project layout - Page 460

Why can I not echo out the value from an input text?

- by user3684783

I am using Wordpress to do an auction website. Here is what the code looks like <form method="post" action="<?php echo ProjectTheme_post_new_with_pid_stuff_thg($pid, '1');?>"> <?php do_action('ProjectTheme_step1_before_title'); ?>  <li> <h2><?php echo __('Your Project Title', 'ProjectTheme'); ?>: <img src="../../images/help-icon.png" width="16" height="16" id="showhelp1"/></h2> <div id="help1">Your Project Title should be informative and brief.</div> <p><input type="text" style="width:90%;" class="do_input" name="project_title" value="Enter an informative & brief title..." onfocus="this.value = this.value=='Enter an informative & brief title...'?'':this.value;" onblur="this.value = this.value==''?'Enter an informative & brief title...':this.value;" /></p> <input type="submit" class="post-button" name="project_submit1" value="<?php _e("Next Step", 'ProjectTheme'); ?> »" /> </form> I am using a step by step form for users to fill in and I wanted to do a preview page, however I tried to use: if(isset($_POST['project_submit1'])){ $Name = $_POST['project_title']; echo "$Name"; } It shows up nothing.

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HTML/CSS - No 100% height on div in IE

- by Jordan Rynard

Okay, so I've got a problem - and I'd love to have it fixed. I am using my favourite way of setting up a simple header/content/footer layout. The problem is that any elements I add to the 'content' div of my layout can not be expanded to 100% in Internet Explorer (as far as I know, IE only). I understand there is no height declared to the 'content' element, but because of the style of its positioning (declaring an absolute top AND bottom), the element fills the desired area. (The content element has a background color defined so you can see that the div is in fact filling between both the header and the footer.) So my problem is, since the div is clearly expanded between the two, why can't a child be set to 100% to fill that area? If anyone has any solutions, I'd love to hear them. (I'm looking for a solution that won't involve designing by an entire different layout.. or at least perhaps an explanation of why this is happening. I'm assuming at this point it's because of the lack of a height declaration -- but the div is expanded, so I don't get it!) You can view a page of the example here: http://www.elizabethlouter.com/html/index.html And here is the code as used on the page: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>No 100% height on 'content' child div in IE</title> </head> <style> html, body { width:100%; height:100%; margin:0px; padding:0px; } body { position:relative; } #wrapper { position:absolute; top:0px; width:960px; height:100%; left:50%; margin-left:-480px; } #header{ position:absolute; top:0px; left:0px; width:100%; height:200px; background-color:#999; } #content{ position:absolute; top:100px; bottom:50px; left:0px; width:100%; background-color:#F7F7F7; } #content_1{ width:200px; background-color:black; height:100%; } #footer{ position:absolute; bottom:0px; left:0px; width:100%; height:50px; background-color:#999; } </style> <body> <div id="wrapper"> <div id="header"> </div> <div id="content"> <div id="content_1"> </div> </div> <div id="footer"> </div> </div> </body> </html>

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Introducing the Earthquake Locator – A Bing Maps Silverlight Application, part 1

- by Bobby Diaz

Update: Live demo and source code now available! The recent wave of earthquakes (no pun intended) being reported in the news got me wondering about the frequency and severity of earthquakes around the world. Since I’ve been doing a lot of Silverlight development lately, I decided to scratch my curiosity with a nice little Bing Maps application that will show the location and relative strength of recent seismic activity. Here is a list of technologies this application will utilize, so be sure to have everything downloaded and installed if you plan on following along. Silverlight 3 WCF RIA Services Bing Maps Silverlight Control * Managed Extensibility Framework (optional) MVVM Light Toolkit (optional) log4net (optional) * If you are new to Bing Maps or have not signed up for a Developer Account, you will need to visit www.bingmapsportal.com to request a Bing Maps key for your application. Getting Started We start out by creating a new Silverlight Application called EarthquakeLocator and specify that we want to automatically create the Web Application Project with RIA Services enabled. I cleaned up the web app by removing the Default.aspx and EarthquakeLocatorTestPage.html. Then I renamed the EarthquakeLocatorTestPage.aspx to Default.aspx and set it as my start page. I also set the development server to use a specific port, as shown below. RIA Services Next, I created a Services folder in the EarthquakeLocator.Web project and added a new Domain Service Class called EarthquakeService.cs. This is the RIA Services Domain Service that will provide earthquake data for our client application. I am not using LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework, so I will use the <empty domain service class> option. We will be pulling data from an external Atom feed, but this example could just as easily pull data from a database or another web service. This is an important distinction to point out because each scenario I just mentioned could potentially use a different Domain Service base class (i.e. LinqToSqlDomainService<TDataContext>). Now we can start adding Query methods to our EarthquakeService that pull data from the USGS web site. Here is the complete code for our service class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel.Syndication; using System.Web.DomainServices; using System.Web.Ria; using System.Xml; using log4net; using EarthquakeLocator.Web.Model; namespace EarthquakeLocator.Web.Services { /// <summary> /// Provides earthquake data to client applications. /// </summary> [EnableClientAccess()] public class EarthquakeService : DomainService { private static readonly ILog log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(EarthquakeService)); // USGS Data Feeds: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/ private const string FeedForPreviousDay = "http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/1day-M2.5.xml"; private const string FeedForPreviousWeek = "http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/7day-M2.5.xml"; /// <summary> /// Gets the earthquake data for the previous week. /// </summary> /// <returns>A queryable collection of <see cref="Earthquake"/> objects.</returns> public IQueryable<Earthquake> GetEarthquakes() { var feed = GetFeed(FeedForPreviousWeek); var list = new List<Earthquake>(); if ( feed != null ) { foreach ( var entry in feed.Items ) { var quake = CreateEarthquake(entry); if ( quake != null ) { list.Add(quake); } } } return list.AsQueryable(); } /// <summary> /// Creates an <see cref="Earthquake"/> object for each entry in the Atom feed. /// </summary> /// <param name="entry">The Atom entry.</param> /// <returns></returns> private Earthquake CreateEarthquake(SyndicationItem entry) { Earthquake quake = null; string title = entry.Title.Text; string summary = entry.Summary.Text; string point = GetElementValue<String>(entry, "point"); string depth = GetElementValue<String>(entry, "elev"); string utcTime = null; string localTime = null; string depthDesc = null; double? magnitude = null; double? latitude = null; double? longitude = null; double? depthKm = null; if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(title) && title.StartsWith("M") ) { title = title.Substring(2, title.IndexOf(',')-3).Trim(); magnitude = TryParse(title); } if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(point) ) { var values = point.Split(' '); if ( values.Length == 2 ) { latitude = TryParse(values[0]); longitude = TryParse(values[1]); } } if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(depth) ) { depthKm = TryParse(depth); if ( depthKm != null ) { depthKm = Math.Round((-1 * depthKm.Value) / 100, 2); } } if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(summary) ) { summary = summary.Replace("</p>", ""); var values = summary.Split( new string[] { "<p>" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); if ( values.Length == 3 ) { var times = values[1].Split( new string[] { "<br>" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); if ( times.Length > 0 ) { utcTime = times[0]; } if ( times.Length > 1 ) { localTime = times[1]; } depthDesc = values[2]; depthDesc = "Depth: " + depthDesc.Substring(depthDesc.IndexOf(":") + 2); } } if ( latitude != null && longitude != null ) { quake = new Earthquake() { Id = entry.Id, Title = entry.Title.Text, Summary = entry.Summary.Text, Date = entry.LastUpdatedTime.DateTime, Url = entry.Links.Select(l => Path.Combine(l.BaseUri.OriginalString, l.Uri.OriginalString)).FirstOrDefault(), Age = entry.Categories.Where(c => c.Label == "Age") .Select(c => c.Name).FirstOrDefault(), Magnitude = magnitude.GetValueOrDefault(), Latitude = latitude.GetValueOrDefault(), Longitude = longitude.GetValueOrDefault(), DepthInKm = depthKm.GetValueOrDefault(), DepthDesc = depthDesc, UtcTime = utcTime, LocalTime = localTime }; } return quake; } private T GetElementValue<T>(SyndicationItem entry, String name) { var el = entry.ElementExtensions.Where(e => e.OuterName == name).FirstOrDefault(); T value = default(T); if ( el != null ) { value = el.GetObject<T>(); } return value; } private double? TryParse(String value) { double d; if ( Double.TryParse(value, out d) ) { return d; } return null; } /// <summary> /// Gets the feed at the specified URL. /// </summary> /// <param name="url">The URL.</param> /// <returns>A <see cref="SyndicationFeed"/> object.</returns> public static SyndicationFeed GetFeed(String url) { SyndicationFeed feed = null; try { log.Debug("Loading RSS feed: " + url); using ( var reader = XmlReader.Create(url) ) { feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader); } } catch ( Exception ex ) { log.Error("Error occurred while loading RSS feed: " + url, ex); } return feed; } } } The only method that will be generated in the client side proxy class, EarthquakeContext, will be the GetEarthquakes() method. The reason being that it is the only public instance method and it returns an IQueryable<Earthquake> collection that can be consumed by the client application. GetEarthquakes() calls the static GetFeed(String) method, which utilizes the built in SyndicationFeed API to load the external data feed. You will need to add a reference to the System.ServiceModel.Web library in order to take advantage of the RSS/Atom reader. The API will also allow you to create your own feeds to serve up in your applications. Model I have also created a Model folder and added a new class, Earthquake.cs. The Earthquake object will hold the various properties returned from the Atom feed. Here is a sample of the code for that class. Notice the [Key] attribute on the Id property, which is required by RIA Services to uniquely identify the entity. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Runtime.Serialization; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; namespace EarthquakeLocator.Web.Model { /// <summary> /// Represents an earthquake occurrence and related information. /// </summary> [DataContract] public class Earthquake { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the id. /// </summary> /// <value>The id.</value> [Key] [DataMember] public string Id { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the title. /// </summary> /// <value>The title.</value> [DataMember] public string Title { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the summary. /// </summary> /// <value>The summary.</value> [DataMember] public string Summary { get; set; } // additional properties omitted } } View Model The recent trend to use the MVVM pattern for WPF and Silverlight provides a great way to separate the data and behavior logic out of the user interface layer of your client applications. I have chosen to use the MVVM Light Toolkit for the Earthquake Locator, but there are other options out there if you prefer another library. That said, I went ahead and created a ViewModel folder in the Silverlight project and added a EarthquakeViewModel class that derives from ViewModelBase. Here is the code: using System; using System.Collections.ObjectModel; using System.ComponentModel.Composition; using System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting; using Microsoft.Maps.MapControl; using GalaSoft.MvvmLight; using EarthquakeLocator.Web.Model; using EarthquakeLocator.Web.Services; namespace EarthquakeLocator.ViewModel { /// <summary> /// Provides data for views displaying earthquake information. /// </summary> public class EarthquakeViewModel : ViewModelBase { [Import] public EarthquakeContext Context; /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="EarthquakeViewModel"/> class. /// </summary> public EarthquakeViewModel() { var catalog = new AssemblyCatalog(GetType().Assembly); var container = new CompositionContainer(catalog); container.ComposeParts(this); Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="EarthquakeViewModel"/> class. /// </summary> /// <param name="context">The context.</param> public EarthquakeViewModel(EarthquakeContext context) { Context = context; Initialize(); } private void Initialize() { MapCenter = new Location(20, -170); ZoomLevel = 2; } #region Private Methods private void OnAutoLoadDataChanged() { LoadEarthquakes(); } private void LoadEarthquakes() { var query = Context.GetEarthquakesQuery(); Context.Earthquakes.Clear(); Context.Load(query, (op) => { if ( !op.HasError ) { foreach ( var item in op.Entities ) { Earthquakes.Add(item); } } }, null); } #endregion Private Methods #region Properties private bool autoLoadData; /// <summary> /// Gets or sets a value indicating whether to auto load data. /// </summary> /// <value><c>true</c> if auto loading data; otherwise, <c>false</c>.</value> public bool AutoLoadData { get { return autoLoadData; } set { if ( autoLoadData != value ) { autoLoadData = value; RaisePropertyChanged("AutoLoadData"); OnAutoLoadDataChanged(); } } } private ObservableCollection<Earthquake> earthquakes; /// <summary> /// Gets the collection of earthquakes to display. /// </summary> /// <value>The collection of earthquakes.</value> public ObservableCollection<Earthquake> Earthquakes { get { if ( earthquakes == null ) { earthquakes = new ObservableCollection<Earthquake>(); } return earthquakes; } } private Location mapCenter; /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the map center. /// </summary> /// <value>The map center.</value> public Location MapCenter { get { return mapCenter; } set { if ( mapCenter != value ) { mapCenter = value; RaisePropertyChanged("MapCenter"); } } } private double zoomLevel; /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the zoom level. /// </summary> /// <value>The zoom level.</value> public double ZoomLevel { get { return zoomLevel; } set { if ( zoomLevel != value ) { zoomLevel = value; RaisePropertyChanged("ZoomLevel"); } } } #endregion Properties } } The EarthquakeViewModel class contains all of the properties that will be bound to by the various controls in our views. Be sure to read through the LoadEarthquakes() method, which handles calling the GetEarthquakes() method in our EarthquakeService via the EarthquakeContext proxy, and also transfers the loaded entities into the view model’s Earthquakes collection. Another thing to notice is what’s going on in the default constructor. I chose to use the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) for my composition needs, but you can use any dependency injection library or none at all. To allow the EarthquakeContext class to be discoverable by MEF, I added the following partial class so that I could supply the appropriate [Export] attribute: using System; using System.ComponentModel.Composition; namespace EarthquakeLocator.Web.Services { /// <summary> /// The client side proxy for the EarthquakeService class. /// </summary> [Export] public partial class EarthquakeContext { } } One last piece I wanted to point out before moving on to the user interface, I added a client side partial class for the Earthquake entity that contains helper properties that we will bind to later: using System; namespace EarthquakeLocator.Web.Model { /// <summary> /// Represents an earthquake occurrence and related information. /// </summary> public partial class Earthquake { /// <summary> /// Gets the location based on the current Latitude/Longitude. /// </summary> /// <value>The location.</value> public string Location { get { return String.Format("{0},{1}", Latitude, Longitude); } } /// <summary> /// Gets the size based on the Magnitude. /// </summary> /// <value>The size.</value> public double Size { get { return (Magnitude * 3); } } } } View Now the fun part! Usually, I would create a Views folder to place all of my View controls in, but I took the easy way out and added the following XAML code to the default MainPage.xaml file. Be sure to add the bing prefix associating the Microsoft.Maps.MapControl namespace after adding the assembly reference to your project. The MVVM Light Toolkit project templates come with a ViewModelLocator class that you can use via a static resource, but I am instantiating the EarthquakeViewModel directly in my user control. I am setting the AutoLoadData property to true as a way to trigger the LoadEarthquakes() method call. The MapItemsControl found within the <bing:Map> control binds its ItemsSource property to the Earthquakes collection of the view model, and since it is an ObservableCollection<T>, we get the automatic two way data binding via the INotifyCollectionChanged interface. <UserControl x:Class="EarthquakeLocator.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:bing="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl" xmlns:vm="clr-namespace:EarthquakeLocator.ViewModel" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480" > <UserControl.Resources> <DataTemplate x:Key="EarthquakeTemplate"> <Ellipse Fill="Red" Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="1" Width="{Binding Size}" Height="{Binding Size}" bing:MapLayer.Position="{Binding Location}" bing:MapLayer.PositionOrigin="Center"> <ToolTipService.ToolTip> <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Title}" FontSize="14" FontWeight="Bold" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding UtcTime}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding LocalTime}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding DepthDesc}" /> </StackPanel> </ToolTipService.ToolTip> </Ellipse> </DataTemplate> </UserControl.Resources> <UserControl.DataContext> <vm:EarthquakeViewModel AutoLoadData="True" /> </UserControl.DataContext> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <bing:Map x:Name="map" CredentialsProvider="--Your-Bing-Maps-Key--" Center="{Binding MapCenter, Mode=TwoWay}" ZoomLevel="{Binding ZoomLevel, Mode=TwoWay}"> <bing:MapItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Earthquakes}" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource EarthquakeTemplate}" /> </bing:Map> </Grid> </UserControl> The EarthquakeTemplate defines the Ellipse that will represent each earthquake, the Width and Height that are determined by the Magnitude, the Position on the map, and also the tooltip that will appear when we mouse over each data point. Running the application will give us the following result (shown with a tooltip example): That concludes this portion of our show but I plan on implementing additional functionality in later blog posts. Be sure to come back soon to see the next installments in this series. Enjoy! Additional Resources USGS Earthquake Data Feeds Brad Abrams shows how RIA Services and MVVM can work together

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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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First round playing with Memcached

- by Shaun

To be honest I have not been very interested in the caching before I’m going to a project which would be using the multi-site deployment and high connection and concurrency and very sensitive to the user experience. That means we must cache the output data for better performance. After looked for the Internet I finally focused on the Memcached. What’s the Memcached? I think the description on its main site gives us a very good and simple explanation. Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. Memcached is simple yet powerful. Its simple design promotes quick deployment, ease of development, and solves many problems facing large data caches. Its API is available for most popular languages. The original Memcached was built on *nix system are is being widely used in the PHP world. Although it’s not a problem to use the Memcached installed on *nix system there are some windows version available fortunately. Since we are WISC (Windows – IIS – SQL Server – C#, which on the opposite of LAMP) it would be much easier for us to use the Memcached on Windows rather than *nix. I’m using the Memcached Win X64 version provided by NorthScale. There are also the x86 version and other operation system version. Install Memcached Unpack the Memcached file to a folder on the machine you want it to be installed, we can see that there are only 3 files and the main file should be the “memcached.exe”. Memcached would be run on the server as a service. To install the service just open a command windows and navigate to the folder which contains the “memcached.exe”, let’s say “C:\Memcached\”, and then type “memcached.exe -d install”. If you are using Windows Vista and Windows 7 system please be execute the command through the administrator role. Right-click the command item in the start menu and use “Run as Administrator”, otherwise the Memcached would not be able to be installed successfully. Once installed successful we can type “memcached.exe -d start” to launch the service. Now it’s ready to be used. The default port of Memcached is 11211 but you can change it through the command argument. You can find the help by typing “memcached -h”. Using Memcached Memcahed has many good and ready-to-use providers for vary program language. After compared and reviewed I chose the Memcached Providers. It’s built based on another 3rd party Memcached client named enyim.com Memcached Client. The Memcached Providers is very simple to set/get the cached objects through the Memcached servers and easy to be configured through the application configuration file (aka web.config and app.config). Let’s create a console application for the demonstration and add the 3 DLL files from the package of the Memcached Providers to the project reference. Then we need to add the configuration for the Memcached server. Create an App.config file and firstly add the section on top of it. Here we need three sections: the section for Memcached Providers, for enyim.com Memcached client and the log4net. 1: <configSections> 2: <section name="cacheProvider" 3: type="MemcachedProviders.Cache.CacheProviderSection, MemcachedProviders" 4: allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" 5: restartOnExternalChanges="true"/> 6: <sectionGroup name="enyim.com"> 7: <section name="memcached" 8: type="Enyim.Caching.Configuration.MemcachedClientSection, Enyim.Caching"/> 9: </sectionGroup> 10: <section name="log4net" 11: type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler,log4net"/> 12: </configSections> Then we will add the configuration for 3 of them in the App.config file. The Memcached server information would be defined under the enyim.com section since it will be responsible for connect to the Memcached server. Assuming I installed the Memcached on two servers with the default port, the configuration would be like this. 1: <enyim.com> 2: <memcached> 3: <servers> 4:  5: <add address="192.168.0.149" port="11211"/> 6: <add address="10.10.20.67" port="11211"/> 7: </servers> 8: <socketPool minPoolSize="10" maxPoolSize="100" connectionTimeout="00:00:10" deadTimeout="00:02:00"/> 9: </memcached> 10: </enyim.com> Memcached supports the multi-deployment which means you can install the Memcached on the servers as many as you need. The protocol of the Memcached responsible for routing the cached objects into the proper server. So it’s very easy to scale-out your system by Memcached. And then define the Memcached Providers configuration. The defaultExpireTime indicates how long the objected cached in the Memcached would be expired, the default value is 2000 ms. 1: <cacheProvider defaultProvider="MemcachedCacheProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MemcachedCacheProvider" 4: type="MemcachedProviders.Cache.MemcachedCacheProvider, MemcachedProviders" 5: keySuffix="_MySuffix_" 6: defaultExpireTime="2000"/> 7: </providers> 8: </cacheProvider> The last configuration would be the log4net. 1: <log4net> 2:  3: <appender name="ConsoleAppender" type="log4net.Appender.ConsoleAppender"> 4: <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout"> 5: <conversionPattern value="%date [%thread] %-5level %logger [%property{NDC}] - %message%newline"/> 6: </layout> 7: </appender> 8:  9:  10: <root> 11: <priority value="WARN"/> 12: <appender-ref ref="ConsoleAppender"> 13: <filter type="log4net.Filter.LevelRangeFilter"> 14: <levelMin value="WARN"/> 15: <levelMax value="FATAL"/> 16: </filter> 17: </appender-ref> 18: </root> 19: </log4net> Get, Set and Remove the Cached Objects Once we finished the configuration it would be very simple to consume the Memcached servers. The Memcached Providers gives us a static class named DistCache that can be used to operate the Memcached servers. Get<T>: Retrieve the cached object from the Memcached servers. If failed it will return null or the default value. Add: Add an object with a unique key into the Memcached servers. Assuming that we have an operation that retrieve the email from the name which is time consuming. This is the operation that should be cached. The method would be like this. I utilized Thread.Sleep to simulate the long-time operation. 1: static string GetEmailByNameSlowly(string name) 2: { 3: Thread.Sleep(2000); 4: return name + "@ethos.com.cn"; 5: } Then in the real retrieving method we will firstly check whether the name, email information had been searched previously and cached. If yes we will just return them from the Memcached, otherwise we will invoke the slowly method to retrieve it and then cached. 1: static string GetEmailByName(string name) 2: { 3: var email = DistCache.Get<string>(name); 4: if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(email)) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("==> The name/email not be in memcached so need slow loading. (name = {0})==>", name); 7: email = GetEmailByNameSlowly(name); 8: DistCache.Add(name, email); 9: } 10: else 11: { 12: Console.WriteLine("==> The name/email had been in memcached. (name = {0})==>", name); 13: } 14: return email; 15: } Finally let’s finished the calling method and execute. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var name = string.Empty; 4: while (name != "q") 5: { 6: Console.Write("==> Please enter the name to find the email: "); 7: name = Console.ReadLine(); 8: 9: var email = GetEmailByName(name); 10: Console.WriteLine("==> The email of {0} is {1}.", name, email); 11: } 12: } The first time I entered “ziyanxu” it takes about 2 seconds to get the email since there’s nothing cached. But the next time I entered “ziyanxu” it returned very quickly from the Memcached. Summary In this post I explained a bit on why we need cache, what’s Memcached and how to use it through the C# application. The example is fairly simple but hopefully demonstrated on how to use it. Memcached is very easy and simple to be used since it gives you the full opportunity to consider what, when and how to cache the objects. And when using Memcached you don’t need to consider the cache servers. The Memcached would be like a huge object pool in front of you. The next step I’m thinking now are: What kind of data should be cached? And how to determined the key? How to implement the cache as a layer on top of the business layer so that the application will not notice that the cache is there. How to implement the cache by AOP so that the business logic no need to consider the cache. I will investigate on them in the future and will share my thoughts and results. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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Basic Spatial Data with SQL Server and Entity Framework 5.0

- by Rick Strahl

In my most recent project we needed to do a bit of geo-spatial referencing. While spatial features have been in SQL Server for a while using those features inside of .NET applications hasn't been as straight forward as could be, because .NET natively doesn't support spatial types. There are workarounds for this with a few custom project like SharpMap or a hack using the Sql Server specific Geo types found in the Microsoft.SqlTypes assembly that ships with SQL server. While these approaches work for manipulating spatial data from .NET code, they didn't work with database access if you're using Entity Framework. Other ORM vendors have been rolling their own versions of spatial integration. In Entity Framework 5.0 running on .NET 4.5 the Microsoft ORM finally adds support for spatial types as well. In this post I'll describe basic geography features that deal with single location and distance calculations which is probably the most common usage scenario. SQL Server Transact-SQL Syntax for Spatial Data Before we look at how things work with Entity framework, lets take a look at how SQL Server allows you to use spatial data to get an understanding of the underlying semantics. The following SQL examples should work with SQL 2008 and forward. Let's start by creating a test table that includes a Geography field and also a pair of Long/Lat fields that demonstrate how you can work with the geography functions even if you don't have geography/geometry fields in the database. Here's the CREATE command:CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Geo]( [id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [Location] [geography] NULL, [Long] [float] NOT NULL, [Lat] [float] NOT NULL ) Now using plain SQL you can insert data into the table using geography::STGeoFromText SQL CLR function:insert into Geo( Location , long, lat ) values ( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(-121.527200 45.712113)', 4326), -121.527200, 45.712113 ) insert into Geo( Location , long, lat ) values ( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(-121.517265 45.714240)', 4326), -121.517265, 45.714240 ) insert into Geo( Location , long, lat ) values ( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(-121.511536 45.714825)', 4326), -121.511536, 45.714825) The STGeomFromText function accepts a string that points to a geometric item (a point here but can also be a line or path or polygon and many others). You also need to provide an SRID (Spatial Reference System Identifier) which is an integer value that determines the rules for how geography/geometry values are calculated and returned. For mapping/distance functionality you typically want to use 4326 as this is the format used by most mapping software and geo-location libraries like Google and Bing. The spatial data in the Location field is stored in binary format which looks something like this: Once the location data is in the database you can query the data and do simple distance computations very easily. For example to calculate the distance of each of the values in the database to another spatial point is very easy to calculate. Distance calculations compare two points in space using a direct line calculation. For our example I'll compare a new point to all the points in the database. Using the Location field the SQL looks like this:-- create a source point DECLARE @s geography SET @s = geography:: STGeomFromText('POINT(-121.527200 45.712113)' , 4326); --- return the ids select ID, Location as Geo , Location .ToString() as Point , @s.STDistance( Location) as distance from Geo order by distance The code defines a new point which is the base point to compare each of the values to. You can also compare values from the database directly, but typically you'll want to match a location to another location and determine the difference for which you can use the geography::STDistance function. This query produces the following output: The STDistance function returns the straight line distance between the passed in point and the point in the database field. The result for SRID 4326 is always in meters. Notice that the first value passed was the same point so the difference is 0. The other two points are two points here in town in Hood River a little ways away - 808 and 1256 meters respectively. Notice also that you can order the result by the resulting distance, which effectively gives you results that are ordered radially out from closer to further away. This is great for searches of points of interest near a central location (YOU typically!). These geolocation functions are also available to you if you don't use the Geography/Geometry types, but plain float values. It's a little more work, as each point has to be created in the query using the string syntax, but the following code doesn't use a geography field but produces the same result as the previous query.--- using float fields select ID, geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(' + STR (long, 15,7 ) + ' ' + Str(lat ,15, 7) + ')' , 4326), geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(' + STR (long, 15,7 ) + ' ' + Str(lat ,15, 7) + ')' , 4326). ToString(), @s.STDistance( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(' + STR(long ,15, 7) + ' ' + Str(lat ,15, 7) + ')' , 4326)) as distance from geo order by distance Spatial Data in the Entity Framework Prior to Entity Framework 5.0 on .NET 4.5 consuming of the data above required using stored procedures or raw SQL commands to access the spatial data. In Entity Framework 5 however, Microsoft introduced the new DbGeometry and DbGeography types. These immutable location types provide a bunch of functionality for manipulating spatial points using geometry functions which in turn can be used to do common spatial queries like I described in the SQL syntax above. The DbGeography/DbGeometry types are immutable, meaning that you can't write to them once they've been created. They are a bit odd in that you need to use factory methods in order to instantiate them - they have no constructor() and you can't assign to properties like Latitude and Longitude. Creating a Model with Spatial Data Let's start by creating a simple Entity Framework model that includes a Location property of type DbGeography: public class GeoLocationContext : DbContext { public DbSet<GeoLocation> Locations { get; set; } } public class GeoLocation { public int Id { get; set; } public DbGeography Location { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } } That's all there's to it. When you run this now against SQL Server, you get a Geography field for the Location property, which looks the same as the Location field in the SQL examples earlier. Adding Spatial Data to the Database Next let's add some data to the table that includes some latitude and longitude data. An easy way to find lat/long locations is to use Google Maps to pinpoint your location, then right click and click on What's Here. Click on the green marker to get the GPS coordinates. To add the actual geolocation data create an instance of the GeoLocation type and use the DbGeography.PointFromText() factory method to create a new point to assign to the Location property:[TestMethod] public void AddLocationsToDataBase() { var context = new GeoLocationContext(); // remove all context.Locations.ToList().ForEach( loc => context.Locations.Remove(loc)); context.SaveChanges(); var location = new GeoLocation() { // Create a point using native DbGeography Factory method Location = DbGeography.PointFromText( string.Format("POINT({0} {1})", -121.527200,45.712113) ,4326), Address = "301 15th Street, Hood River" }; context.Locations.Add(location); location = new GeoLocation() { Location = CreatePoint(45.714240, -121.517265), Address = "The Hatchery, Bingen" }; context.Locations.Add(location); location = new GeoLocation() { // Create a point using a helper function (lat/long) Location = CreatePoint(45.708457, -121.514432), Address = "Kaze Sushi, Hood River" }; context.Locations.Add(location); location = new GeoLocation() { Location = CreatePoint(45.722780, -120.209227), Address = "Arlington, OR" }; context.Locations.Add(location); context.SaveChanges(); } As promised, a DbGeography object has to be created with one of the static factory methods provided on the type as the Location.Longitude and Location.Latitude properties are read only. Here I'm using PointFromText() which uses a "Well Known Text" format to specify spatial data. In the first example I'm specifying to create a Point from a longitude and latitude value, using an SRID of 4326 (just like earlier in the SQL examples). You'll probably want to create a helper method to make the creation of Points easier to avoid that string format and instead just pass in a couple of double values. Here's my helper called CreatePoint that's used for all but the first point creation in the sample above:public static DbGeography CreatePoint(double latitude, double longitude) { var text = string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat, "POINT({0} {1})", longitude, latitude); // 4326 is most common coordinate system used by GPS/Maps return DbGeography.PointFromText(text, 4326); } Using the helper the syntax becomes a bit cleaner, requiring only a latitude and longitude respectively. Note that my method intentionally swaps the parameters around because Latitude and Longitude is the common format I've seen with mapping libraries (especially Google Mapping/Geolocation APIs with their LatLng type). When the context is changed the data is written into the database using the SQL Geography type which looks the same as in the earlier SQL examples shown. Querying Once you have some location data in the database it's now super easy to query the data and find out the distance between locations. A common query is to ask for a number of locations that are near a fixed point - typically your current location and order it by distance. Using LINQ to Entities a query like this is easy to construct:[TestMethod] public void QueryLocationsTest() { var sourcePoint = CreatePoint(45.712113, -121.527200); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); // find any locations within 5 kilometers ordered by distance var matches = context.Locations .Where(loc => loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) < 5000) .OrderBy( loc=> loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) ) .Select( loc=> new { Address = loc.Address, Distance = loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) }); Assert.IsTrue(matches.Count() > 0); foreach (var location in matches) { Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1:n0} meters)", location.Address, location.Distance); } } This example produces: 301 15th Street, Hood River (0 meters)The Hatchery, Bingen (809 meters)Kaze Sushi, Hood River (1,074 meters) The first point in the database is the same as my source point I'm comparing against so the distance is 0. The other two are within the 5 mile radius, while the Arlington location which is 65 miles or so out is not returned. The result is ordered by distance from closest to furthest away. In the code, I first create a source point that is the basis for comparison. The LINQ query then selects all locations that are within 5km of the source point using the Location.Distance() function, which takes a source point as a parameter. You can either use a pre-defined value as I'm doing here, or compare against another database DbGeography property (say when you have to points in the same database for things like routes). What's nice about this query syntax is that it's very clean and easy to read and understand. You can calculate the distance and also easily order by the distance to provide a result that shows locations from closest to furthest away which is a common scenario for any application that places a user in the context of several locations. It's now super easy to accomplish this. Meters vs. Miles As with the SQL Server functions, the Distance() method returns data in meters, so if you need to work with miles or feet you need to do some conversion. Here are a couple of helpers that might be useful (can be found in GeoUtils.cs of the sample project):/// <summary> /// Convert meters to miles /// </summary> /// <param name="meters"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static double MetersToMiles(double? meters) { if (meters == null) return 0F; return meters.Value * 0.000621371192; } /// <summary> /// Convert miles to meters /// </summary> /// <param name="miles"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static double MilesToMeters(double? miles) { if (miles == null) return 0; return miles.Value * 1609.344; } Using these two helpers you can query on miles like this:[TestMethod] public void QueryLocationsMilesTest() { var sourcePoint = CreatePoint(45.712113, -121.527200); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); // find any locations within 5 miles ordered by distance var fiveMiles = GeoUtils.MilesToMeters(5); var matches = context.Locations .Where(loc => loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) <= fiveMiles) .OrderBy(loc => loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint)) .Select(loc => new { Address = loc.Address, Distance = loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) }); Assert.IsTrue(matches.Count() > 0); foreach (var location in matches) { Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1:n1} miles)", location.Address, GeoUtils.MetersToMiles(location.Distance)); } } which produces: 301 15th Street, Hood River (0.0 miles)The Hatchery, Bingen (0.5 miles)Kaze Sushi, Hood River (0.7 miles) Nice 'n simple. .NET 4.5 Only Note that DbGeography and DbGeometry are exclusive to Entity Framework 5.0 (not 4.4 which ships in the same NuGet package or installer) and requires .NET 4.5. That's because the new DbGeometry and DbGeography (and related) types are defined in the 4.5 version of System.Data.Entity which is a CLR assembly and is only updated by major versions of .NET. Why this decision was made to add these types to System.Data.Entity rather than to the frequently updated EntityFramework assembly that would have possibly made this work in .NET 4.0 is beyond me, especially given that there are no native .NET framework spatial types to begin with. I find it also odd that there is no native CLR spatial type. The DbGeography and DbGeometry types are specific to Entity Framework and live on those assemblies. They will also work for general purpose, non-database spatial data manipulation, but then you are forced into having a dependency on System.Data.Entity, which seems a bit silly. There's also a System.Spatial assembly that's apparently part of WCF Data Services which in turn don't work with Entity framework. Another example of multiple teams at Microsoft not communicating and implementing the same functionality (differently) in several different places. Perplexed as a I may be, for EF specific code the Entity framework specific types are easy to use and work well. Working with pre-.NET 4.5 Entity Framework and Spatial Data If you can't go to .NET 4.5 just yet you can also still use spatial features in Entity Framework, but it's a lot more work as you can't use the DbContext directly to manipulate the location data. You can still run raw SQL statements to write data into the database and retrieve results using the same TSQL syntax I showed earlier using Context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(). Here's code that you can use to add location data into the database:[TestMethod] public void RawSqlEfAddTest() { string sqlFormat = @"insert into GeoLocations( Location, Address) values ( geography::STGeomFromText('POINT({0} {1})', 4326),@p0 )"; var sql = string.Format(sqlFormat,-121.527200, 45.712113); Console.WriteLine(sql); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); Assert.IsTrue(context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(sql,"301 N. 15th Street") > 0); } Here I'm using the STGeomFromText() function to add the location data. Note that I'm using string.Format here, which usually would be a bad practice but is required here. I was unable to use ExecuteSqlCommand() and its named parameter syntax as the longitude and latitude parameters are embedded into a string. Rest assured it's required as the following does not work:string sqlFormat = @"insert into GeoLocations( Location, Address) values ( geography::STGeomFromText('POINT(@p0 @p1)', 4326),@p2 )";context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(sql, -121.527200, 45.712113, "301 N. 15th Street") Explicitly assigning the point value with string.format works however. There are a number of ways to query location data. You can't get the location data directly, but you can retrieve the point string (which can then be parsed to get Latitude and Longitude) and you can return calculated values like distance. Here's an example of how to retrieve some geo data into a resultset using EF's and SqlQuery method:[TestMethod] public void RawSqlEfQueryTest() { var sqlFormat = @" DECLARE @s geography SET @s = geography:: STGeomFromText('POINT({0} {1})' , 4326); SELECT Address, Location.ToString() as GeoString, @s.STDistance( Location) as Distance FROM GeoLocations ORDER BY Distance"; var sql = string.Format(sqlFormat, -121.527200, 45.712113); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); var locations = context.Database.SqlQuery<ResultData>(sql); Assert.IsTrue(locations.Count() > 0); foreach (var location in locations) { Console.WriteLine(location.Address + " " + location.GeoString + " " + location.Distance); } } public class ResultData { public string GeoString { get; set; } public double Distance { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } } Hopefully you don't have to resort to this approach as it's fairly limited. Using the new DbGeography/DbGeometry types makes this sort of thing so much easier. When I had to use code like this before I typically ended up retrieving data pks only and then running another query with just the PKs to retrieve the actual underlying DbContext entities. This was very inefficient and tedious but it did work. Summary For the current project I'm working on we actually made the switch to .NET 4.5 purely for the spatial features in EF 5.0. This app heavily relies on spatial queries and it was worth taking a chance with pre-release code to get this ease of integration as opposed to manually falling back to stored procedures or raw SQL string queries to return spatial specific queries. Using native Entity Framework code makes life a lot easier than the alternatives. It might be a late addition to Entity Framework, but it sure makes location calculations and storage easy. Where do you want to go today? ;-) Resources Download Sample Project© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ADO.NET Sql Server .NET 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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Running a simple integration scenario using the Oracle Big Data Connectors on Hadoop/HDFS cluster

- by hamsun

Between the elephant ( the tradional image of the Hadoop framework) and the Oracle Iron Man (Big Data..) an english setter could be seen as the link to the right data Data, Data, Data, we are living in a world where data technology based on popular applications , search engines, Webservers, rich sms messages, email clients, weather forecasts and so on, have a predominant role in our life. More and more technologies are used to analyze/track our behavior, try to detect patterns, to propose us "the best/right user experience" from the Google Ad services, to Telco companies or large consumer sites (like Amazon:) ). The more we use all these technologies, the more we generate data, and thus there is a need of huge data marts and specific hardware/software servers (as the Exadata servers) in order to treat/analyze/understand the trends and offer new services to the users. Some of these "data feeds" are raw, unstructured data, and cannot be processed effectively by normal SQL queries. Large scale distributed processing was an emerging infrastructure need and the solution seemed to be the "collocation of compute nodes with the data", which in turn leaded to MapReduce parallel patterns and the development of the Hadoop framework, which is based on MapReduce and a distributed file system (HDFS) that runs on larger clusters of rather inexpensive servers. Several Oracle products are using the distributed / aggregation pattern for data calculation ( Coherence, NoSql, times ten ) so once that you are familiar with one of these technologies, lets says with coherence aggregators, you will find the whole Hadoop, MapReduce concept very similar. Oracle Big Data Appliance is based on the Cloudera Distribution (CDH), and the Oracle Big Data Connectors can be plugged on a Hadoop cluster running the CDH distribution or equivalent Hadoop clusters. In this paper, a "lab like" implementation of this concept is done on a single Linux X64 server, running an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0, and a single node Apache hadoop-1.2.1 HDFS cluster, using the SQL connector for HDFS. The whole setup is fairly simple: Install on a Linux x64 server ( or virtual box appliance) an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0 server Get the Apache Hadoop distribution from: http://mir2.ovh.net/ftp.apache.org/dist/hadoop/common/hadoop-1.2.1. Get the Oracle Big Data Connectors from: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/bdc/big-data-connectors/downloads/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen. Check the java version of your Linux server with the command: java -version java version "1.7.0_40" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_40-b43) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.0-b56, mixed mode) Decompress the hadoop hadoop-1.2.1.tar.gz file to /u01/hadoop-1.2.1 Modify your .bash_profile export HADOOP_HOME=/u01/hadoop-1.2.1 export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_HOME/bin export HIVE_HOME=/u01/hive-0.11.0 export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_HOME/bin:$HIVE_HOME/bin (also see my sample .bash_profile) Set up ssh trust for Hadoop process, this is a mandatory step, in our case we have to establish a "local trust" as will are using a single node configuration copy the new public keys to the list of authorized keys connect and test the ssh setup to your localhost: We will run a "pseudo-Hadoop cluster", in what is called "local standalone mode", all the Hadoop java components are running in one Java process, this is enough for our demo purposes. We need to "fine tune" some Hadoop configuration files, we have to go at our $HADOOP_HOME/conf, and modify the files: core-site.xml hdfs-site.xml mapred-site.xml check that the hadoop binaries are referenced correctly from the command line by executing: hadoop -version As Hadoop is managing our "clustered HDFS" file system we have to create "the mount point" and format it , the mount point will be declared to core-site.xml as: The layout under the /u01/hadoop-1.2.1/data will be created and used by other hadoop components (MapReduce = /mapred/...) HDFS is using the /dfs/... layout structure format the HDFS hadoop file system: Start the java components for the HDFS system As an additional check, you can use the GUI Hadoop browsers to check the content of your HDFS configurations: Once our HDFS Hadoop setup is done you can use the HDFS file system to store data ( big data : )), and plug them back and forth to Oracle Databases by the means of the Big Data Connectors ( which is the next configuration step). You can create / use a Hive db, but in our case we will make a simple integration of "raw data" , through the creation of an External Table to a local Oracle instance ( on the same Linux box, we run the Hadoop HDFS one node cluster and one Oracle DB). Download some public "big data", I use the site: http://france.meteofrance.com/france/observations, from where I can get *.csv files for my big data simulations :). Here is the data layout of my example file: Download the Big Data Connector from the OTN (oraosch-2.2.0.zip), unzip it to your local file system (see picture below) Modify your environment in order to access the connector libraries , and make the following test: [oracle@dg1 bin]$./hdfs_stream Usage: hdfs_stream locationFile [oracle@dg1 bin]$ Load the data to the Hadoop hdfs file system: hadoop fs -mkdir bgtest_data hadoop fs -put obsFrance.txt bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt hadoop fs -ls /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt [oracle@dg1 bg-data-raw]$ hadoop fs -ls /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Found 1 items -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle supergroup 54103 2013-10-22 06:10 /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt [oracle@dg1 bg-data-raw]$hadoop fs -ls hdfs:///user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Found 1 items -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle supergroup 54103 2013-10-22 06:10 /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Check the content of the HDFS with the browser UI: Start the Oracle database, and run the following script in order to create the Oracle database user, the Oracle directories for the Oracle Big Data Connector (dg1 it’s my own db id replace accordingly yours): #!/bin/bash export ORAENV_ASK=NO export ORACLE_SID=dg1 . oraenv sqlplus /nolog <<EOF CONNECT / AS sysdba; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY osch_bin_path AS '/u01/orahdfs-2.2.0/bin'; CREATE USER BGUSER IDENTIFIED BY oracle; GRANT CREATE SESSION, CREATE TABLE TO BGUSER; GRANT EXECUTE ON sys.utl_file TO BGUSER; GRANT READ, EXECUTE ON DIRECTORY osch_bin_path TO BGUSER; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY BGT_LOG_DIR as '/u01/BG_TEST/logs'; GRANT READ, WRITE ON DIRECTORY BGT_LOG_DIR to BGUSER; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY BGT_DATA_DIR as '/u01/BG_TEST/data'; GRANT READ, WRITE ON DIRECTORY BGT_DATA_DIR to BGUSER; EOF Put the following in a file named t3.sh and make it executable, hadoop jar $OSCH_HOME/jlib/orahdfs.jar \ oracle.hadoop.exttab.ExternalTable \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.tableName=BGTEST_DP_XTAB \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.defaultDirectory=BGT_DATA_DIR \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.dataPaths="hdfs:///user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt" \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.columnCount=7 \ -D oracle.hadoop.connection.url=jdbc:oracle:thin:@//localhost:1521/dg1 \ -D oracle.hadoop.connection.user=BGUSER \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.printStackTrace=true \ -createTable --noexecute then test the creation fo the external table with it: [oracle@dg1 samples]$ ./t3.sh ./t3.sh: line 2: /u01/orahdfs-2.2.0: Is a directory Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS Release 2.2.0 - Production Copyright (c) 2011, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Enter Database Password:] The create table command was not executed. The following table would be created. CREATE TABLE "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB" ( "C1" VARCHAR2(4000), "C2" VARCHAR2(4000), "C3" VARCHAR2(4000), "C4" VARCHAR2(4000), "C5" VARCHAR2(4000), "C6" VARCHAR2(4000), "C7" VARCHAR2(4000) ) ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL ( TYPE ORACLE_LOADER DEFAULT DIRECTORY "BGT_DATA_DIR" ACCESS PARAMETERS ( RECORDS DELIMITED BY 0X'0A' CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8 STRING SIZES ARE IN CHARACTERS PREPROCESSOR "OSCH_BIN_PATH":'hdfs_stream' FIELDS TERMINATED BY 0X'2C' MISSING FIELD VALUES ARE NULL ( "C1" CHAR(4000), "C2" CHAR(4000), "C3" CHAR(4000), "C4" CHAR(4000), "C5" CHAR(4000), "C6" CHAR(4000), "C7" CHAR(4000) ) ) LOCATION ( 'osch-20131022081035-74-1' ) ) PARALLEL REJECT LIMIT UNLIMITED; The following location files would be created. osch-20131022081035-74-1 contains 1 URI, 54103 bytes 54103 hdfs://localhost:19000/user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Then remove the --noexecute flag and create the external Oracle table for the Hadoop data. Check the results: The create table command succeeded. CREATE TABLE "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB" ( "C1" VARCHAR2(4000), "C2" VARCHAR2(4000), "C3" VARCHAR2(4000), "C4" VARCHAR2(4000), "C5" VARCHAR2(4000), "C6" VARCHAR2(4000), "C7" VARCHAR2(4000) ) ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL ( TYPE ORACLE_LOADER DEFAULT DIRECTORY "BGT_DATA_DIR" ACCESS PARAMETERS ( RECORDS DELIMITED BY 0X'0A' CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8 STRING SIZES ARE IN CHARACTERS PREPROCESSOR "OSCH_BIN_PATH":'hdfs_stream' FIELDS TERMINATED BY 0X'2C' MISSING FIELD VALUES ARE NULL ( "C1" CHAR(4000), "C2" CHAR(4000), "C3" CHAR(4000), "C4" CHAR(4000), "C5" CHAR(4000), "C6" CHAR(4000), "C7" CHAR(4000) ) ) LOCATION ( 'osch-20131022081719-3239-1' ) ) PARALLEL REJECT LIMIT UNLIMITED; The following location files were created. osch-20131022081719-3239-1 contains 1 URI, 54103 bytes 54103 hdfs://localhost:19000/user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt This is the view from the SQL Developer: and finally the number of lines in the oracle table, imported from our Hadoop HDFS cluster SQL select count(*) from "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB"; COUNT(*) ---------- 1151 In a next post we will integrate data from a Hive database, and try some ODI integrations with the ODI Big Data connector. Our simplistic approach is just a step to show you how these unstructured data world can be integrated to Oracle infrastructure. Hadoop, BigData, NoSql are great technologies, they are widely used and Oracle is offering a large integration infrastructure based on these services. Oracle University presents a complete curriculum on all the Oracle related technologies: NoSQL: Introduction to Oracle NoSQL Database Using Oracle NoSQL Database Big Data: Introduction to Big Data Oracle Big Data Essentials Oracle Big Data Overview Oracle Data Integrator: Oracle Data Integrator 12c: New Features Oracle Data Integrator 11g: Integration and Administration Oracle Data Integrator: Administration and Development Oracle Data Integrator 11g: Advanced Integration and Development Oracle Coherence 12c: Oracle Coherence 12c: New Features Oracle Coherence 12c: Share and Manage Data in Clusters Oracle Coherence 12c: Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Fundamentals for Oracle Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Fundamentals for SQL Server Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for Oracle Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for DB2 Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for Teradata Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for HP NonStop Oracle GoldenGate 11g Management Pack: Overview Oracle GoldenGate 11g Troubleshooting and Tuning Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Advanced Configuration for Oracle Other Resources: Apache Hadoop : http://hadoop.apache.org/ is the homepage for these technologies. "Hadoop Definitive Guide 3rdEdition" by Tom White is a classical lecture for people who want to know more about Hadoop , and some active "googling " will also give you some more references. About the author: Eugene Simos is based in France and joined Oracle through the BEA-Weblogic Acquisition, where he worked for the Professional Service, Support, end Education for major accounts across the EMEA Region. He worked in the banking sector, ATT, Telco companies giving him extensive experience on production environments. Eugen currently specializes in Oracle Fusion Middleware teaching an array of courses on Weblogic/Webcenter, Content,BPM /SOA/Identity-Security/GoldenGate/Virtualisation/Unified Comm Suite) throughout the EMEA region.

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ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 1 of 2 – CLR Profiler)

- by ToStringTheory

One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction The ANTS Profiler pack provided by Red Gate was something that I had not heard of before receiving an email regarding an offer to review it for a license. Since I look to make my code efficient, it was a no brainer for me to try it out! One thing that I have to say took me by surprise is that upon downloading the program and installing it you fill out a form for your usual contact information. Sure enough within 2 hours, I received an email from a sales representative at Red Gate asking if she could help me to achieve the most out of my trial time so it wouldn’t go to waste. After replying to her and explaining that I was looking to review its feature set, she put me in contact with someone that setup a demo session to give me a quick rundown of its features via an online meeting. After having dealt with a massive ordeal with one of my utility companies and their complete lack of customer service, Red Gates friendly and helpful representatives were a breath of fresh air, and something I was thankful for. ANTS CLR Profiler The ANTS CLR profiler is the thing I want to focus on the most in this post, so I am going to dive right in now. Install was simple and took no time at all. It installed both the profiler for the CLR and Memory, but also visual studio extensions to facilitate the usage of the profilers (click any images for full size images): The Visual Studio menu options (under ANTS menu) Starting the CLR Performance Profiler from the start menu yields this window If you follow the instructions after launching the program from the start menu (Click File > New Profiling Session to start a new project), you are given a dialog with plenty of options for profiling: The New Session dialog. Lots of options. One thing I noticed is that the buttons in the lower right were half-covered by the panel of the application. If I had to guess, I would imagine that this is caused by my DPI settings being set to 125%. This is a problem I have seen in other applications as well that don’t scale well to different dpi scales. The profiler options give you the ability to profile: .NET Executable ASP.NET web application (hosted in IIS) ASP.NET web application (hosted in IIS express) ASP.NET web application (hosted in Cassini Web Development Server) SharePoint web application (hosted in IIS) Silverlight 4+ application Windows Service COM+ server XBAP (local XAML browser application) Attach to an already running .NET 4 process Choosing each option provides a varying set of other variables/options that one can set including options such as application arguments, operating path, record I/O performance performance counters to record (43 counters in all!), etc… All in all, they give you the ability to profile many different .Net project types, and make it simple to do so. In most cases of my using this application, I would be using the built in Visual Studio extensions, as they automatically start a new profiling project in ANTS with the options setup, and start your program, however RedGate has made it easy enough to profile outside of Visual Studio as well. On the flip side of this, as someone who lives most of their work life in Visual Studio, one thing I do wish is that instead of opening an entirely separate application/gui to perform profiling after launching, that instead they would provide a Visual Studio panel with the information, and integrate more of the profiling project information into Visual Studio. So, now that we have an idea of what options that the profiler gives us, its time to test its abilities and features. Horrendous Example Code – Prime Number Generator One of my interests besides development, is Physics and Math – what I went to college for. I have especially always been interested in prime numbers, as they are something of a mystery… So, I decided that I would go ahead and to test the abilities of the profiler, I would write a small program, website, and library to generate prime numbers in the quantity that you ask for. I am going to start off with some terrible code, and show how I would see the profiler being used as a development tool. First off, the IPrimes interface (all code is downloadable at the end of the post): interface IPrimes { IEnumerable<int> GetPrimes(int retrieve); } Simple enough, right? Anything that implements the interface will (hopefully) provide an IEnumerable of int, with the quantity specified in the parameter argument. Next, I am going to implement this interface in the most basic way: public class DumbPrimes : IPrimes { public IEnumerable<int> GetPrimes(int retrieve) { //store a list of primes already found var _foundPrimes = new List<int>() { 2, 3 }; //if i ask for 1 or two primes, return what asked for if (retrieve <= _foundPrimes.Count()) return _foundPrimes.Take(retrieve); //the next number to look at int _analyzing = 4; //since I already determined I don't have enough //execute at least once, and until quantity is sufficed do { //assume prime until otherwise determined bool isPrime = true; //start dividing at 2 //divide until number is reached, or determined not prime for (int i = 2; i < _analyzing && isPrime; i++) { //if (i) goes into _analyzing without a remainder, //_analyzing is NOT prime if (_analyzing % i == 0) isPrime = false; } //if it is prime, add to found list if (isPrime) _foundPrimes.Add(_analyzing); //increment number to analyze next _analyzing++; } while (_foundPrimes.Count() < retrieve); return _foundPrimes; } } This is the simplest way to get primes in my opinion. Checking each number by the straight definition of a prime – is it divisible by anything besides 1 and itself. I have included this code in a base class library for my solution, as I am going to use it to demonstrate a couple of features of ANTS. This class library is consumed by a simple non-MVVM WPF application, and a simple MVC4 website. I will not post the WPF code here inline, as it is simply an ObservableCollection<int>, a label, two textbox’s, and a button. Starting a new Profiling Session So, in Visual Studio, I have just completed my first stint developing the GUI and DumbPrimes IPrimes class, so now I want to check my codes efficiency by profiling it. All I have to do is build the solution (surprised initiating a profiling session doesn’t do this, but I suppose I can understand it), and then click the ANTS menu, followed by Profile Performance. I am then greeted by the profiler starting up and already monitoring my program live: You are provided with a realtime graph at the top, and a pane at the bottom giving you information on how to proceed. I am going to start by asking my program to show me the first 15000 primes: After the program finally began responding again (I did all the work on the main UI thread – how bad!), I stopped the profiler, which did kill the process of my program too. One important thing to note, is that the profiler by default wants to give you a lot of detail about the operation – line hit counts, time per line, percent time per line, etc… The important thing to remember is that this itself takes a lot of time. When running my program without the profiler attached, it can generate the 15000 primes in 5.18 seconds, compared to 74.5 seconds – almost a 1500 percent increase. While this may seem like a lot, remember that there is a trade off. It may be WAY more inefficient, however, I am able to drill down and make improvements to specific problem areas, and then decrease execution time all around. Analyzing the Profiling Session After clicking ‘Stop Profiling’, the process running my application stopped, and the entire execution time was automatically selected by ANTS, and the results shown below: Now there are a number of interesting things going on here, I am going to cover each in a section of its own: Real Time Performance Counter Bar (top of screen) At the top of the screen, is the real time performance bar. As your application is running, this will constantly update with the currently selected performance counters status. A couple of cool things to note are the fact that you can drag a selection around specific time periods to drill down the detail views in the lower 2 panels to information pertaining to only that period. After selecting a time period, you can bookmark a section and name it, so that it is easy to find later, or after reloaded at a later time. You can also zoom in, out, or fit the graph to the space provided – useful for drilling down. It may be hard to see, but at the top of the processor time graph below the time ticks, but above the red usage graph, there is a green bar. This bar shows at what times a method that is selected in the ‘Call tree’ panel is called. Very cool to be able to click on a method and see at what times it made an impact. As I said before, ANTS provides 43 different performance counters you can hook into. Click the arrow next to the Performance tab at the top will allow you to change between different counters if you have them selected: Method Call Tree, ADO.Net Database Calls, File IO – Detail Panel Red Gate really hit the mark here I think. When you select a section of the run with the graph, the call tree populates to fill a hierarchical tree of method calls, with information regarding each of the methods. By default, methods are hidden where the source is not provided (framework type code), however, Red Gate has integrated Reflector into ANTS, so even if you don’t have source for something, you can select a method and get the source if you want. Methods are also hidden where the impact is seen as insignificant – methods that are only executed for 1% of the time of the overall calling methods time; in other words, working on making them better is not where your efforts should be focused. – Smart! Source Panel – Detail Panel The source panel is where you can see line level information on your code, showing the code for the currently selected method from the Method Call Tree. If the code is not available, Reflector takes care of it and shows the code anyways! As you can notice, there does seem to be a problem with how ANTS determines what line is the actual line that a call is completed on. I have suspicions that this may be due to some of the inline code optimizations that the CLR applies upon compilation of the assembly. In a method with comments, the problem is much more severe: As you can see here, apparently the most offending code in my base library was a comment – *gasp*! Removing the comments does help quite a bit, however I hope that Red Gate works on their counter algorithm soon to improve the logic on positioning for statistics: I did a small test just to demonstrate the lines are correct without comments. For me, it isn’t a deal breaker, as I can usually determine the correct placements by looking at the application code in the region and determining what makes sense, but it is something that would probably build up some irritation with time. Feature – Suggest Method for Optimization A neat feature to really help those in need of a pointer, is the menu option under tools to automatically suggest methods to optimize/improve: Nice feature – clicking it filters the call tree and stars methods that it thinks are good candidates for optimization. I do wish that they would have made it more visible for those of use who aren’t great on sight: Process Integration I do think that this could have a place in my process. After experimenting with the profiler, I do think it would be a great benefit to do some development, testing, and then after all the bugs are worked out, use the profiler to check on things to make sure nothing seems like it is hogging more than its fair share. For example, with this program, I would have developed it, ran it, tested it – it works, but slowly. After looking at the profiler, and seeing the massive amount of time spent in 1 method, I might go ahead and try to re-implement IPrimes (I actually would probably rewrite the offending code, but so that I can distribute both sets of code easily, I’m just going to make another implementation of IPrimes). Using two pieces of knowledge about prime numbers can make this method MUCH more efficient – prime numbers fall into two buckets 6k+/-1 , and a number is prime if it is not divisible by any other primes before it: public class SmartPrimes : IPrimes { public IEnumerable<int> GetPrimes(int retrieve) { //store a list of primes already found var _foundPrimes = new List<int>() { 2, 3 }; //if i ask for 1 or two primes, return what asked for if (retrieve <= _foundPrimes.Count()) return _foundPrimes.Take(retrieve); //the next number to look at int _k = 1; //since I already determined I don't have enough //execute at least once, and until quantity is sufficed do { //assume prime until otherwise determined bool isPrime = true; int potentialPrime; //analyze 6k-1 //assign the value to potential potentialPrime = 6 * _k - 1; //if there are any primes that divise this, it is NOT a prime number //using PLINQ for quick boost isPrime = !_foundPrimes.AsParallel() .Any(prime => potentialPrime % prime == 0); //if it is prime, add to found list if (isPrime) _foundPrimes.Add(potentialPrime); if (_foundPrimes.Count() == retrieve) break; //analyze 6k+1 //assign the value to potential potentialPrime = 6 * _k + 1; //if there are any primes that divise this, it is NOT a prime number //using PLINQ for quick boost isPrime = !_foundPrimes.AsParallel() .Any(prime => potentialPrime % prime == 0); //if it is prime, add to found list if (isPrime) _foundPrimes.Add(potentialPrime); //increment k to analyze next _k++; } while (_foundPrimes.Count() < retrieve); return _foundPrimes; } } Now there are definitely more things I can do to help make this more efficient, but for the scope of this example, I think this is fine (but still hideous)! Profiling this now yields a happy surprise 27 seconds to generate the 15000 primes with the profiler attached, and only 1.43 seconds without. One important thing I wanted to call out though was the performance graph now: Notice anything odd? The %Processor time is above 100%. This is because there is now more than 1 core in the operation. A better label for the chart in my mind would have been %Core time, but to each their own. Another odd thing I noticed was that the profiler seemed to be spot on this time in my DumbPrimes class with line details in source, even with comments.. Odd. Profiling Web Applications The last thing that I wanted to cover, that means a lot to me as a web developer, is the great amount of work that Red Gate put into the profiler when profiling web applications. In my solution, I have a simple MVC4 application setup with 1 page, a single input form, that will output prime values as my WPF app did. Launching the profiler from Visual Studio as before, nothing is really different in the profiler window, however I did receive a UAC prompt for a Red Gate helper app to integrate with the web server without notification. After requesting 500, 1000, 2000, and 5000 primes, and looking at the profiler session, things are slightly different from before: As you can see, there are 4 spikes of activity in the processor time graph, but there is also something new in the call tree: That’s right – ANTS will actually group method calls by get/post operations, so it is easier to find out what action/page is giving the largest problems… Pretty cool in my mind! Overview Overall, I think that Red Gate ANTS CLR Profiler has a lot to offer, however I think it also has a long ways to go. 3 Biggest Pros: Ability to easily drill down from time graph, to method calls, to source code Wide variety of counters to choose from when profiling your application Excellent integration/grouping of methods being called from web applications by request – BRILLIANT! 3 Biggest Cons: Issue regarding line details in source view Nit pick – Processor time vs. Core time Nit pick – Lack of full integration with Visual Studio Ratings Ease of Use (7/10) – I marked down here because of the problems with the line level details and the extra work that that entails, and the lack of better integration with Visual Studio. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do. Especially with its large variety of performance counters, a definite plus! Features (9/10) – Besides the real time performance monitoring, and the drill downs that I’ve shown here, ANTS also has great integration with ADO.Net, with the ability to show database queries run by your application in the profiler. This, with the line level details, the web request grouping, reflector integration, and various options to customize your profiling session I think create a great set of features! Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good. their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (8/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find. With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (8/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Performance Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel. I WOULD recommend you trying the application and seeing if it would fit into your process, BUT, remember there are still some kinks in it to hopefully be worked out. My next post will definitely be shorter (hopefully), but thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead! Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think! I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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Metro: Creating a Master/Detail View with a WinJS ListView Control

- by Stephen.Walther

The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can create a simple master/detail view by using the WinJS ListView and Template controls. In particular, I explain how you can use a ListView control to display a list of movies and how you can use a Template control to display the details of the selected movie. Creating a master/detail view requires completing the following four steps: Create the data source – The data source contains the list of movies. Declare the ListView control – The ListView control displays the entire list of movies. It is the master part of the master/detail view. Declare the Details Template control – The Details Template control displays the details for the selected movie. It is the details part of the master/detail view. Handle the selectionchanged event – You handle the selectionchanged event to display the details for a movie when a new movie is selected. Creating the Data Source There is nothing special about our data source. We initialize a WinJS.Binding.List object to represent a list of movies: (function () { "use strict"; var movies = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas"}, { title: "Shrek", director: "Adamson" }, { title: "Star Trek", director: "Abrams" }, { title: "Spiderman", director: "Raimi" }, { title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }, { title: "Minority Report", director: "Spielberg" } ]); // Expose the data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { movies: movies }); })(); The data source is exposed to the rest of our application with the name ListViewDemos.movies. Declaring the ListView Control The ListView control is declared with the following markup: <div id="movieList" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#masterItemTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'directSelect', selectionMode: 'single', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> The data-win-options attribute is used to set the following properties of the ListView control: itemDataSource – The ListView is bound to the list of movies which we created in the previous section. Notice that the ListView is bound to ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource and not just ListViewDemos.movies. itemTemplate – The item template contains the template used for rendering each item in the ListView. The markup for this template is included below. tabBehavior – This enumeration determines what happens when you tap or click on an item in the ListView. The possible values are directSelect, toggleSelect, invokeOnly, none. Because we want to handle the selectionchanged event, we set tapBehavior to the value directSelect. selectionMode – This enumeration determines whether you can select multiple items or only a single item. The possible values are none, single, multi. In the code above, this property is set to the value single. layout – You can use ListLayout or GridLayout with a ListView. If you want to display a vertical ListView, then you should select ListLayout. You must associate a ListView with an item template if you want to render anything interesting. The ListView above is associated with an item template named #masterItemTemplate. Here’s the markup for the masterItemTemplate: <div id="masterItemTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movie"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> This template simply renders the title of each movie. Declaring the Details Template Control The details part of the master/detail view is created with the help of a Template control. Here’s the markup used to declare the Details Template control: <div id="detailsTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <div> Title: <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> <div> Director: <span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> </div> The Details Template control displays the movie title and director. Handling the selectionchanged Event The ListView control can raise two types of events: the iteminvoked and selectionchanged events. The iteminvoked event is raised when you click on a ListView item. The selectionchanged event is raised when one or more ListView items are selected. When you set the tapBehavior property of the ListView control to the value “directSelect” then tapping or clicking a list item raised both the iteminvoked and selectionchanged event. Tapping a list item causes the item to be selected and the item appears with a checkmark. In our code, we handle the selectionchanged event to update the movie details Template when you select a new movie. Here’s the code from the default.js file used to handle the selectionchanged event: var movieList = document.getElementById("movieList"); var detailsTemplate = document.getElementById("detailsTemplate"); var movieDetails = document.getElementById("movieDetails"); // Setup selectionchanged handler movieList.winControl.addEventListener("selectionchanged", function (evt) { if (movieList.winControl.selection.count() > 0) { movieList.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function (items) { // Clear the template container movieDetails.innerHTML = ""; // Render the template detailsTemplate.winControl.render(items[0].data, movieDetails); }); } }); The code above sets up an event handler (listener) for the selectionchanged event. The event handler first verifies that an item has been selected in the ListView (selection.count() > 0). Next, the details for the movie are rendered using the movie details Template (we created this Template in the previous section). The Complete Code For the sake of completeness, I’ve included the complete code for the master/detail view below. I’ve included both the default.html, default.js, and movies.js files. Here is the final code for the default.html file: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewMasterDetail</title>  <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script>  <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/movies.js"></script> <style type="text/css"> body { font-size: xx-large; } .movie { padding: 5px; } #masterDetail { display: -ms-box; } #movieList { width: 300px; margin: 20px; } #movieDetails { margin: 20px; } </style> </head> <body>  <div id="masterItemTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movie"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> <div id="detailsTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <div> Title: <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> <div> Director: <span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> </div>  <div id="masterDetail">  <div id="movieList" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#masterItemTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'directSelect', selectionMode: 'single', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div>  <div id="movieDetails"></div> </div> </body> </html> Here is the default.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { WinJS.UI.processAll(); var movieList = document.getElementById("movieList"); var detailsTemplate = document.getElementById("detailsTemplate"); var movieDetails = document.getElementById("movieDetails"); // Setup selectionchanged handler movieList.winControl.addEventListener("selectionchanged", function (evt) { if (movieList.winControl.selection.count() > 0) { movieList.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function (items) { // Clear the template container movieDetails.innerHTML = ""; // Render the template detailsTemplate.winControl.render(items[0].data, movieDetails); }); } }); } }; app.start(); })(); Here is the movies.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var movies = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas"}, { title: "Shrek", director: "Adamson" }, { title: "Star Trek", director: "Abrams" }, { title: "Spiderman", director: "Raimi" }, { title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }, { title: "Minority Report", director: "Spielberg" } ]); // Expose the data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { movies: movies }); })(); Summary The purpose of this blog entry was to describe how to create a simple master/detail view by taking advantage of the WinJS ListView control. We handled the selectionchanged event of the ListView control to display movie details when you select a movie in the ListView.

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Metro: Creating a Master/Detail View with a WinJS ListView Control

- by Stephen.Walther

The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can create a simple master/detail view by using the WinJS ListView and Template controls. In particular, I explain how you can use a ListView control to display a list of movies and how you can use a Template control to display the details of the selected movie. Creating a master/detail view requires completing the following four steps: Create the data source – The data source contains the list of movies. Declare the ListView control – The ListView control displays the entire list of movies. It is the master part of the master/detail view. Declare the Details Template control – The Details Template control displays the details for the selected movie. It is the details part of the master/detail view. Handle the selectionchanged event – You handle the selectionchanged event to display the details for a movie when a new movie is selected. Creating the Data Source There is nothing special about our data source. We initialize a WinJS.Binding.List object to represent a list of movies: (function () { "use strict"; var movies = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas"}, { title: "Shrek", director: "Adamson" }, { title: "Star Trek", director: "Abrams" }, { title: "Spiderman", director: "Raimi" }, { title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }, { title: "Minority Report", director: "Spielberg" } ]); // Expose the data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { movies: movies }); })(); The data source is exposed to the rest of our application with the name ListViewDemos.movies. Declaring the ListView Control The ListView control is declared with the following markup: <div id="movieList" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#masterItemTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'directSelect', selectionMode: 'single', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> The data-win-options attribute is used to set the following properties of the ListView control: itemDataSource – The ListView is bound to the list of movies which we created in the previous section. Notice that the ListView is bound to ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource and not just ListViewDemos.movies. itemTemplate – The item template contains the template used for rendering each item in the ListView. The markup for this template is included below. tabBehavior – This enumeration determines what happens when you tap or click on an item in the ListView. The possible values are directSelect, toggleSelect, invokeOnly, none. Because we want to handle the selectionchanged event, we set tapBehavior to the value directSelect. selectionMode – This enumeration determines whether you can select multiple items or only a single item. The possible values are none, single, multi. In the code above, this property is set to the value single. layout – You can use ListLayout or GridLayout with a ListView. If you want to display a vertical ListView, then you should select ListLayout. You must associate a ListView with an item template if you want to render anything interesting. The ListView above is associated with an item template named #masterItemTemplate. Here’s the markup for the masterItemTemplate: <div id="masterItemTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movie"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> This template simply renders the title of each movie. Declaring the Details Template Control The details part of the master/detail view is created with the help of a Template control. Here’s the markup used to declare the Details Template control: <div id="detailsTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <div> Title: <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> <div> Director: <span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> </div> The Details Template control displays the movie title and director. Handling the selectionchanged Event The ListView control can raise two types of events: the iteminvoked and selectionchanged events. The iteminvoked event is raised when you click on a ListView item. The selectionchanged event is raised when one or more ListView items are selected. When you set the tapBehavior property of the ListView control to the value “directSelect” then tapping or clicking a list item raised both the iteminvoked and selectionchanged event. Tapping a list item causes the item to be selected and the item appears with a checkmark. In our code, we handle the selectionchanged event to update the movie details Template when you select a new movie. Here’s the code from the default.js file used to handle the selectionchanged event: var movieList = document.getElementById("movieList"); var detailsTemplate = document.getElementById("detailsTemplate"); var movieDetails = document.getElementById("movieDetails"); // Setup selectionchanged handler movieList.winControl.addEventListener("selectionchanged", function (evt) { if (movieList.winControl.selection.count() > 0) { movieList.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function (items) { // Clear the template container movieDetails.innerHTML = ""; // Render the template detailsTemplate.winControl.render(items[0].data, movieDetails); }); } }); The code above sets up an event handler (listener) for the selectionchanged event. The event handler first verifies that an item has been selected in the ListView (selection.count() > 0). Next, the details for the movie are rendered using the movie details Template (we created this Template in the previous section). The Complete Code For the sake of completeness, I’ve included the complete code for the master/detail view below. I’ve included both the default.html, default.js, and movies.js files. Here is the final code for the default.html file: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewMasterDetail</title>  <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script>  <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/movies.js"></script> <style type="text/css"> body { font-size: xx-large; } .movie { padding: 5px; } #masterDetail { display: -ms-box; } #movieList { width: 300px; margin: 20px; } #movieDetails { margin: 20px; } </style> </head> <body>  <div id="masterItemTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movie"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> <div id="detailsTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <div> Title: <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> <div> Director: <span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> </div>  <div id="masterDetail">  <div id="movieList" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: ListViewDemos.movies.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#masterItemTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'directSelect', selectionMode: 'single', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div>  <div id="movieDetails"></div> </div> </body> </html> Here is the default.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { WinJS.UI.processAll(); var movieList = document.getElementById("movieList"); var detailsTemplate = document.getElementById("detailsTemplate"); var movieDetails = document.getElementById("movieDetails"); // Setup selectionchanged handler movieList.winControl.addEventListener("selectionchanged", function (evt) { if (movieList.winControl.selection.count() > 0) { movieList.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function (items) { // Clear the template container movieDetails.innerHTML = ""; // Render the template detailsTemplate.winControl.render(items[0].data, movieDetails); }); } }); } }; app.start(); })(); Here is the movies.js file: (function () { "use strict"; var movies = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas"}, { title: "Shrek", director: "Adamson" }, { title: "Star Trek", director: "Abrams" }, { title: "Spiderman", director: "Raimi" }, { title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }, { title: "Minority Report", director: "Spielberg" } ]); // Expose the data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { movies: movies }); })(); Summary The purpose of this blog entry was to describe how to create a simple master/detail view by taking advantage of the WinJS ListView control. We handled the selectionchanged event of the ListView control to display movie details when you select a movie in the ListView.

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Working with Key Flex Fields in OAF

- by PRajkumar

1. Create a New Workspace and Project Right click Workspaces and click create New OA Workspace and name it as PRajkumarKFFDemo. Automatically a new OA Project will also be created. Name the project as KFFDemo and package as prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.kffdemo 2. Create a New Application Module (AM) Right Click on KFFDemo > New > ADF Business Components > Application Module Name -- KFFAM Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.kffdemo.server Check Application Module Class: KFFAMImpl Generate JavaFile(s) 3. Create a New View Object (VO) Right click on KFFDemo > New > ADF Business Components > View Object Name -- KFFVO Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.kffdemo.server Note - The VO is not based on any EO so click next and go to the query section and paste the query SELECT code_combination_id FROM gl_code_combinations_kfv In Step8 Check Object Class: KFFVOImpl -> Generate Java File -> Bind Variable Accessors 4. Add View Object to Root UI Application Module Right Click on KFFAM > Edit KFFAM > Data Model and shuttle KFFVO from Available View Objects to Data Model 5. Create a New Page Right click on KFFDemo > New > Web Tier > OA Components > Page Name -- KFFPG Package -- prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.kffdemo.webui 6. Select the KFFPG and go to the strcuture pane where a default region has been created 7. Select region1 and set the following properties: Attribute Property ID PageLayoutRN AM Definition prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.kffdemo.server.KFFAM Window Title Key Flex Field Demo Window Title Key Flex Field Demo 8. Create Stack Layout Region Under Page Layout Region Right click PageLayoutRN > New > Region Attribute Property ID MainRN AM Definition stackLayout 9. Create a New Item of type Flex under the Stack Layout Region Right click on MainRN > New > Item Set Following Properties for New Item -- Attribute Property ID KeyFlexItem Item Style Flex Prompt Accounting Key Flex Field Appl Short Name SQLGL Name GL# Type Key View Instance KFFVO1 10. Create Controller for page KFFPG Right Click on PageLayoutRN > Set New Controller Package Name: prajkumar.oracle.apps.fnd.kffdemo.webui Class Name: KFFCO Write Following Code in KFFCO processRequest public void processRequest(OAPageContext pageContext, OAWebBean webBean) { super.processRequest(pageContext, webBean); OAKeyFlexBean kffId = (OAKeyFlexBean)webBean.findIndexedChildRecursive("KeyFlexItem"); // Set the code combination lov kffId.useCodeCombinationLOV(true); //set the structure code for the item key flex kffId.setStructureCode("FED_AFF"); //Set the attribute name to the item kffId.setCCIDAttributeName("CodeCombinationId"); //Execute the Query KFFAMImpl am = (KFFAMImpl)pageContext.getApplicationModule(webBean); KFFVOImpl vo = (KFFVOImpl)am.findViewObject("KFFVO1"); if(!vo.isPreparedForExecution()) { vo.executeQuery(); } } Note -- If you do not want to see the key flex field is merging one then change the code in the controller class as below kffId.useCodeCombinationLOV(false); 11. Use the below Query to find the Structure Code SELECT fif.application_id, fif.id_flex_code, fif.id_flex_name, fif.application_table_name, fif.description, fifs.id_flex_num, fifs.id_flex_structure_code, fifse.segment_name, fifse.segment_num, fifse.flex_value_set_id FROM fnd_id_flexs fif, fnd_id_flex_structures fifs, fnd_id_flex_segments fifse WHERE fif.application_id = fifs.application_id AND fif.id_flex_code = fifs.id_flex_code AND fifse.application_id = fif.application_id AND fifse.id_flex_code = fif.id_flex_code AND fifse.id_flex_num = fifs.id_flex_num AND fif.id_flex_code LIKE 'GL#' AND fif.id_flex_name LIKE 'Accounting Flexfield'; 12. Congratulation you have successfully finished. Run Your page and Test Your Work

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Redirecting to a dynamic page

- by binarydev

I have a page displaying blog posts (latest_posts.php) and another page that display single blog posts (blog.php) . I intend to link the image title in latest_posts.php so that it redirects to blog.php where it would display the particular post that was clicked. latest_posts.php:  <h2 class="underline"> <span>What's new</span> <span></span> </h2>   <ul class="post-list post-list-1"> <?php /* Fetches Date/Time, Post Content and title */ include 'dbconnect.php'; $sql = "SELECT * FROM wp_posts"; $res = mysql_query($sql); while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($res) ) { ?>  <li class="clear-fix">  <div class="post-list-date"> <div class="post-date-box"> <?php //Timestamp broken down to show accordingly $timestamp = $row['post_date']; $datetime = new DateTime($timestamp); $date = $datetime->format("d"); $month = $datetime->format("M"); ?> <h3> <?php echo $date; ?> </h3> <span> <?php echo $month; ?> </span> </div> </div>   <div class="post-list-image">  <div class="image image-overlay-url image-fancybox-url"> <a href="post.php" class="preloader-image"> <?php echo '<img src="', $row['image'], '" alt="' , $row['post_title'] , '\'s Blog Image" />'; ?> </a> </div>  </div>   <div class="post-list-content"> <div>  <h4> <a href="post.php? . $row['ID'] . "> <?php echo $row['post_title']; ?> </a> </h4>   <p> <?php echo $row ['post_content']; }?> </p>  </div> </div>  </li>  </ul>  <a href="blog.php" class="button-browse">Browse All Posts</a> </div> <?php require_once('include/twitter_user_timeline.php'); ?> blog.php: <?php require_once('include/header.php'); ?> <body class="blog"> <?php require_once('include/navigation_bar_blog.php'); ?> <div class="blog"> <div class="main">  <h2 class="underline"> <span>What's new</span> <span></span> </h2>   <div class="layout-p-66x33 clear-fix">    <ul class="post-list post-list-2"> <?php /* Fetches Date/Time, Post Content and title with Pagination */ include 'dbconnect.php'; //sets to default page if(empty($_GET['pn'])){ $page=1; } else { $page = $_GET['pn']; } // Index of the page $index = ($page-1)*3; $sql = "SELECT * FROM `wp_posts` ORDER BY `post_date` DESC LIMIT " . $index . " ,3"; $res = mysql_query($sql); //Loops through the values while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($res) ) { ?>  <li class="clear-fix">  <div class="post-list-date"> <div class="post-date-box"> <?php //Timestamp broken down to show accordingly $timestamp = $row['post_date']; $datetime = new DateTime($timestamp); $date = $datetime->format("d"); $month = $datetime->format("M"); ?> <h3> <?php echo $date; ?> </h3> <span> <?php echo $month; ?> </span> </div> </div>   <div class="post-list-image">  <div class="image image-overlay-url image-fancybox-url"> <a href="post.php" class="preloader-image"> <?php echo '<img src="', $row['image'], '" alt="' , $row['post_title'] , '\'s Blog Image" />'; ?> </a> </div>  </div>   <div class="post-list-content"> <div> <?php $id = $_GET['ID']; $post = lookup_post_somehow($id); if($post) { // render post } else { echo 'blog post not found..'; } ?>  <h4> <a href="post.php"> <?php echo $row['post_title']; ?> </a> </h4>   <p> <?php echo $row ['post_content']; ?> </p>  </div> </div>  </li>  <?php } // close while loop ?> </ul>  <div> <ul class="blog-pagination clear-fix"> <?php //Count the number of rows $numberofrows = mysql_query("SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM `wp_posts`"); //Do ciel() to round the result according to number of posts $postsperpage = 4; $numOfPages = ceil($numberofrows / $postsperpage); for($i=1; $i < $numOfPages; $i++) { //echos links for each page $paginationDisplay = '<li><a href="blog.php?pn=' . $i . '">' . $i . '</a></li>'; echo $paginationDisplay; } ?>  </ul> </div>   </div>  </div> </div> <?php require_once('include/twitter_user_timeline.php'); ?> <?php require_once('include/footer_blog.php'); ?> How do I render?

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Adventures in Windows 8: Placing items in a GridView with a ColumnSpan or RowSpan

- by Laurent Bugnion

Currently working on a Windows 8 app for an important client, I will be writing about small issues, tips and tricks, ideas and whatever occurs to me during the development and the integration of this app. When working with a GridView, it is quite common to use a VariableSizedWrapGrid as the ItemsPanel. This creates a nice flowing layout which will auto-adapt for various resolutions. This is ideal when you want to build views like the Windows 8 start menu. However immediately we notice that the Start menu allows to place items on one column (Smaller) or two columns (Larger). This switch happens through the AppBar. So how do we implement that in our app? Using ColumnSpan and RowSpan When you use a VariableSizedWrapGrid directly in your XAML, you can attach the VariableSizedWrapGrid.ColumnSpan and VariableSizedWrapGrid.RowSpan attached properties directly to an item to create the desired effect. For instance this code create this output (shown in Blend but it runs just the same): <VariableSizedWrapGrid ItemHeight="100" ItemWidth="100" Width="200" Orientation="Horizontal"> <Rectangle Fill="Purple" /> <Rectangle Fill="Orange" /> <Rectangle Fill="Yellow" VariableSizedWrapGrid.ColumnSpan="2" /> <Rectangle Fill="Red" VariableSizedWrapGrid.ColumnSpan="2" VariableSizedWrapGrid.RowSpan="2" /> <Rectangle Fill="Green" VariableSizedWrapGrid.RowSpan="2" /> <Rectangle Fill="Blue" /> <Rectangle Fill="LightGray" /> </VariableSizedWrapGrid> Using the VariableSizedWrapGrid as ItemsPanel When you use a GridView however, you typically bind the ItemsSource property to a collection, for example in a viewmodel. In that case, you want to be able to switch the ColumnSpan and RowSpan depending on properties on the item. I tried to find a way to bind the VariableSizedWrapGrid.ColumnSpan attached property on the GridView’s ItemContainerStyle template to an observable property on the item, but it didn’t work. Instead, I decided to use a StyleSelector to switch the GridViewItem’s style. Here’s how: First I added my two GridViews to my XAML as follows: <Page.Resources> <local:MainViewModel x:Key="Main" /> <DataTemplate x:Key="DataTemplate1"> <Grid Background="{Binding Brush}"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding BrushCode}" /> </Grid> </DataTemplate> </Page.Resources> <Page.DataContext> <Binding Source="{StaticResource Main}" /> </Page.DataContext> <Grid Background="{StaticResource ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush}" Margin="20"> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <GridView ItemsSource="{Binding Items}" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource DataTemplate1}" VerticalAlignment="Top"> <GridView.ItemsPanel> <ItemsPanelTemplate> <VariableSizedWrapGrid ItemHeight="150" ItemWidth="150" /> </ItemsPanelTemplate> </GridView.ItemsPanel> </GridView> <GridView Grid.Column="1" ItemsSource="{Binding Items}" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource DataTemplate1}" VerticalAlignment="Top"> <GridView.ItemsPanel> <ItemsPanelTemplate> <VariableSizedWrapGrid ItemHeight="100" ItemWidth="100" /> </ItemsPanelTemplate> </GridView.ItemsPanel> </GridView> </Grid> The MainViewModel looks like this: public class MainViewModel { public IList<Item> Items { get; private set; } public MainViewModel() { Items = new List<Item> { new Item { Brush = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Red) }, new Item { Brush = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Blue) }, new Item { Brush = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Green), }, // And more... }; } } As for the Item class, I am using an MVVM Light ObservableObject but you can use your own simple implementation of INotifyPropertyChanged of course: public class Item : ObservableObject { public const string ColSpanPropertyName = "ColSpan"; private int _colSpan = 1; public int ColSpan { get { return _colSpan; } set { Set(ColSpanPropertyName, ref _colSpan, value); } } public SolidColorBrush Brush { get; set; } public string BrushCode { get { return Brush.Color.ToString(); } } } Then I copied the GridViewItem’s style locally. To do this, I use Expression Blend’s functionality. It has the disadvantage to copy a large portion of XAML to your application, but the HUGE advantage to allow you to change the look and feel of your GridViewItem everywhere in the application. For example, you can change the selection chrome, the item’s alignments and many other properties. Actually everytime I use a ListBox, ListView or any other data control, I typically copy the item style to a resource dictionary in my application and I tweak it. Note that Blend for Windows 8 apps is automatically installed with every edition of Visual Studio 2012 (including Express) so you have no excuses anymore not to use Blend :) Open MainPage.xaml in Expression Blend by right clicking on the MainPage.xaml file in the Solution Explorer and selecting Open in Blend from the context menu. Note that the items do not look very nice! The reason is that the default ItemContainerStyle sets the content’s alignment to “Center” which I never quite understood. Seems to me that you rather want the content to be stretched, but anyway it is easy to change. Right click on the GridView on the left and select Edit Additional Templates, Edit Generated Item Container (ItemContainerStyle), Edit a Copy. In the Create Style Resource dialog, enter the name “DefaultGridViewItemStyle”, select “Application” and press OK. Side note 1: You need to save in a global resource dictionary because later we will need to retrieve that Style from a global location. Side note 2": I would rather copy the style to an external resource dictionary that I link into the App.xaml file, but I want to keep things simple here. Blend switches in Template edit mode. The template you are editing now is inside the ItemContainerStyle and will govern the appearance of your items. This is where, for instance, the “checked” chrome is defined, and where you can alter it if you need to. Note that you can reuse this style for all your GridViews even if you use a different DataTemplate for your items. Makes sense? I probably need to think about writing another blog post dedicated to the ItemContainerStyle :) In the breadcrumb bar on top of the page, click on the style icon. The property we want to change now can be changed in the Style instead of the Template, which is a better idea. Blend is not in Style edit mode, as you can see in the Objects and Timeline pane. In the Properties pane, in the Search box, enter the word “content”. This will filter all the properties containing that partial string, including the two we are interested in: HorizontalContentAlignment and VerticalContentAlignment. Set these two values to “Stretch” instead of the default “Center”. Using the breadcrumb bar again, set the scope back to the Page (by clicking on the first crumb on the left). Notice how the items are now showing as squares in the first GridView. We will now use the same ItemContainerStyle for the second GridView. To do this, right click on the second GridView and select Edit Additional Templates, Edit Generate Item Container, Apply Resource, DefaultGridViewItemStyle. The page now looks nicer: And now for the ColumnSpan! So now, let’s change the ColumnSpan property. First, let’s define a new Style that inherits the ItemContainerStyle we created before. Make sure that you save everything in Blend by pressing Ctrl-Shift-S. Open App.xaml in Visual Studio. Below the newly created DefaultGridViewItemStyle resource, add the following style: <Style x:Key="WideGridViewItemStyle" TargetType="GridViewItem" BasedOn="{StaticResource DefaultGridViewItemStyle}"> <Setter Property="VariableSizedWrapGrid.ColumnSpan" Value="2" /> </Style> Add a new class to the project, and name it MainItemStyleSelector. Implement the class as follows: public class MainItemStyleSelector : StyleSelector { protected override Style SelectStyleCore(object item, DependencyObject container) { var i = (Item)item; if (i.ColSpan == 2) { return Application.Current.Resources["WideGridViewItemStyle"] as Style; } return Application.Current.Resources["DefaultGridViewItemStyle"] as Style; } } In MainPage.xaml, add a resource to the Page.Resources section: <local:MainItemStyleSelector x:Key="MainItemStyleSelector" /> In MainPage.xaml, replace the ItemContainerStyle property on the first GridView with the ItemContainerStyleSelector property, pointing to the StaticResource we just defined. <GridView ItemsSource="{Binding Items}" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource DataTemplate1}" VerticalAlignment="Top" ItemContainerStyleSelector="{StaticResource MainItemStyleSelector}"> <GridView.ItemsPanel> <ItemsPanelTemplate> <VariableSizedWrapGrid ItemHeight="150" ItemWidth="150" /> </ItemsPanelTemplate> </GridView.ItemsPanel> </GridView> Do the same for the second GridView as well. Finally, in the MainViewModel, change the ColumnSpan property on the 3rd Item to 2. new Item { Brush = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Green), ColSpan = 2 }, Running the application now creates the following image, which is what we wanted. Notice how the green item is now a “wide tile”. You can also experiment by creating different Styles, all inheriting the DefaultGridViewItemStyle and using different values of RowSpan for instance. This will allow you to create any layout you want, while leaving the heavy lifting of “flowing the layout” to the GridView control. What about changing these values dynamically? Of course as we can see in the Start menu, it would be nice to be able to change the ColumnSpan and maybe even the RowSpan values at runtime. Unfortunately at this time I have not found a good way to do that. I am investigating however and will make sure to post a follow up when I find what I am looking for! Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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What's New in ASP.NET 4

- by Navaneeth

The .NET Framework version 4 includes enhancements for ASP.NET 4 in targeted areas. Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express also include enhancements and new features for improved Web development. This document provides an overview of many of the new features that are included in the upcoming release. This topic contains the following sections: ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET Web Forms ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Data ASP.NET Chart Control Visual Web Developer Enhancements Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET 4 introduces many features that improve core ASP.NET services such as output caching and session state storage. Extensible Output Caching Since the time that ASP.NET 1.0 was released, output caching has enabled developers to store the generated output of pages, controls, and HTTP responses in memory. On subsequent Web requests, ASP.NET can serve content more quickly by retrieving the generated output from memory instead of regenerating the output from scratch. However, this approach has a limitation — generated content always has to be stored in memory. On servers that experience heavy traffic, the memory requirements for output caching can compete with memory requirements for other parts of a Web application. ASP.NET 4 adds extensibility to output caching that enables you to configure one or more custom output-cache providers. Output-cache providers can use any storage mechanism to persist HTML content. These storage options can include local or remote disks, cloud storage, and distributed cache engines. Output-cache provider extensibility in ASP.NET 4 lets you design more aggressive and more intelligent output-caching strategies for Web sites. For example, you can create an output-cache provider that caches the "Top 10" pages of a site in memory, while caching pages that get lower traffic on disk. Alternatively, you can cache every vary-by combination for a rendered page, but use a distributed cache so that the memory consumption is offloaded from front-end Web servers. You create a custom output-cache provider as a class that derives from the OutputCacheProvider type. You can then configure the provider in the Web.config file by using the new providers subsection of the outputCache element For more information and for examples that show how to configure the output cache, see outputCache Element for caching (ASP.NET Settings Schema). For more information about the classes that support caching, see the documentation for the OutputCache and OutputCacheProvider classes. By default, in ASP.NET 4, all HTTP responses, rendered pages, and controls use the in-memory output cache. The defaultProvider attribute for ASP.NET is AspNetInternalProvider. You can change the default output-cache provider used for a Web application by specifying a different provider name for defaultProvider attribute. In addition, you can select different output-cache providers for individual control and for individual requests and programmatically specify which provider to use. For more information, see the HttpApplication.GetOutputCacheProviderName(HttpContext) method. The easiest way to choose a different output-cache provider for different Web user controls is to do so declaratively by using the new providerName attribute in a page or control directive, as shown in the following example: <%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="None" providerName="DiskCache" %> Preloading Web Applications Some Web applications must load large amounts of data or must perform expensive initialization processing before serving the first request. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, for these situations you had to devise custom approaches to "wake up" an ASP.NET application and then run initialization code during the Application_Load method in the Global.asax file. To address this scenario, a new application preload manager (autostart feature) is available when ASP.NET 4 runs on IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2. The preload feature provides a controlled approach for starting up an application pool, initializing an ASP.NET application, and then accepting HTTP requests. It lets you perform expensive application initialization prior to processing the first HTTP request. For example, you can use the application preload manager to initialize an application and then signal a load-balancer that the application was initialized and ready to accept HTTP traffic. To use the application preload manager, an IIS administrator sets an application pool in IIS 7.5 to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <applicationPools> <add name="MyApplicationPool" startMode="AlwaysRunning" /> </applicationPools> Because a single application pool can contain multiple applications, you specify individual applications to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <sites> <site name="MySite" id="1"> <application path="/" serviceAutoStartEnabled="true" serviceAutoStartProvider="PrewarmMyCache" >  </application> </site> </sites>  <serviceAutoStartProviders> <add name="PrewarmMyCache" type="MyNamespace.CustomInitialization, MyLibrary" /> </serviceAutoStartProviders> When an IIS 7.5 server is cold-started or when an individual application pool is recycled, IIS 7.5 uses the information in the applicationHost.config file to determine which Web applications have to be automatically started. For each application that is marked for preload, IIS7.5 sends a request to ASP.NET 4 to start the application in a state during which the application temporarily does not accept HTTP requests. When it is in this state, ASP.NET instantiates the type defined by the serviceAutoStartProvider attribute (as shown in the previous example) and calls into its public entry point. You create a managed preload type that has the required entry point by implementing the IProcessHostPreloadClient interface, as shown in the following example: public class CustomInitialization : System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient { public void Preload(string[] parameters) { // Perform initialization. } } After your initialization code runs in the Preload method and after the method returns, the ASP.NET application is ready to process requests. Permanently Redirecting a Page Content in Web applications is often moved over the lifetime of the application. This can lead to links to be out of date, such as the links that are returned by search engines. In ASP.NET, developers have traditionally handled requests to old URLs by using the Redirect method to forward a request to the new URL. However, the Redirect method issues an HTTP 302 (Found) response (which is used for a temporary redirect). This results in an extra HTTP round trip. ASP.NET 4 adds a RedirectPermanent helper method that makes it easy to issue HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently) responses, as in the following example: RedirectPermanent("/newpath/foroldcontent.aspx"); Search engines and other user agents that recognize permanent redirects will store the new URL that is associated with the content, which eliminates the unnecessary round trip made by the browser for temporary redirects. Session State Compression By default, ASP.NET provides two options for storing session state across a Web farm. The first option is a session state provider that invokes an out-of-process session state server. The second option is a session state provider that stores data in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Because both options store state information outside a Web application's worker process, session state has to be serialized before it is sent to remote storage. If a large amount of data is saved in session state, the size of the serialized data can become very large. ASP.NET 4 introduces a new compression option for both kinds of out-of-process session state providers. By using this option, applications that have spare CPU cycles on Web servers can achieve substantial reductions in the size of serialized session state data. You can set this option using the new compressionEnabled attribute of the sessionState element in the configuration file. When the compressionEnabled configuration option is set to true, ASP.NET compresses (and decompresses) serialized session state by using the .NET Framework GZipStreamclass. The following example shows how to set this attribute. <sessionState mode="SqlServer" sqlConnectionString="data source=dbserver;Initial Catalog=aspnetstate" allowCustomSqlDatabase="true" compressionEnabled="true" /> ASP.NET Web Forms Web Forms has been a core feature in ASP.NET since the release of ASP.NET 1.0. Many enhancements have been in this area for ASP.NET 4, such as the following: The ability to set meta tags. More control over view state. Support for recently introduced browsers and devices. Easier ways to work with browser capabilities. Support for using ASP.NET routing with Web Forms. More control over generated IDs. The ability to persist selected rows in data controls. More control over rendered HTML in the FormView and ListView controls. Filtering support for data source controls. Enhanced support for Web standards and accessibility Setting Meta Tags with the Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription Properties Two properties have been added to the Page class: MetaKeywords and MetaDescription. These two properties represent corresponding meta tags in the HTML rendered for a page, as shown in the following example: <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>Untitled Page</title> <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2' /> <meta name="description" content="Description of my page" /> </head> These two properties work like the Title property does, and they can be set in the @ Page directive. For more information, see Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription. Enabling View State for Individual Controls A new property has been added to the Control class: ViewStateMode. You can use this property to disable view state for all controls on a page except those for which you explicitly enable view state. View state data is included in a page's HTML and increases the amount of time it takes to send a page to the client and post it back. Storing more view state than is necessary can cause significant decrease in performance. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, you could reduce the impact of view state on a page's performance by disabling view state for specific controls. But sometimes it is easier to enable view state for a few controls that need it instead of disabling it for many that do not need it. For more information, see Control.ViewStateMode. Support for Recently Introduced Browsers and Devices ASP.NET includes a feature that is named browser capabilities that lets you determine the capabilities of the browser that a user is using. Browser capabilities are represented by the HttpBrowserCapabilities object which is stored in the HttpRequest.Browser property. Information about a particular browser's capabilities is defined by a browser definition file. In ASP.NET 4, these browser definition files have been updated to contain information about recently introduced browsers and devices such as Google Chrome, Research in Motion BlackBerry smart phones, and Apple iPhone. Existing browser definition files have also been updated. For more information, see How to: Upgrade an ASP.NET Web Application to ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET Web Server Controls and Browser Capabilities. The browser definition files that are included with ASP.NET 4 are shown in the following list: •blackberry.browser •chrome.browser •Default.browser •firefox.browser •gateway.browser •generic.browser •ie.browser •iemobile.browser •iphone.browser •opera.browser •safari.browser A New Way to Define Browser Capabilities ASP.NET 4 includes a new feature referred to as browser capabilities providers. As the name suggests, this lets you build a provider that in turn lets you write custom code to determine browser capabilities. In ASP.NET version 3.5 Service Pack 1, you define browser capabilities in an XML file. This file resides in a machine-level folder or an application-level folder. Most developers do not need to customize these files, but for those who do, the provider approach can be easier than dealing with complex XML syntax. The provider approach makes it possible to simplify the process by implementing a common browser definition syntax, or a database that contains up-to-date browser definitions, or even a Web service for such a database. For more information about the new browser capabilities provider, see the What's New for ASP.NET 4 White Paper. Routing in ASP.NET 4 ASP.NET 4 adds built-in support for routing with Web Forms. Routing is a feature that was introduced with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and lets you configure an application to use URLs that are meaningful to users and to search engines because they do not have to specify physical file names. This can make your site more user-friendly and your site content more discoverable by search engines. For example, the URL for a page that displays product categories in your application might look like the following example: http://website/products.aspx?categoryid=12 By using routing, you can use the following URL to render the same information: http://website/products/software The second URL lets the user know what to expect and can result in significantly improved rankings in search engine results. the new features include the following: The PageRouteHandler class is a simple HTTP handler that you use when you define routes. You no longer have to write a custom route handler. The HttpRequest.RequestContext and Page.RouteData properties make it easier to access information that is passed in URL parameters. The RouteUrl expression provides a simple way to create a routed URL in markup. The RouteValue expression provides a simple way to extract URL parameter values in markup. The RouteParameter class makes it easier to pass URL parameter values to a query for a data source control (similar to FormParameter). You no longer have to change the Web.config file to enable routing. For more information about routing, see the following topics: ASP.NET Routing Walkthrough: Using ASP.NET Routing in a Web Forms Application How to: Define Routes for Web Forms Applications How to: Construct URLs from Routes How to: Access URL Parameters in a Routed Page Setting Client IDs The new ClientIDMode property makes it easier to write client script that references HTML elements rendered for server controls. Increasing use of Microsoft Ajax makes the need to do this more common. For example, you may have a data control that renders a long list of products with prices and you want to use client script to make a Web service call and update individual prices in the list as they change without refreshing the entire page. Typically you get a reference to an HTML element in client script by using the document.GetElementById method. You pass to this method the value of the id attribute of the HTML element you want to reference. In the case of elements that are rendered for ASP.NET server controls earlier versions of ASP.NET could make this difficult or impossible. You were not always able to predict what id values ASP.NET would generate, or ASP.NET could generate very long id values. The problem was especially difficult for data controls that would generate multiple rows for a single instance of the control in your markup. ASP.NET 4 adds two new algorithms for generating id attributes. These algorithms can generate id attributes that are easier to work with in client script because they are more predictable and that are easier to work with because they are simpler. For more information about how to use the new algorithms, see the following topics: ASP.NET Web Server Control Identification Walkthrough: Making Data-Bound Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript Walkthrough: Making Controls Located in Web User Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript How to: Access Controls from JavaScript by ID Persisting Row Selection in Data Controls The GridView and ListView controls enable users to select a row. In previous versions of ASP.NET, row selection was based on the row index on the page. For example, if you select the third item on page 1 and then move to page 2, the third item on page 2 is selected. In most cases, is more desirable not to select any rows on page 2. ASP.NET 4 supports Persisted Selection, a new feature that was initially supported only in Dynamic Data projects in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. When this feature is enabled, the selected item is based on the row data key. This means that if you select the third row on page 1 and move to page 2, nothing is selected on page 2. When you move back to page 1, the third row is still selected. This is a much more natural behavior than the behavior in earlier versions of ASP.NET. Persisted selection is now supported for the GridView and ListView controls in all projects. You can enable this feature in the GridView control, for example, by setting the EnablePersistedSelection property, as shown in the following example: <asp:GridView id="GridView2" runat="server" PersistedSelection="true"> </asp:GridView> FormView Control Enhancements The FormView control is enhanced to make it easier to style the content of the control with CSS. In previous versions of ASP.NET, the FormView control rendered it contents using an item template. This made styling more difficult in the markup because unexpected table row and table cell tags were rendered by the control. The FormView control supports RenderOuterTable, a property in ASP.NET 4. When this property is set to false, as show in the following example, the table tags are not rendered. This makes it easier to apply CSS style to the contents of the control. <asp:FormView ID="FormView1" runat="server" RenderTable="false"> For more information, see FormView Web Server Control Overview. ListView Control Enhancements The ListView control, which was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5, has all the functionality of the GridView control while giving you complete control over the output. This control has been made easier to use in ASP.NET 4. The earlier version of the control required that you specify a layout template that contained a server control with a known ID. The following markup shows a typical example of how to use the ListView control in ASP.NET 3.5. <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <LayoutTemplate> <asp:PlaceHolder ID="ItemPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder> </LayoutTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> In ASP.NET 4, the ListView control does not require a layout template. The markup shown in the previous example can be replaced with the following markup: <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> For more information, see ListView Web Server Control Overview. Filtering Data with the QueryExtender Control A very common task for developers who create data-driven Web pages is to filter data. This traditionally has been performed by building Where clauses in data source controls. This approach can be complicated, and in some cases the Where syntax does not let you take advantage of the full functionality of the underlying database. To make filtering easier, a new QueryExtender control has been added in ASP.NET 4. This control can be added to EntityDataSource or LinqDataSource controls in order to filter the data returned by these controls. Because the QueryExtender control relies on LINQ, but you do not to need to know how to write LINQ queries to use the query extender. The QueryExtender control supports a variety of filter options. The following lists QueryExtender filter options. Term Definition SearchExpression Searches a field or fields for string values and compares them to a specified string value. RangeExpression Searches a field or fields for values in a range specified by a pair of values. PropertyExpression Compares a specified value to a property value in a field. If the expression evaluates to true, the data that is being examined is returned. OrderByExpression Sorts data by a specified column and sort direction. CustomExpression Calls a function that defines custom filter in the page. For more information, see QueryExtenderQueryExtender Web Server Control Overview. Enhanced Support for Web Standards and Accessibility Earlier versions of ASP.NET controls sometimes render markup that does not conform to HTML, XHTML, or accessibility standards. ASP.NET 4 eliminates most of these exceptions. For details about how the HTML that is rendered by each control meets accessibility standards, see ASP.NET Controls and Accessibility. CSS for Controls that Can be Disabled In ASP.NET 3.5, when a control is disabled (see WebControl.Enabled), a disabled attribute is added to the rendered HTML element. For example, the following markup creates a Label control that is disabled: <asp:Label id="Label1" runat="server" Text="Test" Enabled="false" /> In ASP.NET 3.5, the previous control settings generate the following HTML: <span id="Label1" disabled="disabled">Test</span> In HTML 4.01, the disabled attribute is not considered valid on span elements. It is valid only on input elements because it specifies that they cannot be accessed. On display-only elements such as span elements, browsers typically support rendering for a disabled appearance, but a Web page that relies on this non-standard behavior is not robust according to accessibility standards. For display-only elements, you should use CSS to indicate a disabled visual appearance. Therefore, by default ASP.NET 4 generates the following HTML for the control settings shown previously: <span id="Label1" class="aspNetDisabled">Test</span> You can change the value of the class attribute that is rendered by default when a control is disabled by setting the DisabledCssClass property. CSS for Validation Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, validation controls render a default color of red as an inline style. For example, the following markup creates a RequiredFieldValidator control: <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator1" runat="server" ErrorMessage="Required Field" ControlToValidate="RadioButtonList1" /> ASP.NET 3.5 renders the following HTML for the validator control: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1" style="color:Red;visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> By default, ASP.NET 4 does not render an inline style to set the color to red. An inline style is used only to hide or show the validator, as shown in the following example: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1" style"visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> Therefore, ASP.NET 4 does not automatically show error messages in red. For information about how to use CSS to specify a visual style for a validation control, see Validating User Input in ASP.NET Web Pages. CSS for the Hidden Fields Div Element ASP.NET uses hidden fields to store state information such as view state and control state. These hidden fields are contained by a div element. In ASP.NET 3.5, this div element does not have a class attribute or an id attribute. Therefore, CSS rules that affect all div elements could unintentionally cause this div to be visible. To avoid this problem, ASP.NET 4 renders the div element for hidden fields with a CSS class that you can use to differentiate the hidden fields div from others. The new classvalue is shown in the following example: <div class="aspNetHidden"> CSS for the Table, Image, and ImageButton Controls By default, in ASP.NET 3.5, some controls set the border attribute of rendered HTML to zero (0). The following example shows HTML that is generated by the Table control in ASP.NET 3.5: <table id="Table2" border="0"> The Image control and the ImageButton control also do this. Because this is not necessary and provides visual formatting information that should be provided by using CSS, the attribute is not generated in ASP.NET 4. CSS for the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress controls do not support expando attributes. This makes it impossible to set a CSS class on the HTMLelements that they render. In ASP.NET 4 these controls have been changed to accept expando attributes, as shown in the following example: <asp:UpdatePanel runat="server" class="myStyle"> </asp:UpdatePanel> The following HTML is rendered for this markup: <div id="ctl00_MainContent_UpdatePanel1" class="expandoclass"> </div> Eliminating Unnecessary Outer Tables In ASP.NET 3.5, the HTML that is rendered for the following controls is wrapped in a table element whose purpose is to apply inline styles to the entire control: FormView Login PasswordRecovery ChangePassword If you use templates to customize the appearance of these controls, you can specify CSS styles in the markup that you provide in the templates. In that case, no extra outer table is required. In ASP.NET 4, you can prevent the table from being rendered by setting the new RenderOuterTable property to false. Layout Templates for Wizard Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the Wizard and CreateUserWizard controls generate an HTML table element that is used for visual formatting. In ASP.NET 4 you can use a LayoutTemplate element to specify the layout. If you do this, the HTML table element is not generated. In the template, you create placeholder controls to indicate where items should be dynamically inserted into the control. (This is similar to how the template model for the ListView control works.) For more information, see the Wizard.LayoutTemplate property. New HTML Formatting Options for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Controls ASP.NET 3.5 uses HTML table elements to format the output for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList controls. To provide an alternative that does not use tables for visual formatting, ASP.NET 4 adds two new options to the RepeatLayout enumeration: UnorderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ul and li elements instead of a table. OrderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ol and li elements instead of a table. For examples of HTML that is rendered for the new options, see the RepeatLayout enumeration. Header and Footer Elements for the Table Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Table control can be configured to render thead and tfoot elements by setting the TableSection property of the TableHeaderRow class and the TableFooterRow class. In ASP.NET 4 these properties are set to the appropriate values by default. CSS and ARIA Support for the Menu Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Menu control uses HTML table elements for visual formatting, and in some configurations it is not keyboard-accessible. ASP.NET 4 addresses these problems and improves accessibility in the following ways: The generated HTML is structured as an unordered list (ul and li elements). CSS is used for visual formatting. The menu behaves in accordance with ARIA standards for keyboard access. You can use arrow keys to navigate menu items. (For information about ARIA, see Accessibility in Visual Studio and ASP.NET.) ARIA role and property attributes are added to the generated HTML. (Attributes are added by using JavaScript instead of included in the HTML, to avoid generating HTML that would cause markup validation errors.) Styles for the Menu control are rendered in a style block at the top of the page, instead of inline with the rendered HTML elements. If you want to use a separate CSS file so that you can modify the menu styles, you can set the Menu control's new IncludeStyleBlock property to false, in which case the style block is not generated. Valid XHTML for the HtmlForm Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the HtmlForm control (which is created implicitly by the <form runat="server"> tag) renders an HTML form element that has both name and id attributes. The name attribute is deprecated in XHTML 1.1. Therefore, this control does not render the name attribute in ASP.NET 4. Maintaining Backward Compatibility in Control Rendering An existing ASP.NET Web site might have code in it that assumes that controls are rendering HTML the way they do in ASP.NET 3.5. To avoid causing backward compatibility problems when you upgrade the site to ASP.NET 4, you can have ASP.NET continue to generate HTML the way it does in ASP.NET 3.5 after you upgrade the site. To do so, you can set the controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion attribute of the pages element to "3.5" in the Web.config file of an ASP.NET 4 Web site, as shown in the following example: <system.web> <pages controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="3.5"/> </system.web> If this setting is omitted, the default value is the same as the version of ASP.NET that the Web site targets. (For information about multi-targeting in ASP.NET, see .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects.) ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC helps Web developers build compelling standards-based Web sites that are easy to maintain because it decreases the dependency among application layers by using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. MVC provides complete control over the page markup. It also improves testability by inherently supporting Test Driven Development (TDD). Web sites created using ASP.NET MVC have a modular architecture. This allows members of a team to work independently on the various modules and can be used to improve collaboration. For example, developers can work on the model and controller layers (data and logic), while the designer work on the view (presentation). For tutorials, walkthroughs, conceptual content, code samples, and a complete API reference, see ASP.NET MVC 2. Dynamic Data Dynamic Data was introduced in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 release in mid-2008. This feature provides many enhancements for creating data-driven applications, such as the following: A RAD experience for quickly building a data-driven Web site. Automatic validation that is based on constraints defined in the data model. The ability to easily change the markup that is generated for fields in the GridView and DetailsView controls by using field templates that are part of your Dynamic Data project. For ASP.NET 4, Dynamic Data has been enhanced to give developers even more power for quickly building data-driven Web sites. For more information, see ASP.NET Dynamic Data Content Map. Enabling Dynamic Data for Individual Data-Bound Controls in Existing Web Applications You can use Dynamic Data features in existing ASP.NET Web applications that do not use scaffolding by enabling Dynamic Data for individual data-bound controls. Dynamic Data provides the presentation and data layer support for rendering these controls. When you enable Dynamic Data for data-bound controls, you get the following benefits: Setting default values for data fields. Dynamic Data enables you to provide default values at run time for fields in a data control. Interacting with the database without creating and registering a data model. Automatically validating the data that is entered by the user without writing any code. For more information, see Walkthrough: Enabling Dynamic Data in ASP.NET Data-Bound Controls. New Field Templates for URLs and E-mail Addresses ASP.NET 4 introduces two new built-in field templates, EmailAddress.ascx and Url.ascx. These templates are used for fields that are marked as EmailAddress or Url using the DataTypeAttribute attribute. For EmailAddress objects, the field is displayed as a hyperlink that is created by using the mailto: protocol. When users click the link, it opens the user's e-mail client and creates a skeleton message. Objects typed as Url are displayed as ordinary hyperlinks. The following example shows how to mark fields. [DataType(DataType.EmailAddress)] public object HomeEmail { get; set; } [DataType(DataType.Url)] public object Website { get; set; } Creating Links with the DynamicHyperLink Control Dynamic Data uses the new routing feature that was added in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to control the URLs that users see when they access the Web site. The new DynamicHyperLink control makes it easy to build links to pages in a Dynamic Data site. For information, see How to: Create Table Action Links in Dynamic Data Support for Inheritance in the Data Model Both the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL support inheritance in their data models. An example of this might be a database that has an InsurancePolicy table. It might also contain CarPolicy and HousePolicy tables that have the same fields as InsurancePolicy and then add more fields. Dynamic Data has been modified to understand inherited objects in the data model and to support scaffolding for the inherited tables. For more information, see Walkthrough: Mapping Table-per-Hierarchy Inheritance in Dynamic Data. Support for Many-to-Many Relationships (Entity Framework Only) The Entity Framework has rich support for many-to-many relationships between tables, which is implemented by exposing the relationship as a collection on an Entity object. New field templates (ManyToMany.ascx and ManyToMany_Edit.ascx) have been added to provide support for displaying and editing data that is involved in many-to-many relationships. For more information, see Working with Many-to-Many Data Relationships in Dynamic Data. New Attributes to Control Display and Support Enumerations The DisplayAttribute has been added to give you additional control over how fields are displayed. The DisplayNameAttribute attribute in earlier versions of Dynamic Data enabled you to change the name that is used as a caption for a field. The new DisplayAttribute class lets you specify more options for displaying a field, such as the order in which a field is displayed and whether a field will be used as a filter. The attribute also provides independent control of the name that is used for the labels in a GridView control, the name that is used in a DetailsView control, the help text for the field, and the watermark used for the field (if the field accepts text input). The EnumDataTypeAttribute class has been added to let you map fields to enumerations. When you apply this attribute to a field, you specify an enumeration type. Dynamic Data uses the new Enumeration.ascx field template to create UI for displaying and editing enumeration values. The template maps the values from the database to the names in the enumeration. Enhanced Support for Filters Dynamic Data 1.0 had built-in filters for Boolean columns and foreign-key columns. The filters did not let you specify the order in which they were displayed. The new DisplayAttribute attribute addresses this by giving you control over whether a column appears as a filter and in what order it will be displayed. An additional enhancement is that filtering support has been rewritten to use the new QueryExtender feature of Web Forms. This lets you create filters without requiring knowledge of the data source control that the filters will be used with. Along with these extensions, filters have also been turned into template controls, which lets you add new ones. Finally, the DisplayAttribute class mentioned earlier allows the default filter to be overridden, in the same way that UIHint allows the default field template for a column to be overridden. For more information, see Walkthrough: Filtering Rows in Tables That Have a Parent-Child Relationship and QueryableFilterRepeater. ASP.NET Chart Control The ASP.NET chart server control enables you to create ASP.NET pages applications that have simple, intuitive charts for complex statistical or financial analysis. The chart control supports the following features: Data series, chart areas, axes, legends, labels, titles, and more. Data binding. Data manipulation, such as copying, splitting, merging, alignment, grouping, sorting, searching, and filtering. Statistical formulas and financial formulas. Advanced chart appearance, such as 3-D, anti-aliasing, lighting, and perspective. Events and customizations. Interactivity and Microsoft Ajax. Support for the Ajax Content Delivery Network (CDN), which provides an optimized way for you to add Microsoft Ajax Library and jQuery scripts to your Web applications. For more information, see Chart Web Server Control Overview. Visual Web Developer Enhancements The following sections provide information about enhancements and new features in Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express. The Web page designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been enhanced for better CSS compatibility, includes additional support for HTML and ASP.NET markup snippets, and features a redesigned version of IntelliSense for JScript. Improved CSS Compatibility The Visual Web Developer designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been updated to improve CSS 2.1 standards compliance. The designer better preserves HTML source code and is more robust than in previous versions of Visual Studio. HTML and JScript Snippets In the HTML editor, IntelliSense auto-completes tag names. The IntelliSense Snippets feature auto-completes whole tags and more. In Visual Studio 2010, IntelliSense snippets are supported for JScript, alongside C# and Visual Basic, which were supported in earlier versions of Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 includes over 200 snippets that help you auto-complete common ASP.NET and HTML tags, including required attributes (such as runat="server") and common attributes specific to a tag (such as ID, DataSourceID, ControlToValidate, and Text). You can download additional snippets, or you can write your own snippets that encapsulate the blocks of markup that you or your team use for common tasks. For more information on HTML snippets, see Walkthrough: Using HTML Snippets. JScript IntelliSense Enhancements In Visual 2010, JScript IntelliSense has been redesigned to provide an even richer editing experience. IntelliSense now recognizes objects that have been dynamically generated by methods such as registerNamespace and by similar techniques used by other JavaScript frameworks. Performance has been improved to analyze large libraries of script and to display IntelliSense with little or no processing delay. Compatibility has been significantly increased to support almost all third-party libraries and to support diverse coding styles. Documentation comments are now parsed as you type and are immediately leveraged by IntelliSense. Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 For Web application projects, Visual Studio now provides tools that work with the IIS Web Deployment Tool (Web Deploy) to automate many processes that had to be done manually in earlier versions of ASP.NET. For example, the following tasks can now be automated: Creating an IIS application on the destination computer and configuring IIS settings. Copying files to the destination computer. Changing Web.config settings that must be different in the destination environment. Propagating changes to data or data structures in SQL Server databases that are used by the Web application. For more information about Web application deployment, see ASP.NET Deployment Content Map. Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET 4 adds new features to the multi-targeting feature to make it easier to work with projects that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. Multi-targeting was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5 to enable you to use the latest version of Visual Studio without having to upgrade existing Web sites or Web services to the latest version of the .NET Framework. In Visual Studio 2008, when you work with a project targeted for an earlier version of the .NET Framework, most features of the development environment adapt to the targeted version. However, IntelliSense displays language features that are available in the current version, and property windows display properties available in the current version. In Visual Studio 2010, only language features and properties available in the targeted version of the .NET Framework are shown. For more information about multi-targeting, see the following topics: .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects ASP.NET Side-by-Side Execution Overview How to: Host Web Applications That Use Different Versions of the .NET Framework on the Same Server How to: Deploy Web Site Projects Targeted for Earlier Versions of the .NET Framework

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SVN / Tortoise SVN - Cannot checkout, Access is denied

- by Shevek

We are having a strange problem with our SVN repository One particular project is failing to check out on some dev's workstations. The error is: svn: E720005: Can't open file 'C:\path\.svn\pristine\4e\4e576fad0f625706379863e6051aac33097dbee0.svn-base': Access is denied. All branches, tags and trunk fail at the same point of checkout Other projects in the repository can be checked out fine One of our devs can check out the problem project fine. We have tried 3 different versions of TortoiseSVN (both UI and command line) and another build of win32svn. The one who can check out is using the same client version as one who cannot. Any ideas?

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Version Assemblies with TFS 2010 Continuous Integration

- by Steve Michelotti

When I first heard that TFS 2010 had moved to Workflow Foundation for Team Build, I was *extremely* skeptical. I’ve loved MSBuild and didn’t quite understand the reasons for this change. In fact, given that I’ve been exclusively using Cruise Control for Continuous Integration (CI) for the last 5+ years of my career, I was skeptical of TFS for CI in general. However, after going through the learning process for TFS 2010 recently, I’m starting to become a believer. I’m also starting to see some of the benefits with Workflow Foundation for the overall processing because it gives you constructs not available in MSBuild such as parallel tasks, better control flow constructs, and a slightly better customization story. The first customization I had to make to the build process was to version the assemblies of my solution. This is not new. In fact, I’d recommend reading Mike Fourie’s well known post on Versioning Code in TFS before you get started. This post describes several foundational aspects of versioning assemblies regardless of your version of TFS. The main points are: 1) don’t use source control operations for your version file, 2) use a schema like <Major>.<Minor>.<IncrementalNumber>.0, and 3) do not keep AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion in sync. To do this in TFS 2010, the best post I’ve found has been Jim Lamb’s post of building a custom TFS 2010 workflow activity. Overall, this post is excellent but the primary issue I have with it is that the assembly version numbers produced are based in a date and look like this: “2010.5.15.1”. This is definitely not what I want. I want to be able to communicate to the developers and stakeholders that we are producing the “1.1 release” or “1.2 release” – which would have an assembly version number of “1.1.317.0” for example. In this post, I’ll walk through the process of customizing the assembly version number based on this method – customizing the concepts in Lamb’s post to suit my needs. I’ll also be combining this with the concepts of Fourie’s post – particularly with regards to the standards around how to version the assemblies. The first thing I’ll do is add a file called SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs to the root of my solution that looks like this: 1: using System; 2: using System.Reflection; 3: [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.1.0.0")] 4: [assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.1.0.0")] I’ll then add that file as a Visual Studio link file to each project in my solution by right-clicking the project, “Add – Existing Item…” then when I click the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file, making sure I “Add As Link”: Now the Solution Explorer will show our file. We can see that it’s a “link” file because of the black arrow in the icon within all our projects. Of course you’ll need to remove the AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes from the AssemblyInfo.cs files to avoid the duplicate attributes since they now leave in the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file. This is an extremely common technique so that all the projects in our solution can be versioned as a unit. At this point, we’re ready to write our custom activity. The primary consideration is that I want the developer and/or tech lead to be able to easily be in control of the Major.Minor and then I want the CI process to add the third number with a unique incremental number. We’ll leave the fourth position always “0” for now – it’s held in reserve in case the day ever comes where we need to do an emergency patch to Production based on a branched version. Writing the Custom Workflow Activity Similar to Lamb’s post, I’m going to write two custom workflow activities. The “outer” activity (a xaml activity) will be pretty straight forward. It will check if the solution version file exists in the solution root and, if so, delegate the replacement of version to the AssemblyVersionInfo activity which is a CodeActivity highlighted in red below: Notice that the arguments of this activity are the “solutionVersionFile” and “tfsBuildNumber” which will be passed in. The tfsBuildNumber passed in will look something like this: “CI_MyApplication.4” and we’ll need to grab the “4” (i.e., the incremental revision number) and put that in the third position. Then we’ll need to honor whatever was specified for Major.Minor in the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file. For example, if the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file had “1.1.0.0” for the AssemblyVersion (as shown in the first code block near the beginning of this post), then we want to resulting file to have “1.1.4.0”. Before we do anything, let’s put together a unit test for all this so we can know if we get it right: 1: [TestMethod] 2: public void Assembly_version_should_be_parsed_correctly_from_build_name() 3: { 4: // arrange 5: const string versionFile = "SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs"; 6: WriteTestVersionFile(versionFile); 7: var activity = new VersionAssemblies(); 8: var arguments = new Dictionary<string, object> { 9: { "tfsBuildNumber", "CI_MyApplication.4"}, 10: { "solutionVersionFile", versionFile} 11: }; 12: 13: // act 14: var result = WorkflowInvoker.Invoke(activity, arguments); 15: 16: // assert 17: Assert.AreEqual("1.2.4.0", (string)result["newAssemblyFileVersion"]); 18: var lines = File.ReadAllLines(versionFile); 19: Assert.IsTrue(lines.Contains("[assembly: AssemblyVersion(\"1.2.0.0\")]")); 20: Assert.IsTrue(lines.Contains("[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(\"1.2.4.0\")]")); 21: } 22: 23: private void WriteTestVersionFile(string versionFile) 24: { 25: var fileContents = "using System.Reflection;\n" + 26: "[assembly: AssemblyVersion(\"1.2.0.0\")]\n" + 27: "[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(\"1.2.0.0\")]"; 28: File.WriteAllText(versionFile, fileContents); 29: } At this point, the code for our AssemblyVersion activity is pretty straight forward: 1: [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.Agent)] 2: public class AssemblyVersionInfo : CodeActivity 3: { 4: [RequiredArgument] 5: public InArgument<string> FileName { get; set; } 6: 7: [RequiredArgument] 8: public InArgument<string> TfsBuildNumber { get; set; } 9: 10: public OutArgument<string> NewAssemblyFileVersion { get; set; } 11: 12: protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) 13: { 14: var solutionVersionFile = this.FileName.Get(context); 15: 16: // Ensure that the file is writeable 17: var fileAttributes = File.GetAttributes(solutionVersionFile); 18: File.SetAttributes(solutionVersionFile, fileAttributes & ~FileAttributes.ReadOnly); 19: 20: // Prepare assembly versions 21: var majorMinor = GetAssemblyMajorMinorVersionBasedOnExisting(solutionVersionFile); 22: var newBuildNumber = GetNewBuildNumber(this.TfsBuildNumber.Get(context)); 23: var newAssemblyVersion = string.Format("{0}.{1}.0.0", majorMinor.Item1, majorMinor.Item2); 24: var newAssemblyFileVersion = string.Format("{0}.{1}.{2}.0", majorMinor.Item1, majorMinor.Item2, newBuildNumber); 25: this.NewAssemblyFileVersion.Set(context, newAssemblyFileVersion); 26: 27: // Perform the actual replacement 28: var contents = this.GetFileContents(newAssemblyVersion, newAssemblyFileVersion); 29: File.WriteAllText(solutionVersionFile, contents); 30: 31: // Restore the file's original attributes 32: File.SetAttributes(solutionVersionFile, fileAttributes); 33: } 34: 35: #region Private Methods 36: 37: private string GetFileContents(string newAssemblyVersion, string newAssemblyFileVersion) 38: { 39: var cs = new StringBuilder(); 40: cs.AppendLine("using System.Reflection;"); 41: cs.AppendFormat("[assembly: AssemblyVersion(\"{0}\")]", newAssemblyVersion); 42: cs.AppendLine(); 43: cs.AppendFormat("[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(\"{0}\")]", newAssemblyFileVersion); 44: return cs.ToString(); 45: } 46: 47: private Tuple<string, string> GetAssemblyMajorMinorVersionBasedOnExisting(string filePath) 48: { 49: var lines = File.ReadAllLines(filePath); 50: var versionLine = lines.Where(x => x.Contains("AssemblyVersion")).FirstOrDefault(); 51: 52: if (versionLine == null) 53: { 54: throw new InvalidOperationException("File does not contain [assembly: AssemblyVersion] attribute"); 55: } 56: 57: return ExtractMajorMinor(versionLine); 58: } 59: 60: private static Tuple<string, string> ExtractMajorMinor(string versionLine) 61: { 62: var firstQuote = versionLine.IndexOf('"') + 1; 63: var secondQuote = versionLine.IndexOf('"', firstQuote); 64: var version = versionLine.Substring(firstQuote, secondQuote - firstQuote); 65: var versionParts = version.Split('.'); 66: return new Tuple<string, string>(versionParts[0], versionParts[1]); 67: } 68: 69: private string GetNewBuildNumber(string buildName) 70: { 71: return buildName.Substring(buildName.LastIndexOf(".") + 1); 72: } 73: 74: #endregion 75: } At this point the final step is to incorporate this activity into the overall build template. Make a copy of the DefaultTempate.xaml – we’ll call it DefaultTemplateWithVersioning.xaml. Before the build and labeling happens, drag the VersionAssemblies activity in. Then set the LabelName variable to “BuildDetail.BuildDefinition.Name + "-" + newAssemblyFileVersion since the newAssemblyFileVersion was produced by our activity. Configuring CI Once you add your solution to source control, you can configure CI with the build definition window as shown here. The main difference is that we’ll change the Process tab to reflect a different build number format and choose our custom build process file: When the build completes, we’ll see the name of our project with the unique revision number: If we look at the detailed build log for the latest build, we’ll see the label being created with our custom task: We can now look at the history labels in TFS and see the project name with the labels (the Assignment activity I added to the workflow): Finally, if we look at the physical assemblies that are produced, we can right-click on any assembly in Windows Explorer and see the assembly version in its properties: Full Traceability We now have full traceability for our code. There will never be a question of what code was deployed to Production. You can always see the assembly version in the properties of the physical assembly. That can be traced back to a label in TFS where the unique revision number matches. The label in TFS gives you the complete snapshot of the code in your source control repository at the time the code was built. This type of process for full traceability has been used for many years for CI – in fact, I’ve done similar things with CCNet and SVN for quite some time. This is simply the TFS implementation of that pattern. The new features that TFS 2010 give you to make these types of customizations in your build process are quite easy once you get over the initial curve.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 06, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 06, 2010New ProjectsAgr.CQRS: Agr.CQRS is a C# framework for DDD applications that use the Command Query Responsibility Segregation pattern (CQRS) and Event Sourcing. BigDays 2010: Big>Days 2010BizTalk - Controlled Admin: Hi .NET folks, I am planning to start project on a Controlled BizTalk Admin tool. This tool will be useful for the organizations which have "Sh...Blacklist of Providers: Blacklist of Providers - the application for department of warehouse logistics (warehouse) at firms.Career Vector: A job board software.Chargify Demo: This is a sample website for ChargifyConceptual: Concept description and animationEric Hexter: My publicly available source code and examplesFluentNHibernate.Search: A Fluent NHibernate.Search mapping interface for NHibernate provider implementation of Lucene.NET.FreelancePlanner: FreelancePlanner is a project tracking tool for freelance translators.HTMLx - JavaScript on the Server for .NET: HTMLx is a set of libraries based on ASP.NET engine to provide JavaScript programmability on the server side. It allows Web developers to use JavaS...IronMSBuild: IronMSBuild is a custom MSBuild Task, which allows you to execute IronRuby scripts. // have to provide some examples LINQ To Blippr: LINQ to Blippr is an open source LINQ Provider for the micro-reviewing service Blippr. LINQ to Blippr makes it easier and more efficent for develo...Luk@sh's HTML Parser: library that simplifies parsing of the HTML documents, for .NETMeta Choons: Unsure as yet but will be a kind of discogs type site but different..NetWork2: NetWork2Regular Expression Chooser: Simple gui for choosing the regular expressions that have become more than simple.See.Sharper: Hopefully useful C# extensions.SharePoint 2010 Toggle User Interface: Toggle the SharePoint 2010 user interface between the new SharePoint 2010 user interface and SharePoint 2007 user interface.Silverlight DiscussionBoard for SharePoint: This is a sharepoint 3.0 webpart that uses a silverlight treeview to display metadata about sharepoint discussions anduses the html bridge to show...Simple Sales Tracking CRM API Wrapper: The Simple Sales Tracking API Wrapper, enables easy extention development and integration with the hosted service at http://www.simplesalestracking...Syntax4Word: A syntax addin for word 2007.TortoiseHg installer builder: TortoiseHg and Mercurial installer builder for Windowsunbinder: Model un binding for route value dictionariesWindows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: This site has previews of Workflow features which are released out of band for the purposes of adoption and feedback.XNA RSM Render State Manager: Render state management idea for XNA games. Enables isolation between draw calls whilst reducing DX9 SetRenderState calls to the minimum.New ReleasesAgr.CQRS: Sourcecode package: Agr.CQRS is a C# framework for DDD applications that use the Command Query Responsibility Segregation pattern (CQRS) and Event Sourcing. This dow...Book Cataloger: Preview 0.1.6a: New Features: Export to Word 2007 Bibliography format Dictionary list editors for Binding, Condition Improvements: Stability improved Content ...Braintree Client Library: Braintree-1.1.2: Includes minor enhancements to CreditCard and ValidationErrors to support upcoming example application.CassiniDev - Cassini 3.5 Developers Edition: CassiniDev v3.5.0.5: For usage see Readme.htm in download. New in CassiniDev v3.5.0.5 Reintroduced the Lib project and signed all Implemented the CassiniSqlFixture -...Composure: Calcium-64420-VS2010rc1.NET4.SL3: This is a simple conversion of Calcium (rev 64420) built in VS2010 RC1 against .NET4 and Silverlight 3. No source files were changed and ALL test...Composure: MS AJAX Library (46266) for VS2010 RC1 .NET4: This is a quick port of Microsoft's AJAX Library (rev 46266) for Visual Studio 2010 RC1 built against .NET 4.0. Since this conversion was thrown t...Composure: MS Web Test Lightweight for VS2010 RC1 .NET4: A simple conversion of Microsoft's Web Test Lightweight for Visual Studio 2010 RC1 .NET 4.0. This is part of a larger "special request" conversion...CoNatural Components: CoNatural Components 1.5: Supporting new data types: Added support for binary data types -> binary, varbinary, etc maps to byte[] Now supporting SQL Server 2008 new types ...Extensia: Extensia 2010-03-05: Extensia is a very large list of extension methods and a few helper types. Some extension methods are not practical (e.g. slow) whilst others are....Fluent Assertions: Fluent Assertions release 1.1: In this release, we've worked hard to add some important missing features that we really needed, and also improve resiliance against illegal argume...Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0 RC: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0 (Release Candidate)Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml, debug and release version) Showcase Application Sa...FluentNHibernate.Search: 0.1 Beta: First beta versionFolderSize: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.7.0: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.6.0 A simple utility intended to be used to scan harddrives for the folders that take most place and display this to the user...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Silverlight and WPF Step Line Chart: Hi, With this release Visifire introduces Step Line Chart. This release also contains fix for the following issues: * In WPF, if AnimatedUpd...Html to OpenXml: HtmlToOpenXml 1.0: The dll library to include in your project. The dll is signed for GAC support. Compiled with .Net 3.5, Dependencies on System.Drawing.dll and Docu...Line Counter: 1.5.1: The Line Counter is a tool to calculate lines of your code files. The tool was written in .NET 2.0. Line Counter 1.5.1 Added outline icons and lin...Lokad Cloud - .NET O/C mapper (object to cloud) for Windows Azure: Lokad.Cloud v1.0.662.1: You can get the most recent release directly from the build server at http://build.lokad.com/distrib/Lokad.Cloud/Lost in Translation: LostInTranslation v0.2: Alpha release: function complete but not UX complete.MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.7.56349: Supported large file resumption. Fixed minor bugs.Mini C# Lab: Mini CSharp Lab Ver 1.4: The primary new feature of Ver 1.4 is batch mode! Now you can run Mini C# Lab program as a scheduled task, no UI interactivity is needed. Here ar...Mobile Store: First drop: First droppatterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG2010 Drop6: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices ****************************************** ***************************************...Picasa Downloader: PicasaDownloader (41446): Changelog: Replaced some exception messages by a Summary dialog shown after downloading if there have been problems. Corrected the Portable vers...Pod Thrower: Version 1: This is the first release, I'm sure there are bugs, the tool is fully functional and I'm using it currently.PowerShell Provider BizTalk: BizTalkFactory PowerShell Provider - 1.1-snapshot: This release constitutes the latest development snapshot for the Provider. Please, leave feedback and use the Issue Tracker to help improve this pr...Resharper Settings Manager: RSM 1.2.1: This is a bug fix release. Changes Fixed plug-in crash when shared settings file was modified externally.Reusable Library Demo: Reusable Library Demo v1.0.2: A demonstration of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerSharePoint 2010 Toggle User Interface: SharePoint Toggle User Interface: Release 1.0.0.0Starter Kit Mytrip.Mvc.Entity: Mytrip.Mvc.Entity(net3.5 MySQL) 1.0 Beta: MySQL VS 2008 EF Membership UserManager FileManager Localization Captcha ClientValidation Theme CrossBrowserTortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.0: http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/wiki/ReleaseNotes Please backup your user Mercurial.ini file and then uninstall any 0.9.X release before in...Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory: Rangers Virtualization Guidance: Rangers Virtualization Guidance Focused guidance on creating a Rangers base image manually and introduction of PowerShell scripts to automate many ...Visual Studio DSite: Advanced Email Program (Visual Basic 2008): This email program can send email to any one using your email username and email credentials. The email program can also attatch attactments to you...WPF ShaderEffect Generator: WPF ShaderEffect Generator 1.6: Several improvements and bug fixes have gone into the comment parsing code for the registers. The plug-in should now correctly pay attention to th...WSDLGenerator: WSDLGenerator 0.0.0.3: - Fixed SharePoint generated *.wsdl.aspx file - Added commandline option -wsdl which does only generate the wsdl file.Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETLiveUpload to FacebookMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsUmbraco CMSRawrSDS: Scientific DataSet library and toolsBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Servicespatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterFluent AssertionsComposureDiffPlex - a .NET Diff Generator

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SVN: Working with branches using the same working copy

- by uXuf

We've just moved to SVN from CVS. We have a small team and everyone checks in code on the trunk and we have never ever used branches for development. We each have directories on a remote dev server with the codebase checked out. Each developer works on their own sandbox with an associated URL to pull up the app in a browser (something like the setup here: Trade-offs of local vs remote development workflows for a web development team). I've decided that for my current project, I'll use a branch because it would span multiple releases. I've already cut a branch out, but I am using the same directory as the one originally checked out (i.e. for the trunk). Since it's the same directory (or working copy) for both the branch and the trunk, if for e.g. a bug pops up in the app I switch to the trunk and commit the change there, and then switch back to my branch for my project development. My questions are: Is this a sane way to work with branches? Are there any pitfalls that I need to be aware of? What would be the optimal way to work with branches if separate working copies are out of the question? I haven't had issues yet as I have just started doing this way but all the tutorials/books/blog posts I have seen about branching with SVN imply working with different working copies (or perhaps I haven't come across an explanation of mixed working copies in plain English). I just don't want to be sorry three months down the road when its time to integrate the branch back to the trunk.

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jQuery Templates and Data Linking (and Microsoft contributing to jQuery)

- by ScottGu

The jQuery library has a passionate community of developers, and it is now the most widely used JavaScript library on the web today. Two years ago I announced that Microsoft would begin offering product support for jQuery, and that we’d be including it in new versions of Visual Studio going forward. By default, when you create new ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects with VS 2010 you’ll find jQuery automatically added to your project. A few weeks ago during my second keynote at the MIX 2010 conference I announced that Microsoft would also begin contributing to the jQuery project. During the talk, John Resig -- the creator of the jQuery library and leader of the jQuery developer team – talked a little about our participation and discussed an early prototype of a new client templating API for jQuery. In this blog post, I’m going to talk a little about how my team is starting to contribute to the jQuery project, and discuss some of the specific features that we are working on such as client-side templating and data linking (data-binding). Contributing to jQuery jQuery has a fantastic developer community, and a very open way to propose suggestions and make contributions. Microsoft is following the same process to contribute to jQuery as any other member of the community. As an example, when working with the jQuery community to improve support for templating to jQuery my team followed the following steps: We created a proposal for templating and posted the proposal to the jQuery developer forum (http://forum.jquery.com/topic/jquery-templates-proposal and http://forum.jquery.com/topic/templating-syntax ). After receiving feedback on the forums, the jQuery team created a prototype for templating and posted the prototype at the Github code repository (http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl ). We iterated on the prototype, creating a new fork on Github of the templating prototype, to suggest design improvements. Several other members of the community also provided design feedback by forking the templating code. There has been an amazing amount of participation by the jQuery community in response to the original templating proposal (over 100 posts in the jQuery forum), and the design of the templating proposal has evolved significantly based on community feedback. The jQuery team is the ultimate determiner on what happens with the templating proposal – they might include it in jQuery core, or make it an official plugin, or reject it entirely. My team is excited to be able to participate in the open source process, and make suggestions and contributions the same way as any other member of the community. jQuery Template Support Client-side templates enable jQuery developers to easily generate and render HTML UI on the client. Templates support a simple syntax that enables either developers or designers to declaratively specify the HTML they want to generate. Developers can then programmatically invoke the templates on the client, and pass JavaScript objects to them to make the content rendered completely data driven. These JavaScript objects can optionally be based on data retrieved from a server. Because the jQuery templating proposal is still evolving in response to community feedback, the final version might look very different than the version below. This blog post gives you a sense of how you can try out and use templating as it exists today (you can download the prototype by the jQuery core team at http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl or the latest submission from my team at http://github.com/nje/jquery-tmpl). jQuery Client Templates You create client-side jQuery templates by embedding content within a <script type="text/html"> tag. For example, the HTML below contains a <div> template container, as well as a client-side jQuery “contactTemplate” template (within the <script type="text/html"> element) that can be used to dynamically display a list of contacts: The {{= name }} and {{= phone }} expressions are used within the contact template above to display the names and phone numbers of “contact” objects passed to the template. We can use the template to display either an array of JavaScript objects or a single object. The JavaScript code below demonstrates how you can render a JavaScript array of “contact” object using the above template. The render() method renders the data into a string and appends the string to the “contactContainer” DIV element: When the page is loaded, the list of contacts is rendered by the template. All of this template rendering is happening on the client-side within the browser: Templating Commands and Conditional Display Logic The current templating proposal supports a small set of template commands - including if, else, and each statements. The number of template commands was deliberately kept small to encourage people to place more complicated logic outside of their templates. Even this small set of template commands is very useful though. Imagine, for example, that each contact can have zero or more phone numbers. The contacts could be represented by the JavaScript array below: The template below demonstrates how you can use the if and each template commands to conditionally display and loop the phone numbers for each contact: If a contact has one or more phone numbers then each of the phone numbers is displayed by iterating through the phone numbers with the each template command: The jQuery team designed the template commands so that they are extensible. If you have a need for a new template command then you can easily add new template commands to the default set of commands. Support for Client Data-Linking The ASP.NET team recently submitted another proposal and prototype to the jQuery forums (http://forum.jquery.com/topic/proposal-for-adding-data-linking-to-jquery). This proposal describes a new feature named data linking. Data Linking enables you to link a property of one object to a property of another object - so that when one property changes the other property changes. Data linking enables you to easily keep your UI and data objects synchronized within a page. If you are familiar with the concept of data-binding then you will be familiar with data linking (in the proposal, we call the feature data linking because jQuery already includes a bind() method that has nothing to do with data-binding). Imagine, for example, that you have a page with the following HTML <input> elements: The following JavaScript code links the two INPUT elements above to the properties of a JavaScript “contact” object that has a “name” and “phone” property: When you execute this code, the value of the first INPUT element (#name) is set to the value of the contact name property, and the value of the second INPUT element (#phone) is set to the value of the contact phone property. The properties of the contact object and the properties of the INPUT elements are also linked – so that changes to one are also reflected in the other. Because the contact object is linked to the INPUT element, when you request the page, the values of the contact properties are displayed: More interesting, the values of the linked INPUT elements will change automatically whenever you update the properties of the contact object they are linked to. For example, we could programmatically modify the properties of the “contact” object using the jQuery attr() method like below: Because our two INPUT elements are linked to the “contact” object, the INPUT element values will be updated automatically (without us having to write any code to modify the UI elements): Note that we updated the contact object above using the jQuery attr() method. In order for data linking to work, you must use jQuery methods to modify the property values. Two Way Linking The linkBoth() method enables two-way data linking. The contact object and INPUT elements are linked in both directions. When you modify the value of the INPUT element, the contact object is also updated automatically. For example, the following code adds a client-side JavaScript click handler to an HTML button element. When you click the button, the property values of the contact object are displayed using an alert() dialog: The following demonstrates what happens when you change the value of the Name INPUT element and click the Save button. Notice that the name property of the “contact” object that the INPUT element was linked to was updated automatically: The above example is obviously trivially simple. Instead of displaying the new values of the contact object with a JavaScript alert, you can imagine instead calling a web-service to save the object to a database. The benefit of data linking is that it enables you to focus on your data and frees you from the mechanics of keeping your UI and data in sync. Converters The current data linking proposal also supports a feature called converters. A converter enables you to easily convert the value of a property during data linking. For example, imagine that you want to represent phone numbers in a standard way with the “contact” object phone property. In particular, you don’t want to include special characters such as ()- in the phone number - instead you only want digits and nothing else. In that case, you can wire-up a converter to convert the value of an INPUT element into this format using the code below: Notice above how a converter function is being passed to the linkFrom() method used to link the phone property of the “contact” object with the value of the phone INPUT element. This convertor function strips any non-numeric characters from the INPUT element before updating the phone property. Now, if you enter the phone number (206) 555-9999 into the phone input field then the value 2065559999 is assigned to the phone property of the contact object: You can also use a converter in the opposite direction also. For example, you can apply a standard phone format string when displaying a phone number from a phone property. Combining Templating and Data Linking Our goal in submitting these two proposals for templating and data linking is to make it easier to work with data when building websites and applications with jQuery. Templating makes it easier to display a list of database records retrieved from a database through an Ajax call. Data linking makes it easier to keep the data and user interface in sync for update scenarios. Currently, we are working on an extension of the data linking proposal to support declarative data linking. We want to make it easy to take advantage of data linking when using a template to display data. For example, imagine that you are using the following template to display an array of product objects: Notice the {{link name}} and {{link price}} expressions. These expressions enable declarative data linking between the SPAN elements and properties of the product objects. The current jQuery templating prototype supports extending its syntax with custom template commands. In this case, we are extending the default templating syntax with a custom template command named “link”. The benefit of using data linking with the above template is that the SPAN elements will be automatically updated whenever the underlying “product” data is updated. Declarative data linking also makes it easier to create edit and insert forms. For example, you could create a form for editing a product by using declarative data linking like this: Whenever you change the value of the INPUT elements in a template that uses declarative data linking, the underlying JavaScript data object is automatically updated. Instead of needing to write code to scrape the HTML form to get updated values, you can instead work with the underlying data directly – making your client-side code much cleaner and simpler. Downloading Working Code Examples of the Above Scenarios You can download this .zip file to get with working code examples of the above scenarios. The .zip file includes 4 static HTML page: Listing1_Templating.htm – Illustrates basic templating. Listing2_TemplatingConditionals.htm – Illustrates templating with the use of the if and each template commands. Listing3_DataLinking.htm – Illustrates data linking. Listing4_Converters.htm – Illustrates using a converter with data linking. You can un-zip the file to the file-system and then run each page to see the concepts in action. Summary We are excited to be able to begin participating within the open-source jQuery project. We’ve received lots of encouraging feedback in response to our first two proposals, and we will continue to actively contribute going forward. These features will hopefully make it easier for all developers (including ASP.NET developers) to build great Ajax applications. 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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error X3501: 'main': entrypoint not found

- by Pasha

I am trying to learn DX10 by following this tutorial. However, my shader won't compile. Below is the detailed error message. Build started 9/10/2012 10:22:46 PM. 1>Project "D:\code\dx\Engine\Engine\Engine.vcxproj" on node 2 (Build target(s)). C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\bin\x86\fxc.exe /nologo /E"main" /Fo "D:\code\dx\Engine\Debug\color.cso" /Od /Zi color.fx 1>FXC : error X3501: 'main': entrypoint not found compilation failed; no code produced 1>Done Building Project "D:\code\dx\Engine\Engine\Engine.vcxproj" (Build target(s)) -- FAILED. Build FAILED. Time Elapsed 00:00:00.05 I can easily compile the downloaded code, but I want to know how to fix this error myself. My color.fx looks like this //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Filename: color.fx //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ///////////// // GLOBALS // ///////////// matrix worldMatrix; matrix viewMatrix; matrix projectionMatrix; ////////////// // TYPEDEFS // ////////////// struct VertexInputType { float4 position : POSITION; float4 color : COLOR; }; struct PixelInputType { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float4 color : COLOR; }; //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Vertex Shader //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// PixelInputType ColorVertexShader(VertexInputType input) { PixelInputType output; // Change the position vector to be 4 units for proper matrix calculations. input.position.w = 1.0f; // Calculate the position of the vertex against the world, view, and projection matrices. output.position = mul(input.position, worldMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, viewMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, projectionMatrix); // Store the input color for the pixel shader to use. output.color = input.color; return output; } //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Pixel Shader //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// float4 ColorPixelShader(PixelInputType input) : SV_Target { return input.color; } //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Technique //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// technique10 ColorTechnique { pass pass0 { SetVertexShader(CompileShader(vs_4_0, ColorVertexShader())); SetPixelShader(CompileShader(ps_4_0, ColorPixelShader())); SetGeometryShader(NULL); } }

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Oracle Application Server Performance Monitoring and Tuning (CPU load high)

- by Berkay

Oracle Application Server Performance Monitoring and Tuning (CPU load high) i have just hired by a company and my boss give me a performance issue to solve as soon as possible. I don't have any experience with the Java EE before at the server side. Let me begin what i learned about the system and still couldn't find the solution: We have an Oracle Application Server (10.1.) and Oracle Database server (9.2.), the software guys wrote a kind of big J2EE project (X project) using specifically JSF 1.2 with Ajax which is only used in this project. They actively use PL/SQL in their code. So, we started the application server (Solaris machine), everything seems OK. users start using the app starting Monday from different locations (app 200 have user accounts,i just checked and see that the connection pool is set right, the session are active only 15 minutes). After sometime (2 days) CPU utilization gets high,%60, at night it is still same nothing changed (the online user amount is nearly 1 or 2 at this time), even it starts using the CPU allocated for other applications on the same server because they freed If we don't restart the server, the utilization becomes %90 following 2 days, application is so slow that end users starts calling. The main problem is software engineers say that code is clear, and the System and DBA managers say that we have the correct configuration,the other applications seems OK why this problem happens only for X application. I start copying the DB to a test platform and upgrade it to the latest version, also did in same with the application server (Weblogic) if there is a bug or not. i only tested by myself only one user and weblogic admin panel i can track the threads and dump them. i noticed that there are some threads showing as a hogging. when i checked the manuals and control the trace i see that it directs me the line number where PL/SQL code is called from a .java file. The software eng. says that yes we have really complex PL/SQL codes but what's the relation with Application server? this is the problem of DB server, i guess they're right... I know the question has many holes, i'd like to give more in detail but i appreciate the way you guide me. Thanks in advance ... Edit: The server both in CPU and Memory enough to run more complex applications

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Best Practices for Renaming, Refactoring, and Breaking Changes with Teams

- by David in Dakota

What are some Best Practices for refactoring and renaming in team environments? I bring this up with a few scenarios in mind: If a library that is commonly referenced is refactored to introduce a breaking change to any library or project that references it. E.g. arbitrarily changing the name of a method. If projects are renamed and solutions must be rebuilt with updated references to them. If project structure is changed to be "more organized" by introducing folders and moving existing projects or solutions to new locations. Some additional thoughts/questions: Should changes like this matter or is resulting pain an indication of structure gone awry? Who should take responsibility for fixing errors related to a breaking change? If a developer makes a breaking change should they be responsible for going into affected projects and updating them or should they alert other developers and prompt them to change things? Is this something that can be done on a scheduled basis or is it something that should be done as frequently as possible? If a refactoring is put off for too long it is increasingly difficult to reconcile but at the same time in a day spending 1 hour increments fixing a build because of changes happening elsewhere. Is this a matter of a formal communication process or can it be organic?

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Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware

- by The Geek

You might be wondering why we have a screenshot of what appears to be AVG Anti-Virus, but is in fact a fake anti-virus malware that holds your computer hostage until you pay them. Here’s a really simple tip to defeating these types of malware, and a quick review of other options. Not sure what we’re talking about? Be sure to check out our previous articles on cleaning up fake antivirus infections. How To Remove Internet Security 2010 and other Rogue/Fake Antivirus Malware How To Remove Antivirus Live and Other Rogue/Fake Antivirus Malware How To Remove Advanced Virus Remover and Other Rogue/Fake Antivirus Malware How To Remove Security Tool and other Rogue/Fake Antivirus Malware So what’s the problem? Can’t you just run a anti-virus scan? Well… it’s not quite that simple. What actually happens is that these pieces of malware block you from running almost anything on your PC, and often prevent you from running apps from a Flash drive, with an error like this: Once you encounter this error, there’s a couple things you can do. The first one is almost stupidly simple, and works some of the time Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines RGB? CMYK? Alpha? What Are Image Channels and What Do They Mean? Project M Brings Classic Super Smash Bro Style Gameplay to the Wii Now Together and Complete – McBain: The Movie [Simpsons Video] Be Creative by Using Hex and RGB Codes for Crayola Crayon Colors on Your Next Web or Art Project [Geek Fun] Flash Updates; Finally Supports Full Screen Video on Multiple Monitors 22 Ways to Recycle an Altoids Mint Tin Make Your Desktop Go Native with the Tribal Arts Theme for Windows 7

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 02, 2013

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 02, 2013Popular ReleasesEla, functional programming language: Ela, dynamic functional language (PDF, book, 0.6): A book about Ela, dynamic functional language in PDF format.Compact 2013 Tools: Managed Code Version of Apps 1.0: Compact13MinShell Download https://download-codeplex.sec.s-msft.com/Images/v20779/RuntimeBinary.gif Compact13MinShellV3.0.zip The Codeplex Project Downloads Page AboutCompact13Tools.zip: Each app as an OS Content Subproject. Includes CoreCon3 Subproject. Apps.zip: Just the apps in a a zip file AppInstallersx86.zip: The apps as separate x86 installers Compact13MinShell Download: (Separate Codeplex Project) The Minshell that implements the menu that includes these apps via registr...Application Architecture Guidelines: App Architecture Guidelines 3.0.8: This document is an overview of software qualities, principles, patterns, practices, tools and libraries.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: Release v1.0.7.0: - smart indentation - document formatting To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.CS-Script for Notepad++: Release v1.0.7.0: - smart indentation - document formatting To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.State of Decay Save Manager: Version 1.0.2: Added Start/Stop button for timer to manually enable/disable Quick save routine updated to force it to refresh the folder date Quick save added to backup listing Manual update button Lower level hooking for F5 and F9 buttons workingSharePoint Farm documentation tool: SPDocumentor 0.1: SPDocumentor 0.1 This is a POC version of the tool that will be implemented.DotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.06: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.06 Changes to 6.0.6•Add in Sql to remove 'text on row' setting for UserDefinedTable to make SQL Azure compatible. •Add new azureCompatible element to manifest. •Added a fix for importing templates. Changes to 6.0.2•Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 •Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext Changes to 6.0.1•Scripts now compatible with SQL Azure. Changes to 6.0.0•Icons are shown in module action b...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.6: 2013.09.30 Ver5.9.6 (1)SMTP???????、???????????????? (2)WinAPI??????? (3)Web???????CGI???????????????????????Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.2: Mostly internal code tweaks. added -nosize switch to turn off the size- and gzip-calculations done after minification. removed the comments in the build targets script for the old AjaxMin build task (discussion #458831). Fixed an issue with extended Unicode characters encoded inside a string literal with adjacent \uHHHH\uHHHH sequences. Fixed an IndexOutOfRange exception when encountering a CSS identifier that's a single underscore character (_). In previous builds, the net35 and net20...AJAX Control Toolkit: September 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - September 2013 Release (Updated) Version 7.1001September 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Important UpdateThis release has been updated to fix two issues: Upda...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha is for testers to figure out if we got the NEW api plugged in ok. thanksVisual Log Parser: VisualLogParser: Portable Visual Log Parser for Dotnet 4.0Trace Reader for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Trace Reader (1.2013.9.29): Initial releaseAudioWordsDownloader: AudioWordsDownloader 1.1 build 88: New features list of words (mp3 files) is available upon typing when a download path is defined list of download paths is added paths history settings added Bug fixed case mismatch in word search field fixed path not exist bug fixed when history has been used path, when filled from dialog, not stored refresh autocomplete list after path change word sought is deleted when path is changed at the end sought word list is deleted word list not refreshed download ends. word lis...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1309.28: Fix a bug, where WPP crash when running on a computer where Windows was installed in another language than Fr, En or De, and launching the Update Creation Wizard. Fix a bug, where WPP crash if some Multi-Thread job are launch with more than 64 items. Add a button to abort "Install This Update" wizard. Allow WPP to remember which columns are shown last time. Make URL clickable on the Update Information Tab. Add a new feature, when Double-Clicking on an update, the default action exec...Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Alpha 0.8.3.0: Version 0.8.3.0 emphasis on the FIlteredStream and ease how to manage Exceptions that can occur due to the network or any other issue you might encounter. Will be available through nuget the 29/09/2013. FilteredStream Features provided by the Twitter Stream API - Ability to track specific keywords - Ability to track specific users - Ability to track specific locations Additional features - Detect the reasons the tweet has been retrieved from the Filtered API. You have access to both the ma...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.5: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.5 ???? AcPlay????????v3.5 ????????，???????????30% ?? ???????GoodManga.net???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??Acfun?????????? ??Bilibili??????????? ?????????flvcd???????? ??SfAcg????????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ????32...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.7.001: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.7.0. Breaking changes: - ToBitmap method of MagickImage returns a png instead of a bmp. - Changed the value for full transparency from 255(Q8)/65535(Q16) to 0. - MagickColor now uses floats instead of Byte/UInt16.Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.578b: With the feedback received over the renaming of Movie Folders, and files, there has been some refinement done. As well as I would like to introduce Blu-Ray movie folder support, for Pre-Frodo and Frodo onwards versions of XBMC. To start with, Context menu option for renaming movies, now has three sub options: Movie & Folder, Movie only & Folder only. The option Manual Movie Rename needs to be selected from Movie Preferences, but the autoscrape boxes do not need to be selected. Blu Ray Fo...New ProjectsAll CRM Resources for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Resources Windows 8 App with News, Feeds, Forums, Blogs, Videos & Twitter updates, information, guides & resources #MSDynCRM community.BasiliskBugTracker: A sample teamwork project for the Telerik Academy's ASP.NET Course 2013.CagerAutoPilot: Programmatically control a toy helicopter with kinectClass Libraries & Database Management: ClassDBManager permette la sincronizzazione delle classi (creazione/modifica/cancellazione) in base alle tabelle contenute nel databaseCommand Line Utility: Enables fast, easy creation of object-oriented settings classes in C# that interface directly with command line input. Minimize code and increase robustness.Controles | Versa: Login Pagina Principal Cadastro UsuáriosDispage: DisPage is a system to hide a website under a different browser title (For example "Vimeo" could look like "Google" (I am working on a way of changing this)ExpressiveDataGenerators: Expressive and powerfull test data generators.Fabrikam Fiber: This project provides download and support to anyone (i.e. trainers) who want to access the Fabrikam Fiber sample application, setup scripts, notes, etc.Get all numbers in between a pair of numbers: Get all integers between two numbers. C#, VB.NETHungryCrowd food lovers market: food lovers market, food, marketsInvalid User Details for SharePoint 2007 and 2010 Sites: Client Based Utility to export invalid users from a SharePoint site (2007 and 2010), as a CSV file using native SP Web Services (UserGroup.asmx and People.asmx)Kh?o Sát Công Ngh?: 1. Tên d? tài: Th?c tr?ng và gi?i pháp h? tr? nâng cao nang l?c c?nh tranh c?a các doanh nghi?p nh? và v?a t?nh Thanh Hóa Lightning: Micro toolkit to make it easy to get content on your site, and serve it fast.LovelyCMS: LovelyCMS ist ein sehr einfaches Content Management System auf der Basis von ASP.NET MVC4.MVC Error Handler: Simple library that allows you to easily create error pages for common HTTP error and application exceptions.MVC Table Styling selection to CSS and demo table: Enter table styling by selection from drop-down list and both generated CSS and see effect of the CSS on a demo table.MvcWebApiFramework: main frameworkNoDemo: It is not only a demo.NumbersInWordsRU: ?????? ??? ??????????? ????? ??????? ? ????? ????????Omnifactotum: Omnifactotum is the .NET library intended to help .NET developers avoid writing the same helper types, methods and extension methods for different projects.Outlook Rules Offline Processor: A utility for organizing Microsoft Outlook rules. The utility uses the rules export file, *.RWZ, to make changes.SharePoint Farm documentation tool: The SPDocumentor (SharePoint Farm documentation tool) allows you to generate a word document that includes most of your farm settings. Startup Shutdown Mailer: This tool is a simple Windows Service which sends an e-mail to a specified account whenever your PC was started up or shut down.YüzKitabi: Daha güvenli ve etkilesimli YüzKitabi Uygulamasi

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Introducing SSIS Reporting Pack for SQL Server code-named Denali

- by jamiet

In recent blog posts I have introduced the new SSIS Catalog that is forthcoming in SQL Server Code-named Denali: What's new in SSIS in Denali Introduction to SSIS Projects in Denali Parameters in SSIS In Denali SSIS Server, Catalogs, Environments and Environment Variables in SSIS in Denali The SSIS Catalog is responsible for executing SSIS packages and also for capturing the metadata from those executions. However, at the time of writing there is no mechanism provided to view analyse and drill into that metadata and that is the reason that I am, in this blog post, introducing a suite of SSIS Catalog reports called the SSIS Reporting Pack which you can download from my SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/SSIS%20Reporting%20Pack/SSISReportingPack%20v0.1.zip. In this first release the SSIS Reporting Pack includes five reports: Catalog – A high-level summary of all activity in the Catalog Folders – A summary of activity in each Catalog Folder Folder – Project-level activity per single Folder Executions – A visualisation of all executions per Folder/Project/Package/Environment or subset thereof Execution – Information about an individual execution Here is a screenshot of the Executions report: Notice that the SSIS Reporting Pack provides a visual overview of all executions in the Catalog. Each execution is represented as a bar on the bar chart, the success or otherwise of each execution is indicated by the colour of the bar and the execution time is indicated by the bar height. I have recorded a video that gives an overview of the SSIS Reporting which I have embedded below. If you are having any trouble viewing the video go see it at http://vimeo.com/17617974 I must stress that this is a very early version of the SSIS Reporting Pack and I am expecting it to change a lot over the coming year. I am very keen to get some feedback about this, specifically: let me know if anything does not work as you expect give me your feature requests The easiest way to get hold of of me for now is within the comments section of this blog post. That’s all for now. I hope the SSIS Reporting Pack proves useful and I look forward to hearing your feedback. Lastly, that download link again: http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/SSIS%20Reporting%20Pack/SSISReportingPack%20v0.1.zip. @jamiet

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