252 Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 MULTI: TCP INIT maxclients=1024 maxevents=1028 Tue Nov 22 03:06:20 2011 Initialization Sequence Completed Tue Nov 22 03:07:10 2011 MULTI: multi_create_instance called Tue Nov 22 03:07:10 2011 Re-using SSL/TLS context Tue Nov 22 03:07:10 2011 Control Channel MTU parms [ L:1543 D:168 EF:68 EB:0 ET:0 EL:0 ] Tue Nov 22 03:07:10 2011 Data Channel MTU parms [ L:1543 D:1450 EF:43 EB:4 ET:0 EL:0 ] Tue Nov 22 03:07:10 2011 Local Options hash (VER=V4): 'c413e92e' Tue Nov 22 03:07:10 2011 Expected Remote Options hash (VER=V4): 'd8421bb0' Tue Nov 22 03:07:10 2011 TCP connection established with [AF_INET]10.0.0.9:47808 Tue Nov 22 03:07:10 2011 TCPv4_SERVER link local: [undef] Tue Nov 22 03:07:10 2011 TCPv4_SERVER link remote: [AF_INET]10.0.0.9:47808 Tue Nov 22 03:07:11 2011 10.0.0.9:47808 TLS: Initial packet from [AF_INET]10.0.0.9:47808, sid=a2cd4052 84b47108 Tue Nov 22 03:07:11 2011 10.0.0.9:47808 TLS_ERROR: BIO read tls_read_plaintext error: error:140890C7:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_CLIENT_CERTIFICATE:peer did not return a certificate Tue Nov 22 03:07:11 2011 10.0.0.9:47808 TLS Error: TLS object -> incoming plaintext read error Tue Nov 22 03:07:11 2011 10.0.0.9:47808 TLS Error: TLS handshake failed Tue Nov 22 03:07:11 2011 10.0.0.9:47808 Fatal TLS error (check_tls_errors_co), restarting Tue Nov 22 03:07:11 2011 10.0.0.9:47808 SIGUSR1[soft,tls-error] received, client-instance restarting Tue Nov 22 03:07:11 2011 TCP/UDP: Closing socket client log: Tue Nov 22 03:06:18 2011 OpenVPN 2.1.3 x86_64-pc-linux-gnu [SSL] [LZO2] [EPOLL] [PKCS11] [MH] [PF_INET6] [eurephia] built on Oct 22 2010 Enter Auth Username:user Enter Auth Password: Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 NOTE: OpenVPN 2.1 requires '--script-security 2' or higher to call user-defined scripts or executables Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 Control Channel Authentication: using 'ta.key' as a OpenVPN static key file Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 Outgoing Control Channel Authentication: Using 160 bit message hash 'SHA1' for HMAC authentication Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 Incoming Control Channel Authentication: Using 160 bit message hash 'SHA1' for HMAC authentication Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 Control Channel MTU parms [ L:1543 D:168 EF:68 EB:0 ET:0 EL:0 ] Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 Socket Buffers: R=[87380->131072] S=[16384->131072] Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 Data Channel MTU parms [ L:1543 D:1450 EF:43 EB:4 ET:0 EL:0 ] Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 Local Options hash (VER=V4): 'd8421bb0' Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 Expected Remote Options hash (VER=V4): 'c413e92e' Tue Nov 22 03:06:25 2011 Attempting to establish TCP connection with [AF_INET]10.0.0.2:1194 [nonblock] Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 TCP connection established with [AF_INET]10.0.0.2:1194 Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 TCPv4_CLIENT link local: [undef] Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 TCPv4_CLIENT link remote: [AF_INET]10.0.0.2:1194 Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 TLS: Initial packet from [AF_INET]10.0.0.2:1194, sid=7a3c2a0f bd35bca7 Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 WARNING: this configuration may cache passwords in memory -- use the auth-nocache option to prevent this Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 VERIFY OK: depth=1, /C=US/ST=CA/L=SanFrancisco/O=Fort-Funston/CN=Fort-Funston_CA/[email protected] Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 Validating certificate key usage Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 ++ Certificate has key usage 00a0, expects 00a0 Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 VERIFY KU OK Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 Validating certificate extended key usage Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 ++ Certificate has EKU (str) TLS Web Server Authentication, expects TLS Web Server Authentication Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 VERIFY EKU OK Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 VERIFY OK: depth=0, /C=US/ST=CA/L=SanFrancisco/O=Fort-Funston/CN=server/[email protected] Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 Connection reset, restarting [0] Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 TCP/UDP: Closing socket Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 SIGUSR1[soft,connection-reset] received, process restarting Tue Nov 22 03:06:26 2011 Restart pause, 5 second(s) ^CTue Nov 22 03:06:27 2011 SIGINT[hard,init_instance] received, process exiting Does anybody know how to get openvpn-auth-ldap wirking?

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 08, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 08, 2011Popular ReleasesyoutubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Supports YouTube's new layout Complete internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details.fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroEnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.6 BETA: 2.3.6 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 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 Changes since 2.3.0 ...TestApi - a library of Test APIs: TestApi v0.6: TestApi v0.6 comes with the following changes: TestApi code development has been moved to Codeplex: Moved TestApi soluton to VS 2010; Moved all source code to Codeplex. All development work is done there now. Fault Injection API: Integrated the unmanaged FaultInjectionEngine.dll COM component in the build; Cleaned up FaultInjectionEngine.dll to build at warning level 4; Implemented “FaultScope” which allows for in-process fault injection; Added automation scripts & sample program; ...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.5: AutoChat now allows up to 6 items. Items with nr. 7-0 will be removed! News page url's are now opened in the default browser Added a context menu to the system tray icon (thanks to Alex Banagos) AutoChat now allows configuring the Chat Keys and the Modifier Key The recent files list now supports compact and full mode Fix: Swapped mouse buttons are now properly detected Fix: Sometimes the Play button was pressed while still greyed out Champion: Karma Note: You can also run the u...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.2: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2362-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.19 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...IronRuby: 1.1.2: IronRuby 1.1.2 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. In this release we fixed several major issues: - problems that blocked Gem installation in certain cases - regex syntax: the parser was replaced with a new one that is much more compatible with Ruby 1.9.2 - cras...Pyxis 2: Production Release: Pyxis 2.0.0.13 - Full Production Release This release of Pyxis 2 offers you a wide range of features: Launch Applications in their own threads & domains Render alpha-blended icons on the desktop Support for SD & USB drives Online App Store Dynamic & Static IP support Menus & Modals Over a dozen GUI controls File selection dialogs Folder selection dialog Application, Bootloader, and Firmware Updating Update Release Notes Much More!Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Sample Browser v2 (CTP Release): Sample Browser v2 (CTP Release) http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=205917MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (4): There was a small issue with the previous release that caused errors when installing the templates in VS10 Express. This release corrects the error. Only use this if you encountered issues when installing the previous release. No changes in the binaries.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.0: Finally the version 1.0 release! Sorry for the long delay since the last release, but I think that you'll find this release to be really smooth, really stable, and a really great enhancement to Windows. New features include: Windows 7 taskbar integration Major performance and usability improvements Redesigned look and feel New name: Finestra Better automatic updating Much faster full-screen switcher Fixes Windows 7 hotkey collisions by default Updated installerFacebook C# SDK: 5.0.2 (BETA): PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO GIVE US SOME FEEDBACK: Facebook C# SDK Survey This is third BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. This release contains some breaking changes. Particularly with authentication. After spending time reviewing the trouble areas that people are having using th...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 for MVC3: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. ChangelogTargeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4.0 Additional UpdatePriority options for generating XML sitemaps Allow to specify target on SiteMapTitleAttribute One action with multiple routes and breadcrumbs Medium Trust optimizations Create SiteMapTitleAttribute for setting parent title IntelliSense for your sitemap with MvcSiteMapSchem...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab consists of six labs: one for logging, one for service location, and four for application setting manager. Each lab takes about 20 minutes to walk through. Each lab consists of a PDF document. You can go through the steps in the doc to create solution and then build/deploy the solution and run the lab. For those of you who wants to save the time, we included the final solution so you can just build/deploy the solution and run the lab.Value Injecter - object(s) to -> object mapper: 2.3: it lets you define your own convention-based matching algorithms (ValueInjections) in order to match up (inject) source values to destination values. inject from multiple sources in one InjectFrom added ConventionInjectionMobile Device Detection and Redirection: 0.1.11.11: Improvements to Beta Release The following changes have been made in version 0.1.11.11: BlackBerry Version 6 devices (such as the 9800 Torch) are now correctly identified with a dedicated handler. Android powered devices are now correctly identified. Minor change to Provider.cs to improve performance and optimise data sent to 51Degrees.mobi if the option is enabled. GC.collect is no longer called at any point. All garbage collection now happens automatically IMPORTANT CHANGES This rele...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 10: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 9 ChangesAdded support for trends Added support for Silverlight 4 Elevated WP7 fixes Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.1.7: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comNew Projectsbisolu_sendus: bisolu smsBlack & Scholes: Black & Scholes OptionsCosLabs: CosLabs makes it easy to see the full capabilities of the Cosmos operating system toolkit. CosLabs has a number of experiments to find new and unique uses for Cosmos. It's developed in C#.DeployToAzure: DeployToAzure allows automating deployment of Windows Azure project and making it a part of TFS 2010 build process without using PowerShell and Azure Management CmdLets. Digital: Educational purposesDiscogsNet: DiscogsNet is a .NET library to query the Discogs.com API and parse the Discogs XML data dump files. It's developed in C# and usable from any .NET language. The API of the library is focused on ease of use and intuitiveness.DJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC is a lightweight framework which helps you build rich user interfaces for ASP.NET MVC while enjoying great developer productivity. DokuDB: Visio AddIn to document different versions of a databaseDtsConfig Explorer: This project is a windows froms application that helps explore a SSIS dtsconfig file with an easy wayEveryDNS Service: Windows service to automatically send your current IP address to everydns.net for dynamic domains. Automatically monitors and sends IP address changes without having to be logged in. The project is built in C# targeting the .NET 4.0 framework.EvoSim - Evolution Simulation: EvoSim is a pet project to learn aspects of MVVM, WPF/Silverlight, and Parallel Processing features of .NET 4. The goal is to simulate a world filled with creatures that move, eat, reproduce, and die according to Darwinian evolutionary principles. It is tile and turn based.EZStorage: A storage library for XNA based on EasyStorage but abstracting in an XML based file list for each folder, allowing file listings on all folders and details like file creation dates which are no longer possible in XNA 4.0ForeverBell's Snake: A snake game written in VB.NET.Glauca Browser: This is a browser with a webkit core inside.Grauers SharePoint 2010 Custom MasterPage Feature: This is a SharePoint 2010 Custom MastePage feature. Custom Master and custom CSS Blog post about the project: http://www.grauers.net/archive/2011/02/07/build-a-sharepoint-2010-custom-mastepage-with-visual-studio-2010.aspxHamming Code Sample: HamCode demonstrate how the hamming code work, result of coded and decoded data. Shows the benefits of hamming method/codeHydroDesktop Mercurial Test: This is a trial version of the HydroDesktop project (hydrodesktop.codeplex.com) running on Mercurial source code repository. We first want to test whether the data update/download is happening fine before switching the official HydroDesktop website to the new system.LateBindingApi: Creates .Net Proxy Components from COM Type Libraries.Middlesex County College Library Wireless Auto Login: The Middlesex County College Library Wireless Auto Login automatically logs a computer in to the Middlesex County College (Edison, NJ) Library's WifiMobility: Mobility is a small program that reads from a text file. The text file includes everything about the program, right down to that cute little bunny on your desktop! Try Mobility today!OpenMFC: OpenMFC is opensource version of MFC for using with C/C++ compiler without MFC.Orchard Content Sharing: This Orchard module adds content sharing functionality via integration with AddThis.com sharing service.Orchard Wunder Weather Widget: This project is used to maintain the source code for the Wunder Weather widget in the Orchard gallery.Professional Audio Recorder: Professional Audio Recorder is a Audio Recorder for Windows Phone 7Python Node Info for Umbraco: Designed to assist Umbraco macro authors who are writing their macros in Python. Provides a helper macro that, when inserted into a page, will enable the display of an info panel showing the page node properties as represented in Python.Softina.Graphs: Softina.Graphs is a graph managment and algorithm utility. It includes a set of libraries to work with graph processing. 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JSF Portlets in Liferay on JBoss

- by JBirch

I'm currently looking at working with and deploying JSF portlets into Liferay 6.0.5, sitting on JBoss 5.1.0. I ran into a lot of trouble trying to port some JSF-y/Seam-y/EJB-y stuff I had lying around, so I thought I'd start simple and work my way up. I could generate generic portlets using the NetBeans Maven archetype for Liferay portlets absolutely fine, but it's rather irrelevant because I wanted JSF portlets I took an example JSF portlet from http://www.liferay.com/downloads/liferay-portal/community-plugins/-/software_catalog/products/5546866 and attempted to deploy into a clean, vanilla installation of Liferay 6.0.5/JBoss 5.1.0 to no avail. The log messages are reproduced at the end of this. This particular example was actually tested for GlassFish and Tomcat, so it's not particularly helpful considering I'm deplying into JBoss. I tried ripping it apart and removing the jsf implementation contained within as there is a jsf implementation shipped with JBoss (Mojarra 1.2_12, in this case). 03:16:17,173 INFO [PortletAutoDeployListener] Copying portlets for /usr/local/[REDACTED]/liferay/liferay-portal-6.0.5/deploy/richfaces-sun-jsf1.2-facelets-portlet-1.2.war Expanding: /usr/local/[REDACTED]/liferay/liferay-portal-6.0.5/deploy/richfaces-sun-jsf1.2-facelets-portlet-1.2.war into /tmp/20110201031617188 Copying 1 file to /tmp/20110201031617188/WEB-INF Copying 1 file to /tmp/20110201031617188/WEB-INF/classes Copying 1 file to /tmp/20110201031617188/WEB-INF/classes Copying 47 files to /usr/local/[REDACTED]/liferay/liferay-portal-6.0.5/jboss-5.1.0/server/default/deploy/richfaces-sun-jsf1.2-facelets-portlet.war Copying 1 file to /usr/local/[REDACTED]/liferay/liferay-portal-6.0.5/jboss-5.1.0/server/default/deploy/richfaces-sun-jsf1.2-facelets-portlet.war Deleting directory /tmp/20110201031617188 03:16:20,075 INFO [PortletAutoDeployListener] Portlets for /usr/local/[REDACTED]/liferay/liferay-portal-6.0.5/deploy/richfaces-sun-jsf1.2-facelets-portlet-1.2.war copied successfully. Deployment will start in a few seconds. 03:16:23,632 INFO [TomcatDeployment] deploy, ctxPath=/richfaces-sun-jsf1.2-facelets-portlet 03:16:24,446 INFO [PortletHotDeployListener] Registering portlets for richfaces-sun-jsf1.2-facelets-portlet 03:16:24,492 INFO [faces] Init GenericFacesPortlet for portlet 1 03:16:24,495 INFO [faces] Bridge class name is org.jboss.portletbridge.AjaxPortletBridge 03:16:24,509 INFO [faces] The bridge does not support doHeaders method 03:16:24,510 INFO [faces] GenericFacesPortlet for portlet 1 initialized 03:16:24,555 INFO [PortletHotDeployListener] 1 portlet for richfaces-sun-jsf1.2-facelets-portlet is available for use 03:16:24,627 SEVERE [webapp] Initialization of the JSF runtime either failed or did not occurr. Review the server''s log for details. java.lang.InstantiationException: org.jboss.portletbridge.context.FacesContextFactoryImpl at java.lang.Class.newInstance0(Class.java:340) at java.lang.Class.newInstance(Class.java:308) at javax.faces.FactoryFinder.getImplGivenPreviousImpl(FactoryFinder.java:537) at javax.faces.FactoryFinder.getImplementationInstance(FactoryFinder.java:394) at javax.faces.FactoryFinder.access$400(FactoryFinder.java:135) at javax.faces.FactoryFinder$FactoryManager.getFactory(FactoryFinder.java:717) at javax.faces.FactoryFinder.getFactory(FactoryFinder.java:239) at javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet.init(FacesServlet.java:164) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.loadServlet(StandardWrapper.java:1048) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.load(StandardWrapper.java:950) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.loadOnStartup(StandardContext.java:4122) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.start(StandardContext.java:4421) at org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.deployers.TomcatDeployment.performDeployInternal(TomcatDeployment.java:310) at org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.deployers.TomcatDeployment.performDeploy(TomcatDeployment.java:142) at org.jboss.web.deployers.AbstractWarDeployment.start(AbstractWarDeployment.java:461) at org.jboss.web.deployers.WebModule.startModule(WebModule.java:118) at org.jboss.web.deployers.WebModule.start(WebModule.java:97) at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor286.invoke(Unknown Source) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.jboss.mx.interceptor.ReflectedDispatcher.invoke(ReflectedDispatcher.java:157) at org.jboss.mx.server.Invocation.dispatch(Invocation.java:96) at org.jboss.mx.server.Invocation.invoke(Invocation.java:88) at org.jboss.mx.server.AbstractMBeanInvoker.invoke(AbstractMBeanInvoker.java:264) at org.jboss.mx.server.MBeanServerImpl.invoke(MBeanServerImpl.java:668) at org.jboss.system.microcontainer.ServiceProxy.invoke(ServiceProxy.java:206) at $Proxy38.start(Unknown Source) at org.jboss.system.microcontainer.StartStopLifecycleAction.installAction(StartStopLifecycleAction.java:42) at org.jboss.system.microcontainer.StartStopLifecycleAction.installAction(StartStopLifecycleAction.java:37) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.action.SimpleControllerContextAction.simpleInstallAction(SimpleControllerContextAction.java:62) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.action.AccessControllerContextAction.install(AccessControllerContextAction.java:71) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractControllerContextActions.install(AbstractControllerContextActions.java:51) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractControllerContext.install(AbstractControllerContext.java:348) at org.jboss.system.microcontainer.ServiceControllerContext.install(ServiceControllerContext.java:286) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.install(AbstractController.java:1631) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.incrementState(AbstractController.java:934) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:1082) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:984) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:822) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:553) at org.jboss.system.ServiceController.doChange(ServiceController.java:688) at org.jboss.system.ServiceController.start(ServiceController.java:460) at org.jboss.system.deployers.ServiceDeployer.start(ServiceDeployer.java:163) at org.jboss.system.deployers.ServiceDeployer.deploy(ServiceDeployer.java:99) at org.jboss.system.deployers.ServiceDeployer.deploy(ServiceDeployer.java:46) at org.jboss.deployers.spi.deployer.helpers.AbstractSimpleRealDeployer.internalDeploy(AbstractSimpleRealDeployer.java:62) at org.jboss.deployers.spi.deployer.helpers.AbstractRealDeployer.deploy(AbstractRealDeployer.java:50) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployerWrapper.deploy(DeployerWrapper.java:171) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.doDeploy(DeployersImpl.java:1439) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.doInstallParentFirst(DeployersImpl.java:1157) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.doInstallParentFirst(DeployersImpl.java:1178) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.install(DeployersImpl.java:1098) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractControllerContext.install(AbstractControllerContext.java:348) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.install(AbstractController.java:1631) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.incrementState(AbstractController.java:934) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:1082) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:984) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:822) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:553) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.process(DeployersImpl.java:781) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.main.MainDeployerImpl.process(MainDeployerImpl.java:702) at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.repository.MainDeployerAdapter.process(MainDeployerAdapter.java:117) at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.hotdeploy.HDScanner.scan(HDScanner.java:362) at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.hotdeploy.HDScanner.run(HDScanner.java:255) at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:441) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRunAndReset(FutureTask.java:317) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.runAndReset(FutureTask.java:150) at java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.access$101(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:98) at java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.runPeriodic(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:181) at java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.run(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:205) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:885) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:907) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) 03:16:24,629 INFO [2-facelets-portlet]] Marking servlet FacesServlet as unavailable 03:16:24,630 ERROR [2-facelets-portlet]] Servlet /richfaces-sun-jsf1.2-facelets-portlet threw load() exception javax.servlet.UnavailableException: Initialization of the JSF runtime either failed or did not occurr. Review the server''s log for details. at javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet.init(FacesServlet.java:172) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.loadServlet(StandardWrapper.java:1048) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.load(StandardWrapper.java:950) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.loadOnStartup(StandardContext.java:4122) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.start(StandardContext.java:4421) at org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.deployers.TomcatDeployment.performDeployInternal(TomcatDeployment.java:310) at org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.deployers.TomcatDeployment.performDeploy(TomcatDeployment.java:142) at org.jboss.web.deployers.AbstractWarDeployment.start(AbstractWarDeployment.java:461) at org.jboss.web.deployers.WebModule.startModule(WebModule.java:118) at org.jboss.web.deployers.WebModule.start(WebModule.java:97) at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor286.invoke(Unknown Source) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.jboss.mx.interceptor.ReflectedDispatcher.invoke(ReflectedDispatcher.java:157) at org.jboss.mx.server.Invocation.dispatch(Invocation.java:96) at org.jboss.mx.server.Invocation.invoke(Invocation.java:88) at org.jboss.mx.server.AbstractMBeanInvoker.invoke(AbstractMBeanInvoker.java:264) at org.jboss.mx.server.MBeanServerImpl.invoke(MBeanServerImpl.java:668) at org.jboss.system.microcontainer.ServiceProxy.invoke(ServiceProxy.java:206) at $Proxy38.start(Unknown Source) at org.jboss.system.microcontainer.StartStopLifecycleAction.installAction(StartStopLifecycleAction.java:42) at org.jboss.system.microcontainer.StartStopLifecycleAction.installAction(StartStopLifecycleAction.java:37) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.action.SimpleControllerContextAction.simpleInstallAction(SimpleControllerContextAction.java:62) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.action.AccessControllerContextAction.install(AccessControllerContextAction.java:71) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractControllerContextActions.install(AbstractControllerContextActions.java:51) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractControllerContext.install(AbstractControllerContext.java:348) at org.jboss.system.microcontainer.ServiceControllerContext.install(ServiceControllerContext.java:286) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.install(AbstractController.java:1631) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.incrementState(AbstractController.java:934) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:1082) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:984) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:822) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:553) at org.jboss.system.ServiceController.doChange(ServiceController.java:688) at org.jboss.system.ServiceController.start(ServiceController.java:460) at org.jboss.system.deployers.ServiceDeployer.start(ServiceDeployer.java:163) at org.jboss.system.deployers.ServiceDeployer.deploy(ServiceDeployer.java:99) at org.jboss.system.deployers.ServiceDeployer.deploy(ServiceDeployer.java:46) at org.jboss.deployers.spi.deployer.helpers.AbstractSimpleRealDeployer.internalDeploy(AbstractSimpleRealDeployer.java:62) at org.jboss.deployers.spi.deployer.helpers.AbstractRealDeployer.deploy(AbstractRealDeployer.java:50) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployerWrapper.deploy(DeployerWrapper.java:171) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.doDeploy(DeployersImpl.java:1439) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.doInstallParentFirst(DeployersImpl.java:1157) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.doInstallParentFirst(DeployersImpl.java:1178) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.install(DeployersImpl.java:1098) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractControllerContext.install(AbstractControllerContext.java:348) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.install(AbstractController.java:1631) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.incrementState(AbstractController.java:934) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:1082) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.resolveContexts(AbstractController.java:984) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:822) at org.jboss.dependency.plugins.AbstractController.change(AbstractController.java:553) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.deployers.DeployersImpl.process(DeployersImpl.java:781) at org.jboss.deployers.plugins.main.MainDeployerImpl.process(MainDeployerImpl.java:702) at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.repository.MainDeployerAdapter.process(MainDeployerAdapter.java:117) at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.hotdeploy.HDScanner.scan(HDScanner.java:362) at org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.hotdeploy.HDScanner.run(HDScanner.java:255) at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:441) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRunAndReset(FutureTask.java:317) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.runAndReset(FutureTask.java:150) at java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.access$101(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:98) at java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.runPeriodic(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:181) at java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.run(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:205) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:885) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:907) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)

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Yet Another ASP.NET MVC CRUD Tutorial

- by Ricardo Peres

I know that I have not posted much on MVC, mostly because I don’t use it on my daily life, but since I find it so interesting, and since it is gaining such popularity, I will be talking about it much more. This time, it’s about the most basic of scenarios: CRUD. Although there are several ASP.NET MVC tutorials out there that cover ordinary CRUD operations, I couldn’t find any that would explain how we can have also AJAX, optimistic concurrency control and validation, using Entity Framework Code First, so I set out to write one! I won’t go into explaining what is MVC, Code First or optimistic concurrency control, or AJAX, I assume you are all familiar with these concepts by now. Let’s consider an hypothetical use case, products. For simplicity, we only want to be able to either view a single product or edit this product. First, we need our model: 1: public class Product 2: { 3: public Product() 4: { 5: this.Details = new HashSet<OrderDetail>(); 6: } 7: 8: [Required] 9: [StringLength(50)] 10: public String Name 11: { 12: get; 13: set; 14: } 15: 16: [Key] 17: [ScaffoldColumn(false)] 18: [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] 19: public Int32 ProductId 20: { 21: get; 22: set; 23: } 24: 25: [Required] 26: [Range(1, 100)] 27: public Decimal Price 28: { 29: get; 30: set; 31: } 32: 33: public virtual ISet<OrderDetail> Details 34: { 35: get; 36: protected set; 37: } 38: 39: [Timestamp] 40: [ScaffoldColumn(false)] 41: public Byte[] RowVersion 42: { 43: get; 44: set; 45: } 46: } Keep in mind that this is a simple scenario. Let’s see what we have: A class Product, that maps to a product record on the database; A product has a required (RequiredAttribute) Name property which can contain up to 50 characters (StringLengthAttribute); The product’s Price must be a decimal value between 1 and 100 (RangeAttribute); It contains a set of order details, for each time that it has been ordered, which we will not talk about (Details); The record’s primary key (mapped to property ProductId) comes from a SQL Server IDENTITY column generated by the database (KeyAttribute, DatabaseGeneratedAttribute); The table uses a SQL Server ROWVERSION (previously known as TIMESTAMP) column for optimistic concurrency control mapped to property RowVersion (TimestampAttribute). Then we will need a controller for viewing product details, which will located on folder ~/Controllers under the name ProductController: 1: public class ProductController : Controller 2: { 3: [HttpGet] 4: public ViewResult Get(Int32 id = 0) 5: { 6: if (id != 0) 7: { 8: using (ProductContext ctx = new ProductContext()) 9: { 10: return (this.View("Single", ctx.Products.Find(id) ?? new Product())); 11: } 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: return (this.View("Single", new Product())); 16: } 17: } 18: } If the requested product does not exist, or one was not requested at all, one with default values will be returned. I am using a view named Single to display the product’s details, more on that later. As you can see, it delegates the loading of products to an Entity Framework context, which is defined as: 1: public class ProductContext: DbContext 2: { 3: public DbSet<Product> Products 4: { 5: get; 6: set; 7: } 8: } Like I said before, I’ll keep it simple for now, only aggregate root Product is available. The controller will use the standard routes defined by the Visual Studio ASP.NET MVC 3 template: 1: routes.MapRoute( 2: "Default", // Route name 3: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters 4: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults 5: ); Next, we need a view for displaying the product details, let’s call it Single, and have it located under ~/Views/Product: 1: <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Product>" %> 2: <!DOCTYPE html> 3: 4: <html> 5: <head runat="server"> 6: <title>Product</title> 7: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-1.7.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 1: 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.19.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: function onFailure(error) 4: { 5: } 6: 7: function onComplete(ctx) 8: { 9: } 10: 11: </script> 8: </head> 9: <body> 10: <div> 11: <% 1: : this.Html.ValidationSummary(false) %> 12: <% 1: using (this.Ajax.BeginForm("Edit", "Product", new AjaxOptions{ HttpMethod = FormMethod.Post.ToString(), OnSuccess = "onSuccess", OnFailure = "onFailure" })) { %> 13: <% 1: : this.Html.EditorForModel() %> 14: <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" /> 15: <% 1: } %> 16: </div> 17: </body> 18: </html> Yes… I am using ASPX syntax… sorry about that! I implemented an editor template for the Product class, which must be located on the ~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates folder as file Product.ascx: 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<Product>" %> 2: <div> 3: <%: this.Html.HiddenFor(model => model.ProductId) %> 4: <%: this.Html.HiddenFor(model => model.RowVersion) %> 5: <fieldset> 6: <legend>Product</legend> 7: <div class="editor-label"> 8: <%: this.Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) %> 9: </div> 10: <div class="editor-field"> 11: <%: this.Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Name) %> 12: <%: this.Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) %> 13: </div> 14: <div class="editor-label"> 15: <%= this.Html.LabelFor(model => model.Price) %> 16: </div> 17: <div class="editor-field"> 18: <%= this.Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Price) %> 19: <%: this.Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Price) %> 20: </div> 21: </fieldset> 22: </div> One thing you’ll notice is, I am including both the ProductId and the RowVersion properties as hidden fields; they will come handy later or, so that we know what product and version we are editing. The other thing is the included JavaScript files: jQuery, jQuery UI and unobtrusive validations. Also, I am not using the Content extension method for translating relative URLs, because that way I would lose JavaScript intellisense for jQuery functions. OK, so, at this moment, I want to add support for AJAX and optimistic concurrency control. So I write a controller method like this: 1: [HttpPost] 2: [AjaxOnly] 3: [Authorize] 4: public JsonResult Edit(Product product) 5: { 6: if (this.TryValidateModel(product) == true) 7: { 8: using (BlogContext ctx = new BlogContext()) 9: { 10: Boolean success = false; 11: 12: ctx.Entry(product).State = (product.ProductId == 0) ? EntityState.Added : EntityState.Modified; 13: 14: try 15: { 16: success = (ctx.SaveChanges() == 1); 17: } 18: catch (DbUpdateConcurrencyException) 19: { 20: ctx.Entry(product).Reload(); 21: } 22: 23: return (this.Json(new { Success = success, ProductId = product.ProductId, RowVersion = Convert.ToBase64String(product.RowVersion) })); 24: } 25: } 26: else 27: { 28: return (this.Json(new { Success = false, ProductId = 0, RowVersion = String.Empty })); 29: } 30: } So, this method is only valid for HTTP POST requests (HttpPost), coming from AJAX (AjaxOnly, from MVC Futures), and from authenticated users (Authorize). It returns a JSON object, which is what you would normally use for AJAX requests, containing three properties: Success: a boolean flag; RowVersion: the current version of the ROWVERSION column as a Base-64 string; ProductId: the inserted product id, as coming from the database. If the product is new, it will be inserted into the database, and its primary key will be returned into the ProductId property. Success will be set to true; If a DbUpdateConcurrencyException occurs, it means that the value in the RowVersion property does not match the current ROWVERSION column value on the database, so the record must have been modified between the time that the page was loaded and the time we attempted to save the product. In this case, the controller just gets the new value from the database and returns it in the JSON object; Success will be false. Otherwise, it will be updated, and Success, ProductId and RowVersion will all have their values set accordingly. So let’s see how we can react to these situations on the client side. Specifically, we want to deal with these situations: The user is not logged in when the update/create request is made, perhaps the cookie expired; The optimistic concurrency check failed; All went well. So, let’s change our view: 1: <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Product>" %> 2: <%@ Import Namespace="System.Web.Security" %> 3: 4: <!DOCTYPE html> 5: 6: <html> 7: <head runat="server"> 8: <title>Product</title> 9: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-1.7.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 1: 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.19.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: function onFailure(error) 4: { 5: window.alert('An error occurred: ' + error); 6: } 7: 8: function onSuccess(ctx) 9: { 10: if (typeof (ctx.Success) != 'undefined') 11: { 12: $('input#ProductId').val(ctx.ProductId); 13: $('input#RowVersion').val(ctx.RowVersion); 14: 15: if (ctx.Success == false) 16: { 17: window.alert('An error occurred while updating the entity: it may have been modified by third parties. Please try again.'); 18: } 19: else 20: { 21: window.alert('Saved successfully'); 22: } 23: } 24: else 25: { 26: if (window.confirm('Not logged in. Login now?') == true) 27: { 28: document.location.href = '<%: FormsAuthentication.LoginUrl %>?ReturnURL=' + document.location.pathname; 29: } 30: } 31: } 32: 33: </script> 10: </head> 11: <body> 12: <div> 13: <% 1: : this.Html.ValidationSummary(false) %> 14: <% 1: using (this.Ajax.BeginForm("Edit", "Product", new AjaxOptions{ HttpMethod = FormMethod.Post.ToString(), OnSuccess = "onSuccess", OnFailure = "onFailure" })) { %> 15: <% 1: : this.Html.EditorForModel() %> 16: <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" /> 17: <% 1: } %> 18: </div> 19: </body> 20: </html> The implementation of the onSuccess function first checks if the response contains a Success property, if not, the most likely cause is the request was redirected to the login page (using Forms Authentication), because it wasn’t authenticated, so we navigate there as well, keeping the reference to the current page. It then saves the current values of the ProductId and RowVersion properties to their respective hidden fields. They will be sent on each successive post and will be used in determining if the request is for adding a new product or to updating an existing one. The only thing missing is the ability to insert a new product, after inserting/editing an existing one, which can be easily achieved using this snippet: 1: <input type="button" value="New" onclick="$('input#ProductId').val('');$('input#RowVersion').val('');"/> And that’s it.

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SOA Suite Integration: Part 1: Building a Web Service

- by Anthony Shorten

Over the next few weeks I will be posting blog entries outlying the SOA Suite integration of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. This will illustrate how easy it is to integrate by providing some samples. I will use a consistent set of features as examples. The examples will be simple and while will not illustrate ALL the possibilities it will illustrate the relative ease of integration. Think of them as a foundation. You can obviously build upon them. Now, to ease a few customers minds, this series will certainly feature the latest version of SOA Suite and the latest version of Oracle Utilities Application Framework but the principles will apply to past versions of both those products. So if you have Oracle SOA Suite 10g or are a customer of Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1 or above most of what I will show you will work with those versions. It is just easier in Oracle SOA Suite 11g and Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.x. This first posting will not feature SOA Suite at all but concentrate on the capability for the Oracle Utilities Application Framework to create Web Services you can use for integration. The XML Application Integration (XAI) component of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework allows product objects to be exposed as XML based transactions or as Web Services (or both). XAI was written before Web Services became fashionable and has allowed customers of our products to provide a consistent interface into and out of our product line. XAI has been enhanced over the last few years to take advantages of the maturing landscape of Web Services in the market place to a point where it now easier to integrate to SOA infrastructure. There are a number of object types that can be exposed as Web Services: Maintenance Objects – These are the lowest level objects that can be exposed as Web Services. Customers of past versions of the product will be familiar with XAI services based upon Maintenance Objects as they used to be the only method of generating Web Services. These are still supported for background compatibility but are starting to become less popular as they were strict in their structure and were solely attribute based. To generate Maintenance Object based Web Services definition you need to use the XAI Schema Editor component. Business Objects – In Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1 we introduced the concept of Business Objects. These are site or industry specific objects that are based upon Maintenance Objects. These allow sites to respecify, in configuration, the structure and elements of a Maintenance Object and other Business Objects (they are true objects with support for inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation etc.). These can be exposed as Web Services. Business Services – As with Business Objects, we introduced Business Services in Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1 which allowed applications services and query zones to be expressed as custom services. These can then be exposed as Web Services via the Business Service definition. Service Scripts - As with Business Objects and Business Services, we introduced Service Scripts in Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1. These allow services and/objects to be combined into complex objects or simply expose common routines as callable scripts. These can also be defined as Web Services. For the purpose of this series we will restrict ourselves to Business Objects. The techniques can apply to any of the objects discussed above. Now, lets get to the important bit of this blog post, the creation of a Web Service. To build a Business Object, you first logon to the product and navigate to the Administration Menu by selecting the Admin Menu from the Menu action on left top of the screen (next to Home). A popup menu will appear with the menu’s available. If you do not see the Admin menu then you do not have authority to use it. Here is an example: Navigate to the B menu and select the + symbol next to the Business Object menu item. This indicates that you want to ADD a new Business Object. This menu will appear if you are running Alphabetic mode in your installation (I almost forgot that point). You will be presented with the Business Object maintenance screen. You will fill out the following on the first tab (at a minimum): Business Object – The name of the Business Object. Typically you will make it descriptive and also prefix with CM to denote it as a customization (you can easily find it if you prefix it). As I running this on my personal copy of the product I will use my initials as the prefix and call the sample Web Service “AS-User”. Description – A short description of the object to tell others what it is used for. For my example, I will use “Anthony Shorten’s User Object”. Detailed Description – You can add a long description to help other developers understand your object. I am just going to specify “Anthony Shorten’s Test Object for SOA Suite Integration”. Maintenance Object – As this Business Service is going to be based upon a Maintenance Object I will specify the desired Maintenance Object. In this example, I have decided to use the Framework object USER. Now, I chose this for a number of reasons. It is meaningful, simple and is across all our product lines. I could choose ANY maintenance object I wished to expose (including any custom ones, if I had them). Parent Business Object – If I was not using a Maintenance Object but building a child Business Object against another Business Object, then I would specify the Parent Business Object here. I am not using Parent’s so I will leave this blank. You either use Parent Business Object or Maintenance Object not both. Application Service – Business Objects like other objects are subject to security. You can attach an Application Service to an object to specify which groups of users (remember services are attached to user groups not users) have appropriate access to the object. I will use a default service provided with the product, F1-DFLTS ,as this is just a demonstration so I do not have to be too sophisticated about security. Instance Control – This allows the object to create instances in its objects. You can specify a Business Object purely to hold rules. I am being simple here so I will set it to Allow New Instances to allow the Business Object to be used to create, read, update and delete user records. The rest of the tab I will leave empty as I want this to be a very simple object. Other options allow lots of flexibility. The contents should look like this: Before saving your work, you need to navigate to the Schema tab and specify the contents of your object. I will save some time. When you create an object the schema will only contain the basic root elements of the object (in fact only the schema tag is visible). When you go to the Schema Tab, on the dashboard you will see a BO Schema zone with a solitary button. This will allow you to Generate the Schema for you from our metadata. Click on the Generate button to generate a basic schema from the metadata. You will now see a Schema with the element tags and references to the metadata of the Maintenance object (in the mapField attribute). I could spend a while outlining all the ways you can change the schema with defaults, formatting, tagging etc but the online help has plenty of great examples to illustrate this. You can use the Schema Tips zone in the for more details of the available customizations. Note: The tags are generated from the language pack you have installed. The sample is English so the tags are in English (which is the base language of all installations). If you are using a language pack then the tags will be generated in the language of the user that generated the object. At this point you can save your Business Object by pressing the Save action. At this point you have a basic Business Object based on the USER maintenance object ready for use but it is not defined as a Web Service yet. To do this you need to define the newly created Business Object as an XAI Inbound Service. The easiest and quickest way is to select + off the XAI Inbound Service off the context menu on the Business Object maintenance screen. This will prepopulate the service definition with the following: Adapter – This will be set to Business Adaptor. This indicates that the service is either Business Object, Business Service or Service Script based. Schema Type – Whether the object is a Business Object, Business Service or Service Script. In this case it is a Business Object. Schema Name – The name of the object. In this case it is the Business Object AS-User. Active – Set to Yes. This means the service is available upon startup automatically. You can enable and disable services as needed. Transaction Type – A default transaction type as this is Business Object Service. More about this in later postings. In our case we use the default Read. This means that if we only specify data and not a transaction type then the product will assume you want to issue a read against the object. You need to fill in the following: XAI Inbound Service – The name of the Web Service. Usually people use the same name as the underlying object , in the case of this example, but this can match your sites interfacing standards. By the way you can define multiple XAI Inbound Services/Web Services against the same object if you want. Description and Detail Description – Documentation for your Web Service. I just supplied some basic documentation for this demonstration. You can now save the service definition. Note: There are lots of other options on this screen that allow for behavior of your service to be specified. I will leave them blank for now. When you save the service you are issued with two new pieces of information. XAI Inbound Service Id is a randomly generated identifier used internally by the XAI Servlet. WSDL URL is the WSDL standard URL used for integration. We will take advantage of that in later posts. An example of the definition is shown below: Now you have defined the service but it will only be available when the next server restart or when you flush the data cache. XAI Inbound Services are cached for performance so the cache needs to be told of this new service. To refresh the cache you can use the Admin –> X –> XAI Command menu item. From the command dropdown select Refresh Registry and press Send Command. You will see an XML of the command sent to the server (the presence of the XML means it is finished). If you have an error around the authorization, then check your default user and password settings on the XAI Options menu item. Be careful with flushing the cache as the cache is shared (unless of course you are the only Web Service user on the system – In that case it only affects you). The Web Service is NOW available to be used. To perform a simple test of your new Web Service, navigate to the Admin –> X –> XAI Submission menu item. You will see an open XML request tab. You need to type in the request XML you want to test in the Main tab. The first tag is the XAI Inbound Service Name and the elements are as per your schema (minus the schema tag itself as that is only used internally). My example is as follows (I want to return the details of user SYSUSER) – Remember to close tags. Hitting the Save button will issue the XML and return the response according to the Business Object schema. Now before you panic, you noticed that it did not ask for credentials. It propagates the online credentials to the service call on this function. You now have a Web Service you can use for integration. We will reuse this information in subsequent posts. The process I just described can be used for ANY object in the system you want to expose. This whole process at a minimum can take under a minute. Obviously I only showed the basics but you can at least get an appreciation of the ease of defining a Web Service (just by using a browser). The next posts now build upon this. Hope you enjoyed the post.

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Install Control Center Agent on Oracle Application Server

- by qianqian.wu

Control Center Agent (CCA) The Control Center Agent is the OWB component that runs the Template Mappings in the Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) server; also referred to as the J2EE Runtime. The Control Center Agent provides a Java-based runtime environment that can be installed on Oracle and non-Oracle database hosts. The Control Center Agent provides fundamental infrastructure for the heterogeneous, Code Template-based mapping support and Web services-related features of OWB in this release. In Oracle Warehouse Builder 11gR2 the Control Center Agent, by default will run in the built-in OC4J that is bundled in the Oracle Home. Besides that, you also have ability to install the Control Center Agent in an Oracle Application Server install. In this article, you will find step-by-step instructions how to install the Control Center Agent on an Oracle Application Server instance. The instructions cover the following tasks: Task 1: Install and Configure the Application Server Task 2: Deploy the Control Center Agent to the Application Server Task 3: Optional Configuration Tasks Task 1: Install and Configure the Application Server Before configuring the Application Server, you need to install it from Oracle Application Server CD-ROM, or by downloading the installation program from Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Once the installation is completed, you are ready to configure the Application Server. The purpose of the configuration task is to make sure the Control Center Agent ear file can be deployed and runs in the Application Server successfully. The essential configuration tasks are outlined below: · Modify the OC4J Startup Script · Set up Control Center Agent Server Side Logging · Set up Audit Table Data Source · Copy ct_permissions.properties File · Set up Security Roles for Control Center Agent · Create JMS Queues · Install JDBC Drivers to OC4J Modify the OC4J Startup Script The OC4J startup script “opmn.xml” is located in Application Server configuration directory, $AS_HOME/opmn/conf. $AS_HOME stands for the root home directory of the application server. Open the file opmn.xml in a text editor, and alter the contents of the file as displayed in the following sample. You need to make sure that: The MaxPerSize is set to 128M. This is to ensure that you allocate enough PermGen space to OC4J to run Control Center Agent. This will prevent java.lang.OutOfMemoryError when running the agent. The Python.path sets the path for the Python library files used by the Control Center Agent: jython_lib.zip and jython_owblib.jar. These two files are in the $OWB_HOME/owb/lib/int directory, where $OWB_HOME is the directory where owb is installed. · The km_security_needed determines whether restrictions will be applied to the kinds of operating system commands allowed to be executed by the OWB Code Template script executed by Control Center Agent. Setting km_security_needed to “true” enforces such restriction while setting it to “false” removes such restrictions. Set up Control Center Agent Server Side Logging Ensure that you are in the Application Server configuration directory, $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config. Open the file j2ee-logging.xml in a text editor and add the following lines to the log handler section. The jrt-internal-log-handler is the handler used by Control Center Agent runtime logger to create log files. Then add the following entry into the loggers section to create the logger for Control Center Agent runtime auditing. Set up Audit Table Data Source To enable Audit Table logging, a managed data source and connection pool need to be set up before Control Center Agent deployment. Ensure that you are in the Application Server configuration directory, $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config. Open the file data-sources.xml in a text editor. Define the audit data source shown below in the file, <managed-data-source name="AuditDS" connection-pool-name="OWBSYS Audit Connection Pool" jndi-name="jdbc/AuditDS"/> <connection-pool name="OWBSYS Audit Connection Pool"> <connection-factory factory-class="oracle.jdbc.pool.OracleDataSource" user="owbsys_audit" password="owbsys_audit" url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@//localhost:1521/ORCL"/> </connection-pool> Copy ct_permissions.properties File The ct_permissions.properties can be obtained from $OWB_HOME /owb/jrt/config/ directory. You need to copy the file to $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config directory.This properties file takes effect when the setting km-security is set to true in Control Center Agent. By default the ALLOWED_CMD is commented out in ct_permissions.properties file. This prevents all system command from being invoked from scripts executed in Control Center Agent (when km-security is set to true). To allow certain system commands to be invoked, ALLOWED_CMD needs to be uncommented out, and the system commands (allowed to be invoked) need to be added to the ALLOWED_CMD. Set up Security Roles for Control Center Agent You can set up the Control Center Agent security roles through Oracle Enterprise Manager. In a web browser, navigate to Enterprise Manager Homepage (e.g. http://hostname:8889/em). 1. Log in using the oc4jadmin credentials. After the Cluster Topology page is loaded, click home (the OC4J instance). This takes you to the home page of the OC4J instance. On the OC4J home screen, click the Administration tab. On the Administration Tasks screen, expand Security. Click the task icon next to Security Providers. 2. On Security Providers page click on the button “Instance Level Security”. On Instance Level Security page, go to “Realms” tab. You will see a row for the default realm “jazn.com” in the results table. It has a “Roles” column and a “Users” column. Click on the number in “Roles” column. In the “Roles” page it will display all the roles available for the realm. Click on “Create” button to create a new role “OWB_J2EE_ EXECUTOR”. 3. On the Add Role screen, enter Name OWB_J2EE_EXECUTOR, and click OK. 4. Follow the same steps as before, and create a new role “OWB_J2EE_OPERATOR”. 5. Assign role “oc4j-administrators” and “OWB_J2EE_EXECUTOR” to the role “OWB_J2EE_OPERATOR” by moving these roles from “Available Roles” and click “OK” to save. 6. Go back to Instance Level Security page and create a new role “OWB_J2EE_ADMINISTRATOR”. 7. Assign roles “OWB_J2EE_ OPERATOR” and “OWB_J2EE_EXECUTOR” to the role “OWB_J2EE_ ADMINISTRATOR” by moving these roles from “Available Roles” and click “OK” to save. 8.Go back to Instance Level Security page. This time, click on the number in “Users” column for the realm “jazn.com”. In the “Users” page, it shows all the users defined for this realm. Locate the user “oc4jadmin” in the results table and click on it. 9. Assign the roles “OWB_J2EE_ADMINISTRATOR” and “oc4j-app-administrators” to this user by moving the role from the “Available Roles” selection box to “Selected Roles” box and click “Apply” to save. 10. Go back to Instance Level Security page and create a new role “OWB_INTERNAL_USERS”, assign no user or role to this role. Simply click “OK” to create this role. Now you have finished creating the security roles required for Control Center Agent. Create JMS Queues You need to create two JMS queues for Control Center Agent: owbQueue and abort_owbQueue. 1. Now go to OC4J home Page. On the OC4J home screen, click the Administration tab. On the Administration Tasks screen, expand Services and then expand Enterprise Messaging Service. Click the task icon next to JMS Destinations. 2. On JMS Destinations page, click “Create New” button to create a new JMS queue. On Add Destination page, choose “Queue” as Destination Type. Put “owbQueue” as Destination Name. Select “In Memory Persistence Only” as the Persistence Type and put “jms/owbQueue” as JNDI Location and click on “OK” to finish. 3. Follow the same instruction as above to create the owb_abortQueue. Now you have finished creating the JMS queues required for Control Center Agent. Install JDBC Drivers to OC4J In order to execute Code Templates using commercial databases other than Oracle, e.g. DB2, SQL Server etc, the corresponding jdbc driver files need to be added to $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/applib directory. 1. To install other JDBC drivers to OC4J, first obtain the .jar file containing the JDBC driver. All the external JDBC drivers .jar files can be found in the directory: $OWB_HOME/owb/lib/ext/. For DB2, the files needed are db2jcc.jar and db2jcc_license_cu.jar. For SQL Server the file is sqljdbc.jar. For sunopsis JDBC drivers, the file needed is snpsxmlo.jar. 2. Copy the required JDBC driver file into the directory $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/applib. Now you have finished the Application Server configuration. To make the configuration to take an effect, you need to restart the Application Server. Task 2: Deploy the Control Center Agent to the Application Server Now you can deploy the Control Center Agent to the Application Server. In a web browser, navigate to Enterprise Manager Homepage (e.g. http://hostname:8889/em). 1. Log in using the oc4jadmin credentials. After the Cluster Topology page is loaded, click home (the OC4J instance). This takes you to the home page of the OC4J instance. On the OC4J home screen, click the Applications tab. Click Deploy to begin deploying Control Center Agent. 2. On the Deploy: Select Archive screen, under Archive, select Archive is present on local host. Upload the archive to the server where Application Server Control is running. Click Browse and locate the jrt.ear file in the $OWB_HOME/owb/jrt/applications directory. Under Deployment Plan, select Automatically create a new deployment plan. Click Next. 3. Wait for the ear file to be uploaded to Application Server. On the Deploy: Application Attributes screen, enter Application Name jrt, and Context Root jrt. Leave the other attributes at their default values. Click Next. 4. On Deploy: Deployment Settings screen, leave all attributes at their default values, and click Deploy. This will take about 1 minute or so and when the application is deployed successfully, a confirmation message will be displayed. Now the Control Center Agent is started automatically. Go back to OC4J home page and click on Applications tab to make sure the deployed application jrt is showing in the applications list. Task 3: Optional Configuration Tasks The optional configuration tasks contain: · Secure Control Center Agent Web Service · Setting the PATH Environment Variable Secure Control Center Agent Web Service If you want to use JRTWebService with a secure website, you need to do the following steps, 1. Create a file “secure-web-site.xml” in the $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config directory. The file can be obtained from $OWB_HOME/owb/jrt/config directory. A sample secure-web-site.xml is shown as below. We need to modify the “protocol” to “https”, and “secure” to “true”, also choose an port as the secure http port. Also we need to add the entry “ssl-config” in the file. Remember to use the absolute path for the key store file. 2. Modify the file “server.xml” that is located at $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config directory. Then add the <web-site> element in the file for the secure-web-site. 3. Create a key store file “serverkeystore.jks” in the $AS_HOME/j2ee/home/config directory. The file can be obtained from $OWB_HOME/owb/jrt/config directory. After the three files are altered, restart the application server. Now you can access the JRTWebService in SSL way through https://hostname:4443/jrt/webservice. Setting the PATH Environment Variable Sometimes, some system commands such as linux ls, sh etc, can not be executed successfully during the script execution due to they are not found in PATH. To ensure they work normally, you can setup the environment variable PATH. Let’s navigate to the Enterprise Manager Homepage. 1. Go to OC4J home screen and click the Administration tab. Expand Administration Tasks, then expand Properties. Click the task icon next to Server Properties. 2. On the Server Properties screen, scroll down to Environment Variables section. Under Environment Variables, click Add Another Row. Enter PATH in Name, and fill Value with directories that contain the system commands. Click Apply. After you work through this article, I believe you have developed a deeper understanding of the Control Center Agent installation process, and you can apply this knowledge in other installation plan such as Control Center Agent installation on Standalone OC4J.

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Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

- by Tarun Arora

Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples. After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped. Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run. Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test. Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through. As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete. Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’. Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You! Share this post : CodeProject

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