Search Results

Search found 37183 results on 1488 pages for 'string conversion'.

Page 472/1488 | < Previous Page | 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479  | Next Page >

• TFS 2010 SDK: Smart Merge - Programmatically Create your own Merge Tool

  - by Tarun Arora

  Technorati Tags: Team Foundation Server 2010,TFS SDK,TFS API,TFS Merge Programmatically,TFS Work Items Programmatically,TFS Administration Console,ALM   The information available in the Merge window in Team Foundation Server 2010 is very important in the decision making during the merging process. However, at present the merge window shows very limited information, more that often you are interested to know the work item, files modified, code reviewer notes, policies overridden, etc associated with the change set. Our friends at Microsoft are working hard to change the game again with vNext, but because at present the merge window is a model window you have to cancel the merge process and go back one after the other to check the additional information you need. If you can relate to what i am saying, you will enjoy this blog post! I will show you how to programmatically create your own merging window using the TFS 2010 API. A few screen shots of the WPF TFS 2010 API – Custom Merging Application that we will be creating programmatically, Excited??? Let’s start coding… 1. Get All Team Project Collections for the TFS Server You can read more on connecting to TFS programmatically on my blog post => How to connect to TFS Programmatically 1: public static ReadOnlyCollection<CatalogNode> GetAllTeamProjectCollections() 2: { 3: TfsConfigurationServer configurationServer = 4: TfsConfigurationServerFactory. 5: GetConfigurationServer(new Uri("http://xxx:8080/tfs/")); 6: 7: CatalogNode catalogNode = configurationServer.CatalogNode; 8: return catalogNode.QueryChildren(new Guid[] 9: { CatalogResourceTypes.ProjectCollection }, 10: false, CatalogQueryOptions.None); 11: } 2. Get All Team Projects for the selected Team Project Collection You can read more on connecting to TFS programmatically on my blog post => How to connect to TFS Programmatically 1: public static ReadOnlyCollection<CatalogNode> GetTeamProjects(string instanceId) 2: { 3: ReadOnlyCollection<CatalogNode> teamProjects = null; 4: 5: TfsConfigurationServer configurationServer = 6: TfsConfigurationServerFactory.GetConfigurationServer(new Uri("http://xxx:8080/tfs/")); 7: 8: CatalogNode catalogNode = configurationServer.CatalogNode; 9: var teamProjectCollections = catalogNode.QueryChildren(new Guid[] {CatalogResourceTypes.ProjectCollection }, 10: false, CatalogQueryOptions.None); 11: 12: foreach (var teamProjectCollection in teamProjectCollections) 13: { 14: if (string.Compare(teamProjectCollection.Resource.Properties["InstanceId"], instanceId, true) == 0) 15: { 16: teamProjects = teamProjectCollection.QueryChildren(new Guid[] { CatalogResourceTypes.TeamProject }, false, 17: CatalogQueryOptions.None); 18: } 19: } 20: 21: return teamProjects; 22: } 3. Get All Branches with in a Team Project programmatically I will be passing the name of the Team Project for which i want to retrieve all the branches. When consuming the ‘Version Control Service’ you have the method QueryRootBranchObjects, you need to pass the recursion type => none, one, full. Full implies you are interested in all branches under that root branch. 1: public static List<BranchObject> GetParentBranch(string projectName) 2: { 3: var branches = new List<BranchObject>(); 4: 5: var tfs = TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory.GetTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("http://<ServerName>:8080/tfs/<teamProjectName>")); 6: var versionControl = tfs.GetService<VersionControlServer>(); 7: 8: var allBranches = versionControl.QueryRootBranchObjects(RecursionType.Full); 9: 10: foreach (var branchObject in allBranches) 11: { 12: if (branchObject.Properties.RootItem.Item.ToUpper().Contains(projectName.ToUpper())) 13: { 14: branches.Add(branchObject); 15: } 16: } 17: 18: return branches; 19: } 4. Get All Branches associated to the Parent Branch Programmatically Now that we have the parent branch, it is important to retrieve all child branches of that parent branch. Lets see how we can achieve this using the TFS API. 1: public static List<ItemIdentifier> GetChildBranch(string parentBranch) 2: { 3: var branches = new List<ItemIdentifier>(); 4: 5: var tfs = TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory.GetTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("http://<ServerName>:8080/tfs/<CollectionName>")); 6: var versionControl = tfs.GetService<VersionControlServer>(); 7: 8: var i = new ItemIdentifier(parentBranch); 9: var allBranches = 10: versionControl.QueryBranchObjects(i, RecursionType.None); 11: 12: foreach (var branchObject in allBranches) 13: { 14: foreach (var childBranche in branchObject.ChildBranches) 15: { 16: branches.Add(childBranche); 17: } 18: } 19: 20: return branches; 21: } 5. Get Merge candidates between two branches Programmatically Now that we have the parent and the child branch that we are interested to perform a merge between we will use the method ‘GetMergeCandidates’ in the namespace ‘Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client’ => http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb138934(v=VS.100).aspx 1: public static MergeCandidate[] GetMergeCandidates(string fromBranch, string toBranch) 2: { 3: var tfs = TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory.GetTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("http://<ServerName>:8080/tfs/<CollectionName>")); 4: var versionControl = tfs.GetService<VersionControlServer>(); 5: 6: return versionControl.GetMergeCandidates(fromBranch, toBranch, RecursionType.Full); 7: } 6. Get changeset details Programatically Now that we have the changeset id that we are interested in, we can get details of the changeset. The Changeset object contains the properties => http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.teamfoundation.versioncontrol.client.changeset.aspx - Changes: Gets or sets an array of Change objects that comprise this changeset. - CheckinNote: Gets or sets the check-in note of the changeset. - Comment: Gets or sets the comment of the changeset. - PolicyOverride: Gets or sets the policy override information of this changeset. - WorkItems: Gets an array of work items that are associated with this changeset. 1: public static Changeset GetChangeSetDetails(int changeSetId) 2: { 3: var tfs = TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory.GetTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("http://<ServerName>:8080/tfs/<CollectionName>")); 4: var versionControl = tfs.GetService<VersionControlServer>(); 5: 6: return versionControl.GetChangeset(changeSetId); 7: } 7. Possibilities In future posts i will try and extend this idea to explore further possibilities, but few features that i am sure will further help during the merge decision making process would be, - View changed files - Compare modified file with current/previous version - Merge Preview - Last Merge date Any other features that you can think of?

  Read the article

• Preparing To Upgrade Access Tables to SQL Server 2005/2008

  Garry Robinson discusses some of the subtleties that you can apply to your database tables prior to upsizing your tables to SQL Server. In this article, I will show you how to fix up some of your Access backend before you make the conversion.

  Read the article

• ASP.NET Localization: Enabling resource expressions with an external resource assembly

  - by Brian Schroer

  I have several related projects that need the same localized text, so my global resources files are in a shared assembly that’s referenced by each of those projects. It took an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to have my .resx files generate “public” properties instead of “internal” so I could have a shared resources assembly (apparently it was pretty tricky pre-VS2008, and my “googling” bogged me down some out-of-date instructions). It’s easy though – Just change the “Custom Tool” to “PublicResXFileCodeGenerator”:    …which can be done via the “Access Modifier” dropdown of the resource file designer window:   A reference to my shared resources DLL gives me the ability to use the resources in code, but by default, the ASP.NET resource expression syntax: <asp:Button ID="BeerButton" runat="server" Text="<%$ Resources:MyResources, Beer %>" />   …assumes that your resources are in your web site project.   To make resource expressions work with my shared resources assembly, I added two classes to the resources assembly: 1) a custom IResourceProvider implementation:   1: using System; 2: using System.Web.Compilation; 3: using System.Globalization; 4:   5: namespace DuffBeer 6: { 7: public class CustomResourceProvider : IResourceProvider 8: { 9: public object GetObject(string resourceKey, CultureInfo culture) 10: { 11: return MyResources.ResourceManager.GetObject(resourceKey, culture); 12: } 13:   14: public System.Resources.IResourceReader ResourceReader 15: { 16: get { throw new NotSupportedException(); } 17: } 18: } 19: }   2) and a custom factory class inheriting from the ResourceProviderFactory base class:   1: using System; 2: using System.Web.Compilation; 3:   4: namespace DuffBeer 5: { 6: public class CustomResourceProviderFactory : ResourceProviderFactory 7: { 8: public override IResourceProvider CreateGlobalResourceProvider(string classKey) 9: { 10: return new CustomResourceProvider(); 11: } 12:   13: public override IResourceProvider CreateLocalResourceProvider(string virtualPath) 14: { 15: throw new NotSupportedException(String.Format( 16: "{0} does not support local resources.", 17: this.GetType().Name)); 18: } 19: } 20: }   In the “system.web / globalization” section of my web.config file, I point the “resourceProviderFactoryType" property to my custom factory:   <system.web> <globalization culture="auto:en-US" uiCulture="auto:en-US" resourceProviderFactoryType="DuffBeer.CustomResourceProviderFactory, DuffBeer" />   This simple approach met my needs for these projects , but if you want to create reusable resource provider and factory classes that allow you to specify the assembly in the resource expression, the instructions are here.

  Read the article

• Caching no .NET Framework 4.0

  - by anobre

  Olá pessoal, como estão? Hoje vou apresentar uma mudança interessante sobre caching, em comparação com versões anteriores. Introdução A versão 4.0 da plataforma .NET trouxe uma mudança estrutural esperada para os recursos de Cache. Nas versão 3.5 (até SP1), a plataforma fornecia uma implementação do Cache através do namespace System.Web.Caching. Nas versões anteriores o cache estava disponível no namespace System.Web, o que criada uma dependência com as classes do ASP.NET. Neste novo framework, o namespace System.Runtime.Caching reúne toda a API necessária para criar todas as tarefas comuns ao ASP.NET Caching de versões anteriores. System.Runtime.Caching e MemoryCache Tudo que precisamos para trabalhar com cache, em aplicações Web ou não, está reunido no namespace System.Runtime.Caching. A unidade básica de trabalho é a classe abstrata ObjectCache, que fornece a base para criar implementações customizadas de cache. E como é de se esperar, a classe MemoryCache é a implementação da classe abstrata ObjectCache para armazenamento das informações em memória. public class MemoryCache : ObjectCache, IEnumerable, IDisposable A utilização do cache é muito simples, bem parecida com o modelo anterior: ObjectCache cache = MemoryCache.Default; string fileContents = cache["filecontents"] as string; if (fileContents == null) { CacheItemPolicy policy = new CacheItemPolicy(); List<string> filePaths = new List<string>(); filePaths.Add("c:\\cache\\example.txt"); policy.ChangeMonitors.Add(new HostFileChangeMonitor(filePaths)); // Fetch the file contents. fileContents = File.ReadAllText("c:\\cache\\example.txt"); cache.Set("filecontents", fileContents, policy); } Label1.Text = fileContents; Extendendo o Cache É possível customizar todo mecanismo de cache através de várias abordagens. ScottGu escreveu sobre isto, que você pode acessar através deste link. Conclusão Algo muito esperado em versões anteriores, finalmente o cache está disponível sem criar relacionamento com assemblies exclusivamente Web. Perfeito para quem desenvolve outros tipos de aplicação, usufruindo deste recurso sem carregar código desnecessário. Abraços!

  Read the article

• ASP.Net MVC - how to post values to the server that are not in an input element

  - by David Carter

  Problem As was mentioned in a previous blog I am building a web page that allows the user to select dates in a calendar and then shows the dates in an unordered list. The problem now is that those dates need to be sent to the server on page submit so that they can be saved to the database. If I was storing the dates in an input element, say a textbox, that wouldn't be an issue but because they are in an html element whose contents are not posted to the server an alternative strategy needs to be developed. Solution The approach that I took to solve this problem is as follows: 1. Place a hidden input field on the form <input id="hiddenDates" name="hiddenDates" type="hidden" value="" /> ASP.Net MVC has an Html helper with a method called Hidden() that will do this for you @Html.Hidden("hiddenDates"). 2. Copy the values from the html element to the hidden input field before submitting the form The following javascript is added to the page:        $(function () {          $('#formCreate').submit(function () {               PopulateHiddenDates();          });        });            function PopulateHiddenDates() {          var dateValues = '';          $($('#dateList').children('li')).each(function(index) {             dateValues += $(this).attr("id") + ",";          });          $('#hiddenDates').val(dateValues);        } I'm using jQuery to bind to the form submit event so that my method to populate the hidden field gets called before the form is submitted. The dateList element is an unordered list and by using the jQuery each function I can itterate through all the <li> items that it contains, get each items id attribute (to which I have assigned the value of the date in millisecs) and write them to the hidden field as a comma delimited string. 3. Process the dates on the server        [HttpPost]         public ActionResult Create(string hiddenDates, string utcOffset)         {            List<DateTime> dates = GetDates(hiddenDates, utcOffset);         }         private List<DateTime> GetDates(string hiddenDates, int utcOffset)         {             List<DateTime> dates = new List<DateTime>();             var values = hiddenDates.Split(",".ToCharArray(),StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);             foreach (var item in values)             {                 DateTime newDate = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1).AddMilliseconds(double.Parse(item)).AddMinutes(utcOffset*-1);                 dates.Add(newDate);                }             return dates;         } By declaring a parameter with the same name as the hidden field ASP.Net will take care of finding the corresponding entry in the form collection posted back to the server and binding it to the hiddenDates parameter! Excellent! I now have my dates the user selected and I can save them to the database. I have also used the same technique to pass back a utcOffset so that I know what timezone the user is in and I can show the dates correctly to users in other timezones if necessary (this isn't strictly necessary at the moment but I plan to introduce times later), Saving multiple dates from an unordered list - DONE!

  Read the article

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentDictionary

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again we consider some of the lesser known classes and keywords of C#.  In this series of posts, we will discuss how the concurrent collections have been developed to help alleviate these multi-threading concerns.  Last week’s post began with a general introduction and discussed the ConcurrentStack<T> and ConcurrentQueue<T>.  Today's post discusses the ConcurrentDictionary<T> (originally I had intended to discuss ConcurrentBag this week as well, but ConcurrentDictionary had enough information to create a very full post on its own!).  Finally next week, we shall close with a discussion of the ConcurrentBag<T> and BlockingCollection<T>. For more of the "Little Wonders" posts, see the index here. Recap As you'll recall from the previous post, the original collections were object-based containers that accomplished synchronization through a Synchronized member.  While these were convenient because you didn't have to worry about writing your own synchronization logic, they were a bit too finely grained and if you needed to perform multiple operations under one lock, the automatic synchronization didn't buy much. With the advent of .NET 2.0, the original collections were succeeded by the generic collections which are fully type-safe, but eschew automatic synchronization.  This cuts both ways in that you have a lot more control as a developer over when and how fine-grained you want to synchronize, but on the other hand if you just want simple synchronization it creates more work. With .NET 4.0, we get the best of both worlds in generic collections.  A new breed of collections was born called the concurrent collections in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace.  These amazing collections are fine-tuned to have best overall performance for situations requiring concurrent access.  They are not meant to replace the generic collections, but to simply be an alternative to creating your own locking mechanisms. Among those concurrent collections were the ConcurrentStack<T> and ConcurrentQueue<T> which provide classic LIFO and FIFO collections with a concurrent twist.  As we saw, some of the traditional methods that required calls to be made in a certain order (like checking for not IsEmpty before calling Pop()) were replaced in favor of an umbrella operation that combined both under one lock (like TryPop()). Now, let's take a look at the next in our series of concurrent collections!For some excellent information on the performance of the concurrent collections and how they perform compared to a traditional brute-force locking strategy, see this wonderful whitepaper by the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform team here. ConcurrentDictionary – the fully thread-safe dictionary The ConcurrentDictionary<TKey,TValue> is the thread-safe counterpart to the generic Dictionary<TKey, TValue> collection.  Obviously, both are designed for quick – O(1) – lookups of data based on a key.  If you think of algorithms where you need lightning fast lookups of data and don’t care whether the data is maintained in any particular ordering or not, the unsorted dictionaries are generally the best way to go. Note: as a side note, there are sorted implementations of IDictionary, namely SortedDictionary and SortedList which are stored as an ordered tree and a ordered list respectively.  While these are not as fast as the non-sorted dictionaries – they are O(log2 n) – they are a great combination of both speed and ordering -- and still greatly outperform a linear search. Now, once again keep in mind that if all you need to do is load a collection once and then allow multi-threaded reading you do not need any locking.  Examples of this tend to be situations where you load a lookup or translation table once at program start, then keep it in memory for read-only reference.  In such cases locking is completely non-productive. However, most of the time when we need a concurrent dictionary we are interleaving both reads and updates.  This is where the ConcurrentDictionary really shines!  It achieves its thread-safety with no common lock to improve efficiency.  It actually uses a series of locks to provide concurrent updates, and has lockless reads!  This means that the ConcurrentDictionary gets even more efficient the higher the ratio of reads-to-writes you have. ConcurrentDictionary and Dictionary differences For the most part, the ConcurrentDictionary<TKey,TValue> behaves like it’s Dictionary<TKey,TValue> counterpart with a few differences.  Some notable examples of which are: Add() does not exist in the concurrent dictionary. This means you must use TryAdd(), AddOrUpdate(), or GetOrAdd().  It also means that you can’t use a collection initializer with the concurrent dictionary. TryAdd() replaced Add() to attempt atomic, safe adds. Because Add() only succeeds if the item doesn’t already exist, we need an atomic operation to check if the item exists, and if not add it while still under an atomic lock. TryUpdate() was added to attempt atomic, safe updates. If we want to update an item, we must make sure it exists first and that the original value is what we expected it to be.  If all these are true, we can update the item under one atomic step. TryRemove() was added to attempt atomic, safe removes. To safely attempt to remove a value we need to see if the key exists first, this checks for existence and removes under an atomic lock. AddOrUpdate() was added to attempt an thread-safe “upsert”. There are many times where you want to insert into a dictionary if the key doesn’t exist, or update the value if it does.  This allows you to make a thread-safe add-or-update. GetOrAdd() was added to attempt an thread-safe query/insert. Sometimes, you want to query for whether an item exists in the cache, and if it doesn’t insert a starting value for it.  This allows you to get the value if it exists and insert if not. Count, Keys, Values properties take a snapshot of the dictionary. Accessing these properties may interfere with add and update performance and should be used with caution. ToArray() returns a static snapshot of the dictionary. That is, the dictionary is locked, and then copied to an array as a O(n) operation.  GetEnumerator() is thread-safe and efficient, but allows dirty reads. Because reads require no locking, you can safely iterate over the contents of the dictionary.  The only downside is that, depending on timing, you may get dirty reads. Dirty reads during iteration The last point on GetEnumerator() bears some explanation.  Picture a scenario in which you call GetEnumerator() (or iterate using a foreach, etc.) and then, during that iteration the dictionary gets updated.  This may not sound like a big deal, but it can lead to inconsistent results if used incorrectly.  The problem is that items you already iterated over that are updated a split second after don’t show the update, but items that you iterate over that were updated a split second before do show the update.  Thus you may get a combination of items that are “stale” because you iterated before the update, and “fresh” because they were updated after GetEnumerator() but before the iteration reached them. Let’s illustrate with an example, let’s say you load up a concurrent dictionary like this: 1: // load up a dictionary. 2: var dictionary = new ConcurrentDictionary<string, int>(); 3:  4: dictionary["A"] = 1; 5: dictionary["B"] = 2; 6: dictionary["C"] = 3; 7: dictionary["D"] = 4; 8: dictionary["E"] = 5; 9: dictionary["F"] = 6; Then you have one task (using the wonderful TPL!) to iterate using dirty reads: 1: // attempt iteration in a separate thread 2: var iterationTask = new Task(() => 3: { 4: // iterates using a dirty read 5: foreach (var pair in dictionary) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine(pair.Key + ":" + pair.Value); 8: } 9: }); And one task to attempt updates in a separate thread (probably): 1: // attempt updates in a separate thread 2: var updateTask = new Task(() => 3: { 4: // iterates, and updates the value by one 5: foreach (var pair in dictionary) 6: { 7: dictionary[pair.Key] = pair.Value + 1; 8: } 9: }); Now that we’ve done this, we can fire up both tasks and wait for them to complete: 1: // start both tasks 2: updateTask.Start(); 3: iterationTask.Start(); 4:  5: // wait for both to complete. 6: Task.WaitAll(updateTask, iterationTask); Now, if I you didn’t know about the dirty reads, you may have expected to see the iteration before the updates (such as A:1, B:2, C:3, D:4, E:5, F:6).  However, because the reads are dirty, we will quite possibly get a combination of some updated, some original.  My own run netted this result: 1: F:6 2: E:6 3: D:5 4: C:4 5: B:3 6: A:2 Note that, of course, iteration is not in order because ConcurrentDictionary, like Dictionary, is unordered.  Also note that both E and F show the value 6.  This is because the output task reached F before the update, but the updates for the rest of the items occurred before their output (probably because console output is very slow, comparatively). If we want to always guarantee that we will get a consistent snapshot to iterate over (that is, at the point we ask for it we see precisely what is in the dictionary and no subsequent updates during iteration), we should iterate over a call to ToArray() instead: 1: // attempt iteration in a separate thread 2: var iterationTask = new Task(() => 3: { 4: // iterates using a dirty read 5: foreach (var pair in dictionary.ToArray()) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine(pair.Key + ":" + pair.Value); 8: } 9: }); The atomic Try…() methods As you can imagine TryAdd() and TryRemove() have few surprises.  Both first check the existence of the item to determine if it can be added or removed based on whether or not the key currently exists in the dictionary: 1: // try add attempts an add and returns false if it already exists 2: if (dictionary.TryAdd("G", 7)) 3: Console.WriteLine("G did not exist, now inserted with 7"); 4: else 5: Console.WriteLine("G already existed, insert failed."); TryRemove() also has the virtue of returning the value portion of the removed entry matching the given key: 1: // attempt to remove the value, if it exists it is removed and the original is returned 2: int removedValue; 3: if (dictionary.TryRemove("C", out removedValue)) 4: Console.WriteLine("Removed C and its value was " + removedValue); 5: else 6: Console.WriteLine("C did not exist, remove failed."); Now TryUpdate() is an interesting creature.  You might think from it’s name that TryUpdate() first checks for an item’s existence, and then updates if the item exists, otherwise it returns false.  Well, note quite... It turns out when you call TryUpdate() on a concurrent dictionary, you pass it not only the new value you want it to have, but also the value you expected it to have before the update.  If the item exists in the dictionary, and it has the value you expected, it will update it to the new value atomically and return true.  If the item is not in the dictionary or does not have the value you expected, it is not modified and false is returned. 1: // attempt to update the value, if it exists and if it has the expected original value 2: if (dictionary.TryUpdate("G", 42, 7)) 3: Console.WriteLine("G existed and was 7, now it's 42."); 4: else 5: Console.WriteLine("G either didn't exist, or wasn't 7."); The composite Add methods The ConcurrentDictionary also has composite add methods that can be used to perform updates and gets, with an add if the item is not existing at the time of the update or get. The first of these, AddOrUpdate(), allows you to add a new item to the dictionary if it doesn’t exist, or update the existing item if it does.  For example, let’s say you are creating a dictionary of counts of stock ticker symbols you’ve subscribed to from a market data feed: 1: public sealed class SubscriptionManager 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<string, int> _subscriptions = new ConcurrentDictionary<string, int>(); 4:  5: // adds a new subscription, or increments the count of the existing one. 6: public void AddSubscription(string tickerKey) 7: { 8: // add a new subscription with count of 1, or update existing count by 1 if exists 9: var resultCount = _subscriptions.AddOrUpdate(tickerKey, 1, (symbol, count) => count + 1); 10:  11: // now check the result to see if we just incremented the count, or inserted first count 12: if (resultCount == 1) 13: { 14: // subscribe to symbol... 15: } 16: } 17: } Notice the update value factory Func delegate.  If the key does not exist in the dictionary, the add value is used (in this case 1 representing the first subscription for this symbol), but if the key already exists, it passes the key and current value to the update delegate which computes the new value to be stored in the dictionary.  The return result of this operation is the value used (in our case: 1 if added, existing value + 1 if updated). Likewise, the GetOrAdd() allows you to attempt to retrieve a value from the dictionary, and if the value does not currently exist in the dictionary it will insert a value.  This can be handy in cases where perhaps you wish to cache data, and thus you would query the cache to see if the item exists, and if it doesn’t you would put the item into the cache for the first time: 1: public sealed class PriceCache 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<string, double> _cache = new ConcurrentDictionary<string, double>(); 4:  5: // adds a new subscription, or increments the count of the existing one. 6: public double QueryPrice(string tickerKey) 7: { 8: // check for the price in the cache, if it doesn't exist it will call the delegate to create value. 9: return _cache.GetOrAdd(tickerKey, symbol => GetCurrentPrice(symbol)); 10: } 11:  12: private double GetCurrentPrice(string tickerKey) 13: { 14: // do code to calculate actual true price. 15: } 16: } There are other variations of these two methods which vary whether a value is provided or a factory delegate, but otherwise they work much the same. Oddities with the composite Add methods The AddOrUpdate() and GetOrAdd() methods are totally thread-safe, on this you may rely, but they are not atomic.  It is important to note that the methods that use delegates execute those delegates outside of the lock.  This was done intentionally so that a user delegate (of which the ConcurrentDictionary has no control of course) does not take too long and lock out other threads. This is not necessarily an issue, per se, but it is something you must consider in your design.  The main thing to consider is that your delegate may get called to generate an item, but that item may not be the one returned!  Consider this scenario: A calls GetOrAdd and sees that the key does not currently exist, so it calls the delegate.  Now thread B also calls GetOrAdd and also sees that the key does not currently exist, and for whatever reason in this race condition it’s delegate completes first and it adds its new value to the dictionary.  Now A is done and goes to get the lock, and now sees that the item now exists.  In this case even though it called the delegate to create the item, it will pitch it because an item arrived between the time it attempted to create one and it attempted to add it. Let’s illustrate, assume this totally contrived example program which has a dictionary of char to int.  And in this dictionary we want to store a char and it’s ordinal (that is, A = 1, B = 2, etc).  So for our value generator, we will simply increment the previous value in a thread-safe way (perhaps using Interlocked): 1: public static class Program 2: { 3: private static int _nextNumber = 0; 4:  5: // the holder of the char to ordinal 6: private static ConcurrentDictionary<char, int> _dictionary 7: = new ConcurrentDictionary<char, int>(); 8:  9: // get the next id value 10: public static int NextId 11: { 12: get { return Interlocked.Increment(ref _nextNumber); } 13: } Then, we add a method that will perform our insert: 1: public static void Inserter() 2: { 3: for (int i = 0; i < 26; i++) 4: { 5: _dictionary.GetOrAdd((char)('A' + i), key => NextId); 6: } 7: } Finally, we run our test by starting two tasks to do this work and get the results… 1: public static void Main() 2: { 3: // 3 tasks attempting to get/insert 4: var tasks = new List<Task> 5: { 6: new Task(Inserter), 7: new Task(Inserter) 8: }; 9:  10: tasks.ForEach(t => t.Start()); 11: Task.WaitAll(tasks.ToArray()); 12:  13: foreach (var pair in _dictionary.OrderBy(p => p.Key)) 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine(pair.Key + ":" + pair.Value); 16: } 17: } If you run this with only one task, you get the expected A:1, B:2, ..., Z:26.  But running this in parallel you will get something a bit more complex.  My run netted these results: 1: A:1 2: B:3 3: C:4 4: D:5 5: E:6 6: F:7 7: G:8 8: H:9 9: I:10 10: J:11 11: K:12 12: L:13 13: M:14 14: N:15 15: O:16 16: P:17 17: Q:18 18: R:19 19: S:20 20: T:21 21: U:22 22: V:23 23: W:24 24: X:25 25: Y:26 26: Z:27 Notice that B is 3?  This is most likely because both threads attempted to call GetOrAdd() at roughly the same time and both saw that B did not exist, thus they both called the generator and one thread got back 2 and the other got back 3.  However, only one of those threads can get the lock at a time for the actual insert, and thus the one that generated the 3 won and the 3 was inserted and the 2 got discarded.  This is why on these methods your factory delegates should be careful not to have any logic that would be unsafe if the value they generate will be pitched in favor of another item generated at roughly the same time.  As such, it is probably a good idea to keep those generators as stateless as possible. Summary The ConcurrentDictionary is a very efficient and thread-safe version of the Dictionary generic collection.  It has all the benefits of type-safety that it’s generic collection counterpart does, and in addition is extremely efficient especially when there are more reads than writes concurrently. Tweet Technorati Tags: C#, .NET, Concurrent Collections, Collections, Little Wonders, Black Rabbit Coder,James Michael Hare

  Read the article

• Web Application : How to upload multiple images at a time

  - by SAMIR BHOGAYTA

  //First add image control into the web form how many you want to upload images at a time //Add one button //Write the below code into the button_click event if (FileUpload1.HasFile) { string imagefile = FileUpload1.FileName; if (CheckFileType(imagefile) == true) { Random rndob = new Random(); int db = rndob.Next(1, 100); filename = System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(imagefile) + db.ToString() + System.IO.Path.GetExtension(imagefile); String FilePath = "images/" + filename; FileUpload1.SaveAs(Server.MapPath(FilePath)); objimg.ImageName = filename; Image1(); if (Session["imagecount"].ToString() == "1") { Img1.ImageUrl = FilePath; ViewState["img1"] = FilePath; } else if (Session["imagecount"].ToString() == "2") { Img1.ImageUrl = ViewState["img1"].ToString(); Img2.ImageUrl = FilePath; ViewState["img2"] = FilePath; } else if (Session["imagecount"].ToString() == "3") { Img1.ImageUrl = ViewState["img1"].ToString(); Img2.ImageUrl = ViewState["img2"].ToString(); Img3.ImageUrl = FilePath; ViewState["img3"] = FilePath; } else if (Session["imagecount"].ToString() == "4") { Img1.ImageUrl = ViewState["img1"].ToString(); Img2.ImageUrl = ViewState["img2"].ToString(); Img3.ImageUrl = ViewState["img3"].ToString(); Img4.ImageUrl = FilePath; ViewState["img4"] = FilePath; } else if (Session["imagecount"].ToString() == "5") { Img1.ImageUrl = ViewState["img1"].ToString(); Img2.ImageUrl = ViewState["img2"].ToString(); Img3.ImageUrl = ViewState["img3"].ToString(); Img4.ImageUrl = ViewState["img4"].ToString(); Img5.ImageUrl = FilePath; ViewState["img5"] = FilePath; } } } //execption handling else { lblErrMsg.Visible = true; lblErrMsg.Text = ""; lblErrMsg.Text = "please select a file"; } } //if file extension belongs to these list then only allowed public bool CheckFileType(string filename) { string ext; ext = System.IO.Path.GetExtension(filename); switch (ext.ToLower()) { case ".gif": return true; case ".jpeg": return true; case ".jpg": return true; case ".bmp": return true; case ".png": return true; default: return false; } }

  Read the article

• View Clipboard & Copy To Clipboard from NetBeans IDE

  - by Geertjan

  Thanks to this code, I can press Ctrl-Alt-V in NetBeans IDE and then view whatever is in the clipboard: import java.awt.Toolkit; import java.awt.datatransfer.DataFlavor; import java.awt.datatransfer.Transferable; import java.awt.datatransfer.UnsupportedFlavorException; import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.awt.event.ActionListener; import java.io.IOException; import javax.swing.JOptionPane; import org.openide.awt.ActionRegistration; import org.openide.awt.ActionReference; import org.openide.awt.ActionReferences; import org.openide.awt.ActionID; import org.openide.util.NbBundle.Messages; @ActionID( category = "Tools", id = "org.demo.ShowClipboardAction") @ActionRegistration( displayName = "#CTL_ShowClipboardAction") @ActionReferences({ @ActionReference(path = "Menu/Tools", position = 5), @ActionReference(path = "Shortcuts", name = "DA-V") }) @Messages("CTL_ShowClipboardAction=Show Clipboard") public final class ShowClipboardAction implements ActionListener { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, getClipboard(), "Clipboard Content", 1); } public String getClipboard() { String text = null; Transferable t = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard().getContents(null); try { if (t != null && t.isDataFlavorSupported(DataFlavor.stringFlavor)) { text = (String) t.getTransferData(DataFlavor.stringFlavor); } } catch (UnsupportedFlavorException e) { } catch (IOException e) { } return text; } } And now I can also press Ctrl-Alt-C, which copies the path to the current file to the clipboard: import java.awt.Toolkit; import java.awt.datatransfer.Clipboard; import java.awt.datatransfer.StringSelection; import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.awt.event.ActionListener; import org.openide.awt.ActionID; import org.openide.awt.ActionReference; import org.openide.awt.ActionReferences; import org.openide.awt.ActionRegistration; import org.openide.awt.StatusDisplayer; import org.openide.loaders.DataObject; import org.openide.util.NbBundle.Messages; @ActionID( category = "Tools", id = "org.demo.CopyPathToClipboard") @ActionRegistration( displayName = "#CTL_CopyPathToClipboard") @ActionReferences({ @ActionReference(path = "Menu/Tools", position = 0), @ActionReference(path = "Editors/Popup", position = 10), @ActionReference(path = "Shortcuts", name = "DA-C") }) @Messages("CTL_CopyPathToClipboard=Copy Path to Clipboard") public final class CopyPathToClipboardAction implements ActionListener { private final DataObject context; public CopyPathToClipboardAction(DataObject context) { this.context = context; } @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { String path = context.getPrimaryFile().getPath(); StatusDisplayer.getDefault().setStatusText(path); StringSelection ss = new StringSelection(path); Clipboard clipboard = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard(); clipboard.setContents(ss, null); } }

  Read the article

• How can I load .FBX files?

  - by gardian06

  I am looking into options for the model assets for my game. I have gotten pretty good with Blender, and want to use C++/DirectX9 (don't need all the excess from 10+), but Blender 2.6 exports .fbx not .x (by nature) and supposedly what is exported from Blender to .x is not entirely stable. In short how do I import .fbx models (I can work around not having animations if I must) into DirectX9? Is there a middleware, or conversion tool that will maintain stability?

  Read the article

• ASP.NET ViewState Tips and Tricks #2

  - by João Angelo

  If you need to store complex types in ViewState DO implement IStateManager to control view state persistence and reduce its size. By default a serializable object will be fully stored in view state using BinaryFormatter. A quick comparison for a complex type with two integers and one string property produces the following results measured using ASP.NET tracing: BinaryFormatter: 328 bytes in view state IStateManager: 28 bytes in view state BinaryFormatter sample code: // DO NOT [Serializable] public class Info { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public int Age { get; set; } } public class ExampleControl : WebControl { protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) { base.OnLoad(e); if (!this.Page.IsPostBack) { this.User = new Info { Id = 1, Name = "John Doe", Age = 27 }; } } public Info User { get { object o = this.ViewState["Example_User"]; if (o == null) return null; return (Info)o; } set { this.ViewState["Example_User"] = value; } } } IStateManager sample code: // DO public class Info : IStateManager { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public int Age { get; set; } private bool isTrackingViewState; bool IStateManager.IsTrackingViewState { get { return this.isTrackingViewState; } } void IStateManager.LoadViewState(object state) { var triplet = (Triplet)state; this.Id = (int)triplet.First; this.Name = (string)triplet.Second; this.Age = (int)triplet.Third; } object IStateManager.SaveViewState() { return new Triplet(this.Id, this.Name, this.Age); } void IStateManager.TrackViewState() { this.isTrackingViewState = true; } } public class ExampleControl : WebControl { protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) { base.OnLoad(e); if (!this.Page.IsPostBack) { this.User = new Info { Id = 1, Name = "John Doe", Age = 27 }; } } public Info User { get; set; } protected override object SaveViewState() { return new Pair( ((IStateManager)this.User).SaveViewState(), base.SaveViewState()); } protected override void LoadViewState(object savedState) { if (savedState != null) { var pair = (Pair)savedState; this.User = new Info(); ((IStateManager)this.User).LoadViewState(pair.First); base.LoadViewState(pair.Second); } } }

  Read the article

• Trouble compiling MonoDevelop 4 on Ubuntu 12.04

  - by Mehran

  I'm trying to compile the latest version of MonoDevelop (4.0.9) on my Ubuntu 12.04 and I'm facing errors I can not overcome. Here are my machine's configurations: OS: Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit Mono: version 3.0.12 And here are the commands that I ran to download MonoDevelop: $ git clone git://github.com/mono/monodevelop.git $ cd monodevelop $ git submodule init $ git submodule update And afterwards to compile: ./configure --prefix=`pkg-config --variable=prefix mono` --profile=stable make Then I faced the following errors (sorry if it's long): ... Building ./Main.sln xbuild /verbosity:quiet /nologo /property:CodePage=65001 ./Main.sln /property:Configuration=Debug /home/mehran/git/monodevelop/main/Main.sln: warning : Don't know how to handle GlobalSection MonoDevelopProperties.Debug, Ignoring. : warning CS1685: The predefined type `System.Runtime.CompilerServices.ExtensionAttribute' is defined in multiple assemblies. Using definition from `mscorlib' /usr/lib/mono/4.0/Microsoft.CSharp.targets: error : Compiler crashed with code: 1. : warning CS1685: The predefined type `System.Runtime.CompilerServices.ExtensionAttribute' is defined in multiple assemblies. Using definition from `mscorlib' Editor/IDocument.cs(98,30): warning CS0419: Ambiguous reference in cref attribute `GetOffset'. Assuming `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.Editor.IDocument.GetOffset(int, int)' but other overloads including `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.Editor.IDocument.GetOffset(ICSharpCode.NRefactory.TextLocation)' have also matched PatternMatching/INode.cs(51,37): warning CS1574: XML comment on `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.PatternMatching.PatternExtensions.Match(this ICSharpCode.NRefactory.PatternMatching.INode, ICSharpCode.NRefactory.PatternMatching.INode)' has cref attribute `PatternMatching.Match.Success' that could not be resolved TextLocation.cs(35,23): warning CS0419: Ambiguous reference in cref attribute `Editor.IDocument.GetOffset'. Assuming `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.Editor.IDocument.GetOffset(int, int)' but other overloads including `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.Editor.IDocument.GetOffset(ICSharpCode.NRefactory.TextLocation)' have also matched TypeSystem/FullTypeName.cs(87,24): warning CS0419: Ambiguous reference in cref attribute `ReflectionHelper.ParseReflectionName'. Assuming `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.TypeSystem.ReflectionHelper.ParseReflectionName(string)' but other overloads including `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.TypeSystem.ReflectionHelper.ParseReflectionName(string, ref int)' have also matched TypeSystem/INamedElement.cs(59,24): warning CS0419: Ambiguous reference in cref attribute `ReflectionHelper.ParseReflectionName'. Assuming `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.TypeSystem.ReflectionHelper.ParseReflectionName(string)' but other overloads including `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.TypeSystem.ReflectionHelper.ParseReflectionName(string, ref int)' have also matched TypeSystem/IType.cs(50,26): warning CS1584: XML comment on `ICSharpCode.NRefactory.TypeSystem.IType' has syntactically incorrect cref attribute `IEquatable{IType}.Equals(IType)' TypeSystem/IType.cs(319,38): warning CS1580: Invalid type for parameter `1' in XML comment cref attribute `GetMethods(Predicate{IUnresolvedMethod}, GetMemberOptions)' TypeSystem/TypeKind.cs(61,17): warning CS1580: Invalid type for parameter `1' in XML comment cref attribute `IType.GetNestedTypes(Predicate{ITypeDefinition}, GetMemberOptions)' TypeSystem/SpecialType.cs(50,52): warning CS1580: Invalid type for parameter `1' in XML comment cref attribute `IType.GetNestedTypes(Predicate{ITypeDefinition}, GetMemberOptions)' /usr/lib/mono/4.0/Microsoft.CSharp.targets: error : Compiler crashed with code: 1.

  Read the article

• Issue with Godaddy DNS manager

  - by Fischer

  I'm using domains.live.com to setup an email to a domain registered on Godaddy. The domains.live.com configuration page says: Godaddy's DNS manager isn't accepting this string Value: v=spf1 include:hotmail.com ~all it gives an error, something is wrong, either with the string or with the DNS manager and I would like to know how to fix it. Notes: The more information link is dead, Godaddy no longer gives support by email, no Microsoft support

  Read the article

• Prevent your Silverlight XAP file from caching in your browser.

  - by mbcrump

  If you work with Silverlight daily then you have run into this problem. Your XAP file has been cached in your browser and you have to empty your browser cache to resolve it. If your using Google Chrome then you typically do the following: Go to Options –> Clear Browsing History –> Empty the Cache and finally click Clear Browsing data. As you can see, this is a lot of unnecessary steps. It is even worse when you have a customer that says, “I can’t see the new features you just implemented!” and you realize it’s a cached xap problem.  I have been struggling with a way to prevent my XAP file from caching inside of a browser for a while now and decided to implement the following solution. If the Visual Studio Debugger is attached then add a unique query string to the source param to force the XAP file to be refreshed. If the Visual Studio Debugger is not attached then add the source param as Visual Studio generates it. This is also in case I forget to remove the above code in my production environment. I want the ASP.NET code to be inline with my .ASPX page. (I do not want a separate code behind .cs page or .vb page attached to the .aspx page.) Below is an example of the hosting code generated when you create a new Silverlight project. As a quick refresher, the hard coded param name = “source” specifies the location of your XAP file.  <form id="form1" runat="server" style="height:100%"> <div id="silverlightControlHost"> <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"/> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50826.0" style="text-decoration:none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> </a> </object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe></div> </form> We are going to use a little bit of inline ASP.NET to generate the param name = source dynamically to prevent the XAP file from caching. Lets look at the completed solution: <form id="form1" runat="server" style="height:100%"> <div id="silverlightControlHost"> <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <% string strSourceFile = @"ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"; string param; if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) //Debugger Attached - Refresh the XAP file. param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "?" + DateTime.Now.Ticks + "\" />"; else { //Production Mode param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "\" />"; } Response.Write(param); %> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50826.0" style="text-decoration:none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> </a> </object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe></div> </form> We add the location to our XAP file to strSourceFile and if the debugger is attached then it will append DateTime.Now.Ticks to the XAP file source and force the browser to download the .XAP. If you view the page source of your Silverlight Application then you can verify it worked properly by looking at the param name = “source” tag as shown below. <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap?634299001187160148" /> If the debugger is not attached then it will use the standard source tag as shown below. <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"/> At this point you may be asking, How do I prevent my XAP file from being cached on my production app? Well, you have two easy options: 1) I really don’t recommend this approach but you can force the XAP to be refreshed everytime with the following code snippet.  <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap?<%=Guid.NewGuid().ToString() %>"/> NOTE: You could also substitute the “Guid.NewGuid().ToString() for anything that create a random field. (I used DateTime.Now.Ticks earlier). 2) Another solution that I like even better involves checking the XAP Creation Date and appending it to the param name = source. This method was described by Lars Holm Jenson. <% string strSourceFile = @"ClientBin/SilverlightApplication2.xap"; string param; if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "\" />"; else { string xappath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"") + @"\" + strSourceFile; DateTime xapCreationDate = System.IO.File.GetLastWriteTime(xappath); param = "<param name=\"source\" value=\"" + strSourceFile + "?ignore=" + xapCreationDate.ToString() + "\" />"; } Response.Write(param); %> As you can see, this problem has been solved. It will work with all web browsers and stubborn proxy servers that are caching your .XAP. If you enjoyed this article then check out my blog for others like this. You may also want to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter.   Subscribe to my feed

  Read the article

• How one decision can turn web services to hell

  - by DigiMortal

  In this posting I will show you how one stupid decision may turn developers life to hell. There is a project where bunch of complex applications exchange data frequently and it is very hard to change something without additional expenses. Well, one analyst thought that string is silver bullet of web services. Read what happened. Bad bad mistake In the early stages of integration project there was analyst who also established architecture and technical design for web services. There was one very bad mistake this analyst made: All data must be converted to strings before exchange! Yes, that’s correct, this was the requirement. All integers, decimals and dates are coming in and going out as strings. There was also explanation for this requirement: This way we can avoid data type conversion errors! Well, this guy works somewhere else already and I hope he works in some burger restaurant – far away from computers. Consequences If you first look at this requirement it may seem like little annoying piece of crap you can easily survive. But let’s see the real consequences one stupid decision can cause: hell load of data conversions are done by receiving applications and SSIS packages, SSIS packages are not error prone and they depend heavily on strings they get from different services, there are more than one format per type that is used in different services, for larger amounts of data all these conversion tasks slow down the work of integration packages, practically all developers have been in hurry with some SSIS import tasks and some fields that are not used in different calculations in SSAS cube are imported without data conversions (by example, some prices are strings in format “1.021 $”). The most painful problem for developers is the part of data conversions because they don’t expect that there is such a stupid requirement stated and therefore they are not able to estimate the time their tasks take on these web services. Also developers must be prepared for cases when suddenly some service sends data that is not in acceptable format and they must solve the problems ASAP. This puts unexpected load on developers and they are not very happy with it because they can’t understand why they have to live with this horror if it is possible to fix. What to do if you see something like this? Well, explain the problem to customer and demand special tasks to project schedule to get this mess solved before going on with new developments. It is cheaper to solve the problems now that later.

  Read the article

• SEO & SEM Long Tail Keyword Marketing Strategy

  Long tail marketing strategies for SEO & SEM often return higher conversion rates by up to 200% as compared to short tail generic keyword terms. These long tail keyword terms can be extremely profitable for SEM (search engine marketing) in terms of lower cost or bid for keywords and larger returns on pay per click investment.

  Read the article

• SSIS: Deploying OLAP cubes using C# script tasks and AMO

  - by DrJohn

  As part of the continuing series on Building dynamic OLAP data marts on-the-fly, this blog entry will focus on how to automate the deployment of OLAP cubes using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Analysis Services Management Objects (AMO). OLAP cube deployment is usually done using the Analysis Services Deployment Wizard. However, this option was dismissed for a variety of reasons. Firstly, invoking external processes from SSIS is fraught with problems as (a) it is not always possible to ensure SSIS waits for the external program to terminate; (b) we cannot log the outcome properly and (c) it is not always possible to control the server's configuration to ensure the executable works correctly. Another reason for rejecting the Deployment Wizard is that it requires the 'answers' to be written into four XML files. These XML files record the three things we need to change: the name of the server, the name of the OLAP database and the connection string to the data mart. Although it would be reasonably straight forward to change the content of the XML files programmatically, this adds another set of complication and level of obscurity to the overall process. When I first investigated the possibility of using C# to deploy a cube, I was surprised to find that there are no other blog entries about the topic. I can only assume everyone else is happy with the Deployment Wizard! SSIS "forgets" assembly references If you build your script task from scratch, you will have to remember how to overcome one of the major annoyances of working with SSIS script tasks: the forgetful nature of SSIS when it comes to assembly references. Basically, you can go through the process of adding an assembly reference using the Add Reference dialog, but when you close the script window, SSIS "forgets" the assembly reference so the script will not compile. After repeating the operation several times, you will find that SSIS only remembers the assembly reference when you specifically press the Save All icon in the script window. This problem is not unique to the AMO assembly and has certainly been a "feature" since SQL Server 2005, so I am not amazed it is still present in SQL Server 2008 R2! Sample Package So let's take a look at the sample SSIS package I have provided which can be downloaded from here: DeployOlapCubeExample.zip  Below is a screenshot after a successful run. Connection Managers The package has three connection managers: AsDatabaseDefinitionFile is a file connection manager pointing to the .asdatabase file you wish to deploy. Note that this can be found in the bin directory of you OLAP database project once you have clicked the "Build" button in Visual Studio TargetOlapServerCS is an Analysis Services connection manager which identifies both the deployment server and the target database name. SourceDataMart is an OLEDB connection manager pointing to the data mart which is to act as the source of data for your cube. This will be used to replace the connection string found in your .asdatabase file Once you have configured the connection managers, the sample should run and deploy your OLAP database in a few seconds. Of course, in a production environment, these connection managers would be associated with package configurations or set at runtime. When you run the sample, you should see that the script logs its activity to the output screen (see screenshot above). If you configure logging for the package, then these messages will also appear in your SSIS logging. Sample Code Walkthrough Next let's walk through the code. The first step is to parse the connection string provided by the TargetOlapServerCS connection manager and obtain the name of both the target OLAP server and also the name of the OLAP database. Note that the target database does not have to exist to be referenced in an AS connection manager, so I am using this as a convenient way to define both properties. We now connect to the server and check for the existence of the OLAP database. If it exists, we drop the database so we can re-deploy. svr.Connect(olapServerName); if (svr.Connected) { // Drop the OLAP database if it already exists Database db = svr.Databases.FindByName(olapDatabaseName); if (db != null) { db.Drop(); } // rest of script } Next we start building the XMLA command that will actually perform the deployment. Basically this is a small chuck of XML which we need to wrap around the large .asdatabase file generated by the Visual Studio build process. // Start generating the main part of the XMLA command XmlDocument xmlaCommand = new XmlDocument(); xmlaCommand.LoadXml(string.Format("<Batch Transaction='false' xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine'><Alter AllowCreate='true' ObjectExpansion='ExpandFull'><Object><DatabaseID>{0}</DatabaseID></Object><ObjectDefinition/></Alter></Batch>", olapDatabaseName));  Next we need to merge two XML files which we can do by simply using setting the InnerXml property of the ObjectDefinition node as follows: // load OLAP Database definition from .asdatabase file identified by connection manager XmlDocument olapCubeDef = new XmlDocument(); olapCubeDef.Load(Dts.Connections["AsDatabaseDefinitionFile"].ConnectionString); // merge the two XML files by obtain a reference to the ObjectDefinition node oaRootNode.InnerXml = olapCubeDef.InnerXml;   One hurdle I had to overcome was removing detritus from the .asdabase file left by the Visual Studio build. Through an iterative process, I found I needed to remove several nodes as they caused the deployment to fail. The XMLA error message read "Cannot set read-only node: CreatedTimestamp" or similar. In comparing the XMLA generated with by the Deployment Wizard with that generated by my code, these read-only nodes were missing, so clearly I just needed to strip them out. This was easily achieved using XPath to find the relevant XML nodes, of which I show one example below: foreach (XmlNode node in rootNode.SelectNodes("//ns1:CreatedTimestamp", nsManager)) { node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node); } Now we need to change the database name in both the ID and Name nodes using code such as: XmlNode databaseID = xmlaCommand.SelectSingleNode("//ns1:Database/ns1:ID", nsManager); if (databaseID != null) databaseID.InnerText = olapDatabaseName; Finally we need to change the connection string to point at the relevant data mart. Again this is easily achieved using XPath to search for the relevant nodes and then replace the content of the node with the new name or connection string. XmlNode connectionStringNode = xmlaCommand.SelectSingleNode("//ns1:DataSources/ns1:DataSource/ns1:ConnectionString", nsManager); if (connectionStringNode != null) { connectionStringNode.InnerText = Dts.Connections["SourceDataMart"].ConnectionString; } Finally we need to perform the deployment using the Execute XMLA command and check the returned XmlaResultCollection for errors before setting the Dts.TaskResult. XmlaResultCollection oResults = svr.Execute(xmlaCommand.InnerXml);  // check for errors during deployment foreach (Microsoft.AnalysisServices.XmlaResult oResult in oResults) { foreach (Microsoft.AnalysisServices.XmlaMessage oMessage in oResult.Messages) { if ((oMessage.GetType().Name == "XmlaError")) { FireError(oMessage.Description); HadError = true; } } } If you are not familiar with XML programming, all this may all seem a bit daunting, but perceiver as the sample code is pretty short. If you would like the script to process the OLAP database, simply uncomment the lines in the vicinity of Process method. Of course, you can extend the script to perform your own custom processing and to even synchronize the database to a front-end server. Personally, I like to keep the deployment and processing separate as the code can become overly complex for support staff.If you want to know more, come see my session at the forthcoming SQLBits conference.

  Read the article

• Bash Printing, how to

  - by Uncle Leo

  Wrote a script in bash. Now im need to bring information into a text file,for example in PostScript, but there is one problem. I need to have a certain length of string in characters, and stretch or shrink the string on the entire width of the page layout. I have tried a2ps and enscript, but there is no such option. Please tell me the solution to this problem, maybe in Ghostscript. Thanks in advance!

  Read the article

• Compiling and Running Handbrake in Ubuntu

  <b>Packt Publishing: </b>"Handbrake is considered the Swiss Army knife of video conversion tools. Running on the three major operating system platforms, Handbrake can open a huge variety of formats, including common ones that others can't handle (like the titles in the MPEG TS structure of a DVD)."

  Read the article

• Adding Attributes to Generated Classes

  ASP.NET MVC 2 adds support for data annotations, implemented via attributes on your model classes.  Depending on your design, you may be using an OR/M tool like Entity Framework or LINQ-to-SQL to generate your entity classes, and you may further be using these entities directly as your Model.  This is fairly common, and alleviates the need to do mapping between POCO domain objects and such entities (though there are certainly pros and cons to using such entities directly). As an example, the current version of the NerdDinner application (available on CodePlex at nerddinner.codeplex.com) uses Entity Framework for its model.  Thus, there is a NerdDinner.edmx file in the project, and a generated NerdDinner.Models.Dinner class.  Fortunately, these generated classes are marked as partial, so you can extend their behavior via your own partial class in a separate file.  However, if for instance the generated Dinner class has a property Title of type string, you cant then add your own Title of type string for the purpose of adding data annotations to it, like this: public partial class Dinner { [Required] public string Title { get;set; } } This will result in a compilation error, because the generated Dinner class already contains a definition of Title.  How then can we add attributes to this generated code?  Do we need to go into the T4 template and add a special case that says if were generated a Dinner class and it has a Title property, add this attribute?  Ick. MetadataType to the Rescue The MetadataType attribute can be used to define a type which contains attributes (metadata) for a given class.  It is applied to the class you want to add metadata to (Dinner), and it refers to a totally separate class to which youre free to add whatever methods and properties you like.  Using this attribute, our partial Dinner class might look like this: [MetadataType(typeof(Dinner_Validation))] public partial class Dinner {}   public class Dinner_Validation { [Required] public string Title { get; set; } } In this case the Dinner_Validation class is public, but if you were concerned about muddying your API with such classes, it could instead have been created as a private class within Dinner.  Having the validation attributes specified in their own class (with no other responsibilities) complies with the Single Responsibility Principle and makes it easy for you to test that the validation rules you expect are in place via these annotations/attributes. Thanks to Julie Lerman for her help with this.  Right after she showed me how to do this, I realized it was also already being done in the project I was working on. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

  - by Rick Strahl

  originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

  Read the article

• Changing CSS with jQuery syntax in Silverlight using jLight

  - by Timmy Kokke

  Lately I’ve ran into situations where I had to change elements or had to request a value in the DOM from Silverlight. jLight, which was introduced in an earlier article, can help with that. jQuery offers great ways to change CSS during runtime. Silverlight can access the DOM, but it isn’t as easy as jQuery. All examples shown in this article can be looked at in this online demo. The code can be downloaded here.   Part 1: The easy stuff Selecting and changing properties is pretty straight forward. Setting the text color in all <B> </B> elements can be done using the following code:   jQuery.Select("b").Css("color", "red");   The Css() method is an extension method on jQueryObject which is return by the jQuery.Select() method. The Css() method takes to parameters. The first is the Css style property. All properties used in Css can be entered in this string. The second parameter is the value you want to give the property. In this case the property is “color” and it is changed to “red”. To specify which element you want to select you can add a :selector parameter to the Select() method as shown in the next example.   jQuery.Select("b:first").Css("font-family", "sans-serif");   The “:first” pseudo-class selector selects only the first element. This example changes the “font-family” property of the first <B></B> element to “sans-serif”. To make use of intellisense in Visual Studio I’ve added a extension methods to help with the pseudo-classes. In the example below the “font-weight” of every “Even” <LI></LI> is set to “bold”.   jQuery.Select("li".Even()).Css("font-weight", "bold");   Because the Css() extension method returns a jQueryObject it is possible to chain calls to Css(). The following example show setting the “color”, “background-color” and the “font-size” of all headers in one go.   jQuery.Select(":header").Css("color", "#12FF70") .Css("background-color", "yellow") .Css("font-size", "25px");   Part 2: More complex stuff In only a few cases you need to change only one style property. More often you want to change an entire set op style properties all in one go.  You could chain a lot of Css() methods together. A better way is to add a class to a stylesheet and define all properties in there. With the AddClass() method you can set a style class to a set of elements. This example shows how to add the “demostyle” class to all <B></B> in the document.   jQuery.Select("b").AddClass("demostyle");   Removing the class works in the same way:   jQuery.Select("b").RemoveClass("demostyle");   jLight is build for interacting with to the DOM from Silverlight using jQuery. A jQueryObjectCss object can be used to define different sets of style properties in Silverlight. The over 60 most common Css style properties are defined in the jQueryObjectCss class. A string indexer can be used to access all style properties ( CssObject1[“background-color”] equals CssObject1.BackgroundColor). In the code below, two jQueryObjectCss objects are defined and instantiated.   private jQueryObjectCss CssObject1; private jQueryObjectCss CssObject2;   public Demo2() { CssObject1 = new jQueryObjectCss { BackgroundColor = "Lime", Color="Black", FontSize = "12pt", FontFamily = "sans-serif", FontWeight = "bold", MarginLeft = 150, LineHeight = "28px", Border = "Solid 1px #880000" }; CssObject2 = new jQueryObjectCss { FontStyle = "Italic", FontSize = "48", Color = "#225522" }; InitializeComponent(); }   Now instead of chaining to set all different properties you can just pass one of the jQueryObjectCss objects to the Css() method. In this case all <LI></LI> elements are set to match this object.   jQuery.Select("li").Css(CssObject1); When using the jQueryObjectCss objects chaining is still possible. In the following example all headers are given a blue backgroundcolor and the last is set to match CssObject2.   jQuery.Select(":header").Css(new jQueryObjectCss{BackgroundColor = "Blue"}) .Eq(-1).Css(CssObject2);   Part 3: The fun stuff Having Silverlight call JavaScript and than having JavaScript to call Silverlight requires a lot of plumbing code. Everything has to be registered and strings are passed back and forth to execute the JavaScript. jLight makes this kind of stuff so easy, it becomes fun to use. In a lot of situations jQuery can call a function to decide what to do, setting a style class based on complex expressions for example. jLight can do the same, but the callback methods are defined in Silverlight. This example calls the function() method for each <LI></LI> element. The callback method has to take a jQueryObject, an integer and a string as parameters. In this case jLight differs a bit from the actual jQuery implementation. jQuery uses only the index and the className parameters. A jQueryObject is added to make it simpler to access the attributes and properties of the element. If the text of the listitem starts with a ‘D’ or an ‘M’ the class is set. Otherwise null is returned and nothing happens.   private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { jQuery.Select("li").AddClass(function); }   private string function(jQueryObject obj, int index, string className) { if (obj.Text[0] == 'D' || obj.Text[0] == 'M') return "demostyle"; return null; }   The last thing I would like to demonstrate uses even more Silverlight and less jLight, but demonstrates the power of the combination. Animating a style property using a Storyboard with easing functions. First a dependency property is defined. In this case it is a double named Intensity. By handling the changed event the color is set using jQuery.   public double Intensity { get { return (double)GetValue(IntensityProperty); } set { SetValue(IntensityProperty, value); } }   public static readonly DependencyProperty IntensityProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("Intensity", typeof(double), typeof(Demo3), new PropertyMetadata(0.0, IntensityChanged));   private static void IntensityChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) { var i = (byte)(double)e.NewValue; jQuery.Select("span").Css("color", string.Format("#{0:X2}{0:X2}{0:X2}", i)); }   An animation has to be created. This code defines a Storyboard with one keyframe that uses a bounce ease as an easing function. The animation is set to target the Intensity dependency property defined earlier.   private Storyboard CreateAnimation(double value) { Storyboard storyboard = new Storyboard(); var da = new DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames(); var d = new EasingDoubleKeyFrame { EasingFunction = new BounceEase(), KeyTime = KeyTime.FromTimeSpan(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.0)), Value = value }; da.KeyFrames.Add(d); Storyboard.SetTarget(da, this); Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(da, new PropertyPath(Demo3.IntensityProperty)); storyboard.Children.Add(da); return storyboard; }   Initially the Intensity is set to 128 which results in a gray color. When one of the buttons is pressed, a new animation is created an played. One to animate to black, and one to animate to white.   public Demo3() { InitializeComponent(); Intensity = 128; }   private void button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CreateAnimation(255).Begin(); }   private void button3_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CreateAnimation(0).Begin(); }   Conclusion As you can see jLight can make the life of a Silverlight developer a lot easier when accessing the DOM. Almost all jQuery functions that are defined in jLight use the same constructions as described above. I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to the real jQuery. Having JavaScript perform callbacks to Silverlight using jLight will be described in more detail in a future tutorial about AJAX or eventing.

  Read the article

• RightNow CX Cloud Service Combined with Oracle Fusion CRM in the Cloud

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  ·        The May 2012 release of Oracle’s RightNow CX Cloud Service, the customer experience suite, is now integrated with Oracle Fusion CRM, helping organizations to achieve sustainable business growth through relevant, cross-channel customer interactions that can increase revenue opportunities and drive organizational efficiencies. Relevant Interactions Build Stronger Customer Relationships ·          Armed with a comprehensive view of all customer interactions across channels, the context and status of these interactions, and an awareness of the customer’s value to the organization, companies can now offer more relevant products and services to customers. ·         Using the combined Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service and Oracle Fusion CRM solutions, organizations can increase customer retention, drive higher levels of customer advocacy, and increase sales conversion rates with tools designed to: - Provide a complete, cross-channel view of the customer to sales, marketing and service. - Empower sales and service departments to easily collaborate to proactively solve customer issues, using opportunities to provide purchase advice at the right time and with the right solutions. - Allow sales to easily review service history in preparation for sales calls. - Enable agents to understand customer value based upon prior buying habits and existing opportunities. Deeper Insight Enables Targeted, Personalized Opportunities ·          The combination of Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service and Oracle Fusion CRM allows sales and marketing organizations to simultaneously leverage service interactions from RightNow CX and sales prediction and segmentation capabilities from Fusion Sales. This helps companies to: - Better match products and services to specific customer needs based on customer service history.  - Deliver targeted, personalized interactions intended to help customers derive more value from purchases and to inform future buying decisions. - Identify new opportunities to increase deal size and conversion rates. Supporting Quotes ·         “Every interaction is a relationship opportunity to grow your business. When these interactions are relevant and add value for customers, customers are more likely to trust the relationship and seek purchase advice,” said David Vap, group vice president, Oracle. “This customer trust provides an opportunity to increase customer product adoption and to reduce the cost of customer acquisition, thereby increasing company profitability.” Supporting Resources ·         Oracle Fusion CRM ·         Oracle Fusion Applications ·         Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service ·         OracleCRM on Facebook ·         OracleCRM on YouTube

  Read the article

• const vs. readonly for a singleton

  - by GlenH7

  First off, I understand there are folk who oppose the use of singletons. I think it's an appropriate use in this case as it's constant state information, but I'm open to differing opinions / solutions. (See The singleton pattern and When should the singleton pattern not be used?) Second, for a broader audience: C++/CLI has a similar keyword to readonly with initonly, so this isn't strictly a C# type question. (Literal field versus constant variable in C++/CLI) Sidenote: A discussion of some of the nuances on using const or readonly. My Question: I have a singleton that anchors together some different data structures. Part of what I expose through that singleton are some lists and other objects, which represent the necessary keys or columns in order to connect the linked data structures. I doubt that anyone would try to change these objects through a different module, but I want to explicitly protect them from that risk. So I'm currently using a "readonly" modifier on those objects*. I'm using readonly instead of const with the lists as I read that using const will embed those items in the referencing assemblies and will therefore trigger a rebuild of those referencing assemblies if / when the list(s) is/are modified. This seems like a tighter coupling than I would want between the modules, but I wonder if I'm obsessing over a moot point. (This is question #2 below) The alternative I see to using "readonly" is to make the variables private and then wrap them with a public get. I'm struggling to see the advantage of this approach as it seems like wrapper code that doesn't provide much additional benefit. (This is question #1 below) It's highly unlikely that we'll change the contents or format of the lists - they're a compilation of things to avoid using magic strings all over the place. Unfortunately, not all the code has converted over to using this singleton's presentation of those strings. Likewise, I don't know that we'd change the containers / classes for the lists. So while I normally argue for the encapsulations advantages a get wrapper provides, I'm just not feeling it in this case. A representative sample of my singleton public sealed class mySingl { private static volatile mySingl sngl; private static object lockObject = new Object(); public readonly Dictionary<string, string> myDict = new Dictionary<string, string>() { {"I", "index"}, {"D", "display"}, }; public enum parms { ABC = 10, DEF = 20, FGH = 30 }; public readonly List<parms> specParms = new List<parms>() { parms.ABC, parms.FGH }; public static mySingl Instance { get { if(sngl == null) { lock(lockObject) { if(sngl == null) sngl = new mySingl(); } } return sngl; } } private mySingl() { doSomething(); } } Questions: Am I taking the most reasonable approach in this case? Should I be worrying about const vs. readonly? is there a better way of providing this information?

  Read the article

• Poner aplicaci&oacute;n Asp.Net en modo OFFLINE

  - by Jason Ulloa

  Una de las opciones que todo aplicación debería tener es el poder ponerse en modo OFFLINE para evitar el acceso de usuarios. Esto es completamente necesario cuando queremos realizar cambios a nuestra aplicación (cambiar algo, poner una actualización, etc) o a nuestra base de datos y evitarnos problemas con los usuarios que se encuentren logueados dentro de la aplicación en ese momento. Muchos ejemplos a través de la Web exponen la forma de realizar esta tarea utilizando dos técnicas: 1. La primera de ellas es utilizar el archivo App_Offline.htm sin embargo, esta técnica tiene un inconveniente. Y es que, una vez que hemos subido el archivo a nuestra aplicación esta se bloquea completamente y no tenemos forma de volver a ponerla ONLINE a menos que eliminemos el archivo. Es decir no podemos controlarla. 2. La segunda de ellas es el utilizar la etiqueta httpRuntime, pero nuevamente tenemos el mismo problema. Al habilitar el modo OFFLINE mediante esta etiqueta, tampoco podremos acceder a un modo de administración para cambiarla. Un ejemplo de la etiqueta httpRuntime <configuration> <system.web> <httpRuntime enable="false" /> </system.web> </configuration>   Tomando en cuenta lo anterior, lo mas optimo seria que podamos por medio de alguna pagina de administración colocar nuestro sitio en modo OFFLINE, pero manteniendo el acceso a la pagina de administración para poder volver a cambiar el valor que pondrá nuestra aplicación nuevamente en modo ONLINE. Para ello, utilizaremos el web.config de nuestra aplicación y una pequeña clase que se encargara de Leer y escribir los valores. Lo primero será, abrir nuestro web.config y definir dentro del appSettings dos nuevas KEY que contendrán los valores para el modo OFFLINE de nuestra aplicación: <appSettings> <add key="IsOffline" value="false" /> <add key="IsOfflineMessage" value="Sistema temporalmente no disponible por tareas de mantenimiento." /> </appSettings>   En las KEY anteriores tenemos el IsOffLine con value de false, esto es para indicarle a nuestra aplicación que actualmente su modo de funcionamiento es ONLINE, este valor será el que posteriormente cambiemos a TRUE para volver al modo OFFLINE. Nuestra segunda KEY (IsOfflineMessage) posee el value (Sistema temporalmente….) que será mostrado al usuario como un mensaje cuando el sitio este en modo OFFLINE. Una vez definidas nuestras dos KEY en el web.config, escribiremos una clase personalizada para leer y escribir los valores. Así que, agregamos un nuevo elemento de tipo clase al proyecto llamado SettingsRules y la definimos como Public. Está clase contendrá dos métodos, el primero será para leer los valores: public string readIsOnlineSettings(string sectionToRead) { Configuration cfg = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration(System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.ApplicationVirtualPath); KeyValueConfigurationElement isOnlineSettings = (KeyValueConfigurationElement)cfg.AppSettings.Settings[sectionToRead]; return isOnlineSettings.Value; }   El segundo método, será el encargado de escribir los nuevos valores al web.config public bool saveIsOnlineSettings(string sectionToWrite, string value) { bool succesFullySaved;   try { Configuration cfg = WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration(System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.ApplicationVirtualPath); KeyValueConfigurationElement repositorySettings = (KeyValueConfigurationElement)cfg.AppSettings.Settings[sectionToWrite];   if (repositorySettings != null) { repositorySettings.Value = value; cfg.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified); } succesFullySaved = true; } catch (Exception) { succesFullySaved = false; } return succesFullySaved; }   Por último, definiremos en nuestra clase una región llamada instance, que contendrá un método encargado de devolver una instancia de la clase (esto para no tener que hacerlo luego) #region instance   private static SettingsRules m_instance;   // Properties public static SettingsRules Instance { get { if (m_instance == null) { m_instance = new SettingsRules(); } return m_instance; } }   #endregion instance   Con esto, nuestra clase principal esta completa. Así que pasaremos a la implementación de las páginas y el resto de código que completará la funcionalidad.   Para complementar la tarea del web.config utilizaremos el fabuloso GLOBAL.ASAX, este contendrá el código encargado de detectar si nuestra aplicación tiene el valor de ONLINE o OFFLINE y además de bloquear todas las paginas y directorios excepto el que le hayamos definido como administrador, esto para luego poder volver a configurar el sitio.   El evento del Global.Asax que utilizaremos será el Application_BeginRequest   protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e) {   if (Convert.ToBoolean(SettingsRules.Instance.readIsOnlineSettings("IsOffline"))) {   string Virtual = Request.Path.Substring(0, Request.Path.LastIndexOf("/") + 1);   if (Virtual.ToLower().IndexOf("/admin/") == -1) { //We don't makes action, is admin section Server.Transfer("~/TemporarilyOfflineMessage.aspx"); }   } } La primer Línea del IF, verifica si el atributo del web.config es True o False, si es true toma la dirección WEB que se ha solicitado y la incluimos en un IF para verificar si corresponde a la Sección admin (está sección no es mas que un folder en nuestra aplicación llamado admin y puede ser cambiado a cualquier otro). Si el resultado de ese if es –1 quiere decir que no coincide, entonces, esa será la bandera que nos permitirá bloquear inmediatamente la pagina actual, transfiriendo al usuario a una pagina de mantenimiento. Ahora, en nuestra carpeta Admin crearemos una nueva pagina asp.net llamada OnlineSettings.aspx para actualizar y leer los datos del web.config y una pagina Default.aspx para pruebas. Nuestra página OnlineSettings tendrá dos pasos importantes: 1. Leer los datos actuales de configuración protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { IsOffline.Checked = Convert.ToBoolean(mySettings.readIsOnlineSettings("IsOffline")); OfflineMessage.Text = mySettings.readIsOnlineSettings("IsOfflineMessage"); } }   2. Actualizar los datos con los nuevos valores. protected void UpdateButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { string htmlMessage = OfflineMessage.Text.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "<br />");   // Update the Application variables Application.Lock(); if (IsOffline.Checked) { mySettings.saveIsOnlineSettings("IsOffline", "True"); mySettings.saveIsOnlineSettings("IsOfflineMessage", htmlMessage); } else { mySettings.saveIsOnlineSettings("IsOffline", "false"); mySettings.saveIsOnlineSettings("IsOfflineMessage", htmlMessage); }   Application.UnLock(); }   Por último en la raíz de la aplicación, crearemos una nueva página aspx llamada TemporarilyOfflineMessage.aspx que será la que se muestre cuando se bloquee la aplicación. Al final nuestra aplicación se vería algo así Página bloqueada Configuración del Bloqueo Y para terminar la aplicación de ejemplo

  Read the article

• Increase Google SERP Rank by Improving Your PageRank

  Having a good search engines results page (SERP) rank is the goal of SEO, this means higher organic traffic, more visitors and increased conversion rate. But how do we improve our SERP rank specially with Google who provides more than 70% of relevant search results? Well one of them is improving your website's PageRank, if you think SERP and PR are not related, keep on reading to find out.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479  | Next Page >