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  • XNA Notes 002

    - by George Clingerman
    This past week (much like every week in the XNA community) was filled with things happening and people doing cool things (and getting noticed for doing cool things!). You can definitely tell there are some Xbox LIVE Indie game developers starting to make some names for themselves. Can’t wait to name drop them at bars. Me- “Oh you played Game X? Yeah, I know the guy that made that. Pretty cool guy.” Yeah, I’ll be THAT guy.   Time Critical XNA News 30 days left to submit XBLIGs made in XNA Game Studio 3.1 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/08/30-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-to-app-hub.aspx Jeromy Walsh wants you to know his XNA 4.0 Winter Workshop starting soon, go get signed up! And the forum is now LIVE on GameDev.net http://gamedevelopedia.com/ http://tinyurl.com/4gg2cfv The XNA Team Per Nick Gravelyn, Aaron Stebner’s blog post is a must read for icons on Windows Phone http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72022/439597.aspx#439597 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/10/01/10070507.aspx Shawn Hargreaves writes about Sprite Billboards in a 3D world http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/12/spritebatch-billboards-in-a-3d-world.aspx XNA MVPs Andy “The ZMan” Dunn wants YOU to come to the MVP Summit and run a 5K http://www.indiegameguy.com/blogs/zman/archive/2010/12/26/come-to-the-mvp-summit-and-run-a-5k-yes-you.aspx Jim Perry updates his forum signature just to make it clear that he’s not speaking for Microsoft or giving official information (LOL, thanks Jim, now if only people will take the time to read that...) XNA MVP | Please use the Forum Search and read the Forum FAQs | My posts are not official info http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/70849/439613.aspx#439613 XNA Developers Robert Boyd (@werezombie) working hard at converting his RPG engine used to make Breath of Death VII and Chtulu Saves the World to XNA 4.0. If you haven’t done the upgrade yet yourself, might be useful to read back through his tweets and recent forum posts to see the problems/solutions he’s encountered. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71834/438099.aspx#438099 http://www.twitter.com/werezompire SpynDoctorGames is in the final phase before the release of Your Doodles are Bugged for the PC! Going to be interesting to watch as more XNA game developers explore the PC game market for their games. http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/24503173217521664 http://www.spyn-doctor.de @DrMistry shares some details of his next title YoYoYo http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/177-a-new-year-a-new-game-and-maybe-a-new-approach.html Travis Woodward (@RabidLionGames) has a blog post coming this weekend on Farseer and Mario-like platformer movement. http://twitter.com/RabidLionGames/statuses/24992762021548032 http://www.rabidlion.com/ S4G Interview with Radiangames http://n4g.com/news/679492/s4g-interview-with-radiangames XBLAratings.com interviews Steve Flores (@DragonDivide) developer of Alpha Squad http://www.xblaratings.com/developer-qaa/3621-alpha-squad-developer-interview XBox LIVE Indie Games If you haven’t been reading the roundups on IndieGames by NaviFairy on GayGamer, you’ve been missing out! http://gaygamer.net/2011/01/xbox_indie_review_roundup_1112.html Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 1 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/10/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-part-1/ Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 2 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/12/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-%E2%80%93-part-2/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews http://www.gamemarx.com/ Don’t forget to be following @XboxHornet . That’s a great way to snag free copies of Xbox LIVE Indie Games http://twitter.com/XboxHornet/statuses/24471103808208896 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Review posts the top 20 Xbox 360 LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://www.xbox-360-community-games-reviews.com/top-20-best-xbox-360-live-indie-games-of-2010/ VVGtv to Stream #XBLIG Again! Help out if you can. http://vvgtv.com/2011/01/07/vvgtv-to-stream-xblig-again/ Indie Gamer Magazine Issue 14 has a look at the Xbox LIVE Winter Indie Game Uprisiing http://www.indiegamemag.com/issue14/ XNA Game Development Andrew Russell announced and asked for help in his development of ExEn: XNA for iPhone, Android and Silverlight http://rockethub.com/projects/752-exen-xna-for-iphone-android-and-silverlight App Hub forums letting you down? Don’t forget about StackOverflow and the game development specific version gamedev.stackexchange http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xna http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xna Transmute gets an update from Aaron Foley (@slyprid) and you can now add and visually edit parallax layers to your 2D tile game. http://twitpic.com/3nudj0 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/23418379574448128 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/Transmute/default.html Webcomics Weekly #75 touches on some feelings I’ve seen people try to express (myself included) when talking about game development and what types of games should be released for XBLIG http://www.pvponline.com/2011/01/05/webcomics-weekly-75-sour-oats/ Setting up a new PC for XNA development? Here’s a site that helps you quickly build a installer for all the most common applications developers use. http://ninite.com/ Fun wew thread on the XNA forums asking XBLIG/XNA developers just what their Top 10 favorite video games of all time are. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/107.aspx Christopher Hill (@Xalterax) stumbled across an entire community that does nothing but create box art. This is a great potential resource for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers to get some awesome box art for their games. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/46582/441451.aspx#441451 http://www.vgboxart.com/browse/plat/360/ Don’t forget about the XNA Wiki, fantastic community resource (and roll up those sleeves and contribute already!) http://xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

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  • Part 2&ndash;Load Testing In The Cloud

    - by Tarun Arora
    Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig.  What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute and to enable communication between Test Controller and Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect.  Azure Connect The Test Controller is on premise and the Test Agents are in the cloud (How will they talk?). To enable communication between the two, we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect. With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IPsec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. With this you can now join Windows Azure role instances to your domain, so that you can use your existing methods for domain authentication, name resolution, or other domain-wide maintenance actions. For more details refer to an overview of Windows Azure connect. A very useful video explaining everything you wanted to know about Windows Azure connect.  Azure Compute Windows Azure compute provides developers a platform to host and manage applications in Microsoft’s data centres across the globe. A Windows Azure application is built from one or more components called ‘roles.’ Roles come in three different types: Web role, Worker role, and Virtual Machine (VM) role, we’ll be using the Worker role to set up the Test Agents. A very nice blog post discussing the difference between the 3 role types. Developers are free to use the .NET framework or other software that runs on Windows with the Worker role or Web role. Developers can also create applications using languages such as PHP and Java. More on Windows Azure Compute. Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server... Virtual Machine Size CPU Cores Memory Cost Per Hour Extra Small Shared 768 MB $0.04 Small 1 1.75 GB $0.12 Medium 2 3.50 GB $0.24 Large 4 7.00 GB $0.48 Extra Large 8 14.00 GB $0.96   You might want to review the Windows Azure Pricing FAQ. Let’s Get Started building the Test Rig… Configuration Machine Role Comments VM – 1 Domain Controller for Playpit.com On Premise VM – 2 TFS, Test Controller On Premise VM – 3 Test Agent Cloud   In this blog post I would assume that you have the domain, Team Foundation Server and Test Controller Installed and set up already. If not, please refer to the TFS 2010 Installation Guide and this walkthrough on MSDN to set up your Test Controller. You can also download a preconfigured TFS 2010 VM from Brian Keller's blog, Brian also has some great hands on Labs on TFS 2010 that you may want to explore. I. Lets start building VM – 3: The Test Agent Download the Windows Azure SDK and Tools Open Visual Studio and create a new Windows Azure Project using the Cloud Template                   Choose the Worker Role for reasons explained in the earlier post         The WorkerRole.cs implements the Run() and OnStart() methods, no code changes required. You should be able to compile the project and run it in the compute emulator (The compute emulator should have been installed as part of the Windows Azure Toolkit) on your local machine.                   We will only be making changes to WindowsAzureProject, open ServiceDefinition.csdef. Ensure that the vmsize is small (remember the cost chart above). Import the “Connect” module. I am importing the Connect module because I need to join the Worker role VM to the Playpit domain. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect"/> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg and note that settings with key ‘Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.%%%%’ have been added to the configuration file. This is because you decided to import the connect module. See the config below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>             Let’s go step by step and understand all the highlighted parameters and where you can find the values for them.       osFamily – By default this is set to 1 (Windows Server 2008 SP2). Change this to 2 if you want the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The Advantage of using osFamily = “2” is that you get Powershell 2.0 rather than Powershell 1.0. In Powershell 2.0 you could simply use “powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted ./myscript.ps1” and it will work while in Powershell 1.0 you will have to change the registry key by including the following in your command file “reg add HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell /v ExecutionPolicy /d Unrestricted /f” before you can execute any power shell. The other reason you might want to move to os2 is if you wanted IIS 7.5.       Activation Token – To enable communication between the on premise machine and the Windows Azure Worker role VM both need to have the same token. Log on to Windows Azure Management Portal, click on Connect, click on Get Activation Token, this should give you the activation token, copy the activation token to the clipboard and paste it in the configuration file. Note – Later in the blog I’ll be showing you how to install connect on the on premise machine.                       EnableDomainJoin – Set the value to true, ofcourse we want to join the on windows azure worker role VM to the domain.       DomainFQDN, DomainControllerFQDN, DomainAccountName, DomainPassword, DomainOU, Administrators – This information is specific to your domain. I have extracted this information from the ‘service manager’ and ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’. Also, i created a new Domain-OU namely ‘CloudInstances’ so all my cloud instances joined to my domain show up here, this is optional. You can encrypt the DomainPassword – refer to the instructions here. Or hold fire, I’ll be covering that when i come to certificates and encryption in the coming section.       Now once you have filled all this information up, the configuration file should look something like below, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Next we will be enabling the Remote Desktop module in to the ServiceDefinition.csdef, we could make changes manually or allow a beautiful wizard to help us make changes. I prefer the second option. So right click on the Windows Azure project and choose Publish       Now once you get the publish wizard, if you haven’t already you would be asked to import your Windows Azure subscription, this is simply the Msdn subscription activation key xml. Once you have done click Next to go to the Settings page and check ‘Enable Remote Desktop for all roles’.       As soon as you do that you get another pop up asking you the details for the user that you would be logging in with (make sure you enter a reasonable expiry date, you do not want the user account to expire today). Notice the more information tag at the bottom, click that to get access to the certificate section. See screen shot below.       From the drop down select the option to create a new certificate        In the pop up window enter the friendly name for your certificate. In my case I entered ‘WAC – Test Rig’ and click ok. This will create a new certificate for you. Click on the view button to see the certificate details. Do you see the Thumbprint, this is the value that will go in the config file (very important). Now click on the Copy to File button to copy the certificate, we will need to import the certificate to the windows Azure Management portal later. So, make sure you save it a safe location.                                Click Finish and enter details of the user you would like to create with permissions for remote desktop access, once you have entered the details on the ‘Remote desktop configuration’ screen click on Ok. From the Publish Windows Azure Wizard screen press Cancel. Cancel because we don’t want to publish the role just yet and Yes because we want to save all the changes in the config file.       Now if you go to the ServiceDefinition.csdef file you will see that the RemoteAccess and RemoteForwarder roles have been imported for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Now go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg file and you see a whole bunch for setting “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.%%%” values added for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.Enabled" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountUsername" value="Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountEncryptedPassword" value="MIIBnQYJKoZIhvcNAQcDoIIBjjCCAYoCAQAxggFOMIIBSgIBADAyMB4xHDAaBgNVBAMME1dpbmRvd 3MgQXp1cmUgVG9vbHMCEGa+B46voeO5T305N7TSG9QwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQAEggEABg4ol5Xol66Ip6QKLbAPWdmD4ae ADZ7aKj6fg4D+ATr0DXBllZHG5Umwf+84Sj2nsPeCyrg3ZDQuxrfhSbdnJwuChKV6ukXdGjX0hlowJu/4dfH4jTJC7sBWS AKaEFU7CxvqYEAL1Hf9VPL5fW6HZVmq1z+qmm4ecGKSTOJ20Fptb463wcXgR8CWGa+1w9xqJ7UmmfGeGeCHQ4QGW0IDSBU6ccg vzF2ug8/FY60K1vrWaCYOhKkxD3YBs8U9X/kOB0yQm2Git0d5tFlIPCBT2AC57bgsAYncXfHvPesI0qs7VZyghk8LVa9g5IqaM Cp6cQ7rmY/dLsKBMkDcdBHuCTAzBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwFAYIKoZIhvcNAwcECDRVifSXbA43gBApNrp40L1VTVZ1iGag+3O1" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountExpiration" value="2012-11-27T23:59:59.0000000+00:00" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteForwarder.Enabled" value="true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <Certificates> <Certificate name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.PasswordEncryption" thumbprint="AA23016CF0BDFC344400B5B82706B608B92E4217" thumbprintAlgorithm="sha1" /> </Certificates> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>          Okay let’s look at them one at a time,       Enabled - Yes, we would like to enable Remote Access.       AccountUserName – This is the user name you entered while you were on the publish windows azure role screen, as detailed above.       AccountEncrytedPassword – Try and decode that, the certificate is used to encrypt the password you specified for the user account. Remember earlier i said, either use the instructions or wait and i’ll be showing you encryption, now the user account i am using for rdp has the same password as my domain password, so i can simply copy the value of the AccountEncryptedPassword to the DomainPassword as well.       AccountExpiration – This is the expiration as you specified in the wizard earlier, make sure your account does not expire today.       Remote Forwarder – Check out the documentation, below is how I understand it, -- One role in an application that implements a remote desktop connection must import the RemoteForwarder module. The two modules work together to enable the remote desktop connections to role instances. -- If you have multiple roles defined in the service model, it does not matter which role you add the RemoteForwarder module to, but you must add it to only one of the role definitions.       Certificate – Remember the certificate thumbprint from the wizard, the on premise machine and windows azure role machine that need to speak to each other must have the same thumbprint. More on that when we install Windows Azure connect Endpoints on the on premise machine. As i said earlier, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you the manual process so i won’t be scripting any star up tasks to install the test agent or register the test agent with the TFS Server. I’ll be showing you all this cool stuff in the next blog post, that’s because it’s important to understand the manual side of it, it becomes easier for you to troubleshoot in case something fails. Having said that, the changes we have made are sufficient to spin up the Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent VM, have it connected with the play.pit.com domain and have remote access enabled on it. Before we deploy the Test Agent VM we need to set up Windows Azure Connect on the TFS Server. II. Windows Azure Connect: Setting up Connect on VM – 2 i.e. TFS & Test Controller Glad you made it so far, now to enable communication between the on premise TFS/Test Controller and Azure-ed Test Agent we need to enable communication. We have set up the Azure connect module in the Test Agent configuration, now the connect end points need to be enabled on the on premise machines, let’s have a look at how we can do this. Log on to VM – 2 running the TFS Server and Test Controller Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network Click on Virtual Network, if you already have a subscription you should see the below screen shot, if not, you would be asked to complete the subscription first        Click on Install Local Endpoints from the top left on the panel and you get a url appended with a token id in it, remember the token i showed you earlier, in theory the token you get here should match the token you added to the Test Agent config file.        Copy the url to the clip board and paste it in IE explorer (important, the installation at present only works out of IE and you need to have cookies enabled in order to complete the installation). As stated in the pop up, you can NOT download and run the software later, you need to run it as is, since it contains a token. Once the installation completes you should see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray.                         Right click the Azure Connect icon, choose Diagnostics and refer to this link for diagnostic detail terminology. NOTE – Unfortunately I could not see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray, a bit of binging with Google revealed that the azure connect icon is only shown when the ‘Windows Azure Connect Endpoint’ Service is started. So go to services.msc and make sure that the service is started, if not start it, unfortunately again, the service did not start for me on a manual start and i realised that one of the dependant services was disabled, you can look at the service dependencies and start them and then start windows azure connect. Bottom line, you need to start Windows Azure connect service before you can proceed. Please refer here on MSDN for more on Troubleshooting Windows Azure connect. (Follow the next step as well)   Now go back to the Windows Azure Management Portal and from Groups and Roles create a new group, lets call it ‘Test Rig’. Make sure you add the VM – 2 (the TFS Server VM where you just installed the endpoint).       Now if you go back to the Azure Connect icon in the system tray and click ‘Refresh Policy’ you will notice that the disconnected status of the icon should change to ready for connection. III. Importing Certificate in to Windows Azure Management Portal But before that you need to import the certificate you created in Step I in to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on ‘Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN’ and then ‘Management Certificates’ followed by Add Certificates as shown in the screen shot below        Browse to the location where you saved the certificate earlier, remember… Refer to Step I in case you forgot.        Now you should be able to see the imported certificate here, make sure the thumbprint of the certificate matches the one you inserted in the config files        IV. Publish Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent Having completed I, II and III, you are ready to publish the Test Agent VM – 3 to the cloud. Go to Visual Studio and right click the Windows Azure project and select Publish. Verify the infomration in the wizard, from the advanced settings tab, you can also enabled capture of intellitrace or profiling information.         Click Next and Click Publish! From the view menu bar select the Windows Azure Activity Log window.       Now you should be able to see the deployment progress in real time.             In the Windows Azure Management Portal, you should also be able to see the progress of creation of a new Worker Role.       Once the deployment is complete you should be able to RDP (go to run prompt type mstsc and in the pop up the machine name) in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM from the Playpit network using the domain admin user account. In case you are unable to log in to the Test Agent using the domain admin user account it means the process of joining the Test Agent to the domain has failed! But the good news is, because you imported the connect module, you can connect to the Test Agent machine using Windows Azure Management Portal and troubleshoot the reason for failure, you will be able to log in with the user name and password you specified in the config file for the keys ‘RemoteAccess.AccountUsername, RemoteAccess.EncryptedPassword (just that enter the password unencrypted)’, fix it or manually join the machine to the domain. Once you have managed to Join the Test Agent VM to the Domain move to the next step.      So, log in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM with the Playpit Domain Administrator and verify that you can log in, the machine is connected to the domain and the connect service is successfully running. If yes, give your self a pat on the back, you are 80% mission accomplished!         Go to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network, click on Groups and Roles and click on Test Rig, click Edit Group, the edit the Test Rig group you created earlier. In the Connect to section, click on Add to select the worker role you have just deployed. Also, check the ‘Allow connections between endpoints in the group’ with this you will enable to communication between test controller and test agents and test agents/test agents. Click Save.      Now, you are ready to deploy the Test Agent software on the Worker Role Test Agent VM and configure it to work with the Test Controller. V. Configuring VM – 3: Installing Test Agent and Associating Test Agent to Controller Log in to the Worker Role Test Agent VM that you have just successfully deployed, make sure you log in with the domain administrator account. Download the All Agents software from MSDN, ‘en_visual_studio_agents_2010_x86_x64_dvd_509679.iso’, extract the iso and navigate to where you have extracted the iso. In my case, i have extracted the iso to “C:\Resources\Temp\VsAgentSetup”. Open the Test Agent folder and double click on setup.exe. Once you have installed the Test Agent you should reach the configuration window. If you face any issues installing TFS Test Agent on the VM, refer to the walkthrough on MSDN.       Once you have successfully installed the Test Agent software you will need to configure the test agent. Right click the test agent configuration tool and run as a different user. i.e. an Administrator. This is really to run the configuration wizard with elevated privileges (you might have UAC block something's otherwise).        In the run options, you can select ‘service’ you do not need to run the agent as interactive un less you are running coded UI tests. I have specified the domain administrator to connect to the TFS Test Controller. In real life, i would never do that, i would create a separate test user service account for this purpose. But for the blog post, we are using the most powerful user so that any policies or restrictions don’t block you.        Click the Apply Settings button and you should be all green! If not, the summary usually gives helpful error messages that you can resolve and proceed. As per my experience, you may run in to either a permission or a firewall blocking communication issue.        And now the moment of truth! Go to VM –2 open up Visual Studio and from the Test Menu select Manage Test Controller       Mission Accomplished! You should be able to see the Test Agent that you have just configured here,         VI. Creating and Running Load Tests on your brand new Azure-ed Test Rig I have various blog posts on Performance Testing with Visual Studio Ultimate, you can follow the links and videos below, Blog Posts: - Part 1 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 2 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 3 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Videos: - Test Tools Configuration & Settings in Visual Studio - Why & How to Record Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio Ultimate - Goal Driven Load Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate Now that you have created your load tests, there is one last change you need to make before you can run the tests on your Azure Test Rig, create a new Test settings file, and change the Test Execution method to ‘Remote Execution’ and select the test controller you have configured the Worker Role Test Agent against in our case VM – 2 So, go on, fire off a test run and see the results of the test being executed on the Azur-ed Test Rig. Review and What’s next? A quick recap of the benefits of running the Test Rig in the cloud and what i will be covering in the next blog post AND I would love to hear your feedback! Advantages Utilizing the power of Azure compute to run a heavy virtual user load. Benefiting from the Azure flexibility, destroy Test Agents when not in use, takes < 25 minutes to spin up a new Test Agent. Most important test Network Latency, (network latency and speed of connection are two different things – usually network latency is very hard to test), by placing the Test Agents in Microsoft Data centres around the globe, one can actually test the lag in transferring the bytes not because of a slow connection but because the page has been requested from the other side of the globe. Next Steps The process of spinning up the Test Agents in windows Azure is not 100% automated. I am working on the Worker process and power shell scripts to make the role deployment, unattended install of test agent software and registration of the test agent to the test controller automated. In the next blog post I will show you how to make the complete process unattended and automated. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Hope you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. See you in Part III.   Share this post : CodeProject

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  • Use WLST to Delete All JMS Messages From a Destination

    - by james.bayer
    I got a question today about whether WebLogic Server has any tools to delete all messages from a JMS Queue.  It just so happens that the WLS Console has this capability already.  It’s available on the screen after the “Show Messages” button is clicked on a destination’s Monitoring tab as seen in the screen shot below. The console is great for something ad-hoc, but what if I want to automate this?  Well it just so happens that the console is just a weblogic application layered on top of the JMX Management interface.  If you look at the MBean Reference, you’ll find a JMSDestinationRuntimeMBean that includes the operation deleteMessages that takes a JMS Message Selector as an argument.  If you pass an empty string, that is essentially a wild card that matches all messages. Coding a stand-alone JMX client for this is kind of lame, so let’s do something more suitable to scripting.  In addition to the console, WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) based on Jython is another way to browse and invoke MBeans, so an equivalent interactive shell session to delete messages from a destination would looks like this: D:\Oracle\fmw11gr1ps3\user_projects\domains\hotspot_domain\bin>setDomainEnv.cmd D:\Oracle\fmw11gr1ps3\user_projects\domains\hotspot_domain>java weblogic.WLST   Initializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) ...   Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell   Type help() for help on available commands   wls:/offline> connect('weblogic','welcome1','t3://localhost:7001') Connecting to t3://localhost:7001 with userid weblogic ... Successfully connected to Admin Server 'AdminServer' that belongs to domain 'hotspot_domain'.   Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port should be used instead.   wls:/hotspot_domain/serverConfig> serverRuntime() Location changed to serverRuntime tree. This is a read-only tree with ServerRuntimeMBean as the root. For more help, use help(serverRuntime)   wls:/hotspot_domain/serverRuntime> cd('JMSRuntime/AdminServer.jms/JMSServers/JMSServer-0/Destinations/SystemModule-0!Queue-0') wls:/hotspot_domain/serverRuntime/JMSRuntime/AdminServer.jms/JMSServers/JMSServer-0/Destinations/SystemModule-0!Queue-0> ls() dr-- DurableSubscribers   -r-- BytesCurrentCount 0 -r-- BytesHighCount 174620 -r-- BytesPendingCount 0 -r-- BytesReceivedCount 253548 -r-- BytesThresholdTime 0 -r-- ConsumersCurrentCount 0 -r-- ConsumersHighCount 0 -r-- ConsumersTotalCount 0 -r-- ConsumptionPaused false -r-- ConsumptionPausedState Consumption-Enabled -r-- DestinationInfo javax.management.openmbean.CompositeDataSupport(compositeType=javax.management.openmbean.CompositeType(name=DestinationInfo,items=((itemName=ApplicationName,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName=ModuleName,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.Boolean)),(itemName=SerializedDestination,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName=ServerName,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName=Topic,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.Boolean)),(itemName=VersionNumber,itemType=javax.management.op ule-0!Queue-0, Queue=true, SerializedDestination=rO0ABXNyACN3ZWJsb2dpYy5qbXMuY29tbW9uLkRlc3RpbmF0aW9uSW1wbFSmyJ1qZfv8DAAAeHB3kLZBABZTeXN0ZW1Nb2R1bGUtMCFRdWV1ZS0wAAtKTVNTZXJ2ZXItMAAOU3lzdGVtTW9kdWxlLTABAANBbGwCAlb6IS6T5qL/AAAACgEAC0FkbWluU2VydmVyAC2EGgJW+iEuk+ai/wAAAAsBAAtBZG1pblNlcnZlcgAthBoAAQAQX1dMU19BZG1pblNlcnZlcng=, ServerName=JMSServer-0, Topic=false, VersionNumber=1}) -r-- DestinationType Queue -r-- DurableSubscribers null -r-- InsertionPaused false -r-- InsertionPausedState Insertion-Enabled -r-- MessagesCurrentCount 0 -r-- MessagesDeletedCurrentCount 3 -r-- MessagesHighCount 2 -r-- MessagesMovedCurrentCount 0 -r-- MessagesPendingCount 0 -r-- MessagesReceivedCount 3 -r-- MessagesThresholdTime 0 -r-- Name SystemModule-0!Queue-0 -r-- Paused false -r-- ProductionPaused false -r-- ProductionPausedState Production-Enabled -r-- State advertised_in_cluster_jndi -r-- Type JMSDestinationRuntime   -r-x closeCursor Void : String(cursorHandle) -r-x deleteMessages Integer : String(selector) -r-x getCursorEndPosition Long : String(cursorHandle) -r-x getCursorSize Long : String(cursorHandle) -r-x getCursorStartPosition Long : String(cursorHandle) -r-x getItems javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[] : String(cursorHandle),Long(start),Integer(count) -r-x getMessage javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData : String(cursorHandle),Long(messageHandle) -r-x getMessage javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData : String(cursorHandle),String(messageID) -r-x getMessage javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData : String(messageID) -r-x getMessages String : String(selector),Integer(timeout) -r-x getMessages String : String(selector),Integer(timeout),Integer(state) -r-x getNext javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[] : String(cursorHandle),Integer(count) -r-x getPrevious javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[] : String(cursorHandle),Integer(count) -r-x importMessages Void : javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[],Boolean(replaceOnly) -r-x moveMessages Integer : String(java.lang.String),javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData,Integer(java.lang.Integer) -r-x moveMessages Integer : String(selector),javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData -r-x pause Void : -r-x pauseConsumption Void : -r-x pauseInsertion Void : -r-x pauseProduction Void : -r-x preDeregister Void : -r-x resume Void : -r-x resumeConsumption Void : -r-x resumeInsertion Void : -r-x resumeProduction Void : -r-x sort Long : String(cursorHandle),Long(start),String[](fields),Boolean[](ascending)   wls:/hotspot_domain/serverRuntime/JMSRuntime/AdminServer.jms/JMSServers/JMSServer-0/Destinations/SystemModule-0!Queue-0> cmo.deleteMessages('') 2 where the domain name is “hotspot_domain”, the JMS Server name is “JMSServer-0”, the Queue name is “Queue-0” and the System Module is named “SystemModule-0”.  To invoke the operation, I use the “cmo” object, which is the “Current Management Object” that represents the currently navigated to MBean.  The 2 indicates that two messages were deleted.  Combining this WLST code with a recent post by my colleague Steve that shows you how to use an encrypted file to store the authentication credentials, you could easily turn this into a secure automated script.  If you need help with that step, a long while back I blogged about some WLST basics.  Happy scripting.

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  • How to install iodbc in Ubuntu 12.10

    - by Hanynowsky
    I need to install the library iodbc (depends on libodbc2) in my Quantal machine. Yet there is creepy dependency problem. This was replaced somehow by unixodbc which I don't have, installed. Here is what I get when I try to install : sudo apt-get install libiodbc2-dev Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libiodbc2-dev : Depends: libiodbc2 (= 3.52.7-2build2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: iodbc (= 3.52.7-2build2) but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. I can tell that iodbc conflicts with odbcinst. Yet, I cannot remove it due to the following: sudo apt-get remove odbcinst Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: akonadi-backend-mysql calligra-l10n-engb kde-l10n-engb kdevelop-l10n kdevelop-php-docs-l10n kdevelop-php-l10n libakonadi-kabc4 libakonadi-notes4 libakonadiprotocolinternals1 libboost-thread1.49.0 libdmtx0a libgpgme++2 libkcalcore4 libkdgantt2 libkholidays4 libkimap4 libkldap4 libkmbox4 libkmime4 libkolabxml0 libkpgp4 libkresources4 libksieve4 libprison0 libqgpgme1 libqrencode3 libxerces-c3.1 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following packages will be REMOVED: akonadi-server k3b k3b-i18n katepart kde-runtime kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-plugins kdepim-runtime kdepim-strigi-plugins kdepimlibs-kio-plugins kdoctools kget kmag kmail kmix kmousetool ksystemlog kubuntu-debug-installer language-pack-kde-ar language-pack-kde-en libakonadi-calendar4 libakonadi-contact4 libakonadi-kcal4 libakonadi-kde4 libakonadi-kmime4 libcalendarsupport4 libincidenceeditorsng4 libk3b6 libkabc4 libkactivities-bin libkactivities6 libkalarmcal2 libkatepartinterfaces4 libkcal4 libkcalutils4 libkcddb4 libkde3support4 libkdepim4 libkdepimdbusinterfaces4 libkdewebkit5 libkemoticons4 libkfile4 libkgapi0 libkhtml5 libkio5 libkleo4 libkmanagesieve4 libkmediaplayer4 libknewstuff3-4 libknotifyconfig4 libkolab0 libkonq-common libkonq5abi1 libkontactinterface4 libkparts4 libkpimidentities4 libkpimtextedit4 libkpimutils4 libkprintutils4 libksieveui4 libktexteditor4 libktnef4 libktorrent4 libkworkspace4abi2 libkxmlrpcclient4 libmailcommon4 libmailimporter4 libmailtransport4 libmessagecomposer4 libmessagecore4 libmessagelist4 libmessageviewer4 libmicroblog4 libnepomuk4 libnepomukcore4abi1 libnepomukquery4a libnepomuksync4 libnepomukutils4 libplasma3 libsoprano4 libtemplateparser4 libvirtodbc0 nepomuk-core odbcinst odbcinst1debian2 plasma-scriptengine-javascript qapt-batch soprano-daemon virtuoso-minimal 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 89 to remove and 0 not upgraded. After this operation, 126 MB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Other info: Why do the "iodbc" and "libmyodbc" packages conflict with each other? The root problem is that I need to use a new feature introduced in the latest MySQL Workbench builds (DB Migration) which uses odbc for that matter. Here is what Mysql doc says about it : Linux The Migration Wizard uses iODBC as a driver manager for all of its ODBC connections in Linux. This may give you some troubles because most Linux distributions provide ODBC drivers compiled against unixODBC. This is another driver manager not supported by MySQL Workbench so you won’t be able to use those drivers unless you compile them against iODBC. Here’s what you should do. Make sure that you have iODBC installed. If you are using Debian, Ubuntu or another Debian based distro, type this command in your terminal: $ sudo apt-get install iodbc libiodbc2-dev libpq-dev libssl-dev For RPM based distros (RedHat, Fedora, etc.) type this command instead of the previous one: $ sudo yum install iodbc iodbc-dev libpqxx-devel openssl-devel Now we need to install the PostgreSQL ODBC drivers. Download the psqlODBC source tarball from here. Use the latest version available for download. As of this writing the latest version corresponds to the file psqlodbc-09.01.0200.tar.gz. Extract this tarball to a directory in your hard drive and open a terminal and cd into that directory. Type this in the terminal window: $ ./configure --with-iodbc --enable-pthreads $ make $ sudo make install Verify that you have the file psqlodbcw.so in the /usr/local/lib directory. This package seems to pose the problem probably: dpkg -s odbcinst1debian2 Package: odbcinst1debian2 Status: install ok installed Priority: optional Section: libs Installed-Size: 241 Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]> Architecture: amd64 Multi-Arch: same Source: unixodbc Version: 2.2.14p2-5ubuntu4 Replaces: unixodbc (<< 2.1.1-2) Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libltdl7 (>= 2.4.2), odbcinst Pre-Depends: multiarch-support Breaks: libiodbc2, libmyodbc (<< 5.1.6-2), odbc-postgresql (<< 1:09.00.0310-1.1), tdsodbc (<< 0.82-8) Conflicts: odbcinst1, odbcinst1debian1 Description: Support library for accessing odbc ini files This package contains the libodbcinst library from unixodbc, a library used by ODBC drivers for reading their configuration settings from /etc/odbc.ini and ~/.odbc.ini. . Also contained in this package are the driver setup plugins, which describe the features supported by individual ODBC drivers. Homepage: http://www.unixodbc.org/ Original-Maintainer: Steve Langasek <[email protected]> I have no broken packages:

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  • Subscribable World Cup 2010 Calendar

    - by jamiet
    I bang on quite a lot on this blog about ways in which data can get published over the web and one of the most interesting ways, in my opinion, of publishing data in a structured manner that is well understood is to use the iCalendar specification. There isn’t much information in the world that doesn’t have some concept of “when” so iCalendar is a great way of distributing that information. You have probably used iCalendar at some point without even knowing about it. All files with a .ics suffix are iCalendar format files and that is why you can happily import them into Outlook, Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar etc… where they can be parsed and have the semantic data (when, where and who) extracted from them. Importing of iCalendar format data is really only half the trick though; in my opinion the real value of iCalendar-formatted calendar is the ability to subscribe to them. Subscribing has a simple benefit over importing but that single benefit is of massive importance: a subscriber to an iCalendar calendar can periodically check to see if any updates have been made and, if they have, automatically update the local copy. The real benefit to the user is the productivity gain – a single update to an iCalendar means that all subscribers are automatically made aware of the change and there is zero effort on the part of the subscriber; as my former colleague Howard van Rooijen is fond of saying, “work smarter not harder” – nowhere is this edict more ably demonstrated than subscribing versus importing of calendars. If you want to read some more thoughts about iCalendar then go and read my past blog post Calendar syndication - My big hope for 2009's breakthrough technology or better still go and seek out Jon Udell who speaks very authoritatively on the issue of iCalendar. With this subject of iCalendar on my mind I was interested to discover (via Steve Clayton’s blog post Download the world cup fixtures) that the BBC had made a .ics file available containing all of the matches in the upcoming World Cup. As you can probably guess this was a file that was made available so that it could be imported into your calendar of choice. It had one obvious downside though, right now nobody knows who is going to be playing in the knock-out stages so the calendar looks like this: with no teams being named after 25th June. How much more useful would this calendar have been if the BBC had made it possible to subscribe to the calendar instead, thus the calendar could be updated with the teams for the knock out stages when they are known and every subscriber would have a permanently up-to-date record of all the fixtures in their calendar. Better still, the calendar could be updated with match results as well or perhaps even post a match report from the BBC sport pages; when calendars are made subscribable a sea of opportunity opens up for distribution of information. So with that in mind I have decided to go one better than the BBC. I have imported their .ics into a brand new Hotmail calendar and made it publicly available at the following URLs: HTML http://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/index.html iCalendar webcal://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/calendar.ics The link you’re really interested in is the second one - click on that and it should open up in your calendar software of choice. Or, if you want to view it in an online calendar such as Hotmail Calendar or Google Calendar, copy and paste that URL into the appropriate place. Some people have told me they’re having trouble with the iCalendar link in which case hit the HTML link and then click “View ICS” at the resultant web page: I shall endeavour to keep the calendar updated throughout the World Cup and even if I don’t you’re no worse off than if you had imported the BBC’s .ics file so why not give it a try? If I do keep it up to date then you will have a permanent record of the 2010 World Cup available in your calendar. Forever. If you have your calendar synced to your smartphone then you’ll be carrying match reports around with you without you having to do a single thing. Surely that’s worth a quick click isn’t it?   If you have any thoughts let me have them in the comments below. Thanks for reading. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • In the Mobile and Tablet World, How Much is Too Much?

    - by andrewbrust
    The week of April 26th was a huge one in the world of mobile and tablet devices,  There were so many individual developments, announcements and solidifications of strategy, it’s almost impossible to believe they occurred in the same month, let alone the same week. Things started with Apple and Gizmodo having a Law and Order moment over the latter’s procurement of what appears to be the former’s 4th gen iPhone prototype.  We found out on the 26th that Gizmodo blogger Jason Chen’s apartment was raided by police and, honestly, that was a bit much. But Apple didn’t stop there.  They also published Steve Job’s critique of Adobe Flash and his explanation of Cupertino’s embargo of Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads.  If you ask me, this too, was a bit much. Apple finished up the week by releasing the 3G version of its iPad product to the US market. I like (iLike?) my WiFi iPad.  The idea of getting a version of it that required a second 3G service monthly subscription, is, well, a bit  much. Microsoft was in the news too.  It killed a project it hadn’t even acknowledged the existence of: the Courier tablet.  That’s a bit much too.  If a tree falls in the woods, and Microsoft says they can’t hear it anyway, could they really have chopped it down? Maybe Microsoft Research should have licensed some of Courier’s technology from other parts of Microsoft.  Then maybe they could have kept the product alive.  Ask HTC: they’re going to be licensing technology from Microsoft because Redmond insists that Google’s Android operating system infringes on certain of their patents.  And since HTC now builds a number of handsets on Android, instead of being beholden, as they once were, to Windows Mobile, that means they can keep making their products.  Why does HTC have to pay the royalties, and not Google?  Maybe Microsoft decided that going after GOOG would have been a bit much, even for them. The agreement came not a moment to soon: HTC released their “Droid Incredible” (that name’s a bit much), an Android 2.1 handset with amazing hardware and HTC’s own Sense UI, on April 30th (this past Friday). This phone is very well-reviewed.  Maybe that’s why Google basically decided to beg off introducing a version of its Nexus One phone (also manufactured by HTC) on the Verizon Wireless network.  Google backing down?  That’s incredible, if not also a bit much. And that brings us to HP.  Which this week announced its acquisition of Palm and its webOS mobile phone touch-oriented operating system.  HP also killed its own Slate initiative.  Apparently HP realized that Windows 7, even with a proprietary HP touch UI added on top, is no match for the iPad.  I’m guessing they think webOS might work a bit better,  And I’m wondering if HP even wants to use webOS for phone handsets, beyond the Pre and Pixi.  Using it just for slate devices would be a bit extreme, but maybe not too much. Honestly, this was not Microsoft’s best week.  It killed a project and a close partner did likewise.  Then that same partner bought a competing OS product, while another partner released their new product that uses yet another competing OS platform. What did Microsoft actually produce this past week? An update to its Windows Phone 7 developer tools that actually works with the version of Visual Studio 2010 released on April 12th, and the version of Silverlight released three days later. That took three weeks to get synced up, and that’s a bit much too. But at least it happened. Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s best hope for a comeback in the SmartPhone market and to offer a credible touch-based tablet device.  This week, two of Microsoft’s slate initiatives died, and its only mobile phone victory was around its competitor’s operating system.  I hope the new platform gets Redmond out of the PC ghetto and into the classes of device that get people really excited today.  If it can’t, that would be a bit much; probably too much.  And, as the signs at the Lonestar Cafe in NYC used to say, too much ain’t enough.

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  • Open World Day 3

    - by Antony Reynolds
    A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part IV My third day was exhibition day for me!  I took the opportunity to wander around the JavaOne and OpenWorld exhibitions to see what might be useful for me when selling WebLogic, Coherence & SOA Suite.  I found a number of interesting vendors and thought I would share what I found here.  These are not necessarily endorsements, but observations on companies that I thought had interesting looking products that fill a need I have seen at customers. Highly Available EBS Upgrades A few years ago I worked with a customer that was a port authority.  They wanted to tie E-Business Suite into their operations to provide faster processing of cargo and passengers.  However they only had a 2 hour downtime window to perform upgrades.  This was not a problem for core database and middleware technology, this could accommodate those upgrade timescales easily.  It was a problem for EBS however so I intrigued to find Rapid E-Suite Inc offering an 11i to 12i upgrade service that claims to require no outage.  This could be a real boon to EBS customers like my port friends that need to upgrade without disruption to their business. Mobile on WebLogic I have come across a number of customers who want a comprehensive mobile solution, connected and disconnected operation and so forth.  ADF only addresses part of these requirements currently so I was excited to discover mFrontiers Inc offering an apparently comprehensive solution that should integrate easily with Oracle SOA Suite to mobile enable a SOA infrastructure.  The ability to operate without a network is important for many applications, particularly in industries that require their engineers to enter buildings to perform maintenance or repairs, because network access is not always available – many of my colleagues don’t have mobile access from their homes because they live in the middle of nowhere – and disconnected support is crucial in these situations. Sharepoint Connector for WebCenter Content Obviously Sharepoint is an evil pernicious intrusion into a companies IT estate but it is widely deployed and many people like it but also would like to take advantage of Oracle products such as WebCenter Content.  So I was encouraged to see that Fishbowl Solutions have created a connector for Sharepoint that allows it to bring in content from WebCenter, it looks like a valuable way to maintain the Sharepoint interface end users are used to but extend the range of content by pulling stuff (technical term for content) from WebCenter.   Load Balancing The Enterprise Deployment Guides are Oracles bible on building highly available FMW environments, and each of them requires a front end load balancer.  I have been asked to help configure F5 Load Balancers on a number of occasions over my time at Oracle and each time I come back to it I find more useful features have been added to the BigIP line of load balancers that F5 sell, many of their documents are tailored to FMW.  I like F5, they provide (relatively) easy to use products that do what they say on the side of the box.  They may not have all the bells and whistles of some of their more expensive competitors but they do the job and do it well!  Besides which I like their logo! Other Stuff I saw lots of other interesting products and services, such as a lightweight monitoring tool for Coherence, Forms migration services, JCAPS migration services and lots of cool freebies to take home to the children! A Quiet Night Wednesday night was the partner appreciation event and I had decided to go back to the hotel and have an early night.  I decided to attend the last session of the day – a Maven/Hudson/WebLogic tutorial.  I got the wrong hotel for the session and snuck in 20 minutes late at the back and starting working on the hands on workshop.  One of my co-attendees raised his hand for help and as the presenter came over to help he suddenly stopped and yelled – “Is that Antony”!  It was my old friend Steve Button who used to be based in Redwood Shores but is now a WebLogic guru PM in Australia.  It was good to catch up with him.  As he yelled out a guy with really bad posture turned around to see who he was talking to, this turned out to be my friend Simon Haslan, Oracle ACE from the UK.  After the tutorial Simon and I retired to the coffee shop to catch up and share stories.  2 and half hours later we decided it was time to retire, so much for an early night but great to renew old friendships and find out what real customers are worrying about.

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  • I, Android

    - by andrewbrust
    I’m just back from the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  I go to CES to get a sense of what Microsoft is doing in the consumer space, and how people are reacting to it.  When I first went to CES 2 years ago, Steve Ballmer announced the beta of Windows 7 at his keynote address, and the crowd went wild.  When I went again last year, everyone was hoping for a Windows tablet announcement at the Ballmer keynote.  Although they didn’t get one (unless you count the unreleased HP Slate running Windows 7), people continued to show anticipation around Project Natal (which became Xbox 360 Kinect) and around Windows Phone 7.  On the show floor last year, there were machines everywhere running Windows 7, including lots of netbooks.  Microsoft had a serious influence at the show both years. But this year, one brand, one product, one operating system evidenced itself over and over again: Android.  Whether in the multitude of tablet devices that were shown across the show, or the burgeoning number of smartphones shown (including all four forthcoming 4G-LTE handsets at Verizon Wireless’ booth) or the Google TV set top box from Logitech and the embedded implementation in new Sony TV models, Android was was there. There was excitement in the ubiquity of Android 2.2 (Froyo) and the emergence of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread).  There was anticipation around the tablet-optimized Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).  There were highly customized skins.  There was even an official CES Android app for navigating the exhibit halls and planning events.  Android was so ubiquitous, in fact, that it became surprising to find a device that was running anything else.  It was as if Android had become the de facto Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) operating system. Motorola’s booth was nothing less than an Android showcase.  And it was large, and it was packed.  Clearly Moto’s fortunes have improved dramatically in the last year and change.  The fact that the company morphed from being a core Windows Mobile OEM to an Android poster child seems non-coincidental to their improved fortunes. Even erstwhile WinMo OEMs who now do produce Windows Phone 7 devices were not pushing them.  Perhaps I missed them, but I couldn’t find WP7 handsets at Samsung’s booth, nor at LG’s.  And since the only carrier exhibiting at the show was Verizon Wireless, which doesn’t yet have WP7 devices, this left Microsoft’s booth as the only place to see the phones. Why is Android so popular with consumer electronics manufacturers in Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan?  Yes, it’s free, but there’s more to it than that.  Android seems to have succeeded as an OEM OS because it’s directed at OEMs who are permitted to personalize it and extend it, and it provides enough base usability and touch-friendliness that OEMs want it.  In the process, it has become a de facto standard (which makes OEMs want it even more), and has done so in a remarkably short time: the OS was launched on a single phone in the US just 2 1/4 years ago. Despite its success and popularity, Apple’s iOS would never be used by OEMs, because it’s not meant to be embedded and customized, but rather to provide a fully finished experience.  Ironically, Windows Phone 7 is likewise disqualified from such embedded use.  Windows Mobile (6.x and earlier) may have been a candidate had it not atrophied so much in its final 5 years of life. What can Microsoft do?  It could start by developing a true touch-centric OS for tablets, whether that be within Windows 8, or derived from Windows Phone 7.  It would then need to deconstruct that finished product into components, via a new or altered version of Windows Embedded or Windows Embedded Compact.  And if Microsoft went that far, it would only make sense to work with its OEMs and mobile carriers to make certain they showcase their products using the OS at CES, and other consumer electronics venues, prominently. Mostly though, Microsoft would need to decide if it were really committed to putting sustained time, effort and money into a commodity product, especially given the far greater financial return that it now derives from its core Windows and Office franchises. Microsoft would need to see an OEM OS for what it is: a loss leader that helps build brand and platform momentum for up-level products.  Is that enough to make the investment worthwhile?  One thing is certain: if that question is not acknowledged and answered honestly, then any investment will be squandered.

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  • JavaOne Latin America Opening Keynotes

    - by Tori Wieldt
    Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone It was a great first day at JavaOne Brazil, which included the Java Strategy and Java Technical keynotes. Henrik Stahl, Senior Director, Product Management for Java opened the keynotes by saying that this is the third year for JavaOne Latin America. He explained, "You know what they say, the first time doesn't count, the second time is a habit and the third time it's a tradition!" He mentioned that he was thrilled that this is largest JavaOne in Brazil to date, and he wants next year to be larger. He said that Oracle knows Latin America is an important hub for development.  "We continually come back to Latin America because of the dedication the community has with driving the continued innovation for Java," he said. Stahl explained that Oracle and the Java community must continue to innovate and Make the Future Java together. The success of Java depends on three important factors: technological innovation, Oracle as a strong steward of Java, and community participation. "The Latin American Java Community (especially in Brazil) is a shining example of how to be positive contributor to Java," Stahl said. Next, George Saab, VP software dev, Java Platform Group at Oracle, discussed some of the recent and upcoming changes to Java. "In addition to the incremental improvements to Java 7, we have also increased the set of platforms supported by Oracle from Linux, Windows, and Solaris to now also include Mac OS X and Linux/ARM for ARM-based PCs such as the Raspberry Pi and emerging ARM based microservers."  Saab announced that EA builds for Linux ARM Hard Float ABI will be available by the end of the year.  Staffan Friberg, Product Manager, Java Platform Group, provided an overview of some of the language coming in Java 8, including Lambda, remove of PermGen, improved data and time APIs and improved security, Java 8 development is moving along. He reminded the audience that they can go to OpenJDK to see this development being done in real-time, and that there are weekly early access builds of OracleJDK 8 that developers can download and try today. Judson Althoff, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Alliances and Channels and Embedded Sales, was invited to the stage, and the audience was told that "even though he is wearing a suit, he is still pretty technical." Althoff started off with a bang: "The Internet of Things is on a collision course with big data and this is a huge opportunity for developers."  For example, Althoff said, today cars are more a data device than a mechanical device. A car embedded with sensors for fuel efficiency, temperature, tire pressure, etc. can generate a petabyte of data A DAY. There are similar examples in healthcare (patient monitoring and privacy requirements creates a complex data problem) and transportation management (sending a package around the world with sensors for humidity, temperature and light). Althoff then brought on stage representatives from three companies that are successful with Java today, first Axel Hansmann, VP Strategy & Marketing Communications, Cinterion. Mr. Hansmann explained that Cinterion, a market leader in Latin America, enables M2M services with Java. At JavaOne San Francisco, Cinterion launched the EHS5, the smallest 3g solderable module, with Java installed on it. This provides Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) with a cost effective, flexible platform for bringing advanced M2M technology to market.Next, Steve Nelson, Director of Marketing for the Americas, at Freescale explained that Freescale is #1 in Embedded Processors in Wired and Wireless Communications, and #1 in Automotive Semiconductors in the Americas. He said that Java provides a mature, proven platform that is uniquely suited to meet the requirements of almost any type of embedded device. He encouraged University students to get involved in the Freescale Cup, a global competition where student teams build, program, and race a model car around a track for speed.Roberto Franco, SBTVD Forum President, SBTVD, talked about Ginga, a Java-based standard for television in Brazil. He said there are 4 million Ginga TV sets in Brazil, and they expect over 20 million TV sets to be sold by the end of 2014. Ginga is also being adopted in other 11 countries in Latin America. Ginga brings interactive services not only at TV set, but also on other devices such as tablets,  PCs or smartphones, as the main or second screen. "Interactive services is already a reality," he said, ' but in a near future, we foresee interactivity enhanced TV content, convergence with OTT services and a big participation from the audience,  all integrated on TV, tablets, smartphones and second screen devices."Before he left the stage, Nandini Ramani thanked Judson for being part of the Java community and invited him to the next Geek Bike Ride in Brazil. She presented him an official geek bike ride jersey.For the Technical Keynote, a "blue screen of death" appeared. With mock concern, Stephin Chin asked the rest of the presenters if they could go on without slides. What followed was a interesting collection of demos, including JavaFX on a tablet, a look at Project Easel in NetBeans, and even Simon Ritter controlling legos with his brainwaves! Stay tuned for more dispatches.

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  • JavaOne Latin America Opening Keynotes

    - by Tori Wieldt
    It was a great first day at JavaOne Brazil, which included the Java Strategy and Java Technical keynotes. Henrik Stahl, Senior Director, Product Management for Java opened the keynotes by saying that this is the third year for JavaOne Latin America. He explained, "You know what they say, the first time doesn't count, the second time is a habit and the third time it's a tradition!" He mentioned that he was thrilled that this is largest JavaOne in Brazil to date, and he wants next year to be larger. He said that Oracle knows Latin America is an important hub for development.  "We continually come back to Latin America because of the dedication the community has with driving the continued innovation for Java," he said. Stahl explained that Oracle and the Java community must continue to innovate and Make the Future Java together. The success of Java depends on three important factors: technological innovation, Oracle as a strong steward of Java, and community participation. "The Latin American Java Community (especially in Brazil) is a shining example of how to be positive contributor to Java," Stahl said. Next, George Saab, VP software dev, Java Platform Group at Oracle, discussed some of the recent and upcoming changes to Java. "In addition to the incremental improvements to Java 7, we have also increased the set of platforms supported by Oracle from Linux, Windows, and Solaris to now also include Mac OS X and Linux/ARM for ARM-based PCs such as the Raspberry Pi and emerging ARM based microservers."  Saab announced that EA builds for Linux ARM Hard Float ABI will be available by the end of the year.  Staffan Friberg, Product Manager, Java Platform Group, provided an overview of some of the language coming in Java 8, including Lambda, remove of PermGen, improved data and time APIs and improved security, Java 8 development is moving along. He reminded the audience that they can go to OpenJDK to see this development being done in real-time, and that there are weekly early access builds of OracleJDK 8 that developers can download and try today. Judson Althoff, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Alliances and Channels and Embedded Sales, was invited to the stage, and the audience was told that "even though he is wearing a suit, he is still pretty technical." Althoff started off with a bang: "The Internet of Things is on a collision course with big data and this is a huge opportunity for developers."  For example, Althoff said, today cars are more a data device than a mechanical device. A car embedded with sensors for fuel efficiency, temperature, tire pressure, etc. can generate a petabyte of data A DAY. There are similar examples in healthcare (patient monitoring and privacy requirements creates a complex data problem) and transportation management (sending a package around the world with sensors for humidity, temperature and light). Althoff then brought on stage representatives from three companies that are successful with Java today, first Axel Hansmann, VP Strategy & Marketing Communications, Cinterion. Mr. Hansmann explained that Cinterion, a market leader in Latin America, enables M2M services with Java. At JavaOne San Francisco, Cinterion launched the EHS5, the smallest 3g solderable module, with Java installed on it. This provides Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) with a cost effective, flexible platform for bringing advanced M2M technology to market.Next, Steve Nelson, Director of Marketing for the Americas, at Freescale explained that Freescale is #1 in Embedded Processors in Wired and Wireless Communications, and #1 in Automotive Semiconductors in the Americas. He said that Java provides a mature, proven platform that is uniquely suited to meet the requirements of almost any type of embedded device. He encouraged University students to get involved in the Freescale Cup, a global competition where student teams build, program, and race a model car around a track for speed.Roberto Franco, SBTVD Forum President, SBTVD, talked about Ginga, a Java-based standard for television in Brazil. He said there are 4 million Ginga TV sets in Brazil, and they expect over 20 million TV sets to be sold by the end of 2014. Ginga is also being adopted in other 11 countries in Latin America. Ginga brings interactive services not only at TV set, but also on other devices such as tablets,  PCs or smartphones, as the main or second screen. "Interactive services is already a reality," he said, ' but in a near future, we foresee interactivity enhanced TV content, convergence with OTT services and a big participation from the audience,  all integrated on TV, tablets, smartphones and second screen devices."Before he left the stage, Nandini Ramani thanked Judson for being part of the Java community and invited him to the next Geek Bike Ride in Brazil. She presented him an official geek bike ride jersey.For the Technical Keynote, a "blue screen of death" appeared. With mock concern, Stephin Chin asked the rest of the presenters if they could go on without slides. What followed was a interesting collection of demos, including JavaFX on a tablet, a look at Project Easel in NetBeans, and even Simon Ritter controlling legos with his brainwaves! Stay tuned for more dispatches.

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  • Memento with optional state?

    - by Korey Hinton
    EDIT: As pointed out by Steve Evers and pdr, I am not correctly implementing the Memento pattern, my design is actually State pattern. Menu Program I built a console-based menu program with multiple levels that selects a particular test to run. Each level more precisely describes the operation. At any level you can type back to go back one level (memento). Level 1: Server Type? [1] Server A [2] Server B Level 2: Server environment? [1] test [2] production Level 3: Test type? [1] load [2] unit Level 4: Data Collection? [1] Legal docs [2] Corporate docs Level 4.5 (optional): Load Test Type [2] Multi TIF [2] Single PDF Level 5: Command Type? [1] Move [2] Copy [3] Remove [4] Custom Level 6: Enter a keyword [setup, cleanup, run] Design States PROBLEM: Right now the STATES enum is the determining factor as to what state is BACK and what state is NEXT yet it knows nothing about what the current memento state is. Has anyone experienced a similar issue and found an effective way to handle mementos with optional state? static enum STATES { SERVER, ENVIRONMENT, TEST_TYPE, COLLECTION, COMMAND_TYPE, KEYWORD, FINISHED } Possible Solution (Not-flexible) In reference to my code below, every case statement in the Menu class could check the state of currentMemo and then set the STATE (enum) accordingly to pass to the Builder. However, this doesn't seem flexible very flexible to change and I'm struggling to see an effective way refactor the design. class Menu extends StateConscious { private State state; private Scanner reader; private ServerUtils utility; Menu() { state = new State(); reader = new Scanner(System.in); utility = new ServerUtils(); } // Recurring menu logic public void startPromptingLoop() { List<State> states = new ArrayList<>(); states.add(new State()); boolean redoInput = false; boolean userIsDone = false; while (true) { // get Memento from last loop Memento currentMemento = states.get(states.size() - 1) .saveMemento(); if (currentMemento == null) currentMemento = new Memento.Builder(0).build(); if (!redoInput) System.out.println(currentMemento.prompt); redoInput = false; // prepare Memento for next loop Memento nextMemento = null; STATES state = STATES.values()[states.size() - 1]; // get user input String selection = reader.nextLine(); switch (selection) { case "exit": reader.close(); return; // only escape case "quit": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); states.clear(); break; case "back": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(previous(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); if (states.size() <= 1) { states.remove(0); } else { states.remove(states.size() - 1); states.remove(states.size() - 1); } break; case "1": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "2": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "3": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "4": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; default: if (state.equals(STATES.CATEGORY)) { String command = selection; System.out.println("Executing " + command + " command on: " + currentMemento.type + " " + currentMemento.environment); utility.executeCommand(currentMemento.nickname, command); userIsDone = true; states.clear(); nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); } else if (state.equals(STATES.KEYWORD)) { nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); states.clear(); nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); } else { redoInput = true; System.out.println("give it another try"); continue; } break; } if (userIsDone) { // start the recurring menu over from the beginning for (int i = 0; i < states.size(); i++) { if (i != 0) { states.remove(i); // remove all except first } } reader = new Scanner(System.in); this.state = new State(); userIsDone = false; } if (!redoInput) { this.state.restoreMemento(nextMemento); states.add(this.state); } } } }

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  • 7 Steps To Cut Recruiting Costs & Drive Exceptional Business Results

    - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies
    By Steve Viarengo, Vice President Product Management, Oracle Taleo Cloud Services  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In good times, trimming operational costs is an ongoing goal. In tough times, it’s a necessity. In both good times and bad, however, recruiting occurs. Growth increases headcount in good times, and opportunistic or replacement hiring occurs in slow business cycles. By employing creative recruiting strategies in tandem with the latest technology developments, you can reduce recruiting costs while driving exceptional business results. Here are some critical areas to focus on. 1.  Target Direct Cost Savings Total recruiting process expenses are the sum of external costs plus internal labor costs. Most organizations can reduce recruiting expenses with direct cost savings. While additional savings on indirect costs can be realized from process improvement and efficiency gains, there are direct cost savings and benefits readily available in three broad areas: sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting. 2. Sourcing: Reduce Agency Costs Agency search firm fees can amount to 35 percent of a new employee’s annual base salary. Typically taken from the hiring department budget, these fees may not be visible to HR. By relying on internal mobility programs, referrals, candidate pipelines, and corporate career Websites, organizations can reduce or eliminate this agency spend. And when you do have to pay third-party agency fees, you can optimize the value you receive by collaborating with agencies to identify referred candidates, ensure access to candidate data and history, and receive automatic notifications and correspondence. 3. Sourcing: Reduce Advertising Costs You can realize significant cost reductions by placing all job positions on your corporate career Website. This will allow you to reap a substantial number of candidates at minimal cost compared to job boards and other sourcing options. 4.  Sourcing: Internal Talent Pool Internal talent pools provide a way to reduce sourcing and advertising costs while delivering improved productivity and retention. Internal redeployment reduces costs and ramp-up time while increasing retention and employee satisfaction. 5.  Sourcing: External Talent Pool Strategic recruiting requires identifying and matching people with a given set of skills to a particular job while efficiently allocating sourcing expenditures. By using an e-recruiting system (which drives external talent pool management) with a candidate relationship database, you can automate prescreening and candidate matching while communicating with targeted candidates. Candidate relationship management can lower sourcing costs by marketing new job opportunities to candidates sourced in the past. By mining the talent pool in this fashion, you eliminate the need to source a new pool of candidates for each new requisition. Managing and mining the corporate candidate database can reduce the sourcing cost per candidate by as much as 50 percent. 6.  Assessments: Reduce Turnover Costs By taking advantage of assessments during the recruitment process, you can achieve a range of benefits, including better productivity, superior candidate performance, and lower turnover (providing considerable savings). Assessments also save recruiter and hiring manager time by focusing on a short list of qualified candidates. Hired for fit, such candidates tend to stay with the organization and produce quality work—ultimately driving revenue.  7. Green Recruiting: Reduce Paper and Processing Costs You can reduce recruiting costs by automating the process—and making it green. A paperless process informs candidates that you’re dedicated to green recruiting. It also leads to direct cost savings. E-recruiting reduces energy use and pollution associated with manufacturing, transporting, and recycling paper products. And process automation saves energy in mailing, storage, handling, filing, and reporting tasks. Direct cost savings come from reduced paperwork related to résumés, advertising, and onboarding. Improving the recruiting process through sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting not only saves costs. It also positions the company to improve the talent base during the recession while retaining the ability to grow appropriately in recovery. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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  • JavaDay Taipei 2014 Trip Report

    - by reza_rahman
    JavaDay Taipei 2014 was held at the Taipei International Convention Center on August 1st. Organized by Oracle University, it is one of the largest Java developer events in Taiwan. This was another successful year for JavaDay Taipei with a fully sold out venue packed with youthful, energetic developers (this was my second time at the event and I have already been invited to speak again next year!). In addition to Oracle speakers like me, Steve Chin and Naveen Asrani, the event also featured a bevy of local speakers including Taipei Java community leaders. Topics included Java SE, Java EE, JavaFX, cloud and Big Data. It was my pleasure and privilege to present one of the opening keynotes for the event. I presented my session on Java EE titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". I covered the changes in Java EE 7 as well as what's coming in Java EE 8. I demoed the Cargo Tracker Java EE BluePrints. I also briefly talked about Adopt-a-JSR for Java EE 8. The slides for the keynote are below (click here to download and view the actual PDF): It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, just click here to download the PDF file. In the afternoon I did my JavaScript + Java EE 7 talk titled "Using JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients with Java EE 7". This talk is basically about aligning EE 7 with the emerging JavaScript ecosystem (specifically AngularJS). The talk was completely packed. The slide deck for the talk is here: JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients Using Java EE 7 from Reza Rahman The demo application code is posted on GitHub. The code should be a helpful resource if this development model is something that interests you. Do let me know if you need help with it but the instructions should be fairly self-explanatory. I am delivering this material at JavaOne 2014 as a two-hour tutorial. This should give me a little more bandwidth to dig a little deeper, especially on the JavaScript end. I finished off Java Day Taipei with my talk titled "Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE" (this was the last session of the conference). The talk covers an interesting gap that there is surprisingly little material on out there. The talk has three parts -- a birds-eye view of the NoSQL landscape, how to use NoSQL via a JPA centric facade using EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, DataNucleus, Kundera, Easy-Cassandra, etc and how to use NoSQL native APIs in Java EE via CDI. The slides for the talk are here: Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE from Reza Rahman The JPA based demo is available here, while the CDI based demo is available here. Both demos use MongoDB as the data store. Do let me know if you need help getting the demos up and running. After the event the Oracle University folks hosted a reception in the evening which was very well attended by organizers, speakers and local Java community leaders. I am extremely saddened by the fact that this otherwise excellent trip was scarred by terrible tragedy. After the conference I joined a few folks for a hike on the Maokong Mountain on Saturday. The group included friends in the Taiwanese Java community including Ian and Robbie Cheng. Without warning, fatal tragedy struck on a remote part of the trail. Despite best efforts by us, the excellent Taiwanese Emergency Rescue Team and World class Taiwanese physicians we were unable to save our friend Robbie Cheng's life. Robbie was just thirty-four years old and is survived by his younger brother, mother and father. Being the father of a young child myself, I can only imagine the deep sorrow that this senseless loss unleashes. Robbie was a key member of the Taiwanese Java community and a Java Evangelist at Sun at one point. Ironically the only picture I was able to take of the trail was mere moments before tragedy. I thought I should place him in that picture in profoundly respectful memoriam: Perhaps there is some solace in the fact that there is something inherently honorable in living a bright life, dying young and meeting one's end on a beautiful remote mountain trail few venture to behold let alone attempt to ascend in a long and tired lifetime. Perhaps I'd even say it's a fate I would not entirely regret facing if it were my own. With that thought in mind it seems appropriate to me to quote some lyrics from the song "Runes to My Memory" by legendary Swedish heavy metal band Amon Amarth idealizing a fallen Viking warrior cut down in his prime: "Here I lie on wet sand I will not make it home I clench my sword in my hand Say farewell to those I love When I am dead Lay me in a mound Place my weapons by my side For the journey to Hall up high When I am dead Lay me in a mound Raise a stone for all to see Runes carved to my memory" I submit my deepest condolences to Robbie's family and hope my next trip to Taiwan ends in a less somber note.

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  • Eloqua Experience 2013: Mystique, Modern Marketing and Masterful Engagement

    - by Mike Stiles
    The following is a guest post from Erick Mott, a social business leader at Oracle Eloqua. There’s a growing gap between 20th century marketing and a modern marketing way of doing business. I can’t think of a better example of modern marketing in action than what more than 2,000 people experienced in San Francisco at #EE13; customer-obsession, multichannel content, and real-time engagement all coming together at one extraordinary event. This was my first Eloqua Experience as a new Oracle Eloqua employee. In weeks prior, I heard about the mystique but didn’t know what to expect. What I’ve come to understand with more clarity is everything we do revolves around customer success, and we operate and educate at all times with these five tenets in mind: 1. Targeting: Really Know Your Buyer 2. Engagement: Create a 1:1 Relationship 3. Conversion: Visualize Guided Thinking 4. Analysis: Learn What’s Working 5. Marketing Technology: Enable and Extend the Cloud Product News from Eloqua Experience 2013 We made some announcements that John Stetic, VP of Products, Oracle Eloqua covers in this brief ‘Modern Marketing Minute’ video recorded after Wednesday’s keynote; summarized below, too: Oracle Eloqua AdFocus: While understanding the impact of a specific marketing channel was formerly relegated to marketers’ wish lists, the channels we now focus on are digital, social, and mobile. AdFocus gives marketers a single platform to dynamically create, manage and measure display ads alongside owned and earned media. AdFocus enables marketers to target only key accounts or prospects you want to reach with display ads, as well as provide creative content or personalized ad copy based on their persona and activities. Oracle Eloqua Profiler: The details of what we now know about customers have expanded into a universal customer profile, which can be used to create highly targeted segments. Marketers now can take data that’s not even stored in Eloqua to help targeted and score prospects for a complete, multichannel view of the customer. Profiler gives sales reps one, detailed view of the prospect to extend views beyond Oracle Eloqua asset activity (emails, forms, page views) to any external assets stored in Oracle Eloqua. Marketing Resource Management: New capabilities create more secure and controlled access to marketing resources and data. New integrations provide greater insight into campaign resources and management through a central marketing calendar and simplify resource management. Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnel: An integrated sales and marketing funnel view gives marketing and sales users, cross-functional teams, and executive management a consistent and clear view of pipeline performance. It also quickly provides users with historical metrics across different time spans and conditions. Eloqua AppCloud: More than 20 new AppCloud partners have been added to the community, which now includes 100+ apps. Eloqua AppCloud now provides modern marketers with an even broader range of marketing applications that help expand and enrich sales and marketing efforts; easily accessible in the Topliners Community. Social Capabilities: Recent integration between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) deliver a comprehensive, scalable and integrated modern marketing solution. New capabilities include better tracking of social activities for a more complete customer profile. Engage Facebook custom audiences with AdFocus to deliver ads and meaningful experiences through trusted social networks. Biggest and Best Eloqua Experience. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the Marketing Cloud. At Oracle Eloqua, we have been on a mission of delivering the most advanced and integrated modern marketing technology on the planet. It’s not just a concept but reality with proven execution, as seen first-hand this week in San Francisco. In this video, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP of Oracle Eloqua, provides some highlights of what made this year’s Eloqua Experience, exceptional, including Steve Woods’ presentation about the journey of modern marketers and Andrea Ward’s conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator of the Breaking Bad television series. The 2013 Markie Awards The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud was best exemplified for me as 19 Markies were awarded to customers for their exceptional creativity and results as modern marketers. Wow, what a night to remember with so many committed and talented people working to create an extraordinary experience! To learn more about how to become a modern marketer, check out these resources. We look forward to seeing you next year at Eloqua Experience. More on Erick: 20 years experience at Oracle, Ektron, Sitecore, Lyris, Habeas, Nokia, creatorbase, Mark Monitor, Cisco Systems, GlobalFluency, Sun Microsystems, Philips NV, Elm Products and CBS TV. Patent holder with agency, Fortune 500, media, and startup company expertise. @mikestiles

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  • Access Control Service V2 and Facebook Integration

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    I haven’t been blogging about ACS2 in the past because it was not released and I was kinda busy with other stuff. Needless to say I spent quite some time with ACS2 already (both in customer situations as well as in the classroom and at conferences). ACS2 rocks! It’s IMHO the most interesting and useful (and most unique) part of the whole Azure offering! For my talk at VSLive yesterday, I played a little with the Facebook integration. See Steve’s post on the general setup. One claim that you get back from Facebook is an access token. This token can be used to directly talk to Facebook and query additional properties about the user. Which properties you have access to depends on which authorization your Facebook app requests. You can specify this in the identity provider registration page for Facebook in ACS2. In my example I added access to the home town property of the user. Once you have the access token from ACS you can use e.g. the Facebook SDK from Codeplex (also available via NuGet) to talk to the Facebook API. In my sample I used the WIF ClaimsAuthenticationManager to add the additional home town claim. This is not necessarily how you would do it in a “real” app. Depends ;) The code looks like this (sample code!): public class ClaimsTransformer : ClaimsAuthenticationManager {     public override IClaimsPrincipal Authenticate( string resourceName, IClaimsPrincipal incomingPrincipal)     {         if (!incomingPrincipal.Identity.IsAuthenticated)         {             return base.Authenticate(resourceName, incomingPrincipal);         }         string accessToken;         if (incomingPrincipal.TryGetClaimValue( "http://www.facebook.com/claims/AccessToken", out accessToken))         {             try             {                 var home = GetFacebookHometown(accessToken);                 if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(home))                 {                     incomingPrincipal.Identities[0].Claims.Add( new Claim("http://www.facebook.com/claims/HomeTown", home));                 }             }             catch { }         }         return incomingPrincipal;     }      private string GetFacebookHometown(string token)     {         var client = new FacebookClient(token);         dynamic parameters = new ExpandoObject();         parameters.fields = "hometown";         dynamic result = client.Get("me", parameters);         return result.hometown.name;     } }  

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  • Windows 8/Surface Lunch Event Summary

    - by Tim Murphy
    Today was a big day for Microsoft with two separate launch event.  The first for Windows 8 and all of it’s hardware partners.  The second was specifically to introduce the Microsoft Windows 8 Surface tablet.  Below are some of the take-aways I got from the webcasts. Windows 8 Launch The three general area that Microsoft focused on were the release of the OS itself, the public unveiling of the Windows Store and the new devices available from its hardware partners. The release of the OS focused on the fact that it will be available at mid-night tonight for both new PCs and for upgrades.  I can’t say that this interested me that much since it was already known to most people.  I think what they did show well was how easy the OS really is to use. The Windows Store is also not a new feature to those of us who have been running the pre-release versions of Windows 8 or have owned Windows Phone 7 for the past 2 years.  What was interesting is that the Windows Store launches with more apps available than any other platforms store at their respective launch.  I think this says a lot about how Microsoft focuses on the ability of developers to create software and make it available.  The of course were sure to emphasize that the Windows Store has better monetary terms for developers than its competitors. The also showed off the fact that XBox Music streaming is available for to all Windows 8 user for free.  Couple this with the Bing suite of apps that give you news, weather, sports and finance right out of the box and I think most people will find the environment a joy to use. I think the hardware demo, while quick and furious, really show where Windows shine: CHOICE!  They made a statement that over 1000 devices have been certified for Windows 8.  They showed tablets, laptops, desktops, all-in-ones and convertibles.  Since these devices have industry standard connectors they give a much wider variety of accessories and devices that you can use with them. Steve Balmer then came on stage and tried to see how many times he could use the “magical”.  He focused on how the Windows 8 OS is designed to integrate with SkyDrive, Skype and Outlook.com.  He also enforced that they think Windows 8 is the best choice for the Enterprise when it comes to protecting data and integrating across devices including Windows Phone 8. With that we were left to wait for the second event of the day. Surface Launch The second event of the day started with kids with magnets.  Ok, they were adults, but who doesn’t like playing with magnets.  Steven Sinofsky detached and reattached the Surface keyboard repeatedly, clearly enjoying himself.  It turns out that there are 4 magnets in the cover, 2 for alignment and 2 as connectors. They then went to giving us the details on the display.  The 10.6” display is optically bonded to the case and is optimized to reduce glare.  I think this came through very well in the demonstrations. The properties of the case were also a great selling point.  The VaporMg allowed them to drop the device on stage, on purpose, and continue working.  Of course they had to bring out the skate boards made from Surface devices. “It just has to feel right” was the reason they gave for many of their design decisions from the weight and size of the device to the way the kickstand and camera work together.  While this gave you the feeling that the whole process was trial and error you could tell that a lot of science went into the specs.  This included making sure that the magnets were strong enough to hold the cover on and still have a 3 year old remove the cover without effort. I am glad that they also decided the a USB port would be part of the spec since it give so many options.  They made the point that this allows Surface to leverage over 420 million existing devices.  That works for me. The last feature that I really thought was important was the microSD port.  Begin stuck with the onboard memory has been an aggravation of mine with many of the devices in the market today. I think they did job of really getting the audience to understand why you want this platform and this particular device.  Using personal examples like creating a video of a birthday party and being in it or the fact that the device was being used to live blog the event and control the lights and presentation.  They showed very well that it was not only fun but very capable of getting real work done.  Handing out tablets to the crowd didn’t hurt either.  In the end I really wanted a Surface even though I really have no need for one on a daily basis.  Great job Microsoft! del.icio.us Tags: Windows 8,Win8,Windows 8 Luanch

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  • IIS logs show sc-win32-status=64 but only through some networks

    - by wweicker
    I have an ASP.NET application running on a client server (W2k3, IIS6, .NET 2.0). FWIW, this is a Test instance, it hasn't been moved into Production yet. So it is not running under SSL, load balancing, etc. When I access one of the pages on their server from our office, the page gets hit once. Inspecting the IIS logs (c:WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\W3SVC1) show a GET for that page, then I push a button on the page and the log file shows a POST. This seems to be working fine so far. Now when I remote into the client's network and access the page from one of their local machines, the log file shows a GET, then I push the button on the page and the log shows two POSTs at the same second. The first one shows status (sc-status, sc-substatus, sc-win32-status) 200 0 64, the second shows 200 0 0. In the log file, both POSTs are identical. Basically the log looks like this (except I masked some of the data): #Fields: date time s-ip cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status 2009-08-11 20:19:32 x.x.x.x GET /File.aspx - 80 - y.y.y.y Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+8.0;+Windows+NT+6.0;+WOW64;+Trident/4.0;+SLCC1;+.NET+CLR+2.0.50727;+.NET+CLR+3.5.21022;+.NET+CLR+3.5.30729;+.NET+CLR+3.0.30618;+MDDR;+OfficeLiveConnector.1.4;+OfficeLivePatch.0.0) 200 0 0 2009-08-11 20:19:45 x.x.x.x POST /File.aspx - 80 - y.y.y.y Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+8.0;+Windows+NT+6.0;+WOW64;+Trident/4.0;+SLCC1;+.NET+CLR+2.0.50727;+.NET+CLR+3.5.21022;+.NET+CLR+3.5.30729;+.NET+CLR+3.0.30618;+MDDR;+OfficeLiveConnector.1.4;+OfficeLivePatch.0.0) 200 0 64 2009-08-11 20:19:45 x.x.x.x POST /File.aspx - 80 - y.y.y.y Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+8.0;+Windows+NT+6.0;+WOW64;+Trident/4.0;+SLCC1;+.NET+CLR+2.0.50727;+.NET+CLR+3.5.21022;+.NET+CLR+3.5.30729;+.NET+CLR+3.0.30618;+MDDR;+OfficeLiveConnector.1.4;+OfficeLivePatch.0.0) 200 0 0 The problem is, the page is getting hit twice. The database performs an operation for the first request, then the second request detects that a duplicate operation is being performed and throws an error message. The users think their operation failed, but it actually succeeded. The error description of sc-win32-status 64 is: "The specified network name is no longer available." This leads me to believe, given that both POST requests show an HTTP status of 200, that the server is successful in serving the request, but the client is never notified and resubmits the request. How can I troubleshoot this? Any ideas what could be causing this behavior on their internal network only? I should mention, this is happening at two separate client sites, but does not happen at six of our other client sites, or in our office, or connecting to any of our eight clients over the web. What could be making this reproducible 100% of the time on their local network but 0% of the time anywhere else? Update: I found a very small number of the duplicated POST requests had sc-win32-status of 995 instead of 64 as originally reported. The error description of sc-win32-status=995 is: "The I/O operation has been aborted because of either a thread exit or an application request." This doesn't make any sense (considering I have full access to the code). I still don't understand how or why this issue is occurring, but the new error code leads me to believe it may not be a network issue after all and I am now investigating the possibility of a random code bug.

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  • Cannot turn on "Network Discovery and File Sharing" when Windows Firewall is enabled

    - by Cheeso
    I have a problem similar to this one. Windows Firewall prevents File and Printer sharing from working and Why does File and Printer Sharing keep turning off in Windows 7? I cannot turn on Network Discovery. This is Windows 7 Home Premium, x64. It's a Dell XPS 1340 and Windows came installed from the OEM. This used to work. Now it doesn't. I don't know what has changed. In windows Explorer, the UI looks like this: When I click the yellow panel that says "Click to change...", the panel disappears, then immediately reappears, with exactly the same text. If I go through the control panel "Network and Sharing Center" thing, the UI looks like this: If I tick the box to "turn on network discovery", the "Save Changes" button becomes enabled. If I then click that button, the dialog box just closes, with no message or confirmation. Re-opening the same dialog box shows that Network Discovery has not been turned on. If I turn off Windows Firewall, I can then turn on Network Discovery via either method. The machine is connected to a wireless home network, via a router. The network is marked as "Home Network" in the Network and Sharing Center, which I think corresponds to the "Private" profile in Windows Firewall Advanced Settings app. (Confirm?) The PC is not part of a domain, and has never been part of a domain. The machine is not bridging any networks. There is a regular 100baseT connector but I have the network adapter for that disabled in Windows. Something else that seems odd. Within Windows Firewall Advanced Settings, there are no predefined rules available. If I click the "New Rule...." Action on the action pane, the "Predefined" option is greyed out. like this: In order to attempt to allow the network discovery protocols through on the private network, I hand-coded a bunch of rules, intending to allow the necessary UPnP and WDP protocols supporting network discovery. I copied them from a working Windows 7 Ultimate PC, running on the same network. This did not work. Even with the hand-coded rules, I still cannot turn on Network Discovery. I looked on the interwebs, and the only solution that appears to work is a re-install of Windows. Seriously? If I try netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Network Discovery" new enable=Yes ...it says "No rules match the specified criteria" EDIT: by the way, these services are running. DNS Client Function Discovery Resource Publication SSDP Discovery UPnP Device Host in any case, since it works with no firewall, I would assume all necessary services are present and running. The issue is a firewall thing, but I don't know how to diagnose further, or fix it. Q1: Is there a way to definitively insure the correct holes are punched through the Windows Firewall to allow Network Discovery to function? Q2: Should I expect the "predefined" firewall rules to be greyed out? Q3: Why did this change?

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  • Troubleshooting inconsistent ODBC connectivity

    - by Chris
    I'm attempting to integrate UPS WorldShip with a SQL Server 2008 R2 database but the connection is very inconsistent. UPS claims this is a DSN/Windows problem and I have not been able to convince them otherwise. The integration is quite simple: my shipping guy clicks a button which opens a form where he enters an order #. After pressing enter the shipping information will be pulled from the database for that order #. The problem is that WorldShip often times thinks the DSN does not exist. However, I am able to open WorldShip's customization tool and browse all the tables and fields in the database my DSN is connected to which means at the very least my DSN does, in fact, exist. The reason this has been so difficult to troubleshoot is because there is no consistency to the problem and I'm not able to reliably repeat any behavior. That is to say that rebooting the PC doesn't cause the connection to break and opening the integration tool and viewing the tables and fields doesn't cause the integration button to work. Is there some way for me to monitor this connection from the SQL server or get any clues as to why it fails? As requested by TallTed here is a sample of the trace file I created. After a mere 5 hours the trace file was over 130MB so there's no way I could provide it in its entirety. WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLSetStmtAttrW with return code -1 (SQL_ERROR) SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1227 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1227] SQLINTEGER -5 DIAG [IM006] [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Driver's SQLSetConnectAttr failed (0) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLAllocHandle SQLSMALLINT 3 <SQL_HANDLE_STMT> SQLHANDLE 0x0C662FC0 SQLHANDLE * 0x03EBCE38 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLAllocHandle with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) SQLSMALLINT 3 <SQL_HANDLE_STMT> SQLHANDLE 0x0C662FC0 SQLHANDLE * 0x03EBCE38 ( 0x0C6632A0) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLSetStmtAttrW SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 0 <SQL_ATTR_QUERY_TIMEOUT> SQLPOINTER 30 SQLINTEGER -5 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLSetStmtAttrW with return code -1 (SQL_ERROR) SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 0 <SQL_ATTR_QUERY_TIMEOUT> SQLPOINTER 30 SQLINTEGER -5 DIAG [HYC00] [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver]Optional feature not implemented (106) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLGetDiagFieldW SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLGetDiagFieldW with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 (10) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLGetInfoW HDBC 0x0C662FC0 UWORD 77 <SQL_DRIVER_ODBC_VER> PTR 0x03EBCEDC SWORD 100 SWORD * 0x0028E290 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLGetInfoW with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) HDBC 0x0C662FC0 UWORD 77 <SQL_DRIVER_ODBC_VER> PTR 0x03EBCEDC [ 10] "03.51" SWORD 100 SWORD * 0x0028E290 (10) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLSetStmtAttrW SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1228 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1228] SQLINTEGER -5 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLSetStmtAttrW with return code -1 (SQL_ERROR) SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1228 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1228] SQLINTEGER -5 DIAG [HY092] [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver]Invalid attribute/option identifier (86) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLGetDiagFieldW SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLGetDiagFieldW with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 (10) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLSetStmtAttrW SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1227 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1227] SQLINTEGER -5 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLSetStmtAttrW with return code -1 (SQL_ERROR) SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1227 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1227] SQLINTEGER -5 DIAG [HY092] [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver]Invalid attribute/option identifier (86) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLGetDiagFieldW SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLGetDiagFieldW with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 (10)

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  • How can I work around problems with certificate configuration in Remote Desktop Services?

    - by Michael Steele
    I am setting up a Remote Desktop Services farm, and am having trouble configuring certificates for it to use. A demonstration of the problem I'm seeing can be found in Step #4. At this point I am convinced that there are problems with the user interface, and am looking for ways around them. Is there any way to configure certificates in Remote Desktop Services so that the settings hold and are reflected in the GUI? If not, is there any way for me to verify that the settings are correct? Step #1 - Create certificate to be used. I've configured a certificate to use with RD Web Access. The certificate is stored with in the Certificates MMC on my RD Connection Broker, and I am configuring the farm from that computer. I found by letting RD Web Access generate its own certificate that the following properties are required: Enhanced Key Usage Server Authentication Client Authentication This may not be required, but the self-signed certificate includes it. Key Usage Digital Signature Key Agreement Subject Alternative Name DNS Name=domain.com Detour about self-signed certificate generation As a quick detour, I was able to work around a problem with creating self-signed certificates using powershell. The documentation for the New-RDCertificate cmdlet gives the following example: PS C:\> $password = ConvertTo-SecureString -string "password" -asplaintext -force New-RDCertificate -Role RDWebAccess -DnsName "test-rdwa.contoso.com" -Password $password -ConnectionBroker rdcb.contoso.com -ExportPath "c:\test-rdwa.pfx" Typing this into the shell will result in an error message claiming that a function, Get-Server cannot be found. Prior to using New-RDCertificate, you must import the RemoteDesktop Module with Import-Module RemoteDesktop. Step #2 - Observe out-of-box behavior The first time you visit the Deployment Properties dialog box by navigating to Server Manager - Remote Desktop Services - Collections and selecting "Edit Deployment Properties" from the "TASKS" dropdown list in the "COLLECTIONS" grouping, you will see the following screen: This window is misleading because the level field is listed as "Not Configured". If I understand correctly all three of the role services are using a self-signed certificate. For the RD Web Access role this can be verified by visiting the website: The certificate being used also appears in the Certificates MMC: Step #3 - Assign new certificate The Deployment Properties dialog box will allow me to select my existing certificate. The certificate must be placed within the local computers Certificates MMC in the "Personal" certificate store. The private key will need to be exportable, and you will need to provide the password. I temporarily exported my certificate to a file named temp.pfx with a password, and then imported it into Remote Desktop Services from there. Once this is done the GUI will indicate that it is ready to accept the new configuration. Once I click the "Apply" button, the GUI indicates success. This can be verified by visiting the RD Web Access web site a second time. There is no certificate error. Step #4 - The GUI fails to maintain its state If the GUI is closed and reopened, all of these settings appear to be lost. Actually, the certificate I configured is still being used. I am able to continue accessing the RD Web Access site without any certificate errors. Oddly, if I use the "Create new certificate..." button to generate a self-signed certificate this window will update to an "Untrusted" level. This setting will then be maintained through the opening and closing of the Deployment Properties dialog box. Is there anything I can do to have my settings appear to stick? I feel like something is wrong when the GUI claims I haven't fully configured certificates.

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  • Computer not POSTing "randomly"?

    - by smoth190
    I have a custom built PC that is exhibiting some...odd... behavior, something I've never seen before. It was working fine one day, and the next day, it wouldn't start. Seeing as I wanted an upgrade anyway, I purchased a new motherboard that was compatible with all my parts. While replacing the motherboard, I accidentally damaged the CPU. Well, I wanted a new one anyway... so I got a new one. Seeing as I was replacing a ton of parts already, I bought a new PSU because the old one was super loud. When I slapped it all together, it starts up, lights, fans, drives, they all start. But I get no display from the monitor. No beeps, which I believe means it doesn't POST. I figured it was the RAM, because after removing the sound card and graphics card, there was nothing else that I hadn't replaced. When I remove both sticks of RAM, I get a continuous beeping, and according to the mobo handbook, means no RAM. So I think the mobo is functional, or atleast partly. I bought new RAM, but it still didn't work. I tried 3 monitors, with both VGA and DIV. So it's probably not the monitor, either. Now, let me get to the random part. Every 20 or so boots (I should also mention, for about 3 out of 5 boots I have to unplug the PC because it won't powerdown via the button), it will POST and I'll get display. Then, after about 2 or 3 resets, it won't work again. This confuses me so much, because even when I change nothing, it will/will not work. My thought is that maybe it has something to do with the RAM not clearing or something. I also reset the CMOS battery, incase that had anything to do with it, but no eval. I found some weird suggestion online about holding the power button for 30 seconds while it was unplugged. That did nothing, but I didn't expect it would... I've replaced just about the entire computer, and all the parts are compatible. Done about everything I can think of, but nothing has worked. Hopefully someone can help me here. And as I side note: When I do get my computer to boot, it says my hardware has changed and I have to re-activate windows. But it says I have to call Microsoft to do it. So I get this fancy automated voice that asks me to enter in a code into windows, then it asks me "How many computers have you activated with this copy of Windows?". Well, I had it on my computer before I replaced everything, so I said 1. Then he yelled at me for violating my 1-use license. I dunno what's going on there, do I have to re-purchase Windows 7? And they wonder why people pirate software... That's just a bonus question, though. Specs: 8GB of DDR2 RAM (Corsair) AMD CPU (I don't know what GHz or model because I can't find the box... (I think its 4 cores of 2.8Ghz) ASRock A785GM-LE Motherboard

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  • Vista 64-bit, DISK BOOT FAILURE

    - by weka
    So I have this Acer Aspire AX3200-U3600A with Windows Vista (64-bit). Every night I turn it off and turn it back on in the morning. Around three weeks ago, I did a fresh factory reimage. Good as new. Then around two days ago, when I turned it on, I noticed it was running extremly slow. As in, it would often freeze up while I had multiple applications open when it usually never froze up. So I decided to restart my computer. Big mistake. My computer froze right after I clicked shut-down. I waited a while. Nothing. Waited some minutes. Nope. I decided to shut it down by pressing the power button. Here is where the problems begin. When I turned it back on, I saw the Windows logo and loading bar and then it loaded to black. I turned it off again forcefully by power button and then once more... then I got: AMD Data Change... Update New Data to DMI! then later the screen clears and I get: AHCI Option ROM BIOS Revision: 01.05.92 Date: 02-19-2008 Copyright (c) 2006-2008 Phoenix Technologies, LTD Port 01: Reset Port Error!! Port 02: then the screen clears again but this time, this loads from the bottom: Nvidia Boot Agent 249.0542 (copyright stuff... blah blah) PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable. PXE-M0F: Exiting Nvidia Boot Agent DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER. So I try to go into Safe Mode. Well, first of all it doesn't load as fast. After it loads disk.sys from windows/drivers, it will wait a while (2-3 mins) THEN load. However it loads the Acer eRecovery Management Tool. I have three options: Reset computer to factory default, Restore computer from user's backup, or Exit. However, the top two options are gray and disabled where as the Exit is in blue and definitely clickable. So obviously safe mode is not there... A strong thing to note: In the beginning when all of this started, I did a Boot Windows Normal from pressing f8 and I got to my desktop! It logged me in. I could see the icons on my files. However my desktop was extremely slow as in when I clicked on the Start menu, it would wait a while, then load up the menu with JUST the gradient, no text or icons... so as you can see... it saw my HDD? Also, before anyone says, I have NO USB plugged in. My mouse and keyboard are not USB inputs, I assure you. And this came without a recovery CD AND when I went in BIOS, to change the BOOT ORDER, I did NOT see a CD-ROM option. And when I tried pressing ALT+F10 to get into Acer eRecovery Management, the top two options were disabled as well. But sometimes on start-up, I get: Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer. This error can be caused by unplugging a removable storage device such as an external USB drive while the device is in use, or by faulty hardware such as a hard drive or CD-ROM drive that is failing. Make sure any removeable storage is properly connected and then restart your computer. If you continue to receive this error message, contact the hardware manufacturer. Status: 0xc00000e9 Info: An unexpected I/O error has occured. Then I tried Last Known Good Configuration Settings, that gives me a BSOD. What should I do/

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  • Generating a twitter OAuth access key - the semi-manual way

    - by Piet
    [UPDATE] Apparently someone at Twitter was listening, or I’m going senile/blind. Let’s call it a combination of both. Instead of following all the steps below, you could just login with the Twitter account you want to use on http://dev.twitter.com, register your application and then click ‘Edit Details’ on the application overview page at http://dev.twitter.com/apps. Next click the ‘Application detail’ button on the right, followed by the ‘My Access Token’ button in order to get your Access Token and Access Token Secret. This makes the old post below rather obsolete. Clearly a case of me thinking everything is a nail and ruby is a hammer (don’t they usually say this about java coders?) [ORIGINAL POST] OAuth is great! OAuth allows your application to use your user’s data without the need to ask for their password. So Twitter made the API much safer for their and your users. Hurray! Free pizza for everyone! Unless of course you’re using the Twitter API for your own needs like running your own bot and don’t need access to other user’s data. In such cases a simple username/password combination is more than enough. I can understand however that the Twitter guys don’t really care that much about these exceptions(?). Most such uses for the API are probably rather spammy in nature. !!! If you have a twitter app that uses the API to access external user’s data: look for another solution. This solution is ONLY meant when you ONLY need access to your own account(s) through the API. Other Solutions Mr Dallas Devries posted a solution here which involves requesting and scraping a one-time PIN. But: I like to minimize the amount of calls I make to twitter’s API or pages to lessen my chances of meeting the fail whale. Also, as soon as the pin isn’t included in a div called ‘oauth_pin’ anymore, this will fail. However, mr Devries’ post was a starting point for my solution, so I’m much obliged to him posting his findings. Authenticating with the Twitter API: old vs new Acessing The Twitter API the old way: require ‘twitter’ httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('my_account','my_secret_password') client = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth) client.update(‘Hurray!’) The OAuth way: require 'twitter' oauth = Twitter::OAuth.new('ve4whatafuzzksaMQKjoI', 'KliketyklikspQ6qYALcuNandsomemored8pQ6qYALIG7mbEQY') oauth.authorize_from_access('123-owhfmeyAgfozdyt5hDeprSevsWmPo5rVeroGfsthis', 'fGiinCdqtehMeehiddenymDeAsasaawgGeryye8amh') client = Twitter::Base.new(oauth) client.update(‘Hurray!’) In the above case, ve4whatafuzzksaMQKjoI is the ‘consumer key’ (sometimes also referred to as ‘consumer token’) and KliketyklikspQ6qYALcuNandsomemored8pQ6qYALIG7mbEQY is the ‘consumer secret’. You’ll get these from Twitter when you register your app. 123-owhfmeyAgfozdyt5hDeprSevsWmPo5rVeroGfsthis is the ‘access token’ and fGiinCdqtehMeehiddenymDeAsasaawgGeryye8amh is the ‘access secret’. This combination gives the registered application access to your account. I’ll show you how to obtain these by following the steps below. (Basically you’ll need a bunch of keys and you’ll have to jump a bit through hoops to obtain them for your server/bot. ) How to get these keys 1. Surf to the twitter apps registration page go to http://dev.twitter.com/apps to register your app. Login with your twitter account. 2. Register your application Enter something for Application name, Description, website,… as I said: they make you jump through hoops. If you plan on using the API to post tweets, Your application name and website will be used in the ‘5 minutes ago via…’ line below your tweet. You could use the this to point to a page with info about your bot, or maybe it’s useful for SEO purposes. For application type I choose ‘browser’ and entered http://www.hadermann.be/callback as a ‘Callback URL’. This url returns a 404 error, which is ideal because after giving our account access to our ‘application’ (step 6), it will redirect to this url with an ‘oauth_token’ and ‘oauth_verifier’ in the url. We need to get these from the url. It doesn’t really matter what you enter here though, you could leave it blank because you need to explicitely specify it when generating a request token. You probably want read&write access so set this at ‘Default Access type’. 3. Get your consumer key and consumer secret On the next page, copy/paste your ‘consumer key’ and ‘consumer secret’. You’ll need these later on. You also need these as part of the authentication in your script later on: oauth = Twitter::OAuth.new([consumer key], [consumer secret]) 4. Obtain your request token run the following in IRB to obtain your ‘request token’ Replace my fake consumer key and consumer secret with the one you obtained in step 3. And use something else instead http://www.hadermann.be/callback: although this will only give a 404, you shouldn’t trust me. irb(main):001:0> require 'oauth' irb(main):002:0> c = OAuth::Consumer.new('ve4whatafuzzksaMQKjoI', 'KliketyklikspQ6qYALcuNandsomemored8pQ6qYALIG7mbEQY', {:site => 'http://twitter.com'}) irb(main):003:0> request_token = c.get_request_token(:oauth_callback => 'http://www.hadermann.be/callback') irb(main):004:0> request_token.token => "UrperqaukeWsWt3IAlfbxzyBUFpwWIcWkHP94QH2C1" This (UrperqaukeWsWt3IAlfbxzyBUFpwWIcWkHP94QH2C1) is the request token: Copy/paste this token, you will need this next. 5. Authorize your application surf to https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=[the above token], for example: https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=UrperqaukeWsWt3IAlfbxzyBUFpwWIcWkHP94QH2C1 This will bring you to the ‘An application would like to connect to your account’- screen on Twitter where you can grant access to the app you just registered. If you aren’t still logged in, you need to login first. Click ‘Allow’. Unless you don’t trust yourself. 6. Get your oauth_verifier from the redirected url Your browser will be redirected to your callback url, with an oauth_token and oauth_verifier parameter appended. You’ll need the oauth_verifier. In my case the browser redirected to: http://www.hadermann.be/callback?oauth_token=UrperqaukeWsWt3IAlfbxzyBUFpwWIcWkHP94QH2C1&oauth_verifier=waoOhKo8orpaqvQe6rVi5fti4ejr8hPeZrTewyeag Which returned a 404, giving me the chance to copy/paste my oauth_verifier: waoOhKo8orpaqvQe6rVi5fti4ejr8hPeZrTewyeag 7. Request an access token Back to irb, use the oauth_verifier to request an access token, as follows: irb(main):005:0> at = request_token.get_access_token(:oauth_verifier => 'waoOhKo8orpaqvQe6rVi5fti4ejr8hPeZrTewyeag') irb(main):006:0> at.params[:oauth_token] => "123-owhfmeyAgfozdyt5hDeprSevsWmPo5rVeroGfsthis" irb(main):007:0> at.params[:oauth_token_secret] => "fGiinCdqtehMeehiddenymDeAsasaawgGeryye8amh" We’re there! 123-owhfmeyAgfozdyt5hDeprSevsWmPo5rVeroGfsthis is the access token. fGiinCdqtehMeehiddenymDeAsasaawgGeryye8amh is the access secret. Try it! Try the following to post an update: require 'twitter' oauth = Twitter::OAuth.new('ve4whatafuzzksaMQKjoI', 'KliketyklikspQ6qYALcuNandsomemored8pQ6qYALIG7mbEQY') oauth.authorize_from_access('123-owhfmeyAgfozdyt5hDeprSevsWmPo5rVeroGfsthis', 'fGiinCdqtehMeehiddenymDeAsasaawgGeryye8amh') client = Twitter::Base.new(oauth) client.update(‘Cowabunga!’) Now you can go to your twitter page and delete the tweet if you want to.

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  • Create a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash Drive

    - by Trevor Bekolay
    The Ubuntu Live CD isn’t just useful for trying out Ubuntu before you install it, you can also use it to maintain and repair your Windows PC. Even if you have no intention of installing Linux, every Windows user should have a bootable Ubuntu USB drive on hand in case something goes wrong in Windows. Creating a bootable USB flash drive is surprisingly easy with a small self-contained application called UNetbootin. It will even download Ubuntu for you! Note: Ubuntu will take up approximately 700 MB on your flash drive, so choose a flash drive with at least 1 GB of free space, formatted as FAT32. This process should not remove any existing files on the flash drive, but to be safe you should backup the files on your flash drive. Put Ubuntu on your flash drive UNetbootin doesn’t require installation; just download the application and run it. Select Ubuntu from the Distribution drop-down box, then 9.10_Live from the Version drop-down box. If you have a 64-bit machine, then select 9.10_Live_x64 for the Version. At the bottom of the screen, select the drive letter that corresponds to the USB drive that you want to put Ubuntu on. If you select USB Drive in the Type drop-down box, the only drive letters available will be USB flash drives. Click OK and UNetbootin will start doing its thing. First it will download the Ubuntu Live CD. Then, it will copy the files from the Ubuntu Live CD to your flash drive. The amount of time it takes will vary depending on your Internet speed, an when it’s done, click on Exit. You’re not planning on installing Ubuntu right now, so there’s no need to reboot. If you look at the USB drive now, you should see a bunch of new files and folders. If you had files on the drive before, they should still be present. You’re now ready to boot your computer into Ubuntu 9.10! How to boot into Ubuntu When the time comes that you have to boot into Ubuntu, or if you just want to test and make sure that your flash drive works properly, you will have to set your computer to boot off of the flash drive. The steps to do this will vary depending on your BIOS – which varies depending on your motherboard. To get detailed instructions on changing how your computer boots, search for your motherboard’s manual (or your laptop’s manual for a laptop). For general instructions, which will suffice for 99% of you, read on. Find the important keyboard keys When your computer boots up, a bunch of words and numbers flash across the screen, usually to be ignored. This time, you need to scan the boot-up screen for a few key words with some associated keys: Boot menu and Setup. Typically, these will show up at the bottom of the screen. If your BIOS has a Boot Menu, then read on. Otherwise, skip to the Hard: Using Setup section. Easy: Using the Boot Menu If your BIOS offers a Boot Menu, then during the boot-up process, press the button associated with the Boot Menu. In our case, this is ESC. Our example Boot Menu doesn’t have the ability to boot from USB, but your Boot Menu should have some options, such as USB-CDROM, USB-HDD, USB-FLOPPY, and others. Try the options that start with USB until you find one that works. Don’t worry if it doesn’t work – you can just restart and try again. Using the Boot Menu does not change the normal boot order on your system, so the next time you start up your computer it will boot from the hard drive as normal. Hard: Using Setup If your BIOS doesn’t offer a Boot Menu, then you will have to change the boot order in Setup. Note: There are some options in BIOS Setup that can affect the stability of your machine. Take care to only change the boot order options. Press the button associated with Setup. In our case, this is F2. If your BIOS Setup has a Boot tab, then switch to it and change the order such that one of the USB options occurs first. There may be several USB options, such as USB-CDROM, USB-HDD, USB-FLOPPY, and others; try them out to see which one works for you. If your BIOS does not have a boot tab, boot order is commonly found in Advanced CMOS Options. Note that this changes the boot order permanently until you change it back. If you plan on only plugging in a bootable flash drive when you want to boot from it, then you could leave the boot order as it is, but you may find it easier to switch the order back to the previous order when you reboot from Ubuntu. Booting into Ubuntu If you set the right boot option, then you should be greeted with the UNetbootin screen. Press enter to start Ubuntu with the default options, or wait 10 seconds for this to happen automatically. Ubuntu will start loading. It should go straight to the desktop with no need for a username or password. And that’s it! From this live desktop session, you can try out Ubuntu, and even install software that is not included in the live CD. Installed software will only last for the duration of your session – the next time you start up the live CD it will be back to its original state. Download UNetbootin from sourceforge.net Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayReset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista SetupHow To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7Speed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoost TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer Create Talking Photos using Fotobabble

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  • Using jQuery and OData to Insert a Database Record

    - by Stephen Walther
    In my previous blog entry, I explored two ways of inserting a database record using jQuery. We added a new Movie to the Movie database table by using a generic handler and by using a WCF service. In this blog entry, I want to take a brief look at how you can insert a database record using OData. Introduction to OData The Open Data Protocol (OData) was developed by Microsoft to be an open standard for communicating data across the Internet. Because the protocol is compatible with standards such as REST and JSON, the protocol is particularly well suited for Ajax. OData has undergone several name changes. It was previously referred to as Astoria and ADO.NET Data Services. OData is used by Sharepoint Server 2010, Azure Storage Services, Excel 2010, SQL Server 2008, and project code name “Dallas.” Because OData is being adopted as the public interface of so many important Microsoft technologies, it is a good protocol to learn. You can learn more about OData by visiting the following websites: http://www.odata.org http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx When using the .NET framework, you can easily expose database data through the OData protocol by creating a WCF Data Service. In this blog entry, I will create a WCF Data Service that exposes the Movie database table. Create the Database and Data Model The MoviesDB database is a simple database that contains the following Movies table: You need to create a data model to represent the MoviesDB database. In this blog entry, I use the ADO.NET Entity Framework to create my data model. However, WCF Data Services and OData are not tied to any particular OR/M framework such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework. For details on creating the Entity Framework data model for the MoviesDB database, see the previous blog entry. Create a WCF Data Service You create a new WCF Service by selecting the menu option Project, Add New Item and selecting the WCF Data Service item template (see Figure 1). Name the new WCF Data Service MovieService.svc. Figure 1 – Adding a WCF Data Service Listing 1 contains the default code that you get when you create a new WCF Data Service. There are two things that you need to modify. Listing 1 – New WCF Data Service File using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel.Web; using System.Web; namespace WebApplication1 { public class MovieService : DataService< /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ > { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc. // Examples: // config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("MyEntityset", EntitySetRights.AllRead); // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } } First, you need to replace the comment /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ with a class that represents the data that you want to expose from the service. In our case, we need to replace the comment with a reference to the MoviesDBEntities class generated by the Entity Framework. Next, you need to configure the security for the WCF Data Service. By default, you cannot query or modify the movie data. We need to update the Entity Set Access Rule to enable us to insert a new database record. The updated MovieService.svc is contained in Listing 2: Listing 2 – MovieService.svc using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; namespace WebApplication1 { public class MovieService : DataService<MoviesDBEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Movies", EntitySetRights.AllWrite); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } } That’s all we have to do. We can now insert a new Movie into the Movies database table by posting a new Movie to the following URL: /MovieService.svc/Movies The request must be a POST request. The Movie must be represented as JSON. Using jQuery with OData The HTML page in Listing 3 illustrates how you can use jQuery to insert a new Movie into the Movies database table using the OData protocol. Listing 3 – Default.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>jQuery OData Insert</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input id="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input id="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { // Convert the form into an object var data = { Title: $("#title").val(), Director: $("#director").val() }; // JSONify the data var data = JSON.stringify(data); // Post it $.ajax({ type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", url: "MovieService.svc/Movies", data: data, dataType: "json", success: insertCallback }); }); function insertCallback(result) { // unwrap result var newMovie = result["d"]; // Show primary key alert("Movie added with primary key " + newMovie.Id); } </script> </body> </html> jQuery does not include a JSON serializer. Therefore, we need to include the JSON2 library to serialize the new Movie that we wish to create. The Movie is serialized by calling the JSON.stringify() method: var data = JSON.stringify(data); You can download the JSON2 library from the following website: http://www.json.org/js.html The jQuery ajax() method is called to insert the new Movie. Notice that both the contentType and dataType are set to use JSON. The jQuery ajax() method is used to perform a POST operation against the URL MovieService.svc/Movies. Because the POST payload contains a JSON representation of a new Movie, a new Movie is added to the database table of Movies. When the POST completes successfully, the insertCallback() method is called. The new Movie is passed to this method. The method simply displays the primary key of the new Movie: Summary The OData protocol (and its enabling technology named WCF Data Services) works very nicely with Ajax. By creating a WCF Data Service, you can quickly expose your database data to an Ajax application by taking advantage of open standards such as REST, JSON, and OData. In the next blog entry, I want to take a closer look at how the OData protocol supports different methods of querying data.

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