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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 28, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 28, 2010New ProjectsBang: BangBox Office: Event Management for Community Theater Groups: Box Office is an event management web application to help theater groups manage & promote their shows. Manage performance schedules, sell tickets, ...CellsOnWeb: El espacio de las células del Programa Académico Microsoft en Argentina. CRM 4.0 Plugin Queue Item Counter: This is a crm 4.0 plugin to count queue items in each folder and display the number at the end of the name. For example, if the queue name is "Tes...Date Calculator: Date Calculator is a small desktop utility developed using Windows Forms .NET technology. This utility is analogous to the "Date calculation" modul...Enterprise Library Investigate: Enterprise Library Investigate ProjecteProject Management: Ứng dụng nền tảng web hỗ trợ quản lí và giám sát tiến độ dự án của tổ chức doanh nghiệp.Fiddler TreeView Panel Extension: Extension for Fiddler, to display the session information in a TreeView panel instead of the default ListBox, so it groups the information logicall...Git Source Control Provider: Git Source Control Provider is a Visual Studio Plug-in that integrates Git with Visual Studio.InspurProjects: Project on Inspur Co.Kryptonite: The Kryptonite project aims to improve development of websites based on the Kentico CMS. MLang .NET Wrapper: Detect the encoding of a text without BOM (Byte Order Mask) and choose the best Encoding for persistence or network transport of textMondaze: Proof of concept using Windows Azure.MultipointControls: A collection of controls that applied Windows Multipoint Mouse SDK. Windows Multipoint Mouse SDK enable app to have multiple mice interact simultan...Mundo De Bloques: "Mundo de bloques" makes it easier for analists to find the shortest way between two states in a problem using an heuristic function for Artificial...MyRPGtests: Just some tests :)OffInvoice Add-in for MS Office 2010: Project Description: The project it's based in the ability to extend funtionality in the Microsoft Office 2010 suite.OpenGraph .NET: A C# client for the Facebook Graph API. Supports desktop, web, ASP.NET MVC, and Silverlight connections and real-time updates. PLEASE NOTE: I dis...Portable Extensible Metadata (PEM) Data Annotation Generator: This project intends to help developers who uses PEM - Portable Extensible Metadata for Entity Framework generating Data Annotation information fro...Production and sale of plastic window systems: Automation company produces window design, production and sale of plastic window systems, management of sales contracts and their execution, print ...Renjian Storm (Renjian Image Viewer Uploader): Renjian Image Viewer UploaderShark Web Intelligence CMS: Shark Web Intelligence Inc. Content Management System.Shuffleboard Game for Windows Phone 7: This is a sample Shuffleboard game written in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7. It demonstrates physics, procedural animation, perspective transform...Silverlight Property Grid: Visual Studio Style PropertyGrid for Silverlight.SvnToTfs: Simple tool that migrates every Subversion revision toward Team Foundation Server 2010. It is developed in C# witn a WPF front-end.Tamias: Basic Cms Mvc Contrib Portable Area: The goal of this project is to have a easy-to-integrate basic cms for ASP.NET MVC applications based on MVC Contrib Portable Areas.TwitBy: TwitBy is a Twitter client for anyone who uses Twitter. It's easy to use and all of the major features are there. More features to come. H...Under Construction: A simple site that can be used as a splash for sites being upgraded or developed. UO Editor: The Owner & Organisation Editor makes it easy to view and edit the names of the registered owner and registered organization for your Windows OS. N...webform2010: this is the test projectWireless Network: ssWiX Toolset: The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line en...Xna.Extend: A collection of easy to use Xna components for aiding a game programmer in developing thee next big thing. I plan on using the components from this...New ReleasesA Guide to Parallel Programming: Drop 4 - Guide Preface, Chapters 1 - 5, and code: This is Drop 4 with Guide Preface, Chapters 1 - 5, and References, and the accompanying code samples. This drop requires Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 ...Ajax Toolkit for ASP.NET MVC: MAT 1.1: MAT 1.1Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V09: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release solves ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V10: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has add...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V11: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has add...CSS 360 Planetary Calendar: Beta Release: =============================================================================== Beta Release Version: 0.2 Description: This is the beta release de...Date Calculator: DateCalculator v1.0: This is the first release and as far as I know this is a stable version.eComic: eComic 2010.0.0.4: Version 2010.0.0.4 Change LogFixed issues in the "Full Screen Control Panel" causing it to lack translucence Added loupe magnification control ...Expression Encoder Batch Processor: Runtime Application v0.2: New in this version: Added more error handling if files not exist. Added button/feature to quit after current encoding job. Added code to handl...Fiddler TreeView Panel Extension: FiddlerTreeViewPanel 0.7: Initial compiled version of the assembly, ready to use. Please refer to http://fiddlertreeviewpanel.codeplex.com/ for instructions and installation.Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX v1.1.4: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.1.4 corre...Gardens Point Parser Generator: Gardens Point Parser Generator v1.4.1: Version 1.4.1 differs from version 1.4.0 only in containing a corrected version of a previously undocumented feature which allows the generation of...IsWiX: IsWiX 1.0.264.0: Build 1.0.264.0 - built against Fireworks 1.0.264.0. Adds support for autogenerating the SourceDir prepreprocessor variable and gives user choice t...Matrix: Matrix 0.5.2: Updated licenseMesopotamia Experiment: Mesopotamia 1.2.90: Release Notes - Ugraded to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 Bug Fixes - Fix to keep any sole organisms that penetrate to the next fitne...Microsoft Crm 4.0 Filtered Lookup: Microsoft Crm 4.0 Filtered Lookup: How to use: Allow passing custom querystring values: Create a DWORD registry key named [DisableParameterFilter] under [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWAR...MSBuild Extension Pack: May 2010: The MSBuild Extension Pack May 2010 release provides a collection of over 340 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover...MultiPoint Vote: MultiPointVote v.1: This accepts user inputs: number of participants, poll/survey title and the list of options A text file containing the items listed line per line...Mundo De Bloques: Mundo de Bloques, Release 1: "Mundo de bloques" makes it easier for analists to find the shortest way between two states in a problem using an heuristic function for Artificial...OffInvoice Add-in for MS Office 2010: OffInvoice for Office 2010 V1.0 Installer: Add-in for MS Word 2010 or MS Excel 2010 to allow the management (issuing, visualization and reception) of electronic invoices, based in the XML fo...OpenGraph .NET: 0.9.1 Beta: This is the first public release of OpenGraph .NET.patterns & practices: Composite WPF and Silverlight: Prism v2.2 - May 2010 Release: Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - May 2010 Release (Prism V2.2) The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight ...Portable Extensible Metadata (PEM) Data Annotation Generator: Release 49376: First release.Production and sale of plastic window systems: Yanuary 2009: NOTEBefore loading program, make sure you have installed MySQL and created DataBase that store in Source Code (look at below) Where Is The Source?...PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT: PROGRAMMABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT--3.2: The current version of the Programmable Software Development Environment has the capability of reading an optional text file in each source develop...Rapidshare Episode Downloader: RED 0.8.6: - Fixed Edit form to actually save the data - Added Bypass Validation to enable future episodes - Added Search parameter to Edit form - Added refr...Renjian Storm (Renjian Image Viewer Uploader): Renjian Storm 0.6: 人间风暴 v0.6 稳定版sELedit: sELedit v1.1b: + Fixed: when export and import items to text files, there was a bug with "NULL" bytes in the unicode stringShake - C# Make: Shake v0.1.21: Changes: FileTask CopyDir method modified, see documentationSharePoint Labs: SPLab7001A-ENU-Level100: SPLab7001A-ENU-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach how to analyze and audit WSP files. WSP files are somewhere in a no man's land between ITPro...SharePoint Rsync List: 1.0.0.3: Fix spcontext dispose bug in menu try and run jobs only on central admin server mark a single file failure if file not copied don't delete destinat...Shuffleboard Game for Windows Phone 7: Shuffleboard 1.0.0.1: Source code, solution files, and assets.Software Is Hardwork: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+04: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+04SoulHackers Demon Unite(Chinese version): WPFClient pre alpha: can unite 2, 3 or more demons. can un-unite 1 demon to 2 demon (no triple un-unite yet).Team Deploy: Team Deploy 2010 R1: This is the initial release for Team Deploy 2010 for TFS Team Build 2010. All features from Team Build 2.x are functional in this version. Comple...Under Construction: Under Construction: All Files required to show under construction page. The Page will pull through the Domain name that the site is being run on this allows you to use...Unit Driven: Version 0.0.5: - Tests nested by namespace parts. - Run buttons properly disabled based on currently running tests. - Timeouts for async tests enabled.UO Editor: UO Editor v1.0: Initial ReleaseVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30527.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWeb Service Software Factory Contrib: Import WSDL 2010: Generate Service Contract models from existing WSDL documents for Web Service Software Factory 2010. Usage: Install the vsix and right click on a S...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active ProjectsAStar.netpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationSqlServerExtensionsBlogEngine.NETRawrpatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceCodeReviewCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMIonics Isapi Rewrite Filter

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• SOA Community Newsletter: nouvelle lettre !

  - by mseika

  SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY NEWSLETTERAUGUST 2012 Dear SOA partner community member Have you submitted your feedback on SOA Partner Community Survey 2012? This is the last chance to participate in the survey. We recommend you to complete the survey and help us to improve our SOA Community. Thanks to all attendees and trainers for their participation in the excellent Fusion Middleware Summer Camps held in Lisbon and Munich. I would also like to thank you for the great feedback and the nice reports provided by AMIS Technology Blog & Middleware by Link Consulting. Most of our courses have been overbooked, if you did not get a chance or missed it, we offer a wide range of online training and the course material. Key take-away from the advanced BPM course is to become an expert in ADF. Here is the course from Grant Ronald Learn Advanced ADF online available. The Link Consulting Team became experts in SOA Governance with EAMS and Oracle Enterprise Repository! We always encourage our community members to share their best practices and are very keen to publish it. Please let us know if you want to share your best practices through this medium.We encourage you to make use of the Specialization benefits - this month we are giving an opportunity to Promote Your SOA & BPM Events. Jürgen KressOracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA NEW CONTENT Presentations & Training material OFM Summer CampsPromote Your SOA & BPM Events Advanced ADF Online, For Free By Grant BPM 11g Customer Stories & Solution Catalog & Process Accelerators Delivering SOA Governance with EAMS by Link Consulting Team WebLogic Server Provisioning and Patching News from our Partners & CommunityUpdated material by Oracle Connect and Network SOA Blogs SOA on Facebook SOA on LinkedIn SOA on Twitter Mix SOA Forum SOA Workspace PRESENTATIONS & TRAINING MATERIAL OFM SUMMER CAMPS Thanks to all attendees who invested their time and utilized the opportunity to attend the Summer Camps! Due to high demand of our most of the trainings, we had a long waiting list with more numbers of partners who are keen to attend it. We would like to give our special thanks to all trainers, who delivered excellent workshops! Most of the presentations and course material have been posted on our SOA Community Workspaceand WebLogic Community Workspace. You can access the content only if you are a registered community member. To register for the SOA Community please click here. You can register for the WebLogic Community here. To find out the first impressions of the event please visit our Facebook pages:www.facebook.com/WebLogicCommunity &www.facebook.com/soacommunity or Picasa AlbumThanks for the excellent blog posts from AMIS Technology Blog & Middleware by Link Consulting. Let us know if you published a twitter blog on@soacommunity & @wlscommunity. We will be pleased to publish it in our Newsletters. BPM Course Quotes “Its always easy, if you know, what you are doing” - Torsten Winterberg, Opitz“ The best ideas are the ideas from the best” - Filipe Sequeria, Primesoft “Best invest in the education in the last 12 months” - Richard Schaller, IPT “Practice best practice with the best instructor” - Graham Lamond Capgemini “If you have basic BPM knowledge, this is the course to really mater it” - Diogo Henriques Link Consulting “Very good trainers lot of work. Lot of fun as well” - Matthias Gris Workflow Factory “If you like to accelerate in Oracle come to the training to bring it all together” - Marcel van der Glind, Amis ADF Course Quotes "Excellent training, great opportunity to network!" - Frank Houweling, Amis "Lots of fun and good ideas" - Ana Santiago, GFI "Learn ADF, worth it Fusion Apps is the future" - Miguel Delgadillo, STO Consulting "The best way to learn Fusion Middleware from the #1" Alexandro Montantes, STO Consulting "Be advanced to to be the first” - Dimitar Petrov Fadata "Great opportunity to suck all the knowledge out of some very experienced product managers” - Wilfred von der Deijl, The Future Group WebLogic Course Quotes “Oracle trainings are the best” - Pedro Neto Novobas“ "Excellent training, well organized” - Pedro Antunh, Capgemini “This course dives you into Oracle WebLogic giving you a quick start on benefiting from Fusion Apps” - Leonardo Fernandes, Outsystems Additional Quotes “Thanks a lot again for organizing such a great and informative Summer Camp. Both training and networking were organized very professionally. I have gained tons of very useful Info, which will definitely help to increase quality of our future projects.” - Daniel Fasko fss-group.com I didn’t get the chance yesterday to thank you for a most enjoyable and thoroughly educational time I had in Munich over the last few days.” - Jeroen Bakker Ordina “Just to congratulate you on a great event, not only today but also in the previous days of training. As we know, a very good organization and, as a native Portuguese that knows Lisbon very good, a nice choice of places to visit. Looking forward to come again next year.” Pedro Miguel Neto, Novobase PROMOTE YOUR SOA & BPM EVENTS The Partner Event Publisher has just been made available to all SOA & BPM specialized partners in EMEA. Partners now have the opportunity to publish their events to theOracle.com/events site and spread the word on their upcoming live in-person and/or live webcast events. See the demo below and click here to read more information. ADVANCED ADF ONLINE, FOR FREE BY GRANT The second part of the advanced ADF online eCourse is Live now! This covers the advanced topics of region and region interaction as well as getting down and dirty with some of the layout features of ADF Faces, skinning and DVT components. The aim of this course is to give you a self-paced learning aid which covers the more advanced topics of ADF development. The content is developed by Product Management and our Curriculum development teams and is based on advanced training material we have been running internally for about 18 months. We will get started on the next chapter, but in the meantime, please have a look at chapters one and two. Back to top BPM 11G CUSTOMER STORIES & SOLUTION CATALOG & PROCESS ACCELERATORS Stories Everyone loves a good story on planning or implementing a BPM strategy. Everyone wants to hear how it was done before?, what worked?, what was achieved? If you have achieved success with BPM, we are very keen to hear your stories and examples of how your customers use it. We receive lots of requests from people who are thinking of using BPM to solve a specific problem or in combination with a specific technology to talk to someone who has done it before. These stories are invaluable. Drop down the details of anything you think is relevant with a bit of detail and we will follow up on it. As one good deed deserves another, we will do our best to give you stories if you need them to show that where you are going, others have treaded before. Send your stories to us using this e-mail link and we will share them among other like minded people. Solution Catalogue This summer, Oracle is launching a solution catalogue specifically intended for partners. If you have delivered a successful implementation in BPM and think it could be reused and applied again in a similar scenario in the same industry or in a similar environment, then we ware keen to know about it and will add it to the solution catalogue. The solution catalogue will showcase successful BPM solutions both inside and outside Oracle. Be in touch with us on this e-mail link and we will make sure to add your solution. Process AcceleratorsFinally if you have specific processes that you are expert on, you have implemented at a customer and you want to work with us on getting these productised, then we would love to know about it. The process accelerator programme is explained in the most recent SOA/BPM Community Newsletter but again feel free to contact us if you want to get involved. Good luck with BPM and let us know how we can help. Barry O'Reilly Director BPM [email protected] DELIVERING SOA GOVERNANCE WITH EAMS BY LINK CONSULTING TEAM In the last 12 years Link Consulting has been making its presence in specific areas such as Governance and Architecture, both in terms of practices and methodologies, products, know-how and technological expertise. The Enterprise Architecture Management System - Oracle Enterprise Edition (EAMS - OER Edition) is the result of this experience and combines the architecture management solution with OER in order to deliver a product specialized for SOA Governance that gathers the better of two worlds in solution that enables SOA Governance projects, initiatives and programs. Enterprise Architecture Management System Enterprise Architecture Management System (EAMS), is an automation based solution that enables the efficient management of Enterprise Architectures. The solution uses configured enterprise repositories and takes advantages of its features to provide automation capabilities to the users. EAMS provides capabilities to create/customize/analyze repository data, architectural blueprints, reports and analytic charts. Oracle Enterprise Repository Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) is one of the major and central elements of the Oracle SOA Governance solution. Oracle Enterprise Repository provides the tools to manage and govern the metadata for any type of software asset, from business processes and services to patterns, frameworks, applications, components, and models. OER maps the relationships and inter-dependencies that connect those assets to improve impact analysis, promote and optimize their reuse, and measure their impact on the bottom line. It provides the visibility, feedback, controls, and analytics to keep your SOA on track to deliver business value. The intense focus on automation helps to overcome barriers to SOA adoption and streamline governance throughout the lifecycle. Core capabilities of the OER include: Asset Management Asset Lifecycle Management Usage Tracking Service Discovery Version Management Dependency Analysis Portfolio Management EAMS - OER Edition The solution takes the advantages and features from both products and combines them in a symbiotic tool that enhances the quality of SOA Governance Initiatives and Programs. EAMS is able to produce a vast number of outputs by combining its analytical engine, SOA-specific configurations and the assets in OER and other related tools, catalogs and repositories. The configurations encompass not only the extendable parametrization of the metadata but also fully configurable blueprints, PowerPoint reports, charts and queries. The SOA blueprints The solution comes with a set of predefined architectural representations that help the organization better perceive their SOA landscape. More blueprints can be easily created in order to accommodate the organizations needs in terms of detail, audience and metadata. Charts & Dashboards The solution encompasses a set of predefined charts and dashboards that promote a more agile way to control and explore the assets. Time Based Visualization All representations are time bound, and with EAMS - OER you can truly govern SOA with a complete view of the Past, Present and Future; The solution delivers Gap Analysis, a project oriented approach while taking into consideration the As-Was, As-Is an To-Be. Time based visualization differentiating factors: Extensive automation and maintenance of architectural representations Organization wide solution. Easy access and navigation to and between all architectural artifacts and representations. Flexible meta-model, customization and extensibility capabilities. Lifecycle management and enforcement of the time dimension over all the repository content. Profile based customization. Comprehensive visibility Architectural alignment Friendly and striking user interfaces For more information on EAMS visit us here. For more information on SOA visit us here. WEBLOGIC SERVER PROVISIONING AND PATCHING For access to the Oracle demo systems please visit OPN and talk to your Partner Expert.SOA Suite and BPM Suite runs on WebLogic! We are pleased to announce the availability of a WebLogic Server Management demo that showcases some of the key provisioning and patching capabilities of WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition (EE). To learn more about these features - as well as other features of the pack - please visit the pack's saleskit page.Demo Highlights The demo showcases the following capabilities: Patching Oracle WebLogic Servers Standardizing WebLogic Server Patch Rollouts Creating a WebLogic Domain Provisioning Profile Cloning a WebLogic Domain from a Provisioning Profile Deploying a Java EE Application Scaling Out an Oracle WebLogic Cluster Demo Instructions Go to the DSS website for Oracle Partners. On the Standard Demo Launchpad page, under the “Software Lifecycle Automation” section, click on the link “EM Cloud Control 12c WLS Provisioning and Patching” (tagged as “NEW”). Specific demo launchpad page contains a link to the detailed demo script with instructions on how to show the demo.

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• Stop Spinning Your Wheels&hellip; Sage Advice for Aspiring Developers

  - by Mark Rackley

  So… lately I’ve been tasked with helping bring some non-developers over the hump and become full-fledged, all around, SharePoint developers. Well, only time will tell if I’m successful or a complete failure. Good thing about failures though, you know what NOT to do next time! Anyway, I’ve been writing some sort of code since I was about 10 years old; so I sometimes take for granted the effort some people have to go through to learn a new technology. I guess if I had to say I was an “expert” in one thing it would be learning (and getting “stuff” done) in new technologies. Maybe that’s why I’ve embraced SharePoint and the SharePoint community. SharePoint is the first technology I haven’t been able to master or get everything done without help from other people. I KNOW I’ll never know it all and I learn something new every day.  It keeps it interesting, it keeps me motivated, and keeps me involved. So, what some people may consider a downside of SharePoint, I definitely consider a plus. Crap.. I’m rambling. Where was I? Oh yeah… me trying to be helpful. Like I said, I am able to quickly and effectively pick up new languages, technology, etc. and put it to good use. Am I just brilliant? Well, my mom thinks so.. but maybe not. Maybe I’ve just been doing it for a long time…. 25 years in some form or fashion… wow I’m old… Anyway, what I lack in depth I make up for in breadth and being the “go-to” guy wherever I work when someone needs to “get stuff done”.  Let’s see if I can take some of that experience and put it to practical use to help new people get up to speed faster, learn things more effectively, and become that go-to guy. First off…  make sure you… Know The Basics I don’t have the time to teach new developers the basics, but you gotta know them. I’ve only been “taught” two languages.. Fortran 77 and C… everything else I’ve picked up from “doing”. I HAD to know the basics though, and all new developers need to understand the very basics of development.  97.23% of all languages will have the following: Variables Functions Arrays If statements For loops / While loops If you think about it, most development is “if this, do this… or while this, do this…”.  “This” may be some unique method to your language or something you develop, but the basics are the basics. YES there are MANY other development topics you need to understand, but you shouldn’t be scratching your head trying to figure out what a ”for loop” is… (Also learn about classes and hashtables as quickly as possible). Once you have the basics down it makes it much easier to… Learn By Doing This may just apply to me and my warped brain.  I don’t learn a new technology by reading or hearing someone speak about it. I learn by doing. It does me no good to try and learn all of the intricacies of a new language or technology inside-and-out before getting my hands dirty. Just show me how to do one thing… let me get that working… then show me how to do the next thing.. let me get that working… Now, let’s see what I can figure out on my own. Okay.. now it starts to make sense. I see how the language works, I can step through the code, and before you know it.. I’m productive in a new technology. Be careful here though…. make sure you… Don’t Reinvent The Wheel People have been writing code for what… 50+ years now? So, why are you trying to tackle ANYTHING without first Googling it with Bing to see what others have done first? When I was first learning C# (I had come from a Java background) I had to call a web service.  Sure! No problem! I’d done this many times in Java. So, I proceeded to write an HTTP Handler, called the Web Service and it worked like a charm!!!  Probably about 2.3 seconds after I got it working completely someone says to me “Why didn’t you just add a Web Reference?” Really? You can do that?  oops… I just wasted a lot of time. Before undertaking the development of any sort of utility method in a new language, make sure it’s not already handled for you… Okay… you are starting to write some code and are curious about the possibilities? Well… don’t just sit there… Try It And See What Happens This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves. “So… ‘x++’ works in C#, but does it also work in JavaScript?”   Really? Did you just ask me that? In the time it spent for you to type that email, press the send button, me receive the email, get around to reading it, and replying with “yes” you could have tested it 47 times and know the answer! Just TRY it! See what happens! You aren’t doing brain surgery. You aren’t going to kill anyone, and you BETTER not be developing in production. So, you are not going to crash any production systems!! Seriously! Get off your butt and just try it yourself. The extra added benefit is that it doesn’t work, the absolute best way to learn is to… Learn From Your Failures I don’t know about you… but if I screw up and something doesn’t work, I learn A LOT more debugging my problem than if everything magically worked. It’s okay that you aren’t perfect! Not everyone can be me? In the same vein… don’t ask someone else to debug your problem until you have made a valiant attempt to do so yourself. There’s nothing quite like stepping through code line by line to see what it’s REALLY doing… and you’ll never feel more stupid sometimes than when you realize WHY it’s not working.. but you realize... you learn... and you remember. There is nothing wrong with failure as long as you learn from it. As you start writing more and more and more code make sure that you ALWAYS… Develop for Production You will soon learn that the “prototype” you wrote last week to show as a “proof of concept” is going to go directly into production no matter how much you beg and plead and try to explain it’s not ready to go into production… it’s going to go straight there.. and it’s like herpes.. it doesn’t go away and there’s no fixing it once it’s in there.  So, why not write ALL your code like it will be put in production? It MIGHT take a little longer, but in the long run it will be easier to maintain, get help on, and you won’t be embarrassed that it’s sitting on a production server for everyone to use and see. So, now that you are getting comfortable and writing code for production it is important to to remember the… KISS Principle… Learn It… Love It… Keep It Simple Stupid Seriously.. don’t try to show how smart you are by writing the most complicated code in history. Break your problem up into discrete steps and write each step. If it turns out you have some redundancy, you can always go back and tweak your code later.  How bad is it when you write code that LOOKS cocky? I’ve seen it before… some of the most abstract and complicated classes when a class wasn’t even needed! Or the most elaborate unreadable code jammed into one really long line when it could have been written in three lines, performed just as well, and been SOOO much easier to maintain. Keep it clear and simple.. baby steps people. This will help you learn the technology, debug problems, AND it will help others help you find your problems if they don’t have to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls just to figure out what you are trying to do…. Really.. don’t be that guy… try to curb your ego and… Keep an Open Mind No matter how smart you are… how fast you type… or how much you get paid, don’t let your ego get in the way. There is probably a better way to do everything you’ve ever done. Don’t become so cocky that you can’t think someone knows more than you. There’s a lot of brilliant, helpful people out there willing to show you tricks if you just give them a chance. A very super-awesome developer once told me “So what if you’ve been writing code for 10 years or more! Does your code look basically the same? Are you not growing as a developer?” Those 10 years become pretty meaningless if you just “know” that you are right and have not picked up new tips, tricks, methods, and patterns along the way. Learn from others and find out what’s new in development land (you know you don’t have to specifically use pointers anymore??). Along those same lines… If it’s not working, first assume you are doing something wrong. You have no idea how much it annoys people who are trying to help you when you first assume that the help they are trying to give you is wrong. Just MAYBE… you… the person learning is making some small mistake? Maybe you didn’t describe your problem correctly? Maybe you are using the wrong terminology? “I did exactly what you said and it didn’t work.”  Oh really? Are you SURE about that? “Your solution doesn’t work.”  Well… I’m pretty sure it works, I’ve used it 200 times… What are you doing differently? First try some humility and appreciation.. it will go much further, especially when it turns out YOU are the one that is wrong. When all else fails…. Try Professional Training Some people just don’t have the mindset to go and figure stuff out. It’s a gift and not everyone has it. If everyone could do it I wouldn’t have a job and there wouldn’t be professional training available.  So, if you’ve tried everything else and no light bulbs are coming on, contact the experts who specialize in training. Be careful though, there is bad training out there. Want to know the names of some good places? Just shoot me a message and I’ll let you know. I’m boycotting endorsing Andrew Connell anymore until I get that free course dangit!! So… that’s it.. that’s all I got right now. Maybe you thought all of this is common sense, maybe you think I’m smoking crack. If so, don’t just sit there, there’s a comments section for a reason. Finally, what about you? What tips do you have to help this aspiring to learn the dark arts??

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• VS 2012 Code Review &ndash; Before Check In OR After Check In?

  - by Tarun Arora

  “Is Code Review Important and Effective?” There is a consensus across the industry that code review is an effective and practical way to collar code inconsistency and possible defects early in the software development life cycle. Among others some of the advantages of code reviews are, Bugs are found faster Forces developers to write readable code (code that can be read without explanation or introduction!) Optimization methods/tricks/productive programs spread faster Programmers as specialists "evolve" faster It's fun “Code review is systematic examination (often known as peer review) of computer source code. It is intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers' skills. Reviews are done in various forms such as pair programming, informal walkthroughs, and formal inspections.” Wikipedia No where does the definition mention whether its better to review code before the code has been committed to version control or after the commit has been performed. No matter which side you favour, Visual Studio 2012 allows you to request for a code review both before check in and also request for a review after check in. Let’s weigh the pros and cons of the approaches independently. Code Review Before Check In or Code Review After Check In? Approach 1 – Code Review before Check in Developer completes the code and feels the code quality is appropriate for check in to TFS. The developer raises a code review request to have a second pair of eyes validate if the code abides to the recommended best practices, will not result in any defects due to common coding mistakes and whether any optimizations can be made to improve the code quality.                                             Image 1 – code review before check in Pros Everything that gets committed to source control is reviewed. Minimizes the chances of smelly code making its way into the code base. Decreases the cost of fixing bugs, remember, the earlier you find them, the lesser the pain in fixing them. Cons Development Code Freeze – Since the changes aren’t in the source control yet. Further development can only be done off-line. The changes have not been through a CI build, hard to say whether the code abides to all build quality standards. Inconsistent! Cumbersome to track the actual code review process.  Not every change to the code base is worth reviewing, a lot of effort is invested for very little gain. Approach 2 – Code Review after Check in Developer checks in, random code reviews are performed on the checked in code.                                                      Image 2 – Code review after check in Pros The code has already passed the CI build and run through any code analysis plug ins you may have running on the build server. Instruct the developer to ensure ZERO fx cop, style cop and static code analysis before check in. Code is cleaner and smell free even before the code review. No Offline development, developers can continue to develop against the source control. Cons Bad code can easily make its way into the code base. Since the review take place much later in the cycle, the cost of fixing issues can prove to be much higher. Approach 3 – Hybrid Approach The community advocates a more hybrid approach, a blend of tooling and human accountability quotient.                                                               Image 3 – Hybrid Approach 1. Code review high impact check ins. It is not possible to review everything, by setting up code review check in policies you can end up slowing your team. More over, the code that you are reviewing before check in hasn't even been through a green CI build either. 2. Tooling. Let the tooling work for you. By running static analysis, fx cop, style cop and other plug ins on the build agent, you can identify the real issues that in my opinion can't possibly be identified using human reviews. Configure the tooling to report back top 10 issues every day. Mandate the manual code review of individuals who keep making it to this list of shame more often. 3. During Merge. I would prefer eliminating some of the other code issues during merge from Main branch to the release branch. In a scrum project this is still easier because cheery picking the merges is a possibility and the size of code being reviewed is still limited. Let the tooling work for you, if some one breaks the CI build often, put them on a gated check in build course until you see improvement. If some one appears on the top 10 list of shame generated via the build then ensure that all their code is reviewed till you see improvement. At the end of the day, the goal is to ensure that the code being delivered is top quality. By enforcing a code review before any check in, you force the developer to work offline or stay put till the review is complete. What do the experts say? So I asked a few expects what they thought of “Code Review quality gate before Checking in code?" Terje Sandstrom | Microsoft ALM MVP You mean a review quality gate BEFORE checking in code????? That would mean a lot of code staying either local or in shelvesets, and not even been through a CI build, and a green CI build being the main criteria for going further, f.e. to the review state. I would not like code laying around with no checkin’s. Having a requirement that code is checked in small pieces, 4-8 hours work max, and AT LEAST daily checkins, a manual code review comes second down the lane. I would expect review quality gates to happen before merging back to main, or before merging to release.  But that would all be on checked-in code.  Branching is absolutely one way to ease the pain.   Another way we are using is automatic quality builds, running metrics, coverage, static code analysis.  Unfortunately it takes some time, would be great to be on CI’s – but…., so it’s done scheduled every night. Based on this we get, among other stuff,  top 10 lists of suspicious code, which is then subjected to reviews.  If a person seems to be very popular on these top 10 lists, we subject every check in from that person to a review for a period. That normally helps.   None of the clients I have can afford to have every checkin reviewed, so we need to find ways around it. I don’t disagree with the nicety of having all the code reviewed, but I find it hard to find those resources in today’s enterprises. David V. Corbin | Visual Studio ALM Ranger I tend to agree with both sides. I hate having code that is not checked in, but at the same time hate having “bad” code in the repository. I have found that branching is one approach to solving this dilemma. Code is checked into the private/feature branch before the review, but is not merged over to the “official” branch until after the review. I advocate both, depending on circumstance (especially team dynamics)   - The “pre-checkin” is usually for elements that may impact the project as a whole. Think of it as another “gate” along with passing unit tests. - The “post-checkin” may very well not be at the changeset level, but correlates to a review at the “user story” level.   Again, this depends on team dynamics in play…. Robert MacLean | Microsoft ALM MVP I do not think there is no right answer for the industry as a whole. In short the question is why do you do reviews? Your question implies risk mitigation, so in low risk areas you can get away with it after check in while in high risk you need to do it before check in. An example is those new to a team or juniors need it much earlier (maybe that is before checkin, maybe that is soon after) than seniors who have shipped twenty sprints on the team. Abhimanyu Singhal | Visual Studio ALM Ranger Depends on per scenario basis. We recommend post check-in reviews when: 1. We don't want to block other checks and processes on manual code reviews. Manual reviews take time, and some pieces may not require manual reviews at all. 2. We need to trace all changes and track history. 3. We have a code promotion strategy/process in place. For risk mitigation, post checkin code can be promoted to Accepted branches. Or can be rejected. Pre Checkin Reviews are used when 1. There is a high risk factor associated 2. Reviewers are generally (most of times) have immediate availability. 3. Team does not have strict tracking needs. Simply speaking, no single process fits all scenarios. You need to select what works best for your team/project. Thomas Schissler | Visual Studio ALM Ranger This is an interesting discussion, I’m right now discussing details about executing code reviews with my teams. I see and understand the aspects you brought in, but there is another side as well, I’d like to point out. 1.) If you do reviews per check in this is not very practical as a hard rule because this will disturb the flow of the team very often or it will lead to reduce the checkin frequency of the devs which I would not accept. 2.) If you do later reviews, for example if you review PBIs, it is not easy to find out which code you should review. Either you review all changesets associate with the PBI, but then you might review code which has been changed with a later checkin and the dev maybe has already fixed the issue. Or you review the diff of the latest changeset of the PBI with the first but then you might also review changes of other PBIs. Jakob Leander | Sr. Director, Avanade In my experience, manual code review: 1. Does not get done and at the very least does not get redone after changes (regardless of intentions at start of project) 2. When a project actually do it, they often do not do it right away = errors pile up 3. Requires a lot of time discussing/defining the standard and for the team to learn it However code review is very important since e.g. even small memory leaks in a high volume web solution have big consequences In the last years I have advocated following approach for code review - Architects up front do “at least one best practice example” of each type of component and tell the team. Copy from this one. This should include error handling, logging, security etc. - Dev lead on project continuously browse code to validate that the best practices are used. Especially that patterns etc. are not broken. You can do this formally after each sprint/iteration if you want. Once this is validated it is unlikely to “go bad” even during later code changes Agree with customer to rely on static code analysis from Visual Studio as the one and only coding standard. This has HUUGE benefits - You can easily tweak to reach the level you desire together with customer - It is easy to measure for both developers/management - It is 100% consistent across code base - It gets validated all the time so you never end up getting hammered by a customer review in the end - It is easy to tell the developer that you do not want code back unless it has zero errors = minimize communication You need to track this at least during nightly builds and make sure team sees total # issues. Do not allow #issues it to grow uncontrolled. On the project I run I require code analysis to have run on code before checkin (checkin rule). This means -  You have to have clean compile (or CA wont run) so this is extra benefit = very few broken builds - You can change a few of the rules to compile as errors instead of warnings. I often do this for “missing dispose” issues which you REALLY do not want in your app Tip: Place your custom CA rules files as part of solution. That  way it works when you do branching etc. (path to CA file is relative in VS) Some may argue that CA is not as good as manual inspection. But since manual inspection in reality suffers from the 3 issues in start it is IMO a MUCH better (and much cheaper) approach from helicopter perspective Tirthankar Dutta | Director, Avanade I think code review should be run both before and after check ins. There are some code metrics that are meant to be run on the entire codebase … Also, especially on multi-site projects, one should strive to architect in a way that lets men manage the framework while boys write the repetitive code… scales very well with the need to review less by containment and imposing architectural restrictions to emphasise the design. Bruno Capuano | Microsoft ALM MVP For code reviews (means peer reviews) in distributed team I use http://www.vsanywhere.com/default.aspx  David Jobling | Global Sr. Director, Avanade Peer review is the only way to scale and its a great practice for all in the team to learn to perform and accept. In my experience you soon learn who's code to watch more than others and tune the attention. Mikkel Toudal Kristiansen | Manager, Avanade If you have several branches in your code base, you will need to merge often. This requires manual merging, when a file has been changed in both branches. It offers a good opportunity to actually review to changed code. So my advice is: Merging between branches should be done as often as possible, it should be done by a senior developer, and he/she should perform a full code review of the code being merged. As for detecting architectural smells and code smells creeping into the code base, one really good third party tools exist: Ndepend (http://www.ndepend.com/, for static code analysis of the current state of the code base). You could also consider adding StyleCop to the solution. Jesse Houwing | Visual Studio ALM Ranger I gave a presentation on this subject on the TechDays conference in NL last year. See my presentation and slides here (talk in Dutch, but English presentation): http://blog.jessehouwing.nl/2012/03/did-you-miss-my-techdaysnl-talk-on-code.html  I’d like to add a few more points: - Before/After checking is mostly a trust issue. If you have a team that does diligent peer reviews and regularly talk/sit together or peer review, there’s no need to enforce a before-checkin policy. The peer peer-programming and regular feedback during development can take care of most of the review requirements as long as the team isn’t under stress. - Under stress, enforce pre-checkin reviews, it might sound strange, if you’re already under time or budgetary constraints, but it is under such conditions most real issues start to be created or pile up. - Use tools to catch most common errors, Code Analysis/FxCop was already mentioned. HP Fortify, Resharper, Coderush etc can help you there. There are also a lot of 3rd party rules you can add to Code Analysis. I’ve written a few myself (http://fccopcontrib.codeplex.com) and various teams from Microsoft have added their own rules (MSOCAF for SharePoint, WSSF for WCF). For common errors that keep cropping up, see if you can define a rule. It’s much easier. But more importantly make sure you have a good help page explaining *WHY* it's wrong. If you have small feature or developer branches/shelvesets, you might want to review pre-merge. It’s still better to do peer reviews and peer programming, but the most important thing is that bad quality code doesn’t make it into the important branch. So my philosophy: - Use tooling as much as possible. - Make sure the team understands the tooling and the importance of the things it flags. It’s too easy to just click suppress all to ignore the warnings. - Under stress, tighten process, it’s under stress that the problems of late reviews will really surface - Most importantly if you do reviews do them as early as possible, but never later than needed. In other words, pre-checkin/post checking doesn’t really matter, as long as the review is done before the code is released. It’ll just be much more expensive to fix any review outcomes the later you find them. --- I would love to hear what you think!

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• Designing for the future

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  User interfaces and user experience design is a fast moving field. It’s something that changes pretty quick: what feels fresh today will look outdated tomorrow. I remember the day I first got a beta version of Windows 95 and I felt swept away by the user interface of the OS. It felt so modern! If I look back now, it feels old. Well, it should: the design is 17 years old which is an eternity in our field. Of course, this is not limited to UI. Same goes for many industries. I want you to think back of the cars that amazed you when you were in your teens (if you are in your teens then this may not apply to you). Didn’t they feel like part of the future? Didn’t you think that this was the ultimate in designs? And aren’t those designs hopelessly outdated today (again, depending on your age, it may just be me)? Let’s review the Win95 design: And let’s compare that to Windows 7: There are so many differences here, I wouldn’t even know where to start explaining them. The general feeling however is one of more usability: studies have shown Windows 7 is much easier to understand for new users than the older versions of Windows did. Of course, experienced Windows users didn’t like it: people are usually afraid of changes and like to stick to what they know. But for new users this was a huge improvement. And that is what UX design is all about: make a product easier to use, with less training required and make users feel more productive. Still, there are areas where this doesn’t hold up. There are plenty examples of designs from the past that are still fresh today. But if you look closely at them, you’ll notice some subtle differences. This differences are what keep the designs fresh. A good example is the signs you’ll find on the road. They haven’t changed much over the years (otherwise people wouldn’t recognize them anymore) but they have been changing gradually to reflect changes in traffic. The same goes for computer interfaces. With each new product or version of a product, the UI and UX is changed gradually. Every now and then however, a bigger change is needed. Just think about the introduction of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007: the whole UI was redesigned. A lot of old users (not in age, but in times of using older versions) didn’t like it a bit, but new users or casual users seem to be more efficient using the product. Which, of course, is exactly the reason behind the changes. I believe that a big engine behind the changes in User Experience design has been the web. In the old days (i.e. before the explosion of the internet) user interface design in Windows applications was limited to choosing the margins between your battleship gray buttons. When the web came along, and especially the web 2.0 where the browsers started to act more and more as application platforms, designers stepped in and made a huge impact. In the browser, they could do whatever they wanted. In the beginning this was limited to the darn blink tag but gradually people really started to think about UX. Even more so: the design of the UI and the whole experience was taken away from the developers and put into the hands of people who knew what they were doing: UX designers. This caused some problems. Everyone who has done a web project in the early 2000’s must have had the same experience: the designers give you a set of Photoshop files and tell you to translate it to HTML. Which, of course, is very hard to do. However, with new tooling and new standards this became much easier. The latest version of HTML and CSS has taken the responsibility for the design away from the developers and placed them in the capable hands of the designers. And that’s where that responsibility belongs, after all, I don’t want a designer to muck around in my c# code just as much as he or she doesn’t want me to poke in the sites style definitions. This change in responsibilities resulted in good looking but more important: better thought out user interfaces in websites. And when websites became more and more interactive, people started to expect the same sort of look and feel from their desktop applications. But that didn’t really happen. Most business applications still have that battleship gray look and feel. Ok, they may use a different color but we’re not talking colors here but usability. Now, you may not be able to read the Dutch captions, but even if you did you wouldn’t understand what was going on. At least, not when you first see it. You have to scan the screen, read all the labels, see how they are related to the other elements on the screen and then figure out what they do. If you’re an experienced user of this application however, this might be a good thing: you know what to do and you get all the information you need in one single screen. But for most applications this isn’t the case. A lot of people only use their computer for a limited time a day (a weird concept for me, but it happens) and need it to get something done and then get on with their lives. For them, a user interface experience like the above isn’t working. (disclaimer: I just picked a screenshot, I am not saying this is bad software but it is an example of about 95% of the Windows applications out there). For the knowledge worker, this isn’t a problem. They use one or two systems and they know exactly what they need to do to achieve their goal. They don’t want any clutter on their screen that distracts them from their task, they just want to be as efficient as possible. When they know the systems they are very productive. The point is, how long does it take to become productive? And: could they be even more productive if the UX was better? Are there things missing that they don’t know about? Are there better ways to achieve what they want to achieve? Also: could a system be designed in such a way that it is not only much more easy to work with but also less tiring? in the example above you need to switch between the keyboard and mouse a lot, something that we now know can be very tiring. The goal of most applications (being client apps or websites on any kind of device) is to provide information. Information is data that when given to the right people, on the right time, in the right place and when it is correct adds value for that person (please, remember that definition: I still hear the statement “the information was wrong” which doesn’t make sense: data can be wrong, information cannot be). So if a system provides data, how can we make sure the chances of becoming information is as high as possible? A good example of a well thought-out system that attempts this is the Zune client. It is a very good application, and I think the UX is much better than it’s main competitor iTunes. Have a look at both: On the left you see the iTunes screenshot, on the right the Zune. As you notice, the Zune screen has more images but less chrome (chrome being visuals not part of the data you want to show, i.e. edges around buttons). The whole thing is text oriented or image oriented, where that text or image is part of the information you need. What is important is big, what’s less important is smaller. Yet, everything you need to know at that point is present and your attention is drawn immediately to what you’re trying to achieve: information about music. You can easily switch between the content on your machine and content on your Zune player but clicking on the image of the player. But if you didn’t know that, you’d find out soon enough: the whole UX is designed in such a way that it invites you to play around. So sooner or later (probably sooner) you’d click on that image and you would see what it does. In the iTunes version it’s harder to find: the discoverability is a lot lower. For inexperienced people the Zune player feels much more natural than the iTunes player, and they get up to speed a lot faster. How does this all work? Why is this UX better? The answer lies in a project from Microsoft with the codename (it seems to be becoming the official name though) “Metro”. Metro is a design language, based on certain principles. When they thought about UX they took a good long look around them and went out in search of metaphors. And they found them. The team noticed that signage in streets, airports, roads, buildings and so on are usually very clear and very precise. These signs give you the information you need and nothing more. It’s simple, clearly understood and fast to understand. A good example are airport signs. Airports can be intimidating places, especially for the non-experienced traveler. In the early 1990’s Amsterdam Airport Schiphol decided to redesign all the signage to make the traveller feel less disoriented. They developed a set of guidelines for signs and implemented those. Soon, most airports around the world adopted these ideas and you see variations of the Dutch signs everywhere on the globe. The signs are text-oriented. Yes, there are icons explaining what it all means for the people who can’t read or don’t understand the language, but the basic sign language is text. It’s clear, it’s high-contrast and it’s easy to understand. One look at the sign and you know where to go. The only thing I don’t like is the green sign pointing to the emergency exit, but since this is the default style for emergency exits I understand why they did this. If you look at the Zune UI again, you’ll notice the similarities. Text oriented, little or no icons, clear usage of fonts and all the information you need. This design language has a set of principles: Clean, light, open and fast Content, not chrome Soulful and alive These are just a couple of the principles, you can read the whole philosophy behind Metro for Windows Phone 7 here. These ideas seem to work. I love my Windows Phone 7. It’s easy to use, it’s clear, there’s no clutter that I do not need. It works for me. And I noticed it works for a lot of other people as well, especially people who aren’t as proficient with computers as I am. You see these ideas in a lot other places. Corning, a manufacturer of glass, has made a video of possible usages of their products. It’s their glimpse into the future. You’ll notice that a lot of the UI in the screens look a lot like what Microsoft is doing with Metro (not coincidentally Corning is the supplier for the Gorilla glass display surface on the new SUR40 device (or Surface v2.0 as a lot of people call it)). The idea behind this vision is that data should be available everywhere where you it. Systems should be available at all times and data is presented in a clear and light manner so that you can turn that data into information. You don’t need a lot of fancy animations that only distract from the data. You want the data and you want it fast. Have a look at this truly inspiring video that made: This is what I believe the future will look like. Of course, not everything is possible, or even desirable. But it is a nice way to think about the future . I feel very strongly about designing applications in such a way that they add value to the user. Designing applications that turn data into information. Applications that make the user feel happy to use them. So… when are you going to drop the battleship-gray designs? Tags van Technorati: surface,design,windows phone 7,wp7,metro

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• Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

  Back in February at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series (EKS) I spoke to various people at Emtel about their data centre here on the island. I was trying to see whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting over there for a selected group of our community members. Well, let's say it like this... My first approach wasn't that promising and far from successful but during the following months there were more and more occasions to get in touch with the "right" contact persons at Emtel to make it happen... Setting up an appointment and pre-requisites The major improvement came during a Boot Camp for Windows Phone 8.1 App development organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands in cooperation with Emtel at the Emtel World, Ebene. Apart from learning bits and pieces regarding Universal Apps I took the opportunity to get in touch with Arvin Lockee, Sales Executive - Data, during our lunch break. And this really kicked off the whole procedure. Prior to get access to the Emtel data centre it is requested that you provide full name and National ID of anyone going to visit. Also, it should be noted that there was only a limited amount of seats available. Anyways, packed with this information I posted through the usual social media channels. Responses came in very quickly and based on First-come, first-serve (FCFS) principle I noted down the details and forwarded them to Emtel in order to fix a date and time for the visit. In preparation on our side, all attendees exchanged contact details and we organised transport options to go to the data centre in Arsenal. The day before and on the day of our meeting, Arvin send me a reminder to check whether everything is still confirmed and ready to go... Of course, it was! Arriving at the Emtel Data Centre As I'm coming from Flic En Flac towards the North, we agreed that I'm going to pick up a couple of young fellows near the old post office in Port Louis. All went well, except that Sean eventually might be living in another time zone compared to the rest of us. Anyway, after some extended stop we were complete and arrived just in time in Arsenal to meet and greet with Ish and Veer. Again, Emtel is taking access procedures to their data centre very serious and the gate stayed close until all our IDs had been noted and compared to the list of registered attendees. Despite having a good laugh at the mixture of old and new ID cards it was a straight-forward processing. The ward was very helpful and guided us to the waiting area at the entrance section of the building. Shortly after we were welcomed by Kamlesh Bokhoree, the Data Centre Officer. He gave us brief introduction into the rules and regulations during our visit, like no photography allowed, not touching the buttons, and following his instructions through the whole visit. Of course! Inside the data centre Next, he explained us the multi-factor authentication system using a combination of bio-metric data, like finger print reader, and "classic" pin panel. The Emtel data centre provides multiple services and next to co-location for your own hardware they also offer storage options for your backup and archive data in their massive, fire-resistant vault. Very impressive to get to know about the considerations that have been done in choosing the right location and how to set up the whole premises. It should also be noted that there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance inside and outside the buildings. Strengths of the Emtel TIER 3 Data Centre, Mauritius Finally, we were guided into the first server room. And wow, the whole setup is cleverly planned and outlined in the architecture. From the false floor and ceilings in order to provide optimum air flow, over to the separation of cold and hot aisles between the full-size server racks, and of course the monitored air conditions in order to analyse and watch changes in temperature, smoke detection and other parameters. And not surprisingly everything has been implemented in two independent circuits. There is a standardised classification for the construction and operation of data centres world-wide, and the Emtel's one has been designed to be a TIER 4 building but due to the lack of an alternative power supplier on the island it is officially registered as a TIER 3 compliant data centre. Maybe in the long run there might be a second supplier of energy next to CEB... time will tell. Luckily, the data centre is integrated into the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and Emtel already connects internationally through diverse undersea cable routes like SAFE & LION/LION2 out of Mauritius and through several other providers for onwards connectivity. The data centre is part of the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and has redundant internet connectivity onwards. Meanwhile, Arvin managed to join our little group of geeks and he supported Kamlesh in answering our technical questions regarding the capacities and general operation of the data centre. Visiting the NOC and its dedicated team of IT professionals was surely one of the visual highlights. Seeing their wall of screens to monitor any kind of activities on the data lines, the managed servers and the activity in and around the building was great. Even though I'm using a multi-head setup since years I cannot keep it up with that setup... ;-) But I got a couple of ideas on how to improve my work spaces here at the office. Clear advantages of hosting your e-commerce and mobile backends locally After the completely isolated NOC area we continued our Q&A session with Kamlesh and Arvin in the second server room which is dedictated to shared environments. On first thought it should be well-noted that there is lots of space for full-sized racks and therefore co-location of your own hardware. Actually, given the feedback that there will be upcoming changes in prices the facilities at the Emtel data centre are getting more and more competitive and interesting for local companies, especially small and medium enterprises. After seeing this world-class infrastructure available on the island, I'm already considering of moving one of my root servers abroad to be co-located here on the island. This would provide an improved user experience in terms of site performance and latency. This would be a good improvement, especially for upcoming e-commerce solutions for two of my local clients. Later on, we actually started the conversation of additional services that could be a catalyst for the local market in order to attract more small and medium companies to take the data centre into their evaluations regarding online activities. Until today Emtel does not provide virtualised server environments but there might be ongoing plans in the future to cover this field as well. Emtel is a mobile operator and internet connectivity provider in the first place, entering a market of managed and virtualised server infrastructures including capacities in terms of cloud storage and computing are rather new and there is a continuous learning curve at Emtel, too. You cannot just jump into a new market and see how it works out... And I appreciate Emtel's approach towards a solid fundament and then building new services on top of that. Emtel as a future one-stop-shop service provider for all your internet and telecommunications needs. Emtel's promotional video about their TIER 3 data centre in Arsenal, Mauritius More details are thoroughly described in Emtel's brochure of their data centre. Check out their PDF document here. Thanks for this opportunity Visiting and walking through the Emtel data centre for more than 2 hours was a great experience. As representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) I would like to thank anyone at Emtel involved in the process of making it happen, and especially to Arvin Lockee and Kamlesh Bokhoree for their time and patience in explaining the infrastructure and answering all the endless questions from our members. Thank You!

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• From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

  - by thatjeffsmith

  This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 01, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 01, 2011Popular ReleasesAgFx Windows Phone Application Data Caching Framework: AgFx November Update: This update is primarily a bug fix release, which provides a number of stability and performance enhancements to AgFx. Available as a NuGet package here. Release Notes Fix IsoStore exceptions during shutdown (Changelist 81729) Thread safety and sequencings issues (Changelists 78682,79252, 80707) Fix landscape layout issue in auth sample Fix async keyword collision Supporting overlapping/multiple notifications for Load requestsiTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.4.4322: Added German (unverified, apologies if incorrect) Properly source invariant resources with correct resIDs Replaced obsolete lyric providers with working providers Fix Pseudolater to correctly morph every third char Fix null reference in CatalogBaseDevpad: 4.6: Whats new for Devpad 4.6: New Recent Files New Run in Safari Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWindows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: Microsoft.Activities v1.8.8: Microsoft.Activities Overview How do I install Microsoft.Activities? Updates in this release9318Technical Analysis Engine for .NET: Technical Analysis Engine 1.25: What's new in the 1.25 release (2011-11-01): - Added Williams %R indicator - Added Moving Average Envelopes indicatorBF3Rcon.NET: BF3Rcon 3.0: This release is targeted for RCON documentation based on R3. Everything should be beta stable, but it's alpha because I haven't been able to fully test it. When a stable release is ready, a proper changelog will be kept. Important Edit: There's one method that will keep this from working in Mono. GeneratePasswordHash uses void HashAlgorithm.Dispose(), which isn't in Mono. This will have to be changed to Clear() in the next release. If anyone needs a Mono version of this immediately, you can...BoxWorld: BoxWorld_2011.10.30: BoxWorld - 8.0.1110.30 This is the initial release of BoxWorld. I'd recommend downloading the installer as it contains the compiled code and everything all nicely contained. By default, you end up with this directory structure: C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Data C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Interface C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Source In the root you have the compiled EXE files, one for the main release, one for the LITE release ...VidCoder: 1.2.1: Fixed a couple regressions: video encoder was blank in queue and crashes with the High Profile preset when opening the Settings window. Fixed problem with auto-update introduced in 1.2.0. If you have 1.2.0 you will need to update manually to get this.AssaultCube Reloaded: Release 2.3: THE RELEASE YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR! IT CAN NOW BE CONSIDERED STABLE Linux has Debian 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, download the Linux package. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for linux (source included) If you are using Windows and require the source code, download the source package!Koober: Koober - The Ebook Creator 0.2: The official release of Koober as Open source. Koober is a ebook creator for Windows, and Koob Reader is the reader.A Microblog API (SINA weibo.com open API in C#, .Net???????API): AMicroblogAPI v1.0: AMicroBlogAPI is a C# implementation, a strong-typed deep encapsulation, a easy-to-use .net wrapper of SINA microblog API v1.0. App developers no longer need to parse various HTTP responses -- all responses are parsed into strong types; No longer need to construt the request query strings -- just simply gives the values of parameters; No longer need to implement the OAuth -- a single call could logs the user on. In this release (AMicroblogAPI v1.0), all basic data APIs are implemented. For ...patterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Media Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Now the the SMinimum and SMaximum par...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngNew ProjectsarlTH: "Airport Link Thailand" Application for Windows Phone 7.1Audio Tags Editor For Excel: The purpose of the project is to create a tool to edit tags of audio files through the excel application. The program is an Excel add-in.AW Load Tester: AW Load Tester is a simple and easy to use website load tester that very closely mimics a regular users browsing session on your website. Many popular load tester only download HTML. AW Load Tester downloads all the related items on a page simultaneously. AzMan - Be Good Do Right !: The AzMan is a collection of reusable software components designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges. http://bbs.fengshupo.com/BestWayWP7UI: The User interface of best wat wp7 applicationCheckout Subsystem Optimizer: Checkout Subsystem OptimizerDBScripter - Library for scripting SQL Server database objects: This project is library that allows users to script SQL Server database objects. Library uses dynamic management views for extracting data about databases objects. This library could be used in various situations. The most interesting areas are comparing database objects and generation database documentation. For both cases examples have been prepared.Dependency Checker: Dependency Checker is a utility for verifying that a set of prerequisites is present on a machine. The set of dependencies is defined in a configuration file. For more information, see http://dependencychecker.codeplex.com/documentation DibTer: DibTer is a brand new CMS for ASP.NET Mainly features are NHibernate MVC JQuery HTML5Dynamics CRM Entity Based Stress Tool: Entity Based Stress Tool, is command line program that creates configurable server agents in order to stress a defined entity at a defined Message/Stage. This tool allows CRM Application Stressing, Plugin Stressing, and enlaborate an execution report.Edinger: Edinger is a simple text editor.FreeboxHDVideoPlayer: FreeboxHDVideoPlayer makes it easier for free.fr french ISP users to play and manage videos stored on the HDD of the Freebox HD. FreeboxHDVideoPlayer simplifie, pour les utilisateurs de free.fr, la lecture et la gestion des vidéos stockées sur le disque du boitier Freebox HD.guglex - google docs xtraz: my studying project for asp.net mvc 3. now displaying spreadsheet rows in card viewIP-Camera MJPEG HTTP Web-Server Emulator: Turns web-camera into IP-camera with mjpeg streaming and access it over network. Usage of i-Lids (Imagery Library for Intelligent Detection Systems) and other data for surveillance systems development. Sends WMV, folder with images, web-camera data over the wire.LIM: LIM is .net software for archive manage.Luminji.CorWeb: luminji's company web.Map Generator: Map Generator for your Civ/Col/Roguelike games in VB.NET.Microformat Parsers for .NET: Microformat's Parsers for .NET helps you to collect information you run into on the web, that is stored by means of microformats. It's written in C# 3.0.Mini Rx: Mini Rx provides LINQ like queries over events for C# and F# using extension methods, somewhat like the Reactive Extensions (Rx) but in a lightweight open source package with one non-strong named assembly.MVC Music Store by NNT: Demo Music Store Follow tut from Microsoft. Team Explorer VS 2010 .NET 4PHP MySQL Web Site Creator: PHP MySQL Web Site Creator helps you create a basic template for your web site using a UI form. I creates all PHP, CSS, HTML basic pages to connect to MySQL database.PQLRD: Paco KLk!Project Web And Application: Project MobileStore in ASP use ASP.NET MVC 3RoboZip: RoboZip combines MS Robocopy and Zip-functionality. Create a job and RoboZip will zip all files (from a list of filetypes) within a time span in the past. The zip file name can contain date and time values of the time period it covers. It's developed in C#. The zip component is the DotNetZip Library from http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com. The logging is done using Apache log4net from http://logging.apache.org/log4net. The idea here is not to only present the code, but also to document how the de...Scriptster Gearbox: Scriptster Gearbox is a full C# scripting system based on Scriptster (also on CodePlex). It is aimed at Visual Studio developers and power users who need to automate the sorts of things that DOS is generally good at, but which using C# can make more powerful and more familiar.Technical Analysis Engine for .NET: Technical Analysis Engine is a .NET based library for technical analysis. It is fast, free, easy to use and provides functionality for financial market analysis.ValidationDSL: A Fluent validation engine with ease to use and reusable around the multi-tenant applicationsWebFormsUtilities: WebFormsUtilities is a collection of tools that assist in using MVC/MVP functionality to webforms in an unobtrusive manner. This differs from a hybrid MVC/WebForms page in that you can use methods like UpdateModel() or TryValidateModel() in a WebForms Page class.Wen - WPF 3D Navigator: Control the camera and the lights of a WPF 3D application without any code modification.WindStudios: WindStudiosWrite My Expect Statement: Have Rhino Mocks automatically generate your expect() and return() statements for you.zion xtraz: some basic helpful classes for use in every project

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• Plan Caching and Query Memory Part II (Hash Match) – When not to use stored procedure - Most common performance mistake SQL Server developers make.

  - by sqlworkshops

  SQL Server estimates Memory requirement at compile time, when stored procedure or other plan caching mechanisms like sp_executesql or prepared statement are used, the memory requirement is estimated based on first set of execution parameters. This is a common reason for spill over tempdb and hence poor performance. Common memory allocating queries are that perform Sort and do Hash Match operations like Hash Join or Hash Aggregation or Hash Union. This article covers Hash Match operations with examples. It is recommended to read Plan Caching and Query Memory Part I before this article which covers an introduction and Query memory for Sort. In most cases it is cheaper to pay for the compilation cost of dynamic queries than huge cost for spill over tempdb, unless memory requirement for a query does not change significantly based on predicates.   This article covers underestimation / overestimation of memory for Hash Match operation. Plan Caching and Query Memory Part I covers underestimation / overestimation for Sort. It is important to note that underestimation of memory for Sort and Hash Match operations lead to spill over tempdb and hence negatively impact performance. Overestimation of memory affects the memory needs of other concurrently executing queries. In addition, it is important to note, with Hash Match operations, overestimation of memory can actually lead to poor performance.   To read additional articles I wrote click here.   The best way to learn is to practice. To create the below tables and reproduce the behavior, join the mailing list by using this link: www.sqlworkshops.com/ml and I will send you the table creation script. Most of these concepts are also covered in our webcasts: www.sqlworkshops.com/webcasts  Let’s create a Customer’s State table that has 99% of customers in NY and the rest 1% in WA.Customers table used in Part I of this article is also used here.To observe Hash Warning, enable 'Hash Warning' in SQL Profiler under Events 'Errors and Warnings'. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com drop table CustomersState go create table CustomersState (CustomerID int primary key, Address char(200), State char(2)) go insert into CustomersState (CustomerID, Address) select CustomerID, 'Address' from Customers update CustomersState set State = 'NY' where CustomerID % 100 != 1 update CustomersState set State = 'WA' where CustomerID % 100 = 1 go update statistics CustomersState with fullscan go   Let’s create a stored procedure that joins customers with CustomersState table with a predicate on State. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com create proc CustomersByState @State char(2) as begin declare @CustomerID int select @CustomerID = e.CustomerID from Customers e inner join CustomersState es on (e.CustomerID = es.CustomerID) where es.State = @State option (maxdop 1) end go  Let’s execute the stored procedure first with parameter value ‘WA’ – which will select 1% of data. set statistics time on go --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByState 'WA' goThe stored procedure took 294 ms to complete.  The stored procedure was granted 6704 KB based on 8000 rows being estimated.  The estimated number of rows, 8000 is similar to actual number of rows 8000 and hence the memory estimation should be ok.  There was no Hash Warning in SQL Profiler. To observe Hash Warning, enable 'Hash Warning' in SQL Profiler under Events 'Errors and Warnings'.   Now let’s execute the stored procedure with parameter value ‘NY’ – which will select 99% of data. -Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByState 'NY' go  The stored procedure took 2922 ms to complete.   The stored procedure was granted 6704 KB based on 8000 rows being estimated.    The estimated number of rows, 8000 is way different from the actual number of rows 792000 because the estimation is based on the first set of parameter value supplied to the stored procedure which is ‘WA’ in our case. This underestimation will lead to spill over tempdb, resulting in poor performance.   There was Hash Warning (Recursion) in SQL Profiler. To observe Hash Warning, enable 'Hash Warning' in SQL Profiler under Events 'Errors and Warnings'.   Let’s recompile the stored procedure and then let’s first execute the stored procedure with parameter value ‘NY’.  In a production instance it is not advisable to use sp_recompile instead one should use DBCC FREEPROCCACHE (plan_handle). This is due to locking issues involved with sp_recompile, refer to our webcasts, www.sqlworkshops.com/webcasts for further details.   exec sp_recompile CustomersByState go --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByState 'NY' go  Now the stored procedure took only 1046 ms instead of 2922 ms.   The stored procedure was granted 146752 KB of memory. The estimated number of rows, 792000 is similar to actual number of rows of 792000. Better performance of this stored procedure execution is due to better estimation of memory and avoiding spill over tempdb.   There was no Hash Warning in SQL Profiler.   Now let’s execute the stored procedure with parameter value ‘WA’. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByState 'WA' go  The stored procedure took 351 ms to complete, higher than the previous execution time of 294 ms.    This stored procedure was granted more memory (146752 KB) than necessary (6704 KB) based on parameter value ‘NY’ for estimation (792000 rows) instead of parameter value ‘WA’ for estimation (8000 rows). This is because the estimation is based on the first set of parameter value supplied to the stored procedure which is ‘NY’ in this case. This overestimation leads to poor performance of this Hash Match operation, it might also affect the performance of other concurrently executing queries requiring memory and hence overestimation is not recommended.     The estimated number of rows, 792000 is much more than the actual number of rows of 8000.  Intermediate Summary: This issue can be avoided by not caching the plan for memory allocating queries. Other possibility is to use recompile hint or optimize for hint to allocate memory for predefined data range.Let’s recreate the stored procedure with recompile hint. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com drop proc CustomersByState go create proc CustomersByState @State char(2) as begin declare @CustomerID int select @CustomerID = e.CustomerID from Customers e inner join CustomersState es on (e.CustomerID = es.CustomerID) where es.State = @State option (maxdop 1, recompile) end go  Let’s execute the stored procedure initially with parameter value ‘WA’ and then with parameter value ‘NY’. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByState 'WA' go exec CustomersByState 'NY' go  The stored procedure took 297 ms and 1102 ms in line with previous optimal execution times.   The stored procedure with parameter value ‘WA’ has good estimation like before.   Estimated number of rows of 8000 is similar to actual number of rows of 8000.   The stored procedure with parameter value ‘NY’ also has good estimation and memory grant like before because the stored procedure was recompiled with current set of parameter values.  Estimated number of rows of 792000 is similar to actual number of rows of 792000.    The compilation time and compilation CPU of 1 ms is not expensive in this case compared to the performance benefit.   There was no Hash Warning in SQL Profiler.   Let’s recreate the stored procedure with optimize for hint of ‘NY’. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com drop proc CustomersByState go create proc CustomersByState @State char(2) as begin declare @CustomerID int select @CustomerID = e.CustomerID from Customers e inner join CustomersState es on (e.CustomerID = es.CustomerID) where es.State = @State option (maxdop 1, optimize for (@State = 'NY')) end go  Let’s execute the stored procedure initially with parameter value ‘WA’ and then with parameter value ‘NY’. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByState 'WA' go exec CustomersByState 'NY' go  The stored procedure took 353 ms with parameter value ‘WA’, this is much slower than the optimal execution time of 294 ms we observed previously. This is because of overestimation of memory. The stored procedure with parameter value ‘NY’ has optimal execution time like before.   The stored procedure with parameter value ‘WA’ has overestimation of rows because of optimize for hint value of ‘NY’.   Unlike before, more memory was estimated to this stored procedure based on optimize for hint value ‘NY’.    The stored procedure with parameter value ‘NY’ has good estimation because of optimize for hint value of ‘NY’. Estimated number of rows of 792000 is similar to actual number of rows of 792000.   Optimal amount memory was estimated to this stored procedure based on optimize for hint value ‘NY’.   There was no Hash Warning in SQL Profiler.   This article covers underestimation / overestimation of memory for Hash Match operation. Plan Caching and Query Memory Part I covers underestimation / overestimation for Sort. It is important to note that underestimation of memory for Sort and Hash Match operations lead to spill over tempdb and hence negatively impact performance. Overestimation of memory affects the memory needs of other concurrently executing queries. In addition, it is important to note, with Hash Match operations, overestimation of memory can actually lead to poor performance.   Summary: Cached plan might lead to underestimation or overestimation of memory because the memory is estimated based on first set of execution parameters. It is recommended not to cache the plan if the amount of memory required to execute the stored procedure has a wide range of possibilities. One can mitigate this by using recompile hint, but that will lead to compilation overhead. However, in most cases it might be ok to pay for compilation rather than spilling sort over tempdb which could be very expensive compared to compilation cost. The other possibility is to use optimize for hint, but in case one sorts more data than hinted by optimize for hint, this will still lead to spill. On the other side there is also the possibility of overestimation leading to unnecessary memory issues for other concurrently executing queries. In case of Hash Match operations, this overestimation of memory might lead to poor performance. When the values used in optimize for hint are archived from the database, the estimation will be wrong leading to worst performance, so one has to exercise caution before using optimize for hint, recompile hint is better in this case.   I explain these concepts with detailed examples in my webcasts (www.sqlworkshops.com/webcasts), I recommend you to watch them. The best way to learn is to practice. To create the above tables and reproduce the behavior, join the mailing list at www.sqlworkshops.com/ml and I will send you the relevant SQL Scripts.  Register for the upcoming 3 Day Level 400 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 Performance Monitoring & Tuning Hands-on Workshop in London, United Kingdom during March 15-17, 2011, click here to register / Microsoft UK TechNet.These are hands-on workshops with a maximum of 12 participants and not lectures. For consulting engagements click here.   Disclaimer and copyright information:This article refers to organizations and products that may be the trademarks or registered trademarks of their various owners. Copyright of this article belongs to R Meyyappan / www.sqlworkshops.com. You may freely use the ideas and concepts discussed in this article with acknowledgement (www.sqlworkshops.com), but you may not claim any of it as your own work. This article is for informational purposes only; you use any of the suggestions given here entirely at your own risk.   R Meyyappan [email protected] LinkedIn: http://at.linkedin.com/in/rmeyyappan

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• MSCC: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp

  Mauritius participated and contributed to the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 (GWAB). Again! And this time stronger than ever, and together with 137 other locations in 56 countries world-wide. We had 62 named registrations, 7 guest additions and approximately 10 offline participants prior to the event day. Most interestingly the organisation of the GWAB through the MSCC helped to increased the number of craftsmen. The Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community has currently 138 registered members - in less than one year! Only with those numbers we can proudly say that all the preparations and hard work towards this event already paid off. Personally, I'm really grateful that we had this kind of response and the feedback from some attendees confirmed that the MSCC is on the right track here on Cyber Island Mauritius. Inspired and motivated by the success of this event, rest assured that there will be more public events like the GWAB. This time it took some time to reflect on our meetup, following my first impression right on spot: "Wow, what an experience to organise and participate in this global event. Overall, I've been very pleased with the preparations and the event itself. Surely, there have been some nicks that we have to address and to improve for future activities like this. Quite frankly, we are not professional event organisers (not yet) but we learned a lot over the past couple of days. A big Thank You to our event sponsors, namely Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands & French Pacific, Ceridian Mauritius and Emtel. Without them this event wouldn't have happened - Thank You! And to the cool team members of Microsoft Student Partners (MSPs). You geeks did a great job! Thanks!" So, how many attendees did we actually have? 61! - Awesome - 61 cloud computing instances to help on the research of diabetes. During Saturday afternoon there was even an online publication on L'Express: Les développeurs mauriciens se joignent au combat contre le diabète Reactions of other attendees Don't take my word for granted... Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Awesome event, really appreciated the presentations :-)" -- Kevin on event comments "very interesting and enriching." -- Diana on event comments "#gwab #gwabmru 2014 great success. Looking forward for gwab 2015" -- Wasiim on Twitter "Was there till the end. Awesome Event. I'll surely join upcoming meetup sessions :)" -- Luchmun on event comments "#gwabmru was not that cool. left early" -- Mohammad on Twitter The overall feedback is positive but we are absolutely aware that there quite a number of problems we had to face. We are already looking into that and ideas / action plans on how we will be able to improve it for future events. The sessions We started the day with welcoming speeches by Thierry Coret, Sr. Marketing Manager of Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands & French Pacific and Vidia Mooneegan, Managing Director and Sr. Vice President of Ceridian Mauritius. The clear emphasis was on the endless possibilities of cloud computing and how it can enable any kind of sectors here in the country. Then it was about time to set up the cloud computing services in order to contribute each attendees cloud computing resources to the global research of diabetes, a step by step guide presented by Arnaud Meslier, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. Given a rendering package and a configuration file it was very interesting to follow the single steps in Windows Azure. Also, during the day we were not sure whether the set up had been correctly, as Mauritius didn't show up on the results board - which should have been the case after approximately 20 to 30 minutes. Anyways, let the minions work... Next, Arnaud gave a brief overview of the variety of services Windows Azure has to offer. Whether you need a development environment for your websites or mobiles app, running a virtual machine with your existing applications or simply putting a SQL database online. No worries, Windows Azure has the right packages available and the online management portal is really easy t handle. After this, we got a little bit more business oriented while Wasiim Hosenbocus, employee at Ceridian, took the attendees through the inerts of a real-life application, and demoed a couple of the existing features. He did a great job by showing how the different services of Windows Azure can be created and pulled together. After the lunch break it is always tough to keep the audience awake... And it was my turn. I gave a brief overview on operating and managing a SQL database on Windows Azure. Well, there are actually two options available and depending on your individual requirements you should be aware of both. The simpler version is called SQL Database and while provisioning only takes a couple of seconds, you should take into consideration that SQL Database has a number of constraints, like limitations on the actual database size - up to 5 GB as web edition and up to 150 GB maximum as business edition -, among others. Next, it was Chervine Bhiwoo's session on Windows Azure Mobile Services. It was absolutely amazing to see that the mobiles services directly offers you various project templates, like Windows 8 Store App, Android app, iOS app, and even Xamarin cross-platform app development. So, within a couple of minutes you can have your first mobile app active and running on Windows Azure. Furthermore, Chervine showed the attendees that adding another user interface, like Web Sites running on ASP.NET MVC 4 only takes a couple of minutes, too. And last but not least, we rounded up the day with Windows Azure Websites and hosting of Virtual Machines presented by some members of the local Microsoft Students Partners programme. Surely, one of the big advantages using Windows Azure is the availability of pre-defined installation packages of known web applications, like WordPress, Joomla!, or Ghost. Compared to running your own web site with a traditional web hoster it is surely en par, and depending on your personal level of expertise, Windows Azure provides you more liberty in terms of configuration than maybe a shared hosting environment. Running a pre-defined web application is one thing but in case that you would like to have more control over your hosting environment it is highly advised to opt for a virtual machine. Provisioning of an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system was very simple to do but it takes some more minutes than you might expect. So, please be patient and take your time while Windows Azure gets everything in place for you. Afterwards, you can use a SecureShell (ssh) client like Putty in case of a Linux-based machine, or Remote Desktop Services when operating a Windows Server system to log in into your virtual machine. At the end of the day we had a great Q&A session and we finalised the event with our raffle of goodies. Participation in the raffle was bound to submission of the session survey and most gratefully we had a give-away for everyone. What a nice coincidence to finish of the day. Note: All session slides (and demo codes) will be made available on the MSCC event page. Please, check the Files section over there. (Some) Visual impressions from the event Just to give you an idea about what has happened during the GWAB 2014 at Ebene... Speakers and Microsoft Student Partners are getting ready for the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 GWAB 2014 attendees are fully integrated into the hands-on-labs and setting up their individuals cloud computing services 60 attendees at the GWAB 2014. Despite some technical difficulties we had a great time running the event GWAB 2014: Using the lunch break for networking and exchange of ideas - Great conversations and topics amongst attendees There are more pictures on the original event page: Questions & Answers Following are a couple of questions which have been asked and didn't get an answer during the event: Q: Is it possible to upload static pages via FTP? A: Yes, you can. Have a look at the right side column on the dashboard of your website. There you'll find information about the FTP and SFTP host names. You can use any FTP client, like ie. FileZilla to log in. FTP also gives you access to your log files. Q: What are the size limitations on SQL Database? A: 5 GB on the Web Edition, and 150 GB on the business edition. A maximum 150 databases (inclusing 'master') per SQL Database server. More details here: General Guidelines and Limitations (Azure SQL Database) Q: What's the maximum size of a SQL Server running in a Virtual Machine? A: The maximum Windows Azure VM has currently 8 CPU cores, 14 or 56 GB of RAM and 16x 1 TB hard drives. More details here: Virtual Machine and Cloud Service Sizes for Azure Q: How can we register for Windows Azure? A: Mauritius is currently not listed for phone verification. Please get in touch with Arnaud Meslier at Microsoft IOI & FP Q: Can I use my own domain name for Windows Azure websites? A: Yes, you can. But this might require to upscale your account to Standard. In case that I missed a question and answer, please use the comment section at the end of the article. Thanks! Final results Every participant was instructed during the hands-on-lab session on how to set up a cloud computing service in their account. Of course, I won't keep the results from you... Global Azure Lab GWAB 2014: Our cloud computing contribution to the research of diabetes And I would say Mauritius did a good job! Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Launch of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 (15.4.2014) Corsair Hackers Reboot (19.4.2014) WebCup (TBA ~ June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! Networking and job/project opportunities Despite having technical presentations on Windows Azure an event like this always offers a great bunch of possibilities and opportunities to get in touch with new people in IT, have an exchange of experience with other like-minded people. As I already wrote about Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion - I had a great conversation with representatives of the University des Mascareignes which are currently embracing cloud infrastructure and cloud computing for their various campuses in the Indian Ocean. As for the MSCC it would be a great experience to stay in touch with them, and to work on upcoming, common activities. Furthermore, I had a very good conversation with Thierry and Ludovic of Microsoft IOI & FP on the necessity of user groups and IT communities here on the island. It's great to see that the MSCC is currently on a run and that local companies are sharing our thoughts on promoting IT careers and exchange of IT knowledge in such an open way. I'm also looking forward to be able to participate and to contribute on more events in the near future. My resume of the day We learned a lot today and there is always room for improvement! It was an awesome event and quite frankly it was a pleasure to spend the day with so many enthuastic IT people in the same room. It was a great experience to organise such event locally and participate on a global scale to support the GlyQ-IQ Technology in their research on diabetes. I was so pleased to see the involvement of new MSCC members in taking the opportunity to share and learn about the power of cloud computing. The Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is on the right way and this year's bootcamp on Windows Azure only marked the beginning of our journey. Thank you to our sponsors and my kudos to the MSPs! Update: Media coverage The event has been reported in local media, too. Following are some resources: Orange - Local - Business: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète Maurice Info.mu: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète Le Quotidien Pg 2: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2014 - Le cloud pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète The Observer Pg 12: Le cloud, pour des recherches approfondies sur le diabète

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• What's up with OCFS2?

  - by wcoekaer

  On Linux there are many filesystem choices and even from Oracle we provide a number of filesystems, all with their own advantages and use cases. Customers often confuse ACFS with OCFS or OCFS2 which then causes assumptions to be made such as one replacing the other etc... I thought it would be good to write up a summary of how OCFS2 got to where it is, what we're up to still, how it is different from other options and how this really is a cool native Linux cluster filesystem that we worked on for many years and is still widely used. Work on a cluster filesystem at Oracle started many years ago, in the early 2000's when the Oracle Database Cluster development team wrote a cluster filesystem for Windows that was primarily focused on providing an alternative to raw disk devices and help customers with the deployment of Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). Oracle RAC is a cluster technology that lets us make a cluster of Oracle Database servers look like one big database. The RDBMS runs on many nodes and they all work on the same data. It's a Shared Disk database design. There are many advantages doing this but I will not go into detail as that is not the purpose of my write up. Suffice it to say that Oracle RAC expects all the database data to be visible in a consistent, coherent way, across all the nodes in the cluster. To do that, there were/are a few options : 1) use raw disk devices that are shared, through SCSI, FC, or iSCSI 2) use a network filesystem (NFS) 3) use a cluster filesystem(CFS) which basically gives you a filesystem that's coherent across all nodes using shared disks. It is sort of (but not quite) combining option 1 and 2 except that you don't do network access to the files, the files are effectively locally visible as if it was a local filesystem. So OCFS (Oracle Cluster FileSystem) on Windows was born. Since Linux was becoming a very important and popular platform, we decided that we would also make this available on Linux and thus the porting of OCFS/Windows started. The first version of OCFS was really primarily focused on replacing the use of Raw devices with a simple filesystem that lets you create files and provide direct IO to these files to get basically native raw disk performance. The filesystem was not designed to be fully POSIX compliant and it did not have any where near good/decent performance for regular file create/delete/access operations. Cache coherency was easy since it was basically always direct IO down to the disk device and this ensured that any time one issues a write() command it would go directly down to the disk, and not return until the write() was completed. Same for read() any sort of read from a datafile would be a read() operation that went all the way to disk and return. We did not cache any data when it came down to Oracle data files. So while OCFS worked well for that, since it did not have much of a normal filesystem feel, it was not something that could be submitted to the kernel mail list for inclusion into Linux as another native linux filesystem (setting aside the Windows porting code ...) it did its job well, it was very easy to configure, node membership was simple, locking was disk based (so very slow but it existed), you could create regular files and do regular filesystem operations to a certain extend but anything that was not database data file related was just not very useful in general. Logfiles ok, standard filesystem use, not so much. Up to this point, all the work was done, at Oracle, by Oracle developers. Once OCFS (1) was out for a while and there was a lot of use in the database RAC world, many customers wanted to do more and were asking for features that you'd expect in a normal native filesystem, a real "general purposes cluster filesystem". So the team sat down and basically started from scratch to implement what's now known as OCFS2 (Oracle Cluster FileSystem release 2). Some basic criteria were : Design it with a real Distributed Lock Manager and use the network for lock negotiation instead of the disk Make it a Linux native filesystem instead of a native shim layer and a portable core Support standard Posix compliancy and be fully cache coherent with all operations Support all the filesystem features Linux offers (ACL, extended Attributes, quotas, sparse files,...) Be modern, support large files, 32/64bit, journaling, data ordered journaling, endian neutral, we can mount on both endian /cross architecture,.. Needless to say, this was a huge development effort that took many years to complete. A few big milestones happened along the way... OCFS2 was development in the open, we did not have a private tree that we worked on without external code review from the Linux Filesystem maintainers, great folks like Christopher Hellwig reviewed the code regularly to make sure we were not doing anything out of line, we submitted the code for review on lkml a number of times to see if we were getting close for it to be included into the mainline kernel. Using this development model is standard practice for anyone that wants to write code that goes into the kernel and having any chance of doing so without a complete rewrite or.. shall I say flamefest when submitted. It saved us a tremendous amount of time by not having to re-fit code for it to be in a Linus acceptable state. Some other filesystems that were trying to get into the kernel that didn't follow an open development model had a lot harder time and a lot harsher criticism. March 2006, when Linus released 2.6.16, OCFS2 officially became part of the mainline kernel, it was accepted a little earlier in the release candidates but in 2.6.16. OCFS2 became officially part of the mainline Linux kernel tree as one of the many filesystems. It was the first cluster filesystem to make it into the kernel tree. Our hope was that it would then end up getting picked up by the distribution vendors to make it easy for everyone to have access to a CFS. Today the source code for OCFS2 is approximately 85000 lines of code. We made OCFS2 production with full support for customers that ran Oracle database on Linux, no extra or separate support contract needed. OCFS2 1.0.0 started being built for RHEL4 for x86, x86-64, ppc, s390x and ia64. For RHEL5 starting with OCFS2 1.2. SuSE was very interested in high availability and clustering and decided to build and include OCFS2 with SLES9 for their customers and was, next to Oracle, the main contributor to the filesystem for both new features and bug fixes. Source code was always available even prior to inclusion into mainline and as of 2.6.16, source code was just part of a Linux kernel download from kernel.org, which it still is, today. So the latest OCFS2 code is always the upstream mainline Linux kernel. OCFS2 is the cluster filesystem used in Oracle VM 2 and Oracle VM 3 as the virtual disk repository filesystem. Since the filesystem is in the Linux kernel it's released under the GPL v2 The release model has always been that new feature development happened in the mainline kernel and we then built consistent, well tested, snapshots that had versions, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8. But these releases were effectively just snapshots in time that were tested for stability and release quality. OCFS2 is very easy to use, there's a simple text file that contains the node information (hostname, node number, cluster name) and a file that contains the cluster heartbeat timeouts. It is very small, and very efficient. As Sunil Mushran wrote in the manual : OCFS2 is an efficient, easily configured, quickly installed, fully integrated and compatible, feature-rich, architecture and endian neutral, cache coherent, ordered data journaling, POSIX-compliant, shared disk cluster file system. Here is a list of some of the important features that are included : Variable Block and Cluster sizes Supports block sizes ranging from 512 bytes to 4 KB and cluster sizes ranging from 4 KB to 1 MB (increments in power of 2). Extent-based Allocations Tracks the allocated space in ranges of clusters making it especially efficient for storing very large files. Optimized Allocations Supports sparse files, inline-data, unwritten extents, hole punching and allocation reservation for higher performance and efficient storage. File Cloning/snapshots REFLINK is a feature which introduces copy-on-write clones of files in a cluster coherent way. Indexed Directories Allows efficient access to millions of objects in a directory. Metadata Checksums Detects silent corruption in inodes and directories. Extended Attributes Supports attaching an unlimited number of name:value pairs to the file system objects like regular files, directories, symbolic links, etc. Advanced Security Supports POSIX ACLs and SELinux in addition to the traditional file access permission model. Quotas Supports user and group quotas. Journaling Supports both ordered and writeback data journaling modes to provide file system consistency in the event of power failure or system crash. Endian and Architecture neutral Supports a cluster of nodes with mixed architectures. Allows concurrent mounts on nodes running 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian (x86, x86_64, ia64) and big-endian (ppc64) architectures. In-built Cluster-stack with DLM Includes an easy to configure, in-kernel cluster-stack with a distributed lock manager. Buffered, Direct, Asynchronous, Splice and Memory Mapped I/Os Supports all modes of I/Os for maximum flexibility and performance. Comprehensive Tools Support Provides a familiar EXT3-style tool-set that uses similar parameters for ease-of-use. The filesystem was distributed for Linux distributions in separate RPM form and this had to be built for every single kernel errata release or every updated kernel provided by the vendor. We provided builds from Oracle for Oracle Linux and all kernels released by Oracle and for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. SuSE provided the modules directly for every kernel they shipped. With the introduction of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux and our interest in reducing the overhead of building filesystem modules for every minor release, we decide to make OCFS2 available as part of UEK. There was no more need for separate kernel modules, everything was built-in and a kernel upgrade automatically updated the filesystem, as it should. UEK allowed us to not having to backport new upstream filesystem code into an older kernel version, backporting features into older versions introduces risk and requires extra testing because the code is basically partially rewritten. The UEK model works really well for continuing to provide OCFS2 without that extra overhead. Because the RHEL kernel did not contain OCFS2 as a kernel module (it is in the source tree but it is not built by the vendor in kernel module form) we stopped adding the extra packages to Oracle Linux and its RHEL compatible kernel and for RHEL. Oracle Linux customers/users obviously get OCFS2 included as part of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, SuSE customers get it by SuSE distributed with SLES and Red Hat can decide to distribute OCFS2 to their customers if they chose to as it's just a matter of compiling the module and making it available. OCFS2 today, in the mainline kernel is pretty much feature complete in terms of integration with every filesystem feature Linux offers and it is still actively maintained with Joel Becker being the primary maintainer. Since we use OCFS2 as part of Oracle VM, we continue to look at interesting new functionality to add, REFLINK was a good example, and as such we continue to enhance the filesystem where it makes sense. Bugfixes and any sort of code that goes into the mainline Linux kernel that affects filesystems, automatically also modifies OCFS2 so it's in kernel, actively maintained but not a lot of new development happening at this time. We continue to fully support OCFS2 as part of Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and other vendors make their own decisions on support as it's really a Linux cluster filesystem now more than something that we provide to customers. It really just is part of Linux like EXT3 or BTRFS etc, the OS distribution vendors decide. Do not confuse OCFS2 with ACFS (ASM cluster Filesystem) also known as Oracle Cloud Filesystem. ACFS is a filesystem that's provided by Oracle on various OS platforms and really integrates into Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management). It's a very powerful Cluster Filesystem but it's not distributed as part of the Operating System, it's distributed with the Oracle Database product and installs with and lives inside Oracle ASM. ACFS obviously is fully supported on Linux (Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) but OCFS2 independently as a native Linux filesystem is also, and continues to also be supported. ACFS is very much tied into the Oracle RDBMS, OCFS2 is just a standard native Linux filesystem with no ties into Oracle products. Customers running the Oracle database and ASM really should consider using ACFS as it also provides storage/clustered volume management. Customers wanting to use a simple, easy to use generic Linux cluster filesystem should consider using OCFS2. To learn more about OCFS2 in detail, you can find good documentation on http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2 in the Documentation area, or get the latest mainline kernel from http://kernel.org and read the source. One final, unrelated note - since I am not always able to publicly answer or respond to comments, I do not want to selectively publish comments from readers. Sometimes I forget to publish comments, sometime I publish them and sometimes I would publish them but if for some reason I cannot publicly comment on them, it becomes a very one-sided stream. So for now I am going to not publish comments from anyone, to be fair to all sides. You are always welcome to email me and I will do my best to respond to technical questions, questions about strategy or direction are sometimes not possible to answer for obvious reasons.

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Using &lsquo;default&rsquo; to Get Default Values

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Today’s little wonder is another of those small items that can help a lot in certain situations, especially when writing generics.  In particular, it is useful in determining what the default value of a given type would be. The Problem: what’s the default value for a generic type? There comes a time when you’re writing generic code where you may want to set an item of a given generic type.  Seems simple enough, right?  We’ll let’s see! Let’s say we want to query a Dictionary<TKey, TValue> for a given key and get back the value, but if the key doesn’t exist, we’d like a default value instead of throwing an exception. So, for example, we might have a the following dictionary defined: 1: var lookup = new Dictionary<int, string> 2: { 3: { 1, "Apple" }, 4: { 2, "Orange" }, 5: { 3, "Banana" }, 6: { 4, "Pear" }, 7: { 9, "Peach" } 8: }; And using those definitions, perhaps we want to do something like this: 1: // assume a default 2: string value = "Unknown"; 3:  4: // if the item exists in dictionary, get its value 5: if (lookup.ContainsKey(5)) 6: { 7: value = lookup[5]; 8: } But that’s inefficient, because then we’re double-hashing (once for ContainsKey() and once for the indexer).  Well, to avoid the double-hashing, we could use TryGetValue() instead: 1: string value; 2:  3: // if key exists, value will be put in value, if not default it 4: if (!lookup.TryGetValue(5, out value)) 5: { 6: value = "Unknown"; 7: } But the “flow” of using of TryGetValue() can get clunky at times when you just want to assign either the value or a default to a variable.  Essentially it’s 3-ish lines (depending on formatting) for 1 assignment.  So perhaps instead we’d like to write an extension method to support a cleaner interface that will return a default if the item isn’t found: 1: public static class DictionaryExtensions 2: { 3: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 4: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound) 5: { 6: TValue value; 7:  8: // value will be the result or the default for TValue 9: if (!dict.TryGetValue(key, out value)) 10: { 11: value = defaultIfNotFound; 12: } 13:  14: return value; 15: } 16: } 17:  So this creates an extension method on Dictionary<TKey, TValue> that will attempt to get a value using the given key, and will return the defaultIfNotFound as a stand-in if the key does not exist. This code compiles, fine, but what if we would like to go one step further and allow them to specify a default if not found, or accept the default for the type?  Obviously, we could overload the method to take the default or not, but that would be duplicated code and a bit heavy for just specifying a default.  It seems reasonable that we could set the not found value to be either the default for the type, or the specified value. So what if we defaulted the type to null? 1: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 2: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound = null) // ... No, this won’t work, because only reference types (and Nullable<T> wrapped types due to syntactical sugar) can be assigned to null.  So what about a calling parameterless constructor? 1: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 2: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound = new TValue()) // ... No, this won’t work either for several reasons.  First, we’d expect a reference type to return null, not an “empty” instance.  Secondly, not all reference types have a parameter-less constructor (string for example does not).  And finally, a constructor cannot be determined at compile-time, while default values can. The Solution: default(T) – returns the default value for type T Many of us know the default keyword for its uses in switch statements as the default case.  But it has another use as well: it can return us the default value for a given type.  And since it generates the same defaults that default field initialization uses, it can be determined at compile-time as well. For example: 1: var x = default(int); // x is 0 2:  3: var y = default(bool); // y is false 4:  5: var z = default(string); // z is null 6:  7: var t = default(TimeSpan); // t is a TimeSpan with Ticks == 0 8:  9: var n = default(int?); // n is a Nullable<int> with HasValue == false Notice that for numeric types the default is 0, and for reference types the default is null.  In addition, for struct types, the value is a default-constructed struct – which simply means a struct where every field has their default value (hence 0 Ticks for TimeSpan, etc.). So using this, we could modify our code to this: 1: public static class DictionaryExtensions 2: { 3: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 4: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound = default(TValue)) 5: { 6: TValue value; 7:  8: // value will be the result or the default for TValue 9: if (!dict.TryGetValue(key, out value)) 10: { 11: value = defaultIfNotFound; 12: } 13:  14: return value; 15: } 16: } Now, if defaultIfNotFound is unspecified, it will use default(TValue) which will be the default value for whatever value type the dictionary holds.  So let’s consider how we could use this: 1: lookup.GetValueOrDefault(1); // returns “Apple” 2:  3: lookup.GetValueOrDefault(5); // returns null 4:  5: lookup.GetValueOrDefault(5, “Unknown”); // returns “Unknown” 6:  Again, do not confuse a parameter-less constructor with the default value for a type.  Remember that the default value for any type is the compile-time default for any instance of that type (0 for numeric, false for bool, null for reference types, and struct will all default fields for struct).  Consider the difference: 1: // both zero 2: int i1 = default(int); 3: int i2 = new int(); 4:  5: // both “zeroed” structs 6: var dt1 = default(DateTime); 7: var dt2 = new DateTime(); 8:  9: // sb1 is null, sb2 is an “empty” string builder 10: var sb1 = default(StringBuilder()); 11: var sb2 = new StringBuilder(); So in the above code, notice that the value types all resolve the same whether using default or parameter-less construction.  This is because a value type is never null (even Nullable<T> wrapped types are never “null” in a reference sense), they will just by default contain fields with all default values. However, for reference types, the default is null and not a constructed instance.  Also it should be noted that not all classes have parameter-less constructors (string, for instance, doesn’t have one – and doesn’t need one). Summary Whenever you need to get the default value for a type, especially a generic type, consider using the default keyword.  This handy word will give you the default value for the given type at compile-time, which can then be used for initialization, optional parameters, etc. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,default

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• Windows Azure Service Bus Splitter and Aggregator

  - by Alan Smith

  This article will cover basic implementations of the Splitter and Aggregator patterns using the Windows Azure Service Bus. The content will be included in the next release of the “Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide”, along with some other patterns I am working on. I’ve taken the pattern descriptions from the book “Enterprise Integration Patterns” by Gregor Hohpe. I bought a copy of the book in 2004, and recently dusted it off when I started to look at implementing the patterns on the Windows Azure Service Bus. Gregor has also presented an session in 2011 “Enterprise Integration Patterns: Past, Present and Future” which is well worth a look. I’ll be covering more patterns in the coming weeks, I’m currently working on Wire-Tap and Scatter-Gather. There will no doubt be a section on implementing these patterns in my “SOA, Connectivity and Integration using the Windows Azure Service Bus” course. There are a number of scenarios where a message needs to be divided into a number of sub messages, and also where a number of sub messages need to be combined to form one message. The splitter and aggregator patterns provide a definition of how this can be achieved. This section will focus on the implementation of basic splitter and aggregator patens using the Windows Azure Service Bus direct programming model. In BizTalk Server receive pipelines are typically used to implement the splitter patterns, with sequential convoy orchestrations often used to aggregate messages. In the current release of the Service Bus, there is no functionality in the direct programming model that implements these patterns, so it is up to the developer to implement them in the applications that send and receive messages. Splitter A message splitter takes a message and spits the message into a number of sub messages. As there are different scenarios for how a message can be split into sub messages, message splitters are implemented using different algorithms. The Enterprise Integration Patterns book describes the splatter pattern as follows: How can we process a message if it contains multiple elements, each of which may have to be processed in a different way? Use a Splitter to break out the composite message into a series of individual messages, each containing data related to one item. The Enterprise Integration Patterns website provides a description of the Splitter pattern here. In some scenarios a batch message could be split into the sub messages that are contained in the batch. The splitting of a message could be based on the message type of sub-message, or the trading partner that the sub message is to be sent to. Aggregator An aggregator takes a stream or related messages and combines them together to form one message. The Enterprise Integration Patterns book describes the aggregator pattern as follows: How do we combine the results of individual, but related messages so that they can be processed as a whole? Use a stateful filter, an Aggregator, to collect and store individual messages until a complete set of related messages has been received. Then, the Aggregator publishes a single message distilled from the individual messages. The Enterprise Integration Patterns website provides a description of the Aggregator pattern here. A common example of the need for an aggregator is in scenarios where a stream of messages needs to be combined into a daily batch to be sent to a legacy line-of-business application. The BizTalk Server EDI functionality provides support for batching messages in this way using a sequential convoy orchestration. Scenario The scenario for this implementation of the splitter and aggregator patterns is the sending and receiving of large messages using a Service Bus queue. In the current release, the Windows Azure Service Bus currently supports a maximum message size of 256 KB, with a maximum header size of 64 KB. This leaves a safe maximum body size of 192 KB. The BrokeredMessage class will support messages larger than 256 KB; in fact the Size property is of type long, implying that very large messages may be supported at some point in the future. The 256 KB size restriction is set in the service bus components that are deployed in the Windows Azure data centers. One of the ways of working around this size restriction is to split large messages into a sequence of smaller sub messages in the sending application, send them via a queue, and then reassemble them in the receiving application. This scenario will be used to demonstrate the pattern implementations. Implementation The splitter and aggregator will be used to provide functionality to send and receive large messages over the Windows Azure Service Bus. In order to make the implementations generic and reusable they will be implemented as a class library. The splitter will be implemented in the LargeMessageSender class and the aggregator in the LargeMessageReceiver class. A class diagram showing the two classes is shown below. Implementing the Splitter The splitter will take a large brokered message, and split the messages into a sequence of smaller sub-messages that can be transmitted over the service bus messaging entities. The LargeMessageSender class provides a Send method that takes a large brokered message as a parameter. The implementation of the class is shown below; console output has been added to provide details of the splitting operation. public class LargeMessageSender {     private static int SubMessageBodySize = 192 * 1024;     private QueueClient m_QueueClient;       public LargeMessageSender(QueueClient queueClient)     {         m_QueueClient = queueClient;     }       public void Send(BrokeredMessage message)     {         // Calculate the number of sub messages required.         long messageBodySize = message.Size;         int nrSubMessages = (int)(messageBodySize / SubMessageBodySize);         if (messageBodySize % SubMessageBodySize != 0)         {             nrSubMessages++;         }           // Create a unique session Id.         string sessionId = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();         Console.WriteLine("Message session Id: " + sessionId);         Console.Write("Sending {0} sub-messages", nrSubMessages);           Stream bodyStream = message.GetBody<Stream>();         for (int streamOffest = 0; streamOffest < messageBodySize;             streamOffest += SubMessageBodySize)         {                                     // Get the stream chunk from the large message             long arraySize = (messageBodySize - streamOffest) > SubMessageBodySize                 ? SubMessageBodySize : messageBodySize - streamOffest;             byte[] subMessageBytes = new byte[arraySize];             int result = bodyStream.Read(subMessageBytes, 0, (int)arraySize);             MemoryStream subMessageStream = new MemoryStream(subMessageBytes);               // Create a new message             BrokeredMessage subMessage = new BrokeredMessage(subMessageStream, true);             subMessage.SessionId = sessionId;               // Send the message             m_QueueClient.Send(subMessage);             Console.Write(".");         }         Console.WriteLine("Done!");     }} The LargeMessageSender class is initialized with a QueueClient that is created by the sending application. When the large message is sent, the number of sub messages is calculated based on the size of the body of the large message. A unique session Id is created to allow the sub messages to be sent as a message session, this session Id will be used for correlation in the aggregator. A for loop in then used to create the sequence of sub messages by creating chunks of data from the stream of the large message. The sub messages are then sent to the queue using the QueueClient. As sessions are used to correlate the messages, the queue used for message exchange must be created with the RequiresSession property set to true. Implementing the Aggregator The aggregator will receive the sub messages in the message session that was created by the splitter, and combine them to form a single, large message. The aggregator is implemented in the LargeMessageReceiver class, with a Receive method that returns a BrokeredMessage. The implementation of the class is shown below; console output has been added to provide details of the splitting operation.   public class LargeMessageReceiver {     private QueueClient m_QueueClient;       public LargeMessageReceiver(QueueClient queueClient)     {         m_QueueClient = queueClient;     }       public BrokeredMessage Receive()     {         // Create a memory stream to store the large message body.         MemoryStream largeMessageStream = new MemoryStream();           // Accept a message session from the queue.         MessageSession session = m_QueueClient.AcceptMessageSession();         Console.WriteLine("Message session Id: " + session.SessionId);         Console.Write("Receiving sub messages");           while (true)         {             // Receive a sub message             BrokeredMessage subMessage = session.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));               if (subMessage != null)             {                 // Copy the sub message body to the large message stream.                 Stream subMessageStream = subMessage.GetBody<Stream>();                 subMessageStream.CopyTo(largeMessageStream);                   // Mark the message as complete.                 subMessage.Complete();                 Console.Write(".");             }             else             {                 // The last message in the sequence is our completeness criteria.                 Console.WriteLine("Done!");                 break;             }         }                     // Create an aggregated message from the large message stream.         BrokeredMessage largeMessage = new BrokeredMessage(largeMessageStream, true);         return largeMessage;     } }   The LargeMessageReceiver initialized using a QueueClient that is created by the receiving application. The receive method creates a memory stream that will be used to aggregate the large message body. The AcceptMessageSession method on the QueueClient is then called, which will wait for the first message in a message session to become available on the queue. As the AcceptMessageSession can throw a timeout exception if no message is available on the queue after 60 seconds, a real-world implementation should handle this accordingly. Once the message session as accepted, the sub messages in the session are received, and their message body streams copied to the memory stream. Once all the messages have been received, the memory stream is used to create a large message, that is then returned to the receiving application. Testing the Implementation The splitter and aggregator are tested by creating a message sender and message receiver application. The payload for the large message will be one of the webcast video files from http://www.cloudcasts.net/, the file size is 9,697 KB, well over the 256 KB threshold imposed by the Service Bus. As the splitter and aggregator are implemented in a separate class library, the code used in the sender and receiver console is fairly basic. The implementation of the main method of the sending application is shown below.   static void Main(string[] args) {     // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Use the MessagingFactory to create a queue client     QueueClient queueClient = factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.QueueName);       // Open the input file.     FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(AccountDetails.TestFile, FileMode.Open);       // Create a BrokeredMessage for the file.     BrokeredMessage largeMessage = new BrokeredMessage(fileStream, true);       Console.WriteLine("Sending: " + AccountDetails.TestFile);     Console.WriteLine("Message body size: " + largeMessage.Size);     Console.WriteLine();         // Send the message with a LargeMessageSender     LargeMessageSender sender = new LargeMessageSender(queueClient);     sender.Send(largeMessage);       // Close the messaging facory.     factory.Close();  } The implementation of the main method of the receiving application is shown below. static void Main(string[] args) {       // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Use the MessagingFactory to create a queue client     QueueClient queueClient = factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.QueueName);       // Create a LargeMessageReceiver and receive the message.     LargeMessageReceiver receiver = new LargeMessageReceiver(queueClient);     BrokeredMessage largeMessage = receiver.Receive();       Console.WriteLine("Received message");     Console.WriteLine("Message body size: " + largeMessage.Size);       string testFile = AccountDetails.TestFile.Replace(@"\In\", @"\Out\");     Console.WriteLine("Saving file: " + testFile);       // Save the message body as a file.     Stream largeMessageStream = largeMessage.GetBody<Stream>();     largeMessageStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);     FileStream fileOut = new FileStream(testFile, FileMode.Create);     largeMessageStream.CopyTo(fileOut);     fileOut.Close();       Console.WriteLine("Done!"); } In order to test the application, the sending application is executed, which will use the LargeMessageSender class to split the message and place it on the queue. The output of the sender console is shown below. The console shows that the body size of the large message was 9,929,365 bytes, and the message was sent as a sequence of 51 sub messages. When the receiving application is executed the results are shown below. The console application shows that the aggregator has received the 51 messages from the message sequence that was creating in the sending application. The messages have been aggregated to form a massage with a body of 9,929,365 bytes, which is the same as the original large message. The message body is then saved as a file. Improvements to the Implementation The splitter and aggregator patterns in this implementation were created in order to show the usage of the patterns in a demo, which they do quite well. When implementing these patterns in a real-world scenario there are a number of improvements that could be made to the design. Copying Message Header Properties When sending a large message using these classes, it would be great if the message header properties in the message that was received were copied from the message that was sent. The sending application may well add information to the message context that will be required in the receiving application. When the sub messages are created in the splitter, the header properties in the first message could be set to the values in the original large message. The aggregator could then used the values from this first sub message to set the properties in the message header of the large message during the aggregation process. Using Asynchronous Methods The current implementation uses the synchronous send and receive methods of the QueueClient class. It would be much more performant to use the asynchronous methods, however doing so may well affect the sequence in which the sub messages are enqueued, which would require the implementation of a resequencer in the aggregator to restore the correct message sequence. Handling Exceptions In order to keep the code readable no exception handling was added to the implementations. In a real-world scenario exceptions should be handled accordingly.

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• Prepping a conference

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  I have had the chance to talk at many conferences these past few years, and came up with a way to prepare them which works really well for me. Most importantly, it would make it quite easy to overcome an emergency (for example if my laptop would suddenly lose data). The whole code as well as the slides and other documents are in the cloud. I also use source control for my demos, so that I always have the latest and the greatest, but also a history of changes I made to my demos. Finally I have a system of code snippets which works great, and I often had very positive remarks from the audience regarding that. Putting everything in the cloud The one thing I used to be the most scared of was a sudden crash of my laptop, and being unable to restore in time for a conference. Most conferences ask speakers to send slides a few days (or weeks…) in advance, but let's face it, we all have last minute changes to our talks and I always come in the conference with updated slides that I pass to the management team. The answer to that dilemma used to be working off memory sticks, and that worked not bad. However last year I started putting all the documents relating to a conference in a DropBox folder, and that works great too. Obviously DropBox works only if you have connectivity, so if I for instance update slides while on an international flight, I cannot save to the cloud. The obvious answer to that is to backup everything on a memory stick… but I have to admit, I have been trusting my luck and working off my laptop HD and then synching everything to the cloud after landing. Of course on some US national flights you get WiFi on board, so in that case it is even simpler :) Usually after the conference is done, I remove the files from DropBox and copy them to their "final destination". They are backed up from there to BackBlaze, the great online backup service I am using routinely (I currently have about 90GB of data in BackBlaze). Outlining the presentations I like to have a written outline of my presentations written somewhere. I keep it simple, just write the various sections of the presentation with timing. I guess it is a remnant of the time when I was a private pilot, and using checklists for flight preparation. For example: Demo about designability 15' (0:37) Switch to Blend Open MainPage.xaml Create a DataTemplate ... Here I can immediately see during the presentation if I am taking too much time for my demo (0:37 is where I need to be when I am done with this section of the presentation, and 15' is the time that this particular section takes). I keep these sections reasonable, I don't detail every step of the preparation. Typically I have one such section for every 10-15 minutes of my talks. Yes, I am timing my presentations. I keep adjusting these numbers when I rehearse, and this really helps to feel more confident during the presentations. This is especially important for presentations that are long, like my MIX11 demo which clocked at 57 minutes (I had a lot of stuff to show…). Such presentations are risky, because if anything goes wrong, you will have to cut stuff, so the answer to that is: Rehearse, rehearse and when you're done rehearsing, rehearse a little more. I also have a "Preparation" section where I outline what I need to do before a presentation. For instance: Preparation Reboot in VHD Make sure MSN and Twitter are not running. Open VS10 and load demo Open Blend and load demo Run the WP7 emulator ... I typically start preparing my laptop an hour before the talk, starting everything I need to start and then putting my laptop to sleep. Saving and printing the outline, Timing Printing is a real problem because it is really hard to find a printer at most conference venues, and also quite hard in hotels. To solve that, I simply write everything in OneNote (synched to the cloud, now you start to know what I like ;) and then I print it to a PDF (I use CutePDFWriter) that I save to my Kindle. During the presentation, I read the outline off the Kindle (I mostly just need a quick check to see how I am timing). For timing during the presentation, I use the free tool ChronoGPS on my Windows Phone 7, but of course any phone these days has a clock/chrono application. In some conferences, they even have timers that the presenters can see, but they tend to count down and I prefer to count up… so I just use my own :) Source control for demos For demos, I create a separate folder and use Mercurial as source control. Mercurial has the huge advantage (over SVN or TFS) to work offline too, so I can commit while on a plane, and all the history is saved. Then when I have connectivity I push everything to the cloud (I am using the fantastic Trunksapp.com for my private repositories). Here too the obvious downside is the risk of losing my last changes if my laptop crashes before I can push to the cloud, and here too the obvious answer would be to work from a memory stick… though I have to admit I didn't do that lately (except when I was writing Silverlight 4 Unleashed, where I was really paranoid…) And code snippets? I am one of these presenters who hates to type in front of an audience. I can type really fast (writing two books has this advantage, it really teaches you to touch type and be fast at it) but in the context of an audience, on a stage where it is often damn cold (an issue I had a lot in past conferences, air conditioning can freeze your fingers and make it really hard to type), it doesn't work as well. I don't know for you, but I really dislike seeing a presentation where the speaker uses the backspace key more often than others ;) To solve that, I like to have my code ready in snippets, and drag them to the screen. Then I can spend time explaining each code snippet, while highlighting portions of the code (always highlight what you talk about, the audience often doesn't even see the cursor and doesn't know where you are on the screen!) Over the years I have used various solutions for code snippets, and now I have one which works really well… if you take a few precautions! I use the Visual Studio Toolbox. Preparing the code snippets You can store code snippets in the Toolbox for anything, XAML, C# etc. I arrange the snippets in the order in which I need them, which is a great way to remember what comes next in the presentation. I also separate them by topic, to make it easier to find them, for example when I switch to the slides and then back to the code. Remember that no matter how experienced you are, you will feel more nervous on stage than while you are preparing, so any way to make it easier for you is going to be beneficial to the audience. To store a code snippet, I do the following: Open the final demo that you want to show to the audience in Visual Studio. In your code, select a snippet of code that you want to explain in particular. Make sure that the Visual Studio Toolbox is open (menu View, Toolbox or Ctrl-Alt-X). Drag the selected snippet from the code window to the toolbox. (if needed) drag the snippet to the correct location (for example between two other code snippets so that you can access it as you speak through the demo). Right click on the snippet and select Rename Item from the context menu. Select a meaningful name. For me I use the following conventions: If it is a method, I use the method's name. If it is not a whole method, I use a descriptive name. If it is the content of a method (i.e. the body only, without the method's signature), I use "-> MethodName". This reminds me during the presentation that this is only the body, and that I need to insert that into an existing signature. This is the case, for instance, when I use Visual Studio to automatically generate the members of an interface’s implementation; then I only need to insert my snippet inside the generated method body. Saving the snippets This is the most important!! It happened to me a few times that VS10 lost its settings. When that happens, the snippets are lost too! Yeah that really sucks, especially (as it happened once) when this is the case about an hour before a talk… Stress and sweat follows, not good conditions to start a talk in front of an audience believe me. Thankfully, saving snippets is really easy with the following steps: Select the menu Tools, Import and Export Settings. Select Export selected environment settings and press Next. Uncheck All Settings. Then expand General Settings and select Toolbox (only!). Press Next. Select your source control folder and save under a meaningful name (for instance Snippets.vssettings). Commit to source control and push to the cloud. By the way, this also has the advantage of applying source control to the snippets file (which is an XML file), so you get history for free on that file! Reimporting the snippets If VS loses its settings and you need to reimport the snippets, this can be done super easily and very fast. Make sure that the Toolbox is empty. When you import snippets, they are merged with existing ones, they do not replace the content of the Toolbox. Unless merging is really what you want, make sure that your Toolbox is clean before you import, it is really easier. Select the menu Tools, Import and Export Settings. Select Import selected environment settings and press Next. Select No, just import new settings and press Next. Press Browse and select the Snippets.vssettings file. Press Finish. Et voila, all your snippets appear again in the Toolbox. Whew, the worst was averted and you can start your demo without sweating! (I had to do that once literally 5 minutes before the start of a demo, while my laptop was already hooked to the projector, and it went just fine). What about special tools? When using special tools (for example beta versions of tools you have an early access to), or a special configuration of your laptop, things can get tricky because you cannot really be sure that you will get a laptop with the same tools and the same configuration at the conference. To solve that, I use the following precautions: I make my demos from a Virtual Hard Disk. The great John Papa made a very easy-to-follow web page where he explains how to create a VHD and install Win7 to it. This gives you the full power of your laptop (as fast as booting from the metal). For me, I have a basic configuration that I saved on a USB harddrive (Win7 plus drivers, basic settings for desktop, folder options, taskbar etc) and Visual Studio 2010 SP1 on it. When preparing, I start by copying this "basis VHD" to my laptop. I install additional tools and configurations. I save the VHD back to the USB harddrive in a different folder. This would allow me to reinstall my demo environment quite fast, for example in case of harddrive failure. Replace the harddrive, copy the VHD to it, configure the BCD and you can start. Unfortunately this only works if the laptop itself still works. In the worst case of total failure, my security is to back all the installers up: The installers I use are synched on all my laptops and backed up to BackBlaze. If the worst happens and my laptop is absolutely broken, I can download the installer from BackBlaze and install on another laptop. This of course takes some time, and if that happens 5 minutes before a presentation, well… I don't have an answer to that, except of course crossing my fingers. Still, all that gives me additional security. Conclusion Remember folks, talking to an audience, large or small, will make you nervous. Just ask Scott Hanselman :) The goal here is to create the best possible conditions for you, and to create an environment where everything is saved and easy to restore, where everything is well known and provides you with additional confidence. The cooler you feel before the presentation (and during ;)), the better your presentation will be. Here too, the goal is to provide the best user experience you can have, which in turn will make it more enjoyable for your audience! Happy presenting :) Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 03, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 03, 2010Popular ReleasesChronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.26.7024: Fixed updater; Fixed MegauploadDJ - jQuery WebControls for ASP.NET: DJ 1.2: What is new? Update to support jQuery 1.4.2 Update to support jQuery ui 1.8.6 Update to Visual Studio 2010 New WebControls with samples added Autocomplete WebControl Button WebControl ToggleButt WebControl The example web site is including in source code project.LateBindingApi.Excel: LateBindingApi.Excel Release 0.7g: Unterschiede zur Vorgängerversion: - Zusätzliche Interior Properties - Group / Ungroup Methoden für Range - Bugfix COM Reference Handling für Application Objekt in einigen Klassen Release+Samples V0.7g: - Enthält Laufzeit DLL und Beispielprojekte Beispielprojekte: COMAddinExample - Demonstriert ein versionslos angebundenes COMAddin Example01 - Background Colors und Borders für Cells Example02 - Font Attributes undAlignment für Cells Example03 - Numberformats Example04 - Shapes, WordArts, P...ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit: November 2010 - v2.1: ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit v2.1 Added Windows Phone 7 build. New controls added: InfoWindow ChildPage (Windows Phone 7 only) See what's new here full details for : http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/help/#/What_s_new_in_2_1/016600000025000000/ Note: Requires Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0.ASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.1: Atomic CMS 2.1.1 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide Winware: Winware 3.0 (.Net 4.0): Winware 3.0 is base on .Net 4.0 with C#. Please open it with Visual Studio 2010. This release contains a lab web application.UltimateJB: UltimateJB 2.02 PL3 KAKAROTO + CE-X-3.41 EvilSperm: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La Version CEX341 pour pouvoir jouer avec des jeux demandant le firmware 3.50 ( certain ne fonctionne tous simplement pas ). - Pour l'instant le CEX341 n'est disponible qu'avec les PS3 en firmwares 3.41 !!! - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 3.30 !!! Conclusion : - UltimateJB CEX341 => Spoof le Firmware 3.41 en 3.50 ( facilite l'utilisation de certain jeux avec openManage...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.1.1: 2.1.1This release adds in the changes for 4.03a. To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Switched Searing Flames bac...AI: Initial 0.0.1: It’s simply just one code file; it simulates AI and machine in a simulated world. The AI has a little understanding of its body machine and parts, and able to use its feet to do actions just start and stop walking. The world is all of white with nothing but just the machine on a white planet. Colors, odors and position information make no sense. I’m previous C# programmer and I’m learning F# during this project, although I’m still not a good F# programmer, in this project I learning to prog...NKinect: NKinect Preview: Build features: Accelerometer reading Motor serial number property Realtime image update Realtime depth calculation Export to PLY (On demand) Control motor LED Control Kinect tiltMicrosoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V1.0 - N-Layer DDD Sample App .NET 4.0: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools http://re...Sense/Net Enterprise Portal & ECMS: SenseNet 6.0.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.1 Community Edition This half year we have been working quite fiercely to bring you the long-awaited release of Sense/Net 6.0. Download this Community Edition to see what we have been up to. These months we have worked on getting the WebCMS capabilities of Sense/Net 6.0 up to par. New features include: New, powerful page and portlet editing experience. HTML and CSS cleanup, new, powerful site skinning system. Upgraded, lightning-fast indexing and query via Lucene. Limita...Minecraft GPS: Minecraft GPS 1.1.1: New Features Compass! New style. Set opacity on main window to allow overlay of Minecraft. Open World in any folder. Fixes Fixed style so listbox won't grow the window size. Fixed open file dialog issue on non-vista kernel machines.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 11-28-2001: This release introduces some exciting improvements. Support for big raster, both in display and changing the scheme. Faster raster scheme creation for all rasters. Caching of the "sample" values so once obtained the raster symbolizer dialog loads faster. Reprojection supported for raster and image classes. Affine transform fully supported for images and rasters, so skewed images are now possible. Projection uses better checks when loading unprojected layers. GDAL raster support f...Virtu: Virtu 0.9.0: Source Requirements.NET Framework 4 Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 Express Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools (which includes XNA Game Studio 4) Binaries RequirementsSilverlight 4 .NET Framework 4 XNA Framework 4SuperWebSocket: SuperWebSocket(60438): It is the first release of SuperWebSocket. Because it is base on SuperSocket, most features of SuperSocket are supported in SuperWebSocket. The source code include a LiveChat demo.Cropper: 1.9.4: Mostly fixes for issues with a few feature requests. Fixed Issues 2730 & 3638 & 14467 11044 11447 11448 11449 14665 Implemented Features 6123 11581PFC: PFC for PB 11.5: This is just a migration from the 11.0 code. No changes have been made yet (and they are needed) for it to work properly with 11.5.PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5: This release does not add any new feature for pdf manipulation, but enables automatic updates checking, so it is reccomended to install it in order to stay updated with next releases. Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0...New Projects.Net MVC Dialog Authentication Starter: .Net MVC Dialog Authentication Starter is the basic .Net MVC application starter template that has been modified to render the Register and Logon functionality via a modal dialog. It is developed using .Net MVC 2, Jquery 1.4.1, and Jquery UI 1.8.6..Net SQL Generator: Generation tool for random queries in SQL in the Windows environment. Can produce random queries, tables, deletes, and updates as well as generate random data for a table. Structured to allow easy adaptation for other SQL implementations as well.10010dshjlahfajhflkjhkjhherkjhfkja: 10010dshjlahfajhflkjhkjhherkjhfkjaBanshee: MOSS 2007 utility to detect authored links and headings in navigation structure of a site collection which point to the subweb's root instead of the subweb's welcome page. It's developed in C# and requires MOSS 2007 SP2 or later.Counter Strike Live Level editor: What is CSLIVE? A web browser based online 2d Shooter. It is clone of Counter Strike. Game supports the multiplayer game over internet or lan. And its Free to play! open souce! This project is still in development. Official open beta tests will be ran every day 20:00 - 21:00 +2GTCRM 2011 Style Templates: CRM 2011 Style Templates.DarkTimes: Having many projects at the sames time ? need an easy way to count those times ? here is a windows phone 7 app for this ^^ --------------------- Vous avez plusieurs projets en même temps ? besoin d'un moyen simple de compter ces temps ? voici une appli windows phone 7 pour ca ^^DSN Export-o-Matic 3000: DSN Export-o-Matic 3000 is a Windows application which allows you to export ODBC DSN Registry settings to a .reg file which can then be imported on another computer. It is written in C#.NET using Visual C# 2010 Express Edition.DYSS Game and AGE Game Engine for XNA: Did You Slay Something? (Working title) and AGE Game Engine for XNA Developed by Lucas LoreggiaExeCryptorNetWrapper: .NET Wrapper for ExeCryptor product (serial number checking functionalities only)ffmpegYAG: ffmpegYAG is a GUI for the popular ffmpeg audio/video processing toolFluentScheduler: A task scheduler that uses fluent interface to configure schedules. Useful for running cron jobs/automated tasks from your application. General Purpose Hash Function Algorithms: The General Purpose Hash Functions Library has the following mix of additive and rotative general purpose string hashing algorithms. HD Web FileManager: Incercam sa facem un singur fisier asp.net care sa faca managementul fisierelor pe un server web.iConverter: iConverter ?????????????。 iConverter is a character transcoding encoding conversion tool.LHA Social Work: Source control host for http://lhasocialwork.org.Mega Puzzle WP7: Mega Puzzle its a Puzzle game in Silverlight that run in Windows Phone 7.It's developed in C#MTConnect Managed Agent SDK: The MTConnect Managed SDK provides an Agent object model to facilitate exposing MTConnect data from your machine tools.Nebula - Image Lock / Unlock Software: Nebula - Image ( Jpg / bmp ) file lock / unlock software designed for simply changing file extension, so that files will be visible on HDD but not unless you change the extension. Written in Perl + Compiled into exe.Pushing - A Sokoban like Puzzle game: Pushing is a C# port of a little hobby project I created some years ago in C++. It's a Sokoban like Puzzle game. The old C++ version was just a 2D/Pseudo 3D Game, the new C# version will be a real 3D Game.RESTController: Provides a base class implementation for a RESTful controller model. Provides common functionality for the basic controller actions of List, Show, New, Edit, and Delete. It's meant to remove as much of the redundant code for MVC controllers as possible.Scientific Calculator ZENO-5000: HTML 5, CSS 3, jQuery: Scientific Calculator ZENO-5000 is a lightweight web application (<40kb), utilizing latest HTML5/CSS3 features and client-side jQuery/Java scripting. Application does not include any graphic files. It is portable, capable of running in online/offline modes on PC/mobile devicesSCR-Airplane Autopilot System: Automatyczny pilot samolotu - projekt na zaliczenie przedmiotu Systemy Czasu RzeczywistegoScriptonite: A lightweight system for scripting gameplay events for games such as RPGs. After integrating Scriptonite into your project, you create scripted events using an incredibly simple scripting language. Intended for XNA, but should work anywhere.Shelf: Shelf is a .NET library of common extension methods.SQLite ADO.NET for Windows Phone: Windows Phone is missing SQLite. This project fixes that :) And does so by giving the community the interfaces we've grown to know and love; IDbConnection, IDbCommand, IDbTransaction and, IDbReader. Thanks so much to the pioneers before me who ported the c++ to c#!Tailf: Tailf is a C# implementation of the tail -f command available on unix/linux systems. Differently form other ports it does not lock the file in any way so it works even if other rename the file: this is expecially designed to works well with log4net rolling file appender.TeamBrain: TeamBrain helps project teams to centralise all knowledge about a project into a repository that is clean and a pleasure to use.TeamDev JQuery c# wrapper: C# jQuery Wrapper. Helps you to write correct jQuery functions in c# language. The code you write will be traduced into correct jQuery methods calls. VirtualEye: Virtual Eye...Win32 Registry Activity Monitor: A simple program written in Delphi that monitors registry activity on win32 systems. In short a registry key and class are statically added to the code, the program is then run and as changes are made by other applications to the key and all its sub keys the changes are logged anXamlCode: XamlCode provides support for embedding inline C# code directly in the xaml files to create simple value converters, value providers and validation rules. It's targeted mainly as a rapid WPF application development tool.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 29, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 29, 2010Popular Releasesexpression Blend 4.0 Comment Uncomment Xaml Code addin: Blend addin 1.0b: First releaseConfuser: Confuser v1.5: Change logs: +packer system +two confusion +console version *Enhanced encryption algorithm and protection. *Better documentationDotSpatial: DotSpatial 11-28-2001: This release introduces some exciting improvements. Support for big raster, both in display and changing the scheme. Faster raster scheme creation for all rasters. Caching of the "sample" values so once obtained the raster symbolizer dialog loads faster. Reprojection supported for raster and image classes. Affine transform fully supported for images and rasters, so skewed images are now possible. Projection uses better checks when loading unprojected layers. GDAL raster support f...SuperWebSocket: SuperWebSocket(60333): It is the first release of SuperWebSocket. Because it is base on SuperSocket, most features of SuperSocket are supported in SuperWebSocket.MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.25.7002: Fixed updater Fixed FileServe Fixed LetItBitNotepad.NET: Notepad.NET 0.7 Preview 1: Whats New?* Optimized Code Generation: Which means it will run significantly faster. * Preview of Syntax Highlighting: Only VB.NET highlighting is supported, C# and Ruby will come in Preview 2. * Improved Editing Updates (when the line number, etc updates) to be more graceful. * Recent Documents works! * Images can be inserted but they're extremely large. Known Bugs* The Update Process hangs: This is a bug apparently spawning since 0.5. It will be fixed in Preview 2. Until then, perform a fr...Cropper: 1.9.4: Mostly fixes for issues with a few feature requests. Fixed Issues 2730 & 3638 & 14467 11044 11447 11448 11449 14665 Implemented Features 6123 11581PFC: PFC for PB 11.5: This is just a migration from the 11.0 code. No changes have been made yet (and they are needed) for it to work properly with 11.5.PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5: This release does not add any new feature for pdf manipulation, but enables automatic updates checking, so it is reccomended to install it in order to stay updated with next releases. Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0...Eneta community portal: Eneta Portal 0.1a: This is very first public deployment package of Eneta portal. This is test and development release and it is not suggested to use it on live or more complex development or test environments. You can find installation guides from documentation section of this site. For help and support please leave your message to discussions.XamlQuery/WPF - The Write Less, Do More, WPF Library: XamlQuery-WPF v1.2 (Runtime, Source): This is the first release of popular XamlQuery library for WPF. XamlQuery has already gained recognition among Silverlight developers.Math.NET Numerics: Beta 1: First beta of Math.NET Numerics. Only contains the managed linear algebra provider. Beta 2 will include the native linear algebra providers along with better documentation and examples.Minecraft GPS: Minecraft GPS 1.1: 1.1 Release New Features Compass! New style. Set opacity on main window to allow overlay of Minecraft.Code Sample from Microsoft: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-11-25: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.8.5 Beta: - WBFS repair (default) options fixed - Transfer to image fixed - Settings ui widget names fixed - Some little bug fixes You need to reset the settings! Delete WiiBaFu's config file or registry entries on windows: Linux: ~/.config/WiiBaFu/wiibafu.conf Windows: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WiiBaFu\wiibafu Mac OS X: ~/Library/Preferences/com.wiibafu.wiibafu.plist Caution: This is a BETA version! Errors, crashes and data loss not impossible! Use in test environments only, not on productive syste...Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.3: Added process count and world size calculation progress to the status bar. Added View->'Status Bar' menu item to show/hide the status bar. Status bar is automatically shown when loading a world. Added a prompt, when loading a world, to use or clear cached images.Sexy Select: sexy select v0.4: Changes in v0.4 Added method : elements. This returns all the option elements that are currently added to the select list Added method : selectOption. This method accepts two values, the element to be modified and the selected state. (true/false)Deep Zoom for WPF: First Release: This first release of the Deep Zoom control has the same source code, binaries and demos as the CodeProject article (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/DeepZoom.aspx).BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.0 RC: This is a Release Candidate version for BlogEngine.NET 2.0. The most current, stable version of BlogEngine.NET is version 1.6. Find out more about the BlogEngine.NET 2.0 RC here. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. To get started, be sure to check out our installation documentation and the installation screencast. If you are upgrading from a previous version, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0 instructions. As this ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.156: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release adds a feature for aggregating the overall metrics in a folder full of NodeXL workbooks, adds geographical coordinates to the Twitter import features, and fixes a memory-related bug. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Please Note: There is a new option in the setup program to install for "Just Me" or "Everyone." Most people...New ProjectsAntikCompta: AntikCompta is the easiest way to share comptability beetween an antiquaire and it's account manager.Blend Extensions: This shows you how to extend blend. It provides the basic plumbing for adding custom menu items, panes etc. codinghints: Sample codes of my blog codinghints.blogspot.comConvertitore dec->all: programma conversione da decimale a tutte le altre basi...DHCP Server: Open source managed ipv4 DHCP server implementation, written in C#. With extensive support for DHCP options it is ideally suited for configuring and netbooting local systems such as PLCs and blade racks. The permissive MIT license enables free commercial use and distribution.EducationProject: To be continuedEfficiency: Autumoon Efficiency.FarmerStore: Farmer store is e-commerical website about agricultural products.gStocksGadget: gStocksGadget is a Gadget for Windows Sidebar，display real-time stock prices(China's A-share market).Illumina PRT: Research ProjectImageCrawler: web crawler for downloading imagesInstantWatcher: Allows a user to view their Netflix Instant Watch Queue and launch a video.IRobotOnCLR - Control an "IRobot Create" Like You Are John Connor: This is a C# IRobot Create library w/ an accompanied Silverlight client that allows for remote interaction. To make use of this entire project, mounting a .net capable computer on the IRobot Create is suggested.it0758: it0758jkwcg: jkw cg form submit and managment, use xaf as testModificator of the URLs in the Web.config files: FilesModificatorAdmin utility 1. Purpose. 2. How it works. ================================================= 1. Purpose. In my current project we've got a lot of composite WCF-services. We have several environments: Development,Test1, Test2, Production. We don't have the service repository. That means when we move the services from one environment to another, we have to change addresses (URLs) in the <client> sections of all Web.config files (several dozens). Boring and error prone work, is...NARDAX: A collection of usefull API's and extensions that have been built out of necessity.OpenGLLesson: ?? ??? ???Peachlab ASP.NET Project Starter Kit: this is a personal project.picoCMS: picoCMS is an open-source content management system based on ASP.Net 3.5. It can be used as a learning platform for people who are totally new to ASP.Net and want to get things working around. SogouMusicBox Data: SogouMusicBox Data.Sound It Out - Phonetic Algorithms: Phonetic Algorithm helper Completed: NYSIIS In Progress: Soundex Metaphone Double Metaphone SPMetal Extender: SPMetal Extended helps SharePoint 2010 C# developers to remove some Linq to SharePoint 2010 limitations. You can extend the fields that Linq to SharePoint handles (including SharePoint Server 2010's): taxonaomy, publishing html, publishing image, attachments, created by, modifiedStrategyGame: A Fantasy Strategy Game.Task Scheduler Engine: Embed cron-like scheduling in your .NET application. Want your application to execute a task on the 12th second of the 29th minute of the 9th hour on Tuesdays? Piece of cake--2 lines of code. Coming in at ~250 lines of code, it offers considerable functionality with no bloat.The C# Todoist API: The C# Todoist API is a C# wrapper around the Todoist API documented at http://todoist.com/API/help. This is a work in progress.Tools Project: Tools to ease management.uObject: uObject is an Library That persist sample objectVisual Design: Visual Design is a collaborative diagramming editor written in silverlight to support design of software systems through diagramming, mainly UML, but even other types of diagram not supported in commercial and open source tools.Wusic - Web Music: Wusic.NET is an online video player and management system that highlights silverlight's rich-client functionality and potential. Some of the custom controls that make up Wusic.NET are drag n' drop, modality, sizability, YouTube and FaceBook integration, and Mac'ish menubar.XNADeviceEnumeration Component: A component which helps to enumerate a(all) graphics device/adapter on pc with XNA.XPlatformConvertCPP: Mesh Converter For XPlatformCPPZvP: First project to be tested. It's empty, so don't join us.?????「??」: ????????????????????。

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• e-interview: SunSpace to WebCenter migration

  - by me

  I had the pleasure to do an e-interview with Ana Neves around the SunSpace to WebCenter migration project.  Below is the english version of the interview.  Enjoy   Peter, you joined Oracle in 2009 through the acquisition of Sun. Becoming a part of Oracle meant many changes. The internal collaboration platform was one of them, as per a post you wrote back in 2011. Sun had SunSpace. How would you describe SunSpace? SunSpace was the internal Community and Social Collaboration platform for the Sun's Global Sales and Services Organization. SunSpace served around 600 communities with a main focus around technology, products and services. SunSpace was a big success. Within 3 months of its launch SunSpace had over 20,000 users and it won the Atlassian "Not just another wiki" Award for the best use of Confluence (https://blogs.oracle.com/peterreiser/entry/goodbye_sunspace_hello_webcenter). What made SunSpace so special? 1. People centric versus  Web centric The main concept of SunSpace put the person in the middle of everything. All relevant information, resources  etc. where dynamically pushed to a person's  myProfile ( Facebook like interface) based on the person's interest and  needs.  2. Ease to use  SunSpace was really easy to use. We spent a lot of time on social interaction design to optimize the user experience.  Also we integrated some sophisticated technology to hide complexity from the user. As example - when a user added a document to SunSpace - we analyzed the content of the document and suggested related metadata and tags to the user based on a sophisticated algorithm which was integrated with the corporate taxonomy. Based on this metadata the document was automatically shared with the relevant communities.  3. Easy to find One of the main use cases for SunSpace was that  a user could quickly find the content and information they needed for their job.  The search implementation was based on:  optimized search engine algorithm using social value based ranking enhancements community facilitated search optimization  faceted search which recommended highly relevant  content like products, communities and experts 4. Social Adoption  - How to build vibrant communities You can deploy the coolest social technology but what if the users are not using it?   To drive user adoption we implemented two  complementary models: 4.1 Community Methodology  We developed a set of best practices on how to create, run and sustain communities including: community structure and types (e.g. Community of Practice, Community of Interest etc.) & tips and tricks on how to build a "vibrant " communities, Community Health check etc.  These best practices where constantly tuned and updated by the community of community drivers. 4.2. Social Value System To drive user adoption there is ONE key  question you  have to answer for each individual user: What's In It For Me (WIIFM) We developed a Social Value System called Community Equity which measures the social value flow between People, Content and Metadata. Based on this technology we added "Gamfication" techniques (although at that time this term did not exist ) to SunSpace to honor people for the active contribution and participation.  As example: All  social credentials a user earned trough active community participation where dynamically displayed on her/his myProfile. How would you describe WebCenter? Oracle WebCenter (@oraclewebcenter) is the Oracle's  user engagement platform for social business. It helps people work together more efficiently through contextual collaboration tools that optimize connections between people, information, and applications and ensures users have access to the right information in the context of the business process in which they are engaged. Oracle WebCenter can help your organization deliver contextual and targeted Web experiences to users and enable employees to access information and applications through intuitive portals, composite applications, and mash-ups. How does it compare to SunSpace in terms of functionality? Before I answer this question, I would like to point out some limitation we started to see with the current SunSpace implementation. Due to the massive growth of the user population (>20,000 users), we experienced  performance and scalability challenges with the current technology. Also at the time - Sun Internal Communications and SunIT planned to replace the entire Sun Intranet with SunSpace. We  kicked-off a project to evaluate the enterprise level technology which eventually would replace the good old static Intranet.  And then Oracle acquired Sun. We already had defined the functional requirements for the Intranet replacement with a Social Enterprise Stack and we just needed to evaluate the functional requirements against WebCenter   Below are the summary of this evaluation  MyProfile SunSpace WebCenter How WebCenter Works Home MyProfile: to access, click on your name at the top of any WebCenter page Your name, title, and reporting line are displayed.  Sub-tabs show your activity stream (Activities); people in your network (Connections); files you have uploaded (Documents); your contact information (Organization); and any personal information you wish to share (About).   Files MyFiles Allows you to upload, download and store documents or wiki pages within folders and subfolders.  The WebDav interface allows you to download / upload files / folders with a simple drag and drop to / from your local machine.  Tagging is supported and recommended. Network HomeMyConnections Home: displays the activity stream of individuals in your network.MyConnections: shows individuals in your network.  Click on a person's name to see their contact info and link to their profile. Status Updates MyProfle > Activties Add and displays  your recent activties and status updates. Watches Preferences > Subscriptions > Current Subscriptions Receive email notifications when  pages / spaces you watch are modified. Drafts N/A WebCenter does not support Drafts Settings Preferences: to access, click on 'Preferences' at the top of any WebCenter page Set your general preferences, as well as your WebCenter messaging, search and mail settings. MyCommunities MySpaces: to access, click on 'Spaces' at the top of any WebCenter page Displays MySpaces (communities you are a member of); and Recent Spaces (communities you have recently visited). Community SunSpace Webcenter How Webcenter Works Home Home Displays a community introduction and activity stream.  Members can add messages, links or documents via the Community Message Board. No Top Contributors widget. People Members Lists members of the community. The Mail All Members feature allows moderators and participants to send a message to all members of the community. Membership Management can be found under > Manage > Members News News Members can post and access latest community news and they can subscribe to news using an RSS reader Documents Documents Allows community members to upload, download and store documents or wiki pages within folders and subfolders.  The WebDav interface allows participants to download / upload files / folders with a simple drag and drop to / from your local machine.  Tagging is supported and recommended. Wiki Wiki Allows community members to create and update web pages with a WYSIWYG editor.  Note: WebCenter does not support macros or portlet embedding. Forum Forum Post community forum topics. Contribute to community forum conversations.  N/A Calendar Update and/or view the Community Calendar. N/A Analytics Displays detailed analytics data (views,downloads, unique users etc.) for Pages, Wiki, Documents, and Forum in a given community space. What is the adoption of WebCenter at Oracle? The entire Intranet serving around 100,000 users  is running on WebCenter Content.  For professional communities we use WebCenter Portal and Spaces. Currently we have around 6,000 community spaces with  around 40,000 members.  Does Oracle have any metrics to assess usage and impact of WebCenter? Can you give us some examples? Sure -  we have a lot of metrics   For the Intranet we use traditional metrics like pageviews, monthly unique visitors and unique visits.  For Communities we use the WebCenter Portal/Spaces analytics service which gives as a wealth of data. The key metrics we track are: Space traffic (PageViews, Unique Users) Wiki,Documents (views, downloads etc.) Forum (users, views, posts etc.) Registered members over time  Depending on the community we can filter/segment the metrics by User Properties e.g. Country, Organization, Job Role etc. What are you doing to improve usage and impact? 1. We  integrating the WebCenter social services/fabric into all  main business applications. As example The Fusion CRM deployment is seamless integrated with Oracle Social Network (OSN) and all conversation around an opportunity or customer engagement is  done in OSN (see youtube video). 2. We drive Social Best Practice trough a program called "Social Networking & Business Collaboration (SNBC) program" You worked both with WebCenter and SunSpace. Knowing what you know today, if you had the chance to choose between the two, which one would you choose? Why? That's a tricky question   In the early days of  the Social Enterprise implementation (we started SunSpace in 2006), we needed an agile and easy to deploy technology to keep up with the users requirements. Sometimes we pushed two releases per day  and we were in a permanent perpetual beta mode - SunSpace was perfect for that.  After the social implementation matured over time - community generated content became business critical and we saw a change in the  requirements from agile to stability, scalability and reliability  of the infrastructure.  WebCenter is the right choice for such an enterprise-level deployment.  You are a WebCenter Evangelist at Oracle. What do you do as part of that role? Our  role is to help position Oracle as one of the key thought leaders and solutions provider for Social Business. In addition we drive social innovation trough our Oracle Appslab  team. Is that a full time role? Yes  How many other Evangelists are there in Oracle? We are currently 5 people in the WebCenter evangelist team (@webcentervoices): Christian Finn (@cfinn) leads the team - Christian came from the Microsoft Sharepoint product management team and is a recognized expert in Social Business and Enterprise Collaboration. Noël Jaffré  (@noeljaffre) is our Web Experience Management (WEM) guru and came to Oracle via FatWire acquisition (now WebCenter Sites). Jake Kuramoto (@theapplab) is part of the Oracle AppsLab innovation  team - Jake is well known as  the driving force behind  http://theappslab.com  a blog around social and innovation.  Noel Portugal (@noelportugal) is a developer in the Oracle AppsLab innovation team - he is the inventor of OraTweet - Oracle's internal tweeting platform  Peter Reiser (@peterreiser) is  a Social Business guru and the inventor of SunSpace and Community Equity.  What area of the business do you and the rest of the Evangelists sit in? What area of the organisation is responsible for WebCenter? We are part of the WebCenter product management  organization.  Is WebCenter part of the Knowledge Management strategy? Oracle WebCenter is the Oracle's user engagement platform for social business. It brings together the most complete portfolio of portal, web experience management, content, social and collaboration technologies into a single product suite and is the product foundation of the Oracle Knowledge Management strategy.  I am aware Oracle also uses Beehive internally. How would you describe Beehive? Oracle Beehive provides an integrated set of communication and collaboration services built on a single scalable, secure, enterprise-class platform Beehive is  internally used for enterprise wide mail, calendar and real collaboration (Web conferencing) services.  Are Beehive and WebCenter connected? Historically Beehive and WebCenter Portal & Content had some overlap in functionally. (Hey - if  a company has an acquisition strategy to strengthen its product offering and accelerate  innovation, it's pretty normal that functional overlap exists  :- )) A key objective of the WebCenter strategy is  to combine all social and collaboration offerings under the WebCenter product family. That means that certain Beehive components  will be integrated into the overall WebCenter product offering.  Are there any other internal collaboration tools at Oracle? Which ones There here are two other main social tools which are widely used at Oracle  Oracle Connect was the first social tool the Oracle AppsLab team created in 2007 - see (Jake's blog post for details). It is still extensively used. ... and as a former Sun guy I like this quote from the blog post:  "Traffic to Connect peaked right after the Sun merger in 2010, when it served several hundred thousand pageviews each month; since then, traffic has subsided, but still averages tens of thousands of pageviews to several thousand users each month." Oratweet - Oracle internal microblogging platform has been used since June 2008 and it is still growing.  It's entirely written in Oracle Application Express (APEX) which is a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database. Wanna try it out? Here you can download the code.  What is Oracle's strategy regarding (all these) collaboration tools? Pretty straight forward. The strategy is to seamless  integrate the WebCenter social & collaboration services into all Business Applications to help customers to socialize their enterprise. 

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• DevConnections Session Slides, Samples and Links

  - by Rick Strahl

  Finally coming up for air this week, after catching up with being on the road for the better part of three weeks. Here are my slides, samples and links for my four DevConnections Session two weeks ago in Vegas. I ended up doing one extra un-prepared for session on WebAPI and AJAX, as some of the speakers were either delayed or unable to make it at all to Vegas due to Sandy's mayhem. It was pretty hectic in the speaker room as Erik (our event coordinator extrodinaire) was scrambling to fill session slots with speakers :-). Surprisingly it didn't feel like the storm affected attendance drastically though, but I guess it's hard to tell without actual numbers. The conference was a lot of fun - it's been a while since I've been speaking at one of these larger conferences. I'd been taking a hiatus, and I forgot how much I enjoy actually giving talks. Preparing - well not  quite so much, especially since I ended up essentially preparing or completely rewriting for all three of these talks and I was stressing out a bit as I was sick the week before the conference and didn't get as much time to prepare as I wanted to. But - as always seems to be the case - it all worked out, but I guess those that attended have to be the judge of that… It was great to catch up with my speaker friends as well - man I feel out of touch. I got to spend a bunch of time with Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell, Julie Lerman and for about 10 minutes even got to catch up with the ever so busy Michele Bustamante. Lots of great technical discussions including a fun and heated REST controversy with Ward and Howard Dierking. There were also a number of great discussions with attendees, describing how they're using the technologies touched in my talks in live applications. I got some great ideas from some of these and I wish there would have been more opportunities for these kinds of discussions. One thing I miss at these Vegas events though is some sort of coherent event where attendees and speakers get to mingle. These Vegas conferences are just like "go to sessions, then go out and PARTY on the town" - it's Vegas after all! But I think that it's always nice to have at least one evening event where everybody gets to hang out together and trade stories and geek talk. Overall there didn't seem to be much opportunity for that beyond lunch or the small and short exhibit hall events which it seemed not many people actually went to. Anyways, a good time was had. I hope those of you that came to my sessions learned something useful. There were lots of great questions and discussions after the sessions - always appreciate hearing the real life scenarios that people deal with in relation to the abstracted scenarios in sessions. Here are the Session abstracts, a few comments and the links for downloading slides and  samples. It's not quite like being there, but I hope this stuff turns out to be useful to some of you. I'll be following up a couple of these sessions with white papers in the following weeks. Enjoy. ASP.NET Architecture: How ASP.NET Works at the Low Level Abstract:Interested in how ASP.NET works at a low level? ASP.NET is extremely powerful and flexible technology, but it's easy to forget about the core framework that underlies the higher level technologies like ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, WebPages, Web Services that we deal with on a day to day basis. The ASP.NET core drives all the higher level handlers and frameworks layered on top of it and with the core power comes some complexity in the form of a very rich object model that controls the flow of a request through the ASP.NET pipeline from Windows HTTP services down to the application level. To take full advantage of it, it helps to understand the underlying architecture and model. This session discusses the architecture of ASP.NET along with a number of useful tidbits that you can use for building and debugging your ASP.NET applications more efficiently. We look at overall architecture, how requests flow from the IIS (7 and later) Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime into HTTP handlers, modules and filters and finally into high-level handlers like MVC, Web Forms or Web API. Focus of this session is on the low-level aspects on the ASP.NET runtime, with examples that demonstrate the bootstrapping of ASP.NET, threading models, how Application Domains are used, startup bootstrapping, how configuration files are applied and how all of this relates to the applications you write either using low-level tools like HTTP handlers and modules or high-level pages or services sitting at the top of the ASP.NET runtime processing chain. Comments:I was surprised to see so many people show up for this session - especially since it was the last session on the last day and a short 1 hour session to boot. The room was packed and it was to see so many people interested the abstracts of architecture of ASP.NET beyond the immediate high level application needs. Lots of great questions in this talk as well - I only wish this session would have been the full hour 15 minutes as we just a little short of getting through the main material (didn't make it to Filters and Error handling). I haven't done this session in a long time and I had to pretty much re-figure all the system internals having to do with the ASP.NET bootstrapping in light for the changes that came with IIS 7 and later. The last time I did this talk was with IIS6, I guess it's been a while. I love doing this session, mainly because in my mind the core of ASP.NET overall is so cleanly designed to provide maximum flexibility without compromising performance that has clearly stood the test of time in the 10 years or so that .NET has been around. While there are a lot of moving parts, the technology is easy to manage once you understand the core components and the core model hasn't changed much even while the underlying architecture that drives has been almost completely revamped especially with the introduction of IIS 7 and later. Download Samples and Slides   Introduction to using jQuery with ASP.NET Abstract:In this session you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery in your ASP.NET applications. Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors for document element selection, manipulating these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The second half of the session then delves into jQuery's AJAX features and several different ways how you can interact with ASP.NET on the server. You'll see examples of using ASP.NET MVC for serving HTML and JSON AJAX content, as well as using the new ASP.NET Web API to serve JSON and hypermedia content. You'll also see examples of client side templating/databinding with Handlebars and Knockout. Comments:This session was in a monster of a room and to my surprise it was nearly packed, given that this was a 100 level session. I can see that it's a good idea to continue to do intro sessions to jQuery as there appeared to be quite a number of folks who had not worked much with jQuery yet and who most likely could greatly benefit from using it. Seemed seemed to me the session got more than a few people excited to going if they hadn't yet :-).  Anyway I just love doing this session because it's mostly live coding and highly interactive - not many sessions that I can build things up from scratch and iterate on in an hour. jQuery makes that easy though. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Introduction to jQuery White Paper Introduction to ASP.NET Web API   Hosting the Razor Scripting Engine in Your Own Applications Abstract:The Razor Engine used in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages is a free-standing scripting engine that can be disassociated from these Web-specific implementations and can be used in your own applications. Razor allows for a powerful mix of code and text rendering that makes it a wonderful tool for any sort of text generation, from creating HTML output in non-Web applications, to rendering mail merge-like functionality, to code generation for developer tools and even as a plug-in scripting engine. In this session, we'll look at the components that make up the Razor engine and how you can bootstrap it in your own applications to hook up templating. You'll find out how to create custom templates and manage Razor requests that can be pre-compiled, detecting page changes and act in ways similar to a full runtime. We look at ways that you can pass data into the engine and retrieve both the rendered output as well as result values in a package that makes it easy to plug Razor into your own applications. Comments:That this session was picked was a bit of a surprise to me, since it's a bit of a niche topic. Even more of a surprise was that during the session quite a few people who attended had actually used Razor externally and were there to find out more about how the process works and how to extend it. In the session I talk a bit about a custom Razor hosting implementation (Westwind.RazorHosting) and drilled into the various components required to build a custom Razor Hosting engine and a runtime around it. This sessions was a bit of a chore to prepare for as there are lots of technical implementation details that needed to be dealt with and squeezing that into an hour 15 is a bit tight (and that aren't addressed even by some of the wrapper libraries that exist). Found out though that there's quite a bit of interest in using a templating engine outside of web applications, or often side by side with the HTML output generated by frameworks like MVC or WebForms. An extra fun part of this session was that this was my first session and when I went to set up I realized I forgot my mini-DVI to VGA adapter cable to plug into the projector in my room - 6 minutes before the session was about to start. So I ended up sprinting the half a mile + back to my room - and back at a full sprint. I managed to be back only a couple of minutes late, but when I started I was out of breath for the first 10 minutes or so, while trying to talk. Musta sounded a bit funny as I was trying to not gasp too much :-) Resources: Slides and Code Samples Westwind.RazorHosting GitHub Project Original RazorHosting Blog Post   Introduction to ASP.NET Web API for AJAX Applications Abstract:WebAPI provides a new framework for creating REST based APIs, but it can also act as a backend to typical AJAX operations. This session covers the core features of Web API as it relates to typical AJAX application development. We’ll cover content-negotiation, routing and a variety of output generation options as well as managing data updates from the client in the context of a small Single Page Application style Web app. Finally we’ll look at some of the extensibility features in WebAPI to customize and extend Web API in a number and useful useful ways. Comments:This session was a fill in for session slots not filled due MIA speakers stranded by Sandy. I had samples from my previous Web API article so decided to go ahead and put together a session from it. Given that I spent only a couple of hours preparing and putting slides together I was glad it turned out as it did - kind of just ran itself by way of the examples I guess as well as nice audience interactions and questions. Lots of interest - and also some confusion about when Web API makes sense. Both this session and the jQuery session ended up getting a ton of questions about when to use Web API vs. MVC, whether it would make sense to switch to Web API for all AJAX backend work etc. In my opinion there's no need to jump to Web API for existing applications that already have a good AJAX foundation. Web API is awesome for real externally consumed APIs and clearly defined application AJAX APIs. For typical application level AJAX calls, it's still a good idea, but ASP.NET MVC can serve most if not all of that functionality just as well. There's no need to abandon MVC (or even ASP.NET AJAX or third party AJAX backends) just to move to Web API. For new projects Web API probably makes good sense for isolation of AJAX calls, but it really depends on how the application is set up. In some cases sharing business logic between the HTML and AJAX interfaces with a single MVC API can be cleaner than creating two completely separate code paths to serve essentially the same business logic. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Sample Code on GitHub Introduction to ASP.NET Web API White Paper© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Conferences  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0

  - by James Michael Hare

  I had always been a fan of ANTS products (Reflector is absolutely invaluable, and their performance profiler is great as well – very easy to use!), so I was curious to see what the ANTS Memory Profiler could show me. Background While a performance profiler will track how much time is typically spent in each unit of code, a memory profiler gives you much more detail on how and where your memory is being consumed and released in a program. As an example, I’d been working on a data access layer at work to call a market data web service.  This web service would take a list of symbols to quote and would return back the quote data.  To help consolidate the thousands of web requests per second we get and reduce load on the web services, we implemented a 5-second cache of quote data.  Not quite long enough to where customers will typically notice a quote go “stale”, but just long enough to be able to collapse multiple quote requests for the same symbol in a short period of time. A 5-second cache may not sound like much, but it actually pays off by saving us roughly 42% of our web service calls, while still providing relatively up-to-date information.  The question is whether or not the extra memory involved in maintaining the cache was worth it, so I decided to fire up the ANTS Memory Profiler and take a look at memory usage. First Impressions The main thing I’ve always loved about the ANTS tools is their ease of use.  Pretty much everything is right there in front of you in a way that makes it easy for you to find what you need with little digging required.  I’ve worked with other, older profilers before (that shall remain nameless other than to hint it was created by a very large chip maker) where it was a mind boggling experience to figure out how to do simple tasks. Not so with AMP.  The opening dialog is very straightforward.  You can choose from here whether to debug an executable, a web application (either in IIS or from VS’s web development server), windows services, etc. So I chose a .NET Executable and navigated to the build location of my test harness.  Then began profiling. At this point while the application is running, you can see a chart of the memory as it ebbs and wanes with allocations and collections.  At any given point in time, you can take snapshots (to compare states) zoom in, or choose to stop at any time.  Snapshots Taking a snapshot also gives you a breakdown of the managed memory heaps for each generation so you get an idea how many objects are staying around for extended periods of time (as an object lives and survives collections, it gets promoted into higher generations where collection becomes less frequent). Generating a snapshot brings up an analysis view with very handy graphs that show your generation sizes.  Almost all my memory is in Generation 1 in the managed memory component of the first graph, which is good news to me, because Gen 2 collections are much rarer.  I once3 made the mistake once of caching data for 30 minutes and found it didn’t get collected very quick after I released my reference because it had been promoted to Gen 2 – doh! Analysis It looks like (from the second pie chart) that the majority of the allocations were in the string class.  This also is expected for me because the majority of the memory allocated is in the web service responses, so it doesn’t seem the entities I’m adapting to (to prevent being too tightly coupled to the web service proxy classes, which can change easily out from under me) aren’t taking a significant portion of memory. I also appreciate that they have clear summary text in key places such as “No issues with large object heap fragmentation were detected”.  For novice users, this type of summary information can be critical to getting them to use a tool and develop a good working knowledge of it. There is also a handy link at the bottom for “What to look for on the summary” which loads a web page of help on key points to look for. Clicking over to the session overview, it’s easy to compare the samples at each snapshot to see how your memory is growing, shrinking, or staying relatively the same.  Looking at my snapshots, I’m pretty happy with the fact that memory allocation and heap size seems to be fairly stable and in control: Once again, you can check on the large object heap, generation one heap, and generation two heap across each snapshot to spot trends. Back on the analysis tab, we can go to the [Class List] button to get an idea what classes are making up the majority of our memory usage.  As was little surprise to me, System.String was the clear majority of my allocations, though I found it surprising that the System.Reflection.RuntimeMehtodInfo came in second.  I was curious about this, so I selected it and went into the [Instance Categorizer].  This view let me see where these instances to RuntimeMehtodInfo were coming from. So I scrolled back through the graph, and discovered that these were being held by the System.ServiceModel.ChannelFactoryRefCache and I was satisfied this was just an artifact of my WCF proxy. I also like that down at the bottom of the Instance Categorizer it gives you a series of filters and offers to guide you on which filter to use based on the problem you are trying to find.  For example, if I suspected a memory leak, I might try to filter for survivors in growing classes.  This means that for instances of a class that are growing in memory (more are being created than cleaned up), which ones are survivors (not collected) from garbage collection.  This might allow me to drill down and find places where I’m holding onto references by mistake and not freeing them! Finally, if you want to really see all your instances and who is holding onto them (preventing collection), you can go to the “Instance Retention Graph” which creates a graph showing what references are being held in memory and who is holding onto them. Visual Studio Integration Of course, VS has its own profiler built in – and for a free bundled profiler it is quite capable – but AMP gives a much cleaner and easier-to-use experience, and when you install it you also get the option of letting it integrate directly into VS. So once you go back into VS after installation, you’ll notice an ANTS menu which lets you launch the ANTS profiler directly from Visual Studio.   Clicking on one of these options fires up the project in the profiler immediately, allowing you to get right in.  It doesn’t integrate with the Visual Studio windows themselves (like the VS profiler does), but still the plethora of information it provides and the clear and concise manner in which it presents it makes it well worth it. Summary If you like the ANTS series of tools, you shouldn’t be disappointed with the ANTS Memory Profiler.  It was so easy to use that I was able to jump in with very little product knowledge and get the information I was looking it for. I’ve used other profilers before that came with 3-inch thick tomes that you had to read in order to get anywhere with the tool, and this one is not like that at all.  It’s built for your everyday developer to get in and find their problems quickly, and I like that! Tweet Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Memory,Profiler

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, November 02, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, November 02, 2012Popular ReleasesVST.NET: VST.NET 1.0: Long overdue, but here is version 1.0! The zip contains the Debug and Release binaries for x86 and x64 as well as .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0. Note that the samples sources are not included in the release. Refer to "Building the Source Code" to get them working in the Visual Studio Express editions. The documentation will be uploaded later... Changes: Removed nuget and fixed samples copy operation (*.exe). Finalized build automation support. Bug fixes in VS templates. Compiled and Packaged n...DevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: DevTreks Version 1.0: This is the first production release.Mouse Jiggler: MouseJiggle-1.3: This adds the much-requested minimize-to-tray feature to Mouse Jiggler.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.10.0 Release Candidate: This is a Release Candidate, which means that if we do not find any major issues in the next week, we will release this version as the final release of 4.10.0 on November 9th, 2012. The documentation for the MVC bits still lives in the Github version of the docs for now and will be updated on our.umbraco.org with the final release of 4.10.0. Browse the documentation here: https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco4Docs/tree/4.8.0/Documentation/Reference/Mvc If you want to do only MVC then make sur...Skype Auto Recorder: SkypeAutoRecorder 1.3.4: New icon and images. Reworked settings window. Implemented high-quality sound encoding. Implemented a possibility to produce stereo records. Added buttons with system-wide hot keys for manual starting and canceling of recording. Added buttons for opening folder with records. Added Help button. Fixed an issue when recording is continuing after call end. Fixed an issue when recording doesn't start. Fixed several bugs and improved stability. Major refactoring and optimization...Access 2010 Application Platform - Build Your Own Database: Application Platform - 0.0.1: Initial Release This is the first version of the database. At the moment is all contained in one file to make development easier, but the obvious idea would be to split it into Front and Back End for a production version of the tool. The features it contains at the moment are the "Core" features.Python Tools for Visual Studio: Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 RTM. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, etc. support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video There are a number of exciting improvement in this release comp...Devpad: 4.25: Whats new for Devpad 4.25: New Theme support New Export Wordpress Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsAssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.5: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we try to package for those OSes. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) Changelog: Fixed potential bot bugs: Map change, OpenAL...Edi: Edi 1.0 with DarkExpression: Added DarkExpression theme (dialogs and message boxes are not completely themed, yet)DirectX Tool Kit: October 30, 2012 (add WP8 support): October 30, 2012 Added project files for Windows Phone 8MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.6: Changelog for 2.3.6 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Fixed a bug in multichannel audio conversion failure. AAC does not support 6 channel audio, MCEBuddy now checks for it and force the output to 2 channel if AAC codec is specified 2. Fixed a bug in Original Broadcast Date and Time. Original Broadcast Date and Time is reported in UTC timezone in WTV metadata. TVDB and MovieDB dates are reported in network timezone. It is assumed the video is recorded and converted on the same machine, i.e. local timezone...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V4.1 for Visual Studio 2012: This version only supports Visual Studio 2012 (and all Express editions too). If you use Visual Studio 2010, please stay tuned, we will publish an update in a few days with support for VS10. V4.1 supports: Windows Phone 8 Windows 8 (Windows RT) Silverlight 5 Silverlight 4 WPF 4.5 WPF 4 WPF 3.5 And the following development environments: Visual Studio 2012 (Pro, Premium, Ultimate) Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone 8 Visual...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.73: Fix issue in Discussion #401101 (unreferenced var in a for-in statement was getting removed). add the grouping operator to the parsed output so that unminified parsed code is closer to the original. Will still strip unneeded parens later, if minifying. more cleaning of references as they are minified out of the code.RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.03: changes NEW: Added Support for the phun.org forum FIXED: Kitty-Kats new Forum UrlLiberty: v3.4.0.1 Release 28th October 2012: Change Log -Fixed -H4 Fixed the save verification screen showing incorrect mission and difficulty information for some saves -H4 Hopefully fixed the issue where progress did not save between missions and saves would not revert correctly -H3 Fixed crashes that occurred when trying to load player information -Proper exception dialogs will now show in place of crashesPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 7): This release is compatible with the version of the Smooth Streaming SDK released today (10/26). Release 1 of the player framework is expected to be available next week. IMPROVEMENTS & FIXESIMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 6 Support for the latest smooth streaming SDK. Xaml only: Support for moving any of the UI elements outside the MediaPlayer (e.g. into the appbar). Note: Equivelent changes to the JS version due in coming week. Support for localizing all text used in t...Send multiple SMS via Way2SMS C#: SMS 1.1: Added support for 160by2Quick Launch: Quick Launch 1.0: A Lightweight and Fast Way to Manage and Launch Thousands of Tools and ApplicationsPress Win+Q and start to search and run. http://www.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=quicklaunch&DownloadId=523536Orchard Project: Orchard 1.6: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.6: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-6-Release-Notes Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you will pollute the rating, and you won't get an answer.New ProjectsAnother Green World: Another Green WorldApplication Data across Web Farm: A library containing a new version of the HttpApplicationState class that allow the synchronization of data across a web farm. With this library, on the web farm Data can be: • Shared • Auto synchronized • Locked for a useras3 game: it's as3 framework . Context: UIFramework,GameFrameworkBit Moose: Bit Moose is a bitcoin mining assistant program. It allows miners to run under a background windows service. Includes a GUI and console host.BUMO: A TFS Build MOnitoring Tool: BUMO is short name of Build Monitoring tool for TFS. BUMO provides a platform to Monitor TFS builds, Statistics of Builds,View Build History, Clone Builds.cantinho: cantinhoCMTS: CMTSCP866U Encoding: A simple implementation of cp866u encoding class written in C#.D3D9Client: This is a DirectX 9 Graphics Client for Orbiter SpaceFlight SimulatorDatabase Exporter for DotNetNuke By IowaComputerGurus Inc.: Database Exporter is a customized SQL module designed for selects and supports export to XML/CSV of query resultsDistributed Systems at TUM: The initial project is a simple client connecting to a server through sockets. The client may send a message and the server will echo back that message.Enneract Project: Enneract makes it easier for LDS Leadership works in theirs responsibilities through BI techniques.EntityFramework Reverse POCO Code First Generator: Reverse engineers an existing database and generates EntityFramework Code First POCO classes, DbContext and Configuration mappingsfastCSharp: ?????????????????，????????????????????，??????。 ??：????????????????，???????????，???????????。 ??? http://www.51nod.com/topic/index.html#!topicId=100000056Fault Logger!: Fault Logger is a simple web application ideal for schools and small business which allows staff to report computer faults and allows technicians to keep logs.Flow Sequencer: Simple task sequencer using Johnson's algorithm for two and three machines. Client side is made in wpf technology. Free Template Filler (FTF): Tool for generating text from templates, when given parameters. Good for generating code, etc.GameTrakXNA: This project aims to create a simple library to use the unique GameTrak controller within XNA and Flash.Greg DNN Task Manager: This is a test project that I am using to learn about DNN Module Development.GroupToolbar: A Toolbar that can group your items and is totally templatable :)Helper Project: Helpdesk project, using C# .NET, Linq, with Nhibernate ORM and interface written using ExtJS 4.HIPO Legacy Systems Flowcharter: Creates Visio HIPO flowcharts from legacy system batch files.huangli1101: jabbr projectHusqvarna Svishtov: The idea is to create content management system for web site of a small town store.Hybrid Lab Workflow: This workflow allows you to incorporate snapshots into a Build-Deploy-Test using a Standard Environment that is composed of Virtual Machines in TFS 2012.jas: Project to make an application for Jeugdondernemingen Aartselaar Service...keleyi: MD5 C# WinFormKnockout.js Declarations for TypeScript: A set of declarations for intellisense and type completion for Knockout.js in TypeScript. Last edited Today at 8:39 AM by jnosek, version 2List Rollup web part: Hi I was wondering that how to show a list from other site on my home page. But I didn’t get any proper & free solution. So I decided to create a Cross Site LisMidlands Community Management Solution (MCMS): This project is to develop an open source residential community management solution. This initiative has been taken by the IT guys of Srijan Midlands Community.MultipartHttpClient for Windows Phone 7: This is a simple MultipartHttpClient for windows phone 7MyGProject: GprojectN2F Yverdon FirePHP Extension: Extension to add FirePHP support to your N2F Yverdon projects.netbee: ???Over Look Pa Controller: Real World Application for the Collection of Credit Card, Gift Card and Driver License information. Controls access to an Observation Tower via a turnstile.PureSystems DotNetNuke GoSquared tracking module: A DotNetNuke module which adds the GoSquared tracking code to your pages.Quiz Module for DotNetNuke by IowaComputerGurus Inc.: The IowaComputerGurus DotNetNuke Quiz Module is a free extension that allows users to quickly and easily create custom quizzes for their site.RadioSmart: ? ??d??a? t?? radiosmartRSA ID Validation for SQL Server: Solution for validating South African identity numbers. Provides SQL Server CLR bindings which allow identity numbers to be efficiently validated within T-SQLSales Visualization Web App: Sales VisualizationsSonar Connector (Wagga Wagga Christian College Network connector): A network settings manager for Wagga Wagga christian college. Supports switching back and forth settings and can be used for personal use.Stopwatch - Windows Phone: This project is a Stopwatch for windows phone app. Now, it had published in Windows phone store.Study: Study for ExtJS! Come on!Team Foundation Server Test Management Tools: Team Foundation Server Test Management Tools ? Team Foundation Server ???? ???? Visual Studio ??????????????????????????。testdd11012012git01: ttesttom11012012tfs02: gdgf dgf dTimBazinga EVoting: Undergrad project - designing an e-voting software system.TNT Scripts: TNT ScriptsTrombone: Trombone makes it easier for Windows Mobile Professional users to automate status reply through SMS. It's developed in Visual C# 2008.TurbofilmTV: Turbofilm metro is the greate metro app for turbofilm users.VinculacionMicrosoft: Vinculacion Microsoft is a project for distributing Dreamsparks and Faculty Connection codes to students and professors. It is developed in ASP .Net and designed for Universities in Mexico interested in the different benefits that Microsoft has for them. Visual Studio Reference Swap: Winforms app and Nant task that will handle swapping out project references to file references.??????: ??????????: ??

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• Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

  - by Kerrie Foy

  Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now?  No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access.  For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment.  ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey.  In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014.   Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives.  Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster.   Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation.  Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article. 

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 02, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 02, 2011Popular ReleasesTweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 10: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 9 ChangesAdded support for trends Added support for Silverlight 4 Elevated WP7 fixes Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.1.7: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comFacebook C# SDK: 5.0.0 (BETA): This is our first BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. This release contains some breaking changes. Particularly with authentication. After spending time reviewing the trouble areas that people are having using this SDK (and Facebook in general) we decided to spend a good deal of time w...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (February 2011): Next release of Phalanger; again faster, more stable and ready for daily use. Based on many user experiences this release is one more step closer to be perfect compiler and runtime of your old PHP applications; or perfect platform for migrating to .NET. February 2011 release of Phalanger introduces several changes, enhancements and fixes. See complete changelist for all the changes. To improve the performance of your application using MySQL, please use Managed MySQL Extension for Phalanger....Chemistry Add-in for Word: Chemistry Add-in for Word - Version 1.0: On February 1, 2011, we announced the availability of version 1 of the Chemistry Add-in for Word, as well as the assignment of the open source project to the Outercurve Foundation by Microsoft Research and the University of Cambridge. System RequirementsHardware RequirementsAny computer that can run Office 2007 or Office 2010. Software RequirementsYour computer must have the following software: Any version of Windows that can run Office 2007 or Office 2010, which includes Windows XP SP3 and...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.15005.000: Applied patch from rodpl for merging of stylecop setting files with settings in parent folder. Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new Objec...Minecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.4: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds MCRegion support and fixes bugs that caused rendering to fail for some users. New in this version of MTS: Support for rendering worlds compressed with MCRegion Fixed rendering failure when encountering non-NBT files with the .dat extension Fixed rendering failure when encountering corrupt NBT files Minor GUI updates Note that the command...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 0.8: Fixed the following bugs: *Variable name error in the jvascript file that prevented the use of the deleted item template of the Datagrid *Now after the changes applied to an item of the DataGrid are cancelled all input fields are reset to the very initial value they had. *Other minor bugs. Added: *This version is available both for MVC2, and MVC 3. The MVC 3 version has a release number of 0.85. This way one can install both version. *Client Validation support has been added to all control...Office Web.UI: Beta preview (Source): This is the first Beta. it includes full source code and all available controls. Some designers are not ready, and some features are not finalized allready (missing properties, draft styles) ThanksASP.net Ribbon: Version 2.2: This release brings some new controls (part of Office Web.UI). A few bugs are fixed and it includes the "auto resize" feature as you resize the window. (It can cause an infinite loop when the window is too reduced, it's why this release is not marked as "stable"). I will release more versions 2.3, 2.4... until V3 which will be the official launch of Office Web.UI. Both products will evolve at the same speed. Thanks.Barcode Rendering Framework: 2.1.1.0: Finally fixed bugs with code 128 symbology. It was envisioned that this would be the last release to target VS2008 but support will continue due in no small part to a desire to add SSRS support in the future.xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7: xUnit.net release 1.7Build #1540 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision) Ad...Spark View Engine: Spark v1.5: Release Notes There have been a lot of minor changes going on since version 1.1, but most important to note are the major changes which include: Support for HTML5 "section" tag. Spark has now renamed its own section tag to "segment" instead to avoid clashes. You can still use "section" in a Spark sense for legacy support by specifying ParseSectionAsSegment = true if needed while you transition Bindings - this is a massive feature that further simplifies your views by giving you a powerful ...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.3: Version: 2.0.0.3 (Milestone 3): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...Rawr: Rawr 4.0.17 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 and on the Version Notes page: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you...Squiggle - A Free open source LAN Messenger: Squiggle 2.5 Beta: In this release following are the new features: Localization: Support for Arabic, French, German and Chinese (Simplified) Bridge: Connect two Squiggle nets across the WAN or different subnets Aliases: Special codes with special meaning can be embedded in message like (version),(datetime),(time),(date),(you),(me) Commands: cls, /exit, /offline, /online, /busy, /away, /main Sound notifications: Get audio alerts on contact online, message received, buzz Broadcast for group: You can ri...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.2: Version 7.4.2 of VivoSocial has been released. If you experienced any issues with the previous version, please update your modules to the 7.4.2 release and see if they persist. If you have any questions about this release, please post them in our Support forums. If you are experiencing a bug or would like to request a new feature, please submit it to our issue tracker. Web Controls * Updated Business Objects and added a new SQL Data Provider File. Groups * Fixed a security issue whe...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1.1 for IIS 7: This is a minor release of PHP Manager for IIS 7. It contains all the functionality available in 56962 plus several bug fixes (see change list for more details). Also, this release includes Russian language support. SHA1 codes for the downloads are: PHPManagerForIIS-1.1.0-x86.msi - 6570B4A8AC8B5B776171C2BA0572C190F0900DE2 PHPManagerForIIS-1.1.0-x64.msi - 12EDE004EFEE57282EF11A8BAD1DC1ADFD66A654BloodSim: WControls.dll update: Priority Update It's just come to my attention that the latest version of WControls.dll was not included in the 1.4 release and as a result, BloodSim has been unuseable. Please download WControls.dll from here, and this will rectify the issue.VFPX: VFP2C32 2.0.0.8 Release Candidate: This release includes several bugfixes, new functions and finally a CHM help file for the complete library.DB>doc for Microsoft SQL Server: 1.0.0.0: Initial release Supported output HTML WikiPlex markup Raw XML Supported objects Tables Primary Keys Foreign Keys ViewsNew ProjectsAlay Plugin for Windows Live Writer: a project for creating an alay languageAnalyse Rapide des Droits sur une Arborescence du Système de Fichiers: Outil permettant une analyse simple sur une arborescence du système de fichier. L'idée étant de repérer rapidement les parties de l'arborescence qui changent de droits (arrêt de la propagation des droits). Developpement en C#, Interface WPF.Asp.Net Chat 4 All: Asp.Net Chat Application made easy By VaibhavBlogEngine.NET Image Picker: The image picker for BlogEngine.NET An utitilty to pick previously uploaded images in BlogEngine.NET blog posts. CMS for the kubert.info web-site: CMS for the kubert.info web-siteCommonRepositoryInterface: <project name> is a interface for abstracting away the details of the underlying data store behind a repositoryDragon Library Lite: This is a free version of my game engine missing some of its components, and parts of some, to make it so I could put this up for free without giving away all my source code. Also, any developers that show an interest here may be able to get access to the full version and help meeBookInfoGrabber: eBookInfoGrabber is a simple program designed to quickly grab any possible information you could desire on a given eBook using ISBN-10, ISBN-13, or by Title. It uses the Sony eBook store to gather all the data, and is developed in C#.Japanese Character Sets - Input, Identification and Comparison: Basic application written in C# which demonstrates the input, identification and comparison of specific Hiragana (half- and full-width), Katakana (half- and full-width), Kanji and Romaji Japanese characters. May be useful for developers beginning a project for Japanese users.Lighting UP 2011: 2011 NDSU Capstone project. Developing a Windows Phone 7 service application.Localization for SharePoint: Localize for SharePoint gives you the flexibility of localizing any site collection to any language. You don't need to have any language packs installed on your server. Any page on your site will be instantly translated to your preferred language.mzXML Corrupted Scans Remover: This application makes fast error correction on mzXML files. Each empty scan is being replaced by previous one. Program is optimized to work with large files (>2GB) with very small amout of memory needed while processing.Net Rank BR: Um projeto para criar analises sobre o log do jogo Urban Terror, um centro de encontro de players para jogo em time, um editor e criador de configs para Urt.NGinn.BPM: NGinn.BPM - a BPM / Workflow engine for Microsoft.NetOmegaEngine: A simple, light weight and easy to use Game Engine created in XNA. Intended to help reduce time needed with coding and focus more on game creation.Open Intel: Open Intel (OI) is an accelerator for rapidly building open data solutions with business intelligence and spatial analysis capabilities.Peekaboo - Proxy Server StarterKit: Peekaboo is a proxy server starterkit made in Java. Its a HTTP proxy server with a Swing UI to peek into the application/browser <-> server communication. Red Arrow: Turn based space strategy game. Source is published, but assets are considered private. Developed with C# / XNA FrameworkRPG engine: RPG engine for RPG games!Sancer: This is a school project which aids the teachers/advisers in choosing a students class depending on their grade on the placement test. Scaffold it !: "Scaffold it !" is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that enable you to scaffold elements from your entities. It's a time saver tool that leverage T4 templates and Visual Studio extensibility. SharePoint 2010 Design Guides for Developers: This projects holds visual guides to help developers and software architects take the best decision when building SharePoint ApplicationsSmith Image Converter: An easy-to-use tool to convert images format. At present, it supports bmp, png and jpeg type conversion.TFS Process Dashboard Integration: Small tool which allows integration of Team Foundation Server source control with the Process Dashboard line counter.Tibco Team Foundation Server (TFS) plugin: This project creates a Team Foundation Server plugin for Tibco BW Designer. It can be used from Tibco Designer as RCS adapter and manipulates the project files that are stored-version controlled- in TFS. ubotia: ubotiaXNA 4.0 Content Compiler: <project name> Compile to .xnb your texture files, audio files and SpriteFont files without adding to the Content project. Very Usefull in tools to create content for a game.

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• How to safely reboot via First Boot script

  - by unixman

  With the cost and performance benefits of the SPARC T4 and SPARC T5 systems undeniably validated, the banking sector is actively moving to Solaris 11.  I was recently asked to help a banking customer of ours look at migrating some of their Solaris 10 logic over to Solaris 11.  While we've introduced a number of holistic improvements in Solaris 11, in terms of how we ease long-term software lifecycle management, it is important to appreciate that customers may not be able to move all of their Solaris 10 scripts and procedures at once; there are years of scripts that reflect fine-tuned requirements of proprietary banking software that gets layered on top of the operating system. One of these requirements is to go through a cycle of reboots, after the system is installed, in order to ensure appropriate software dependencies and various configuration files are in-place. While Solaris 10 introduced a facility that aids here, namely SMF, many of our customers simply haven't yet taken the time to take advantage of this - proceeding with logic that, while functional, without further analysis has an appearance of not being optimal in terms of taking advantage of all the niceties bundled in Solaris 11 at no extra cost. When looking at Solaris 11, we recognize that one of the vehicles that bridges the gap between getting the operating system image payload delivered, and the customized banking software installed, is a notion of a First Boot script.  I had a working example of this at one of the Oracle OpenWorld sessions a few years ago - we've since improved our documentation and have introduced sections where this is described in better detail.   If you're looking at this for the first time and you've not worked with IPS and SMF previously, you might get the sense that the tasks are daunting.   There is a set of technologies involved that are jointly engineered in order to make the process reliable, predictable and extensible. As you go down the path of writing your first boot script, you'll be faced with a need to wrap it into a SMF service and then packaged into a IPS package. The IPS package would then need to be placed onto your IPS repository, in order to subsequently be made available to all of your AI (Automated Install) clients (i.e. the systems that you're installing Solaris and your software onto).     With this blog post, I wanted to create a single place that outlines the entire process (simplistically), and provide a hint of how a good old "at" command may make the requirement of forcing an initial reboot handy. The syntax and references to commands here is based on running this on a version of Solaris 11 that has been updated since its initial release in 2011 (i.e. I am writing this on Solaris 11.1) Assuming you've built an AI server (see this How To article for an example), you might be asking yourself: "Ok, I've got some logic that I need executed AFTER Solaris is deployed and I need my own little script that would make that happen. How do I go about hooking that script into the Solaris 11 AI framework?"  You might start here, in Chapter 13 of the "Installing Oracle Solaris 11.1 Systems" guide, which talks about "Running a Custom Script During First Boot".  And as you do, you'll be confronted with command that might be unfamiliar to you if you're new to Solaris 11, like our dear new friend: svcbundle svcbundle is an aide to creating manifests and profiles.  It is awesome, but don't let its awesomeness overwhelm you. (See this How To article by my colleague Glynn Foster for a nice working example).  In order to get your script's logic integrated into the Solaris 11 deployment process, you need to wrap your (shell) script into 2 manifests -  a SMF service manifest and a IPS package manifest.  ....and if you're new to XML, well then -- buckle up We have some examples of small first boot scripts shown here, as templates to build upon. Necessary structure of the script, particularly in leveraging SMF interfaces, is key. I won't go into that here as that is covered nicely in the doc link above.    Let's say your script ends up looking like this (btw: if things appear to be cut-off in your browser, just select them, copy and paste into your editor and it'll be grabbed - the source gets captured eventhough the browser may not render it "correctly" - ah, computers). #!/bin/sh # Load SMF shell support definitions . /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh # If nothing to do, exit with temporary disable completed=`svcprop -p config/completed site/first-boot-script-svc:default` [ "${completed}" = "true" ] && \ smf_method_exit $SMF_EXIT_TEMP_DISABLE completed "Configuration completed" # Obtain the active BE name from beadm: The active BE on reboot has an R in # the third column of 'beadm list' output. Its name is in column one. bename=`beadm list -Hd|nawk -F ';' '$3 ~ /R/ {print $1}'` beadm create ${bename}.orig echo "Original boot environment saved as ${bename}.orig" # ---- Place your one-time configuration tasks here ---- # For example, if you have to pull some files from your own pre-existing system: /usr/bin/wget -P /var/tmp/ $PULL_DOWN_ADDITIONAL_SCRIPTS_FROM_A_CORPORATE_SYSTEM /usr/bin/chmod 755 /var/tmp/$SCRIPTS_THAT_GOT_PULLED_DOWN_IN_STEP_ABOVE # Clearly the above 2 lines represent some logic that you'd have to customize to fit your needs. # # Perhaps additional things you may want to do here might be of use, like # (gasp!) configuring ssh server for root login and X11 forwarding (for testing), and the like... # # Oh and by the way, after we're done executing all of our proprietary scripts we need to reboot # the system in accordance with our operational software requirements to ensure all layered bits # get initialized properly and pull-in their own modules and components in the right sequence, # subsequently. # We need to set a "time bomb" reboot, that would take place upon completion of this script. # We already know that *this* script depends on multi-user-server SMF milestone, so it should be # safe for us to schedule a reboot for 5 minutes from now. The "at" job get scheduled in the queue # while our little script continues thru the rest of the logic. /usr/bin/at now + 5 minutes <<REBOOT /usr/bin/sync /usr/sbin/reboot REBOOT # ---- End of your customizations ---- # Record that this script's work is done svccfg -s site/first-boot-script-svc:default setprop config/completed = true svcadm refresh site/first-boot-script-svc:default smf_method_exit $SMF_EXIT_TEMP_DISABLE method_completed "Configuration completed"  ...and you're happy with it and are ready to move on. Where do you go and what do you do? The next step is creating the IPS package for your script. Since running the logic of your script constitutes a service, you need to create a service manifest. This is described here, in the middle of Chapter 13 of "Creating an IPS package for the script and service".  Assuming the name of your shell script is first-boot-script.sh, you could end up doing the following: $ cd some_working_directory_for_this_project$ mkdir -p proto/lib/svc/manifest/site$ mkdir -p proto/opt/site $ cp first-boot-script.sh proto/opt/site  Then you would create the service manifest  file like so: $ svcbundle -s service-name=site/first-boot-script-svc \ -s start-method=/opt/site/first-boot-script.sh \ -s instance-property=config:completed:boolean:false -o \ first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml   ...as described here, and place it into the directory hierarchy above. But before you place it into the directory, make sure to inspect the manifest and adjust the appropriate service dependencies.  That is to say, you want to properly specify what milestone should be reached before your service runs.  There's a <dependency> section that looks like this, before you modify it: <dependency restart_on="none" type="service" name="multi_user_dependency" grouping="require_all"> <service_fmri value="svc:/milestone/multi-user"/>  </dependency>  So if you'd like to have your service run AFTER the multi-user-server milestone has been reached (i.e. later, as multi-user-server has more dependencies then multi-user and our intent to reboot the system may have significant ramifications if done prematurely), you would modify that section to read:  <dependency restart_on="none" type="service" name="multi_user_server_dependency" grouping="require_all"> <service_fmri value="svc:/milestone/multi-user-server"/>  </dependency> Save the file and validate it: $ svccfg validate first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml Assuming there are no errors returned, copy the file over into the directory hierarchy: $ cp first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml proto/lib/svc/manifest/site Now that we've created the service manifest (.xml), create the package manifest (.p5m) file named: first-boot-script.p5m.  Populate it as follows: set name=pkg.fmri value=first-boot-script-AT-1-DOT-0,5.11-0 set name=pkg.summary value="AI first-boot script" set name=pkg.description value="Script that runs at first boot after AI installation" set name=info.classification value=\ "org.opensolaris.category.2008:System/Administration and Configuration" file lib/svc/manifest/site/first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml \ path=lib/svc/manifest/site/first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml owner=root \ group=sys mode=0444 dir path=opt/site owner=root group=sys mode=0755 file opt/site/first-boot-script.sh path=opt/site/first-boot-script.sh \ owner=root group=sys mode=0555 Now we are going to publish this package into a IPS repository. If you don't have one yet, don't worry. You have 2 choices: You can either  publish this package into your mirror of the Oracle Solaris IPS repo or create your own customized repo.  The best practice is to create your own customized repo, leaving your mirror of the Oracle Solaris IPS repo untouched.  From this point, you have 2 choices as well - you can either create a repo that will be accessible by your clients via HTTP or via NFS.  Since HTTP is how the default Solaris repo is accessed, we'll go with HTTP for your own IPS repo.   This nice and comprehensive How To by Albert White describes how to create multiple internal IPS repos for Solaris 11. We'll zero in on the basic elements for our needs here: We'll create the IPS repo directory structure hanging off a separate ZFS file system, and we'll tie it into an instance of pkg.depotd. We do this because we want our IPS repo to be accessible to our AI clients through HTTP, and the pkg.depotd SMF service bundled in Solaris 11 can help us do this. We proceed as follows: # zfs create rpool/export/MyIPSrepo # pkgrepo create /export/MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server add MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpg pkg application # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/port=10081 # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/inst_root=/export/MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpg general framework # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpropvalue general/complete astring: MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpropvalue general/enabled boolean: true # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/readonly=true # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/proxy_base = astring: http://your_internal_websrvr/MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/threads = 200 # svcadm refresh application/pkg/server:MyIPSrepo # svcadm enable application/pkg/server:MyIPSrepo Now that the IPS repo is created, we need to publish our package into it: # pkgsend publish -d ./proto -s /export/MyIPSrepo first-boot-script.p5m If you find yourself making changes to your script, remember to up-rev the version in the .p5m file (which is your IPS package manifest), and re-publish the IPS package. Next, you need to go to your AI install server (which might be the same machine) and modify the AI manifest to include a reference to your newly created package.  We do that by listing an additional publisher, which would look like this (replacing the IP address and port with your own, from the "svccfg" commands up above): <publisher name="firstboot"> <origin name="http://192.168.1.222:10081"/> </publisher>  Further down, in the  <software_data action="install">  section add: <name>pkg:/first-boot-script</name> Make sure to update your Automated Install service with the new AI manifest via installadm update-manifest command.  Don't forget to boot your client from the network to watch the entire process unfold and your script get tested.  Once the system makes the initial reboot, the first boot script will be executed and whatever logic you've specified in it should be executed, too, followed by a nice reboot. When the system comes up, your service should stay in a disabled state, as specified by the tailing lines of your SMF script - this is normal and should be left as is as it helps provide an auditing trail for you.   Because the reboot is quite a significant action for the system, you may want to add additional logic to the script that actually places and then checks for presence of certain lock files in order to avoid doing a reboot unnecessarily. You may also want to, alternatively, remove the SMF service entirely - if you're unsure of the potential for someone to try and accidentally enable that service -- eventhough its role in life is to only run once upon the system's first boot. That is how I spent a good chunk of my pre-Halloween time this week, hope yours was just as SPARCkly^H^H^H^H fun!    

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• Running OpenStack Icehouse with ZFS Storage Appliance

  - by Ronen Kofman

  Couple of months ago Oracle announced the support for OpenStack Cinder plugin with ZFS Storage Appliance (aka ZFSSA).  With our recent release of the Icehouse tech preview I thought it is a good opportunity to demonstrate the ZFSSA plugin working with Icehouse. One thing that helps a lot to get started with ZFSSA is that it has a VirtualBox simulator. This simulator allows users to try out the appliance’s features before getting to a real box. Users can test the functionality and design an environment even before they have a real appliance which makes the deployment process much more efficient. With OpenStack this is especially nice because having a simulator on the other end allows us to test the complete set of the Cinder plugin and check the entire integration on a single server or even a laptop. Let’s see how this works Installing and Configuring the Simulator To get started we first need to download the simulator, the simulator is available here, unzip it and it is ready to be imported to VirtualBox. If you do not already have VirtualBox installed you can download it from here according to your platform of choice. To import the simulator go to VirtualBox console File -> Import Appliance , navigate to the location of the simulator and import the virtual machine. When opening the virtual machine you will need to make the following changes: - Network – by default the network is “Host Only” , the user needs to change that to “Bridged” so the VM can connect to the network and be accessible. - Memory (optional) – the VM comes with a default of 2560MB which may be fine but if you have more memory that could not hurt, in my case I decided to give it 8192 - vCPU (optional) – the default the VM comes with 1 vCPU, I decided to change it to two, you are welcome to do so too. And here is how the VM looks like: Start the VM, when the boot process completes we will need to change the root password and the simulator is running and ready to go. Now that the simulator is up and running we can access simulated appliance using the URL https://<IP or DNS name>:215/, the IP is showing on the virtual machine console. At this stage we will need to configure the appliance, in my case I did not change any of the default (in other words pressed ‘commit’ several times) and the simulated appliance was configured and ready to go. We will need to enable REST access otherwise Cinder will not be able to call the appliance we do that in Configuration->Services and at the end of the page there is ‘REST’ button, enable it. If you are a more advanced user you can set additional features in the appliance but for the purpose of this demo this is sufficient. One final step will be to create a pool, go to Configuration -> Storage and add a pool as shown below the pool is named “default”: The simulator is now running, configured and ready for action. Configuring Cinder Back to OpenStack, I have a multi node deployment which we created according to the “Getting Started with Oracle VM, Oracle Linux and OpenStack” guide using Icehouse tech preview release. Now we need to install and configure the ZFSSA Cinder plugin using the README file. In short the steps are as follows: 1. Copy the file from here to the control node and place them at: /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/cinder/volume/drivers/zfssa 2. Configure the plugin, editing /etc/cinder/cinder.conf # Driver to use for volume creation (string value) #volume_driver=cinder.volume.drivers.lvm.LVMISCSIDriver volume_driver=cinder.volume.drivers.zfssa.zfssaiscsi.ZFSSAISCSIDriver zfssa_host = <HOST IP> zfssa_auth_user = root zfssa_auth_password = <ROOT PASSWORD> zfssa_pool = default zfssa_target_portal = <HOST IP>:3260 zfssa_project = test zfssa_initiator_group = default zfssa_target_interfaces = e1000g0 3. Restart the cinder-volume service: service openstack-cinder-volume restart 4. Look into the log file, this will tell us if everything works well so far. If you see any errors fix them before continuing. 5. Install iscsi-initiator-utils package, this is important since the plugin uses iscsi commands from this package: yum install -y iscsi-initiator-utils The installation and configuration are very simple, we do not need to have a “project” in the ZFSSA but we do need to define a pool. Creating and Using Volumes in OpenStack We are now ready to work, to get started lets create a volume in OpenStack and see it showing up on the simulator: #  cinder create 2 --display-name my-volume-1 +---------------------+--------------------------------------+ |       Property      |                Value                 | +---------------------+--------------------------------------+ |     attachments     |                  []                  | |  availability_zone  |                 nova                 | |       bootable      |                false                 | |      created_at     |      2014-08-12T04:24:37.806752      | | display_description |                 None                 | |     display_name    |             my-volume-1              | |      encrypted      |                False                 | |          id         | df67c447-9a36-4887-a8ff-74178d5d06ee | |       metadata      |                  {}                  | |         size        |                  2                   | |     snapshot_id     |                 None                 | |     source_volid    |                 None                 | |        status       |               creating               | |     volume_type     |                 None                 | +---------------------+--------------------------------------+ In the simulator: Extending the volume to 5G: # cinder extend df67c447-9a36-4887-a8ff-74178d5d06ee 5 In the simulator: Creating templates using Cinder Volumes By default OpenStack supports ephemeral storage where an image is copied into the run area during instance launch and deleted when the instance is terminated. With Cinder we can create persistent storage and launch instances from a Cinder volume. Booting from volume has several advantages, one of the main advantages of booting from volumes is speed. No matter how large the volume is the launch operation is immediate there is no copying of an image to a run areas, an operation which can take a long time when using ephemeral storage (depending on image size). In this deployment we have a Glance image of Oracle Linux 6.5, I would like to make it into a volume which I can boot from. When creating a volume from an image we actually “download” the image into the volume and making the volume bootable, this process can take some time depending on the image size, during the download we will see the following status: # cinder create --image-id 487a0731-599a-499e-b0e2-5d9b20201f0f --display-name ol65 2 # cinder list +--------------------------------------+-------------+--------------+------+-------------+ |                  ID                  |    Status   | Display Name | Size | Volume Type | … +--------------------------------------+-------------+--------------+------+------------- | df67c447-9a36-4887-a8ff-74178d5d06ee |  available  | my-volume-1  |  5   |     None    | … | f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 | downloading |     ol65     |  2   |     None    | … +--------------------------------------+-------------+--------------+------+-------------+ After the download is complete we will see that the volume status changed to “available” and that the bootable state is “true”. We can use this new volume to boot an instance from or we can use it as a template. Cinder can create a volume from another volume and ZFSSA can replicate volumes instantly in the back end. The result is an efficient template model where users can spawn an instance from a “template” instantly even if the template is very large in size. Let’s try replicating the bootable volume with the Oracle Linux 6.5 on it creating additional 3 bootable volumes: # cinder create 2 --source-volid f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 --display-name ol65-bootable-1 # cinder create 2 --source-volid f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 --display-name ol65-bootable-2 # cinder create 2 --source-volid f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 --display-name ol65-bootable-3 # cinder list +--------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------+------+-------------+----------+-------------+ |                  ID                  |   Status  |   Display Name  | Size | Volume Type | Bootable | Attached to | +--------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------+------+-------------+----------+-------------+ | 9bfe0deb-b9c7-4d97-8522-1354fc533c26 | available | ol65-bootable-2 |  2   |     None    |   true   |             | | a311a855-6fb8-472d-b091-4d9703ef6b9a | available | ol65-bootable-1 |  2   |     None    |   true   |             | | df67c447-9a36-4887-a8ff-74178d5d06ee | available |   my-volume-1   |  5   |     None    |  false   |             | | e7fbd2eb-e726-452b-9a88-b5eee0736175 | available | ol65-bootable-3 |  2   |     None    |   true   |             | | f61702b6-4204-4f10-8bdf-7da792f15c28 | available |       ol65      |  2   |     None    |   true   |             | +--------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------+------+-------------+----------+-------------+ Note that the creation of those 3 volume was almost immediate, no need to download or copy, ZFSSA takes care of the volume copy for us. Start 3 instances: # nova boot --boot-volume a311a855-6fb8-472d-b091-4d9703ef6b9a --flavor m1.tiny ol65-instance-1 --nic net-id=25b19746-3aea-4236-8193-4c6284e76eca # nova boot --boot-volume 9bfe0deb-b9c7-4d97-8522-1354fc533c26 --flavor m1.tiny ol65-instance-2 --nic net-id=25b19746-3aea-4236-8193-4c6284e76eca # nova boot --boot-volume e7fbd2eb-e726-452b-9a88-b5eee0736175 --flavor m1.tiny ol65-instance-3 --nic net-id=25b19746-3aea-4236-8193-4c6284e76eca Instantly replicating volumes is a very powerful feature, especially for large templates. The ZFSSA Cinder plugin allows us to take advantage of this feature of ZFSSA. By offloading some of the operations to the array OpenStack create a highly efficient environment where persistent volume can be instantly created from a template. That’s all for now, with this environment you can continue to test ZFSSA with OpenStack and when you are ready for the real appliance the operations will look the same. @RonenKofman

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• Day 3 - XNA: Hacking around with images

  - by dapostolov

  Yay! Today I'm going to get into some code! My mind has been on this all day! I find it amusing how I practice, daily, to be "in the moment" or "present" and the excitement and anticipation of this project seems to snatch it away from me frequently. WELL!!! (Shakes Excitedly) Let's do this =)! Let's code! For these next few days it is my intention to better understand image rendering using XNA; after said prototypes are complete I should (fingers crossed) be able to dive into my game code using the design document I hammered out the other night. On a personal note, I think the toughest thing right now is finding the time to do this project. Each night, after my little ones go to bed I can only really afford a couple hours of work on this project. However, I hope to utilise this time as best as I can because this is the first time in a while I've found a project that I've been passionate about. A friend recently asked me if I intend to go 3D or extend the game design. Yes. For now I'm keeping it simple. Lastly, just as a note, as I was doing some further research into image rendering this morning I came across some other XNA content and lessons learned. I believe this content could have probably been posted in the first couple of posts, however, I will share the new content as I learn it at the end of each day. Maybe I'll take some time later to fix the posts but for now Installation and Deployment - Lessons Learned I had installed the XNA studio  (Day 1) and the site instructions were pretty easy to follow. However, I had a small difficulty with my development environment. You see, I run a virtual desktop development environment. Even though I was able to code and compile all the tutorials the game failed to run...because I lacked a 3D capable card; it was not detected on the virtual box... First Lesson: The XNA runtime needs to "see" the 3D card! No sweat, Il copied the files over to my parent box and executed the program. ERROR. Hmm... Second Lesson (which I should have probably known but I let the excitement get the better of me): you need the XNA runtime on the client PC to run the game, oh, and don't forget the .Net Runtime! Sprite, it ain't just a Soft Drink... With these prototypes I intend to understand and perform the following tasks. learn game development terminology how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen how to layer static images on the screen understand image scaling can we reuse images? understand how framerate is handled in XNA how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques how to detect colliding images or screen edges how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) Well, let's start with this "prototype" task list for now...Today, let's get an image on the screen and maybe I can mark a few of the tasks as completed... C# Prototype1 New Visual Studio Project Select the XNA Game Studio 3.1 Project Type Select the Windows Game 3.1 Template Type Prototype1 in the Name textbox provided Press OK. At this point code has auto-magically been created. Feel free to press the F5 key to run your first XNA program. You should have a blue screen infront of you. Without getting into the nitty gritty right, the code that was generated basically creates some basic code to clear the window content with the lovely CornFlowerBlue color. Something to notice, when you move your mouse into the window...nothing. ooooo spoooky. Let's put an image on that screen! Step A - Get an Image into the solution Under "Content" in your Solution Explorer, right click and add a new folder and name it "Sprites". Copy a small image in there; I copied a "Royalty Free" wizard hat from a quick google search and named it wizards_hat.jpg (rightfully so!) Step B - Add the sprite and position fields Now, open/edit  Game1.cs Locate the following line:  SpriteBatch spriteBatch; Under this line type the following:         SpriteBatch spriteBatch; // the line you are looking for...         Texture2D sprite;         Vector2 position; Step C - Load the image asset Locate the "Load Content" Method and duplicate the following:             protected override void LoadContent()         {             spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice);             // your image name goes here...             sprite = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Sprites\\wizards_hat");             position = new Vector2(200, 100);             base.LoadContent();         } Step D - Draw the image Locate the "Draw" Method and duplicate the following:        protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)         {             GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue);             spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);             spriteBatch.End();             base.Draw(gameTime);         }  Step E - Compile and Run Engage! (F5) - Debug! Your image should now display on a cornflowerblue window about 200 pixels from the left and 100 pixels from the top. Awesome! =) Pretty cool how we only coded a few lines to display an image, but believe me, there is plenty going on behind the scenes. However, for now, I'm going to call it a night here. Blogging all this progress certainly takes time... However, tomorrow night I'm going to detail what we just did, plus start checking off points on that list! I'm wondering right now if I should add pictures / code to this post...let me know if you want them =) Best Regards, D.

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