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• Getting Started with Boxee

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Boxee is a free Media PC application that runs on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu Linux. With Boxee, you can integrate online video, music and pictures, with your own local media and social networking. Today we are going to take a closer look at Boxee and some of it’s features. Note: We used Windows 7 for this tutorial. Your experience on a Mac or Ubuntu Linux build may vary slightly. Hardware Requirements x86 (Intel/AMD processor) based system running at 1.0GHz or greater 512MB system memory (RAM) or more Video card capable of OpenGL 1.4, Direct X 9.0 Software Requirements Mac OS X 10.4+ (Intel based processor) Ubuntu Linux 9.04+ x86 only Windows XP / Vista / 7 (64 bit in Vista or 7) Installing Boxee Before downloading and installing Boxee, you’ll need to register for a free account. (See link below) Once your account is registered and verified, you’ll be able to log in and download the application. Installation is pretty straightforward…just take the defaults. Boxee will open in full screen mode and you’ll be prompted to login with your username and password. Before you login, you may want to take a moment to click on the “Guide” icon and learn a bit about navigating in Boxee. Some basic keyboard navigation is as follows. Move right, left, up, & down with the arrow keys. Hit “Enter” to make a selection, the forward slash key “\” to toggle between full screen and windowed mode, and “Esc” to go back to the previous screen. For Playback, the volume is controlled by plus & minus (+/-) keys, you can Play / Pause using the spacebar, and skip using the arrow keys. Boxee will also work with any infrared remote. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can download software to enable them as a Boxee remote. If you’re using a mouse and keyboard, hover over the username and password boxes to enter your login credentials. If using a a remote, click your OK button and enter credentials with the on screen keyboard. Click “Done” when finished.   When you are ready to login, enter your credentials and click “Login.” On first login, you’ll be prompted to calibrate your screen. If you choose “Skip” you can always calibrate your screen later under Settings > Appearance > Screen. When Boxee opens, you’ll be greeted by the Home screen. To the left will be your Feeds. This will be any recommended content from friends on Boxee, and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Although, when you first login, it will mainly be info from the Boxee staff. You’ll have “Featured” content in the center and your Queue on the right. You’ll also have the Menu along the top.   Pop Up Menu The Pop Menu can be accessed by hitting the “Esc” key, or back on your remote. Depending on where you are located in Boxee, you may have to hit it a few time to “back out” to the Pop Up menu. From the Pop Up Menu, you can easily access any of the resources, settings, and favorites. Queue The Queue is your playlist of TV shows, movies, or Internet videos you wish to watch. When you find an offering you’d like to watch, select it and then click “Add to Queue.” The selected item will be added to your Queue and can be accessed at any time from the Menu. TV Show Library The TV Show library can contain files from your local hard drive or streaming content from the Web. Boxee pulls content from a variety of online locations such as Hulu and TV network sites. Click on the show to see which specific episodes are currently available. To search for your favorite shows, click on the yellow arrow to the left, or navigate to the left with your keyboard or remote. Enter your selection into the search box. My Apps By default, the “My Apps” section includes a list of the most popular apps, such as Netflix, Pandora, YouTube, and others. You can remove Apps from “My Apps,” or add new Apps from the Apps Library.   To access all the available Apps, click on the left arrow button, or click on the yellow arrow at the left, then select “App Library.” Choose an App from the Library and click it to open… … and then select “Add to My Apps.” Or, you can click start to play the App if you don’t wish to Add it to your “My Apps.”   Music, Pictures, and Movies Boxee will scan your PC for movies, pictures, and music. You can choose to scan specific folders by clicking on “Scan Media Folders…” … or from the Pop Up Menu, selecting Settings > Media, and then browsing for your media.   Conclusion Boxee to be a great way to integrate your local media with online streaming content. It can be run as an application on your home PC, or as a stand alone media PC. It should also be noted, however, that your access to online content will vary depending on your country. If you are a Windows Media Center user and and want to add the additional features of Boxee, check out our article on integrating Boxee with Windows 7 Media Center. Download Boxee Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Integrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Disable Fast User Switching on Windows XPOops! Sorry About the Feed ErrorsDisplay a list of Started Services from the Command Line (Windows)Feedburner to Google: Worst Transition Ever. TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox)

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• Tips on installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1

  - by Jon Galloway

  Visual Studio SP1 went up on MSDN downloads (here) on March 8, and will be released publicly on March 10 here. Release announcements: Soma: Visual Studio 2010 enhancements Jason Zander: Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 I started on this post with tips on installing VS2010 SP1 when I realized I’ve been writing these up for Visual Studio and .NET framework SP releases for a while (e.g. VS2008 / .NET 3.5 SP1 post, VS2005 SP1 post). Looking back the years of Visual Studio SP installs (and remembering when we’d get up to SP6 for a Visual Studio release), I’m happy to see that it just keeps getting easier. Service Packs are a lot less finicky about requiring beta software to be uninstalled, install more quickly, and are just generally a lot less scary. If I can’t have a jetpack, at least my future provided me faster, easier service packs. Disclaimer: These tips are just general things I've picked up over the years. I don't have any inside knowledge here. If you see anything wrong, be sure to let me know in the comments. You may want to check the readme file before installing - it's short, and it's in that new-fangled HTML format. On with the tips! Before starting, uninstall Visual Studio features you don't use Visual Studio service packs (and other Microsoft service packs as well) install patches for the specific features you’ve got installed. This is a big reason to always do a custom install when you first install Visual Studio, but it’s not difficult to update your existing installation. Here’s the quick way to do that: Tap the windows key and type “add or remove programs” and press enter (or click on the “Add or remove programs” link if you must).   Type “Visual Studio 2010” in the search box in the upper right corner, click on the Visual Studio program (the one with the VS infinity looking logo) and click on Uninstall/Change. Click on Add or Remove Features The next part’s up to you – what features do you actually use? I’ve been doing primarily ASP.NET MVC development in C# lately, so I selected Visual C# and Visual Web Developer. Remember that you can install features later if needed, and can also install the express versions if you want. Selecting everything just because it’s there - or you paid for it – means that you install updates for everything, every time. When you’ve made your changes, click on the Update button to uninstall unused features. Shut down all instances of Visual Studio It probably goes without saying that you should close a program down before installing it, partly to avoid the file-in-use-reboot-after-install horror. Additional "hunch / works on my machine" quality tip: On one computer I saw a note in the setup log about Visual Studio a prompt for user input to close Visual Studio, although I never saw the prompt. Just to  be sure, I'd personally open up Task Manager and kill any devenv.exe processes I saw running, as it couldn't hurt. Use the web installer I use the Web Installers whenever possible. There’s no point in downloading the DVD unless you’re doing multiple installs or won’t have internet access. The DVD IS is 1.5GB, since it needs to be able to service every possible supported installation option on both x86 and x64. The web installer is 776 KB (smaller than calc.exe), so you can start the installation right away. Like other web installers, the real benefit is that it only installs the updates you need (hence the reason for step 1 – uninstalling unused components). Instead of 1.5GB, my download was roughly 530MB. If you’re installing from MSDN (this link takes you right to the Visual Studio installs), select the first one on the list: The first step in the installation process is to analyze the machine configuration and tell you what needs to be installed. Since I've trimmed down my features, that's a pretty short list. The time's not far off where I may not install SQL Server on my dev machines, just using SQL Server Compact - that would shorten the list further. When I hit next, you can see that the download size has shrunk considerably. When I start the install, note that the installation begins while other components are downloading - another benefit of the web install. On my mid-range desktop machine, the install took 25 minutes. What if it takes longer? According to Heath Stewart (Visual Studio installer guru), average SP1 installs take roughly 45 minutes. An installation which takes hours to complete may be a sign of a problem: see his post Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installing for over 2 hours could be a sign of a problem. Why so long? Yes, even 25 minutes is a while. Heath's got another blog post explaining why the update can take longer than the initial install (see: A patch may take as long or longer to install than the target product) which explains all the additional steps and complexities a patch needs to deal with, as well as some mitigation steps that deployment authors can take to mitigate the impact. Other things to know about Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Installs over Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta That's nice. Previous Visual Studio versions did a number of annoying things when you installed SP's over beta's - fail with weird errors, get part way through and tell you needed to cancel and uninstall first, etc. I've installed this on two machines that had random beta stuff installed without tears. That Readme file you didn't read I mentioned the readme file earlier (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=210711 ). Some interesting things I picked up in there: 2.1.3. Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installation may fail when a USB drive or other removeable drive is connected 2.1.4. Visual Studio must be restarted after Visual Studio 2010 SP1 tooling for SQL Server Compact (Compact) 4.0 is installed 2.2.1. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled to restore certain components 2.2.2. If Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is uninstalled, Visual Studio 2010 must be reinstalled before SP1 can be installed again 2.4.3.1. Async CTP If you installed the pre-SP1 version of Async CTP but did not uninstall it before you installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1, then your computer will be in a state in which the version of the C# compiler in the .NET Framework does not match the C# compiler in Visual Studio. To resolve this issue: After you install Visual Studio 2010 SP1, reinstall the SP1 version of the Async CTP from here. Hardware acceleration for Visual Studio is disabled on Windows XP Visual Studio 2010 SP1 disables hardware acceleration when running on Windows XP (only on XP). You can turn it back on in the Visual Studio options, under Environment / General, as shown below. See Jason Zander's post titled Performance Troubleshooting Article and VS2010 SP1 Change.

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• HttpContext.Items and Server.Transfer/Execute

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few days ago my buddy Ben Jones pointed out that he ran into a bug in the ScriptContainer control in the West Wind Web and Ajax Toolkit. The problem was basically that when a Server.Transfer call was applied the script container (and also various ClientScriptProxy script embedding routines) would potentially fail to load up the specified scripts. It turns out the problem is due to the fact that the various components in the toolkit use request specific singletons via a Current property. I use a static Current property tied to a Context.Items[] entry to handle this type of operation which looks something like this: /// <summary> /// Current instance of this class which should always be used to /// access this object. There are no public constructors to /// ensure the reference is used as a Singleton to further /// ensure that all scripts are written to the same clientscript /// manager. /// </summary> public static ClientScriptProxy Current { get { if (HttpContext.Current == null) return new ClientScriptProxy(); ClientScriptProxy proxy = null; if (HttpContext.Current.Items.Contains(STR_CONTEXTID)) proxy = HttpContext.Current.Items[STR_CONTEXTID] as ClientScriptProxy; else { proxy = new ClientScriptProxy(); HttpContext.Current.Items[STR_CONTEXTID] = proxy; } return proxy; } } The proxy is attached to a Context.Items[] item which makes the instance Request specific. This works perfectly fine in most situations EXCEPT when you’re dealing with Server.Transfer/Execute requests. Server.Transfer doesn’t cause Context.Items to be cleared so both the current transferred request and the original request’s Context.Items collection apply. For the ClientScriptProxy this causes a problem because script references are tracked on a per request basis in Context.Items to check for script duplication. Once a script is rendered an ID is written into the Context collection and so considered ‘rendered’: // No dupes - ref script include only once if (HttpContext.Current.Items.Contains( STR_SCRIPTITEM_IDENTITIFIER + fileId ) ) return; HttpContext.Current.Items.Add(STR_SCRIPTITEM_IDENTITIFIER + fileId, string.Empty); where the fileId is the script name or unique identifier. The problem is on the Transferred page the item will already exist in Context and so fail to render because it thinks the script has already rendered based on the Context item. Bummer. The workaround for this is simple once you know what’s going on, but in this case it was a bitch to track down because the context items are used in many places throughout this class. The trick is to determine when a request is transferred and then removing the specific keys. The first issue is to determine if a script is in a Trransfer or Execute call: if (HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler != HttpContext.Current.Handler) Context.Handler is the original handler and CurrentHandler is the actual currently executing handler that is running when a Transfer/Execute is active. You can also use Context.PreviousHandler to get the last handler and chain through the whole list of handlers applied if Transfer calls are nested (dog help us all for the person debugging that). For the ClientScriptProxy the full logic to check for a transfer and remove the code looks like this: /// <summary> /// Clears all the request specific context items which are script references /// and the script placement index. /// </summary> public void ClearContextItemsOnTransfer() { if (HttpContext.Current != null) { // Check for Server.Transfer/Execute calls - we need to clear out Context.Items if (HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler != HttpContext.Current.Handler) { List<string> Keys = HttpContext.Current.Items.Keys.Cast<string>().Where(s => s.StartsWith(STR_SCRIPTITEM_IDENTITIFIER) || s == STR_ScriptResourceIndex).ToList(); foreach (string key in Keys) { HttpContext.Current.Items.Remove(key); } } } } along with a small update to the Current property getter that sets a global flag to indicate whether the request was transferred: if (!proxy.IsTransferred && HttpContext.Current.Handler != HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler) { proxy.ClearContextItemsOnTransfer(); proxy.IsTransferred = true; } return proxy; I know this is pretty ugly, but it works and it’s actually minimal fuss without affecting the behavior of the rest of the class. Ben had a different solution that involved explicitly clearing out the Context items and replacing the collection with a manually maintained list of items which also works, but required changes through the code to make this work. In hindsight, it would have been better to use a single object that encapsulates all the ‘persisted’ values and store that object in Context instead of all these individual small morsels. Hindsight is always 20/20 though :-}. If possible use Page.Items ClientScriptProxy is a generic component that can be used from anywhere in ASP.NET, so there are various methods that are not Page specific on this component which is why I used Context.Items, rather than the Page.Items collection.Page.Items would be a better choice since it will sidestep the above Server.Transfer nightmares as the Page is reloaded completely and so any new Page gets a new Items collection. No fuss there. So for the ScriptContainer control, which has to live on the page the behavior is a little different. It is attached to Page.Items (since it’s a control): /// <summary> /// Returns a current instance of this control if an instance /// is already loaded on the page. Otherwise a new instance is /// created, added to the Form and returned. /// /// It's important this function is not called too early in the /// page cycle - it should not be called before Page.OnInit(). /// /// This property is the preferred way to get a reference to a /// ScriptContainer control that is either already on a page /// or needs to be created. Controls in particular should always /// use this property. /// </summary> public static ScriptContainer Current { get { // We need a context for this to work! if (HttpContext.Current == null) return null; Page page = HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler as Page; if (page == null) throw new InvalidOperationException(Resources.ERROR_ScriptContainer_OnlyWorks_With_PageBasedHandlers); ScriptContainer ctl = null; // Retrieve the current instance ctl = page.Items[STR_CONTEXTID] as ScriptContainer; if (ctl != null) return ctl; ctl = new ScriptContainer(); page.Form.Controls.Add(ctl); return ctl; } } The biggest issue with this approach is that you have to explicitly retrieve the page in the static Current property. Notice again the use of CurrentHandler (rather than Handler which was my original implementation) to ensure you get the latest page including the one that Server.Transfer fired. Server.Transfer and Server.Execute are Evil All that said – this fix is probably for the 2 people who are crazy enough to rely on Server.Transfer/Execute. :-} There are so many weird behavior problems with these commands that I avoid them at all costs. I don’t think I have a single application that uses either of these commands… Related Resources Full source of ClientScriptProxy.cs (repository) Part of the West Wind Web Toolkit Static Singletons for ASP.NET Controls Post © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Why can't I reinstall MySQL?

  - by Johannes Nielsen

  I've been looking all around the Internet for an answer but didn't find anything. I hope you can help me now. I have a server with MySQL. From one day to another, MySQL didn't let me enter with my root password anymore (accsess denied for user 'root'@'localhost' using password: 'YES'). So I tried two ways to reset the password: No.1: I typed: shell> /etc/init.d/mysqld stop To stop MySQL. Then I restarted it skipping the grant-tables: shell> mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables So I was able to log in as root and change the password using: mysql> UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = PASSWORD('MyNewPassword') WHERE User = 'root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; I restarted MySQL and tried to log in as root with my new password - didn't work. So I tried the solution that's described here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/resetting-permissions.html (I don't want to post it here because this post is already pretty long). Didn't work either. Actually it made it worse, because since that day, every time I try to start MySQL, it doesn't even ask me for my password, but I get: shell> ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (111) Well, I've looked up what it means and found that my mysqld.sock is missing. I tried to create it using touch but MySQL can't start with that socket. Now I'm trying to reinstall MySQL but everytime I type in shell> apt-get --purge remove mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client In that or any other order or every one of those three alone, I get: shell> Reading package lists... Done shell> Building dependency tree shell> Reading state information... Done shell> Package mysql-client is not installed, so not removed shell> Package mysql-server is not installed, so not removed shell> You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: shell> The following packages have unmet dependencies: shell> libmysqlclient18 : Depends: mysql-common (>= 5.5.28-0ubuntu0.12.04.2) but it is not going to be installed shell> libmysqlclient18:i386 : Depends: mysql-common:i386 (>= 5.5.28-0ubuntu0.12.04.2) shell> mysql-client-5.5 : Depends: mysql-common (>= 5.5.28-0ubuntu0.12.04.2) but it is not going to be installed shell> mysql-server-5.5 : PreDepends: mysql-common (>= 5.5.28-0ubuntu0.12.04.2) but it is not going to be installed shell> psa-firewall : Depends: plesk-core (>= 11.0.9) but it is not installable shell> Depends: mysql-server but it is not going to be installed shell> psa-spamassassin : Depends: plesk-core (>= 11.0.9) but it is not installable shell> psa-vpn : Depends: plesk-core (>= 11.0.9) but it is not installable shell> Depends: plesk-base (>= 11.0.9) but it is not installable shell> Depends: mysql-server but it is not going to be installed shell> E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). So I said to my self "let's just remove those files with depenencies, too" (that psa-stuff since plesk is virtual and can't be uninstalled)... Guess what happened: shell> Reading package lists... Done shell> Building dependency tree shell> Reading state information... Done shell> Package mysql-client is not installed, so not removed shell> Package mysql-server is not installed, so not removed shell> You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: shell> The following packages have unmet dependencies: shell> libmysqlclient18 : Depends: mysql-common (>= 5.5.28-0ubuntu0.12.04.2) but it is not going to be installed shell> libmysqlclient18:i386 : Depends: mysql-common:i386 (>= 5.5.28-0ubuntu0.12.04.2) shell> mysql-client-5.5 : Depends: mysql-common (>= 5.5.28-0ubuntu0.12.04.2) but it is not going to be installed shell> mysql-server-5.5 : PreDepends: mysql-common (>= 5.5.28-0ubuntu0.12.04.2) but it is not going to be installed shell> E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). Of course I tried apt-get -f install, too many times even. What am I doing wrong? No matter, which other packages I include into apt-get --purge remove, I always get new dependencies. Do I have to delete every MySQL-related directory and file manually? Hope there's someone out there who can help me! Cheers! EDIT: After trying apt-get purge mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client libmysqlclient18 libmysqlclient18:i386 mysql-client-5.5 mysql-server-5.5 psa-firewall psa-spamassassin psa-vpn Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Package mysql-client is not installed, so not removed Package mysql-server is not installed, so not removed You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libdbd-mysql-perl : Depends: libmysqlclient18 (>= 5.5.13-1) but it is not going to be installed libmyodbc : Depends: libmysqlclient18 (>= 5.5.13-1) but it is not going to be installed libqt4-sql-mysql:i386 : Depends: libmysqlclient18:i386 (>= 5.5.13-1) but it is not going to be installed php5-mysql : Depends: libmysqlclient18 (>= 5.5.13-1) but it is not going to be installed ruby-mysql : Depends: libmysqlclient18 (>= 5.5.13-1) but it is not going to be installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). So I tried to remove all these and got: Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Package mysql-client is not installed, so not removed Package mysql-server is not installed, so not removed You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:qlclient18:i386 mysql The following packages have unmet dependencies: libmysql-ruby1.8 : Depends: ruby-mysql but it is not going to be installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). And actually I think removing that file, too solved my problem :-S Next time I'll try everything before asking :D Thank you Eric for keeping me couraged to just go on removing :D

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• Why do I have to run aptitude update twice to install Ruby?

  - by Willie Wheeler

  Summary. I have a fresh EC2 Precise 64-bit instance (ami-82fa58eb). After launching the instance, I want to install ruby1.9.1 (among others). This doesn't work: aptitude update && apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew" --force-yes -fuy dist-upgrade && aptitude install -y ruby1.9.1 ruby1.9.1-dev make as Aptitude can't find the Ruby package. But this works: aptitude update && aptitude update && apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew" --force-yes -fuy dist-upgrade && aptitude install -y ruby1.9.1 ruby1.9.1-dev make I would like to understand why I need to run aptitude update twice. Details. The first and second runs look pretty different. First run: Ign http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security InRelease Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com precise InRelease Get: 1 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security Release.gpg [198 B] Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates InRelease Get: 2 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security Release [49.6 kB] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise Release.gpg Get: 3 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates Release.gpg [198 B] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise Release Get: 4 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/main amd64 Packages [161 kB] Get: 5 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates Release [49.6 kB] Get: 6 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/restricted amd64 Packages [3,969 B] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/main amd64 Packages Get: 7 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/universe amd64 Packages [43.8 kB] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/restricted amd64 Packages Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe amd64 Packages Get: 8 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/multiverse amd64 Packages [2,180 B] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/multiverse amd64 Packages Get: 9 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/main i386 Packages [165 kB] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/main i386 Packages Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/restricted i386 Packages Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe i386 Packages Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/multiverse i386 Packages Get: 10 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/restricted i386 Packages [3,968 B] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/main TranslationIndex Get: 11 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/universe i386 Packages [44.0 kB] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/multiverse TranslationIndex Get: 12 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/multiverse i386 Packages [2,369 B] Get: 13 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/main TranslationIndex [73 B] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/restricted TranslationIndex Get: 14 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/multiverse TranslationIndex [71 B] Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe TranslationIndex Get: 15 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/restricted TranslationIndex [71 B] Get: 16 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/main amd64 Packages [382 kB] Get: 17 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/universe TranslationIndex [73 B] Get: 18 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/main Translation-en [76.5 kB] Get: 19 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/multiverse Translation-en [995 B] Get: 20 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/restricted Translation-en [978 B] Get: 21 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/universe Translation-en [27.2 kB] Get: 22 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/restricted amd64 Packages [6,755 B] Get: 23 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/universe amd64 Packages [129 kB] Get: 24 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/multiverse amd64 Packages [8,677 B] Get: 25 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/main i386 Packages [387 kB] Get: 26 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/restricted i386 Packages [6,732 B] Get: 27 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/universe i386 Packages [130 kB] Get: 28 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/multiverse i386 Packages [9,672 B] Get: 29 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/main TranslationIndex [3,564 B] Get: 30 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/multiverse TranslationIndex [2,605 B] Get: 31 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/restricted TranslationIndex [2,461 B] Get: 32 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/universe TranslationIndex [2,850 B] Get: 33 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/main Translation-en [726 kB] Get: 34 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/multiverse Translation-en [93.4 kB] Get: 35 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/restricted Translation-en [2,395 B] Get: 36 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe Translation-en [3,341 kB] Get: 37 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/main Translation-en [188 kB] Get: 38 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/multiverse Translation-en [5,414 B] Get: 39 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/restricted Translation-en [1,484 B] Get: 40 http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/universe Translation-en [77.3 kB] Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/main Translation-en_US Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/multiverse Translation-en_US Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/restricted Translation-en_US Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe Translation-en_US Fetched 6,137 kB in 11s (538 kB/s) Reading package lists... Second run: Ign http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise InRelease Ign http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates InRelease Get: 1 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise Release.gpg [198 B] Get: 2 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates Release.gpg [198 B] Ign http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security InRelease Get: 3 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise Release [49.6 kB] Get: 4 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates Release [49.6 kB] Get: 5 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/main Sources [934 kB] Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security Release.gpg Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security Release Get: 6 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe Sources [5,019 kB] Get: 7 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/main Sources [42.8 kB] Get: 8 http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/universe Sources [13.5 kB] Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/main amd64 Packages Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/universe amd64 Packages Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/main i386 Packages Get: 9 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/main amd64 Packages [1,273 kB] Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/universe i386 Packages Get: 10 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe amd64 Packages [4,786 kB] Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/main TranslationIndex Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/universe TranslationIndex Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/main Translation-en Hit http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security/universe Translation-en Get: 11 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/main i386 Packages [1,274 kB] Get: 12 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe i386 Packages [4,796 kB] Get: 13 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/main TranslationIndex [3,706 B] Get: 14 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe TranslationIndex [2,922 B] Get: 15 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/main Sources [163 kB] Get: 16 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/universe Sources [50.8 kB] Get: 17 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/main amd64 Packages [382 kB] Get: 18 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/universe amd64 Packages [129 kB] Get: 19 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/main i386 Packages [387 kB] Get: 20 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/universe i386 Packages [129 kB] Get: 21 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/main TranslationIndex [3,564 B] Get: 22 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/universe TranslationIndex [2,850 B] Get: 23 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/main Translation-en [726 kB] Get: 24 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise/universe Translation-en [3,341 kB] Get: 25 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/main Translation-en [188 kB] Get: 26 http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates/universe Translation-en [77.1 kB] Fetched 23.8 MB in 23s (1,026 kB/s) Reading package lists... Note. My question is almost exactly the same as Running 'apt-get upgrade' on Amazon EC2 AMI twice in succession upgrades very different packages except that I'm seeing this issue with aptitude updates rather than apt-get upgrades.

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• Security Trimmed Cross Site Collection Navigation

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). This article will serve as documentation of a fully functional codeplex project that I just created. This project will give you a WebPart that will give you security trimmed navigation across site collections. The first question is, why create such a project? In every single SharePoint project you will do, one question you will always be faced with is, what should the boundaries of sites be, and what should the boundaries of site collections be? There is no good or bad answer to this, because it really really depends on your needs. There are some factors in play here. Site Collections will allow you to scale, as a Site collection is the smallest entity you can put inside a content database Site collections will allow you to offer different levels of SLAs, because you put a site collection on a separate content database, and put that database on a separate server. Site collections are a security boundary – and they can be moved around at will without affecting other site collections. Site collections are also a branding boundary. They are also a feature deployment boundary, so you can have two site collections on the same web application with completely different nature of services. But site collections break navigation, i.e. a site collection at “/”, and a site collection at “/sites/mySiteCollection”, are completely independent of each other. If you have access to both, the navigation of / won’t show you a link to /sites/mySiteCollection. Some people refer to this as a huge issue in SharePoint. Luckily, some workarounds exist. A long time ago, I had blogged about “Implementing Consistent Navigation across Site Collections”. That approach was a no-code solution, it worked – it gave you a consistent navigation across site collections. But, it didn’t work in a security trimmed fashion! i.e., if I don’t have access to Site Collection ‘X’, it would still show me a link to ‘X’. Well this project gets around that issue. Simply deploy this project, and it’ll give you a WebPart. You can use that WebPart as either a webpart or as a server control dropped via SharePoint designer, and it will give you Security Trimmed Cross Site Collection Navigation. The code has been written for SP2010, but it will work in SP2007 with the help of http://spwcfsupport.codeplex.com . What do I need to do to make it work? I’m glad you asked! Simple! Deploy the .wsp (which you can download here). This will give you a site collection feature called “Winsmarts Cross Site Collection Navigation” as shown below. Go ahead and activate it, and this will give you a WebPart called “Winsmarts Navigation Web Part” as shown below: Just drop this WebPart on your page, and it will show you all site collections that the currently logged in user has access to. Really it’s that easy! This is shown as below - In the above example, I have two site collections that I created at /sites/SiteCollection1 and /sites/SiteCollection2. The navigation shows the titles. You see some extraneous crap as well, you might want to clean that – I’ll talk about that in a minute. What? You’re running into problems? If the problem you’re running into is that you are prompted to login three times, and then it shows a blank webpart that says “Loading your applications ..” and then craps out!, then most probably you’re using a different authentication scheme. Behind the scenes I use a custom WCF service to perform this job. OOTB, I’ve set it to work with NTLM, but if you need to make it work alternate authentications such as forms based auth, or client side certs, you will need to edit the %14%\ISAPI\Winsmarts.CrossSCNav\web.config file, specifically, this section - 1: <bindings> 2: <webHttpBinding> 3: <binding name="customWebHttpBinding"> 4: <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> 5: <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm"/> 6: </security> 7: </binding> 8: </webHttpBinding> 9: </bindings> For Kerberos, change the “clientCredentialType” to “Windows” For Forms auth, remove that transport line For client certs – well that’s a bit more involved, but it’s just web.config changes – hit a good book on WCF or hire me for a billion trillion $. But fair warning, I might be too busy to help immediately. If you’re running into a different problem, please leave a comment below, but the code is pretty rock solid, so .. hmm .. check what you’re doing! BTW, I don’t  make any guarantee/warranty on this – if this code makes you sterile, unpopular, bad hairstyle, anything else, that is your problem! But, there are some known issues - I wrote this as a concept – you can easily extend it to be more flexible. Example, hierarchical nav, or, horizontal nav, jazzy effects with jquery or silverlight– all those are possible very very easily. This webpart is not smart enough to co-exist with another instance of itself on the same page. I can easily extend it to do so, which I will do in my spare(!?) time! Okay good! But that’s not all! As you can see, just dropping the WebPart may show you many extraneous site collections, or maybe you want to restrict which site collections are shown, or exclude a certain site collection to be shown from the navigation. To support that, I created a property on the WebPart called “UrlMatchPattern”, which is a regex expression you specify to trim the results :). So, just edit the WebPart, and specify a string property of “http://sp2010/sites/” as shown below. Note that you can put in whatever regex expression you want! So go crazy, I don’t care! And this gives you a cleaner look.   w00t! Enjoy! Comment on the article ....

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• GZip/Deflate Compression in ASP.NET MVC

  - by Rick Strahl

  A long while back I wrote about GZip compression in ASP.NET. In that article I describe two generic helper methods that I've used in all sorts of ASP.NET application from WebForms apps to HttpModules and HttpHandlers that require gzip or deflate compression. The same static methods also work in ASP.NET MVC. Here are the two routines:/// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } The first method checks whether the client sending the request includes the accept-encoding for either gzip or deflate, and if if it does it returns true. The second function uses IsGzipSupported() to decide whether it should encode content and uses an Response Filter to do its job. Basically response filters look at the Response output stream as it's written and convert the data flowing through it. Filters are a bit tricky to work with but the two .NET filter streams for GZip and Deflate Compression make this a snap to implement. In my old code and even now in MVC I can always do:public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); …} to encode my content. And that works just fine. The proper way: Create an ActionFilterAttribute However in MVC this sort of thing is typically better handled by an ActionFilter which can be applied with an attribute. So to be all prim and proper I created an CompressContentAttribute ActionFilter that incorporates those two helper methods and which looks like this:/// <summary> /// Attribute that can be added to controller methods to force content /// to be GZip encoded if the client supports it /// </summary> public class CompressContentAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute { /// <summary> /// Override to compress the content that is generated by /// an action method. /// </summary> /// <param name="filterContext"></param> public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { GZipEncodePage(); } /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } } It's basically the same code wrapped into an ActionFilter attribute, which intercepts requests MVC requests to Controller methods and lets you hook up logic before and after the methods have executed. Here I want to override OnActionExecuting() which fires before the Controller action is fired. With the CompressContentAttribute created, it can now be applied to either the controller as a whole:[CompressContent] public class ClassifiedsController : ClassifiedsBaseController { … } or to one of the Action methods:[CompressContent] public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { … } The former applies compression to every action method, while the latter is selective and only applies it to the individual action method. Is the attribute better than the static utility function? Not really, but it is the standard MVC way to hook up 'filter' content and that's where others are likely to expect to set options like this. In fact,  you have a bit more control with the utility function because you can conditionally apply it in code, but this is actually much less likely in MVC applications than old WebForms apps since controller methods tend to be more focused. Compression Caveats Http compression is very cool and pretty easy to implement in ASP.NET but you have to be careful with it - especially if your content might get transformed or redirected inside of ASP.NET. A good example, is if an error occurs and a compression filter is applied. ASP.NET errors don't clear the filter, but clear the Response headers which results in some nasty garbage because the compressed content now no longer matches the headers. Another issue is Caching, which has to account for all possible ways of compression and non-compression that the content is served. Basically compressed content and caching don't mix well. I wrote about several of these issues in an old blog post and I recommend you take a quick peek before diving into making every bit of output Gzip encoded. None of these are show stoppers, but you have to be aware of the issues. Related Posts GZip Compression with ASP.NET Content ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   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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• Displaying an image on a LED matrix with a Netduino

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  In the previous post, we’ve been flipping bits manually on three ports of the Netduino to simulate the data, clock and latch pins that a shift register expected. We did all that in order to control one line of a LED matrix and create a simple Knight Rider effect. It was rightly pointed out in the comments that the Netduino has built-in knowledge of the sort of serial protocol that this shift register understands through a feature called SPI. That will of course make our code a whole lot simpler, but it will also make it a whole lot faster: writing to the Netduino ports is actually not that fast, whereas SPI is very, very fast. Unfortunately, the Netduino documentation for SPI is severely lacking. Instead, we’ve been reliably using the documentation for the Fez, another .NET microcontroller. To send data through SPI, we’ll just need  to move a few wires around and update the code. SPI uses pin D11 for writing, pin D12 for reading (which we won’t do) and pin D13 for the clock. The latch pin is a parameter that can be set by the user. This is very close to the wiring we had before (data on D11, clock on D12 and latch on D13). We just have to move the latch from D13 to D10, and the clock from D12 to D13. The code that controls the shift register has slimmed down considerably with that change. Here is the new version, which I invite you to compare with what we had before: public class ShiftRegister74HC595 { protected SPI Spi; public ShiftRegister74HC595(Cpu.Pin latchPin) : this(latchPin, SPI.SPI_module.SPI1) { } public ShiftRegister74HC595(Cpu.Pin latchPin, SPI.SPI_module spiModule) { var spiConfig = new SPI.Configuration( SPI_mod: spiModule, ChipSelect_Port: latchPin, ChipSelect_ActiveState: false, ChipSelect_SetupTime: 0, ChipSelect_HoldTime: 0, Clock_IdleState: false, Clock_Edge: true, Clock_RateKHz: 1000 ); Spi = new SPI(spiConfig); } public void Write(byte buffer) { Spi.Write(new[] {buffer}); } } All we have to do here is configure SPI. The write method couldn’t be any simpler. Everything is now handled in hardware by the Netduino. We set the frequency to 1MHz, which is largely sufficient for what we’ll be doing, but it could potentially go much higher. The shift register addresses the columns of the matrix. The rows are directly wired to ports D0 to D7 of the Netduino. The code writes to only one of those eight lines at a time, which will make it fast enough. The way an image is displayed is that we light the lines one after the other so fast that persistence of vision will give the illusion of a stable image: foreach (var bitmap in matrix.MatrixBitmap) { matrix.OnRow(row, bitmap, true); matrix.OnRow(row, bitmap, false); row++; } Now there is a twist here: we need to run this code as fast as possible in order to display the image with as little flicker as possible, but we’ll eventually have other things to do. In other words, we need the code driving the display to run in the background, except when we want to change what’s being displayed. Fortunately, the .NET Micro Framework supports multithreading. In our implementation, we’ve added an Initialize method that spins a new thread that is tied to the specific instance of the matrix it’s being called on. public LedMatrix Initialize() { DisplayThread = new Thread(() => DoDisplay(this)); DisplayThread.Start(); return this; } I quite like this way to spin a thread. As you may know, there is another, built-in way to contextualize a thread by passing an object into the Start method. For the method to work, the thread must have been constructed with a ParameterizedThreadStart delegate, which takes one parameter of type object. I like to use object as little as possible, so instead I’m constructing a closure with a Lambda, currying it with the current instance. This way, everything remains strongly-typed and there’s no casting to do. Note that this method would extend perfectly to several parameters. Of note as well is the return value of Initialize, a common technique to add some fluency to the API and enabling the matrix to be instantiated and initialized in a single line: using (var matrix = new LedMS88SR74HC595().Initialize()) The “using” in the previous line is because we have implemented IDisposable so that the matrix kills the thread and clears the display when the user code is done with it: public void Dispose() { Clear(); DisplayThread.Abort(); } Thanks to the multi-threaded version of the matrix driver class, we can treat the display as a simple bitmap with a very synchronous programming model: matrix.Set(someimage); while (button.Read()) { Thread.Sleep(10); } Here, the call into Set returns immediately and from the moment the bitmap is set, the background display thread will constantly continue refreshing no matter what happens in the main thread. That enables us to wait or read a button’s port on the main thread knowing that the current image will continue displaying unperturbed and without requiring manual refreshing. We’ve effectively hidden the implementation of the display behind a convenient, synchronous-looking API. Pretty neat, eh? Before I wrap up this post, I want to talk about one small caveat of using SPI rather than driving the shift register directly: when we got to the point where we could actually display images, we noticed that they were a mirror image of what we were sending in. Oh noes! Well, the reason for it is that SPI is sending the bits in a big-endian fashion, in other words backwards. Now sure you could fix that in software by writing some bit-level code to reverse the bits we’re sending in, but there is a far more efficient solution than that. We are doing hardware here, so we can simply reverse the order in which the outputs of the shift register are connected to the columns of the matrix. That’s switching 8 wires around once, as compared to doing bit operations every time we send a line to display. All right, so bringing it all together, here is the code we need to write to display two images in succession, separated by a press on the board’s button: var button = new InputPort(Pins.ONBOARD_SW1, false, Port.ResistorMode.Disabled); using (var matrix = new LedMS88SR74HC595().Initialize()) { // Oh, prototype is so sad! var sad = new byte[] { 0x66, 0x24, 0x00, 0x18, 0x00, 0x3C, 0x42, 0x81 }; DisplayAndWait(sad, matrix, button); // Let's make it smile! var smile = new byte[] { 0x42, 0x18, 0x18, 0x81, 0x7E, 0x3C, 0x18, 0x00 }; DisplayAndWait(smile, matrix, button); } And here is a video of the prototype running: The prototype in action I’ve added an artificial delay between the display of each row of the matrix to clearly show what’s otherwise happening very fast. This way, you can clearly see each of the two images being displayed line by line. Next time, we’ll do no hardware changes, focusing instead on building a nice programming model for the matrix, with sprites, text and hardware scrolling. Fun stuff. By the way, can any of my reader guess where we’re going with all that? The code for this prototype can be downloaded here: http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/NetduinoLedMatrixDriver.zip

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• ASP.NET MVC 3: Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor

  - by ScottGu

  This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (Dec 15th) Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor (today) In today’s post I’m going to discuss how Razor enables you to both implicitly and explicitly define code nuggets within your view templates, and walkthrough some code examples of each of them.  Fluid Coding with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to the existing .aspx view engine).  You can learn more about Razor, why we are introducing it, and the syntax it supports from my Introducing Razor blog post. Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. For example, the Razor snippet below can be used to iterate a collection of products and output a <ul> list of product names that link to their corresponding product pages: When run, the above code generates output like below: Notice above how we were able to embed two code nuggets within the content of the foreach loop.  One of them outputs the name of the Product, and the other embeds the ProductID within a hyperlink.  Notice that we didn’t have to explicitly wrap these code-nuggets - Razor was instead smart enough to implicitly identify where the code began and ended in both of these situations.  How Razor Enables Implicit Code Nuggets Razor does not define its own language.  Instead, the code you write within Razor code nuggets is standard C# or VB.  This allows you to re-use your existing language skills, and avoid having to learn a customized language grammar. The Razor parser has smarts built into it so that whenever possible you do not need to explicitly mark the end of C#/VB code nuggets you write.  This makes coding more fluid and productive, and enables a nice, clean, concise template syntax.  Below are a few scenarios that Razor supports where you can avoid having to explicitly mark the beginning/end of a code nugget, and instead have Razor implicitly identify the code nugget scope for you: Property Access Razor allows you to output a variable value, or a sub-property on a variable that is referenced via “dot” notation: You can also use “dot” notation to access sub-properties multiple levels deep: Array/Collection Indexing: Razor allows you to index into collections or arrays: Calling Methods: Razor also allows you to invoke methods: Notice how for all of the scenarios above how we did not have to explicitly end the code nugget.  Razor was able to implicitly identify the end of the code block for us. Razor’s Parsing Algorithm for Code Nuggets The below algorithm captures the core parsing logic we use to support “@” expressions within Razor, and to enable the implicit code nugget scenarios above: Parse an identifier - As soon as we see a character that isn't valid in a C# or VB identifier, we stop and move to step 2 Check for brackets - If we see "(" or "[", go to step 2.1., otherwise, go to step 3  Parse until the matching ")" or "]" (we track nested "()" and "[]" pairs and ignore "()[]" we see in strings or comments) Go back to step 2 Check for a "." - If we see one, go to step 3.1, otherwise, DO NOT ACCEPT THE "." as code, and go to step 4 If the character AFTER the "." is a valid identifier, accept the "." and go back to step 1, otherwise, go to step 4 Done! Differentiating between code and content Step 3.1 is a particularly interesting part of the above algorithm, and enables Razor to differentiate between scenarios where an identifier is being used as part of the code statement, and when it should instead be treated as static content: Notice how in the snippet above we have ? and ! characters at the end of our code nuggets.  These are both legal C# identifiers – but Razor is able to implicitly identify that they should be treated as static string content as opposed to being part of the code expression because there is whitespace after them.  This is pretty cool and saves us keystrokes. Explicit Code Nuggets in Razor Razor is smart enough to implicitly identify a lot of code nugget scenarios.  But there are still times when you want/need to be more explicit in how you scope the code nugget expression.  The @(expression) syntax allows you to do this: You can write any C#/VB code statement you want within the @() syntax.  Razor will treat the wrapping () characters as the explicit scope of the code nugget statement.  Below are a few scenarios where we could use the explicit code nugget feature: Perform Arithmetic Calculation/Modification: You can perform arithmetic calculations within an explicit code nugget: Appending Text to a Code Expression Result: You can use the explicit expression syntax to append static text at the end of a code nugget without having to worry about it being incorrectly parsed as code: Above we have embedded a code nugget within an <img> element’s src attribute.  It allows us to link to images with URLs like “/Images/Beverages.jpg”.  Without the explicit parenthesis, Razor would have looked for a “.jpg” property on the CategoryName (and raised an error).  By being explicit we can clearly denote where the code ends and the text begins. Using Generics and Lambdas Explicit expressions also allow us to use generic types and generic methods within code expressions – and enable us to avoid the <> characters in generics from being ambiguous with tag elements. One More Thing….Intellisense within Attributes We have used code nuggets within HTML attributes in several of the examples above.  One nice feature supported by the Razor code editor within Visual Studio is the ability to still get VB/C# intellisense when doing this. Below is an example of C# code intellisense when using an implicit code nugget within an <a> href=”” attribute: Below is an example of C# code intellisense when using an explicit code nugget embedded in the middle of a <img> src=”” attribute: Notice how we are getting full code intellisense for both scenarios – despite the fact that the code expression is embedded within an HTML attribute (something the existing .aspx code editor doesn’t support).  This makes writing code even easier, and ensures that you can take advantage of intellisense everywhere. Summary Razor enables a clean and concise templating syntax that enables a very fluid coding workflow.  Razor’s ability to implicitly scope code nuggets reduces the amount of typing you need to perform, and leaves you with really clean code. When necessary, you can also explicitly scope code expressions using a @(expression) syntax to provide greater clarity around your intent, as well as to disambiguate code statements from static markup. 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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• Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server

  - by jamiet

  I overheard/read a couple of things today that really made me, data junkie that I am, take a step back and think, “Hmmm, yeah, that could be really interesting” and I wanted to make a note of them here so that (a) I could bring them to the attention of anyone that happens to read this and (b) I can maybe come back here in a few years and see if either of these have come to fruition. Your phone as a web server While listening to Jon Udell’s (twitter) “Interviews with Innovators Podcast” today in which he interviewed Herbert Van de Sompel (twitter) about his Momento project. During the interview Jon and Herbert made the following remarks: Jon: [some people] really had this vision of a web of servers, the notion that every node on the internet, every connected entity, is potentially a server and a client…we can see where we’re getting to a point where these endpoint devices we have in our pockets are going to be massively capable and it may be in the not too distant future that significant chunks of the web archive will be cached all over the place including on your own machine… Herbert: wasn’t it Opera who at one point turned your browser into a server? That really got my brain ticking. We all carry a mobile phone with us and therefore we all potentially carry a mobile web server with us as well and to my mind the only thing really stopping that from happening is the capabilities of the phone hardware, the capabilities of the network infrastructure and the will to just bloody do it. Certainly all the standards required for addressing a web server on a phone already exist (to this uninitiated observer DNS and IPv6 seem to solve that problem) so why not? I tweeted about the idea and Rory Street answered back with “why would you want a phone to be a web server?”: Its a fair question and one that I would like to try and answer. Mobile phones are increasingly becoming our window onto the world as we use them to upload messages to Twitter, record our location on FourSquare or interact with our friends on Facebook but in each of these cases some other service is acting as our intermediary; to see what I’m thinking you have to go via Twitter, to see where I am you have to go to FourSquare (I’m using ‘I’ liberally, I don’t actually use FourSquare before you ask). Why should this have to be the case? Why can’t that data be decentralised? Why can’t we be masters of our own data universe? If my phone acted as a web server then I could expose all of that information without needing those intermediary services. I see a time when we can pass around URLs such as the following: http://jamiesphone.net/location/current - Where is Jamie right now? http://jamiesphone.net/location/2010-04-21 – Where was Jamie on 21st April 2010? http://jamiesphone.net/thoughts/current – What’s on Jamie’s mind right now? http://jamiesphone.net/blog – What documents is Jamie sharing with me? http://jamiesphone.net/calendar/next7days – Where is Jamie planning to be over the next 7 days? and those URLs get served off of the phone in our pockets. If we govern that data then we can control who has access to it and (crucially) how long its available for. Want to wipe yourself off the face of the web? its pretty easy if you’re in control of all the data – just turn your phone off. None of this exists today but I look forward to a time when it does. Opera really were onto something last June when they announced Opera Unite (admittedly Unite only works because Opera provide an intermediary DNS-alike system – it isn’t totally decentralised). Opening up Twitter annotations Last week Twitter held their first developer conference called Chirp where they announced an upcoming new feature called ‘Twitter Annotations’; in short this will allow us to attach metadata to a Tweet thus enhancing the tweet itself. Think of it as a richer version of hashtags. To think of it another way Twitter are turning their data into a humongous Entity-Attribute-Value or triple-tuple store. That alone has huge implications both for the web and Twitter as a whole – the ability to enrich that 140 characters data and thus make it more useful is indeed compelling however today I stumbled upon a blog post from Eugene Mandel entitled Tweet Annotations – a Way to a Metadata Marketplace? where he proposed the idea of allowing tweets to have metadata added by people other than the person who tweeted the original tweet. This idea really fascinated me especially when I read some of the potential uses that Eugene and his commenters suggested. They included: Amazon could attach an ISBN to a tweet that mentions a book. Specialist clients apps for book lovers could be built up around this metadata. Advertisers could pay to place adverts in metadata. The revenue generated from those adverts could be shared with the tweeter or people who add the metadata. Granted, allowing anyone to add metadata to a tweet has the potential to create a spam problem the like of which we haven’t even envisaged but spam hasn’t halted the growth of the web and neither should it halt the growth of data annotations either. The original tweeter should of course be able to determine who can add metadata and whether it should be moderated. As Eugene says himself: Opening publishing tweet annotations to anyone will open the way to a marketplace of metadata where client developers, data mining companies and advertisers can add new meaning to Twitter and build innovative businesses. What Eugene and his followers did not mention is what I think is potentially the most fascinating use of opening up annotations. Google’s success today is built on their page rank algorithm that measures the validity of a web page by the number of incoming links to it and the page rank of the sites containing those links – its a system built on reputation. Twitter annotations could open up a new paradigm however – let’s call it People rank- where reputation can be measured by the metadata that people choose to apply to links and the websites containing those links. Its not hard to see why Google and Microsoft have paid big bucks to get access to the Twitter firehose! Neither of these features, phones as a web server or the ability to add annotations to other people’s tweets, exist today but I strongly believe that they could dramatically enhance the web as we know it today. I hope to look back on this blog post in a few years in the knowledge that these ideas have been put into place. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• MvcExtensions – Bootstrapping

  - by kazimanzurrashid

  When you create a new ASP.NET MVC application you will find that the global.asax contains the following lines: namespace MvcApplication1 { // Note: For instructions on enabling IIS6 or IIS7 classic mode, // visit http://go.microsoft.com/?LinkId=9394801 public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapRoute( "Default", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults ); } protected void Application_Start() { AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); } } } As the application grows, there are quite a lot of plumbing code gets into the global.asax which quickly becomes a design smell. Lets take a quick look at the code of one of the open source project that I recently visited: public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapRoute("Default","{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }); } protected override void OnApplicationStarted() { Error += OnError; EndRequest += OnEndRequest; var settings = new SparkSettings() .AddNamespace("System") .AddNamespace("System.Collections.Generic") .AddNamespace("System.Web.Mvc") .AddNamespace("System.Web.Mvc.Html") .AddNamespace("MvcContrib.FluentHtml") .AddNamespace("********") .AddNamespace("********.Web") .SetPageBaseType("ApplicationViewPage") .SetAutomaticEncoding(true); #if DEBUG settings.SetDebug(true); #endif var viewFactory = new SparkViewFactory(settings); ViewEngines.Engines.Add(viewFactory); #if !DEBUG PrecompileViews(viewFactory); #endif RegisterAllControllersIn("********.Web"); log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure(); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); Factory.Load(new Components.WebDependencies()); ModelBinders.Binders.DefaultBinder = new Binders.GenericBinderResolver(Factory.TryGet<IModelBinder>); ValidatorConfiguration.Initialize("********"); HtmlValidationExtensions.Initialize(ValidatorConfiguration.Rules); } private void OnEndRequest(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { if (((HttpApplication)sender).Context.Handler is MvcHandler) { CreateKernel().Get<ISessionSource>().Close(); } } private void OnError(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { CreateKernel().Get<ISessionSource>().Close(); } protected override IKernel CreateKernel() { return Factory.Kernel; } private static void PrecompileViews(SparkViewFactory viewFactory) { var batch = new SparkBatchDescriptor(); batch.For<HomeController>().For<ManageController>(); viewFactory.Precompile(batch); } As you can see there are quite a few of things going on in the above code, Registering the ViewEngine, Compiling the Views, Registering the Routes/Controllers/Model Binders, Settings up Logger, Validations and as you can imagine the more it becomes complex the more things will get added in the application start. One of the goal of the MVCExtensions is to reduce the above design smell. Instead of writing all the plumbing code in the application start, it contains BootstrapperTask to register individual services. Out of the box, it contains BootstrapperTask to register Controllers, Controller Factory, Action Invoker, Action Filters, Model Binders, Model Metadata/Validation Providers, ValueProvideraFactory, ViewEngines etc and it is intelligent enough to automatically detect the above types and register into the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Other than the built-in tasks you can create your own custom task which will be automatically executed when the application starts. When the BootstrapperTasks are in action you will find the global.asax pretty much clean like the following: public class MvcApplication : UnityMvcApplication { public void ErrorLog_Filtering(object sender, ExceptionFilterEventArgs e) { Check.Argument.IsNotNull(e, "e"); HttpException exception = e.Exception.GetBaseException() as HttpException; if ((exception != null) && (exception.GetHttpCode() == (int)HttpStatusCode.NotFound)) { e.Dismiss(); } } } The above code is taken from my another open source project Shrinkr, as you can see the global.asax is longer cluttered with any plumbing code. One special thing you have noticed that it is inherited from the UnityMvcApplication rather than regular HttpApplication. There are separate version of this class for each IoC Container like NinjectMvcApplication, StructureMapMvcApplication etc. Other than executing the built-in tasks, the Shrinkr also has few custom tasks which gets executed when the application starts. For example, when the application starts, we want to ensure that the default users (which is specified in the web.config) are created. The following is the custom task that is used to create those default users: public class CreateDefaultUsers : BootstrapperTask { protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(IServiceLocator serviceLocator) { IUserRepository userRepository = serviceLocator.GetInstance<IUserRepository>(); IUnitOfWork unitOfWork = serviceLocator.GetInstance<IUnitOfWork>(); IEnumerable<User> users = serviceLocator.GetInstance<Settings>().DefaultUsers; bool shouldCommit = false; foreach (User user in users) { if (userRepository.GetByName(user.Name) == null) { user.AllowApiAccess(ApiSetting.InfiniteLimit); userRepository.Add(user); shouldCommit = true; } } if (shouldCommit) { unitOfWork.Commit(); } return TaskContinuation.Continue; } } There are several other Tasks in the Shrinkr that we are also using which you will find in that project. To create a custom bootstrapping task you have create a new class which either implements the IBootstrapperTask interface or inherits from the abstract BootstrapperTask class, I would recommend to start with the BootstrapperTask as it already has the required code that you have to write in case if you choose the IBootstrapperTask interface. As you can see in the above code we are overriding the ExecuteCore to create the default users, the MVCExtensions is responsible for populating the  ServiceLocator prior calling this method and in this method we are using the service locator to get the dependencies that are required to create the users (I will cover the custom dependencies registration in the next post). Once the users are created, we are returning a special enum, TaskContinuation as the return value, the TaskContinuation can have three values Continue (default), Skip and Break. The reason behind of having this enum is, in some  special cases you might want to skip the next task in the chain or break the complete chain depending upon the currently running task, in those cases you will use the other two values instead of the Continue. The last thing I want to cover in the bootstrapping task is the Order. By default all the built-in tasks as well as newly created task order is set to the DefaultOrder(a static property), in some special cases you might want to execute it before/after all the other tasks, in those cases you will assign the Order in the Task constructor. For Example, in Shrinkr, we want to run few background services when the all the tasks are executed, so we assigned the order as DefaultOrder + 1. Here is the code of that Task: public class ConfigureBackgroundServices : BootstrapperTask { private IEnumerable<IBackgroundService> backgroundServices; public ConfigureBackgroundServices() { Order = DefaultOrder + 1; } protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(IServiceLocator serviceLocator) { backgroundServices = serviceLocator.GetAllInstances<IBackgroundService>().ToList(); backgroundServices.Each(service => service.Start()); return TaskContinuation.Continue; } protected override void DisposeCore() { backgroundServices.Each(service => service.Stop()); } } That’s it for today, in the next post I will cover the custom service registration, so stay tuned.

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• Problems with Update Manager

  - by user65965

  Whenever I try to update with update manager I get the following errors: W:Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/Release Unable to find expected entry 'commercial/source/Sources' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file) W:Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-updates/Release Unable to find expected entry 'commercial/source/Sources' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file) W:Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-backports/Release Unable to find expected entry 'commercial/source/Sources' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file) W:Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise-security/Release Unable to find expected entry 'commercial/source/Sources' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file) W:Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/iefremov/ppa/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found W:Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/iefremov/ppa/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/binary-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found W:Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/iefremov/ppa/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found E:Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead. Any help would be much appreciated, thank you. Thank you very much Eliah. I'm still pretty new to Ubuntu. Here's the output I got from the terminal: No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Release: 12.04 Codename: precise # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main restricted commercial deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise restricted main commercial multiverse universe #Added by software-properties ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates main restricted commercial deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates restricted main commercial multiverse universe #Added by software-properties ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise universe deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise multiverse deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse commercial deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse commercial #Added by software-properties deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted commercial deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security restricted main commercial multiverse universe #Added by software-properties deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu oneiric partner deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main ## This is a 3rd party script to install and update Oracle Java deb http://www.duinsoft.nl/pkg debs all ## Sun-Java6-JRE deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main multiverse ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/askubuntu-tools-ppa-precise.list: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/askubuntu-tools/ppa/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/askubuntu-tools/ppa/ubuntu precise main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/askubuntu-tools-ppa-precise.list.save: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/askubuntu-tools/ppa/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/askubuntu-tools/ppa/ubuntu precise main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/effie-jayx-turpial-oneiric.list: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/effie-jayx/turpial/ubuntu precise main # disabled on upgrade to precise deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/effie-jayx/turpial/ubuntu precise main # disabled on upgrade to precise ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/effie-jayx-turpial-oneiric.list.distUpgrade: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/effie-jayx/turpial/ubuntu oneiric main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/effie-jayx/turpial/ubuntu oneiric main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/effie-jayx-turpial-oneiric.list.save: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/effie-jayx/turpial/ubuntu precise main # disabled on upgrade to precise deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/effie-jayx/turpial/ubuntu precise main # disabled on upgrade to precise ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list: # deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu oneiric-getdeb apps # disabled on upgrade to precise ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list.distUpgrade: deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu oneiric-getdeb apps ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list.save: # deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu oneiric-getdeb apps # disabled on upgrade to precise ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hotot-team-ppa-oneiric.list: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hotot-team/ppa/ubuntu precise main # disabled on upgrade to precise deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/hotot-team/ppa/ubuntu precise main # disabled on upgrade to precise ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hotot-team-ppa-oneiric.list.distUpgrade: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hotot-team/ppa/ubuntu oneiric main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/hotot-team/ppa/ubuntu oneiric main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hotot-team-ppa-oneiric.list.save: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/hotot-team/ppa/ubuntu precise main # disabled on upgrade to precise deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/hotot-team/ppa/ubuntu precise main # disabled on upgrade to precise ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/iefremov-ppa-precise.list: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/iefremov/ppa/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/iefremov/ppa/ubuntu precise main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/iefremov-ppa-precise.list.save: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/iefremov/ppa/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/iefremov/ppa/ubuntu precise main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jockey.list: deb http://www.openprinting.org/download/printdriver/debian/ lsb3.2 main-nonfree # disabled on upgrade to precise ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jockey.list.distUpgrade: deb http://www.openprinting.org/download/printdriver/debian/ lsb3.2 main-nonfree ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jockey.list.save: deb http://www.openprinting.org/download/printdriver/debian/ lsb3.2 main-nonfree # disabled on upgrade to precise ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexydesk-plexydesk-dailybuild-precise.list: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/plexydesk/plexydesk-dailybuild/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/plexydesk/plexydesk-dailybuild/ubuntu precise main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plexydesk-plexydesk-dailybuild-precise.list.save: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/plexydesk/plexydesk-dailybuild/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/plexydesk/plexydesk-dailybuild/ubuntu precise main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/precise-partner.list: deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner #Added by software-center ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/precise-partner.list.save: deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner #Added by software-center ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/private-ppa.launchpad.net_commercial-ppa-uploaders_crossover-pro_ubuntu.list: # deb https://justin-dormandy:[email protected]/commercial-ppa-uploaders/crossover-pro/ubuntu precise main #Added by software-center disabled on upgrade to precise ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/private-ppa.launchpad.net_commercial-ppa-uploaders_crossover-pro_ubuntu.list.distUpgrade: cat: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/private-ppa.launchpad.net_commercial-ppa-uploaders_crossover-pro_ubuntu.list.distUpgrade: Permission denied ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/private-ppa.launchpad.net_commercial-ppa-uploaders_crossover-pro_ubuntu.list.save: cat: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/private-ppa.launchpad.net_commercial-ppa-uploaders_crossover-pro_ubuntu.list.save: Permission denied ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/screenlets-ppa-precise.list: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/screenlets/ppa/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/screenlets/ppa/ubuntu precise main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/screenlets-ppa-precise.list.save: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/screenlets/ppa/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/screenlets/ppa/ubuntu precise main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/webupd8team-java-precise.list: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main ** /etc/apt/sources.list.d/webupd8team-java-precise.list.save: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main

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• Top 10 Reasons SQL Developer is Perfect for Oracle Beginners

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Learning new technologies can be daunting. If you’ve never used a Mac before, you’ll probably be a bit baffled at first. But, you’re probably at least coming from a desktop computing background (Windows), so you common frame of reference. But what if you’re just now learning to use a relational database? Yes, you’ve played with Access a bit, but now your employer or college instructor has charged you with becoming proficient with Oracle database. Here’s 10 reasons why I think Oracle SQL Developer is the perfect vehicle to help get you started. 1. It’s free No need to break into one of these… No start-up costs, no need to wrangle budget dollars from your company. Students don’t have any money after books and lab fees anyway. And most employees don’t like having to ask for ‘special’ software anyway. So avoid all of that and make sure the free stuff doesn’t suit your needs first. Upgrades are available on a regular base, also at no cost, and support is freely available via our public forums. 2. It will run pretty much anywhere Windows – check. OSX (Apple) – check. Unix – check. Linux – check. No need to start up a windows VM to run your Windows-only software in your lab machine. 3. Anyone can install it There’s no installer, no registry to be updated, no admin privs to be obtained. If you can download and extract files to your machine or USB storage device, you can run it. You can be up and running with SQL Developer in under 5 minutes. Here’s a video tutorial to see how to get started. 4. It’s ubiquitous I admit it, I learned a new word yesterday and I wanted an excuse to use it. SQL Developer’s everywhere. It’s had over 2,500,000 downloads in the past year, and is the one of the most downloaded items from OTN. This means if you need help, there’s someone sitting nearby you that can assist, and since they’re in the same tool as you, they’ll be speaking the same language. 5. Simple User Interface Up-up-down-down-Left-right-left-right-A-B-A-B-START will get you 30 lives, but you already knew that, right? You connect, you see your objects, you click on your objects. Or, you can use the worksheet to write your queries and programs in. There’s only one toolbar, and just a few buttons. If you’re like me, video games became less fun when each button had 6 action items mapped to it. I just want the good ole ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘SELECT’, and ‘START’ controls. If you’re new to Oracle, you shouldn’t have the double-workload of learning a new complicated tool as well. 6. It’s not a ‘black box’ Click through your objects, but also get the SQL that drives the GUI As you use the wizards to accomplish tasks for you, you can view the SQL statement being generated on your behalf. Just because you have a GUI, doesn’t mean you’re ceding your responsibility to learn the underlying code that makes the database work. 7. It’s four tools in one It’s not just a query tool. Maybe you need to design a data model first? Or maybe you need to migrate your Sybase ASE database to Oracle for a new project? Or maybe you need to create some reports? SQL Developer does all of that. So once you get comfortable with one part of the tool, the others will be much easier to pick up as your needs change. 8. Great learning resources available Videos, blogs, hands-on learning labs – you name it, we got it. Why wait for someone to train you, when you can train yourself at your own pace? 9. You can use it to teach yourself SQL Instead of being faced with the white-screen-of-panic, you can visually build your queries by dragging and dropping tables and views into the Query Builder. Yes, ‘just like Access’ – only better. And as you build your query, toggle to the Worksheet panel and see the SQL statement. Again, SQL Developer is not a black box. If you prefer to learn by trial and error, the worksheet will attempt to suggest the next bit of your SQL statement with it’s completion insight feature. And if you have syntax errors, those will be highlighted – just like your misspelled words in your favorite word processor. 10. It scales to match your experience level You won’t be a n00b forever. In 6-8 months, when you’re ready to tackle something a bit more complicated, like XML DB or Oracle Spatial, the tool is already there waiting on you. No need to go out and find the ‘advanced’ tool. 11. Wait, you said this was a ‘Top 10′ list? Yes. Yes, I did. I’m using this ‘trick’ to get you to continue reading because I’m going to say something you might not want to hear. Are you ready? Tools won’t replace experience, failure, hard work, and training. Just because you have the keys to the car, doesn’t mean you’re ready to head out on the race track. While SQL Developer reduces the barriers to entry, it does not completely remove them. Many experienced folks simply do not like tools. Rather, they don’t like the people that pick up tools without the know-how to properly use them. If you don’t understand what ‘TRUNCATE’ means, don’t try it out. Try picking up a book first. Of course, it’s very nice to have your own sandbox to play in, so you don’t upset the other children. That’s why I really like our Dev Days Database Virtual Box image. It’s your own database to learn and experiment with.

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• BNF – how to read syntax?

  - by Piotr Rodak

  A few days ago I read post of Jen McCown (blog) about her idea of blogging about random articles from Books Online. I think this is a great idea, even if Jen says that it’s not exciting or sexy. I noticed that many of the questions that appear on forums and other media arise from pure fact that people asking questions didn’t bother to read and understand the manual – Books Online. Jen came up with a brilliant, concise acronym that describes very well the category of posts about Books Online – RTFM365. I take liberty of tagging this post with the same acronym. I often come across questions of type – ‘Hey, i am trying to create a table, but I am getting an error’. The error often says that the syntax is invalid. 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT DEFAULT Guid_Default NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); 5 The answer is usually(1), ‘Ok, let me check it out.. Ah yes – you have to put name of the DEFAULT constraint before the type of constraint: 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT Guid_Default DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); Why many people stumble on syntax errors? Is the syntax poorly documented? No, the issue is, that correct syntax of the CREATE TABLE statement is documented very well in Books Online and is.. intimidating. Many people can be taken aback by the rather complex block of code that describes all intricacies of the statement. However, I don’t know better way of defining syntax of the statement or command. The notation that is used to describe syntax in Books Online is a form of Backus-Naur notatiion, called BNF for short sometimes. This is a notation that was invented around 50 years ago, and some say that even earlier, around 400 BC – would you believe? Originally it was used to define syntax of, rather ancient now, ALGOL programming language (in 1950’s, not in ancient India). If you look closer at the definition of the BNF, it turns out that the principles of this syntax are pretty simple. Here are a few bullet points: italic_text is a placeholder for your identifier <italic_text_in_angle_brackets> is a definition which is described further. [everything in square brackets] is optional {everything in curly brackets} is obligatory everything | separated | by | operator is an alternative ::= “assigns” definition to an identifier Yes, it looks like these six simple points give you the key to understand even the most complicated syntax definitions in Books Online. Books Online contain an article about syntax conventions – have you ever read it? Let’s have a look at fragment of the CREATE TABLE statement: 1 CREATE TABLE 2 [ database_name . [ schema_name ] . | schema_name . ] table_name 3 ( { <column_definition> | <computed_column_definition> 4 | <column_set_definition> } 5 [ <table_constraint> ] [ ,...n ] ) 6 [ ON { partition_scheme_name ( partition_column_name ) | filegroup 7 | "default" } ] 8 [ { TEXTIMAGE_ON { filegroup | "default" } ] 9 [ FILESTREAM_ON { partition_scheme_name | filegroup 10 | "default" } ] 11 [ WITH ( <table_option> [ ,...n ] ) ] 12 [ ; ] Let’s look at line 2 of the above snippet: This line uses rules 3 and 5 from the list. So you know that you can create table which has specified one of the following. just name – table will be created in default user schema schema name and table name – table will be created in specified schema database name, schema name and table name – table will be created in specified database, in specified schema database name, .., table name – table will be created in specified database, in default schema of the user. Note that this single line of the notation describes each of the naming schemes in deterministic way. The ‘optionality’ of the schema_name element is nested within database_name.. section. You can use either database_name and optional schema name, or just schema name – this is specified by the pipe character ‘|’. The error that user gets with execution of the first script fragment in this post is as follows: Msg 156, Level 15, State 1, Line 2 Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'DEFAULT'. Ok, let’s have a look how to find out the correct syntax. Line number 3 of the BNF fragment above contains reference to <column_definition>. Since column_definition is in angle brackets, we know that this is a reference to notion described further in the code. And indeed, the very next fragment of BNF contains syntax of the column definition. 1 <column_definition> ::= 2 column_name <data_type> 3 [ FILESTREAM ] 4 [ COLLATE collation_name ] 5 [ NULL | NOT NULL ] 6 [ 7 [ CONSTRAINT constraint_name ] DEFAULT constant_expression ] 8 | [ IDENTITY [ ( seed ,increment ) ] [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] 9 ] 10 [ ROWGUIDCOL ] [ <column_constraint> [ ...n ] ] 11 [ SPARSE ] Look at line 7 in the above fragment. It says, that the column can have a DEFAULT constraint which, if you want to name it, has to be prepended with [CONSTRAINT constraint_name] sequence. The name of the constraint is optional, but I strongly recommend you to make the effort of coming up with some meaningful name yourself. So the correct syntax of the CREATE TABLE statement from the beginning of the article is like this: 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT Guid_Default DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); That is practically everything you should know about BNF. I encourage you to study the syntax definitions for various statements and commands in Books Online, you can find really interesting things hidden there. Technorati Tags: SQL Server,t-sql,BNF,syntax   (1) No, my answer usually is a question – ‘What error message? What does it say?’. You’d be surprised to know how many people think I can go through time and space and look at their screen at the moment they received the error.

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• Sending Messages to SignalR Hubs from the Outside

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction You are by now probably familiarized with SignalR, Microsoft’s API for real-time web functionality. This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest products Microsoft has released in recent time. Usually, people login to a site and enter some page which is connected to a SignalR hub. Then they can send and receive messages – not just text messages, mind you – to other users in the same hub. Also, the server can also take the initiative to send messages to all or a specified subset of users on its own, this is known as server push. The normal flow is pretty straightforward, Microsoft has done a great job with the API, it’s clean and quite simple to use. And for the latter – the server taking the initiative – it’s also quite simple, just involves a little more work. The Problem The API for sending messages can be achieved from inside a hub – an instance of the Hub class – which is something that we don’t have if we are the server and we want to send a message to some user or group of users: the Hub instance is only instantiated in response to a client message. The Solution It is possible to acquire a hub’s context from outside of an actual Hub instance, by calling GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<T>(). This API allows us to: Broadcast messages to all connected clients (possibly excluding some); Send messages to a specific client; Send messages to a group of clients. So, we have groups and clients, each is identified by a string. Client strings are called connection ids and group names are free-form, given by us. The problem with client strings is, we do not know how these map to actual users. One way to achieve this mapping is by overriding the Hub’s OnConnected and OnDisconnected methods and managing the association there. Here’s an example: 1: public class MyHub : Hub 2: { 3: private static readonly IDictionary<String, ISet<String>> users = new ConcurrentDictionary<String, ISet<String>>(); 4:  5: public static IEnumerable<String> GetUserConnections(String username) 6: { 7: ISet<String> connections; 8:  9: users.TryGetValue(username, out connections); 10:  11: return (connections ?? Enumerable.Empty<String>()); 12: } 13:  14: private static void AddUser(String username, String connectionId) 15: { 16: ISet<String> connections; 17:  18: if (users.TryGetValue(username, out connections) == false) 19: { 20: connections = users[username] = new HashSet<String>(); 21: } 22:  23: connections.Add(connectionId); 24: } 25:  26: private static void RemoveUser(String username, String connectionId) 27: { 28: users[username].Remove(connectionId); 29: } 30:  31: public override Task OnConnected() 32: { 33: AddUser(this.Context.Request.User.Identity.Name, this.Context.ConnectionId); 34: return (base.OnConnected()); 35: } 36:  37: public override Task OnDisconnected() 38: { 39: RemoveUser(this.Context.Request.User.Identity.Name, this.Context.ConnectionId); 40: return (base.OnDisconnected()); 41: } 42: } As you can see, I am using a static field to store the mapping between a user and its possibly many connections – for example, multiple open browser tabs or even multiple browsers accessing the same page with the same login credentials. The user identity, as is normal in .NET, is obtained from the IPrincipal which in SignalR hubs case is stored in Context.Request.User. Of course, this property will only have a meaningful value if we enforce authentication. Another way to go is by creating a group for each user that connects: 1: public class MyHub : Hub 2: { 3: public override Task OnConnected() 4: { 5: this.Groups.Add(this.Context.ConnectionId, this.Context.Request.User.Identity.Name); 6: return (base.OnConnected()); 7: } 8:  9: public override Task OnDisconnected() 10: { 11: this.Groups.Remove(this.Context.ConnectionId, this.Context.Request.User.Identity.Name); 12: return (base.OnDisconnected()); 13: } 14: } In this case, we will have a one-to-one equivalence between users and groups. All connections belonging to the same user will fall in the same group. So, if we want to send messages to a user from outside an instance of the Hub class, we can do something like this, for the first option – user mappings stored in a static field: 1: public void SendUserMessage(String username, String message) 2: { 3: var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<MyHub>(); 4: 5: foreach (String connectionId in HelloHub.GetUserConnections(username)) 6: { 7: context.Clients.Client(connectionId).sendUserMessage(message); 8: } 9: } And for using groups, its even simpler: 1: public void SendUserMessage(String username, String message) 2: { 3: var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<MyHub>(); 4:  5: context.Clients.Group(username).sendUserMessage(message); 6: } Using groups has the advantage that the IHubContext interface returned from GetHubContext has direct support for groups, no need to send messages to individual connections. Of course, you can wrap both mapping options in a common API, perhaps exposed through IoC. One example of its interface might be: 1: public interface IUserToConnectionMappingService 2: { 3: //associate and dissociate connections to users 4:  5: void AddUserConnection(String username, String connectionId); 6:  7: void RemoveUserConnection(String username, String connectionId); 8: } SignalR has built-in dependency resolution, by means of the static GlobalHost.DependencyResolver property: 1: //for using groups (in the Global class) 2: GlobalHost.DependencyResolver.Register(typeof(IUserToConnectionMappingService), () => new GroupsMappingService()); 3:  4: //for using a static field (in the Global class) 5: GlobalHost.DependencyResolver.Register(typeof(IUserToConnectionMappingService), () => new StaticMappingService()); 6:  7: //retrieving the current service (in the Hub class) 8: var mapping = GlobalHost.DependencyResolver.Resolve<IUserToConnectionMappingService>(); Now all you have to do is implement GroupsMappingService and StaticMappingService with the code I shown here and change SendUserMessage method to rely in the dependency resolver for the actual implementation. Stay tuned for more SignalR posts!

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• How Mary Meeker’s Latest Findings May Make You Re-Imagine Commerce

  - by Brenna Johnson-Oracle

  0 0 1 954 5439 Endeca Technologies 45 12 6381 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Today, Mary Meeker released her highly anticipated annual “Internet Trends” presentation for 2014. All 164 slides are jam-packed with pretty much everything you need to know about the state of the Internet. And as luck would have it, Oracle is staying ahead of these trends (but we’ll talk about that later). There were a few surprises, some stats to solidify what you likely already know, and Meeker’s novel observations about where we are all going. What interested me the most is not only how people are engaging in their personal lives, but how they engage with brands. As you could probably predict, Internet usage growth is slowing while tablet user and mobile data traffic growth continue their meteoric rise around the globe, with tremendous growth in underpenetrated markets like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. Now hold those the “Internet is dead” comments. Keep in mind there’s still plenty of room to grow, and a multiscreen model is Meeker’s vision for our future. Despite 1.5x YOY growth for mobile traffic, mobile still only makes up about 23% of all traffic today. With tablet shipments easily outpacing figures for PCs even at their height (in 2007), mobile will only continue on it’s path, but won’t be everything to everyone. Mobile won’t replace every touchpoint, it’s just created our shorter attention spans and demand for simpler, more personal experiences. As Meeker points out TVs, tablets, PCs, and smartphones are used for different activities at present, but lines will blur (for example, 84% of smartphones owners use their device while watching TV). Day-to-day activities are being re-imagining through simple, beautiful user experiences. It seems like every day I discover a new way a brand/site/app made the most mundane or mounting task enjoyable and frictionless – and I’m not alone. Meeker points out the evolution of how we do everything from how we communicate, get information, use money, meet someone, get places, order a meal, and consume media is all done through new user interfaces that make day-to-day tasks simpler. This movement has caused just about everyone’s patience for a poor UX to take a nosedive. And it’s not just the digital user experience, technology is making a lot of people’s offline lives easier, and less expensive. Today 47% of online shopping utilizes free shipping— nearly half. And Meeker predicts same day local delivery will be the “next big thing” (and you can take a guess on who will own that). Content, Community and Commerce creates the “Internet Trifecta.” Meeker pointed out that when content, communities and commerce occur in a single experience it’s embraced by consumers, which translates to big dollars for brands. The magic happens when consumers can get inspired, research, and buy in a single experience. As the buying cycle has changed and touchpoints (Web, mobile, social, store) are no longer tied to “roles” or steps in the customer journey, brands must make all experiences (content and commerce) available in a single, adaptable experience. (We at Oracle Commerce have a lot to say on this topic – stay tuned!) And in what Meeker calls the “biggest re-imagination of all:” consumers enabled with smartphones and sensors are creating troves of findable and sharable data, which she says is in the early stages, by growing rapidly. She notes that transparency and patterns of consumers with this hardware (FYI - there are up to 10 sensors embedded in smartphones now) has created a Big Data treasure chest to be mined to improve business and the life of the consumer. The opportunities are endless. So what does it all mean for a company doing business online? Start thinking about how you can: Re-imagine your experience. Not your online experience and your mobile experience and your social experience – your overall experience. When consumers can research, buy, and advocate from anywhere (and their attention spans are at an all-time low) channels don’t exist. Enable simple and beautiful interactions informed by all of the online and offline data you leverage across your enterprise. Ethically leverage the endless supply of data (user generated content, clicks, purchases, in-store behavior, social activity) to make experiences more beautiful, more accurate, and more personalized (not to mention, more lucrative for you). Re-imagine content and commerce. Content and commerce must co-exist in a single destination where shoppers can get inspired, explore, research, share, and purchase in a collective experience. Think of how you can deliver an experience where all types of experiences (brand stories and commerce) adapt to every customer need. (Look for more on this topic coming soon). Re-imagine your reach. Look to Meeker’s findings to see how the global appetite for digital experiences is growing, but under-served in many places (i.e.: India, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Philippines, etc.). Growing your online business to a new geography doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch or having an entirely new team manage the new endeavor. Expand using what you’ve already built in a multisite framework, with global language support. And of course, make sure it’s optimized for mobile! Re-imagine the possible. After every Meeker report, I’m always left with the thought “we are just at the beginning.” Everyday there is more data, more possibilities, more online consumers, and more opportunities to use new latest technology to get closer to your customers and be more successful. There’s a lot going on in our Product Development and Product Innovations groups to automate innovation for our customers, so that they can continue to stay ahead of these trends, without disrupting their business. Check out a recent interview with our Innovations Team on some of these new possibilities. Staying on track despite the seemingly endless possibilities out there is the hard part. Prioritizing where you will focus based on your unique brand promise, customer and goals is what you do best. To learn how Oracle Commerce can help your business achieve your goals check out oracle.com/commerce. Check out Meeker’s entire report here.

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• I have Oracle SQL Developer Installed, Now What?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  If you’re here because you downloaded a copy of Oracle SQL Developer and now you need help connecting to a database, then you’re in the right place. I’ll show you what you need to get up and going so you can finish your homework, teach yourself Oracle database, or get ready for that job interview. You’ll need about 30 minutes to set everything up…and about 5 years to become proficient with Oracle Oracle Database come with SQL Developer but SQL Developer doesn’t include a database If you install Oracle database, it includes a copy of SQL Developer. If you’re running that copy of SQL Developer, please take a second to upgrade now, as it is WAY out of date. But I’m here to talk to the folks that have downloaded SQL Developer and want to know what to do next. You’ve got it running. You see this ‘Connection’ dialog, and… Where am I connecting to, and who as? You NEED a database Installing SQL Developer does not give you a database. So you’re going to need to install Oracle and create a database, or connect to a database that is already up and running somewhere. Basically you need to know the following: where is this database, what’s it called, and what port is the listener running on? The Default Connection properties in SQL Developer These default settings CAN work, but ONLY if you have installed Oracle Database Express Edition (XE). Localhost is a network alias for 127.0.0.1 which is an IP address that maps to the ‘local’ machine, or the machine you are reading this blog post on. The listener is a service that runs on the server and handles connections for the databases on that machine. You can run a database without a listener and you can run a listener without a database, but you can’t connect to a database on a different server unless both that database and listener are up and running. Each listener ‘listens’ on one or more ports, you need to know the port number for each connection. The default port is 1521, but 1522 is often pretty common. I know all of this sounds very complicated Oracle is a very sophisticated piece of software. It’s not analogous to downloading a mobile phone app and and using it 10 seconds later. It’s not like installing Office/Access either – it requires services, environment setup, kernel tweaks, etc. However. Normally an administrator will setup and install Oracle, create the database, and configure the listener for everyone else to use. They’ll often also setup the connection details for everyone via a ‘TNSNAMES.ORA’ file. This file contains a list of database connection details for folks to browse – kind of like an Oracle database phoneboook. If someone has given you a TNSNAMES.ORA file, or setup your machine to have access to a TNSNAMES file, then you can just switch to the ‘TNS’ connection type, and use the dropdown to select the database you want to connect to. Then you don’t have to worry about the server names, database names, and the port numbers. ORCL – that sounds promising! ORCL is the default SID when creating a new database with the Database Creation Assistant (DBCA). It’s just me, and I need help! No administrator, no database, no nothing. What do you do? You have a few options: Buy a copy of Oracle and download, install, and create a database Download and install XE (FREE!) Download, import, and run our Developer Days Hands-on-Lab (FREE!) If you’re a student (or anyone else) with little to no experience with Oracle, then I recommend the third option. Oracle Technology Network Developer Day: Hands-on Database Application Development Lab The OTN lab runs on a A Virtual Box image which contains: 11gR2 Enterprise Edition copy of Oracle a database and listener running for you to connect to lots of demo data for you to play with SQL Developer installed and ready to connect Some browser based labs you can step through to learn Oracle You download the image, you download and install Virtual Box (also FREE!), then you IMPORT the image you previously downloaded. You then ‘Start’ the image. It will boot a copy of Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL), start your database, and all that jazz. You can then start up and run SQL Developer inside the image OR you can connect to the database running on the image using the copy of SQL Developer you installed on your host machine. Setup Port Forwarding to Make It Easy to Connect From Your Host When you start the image, it will be assigned an IP address. Depending on what network adapter you select in the image preferences, you may get something that can get out to the internet from your image, something your host machine can see and connect to, or something that kind of just lives out there in a vacuum. You want to avoid the ‘vacuum’ option – unless you’re OK with running SQL Developer inside the Linux image. Open the Virtual Box image properties and go to the Networking options. We’re going to setup port forwarding. This will tell your machine that anything that happens on port 1521 (the default Oracle Listener port), should just go to the image’s port 1521. So I can connect to ‘localhost’ and it will magically get transferred to the image that is running. Oracle Virtual Box Port Forwarding 1521 listener database Now You Just Need a Username and Password The default passwords on this image are all ‘oracle’ – so you can connect as SYS, HR, or whatever – just use ‘oracle’ as the password. The Linux passowrds are all ‘oracle’ too, so you can login as ‘root’ or as ‘oracle’ in the Linux desktop. Connect! Connect as HR to your Oracle database running on the OTN Developer Days Virtual Box image If you’re connecting to someone else’s database, you need to ask the person that manages that environment to create for you an account. Don’t try to ‘guess’ or ‘figure out’ what the username and password is. Introduce yourself, explain your situation, and ask kindly for access. This is your first test – can you connect? I know it’s hard to get started with Oracle. There are however many things we offer to make this easier. You’ll need to do a bit of RTM first though. Once you know what’s required, you will be much more likely to succeed. Of course, if you need help, you know where to find me

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• Using Unity – Part 2

  - by nmarun

  In the first part of this series, we created a simple project and learned how to implement IoC pattern using Unity. In this one, I’ll show how you can instantiate other types that implement our IProduct interface. One place where this one would want to use this feature is to create mock types for testing purposes. Alright, let’s dig in. I added another class – Product2.cs  to the ProductModel project. 1: public class Product2 : IProduct 2: { 3: public string Name { get; set;} 4: public Category Category { get; set; } 5: public DateTime MfgDate { get;set; } 6:  7: public Product2() 8: { 9: Name = "Canon Digital Rebel XTi"; 10: Category = new Category {Name = "Electronics", SubCategoryName = "Digital Cameras"}; 11: MfgDate = DateTime.Now; 12: } 13:  14: public string WriteProductDetails() 15: { 16: return string.Format("Name: {0}<br/>Category: {1}<br/>Mfg Date: {2}", 17: Name, Category, MfgDate.ToShortDateString()); 18: } 19: } Highlights of this class are that it implements IProduct interface and it has some different properties than the Product class. The Category class looks like below: 1: public class Category 2: { 3: public string Name { get; set; } 4: public string SubCategoryName { get; set; } 5:  6: public override string ToString() 7: { 8: return string.Format("{0} - {1}", Name, SubCategoryName); 9: } 10: } We’ll go to our web.config file to add the configuration information about this new class – Product2 that we created. Let’s first add a typeAlias element. 1: <typeAlias alias="Product2" type="ProductModel.Product2, ProductModel"/> That’s all that is needed for us to get an instance of Product2 in our application. I have a new button added to the .aspx page and the click event of this button is where all the magic happens: 1: private IUnityContainer unityContainer; 2: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 3: { 4: unityContainer = Application["UnityContainer"] as IUnityContainer; 5: 6: if (unityContainer == null) 7: { 8: productDetailsLabel.Text = "ERROR: Unity Container not populated in Global.asax.<p />"; 9: } 10: else 11: { 12: if (!IsPostBack) 13: { 14: IProduct productInstance = unityContainer.Resolve<IProduct>(); 15: productDetailsLabel.Text = productInstance.WriteProductDetails(); 16: } 17: } 18: } 19:  20: protected void Product2Button_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 21: { 22: unityContainer.RegisterType<IProduct, Product2>(); 23: IProduct product2Instance = unityContainer.Resolve<IProduct>(); 24: productDetailsLabel.Text = product2Instance.WriteProductDetails(); 25: } The unityContainer instance is set in the Page_Load event. Line 22 in the click event of the Product2Button registers a type mapping in the container. In English, this means that when unityContainer tries to resolve for IProduct, it gets an instance of Product2. Once this code runs, following output is rendered: There’s another way of doing this. You can resolve an instance of the requested type with a name from the container. We’ll have to update the container element of our web.config file to include the following: 1: <container name="unityContainer"> 2: <types> 3: <type type="IProduct" mapTo="Product"/> 4: <!-- Named mapping for IProduct to Product --> 5: <type type="IProduct" mapTo="Product" name="LegacyProduct" /> 6: <!-- Named mapping for IProduct to Product2 --> 7: <type type="IProduct" mapTo="Product2" name="NewProduct" /> 8: </types> 9: </container> I’ve added a Dropdownlist and a button to the design page: 1: <asp:DropDownList ID="ModelTypesList" runat="server"> 2: <asp:ListItem Text="Legacy Product" Value="LegacyProduct" /> 3: <asp:ListItem Text="New Product" Value="NewProduct" /> 4: </asp:DropDownList> 5: <br /> 6: <asp:Button ID="SelectedModelButton" Text="Get Selected Instance" runat="server" 7: onclick="SelectedModelButton_Click" /> 1: protected void SelectedModelButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: // get the selected value: LegacyProduct or NewProduct 4: string modelType = ModelTypesList.SelectedValue; 5: // pass the modelType to the Resolve method 6: IProduct customModel = unityContainer.Resolve<IProduct>(modelType); 7: productDetailsLabel.Text = customModel.WriteProductDetails(); 8: } Pretty straight forward right? The only thing to note here is that the values in the dropdownlist item need to match the name attribute of the type. Depending on what you select, you’ll get an instance of either the Product class or the Product2 class and the corresponding WriteProductDetails() method is called. Now you see, how either of these methods can be used to create mock objects your the test project. See the code here. I’ll continue to share more of Unity in the next blog.

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• T4 Template error - Assembly Directive cannot locate referenced assembly in Visual Studio 2010 proje

  - by CodeSniper

  I ran into the following error recently in Visual Studio 2010 while trying to port Phil Haack’s excellent T4CSS template which was originally built for Visual Studio 2008.   The Problem Error Compiling transformation: Metadata file 'dotless.Core' could not be found In “T4 speak”, this simply means that you have an Assembly directive in your T4 template but the T4 engine was not able to locate or load the referenced assembly. In the case of the T4CSS Template, this was a showstopper for making it work in Visual Studio 2010. On a side note: The T4CSS template is a sweet little wrapper to allow you to use DotLessCss to generate static .css files from .less files rather than using their default HttpHandler or command-line tool.    If you haven't tried DotLessCSS yet, go check it out now!  In short, it is a tool that allows you to templatize and program your CSS files so that you can use variables, expressions, and mixins within your CSS which enables rapid changes and a lot of developer-flexibility as you evolve your CSS and UI. Back to our regularly scheduled program… Anyhow, this post isn't about DotLessCss, its about the T4 Templates and the errors I ran into when converting them from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010. In VS2010, there were quite a few changes to the T4 Template Engine; most were excellent changes, but this one bit me with T4CSS: “Project assemblies are no longer used to resolve template assembly directives.” In VS2008, if you wanted to reference a custom assembly in your T4 Template (.tt file) you would simply right click on your project, choose Add Reference and select that assembly.  Afterwards you were allowed to use the following syntax in your T4 template to tell it to look at the local references: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core.dll" #> This told the engine to look in the “usual place” for the assembly, which is your project references. However, this is exactly what they changed in VS2010.  They now basically sandbox the T4 Engine to keep your T4 assemblies separate from your project assemblies.  This can come in handy if you want to support different versions of an assembly referenced both by your T4 templates and your project. Who broke the build?  Oh, Microsoft Did! In our case, this change causes a problem since the templates are no longer compatible when upgrading to VS 2010 – thus its a breaking change.  So, how do we make this work in VS 2010? Luckily, Microsoft now offers several options for referencing assemblies from T4 Templates: GAC your assemblies and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name Use a hard-coded Fully Qualified UNC path Copy assembly to Visual Studio "Public Assemblies Folder" and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name.  Use or Define a Windows Environment Variable to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Use a Visual Studio Macro to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Option #1 & 2 were already supported in Visual Studio 2008, so if you want to keep your templates compatible with both Visual Studio versions, then you would have to adopt one of these approaches. Yakkety Yak, use the GAC! Option #1 requires an additional pre-build step to GAC the referenced assembly, which could be a pain.  But, if you go that route, then after you GAC, all you need is a simple type name or namespace reference such as: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Hard Coding aint that hard! The other option of using hard-coded paths in Option #2 is pretty impractical in most situations since each developer would have to use the same local project folder paths, or modify this setting each time for their local machines as well as for production deployment.  However, if you want to go that route, simply use the following assembly directive style: <#@ assembly name="C:\Code\Lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> Lets go Public! Option #3, the Visual Studio Public Assemblies Folder, is the recommended place to put commonly used tools and libraries that are only needed for Visual Studio.  Think of it like a VS-only GAC.  This is likely the best place for something like dotLessCSS and is my preferred solution.  However, you will need to either use an installer or a pre-build action to copy the assembly to the right folder location.   Normally this is located at:  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies Once you have copied your assembly there, you use the type name or namespace syntax again: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Save the Environment! Option #4, using a Windows Environment Variable, is interesting for enterprise use where you may have standard locations for files, but less useful for demo-code, frameworks, and products where you don't have control over the local system.  The syntax for including a environment variable in your assembly directive looks like the following, just as you would expect: <#@ assembly name="%mypath%\dotless.Core.dll" #> “mypath” is a Windows environment variable you setup that points to some fully qualified UNC path on your system.  In the right situation this can be a great solution such as one where you use a msi installer for deployment, or where you have a pre-existing environment variable you can re-use. OMG Macros! Finally, Option #5 is a very nice option if you want to keep your T4 template’s assembly reference local and relative to the project or solution without muddying-up your dev environment or GAC with extra deployments.  An example looks like this: <#@ assembly name="$(SolutionDir)lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> In this example, I’m using the “SolutionDir” VS macro so I can reference an assembly in a “/lib” folder at the root of the solution.   This is just one of the many macros you can use.  If you are familiar with creating Pre/Post-build Event scripts, you can use its dialog to look at all of the different VS macros available. This option gives the best solution for local assemblies without the hassle of extra installers or other setup before the build.   However, its still not compatible with Visual Studio 2008, so if you have a T4 Template you want to use with both, then you may have to create multiple .tt files, one for each IDE version, or require the developer to set a value in the .tt file manually.   I’m not sure if T4 Templates support any form of compiler switches like “#if (VS2010)”  statements, but it would definitely be nice in this case to switch between this option and one of the ones more compatible with VS 2008. Conclusion As you can see, we went from 3 options with Visual Studio 2008, to 5 options (plus one problem) with Visual Studio 2010.  As a whole, I think the changes are great, but the short-term growing pains during the migration may be annoying until we get used to our new found power. Hopefully this all made sense and was helpful to you.  If nothing else, I’ll just use it as a reference the next time I need to port a T4 template to Visual Studio 2010.  Happy T4 templating, and “May the fourth be with you!”

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 30, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 30, 2012Popular ReleasesCAPTCHA Solver: Initial Release: This is the initial Release :) Still very much a WIP.MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.17: Reccomended update to 2.2.16 Changelog for 2.2.17 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Fixed bugs around thread synchronization with new remote model (fixes cause the app to crash or hang) 2. Updated UPnP code base, faster and more reliable now 3. Now you can get audio/video properties for multiple files on main page. Selected multiple files and right click, all selected files properties will be shown. 4. Fix a bug, not able to enter a conversion task name in the GUIAggravation: Version 1.0: This version 1.0 release is pretty stable. You need the Silverlight 4 runtime, developer tools, and Experssion Blend 4 installed.Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.1: See the KeePass Plugin Step By Step Guide for instructions on how to install the plugin. Changes Built against KeePass 2.20Windows 8 Toolkit - Charts and More: Beta 1.0: The First Compiled Version of my LibraryPDF.NET: PDF.NET.Ver4.5-OpenSourceCode: PDF.NET Ver4.5 ????，????Web??????。 PDF.NET Ver4.5 Open Source Code,include a sample Web application project.D3 Loot Tracker: 1.4: Session name is displayed in the UI. Changes data directory for clickonce deployment so that sessions files are persisted between versions. Added a delete button in the sessions list window. Allow opening of the sessions local folder from the session list widow. Display the session name in the main window Ability to select which diablo process to hook up to when pressing new () function BUT only if multi-process support is selected in the generals settings tab menu. Session picker...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta: Visual Ribbon Editor 1.1 Beta What's New: Fixed scrolling issue in UnHide dialog Added support for connecting via ADFS / IFD Added support for more than one action for a button Added support for empty StringParameter for Javascript functions Fixed bug in rule CrmClientTypeRule when selecting Outlook option Extended Prefix field in New Button dialogVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.7: Synthesis since 0.6 : ePUB : Complete refactoring Add a new dedicated feed viewer for opds stream PDF conversion : improved with image merge Make all backstage panel scrollable Integrate the new AvalonDock 2 library. Support multi-document. Library explorer and Table of content are now toolboxes Designer for dynamic books is now mvvm and much better New BrowserForControl Customized xps viewer to suppress toolbars and bind it to cbr commands Add quick start manual and button ...menu4web: menu4web 1.0 - free javascript menu for web sites: menu4web 1.0 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 21 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Rawr: Rawr 5.0.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.26: The zh-CN issue has been solved. We also add a project management module.VidCoder: 1.4.1 Beta: Updated to HandBrake 4971. This should fix some issues with stuck PGS subtitles. Fixed build break which prevented pre-compiled XML serializers from showing up. Fixed problem where a preset would get errantly marked as modified when re-opening the encode settings window or importing a new preset.Snake!: Snake 1.0: Version 1 StablePaging SharePoint ListItems using listitems position: Paginglistitems V1.0: This is a console application which has two methods both on CSOM and SOM to display the listitems in a paged manner.SharePoint Move Discussion Threads: SharePoint Move Discussion Threads ver 0.1: ver 0.1NTCPMSG: V1.1.1.0: increase the performance. Support .net framework 4.0.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.2: 2012.09.23 Ver5.7.2 (1)InetTest?? (2)HTTP?????????????????100???????????New Projects2D Sprite Editor: This is a 2d sprite editor. Import your sprite sheet, trace your animations frame and export the coordinates points in a simple txt file, ready to import.caifenweb1: test project.CatchThatException: This is a small logging library We created at developerpath.com to help us log exceptions. It write it to a text file and you can easilay open that txt.FsxWs - WebServices for Microsoft FSX: WebServices for MS Flight Simulator. Get flights data as JSON, KML. !! Still in SetUp phase - be patient !!GetTPB: Some training in downloading and parsing web pages, with multithreading too.JSON-RPC Client Generator (for XBMC): The goal of this project is to provide a .Net client for the XBMC JSONRPC API. The main part is not XBMC dependent and may be used for any JSON-RPC client.matlab-silhouette-pose-wtf: Whatevermfp: this is random codeMVC Grid: MVC Grid ExampleMyWebSocketTry: sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssNetduino Console: Netduino Console is an interface with built in messaging layers that allows you as a developer to dynamically create plugins following a provided interface to iSharePoint ASP.NET Verifier: Project will allow to verify SharePoint 2010 components using ASP.NET web applicationSharepoint Custom Upload: This is a SharePoint solution that allows an administrator to customize the upload page individually for each document library in a site.. It allows you to makeWinWeb Browser Deluxe: WinWeb Browser Deluxe es un navegador web de código abierto basado en Internet Explorer hecho en Visual Basic .NET. Descargalo ya!writethatoutput: This is the official release page for WriteThatOutPut from developerpath.com

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• South Florida Code Camp 2010 &ndash; VI &ndash; 2010-02-27

  - by Dave Noderer

  Catching up after our sixth code camp here in the Ft Lauderdale, FL area. Website at: http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp. For the 5th time, DeVry University hosted the event which makes everything else really easy! Statistics from 2010 South Florida Code Camp: 848 registered (we use Microsoft Group Events) ~ 600 attended (516 took name badges) 64 speakers (including speaker idol) 72 sessions 12 parallel tracks Food 400 waters 600 sodas 900 cups of coffee (it was cold!) 200 pounds of ice 200 pizza's 10 large salad trays 900 mouse pads Photos on facebook Dave Noderer: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=190812&id=693530361 Joe Healy: http://www.facebook.com/devfish?ref=mf#!/album.php?aid=202787&id=720054950 Will Strohl:http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=2045553&id=1046966128&ref=mf Veronica Gonzalez: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=150954&id=672439484 Florida Speaker Idol One of the sessions at code camp was the South Florida Regional speaker idol competition. After user group level competitions there are five competitors. I acted as MC and score keeper while Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell, John Dunagan and Shervin Shakibi were judges. This statewide competition is being run by Roy Lawsen in Lakeland and the winner, Jeff Truman from Naples will move on to the state finals to be held at the Orlando Code Camp on 3/27/2010: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/. Each speaker has 10 minutes. The participants were: Alex Koval Jeff Truman Jared Nielsen Chris Catto Venkat Narayanasamy They all did a great job and I’m working with each to make sure they don’t stop there and start speaking at meetings. Thanks to everyone involved! Volunteers As always events like this don’t happen without a lot of help! The key people were: Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell – DeVry For the months leading up to the event, Ed collects all of the swag, books, etc and stores them. He holds meeting with various DeVry departments to coordinate the day, he works with the students in the days  before code camp to stuff bags, print signs, arrange tables and visit BJ’s for our supplies (I go and pay but have a small car!). And of course the day of the event he is there at 5:30 am!! We took two SUV’s to BJ’s, i was really worried that the 36 cases of water were going to break his rear axle! He also helps with the students and works very hard before and after the event. Rainer Haberman – Speakers and Volunteer of the Year Rainer has helped over the past couple of years but this time he took full control of arranging the tracks. I did some preliminary work solicitation speakers but he took over all communications after that. We have tried various organizations around speakers, chair per track, central team but having someone paying attention to the details is definitely the way to go! This was the first year I did not have to jump in at the last minute and re-arrange everything. There were lots of kudo’s from the speakers too saying they felt it was more organized than they have experienced in the past from any code camp. Thanks Rainer! Ray Alamonte – Book Swap We saw the idea of a book swap from the Alabama Code Camp and thought we would give it a try. Ray jumped in and took control. The idea was to get people to bring their old technical books to swap or for others to buy. You got a ticket for each book you brought that you could then turn in to buy another book. If you did not have a ticket you could buy a book for $1. Net proceeds were $153 which I rounded up and donated to the Red Cross. There is plenty going on in Haiti and Chile! I don’t think we really got a count of how many books came in. I many cases the books barely hit the table before being picked up again. At the end we were left with a dozen books which we donated to the DeVry library. A great success we will definitely do again! Jace Weiss / Ratchelen Hut – Coffee and Snacks Wow, this was an eye opener. In past years a few of us would struggle to give some attention to coffee, snacks, etc. But it was always tenuous and always ended up running out of coffee. In the past we have tried buying Dunkin Donuts coffee, renting urns, borrowing urns, etc. This year I actually purchased 2 – 100 cup Westbend commercial brewers plus a couple of small urns (30 and 60 cup we used for decaf). We got them both started early (although i forgot to push the on button on one!) and primed it with 10 boxes of Joe from Dunkin. then Jace and Rachelen took over.. once a batch was brewed they would refill the boxes, keep the area clean and at one point were filling cups. We never ran out of coffee and served a few hundred more than last  year. We did look but next year I’ll get a large insulated (like gatorade) dispensing container. It all went very smoothly and having help focused on that one area was a big win. Thanks Jace and Rachelen! Ken & Shirley Golding / Roberta Barbosa – Registration Ken & Shirley showed up and took over registration. This year we printed small name tags for everyone registered which was great because it is much easier to remember someone’s name when they are labeled! In any case it went the smoothest it has ever gone. All three were actively pulling people through the registration, answering questions, directing them to bags and information very quickly. I did not see that there was too big a line at any time. Thanks!! Scott Katarincic / Vishal Shukla – Website For the 3rd?? year in a row, Scott was in charge of the website starting in August or September when I start on code camp. He handles all the requests, makes changes to the site and admin. I think two years ago he wrote all the backend administration and tunes it and the website a bit but things are pretty stable. The only thing I do is put up the sponsors. It is a big pressure off of me!! Thanks Scott! Vishal jumped into the web end this year and created a new Silverlight agenda page to replace the old ajax page. We will continue to enhance this but it is definitely a good step forward! Thanks! Alex Funkhouser – T-shirts/Mouse pads/tables/sponsors Alex helps in many areas. He helps me bring in sponsors and handles all the logistics for t-shirts, sponsor tables and this year the mouse pads. He is also a key person to help promote the event as well not to mention the after after party which I did not attend and don’t want to know much about! Students There were a number of student volunteers but don’t have all of their names. But thanks to them, they stuffed bags, patrolled pizza and helped with moving things around. Sponsors We had a bunch of great sponsors which allowed us to feed people and give a way a lot of great swag. Our major sponsors of DeVry, Microsoft (both DPE and UGSS), Infragistics, Telerik, SQL Share (End to End, SQL Saturdays), and Interclick are very much appreciated. The other sponsors Applied Innovations (also supply code camp hosting), Ultimate Software (a great local SW company), Linxter (reliable cloud messaging we are lucky to have here!), Mediascend (a media startup), SoftwareFX (another local SW company we are happy to have back participating in CC), CozyRoc (if you do SSIS, check them out), Arrow Design (local DNN and Silverlight experts),Boxes and Arrows (a local SW consulting company) and Robert Half. One thing we did this year besides a t-shirt was a mouse pad. I like it because it will be around for a long time on many desks. After much investigation and years of using mouse pad’s I’ve determined that the 1/8” fabric top is the best and that is what we got!   So now I get a break for a few months before starting again!

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• Class-Level Model Validation with EF Code First and ASP.NET MVC 3

  - by ScottGu

  Earlier this week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library.  In my blog post a few days ago I talked about a few of the improvements introduced with the new CTP5 build.  Automatic support for enforcing DataAnnotation validation attributes on models was one of the improvements I discussed.  It provides a pretty easy way to enable property-level validation logic within your model layer. You can apply validation attributes like [Required], [Range], and [RegularExpression] – all of which are built-into .NET 4 – to your model classes in order to enforce that the model properties are valid before they are persisted to a database.  You can also create your own custom validation attributes (like this cool [CreditCard] validator) and have them be automatically enforced by EF Code First as well.  This provides a really easy way to validate property values on your models.  I showed some code samples of this in action in my previous post. Class-Level Model Validation using IValidatableObject DataAnnotation attributes provides an easy way to validate individual property values on your model classes.  Several people have asked - “Does EF Code First also support a way to implement class-level validation methods on model objects, for validation rules than need to span multiple property values?”  It does – and one easy way you can enable this is by implementing the IValidatableObject interface on your model classes. IValidatableObject.Validate() Method Below is an example of using the IValidatableObject interface (which is built-into .NET 4 within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace) to implement two custom validation rules on a Product model class.  The two rules ensure that: New units can’t be ordered if the Product is in a discontinued state New units can’t be ordered if there are already more than 100 units in stock We will enforce these business rules by implementing the IValidatableObject interface on our Product class, and by implementing its Validate() method like so: The IValidatableObject.Validate() method can apply validation rules that span across multiple properties, and can yield back multiple validation errors. Each ValidationResult returned can supply both an error message as well as an optional list of property names that caused the violation (which is useful when displaying error messages within UI). Automatic Validation Enforcement EF Code-First (starting with CTP5) now automatically invokes the Validate() method when a model object that implements the IValidatableObject interface is saved.  You do not need to write any code to cause this to happen – this support is now enabled by default. This new support means that the below code – which violates one of our above business rules – will automatically throw an exception (and abort the transaction) when we call the “SaveChanges()” method on our Northwind DbContext: In addition to reactively handling validation exceptions, EF Code First also allows you to proactively check for validation errors.  Starting with CTP5, you can call the “GetValidationErrors()” method on the DbContext base class to retrieve a list of validation errors within the model objects you are working with.  GetValidationErrors() will return a list of all validation errors – regardless of whether they are generated via DataAnnotation attributes or by an IValidatableObject.Validate() implementation.  Below is an example of proactively using the GetValidationErrors() method to check (and handle) errors before trying to call SaveChanges(): ASP.NET MVC 3 and IValidatableObject ASP.NET MVC 2 included support for automatically honoring and enforcing DataAnnotation attributes on model objects that are used with ASP.NET MVC’s model binding infrastructure.  ASP.NET MVC 3 goes further and also honors the IValidatableObject interface.  This combined support for model validation makes it easy to display appropriate error messages within forms when validation errors occur.  To see this in action, let’s consider a simple Create form that allows users to create a new Product: We can implement the above Create functionality using a ProductsController class that has two “Create” action methods like below: The first Create() method implements a version of the /Products/Create URL that handles HTTP-GET requests - and displays the HTML form to fill-out.  The second Create() method implements a version of the /Products/Create URL that handles HTTP-POST requests - and which takes the posted form data, ensures that is is valid, and if it is valid saves it in the database.  If there are validation issues it redisplays the form with the posted values.  The razor view template of our “Create” view (which renders the form) looks like below: One of the nice things about the above Controller + View implementation is that we did not write any validation logic within it.  The validation logic and business rules are instead implemented entirely within our model layer, and the ProductsController simply checks whether it is valid (by calling the ModelState.IsValid helper method) to determine whether to try and save the changes or redisplay the form with errors. The Html.ValidationMessageFor() helper method calls within our view simply display the error messages our Product model’s DataAnnotations and IValidatableObject.Validate() method returned.  We can see the above scenario in action by filling out invalid data within the form and attempting to submit it: Notice above how when we hit the “Create” button we got an error message.  This was because we ticked the “Discontinued” checkbox while also entering a value for the UnitsOnOrder (and so violated one of our business rules).  You might ask – how did ASP.NET MVC know to highlight and display the error message next to the UnitsOnOrder textbox?  It did this because ASP.NET MVC 3 now honors the IValidatableObject interface when performing model binding, and will retrieve the error messages from validation failures with it. The business rule within our Product model class indicated that the “UnitsOnOrder” property should be highlighted when the business rule we hit was violated: Our Html.ValidationMessageFor() helper method knew to display the business rule error message (next to the UnitsOnOrder edit box) because of the above property name hint we supplied: Keeping things DRY ASP.NET MVC and EF Code First enables you to keep your validation and business rules in one place (within your model layer), and avoid having it creep into your Controllers and Views.  Keeping the validation logic in the model layer helps ensure that you do not duplicate validation/business logic as you add more Controllers and Views to your application.  It allows you to quickly change your business rules/validation logic in one single place (within your model layer) – and have all controllers/views across your application immediately reflect it.  This help keep your application code clean and easily maintainable, and makes it much easier to evolve and update your application in the future. Summary EF Code First (starting with CTP5) now has built-in support for both DataAnnotations and the IValidatableObject interface.  This allows you to easily add validation and business rules to your models, and have EF automatically ensure that they are enforced anytime someone tries to persist changes of them to a database.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also now supports both DataAnnotations and IValidatableObject as well, which makes it even easier to use them with your EF Code First model layer – and then have the controllers/views within your web layer automatically honor and support them as well.  This makes it easy to build clean and highly maintainable applications. You don’t have to use DataAnnotations or IValidatableObject to perform your validation/business logic.  You can always roll your own custom validation architecture and/or use other more advanced validation frameworks/patterns if you want.  But for a lot of applications this built-in support will probably be sufficient – and provide a highly productive way to build solutions. 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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• Automating Form Login

  - by Greg_Gutkin

  Introduction A common task in configuring a web application for proxying in Pagelet Producer is setting up form autologin. PP provides a wizard-like tool for detecting the login form fields, but this is usually only the first step in configuring this feature. If the generated configuration doesn't seem to work, some additional manual modifications will be needed to complete the setup. This article will try to guide you through this process while steering you away from common pitfalls. For the purposes of this article, let's assume the following characteristics about your environment: Web Application Base URL: http://host/app (configured as Resource Source URL in PP) Pagelet Producer Base URL: http://pp/pagelets Form Field Auto-Detection Form Autologin is configured in the PP Admin UI under resource_name/Autologin/Form Login. First, you'll enter the URL to the login form under "Login Form Identification". This will enable the admin wizard to connect to and display the login page. Caution: RedirectsMake sure the entered URL matches what you see in the browser's address bar, when the application login page is displayed. For example, even though you may be able to reach the login page by simply typing http://host/app, the URL you end up on may change to http://host/app/login via browser redirect(s).The second URL is the one you will want to use. Caution: External Login ServersThe login page may actually come from a different server than the application you are trying to proxy. For example, you may notice that the login page URL changes to http://hostB/appB. This is common when external SSO products are involved. There are two ways of dealing with this situation. One is to configure Pagelet Producer to participate in SSO. This approach is out of scope of this article and is discussed in a separate whitepaper (TODO add link). The second approach is to use the autologin feature to provide stored credentials to the SSO login form. Since the login form URL is not an extension of the application base URL (PP resource URL), you will need to add a new PP resource for the SSO server and configure the login form on that resource instead of the original application resource. One side benefit of this additional resource is that it can reused for other applications relying on the same SSO server for login. After entering the login page URL (make sure dropdown says "URL"), click "Automatically Detect Form Fields". This will bring up the web app's login page in a new browser window. Fill it out and submit it as you would normally. If everything goes right, Pagelet Producer will intercept the submitted values and fill out all the needed configuration data in the Admin UI. If the login form window doesn't close or configuration data doesn't get filled in, you may have not entered the login page URL correctly. Review the two cautionary notes above and make any necessary changes. If the form fields got filled automatically, it's time to save the configuration and test it out. If you can access a protected area of the backend application via a proxied PP URL without filling out its login form, then you are pretty much done with login form configuration. The only other step you will need to complete before declaring this aspect of configuration production ready is configuring form field source. You may skip to that section below. Manual Login Form Identification Let's take a closer look at Login Form Identification. This determines how Pagelet Producer recognizes login forms as such. URL The most efficient way of detecting login forms is by looking at the page URL. This method can only be used under the following conditions: Login page URL must be different from the post login application URLs. Login page URL must stay constant regardless of the path it takes to reach the page. For example, reaching the login page by going to the application base URL or to a specific protected URL must result in a redirect to the same login page URL (query string excluded). If only the query string parameters change, just leave out the query string from the configured login page URL. If either of these conditions is not fullfilled, you must switch to the RegEx approach below. RegEx If the login page URL is not uniform enough across all scenarios or is indistinguishable from other page locations, PP can be configured to recognize it by looking at the page markup itself. This is accomplished by changing the dropdown to "RegEx". If regular expressions scare you, take comfort from the fact that in most cases you won't need to enter any special regex characters. Let's look at an example: Say you have a login form that looks like <form id='loginForm' action='login?from=pageA' > <input id='user'> <input id='pass'> </form> Since this form has an id attribute, you can be reasonably sure that this login form can be uniquely identified across the web application by this snippet: "id='loginForm'". (Unless, of course your backend web application contains login forms to other apps). Since no wildcards are needed to find this snippet, you can just enter it as is into the RegEx field - no special regular expression characters needed! If the web developer who created the form wasn't kind enough to provide a unique id, you will need to look for other snippets of the page to uniquely identify it. It could be the action URL, an input field id, or some other markup fragment. You should abstain from using UI text as an identifier it may change in translated versions of the page and prevent the login page logic from working for international users. You may need to turn to regular expression wildcard syntax if no simple matches work. For more information on regular expression, refer to the Resources section. Form Submit Location Now we'll look at the form submit location. If the captured URL contains query string parameters that will likely change from one form submission to the next, you will need to change its type to RegEx. This type will tell Pagelet Producer to parse the login page for the action URL and submit to the value found. The regular expression needs to point at the actual action URL with its first grouping expression. Taking the example form definition above, the form submit location regex would be: action='(.*?)' The parentheses are used to identify the actual action URL, while the rest of the expression provides the context for finding it. Expression .*? is a so-called reluctant wildcard that matches any character excluding the single quote that follows. See Resources section below for further information on regular expressions. Manual Form Field Detection If the Admin UI form field detection wizard fails to populate login form configuration page, you will have to enter the fields by hand. Use a built-in browser developer tool or addon (e.g. Firebug) to inspect the form element and its children input elements. For each input element (including hidden elements), create an entry under Form Fields. Change its Source according to the next section. Form Field Source Change the source of any of the fields not exposed to the users of the login form (i.e. hidden fields) to "Generated". This means Pagelet Producer will just use the values returned by the web app rather than supplying values it stored. For fields that contain sensitive data or vary from user to user (e.g. username & password), change the source to User (Credential) Vault. Logging Support To help you troubleshoot you autologin configuration, PP provides some useful logging support. To turn on detailed logging for the autologin feature, navigate to Settings in Admin UI. Under Logging, change the log level for AutoLogin to Finest. Known Limitations Autologin feature may not work as expected if login form fields (not just the values, but the DOM elements themselves) are generated dynamically by client side JavaScript. Resources RegEx RegEx Reference from Java RegEx Test Tool

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• Transparency and AlphaBlending

  - by TechTwaddle

  In this post we'll look at the AlphaBlend() api and how it can be used for semi-transparent blitting. AlphaBlend() takes a source device context and a destination device context (DC) and combines the bits in such a way that it gives a transparent effect. Follow the links for the msdn documentation. So lets take a image like, and AlphaBlend() it on our window. The code to do so is below, (under the WM_PAINT message of WndProc) HBITMAP hBitmap=NULL, hBitmapOld=NULL; HDC hMemDC=NULL; BLENDFUNCTION bf; hdc = BeginPaint(hWnd, &ps); hMemDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc); hBitmap = LoadBitmap(g_hInst, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDB_BITMAP1)); hBitmapOld = SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap); bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER; bf.BlendFlags = 0; bf.SourceConstantAlpha = 80; //transparency value between 0-255 bf.AlphaFormat = 0;    AlphaBlend(hdc, 0, 25, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, bf); SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmapOld); DeleteDC(hMemDC); DeleteObject(hBitmap); EndPaint(hWnd, &ps);   The code above creates a memory DC (hMemDC) using CreateCompatibleDC(), loads a bitmap onto the memory DC and AlphaBlends it on the device DC (hdc), with a transparency value of 80. The result is: Pretty simple till now. Now lets try to do something a little more exciting. Lets get two images involved, each overlapping the other, giving a better demonstration of transparency. I am also going to add a few buttons so that the user can increase or decrease the transparency by clicking on the buttons. Since this is the first time I played around with GDI apis, I ran into something that everybody runs into sometime or the other, flickering. When clicking the buttons the images would flicker a lot, I figured out why and used something called double buffering to avoid flickering. We will look at both my first implementation and the second implementation just to give the concept a little more depth and perspective. A few pre-conditions before I dive into the code: - hBitmap and hBitmap2 are handles to the two images obtained using LoadBitmap(), these variables are global and are initialized under WM_CREATE - The two buttons in the application are labeled Opaque++ (make more opaque, less transparent) and Opaque-- (make less opaque, more transparent) - DrawPics(HWND hWnd, int step=0); is the function called to draw the images on the screen. This is called from under WM_PAINT and also when the buttons are clicked. When Opaque++ is clicked the 'step' value passed to DrawPics() is +20 and when Opaque-- is clicked the 'step' value is -20. The default value of 'step' is 0 Now lets take a look at my first implementation: //this funciton causes flicker, cos it draws directly to screen several times void DrawPics(HWND hWnd, int step) {     HDC hdc=NULL, hMemDC=NULL;     BLENDFUNCTION bf;     static UINT32 transparency = 100;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 0 and user clicks Opaque--     if (transparency == 0 && step < 0)         return;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 240 (opaque) and user clicks Opaque++     if (transparency == 240 && step > 0)         return;         hdc = GetDC(hWnd);     if (!hdc)         return;     //create a memory DC     hMemDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc);     if (!hMemDC)     {         ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc);         return;     }     //while increasing transparency, clear the contents of screen     if (step < 0)     {         RECT rect = {0, 0, 240, 200};         FillRect(hdc, &rect, (HBRUSH)GetStockObject(WHITE_BRUSH));     }     SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap2);     BitBlt(hdc, 0, 25, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);         SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap);     transparency += step;     if (transparency >= 240)         transparency = 240;     if (transparency <= 0)         transparency = 0;     bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER;     bf.BlendFlags = 0;     bf.SourceConstantAlpha = transparency;     bf.AlphaFormat = 0;            AlphaBlend(hdc, 0, 75, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, bf);     DeleteDC(hMemDC);     ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc); }   In the code above, we first get the window DC using GetDC() and create a memory DC using CreateCompatibleDC(). Then we select hBitmap2 onto the memory DC and Blt it on the window DC (hdc). Next, we select the other image, hBitmap, onto memory DC and AlphaBlend() it over window DC. As I told you before, this implementation causes flickering because it draws directly on the screen (hdc) several times. The video below shows what happens when the buttons were clicked rapidly: Well, the video recording tool I use captures only 15 frames per second and so the flickering is not visible in the video. So you're gonna have to trust me on this, it flickers (; To solve this problem we make sure that the drawing to the screen happens only once and to do that we create an additional memory DC, hTempDC. We perform all our drawing on this memory DC and finally when it is ready we Blt hTempDC on hdc, and the images are displayed in one go. Here is the code for our new DrawPics() function: //no flicker void DrawPics(HWND hWnd, int step) {     HDC hdc=NULL, hMemDC=NULL, hTempDC=NULL;     BLENDFUNCTION bf;     HBITMAP hBitmapTemp=NULL, hBitmapOld=NULL;     static UINT32 transparency = 100;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 0 and user clicks Opaque--     if (transparency == 0 && step < 0)         return;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 240 (opaque) and user clicks Opaque++     if (transparency == 240 && step > 0)         return;         hdc = GetDC(hWnd);     if (!hdc)         return;     hMemDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc);     hTempDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc);     hBitmapTemp = CreateCompatibleBitmap(hdc, 240, 150);     hBitmapOld = (HBITMAP)SelectObject(hTempDC, hBitmapTemp);     if (!hMemDC)     {         ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc);         return;     }     //while increasing transparency, clear the contents     if (step < 0)     {         RECT rect = {0, 0, 240, 150};         FillRect(hTempDC, &rect, (HBRUSH)GetStockObject(WHITE_BRUSH));     }     SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap2);     //Blt hBitmap2 directly to hTempDC     BitBlt(hTempDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);         SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap);     transparency += step;     if (transparency >= 240)         transparency = 240;     if (transparency <= 0)         transparency = 0;     bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER;     bf.BlendFlags = 0;     bf.SourceConstantAlpha = transparency;     bf.AlphaFormat = 0;            AlphaBlend(hTempDC, 0, 50, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, bf);     //now hTempDC is ready, blt it directly on hdc     BitBlt(hdc, 0, 25, 240, 150, hTempDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);     SelectObject(hTempDC, hBitmapOld);     DeleteObject(hBitmapTemp);     DeleteDC(hMemDC);     DeleteDC(hTempDC);     ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc); }   This function is very similar to the first version, except for the use of hTempDC. Another point to note is the use of CreateCompatibleBitmap(). When a memory device context is created using CreateCompatibleDC(), the context is exactly one monochrome pixel high and one monochrome pixel wide. So in order for us to draw anything onto hTempDC, we first have to set a bitmap on it. We use CreateCompatibleBitmap() to create a bitmap of required dimension (240x150 above), and then select this bitmap onto hTempDC. Think of it as utilizing an extra canvas, drawing everything on the canvas and finally transferring the contents to the display in one scoop. And with this version the flickering is gone, video follows:   If you want the entire solutions source code then leave a message, I will share the code over SkyDrive.

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• Web Self Service installation on Windows

  - by Rajesh Sharma

  Web Self Service (WSS) installation on windows is pretty straight forward but you might face some issues if deployed under tomcat. Here's a step-by-step guide to install Oracle Utilities Web Self Service on windows.   Below installation steps are done on: Oracle Utilities Framework version 2.2.0 Oracle Utilities Application - Customer Care & Billing version 2.2.0 Application server - Apache Tomcat 6.0.13 on default port 6500 Other settings include: SPLBASE = C:\spl\CCBDEMO22 SPLENVIRON = CCBV22 SPLWAS = TCAT   Follow these steps for a Web Self Service installation on windows: Download Web Self Service application from edelivery.   Copy the delivery file Release-SelfService-V2.2.0.zip from the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing version 2.2.0 Web Self Service folder on the installation media to a directory on your Windows box where you would like to install the application, in our case it's a temporary folder C:\wss_temp.   Setup application environment, execute splenviron.cmd -e <ENVIRON_NAME>   Create base folder for Self Service application named SelfService under %SPLEBASE%\splapp\applications   Install Oracle Utilities Web Self Service   C:\wss_temp\Release-SelfService-V2.2.0>install.cmd -d %SPLEBASE%\splapp\applications\SelfService   Web Self Service installation menu. Populate environment values for each item.   ******************************************************** Pick your installation options: ******************************************************** 1. Destination directory name for installation.             | C:\spl\CCBDEMO22\splapp\applications\SelfService 2. Web Server Host.                                         | CCBV22 3. Web Server Port Number.                                  | 6500 4. Mail SMTP Host.                                          | CCBV22 5. Top Product Installation directory.                      | C:\spl\CCBDEMO22 6.     Web Application Server Type.                         | TCAT 7.     When OAS: SPLWeb OC4J instance name is required.     | OC4J1 8.     When WAS: SPLWeb server instance name is required.   | server1   P. Process the installation. Each item in the above list should be configured for a successful installation. Choose option to configure or (P) to process the installation:  P   Option 7 and Option 8 can be ignored for TCAT.   Above step installs SelfService.war file in the destination directory. We need to explode this war file. Change directory to the installation destination folder, and   C:\spl\CCBDEMO22\splapp\applications\SelfService>jar -xf SelfService.war   Review SelfServiceConfig.properties and CMSelfServiceConfig.properties. Change any properties value within the file specific to your installation/site. Generally default settings apply, for this exercise assumes that WEB user already exists in your application database.   For more information on property file customization, refer to Oracle Utilities Web Self Service Configuration section in Customer Care & Billing Installation Guide.   Add context entry in server.xml located under tomcat-base folder C:\spl\CCBDEMO22\product\tomcatBase\conf   ... <!-- SPL Context -->           <Context path="" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/root" debug="0" privileged="true"/>           <Context path="/appViewer" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/appViewer" debug="0" privileged="true"/>           <Context path="/help" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/help" debug="0" privileged="true"/>           <Context path="/XAIApp" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/XAIApp" debug="0" privileged="true"/>           <Context path="/SelfService" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/SelfService" debug="0" privileged="true"/> ...   Add User in tomcat-users.xml file located under tomcat-base folder C:\spl\CCBDEMO22\product\tomcatBase\conf   <user username="WEB" password="selfservice" roles="cisusers"/>   Note the password is "selfservice", this is the default password set within the SelfServiceConfig.properties file with base64 encoding.   Restart the application (spl.cmd stop | start)   12.  Although Apache Tomcat version 6.0.13 does not come with the admin pack, you can verify whether SelfService application is loaded and running, go to following URL http://server:port/manager/list, in our case it'll be http://ccbv22:6500/manager/list Following output will be displayed   OK - Listed applications for virtual host localhost /admin:running:0:C:/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.13/webapps/ROOT/admin /XAIApp:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/XAIApp /host-manager:running:0:C:/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.13/webapps/host-manager /SelfService:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/SelfService /appViewer:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/appViewer /manager:running:1:C:/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.13/webapps/manager /help:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/help /:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/root   Also ensure that the XAIApp is running.   Run Oracle Utilities Web Self Service application http://server:port/SelfService in our case it'll be  http://ccbv22:6500/SelfService   Still doesn't work? And you get '503 HTTP response' at the time of customer registration?     This is because XAI service is still unavailable. There is initialize.waittime set for a default value of 90 seconds for the XAI Application to come up.   Remember WSS uses XAI to perform actions/validations on the CC&B database.  

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